The Notable - Bryce Gillespie - A Maths Teacher, extraordinaire

Veteran of Flying Corps dies after living life to the full
 

By Rob Brady ( Liverpool Daily Post Staff)

ONE of the last surviving members of the Royal Flying Corps, the forerunner to the RAF, has died at his Liverpool home. Bryce Gillespie served both Britain and New Zealand in two world wars, despite loathing conflict. In an extraordinary life lasting 99 years, his globetrotting experiences could have been lifted straight from the pages of a Boys’ Own comic.

His niece, Alison Smythe, said the bachelor, who lived in Parkview Road, Aigburth, had lived an "incredibly active and varied life". Toxteth-born Mr Gillespie, who had no children, died on January 8 after a short illness.

As an eager youngster straight out of school, he signed up to the pioneering Royal Flying Corps and flew biplanes in World War I. Surviving the horrors of the Western Front, he travelled to California to seek his fortune as an orange farmer. But his yearning for adventure soon took him overseas again and he found work in New Zealand as a cowboy on a cattle ranch, while preaching part-time in a local church. Mrs Smythe, who is making preparations for his funeral at the Toxteth United Reform Church on January 20, said: "He was very keen on flying. His experiences in the Royal Flying Corps left him with a love of flying for the rest of his life.

He was also quite a religious man and in New Zealand found himself in charge of a church. He called himself a home missionary." Mr Gillespie later enrolled at Auckland University to study geography in a desire to better himself and he became a teacher at a grammar school in the city. He taught until the outbreak of World War Two, when, despite being nearly 40, he enlisted in the Australian and New Zealand armed forces, known as Anzacs. His second war saw him serving alongside some of his former pupils in North Africa. According to his niece, Mr Gillespie detested war,  but was determined to do something for the war effort. She said: "He resigned his commission with the Flying Corps to serve with the Anzacs. He always felt he had two homes, Britain and New Zealand. "

He went out with some of the lads he had been teaching and reached the rank of sergeant major. He even came face to face with the German military leader, Rommel, when the Afrika Korps overran a field hospital where he was based as a medical orderly. Mrs Smythe said: "Bryce told me that he actually met Rommel at a first-aid station where they were treating German troops as well as Allied casualties. Rommel came in and agreed that the seriously injured could be taken back to the Allied lines. Bryce remembered that he spoke very good English."
Mr Gillespie was allowed to escort the seriously injured patients back to the Allied lines, but was later invalided out himself and served the last two years of the war at an RAF meteorological office in Scotland. He returned to New Zealand and resumed his career as a teacher, but came back to Britain in the 1950s to lecture in maths at The Liverpool Collegiate School. After retiring in 1965, he continued to give out-of-school tuition.

He also cared for his ill sister, Grace, up until her death in 1988. Mrs Smythe said: "Bryce was a very committed brother and a very caring man."

In 1990, on Mr Gillespie's 90th birthday he was treated to a helicopter flight over his home city.