In September 1939 the twenty-year-old John Wooldridge, then a Sergeant Pilot, took part in the British air raid on Kiel, the first raid of World War Two. Having brought his damaged aircraft home safely, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal. Commissioned in August 1940, he rapidly rose to the rank of Flight Commander, flying Lancasters as a Flight Lieutenant. In the middle of 1942, for his part in the 1,000-bomber raid on Cologne, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. By the end of the War, he had flown 97 missions over enemy territory. To commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the end of World War Two, John’s daughter and son, Susan and Hugh, share their memories of him below.
On 9th and 10th May 1944, our father, Wing Commander John Wooldridge DSO, DFC*, DFM, returning from New York where his music was being performed at Carnegie Hall, flew over the Atlantic in a Mosquito, taking off from Goose Bay, Canada and landing six and a half hours later in Ballykelly, Northern Ireland. In so doing, he broke the then speed record for crossing the Atlantic.
The Air Ministry, unsure what to do with this daring twenty-five-year-old, told him to lie low but, within a couple of days, they’d been outflanked by the Press and the story was all over the newspapers. As our father writes in his diary for Sunday 14th May: Ye gods, what a splash! Headlines, pictures…
Meanwhile, on Monday 15th May in a London hairdresser, our mother, the distinguished British actress Margaretta Scott, was having her hair done. Whilst under the dryer, she read the story in the London Evening Standard of this amazing trans-Atlantic flight. But what really caught her eye was that the pilot was also a composer of serious music, who had composed a work for Narrator and Orchestra called The Constellations.
‘That’s my boy!’ she cried, as Sir Henry Wood had recently asked her to find a new work for Narrator and Orchestra for his upcoming Promenade Concerts, and she felt that The Constellations might be just the job.
Our mother immediately approached the Air Ministry, but they refused to give out the personal details of the record-breaking flyer.
The story would have ended there if, a couple of days later, at Denham Film Studios where she was making the film Fanny by Gaslight, our mother had not given a lift to a film publicist who, on their journey back to London, had boasted that he’d just been given a camembert cheese flown across the Atlantic by a friend, one John Wooldridge.
‘Bring him to tea!’ she cried. And the next Sunday, there was our father on her doorstep — and that was it! For the next fourteen years until our father’s sudden death in a car crash in 1958, our mother and father were as inseparable as their young family and busy work schedules would allow.
In the 1950s, Margaretta Scott continued to star in plays and films whilst John Wooldridge wrote his music and plays and films. One of his most important films was the 1953 film starring Dirk Bogarde, Appointment in London, about a Royal Air Force Bomber Command squadron, for which he wrote both the screenplay and the music score. To this day it continues to be screened to great acclaim and serves as a memorial to Bomber Command by one of their own.
By John Wooldridge:
