AIR COMMANDER

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 October 1940, Page 5

AIR COMMANDER

MARSHAL SIR C. NEWALL COMING TO NEW ZEALAND AS NEXT GOVERNOR-GENERAL (By Telegraph—Press Association.) WELLINGTON, This Day. It is officially announced that the King has approved the appointment of Air Chief Marshal Sir Cyril Newall, G.C.8., C.M.G., C.8.E., A.M., to be Governor-General of New Zealand in succession to Colonel the Right Honourable Viscount Galway, P. 0., G.C.M.G., D. 5.0., 0.8. E., whose term of office will expire in February, 1941. His Majesty has also approved the promotion of Air Chief Marshall Sir Cyril Newall to be Marshal of the Royal Air Force. The Empire’s Commander-in-Chief in the Air, Sir Cyril Louis Norton Newall, has been Chief of the Air Staff fop the last three years. He was born in 1886 in an Indian hill station where his father, the late Lieutenant-Colonel William Potter Newall, of the Indian Army, was posted. He was educated at Bedford School and Sandhurst. In 1905 he entered the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, with whom he took part in the Zakkha Kel Expedition of 1908. The next year he transferred to the Ghurkas and served with them till the war broke out. EARLY AIR TRAINING. In 1911, home on leave, he first interested himself in flying, and took his Royal Aero Club certificate as a pilot. Only five pilots who gained their ’’tickets” in those days are still serving. Early in the Great War, he was seconded to the Royal Flying Corps, and was given command of a flight in the No. 1 Squadron. There were then only about two score machines with the British Expeditionary Force, and they were used for reconnaissance. By 1915 he was squadron commander, and led the No. 12 Squadron for two years. In 1917 he was given command of the No. 41 Bombing Squadron, then the spear-point of the British offensive airarm. He emerged from the war having been three times mentioned in dispatches, decorated C.M.G., C.8.E., Albert Medal Ist Class, Brevet-Major, and Officer of the Legion of Honour, Crown of Italy, and Order of Leopold of Belgium, and Belgian Croix de Guerre. FIRE-FIGHTING IN BOMB STORE. The Albert Medal was awarded for his action when fire broke out in an R.F.C. bomb-store in 1916, and he and a mechanic climbed on to the roof and played a hose, through a hole burned by the flames, on to the 2000 high-ex-plosive bombs below. Afterward he entered the building with three others, and put out the fire. After the war he transferred to the R.A.F. and held a number of important staff appointments—Deputy-Director of Personnel, Air Commodore, Air Officer Commanding the Special Reserve and Auxiliary Air Force, Director of Operations and Intelligence, and, in 1926, Deputy-Chief of the Air Staff, He was already Air A.D.C. to his Majesty. He became a member of the Air Council in 1930, and the next year was placed in command of the Wessex Bombing Area. Alsp in 1931, he went out as Air Vice-Marshal to command the Royal Air Force in the Middle East. He was four years absent from England, but in 1935 returned as Member of the Air Council for Supply and Organisation. In 1937 he became Chief of the Air Staff.

He was created C.B. in 1929, K.C.B. in 1935, and G.C.B. in 1938. In 1922 he married May Dulcie Wendell, but his wife died two years later. He married again in 1925, Olive Tennyson Foster, the daughter of Mrs Francis Storer Eaton, Boston, United States. He has two daughters and a son.