Will's Story

William Barnard Rhodes-Moorhouse VC

William Barnard Rhodes-Moorhouse VC

Born London 26.09.1887; died of wounds in France 27.04.1915
Awarded the first Victoria Cross gained in the air

Will Rhodes-Moorhouse was the eldest son of Edward Moorhouse and Mary Anne, the part Maori daughter of William Barnard Rhodes who was one of the founders of the colony of New Zealand.  Will's parents settled in England in 1884 and he was brought up mainly in Northamptonshire with a brother and two sisters. The family was rich, comfortable and happily living off the considerable fortune in property and rents from New Zealand.  Will was a mischievous child and quite a handful for the nursery maids.  He had auburn hair, green eyes and was not very tall but well built.  His Maori ancestry would have been noticeable to anyone familiar with the race.

His father tried to interest him in horses and hunting but he hated riding.  As a small boy Will became obsessed by machines of all kinds and was particularly keen on steam engines and locomotive sets purchased from the Bassett-Lowke factory in Northampton.  He was a natural mechanic but never shone at school having left Harrow to attend a crammer before going up to Cambridge University where he never quite fitted in.  Will had now begun his craze for speed on motorcycles and with student friends they raced cars on the open road and became expert at sliding and skid braking. He could skid right into a garage by judging it from within a matter of inches.  He said his time at Cambridge was completely wasted and wished he had gone straight from Harrow into the engineering shops.

In 1906/7 Will spent some months in New Zealand where on one occasion he was hailed as a Maori Chief.  Will was mystified by this ceremony since his family at home would never discuss or admit to such a sensitive matter of heritage.  It is only recently that research has revealed the likely parentage of his mother much to the pleasure and interest of his present day relations.

Back in England he was soon involved in aviation and learning to fly at Huntingdon where he teamed up with James Radley, another pioneer aviator.  Together they built the Radley-Moorhouse monoplane which resembled the familiar Bleriot type.  In this aircraft Will gained considerable experience and became one of the top cross-country pilots of his time.  In 1910 he and Radley took a Gnome engined Bleriot 'barnstorming' across the USA to compete for money and fame in the newly popular aero-meetings.  They ended up in San Francisco winning the £1000 Harbour Prize and where Will was the first pilot to ever fly through the Golden Gate Gorge.

In 1911 he came second in the Aerial Derby race around London and also made the first cargo flight carrying 'Barratt's' boots from Northampton to Hendon.  At about this time it is thought he demonstrated the first tail slides and possibly even a loop in a plane.  He knew many of the early aviators including the Wright Brothers, Graham Gilmour, Gustave Hamel, Colonel Cody, Claude Graham-White and of course Bleriot.

By now Will and Linda Morritt, the great friend of his sister Anne, were in love.  She was also fearless and accompanied Will on several risky enterprises including a winter sports holiday in St. Moritz where Will mastered the Cresta Run and she joined in on lord Carberry's six-man bobsleigh!
They were married in the spring of 1912 and for their honeymoon went to Belgium to take delivery of a Breguet machine which Will hoped to enter for the Salisbury Plain military flying trails.  The Breguet, with a 70HP Canton-Unnee engine, was a great load carrier and along with a reporter from the London Evening News they set off for England to make the first Channel flight carrying two passengers.  Unfortunately, Will was forced to crash land in extremely turbulent weather near Ashford but the flight made a big news story.  The strength of the Breguet saved them but Linda suffered a miscarriage not long afterwards and Will stopped flying to concentrate on motor racing and rallying.  He was a regular at Brooklands with his faithful mechanic Tookey and took part with Radley in the Monte Carlo driving a Rolls-Royce.

His only son Willie was born in March 1914.  Meanwhile the family had purchased Parnham House in Beaminster, Dorset.  A beautiful Tudor Manor which was to be Will and Linda's future home.

Upon the outbreak of war he immediately joined the RFC (Royal Flying Corps), as a second Lieutenant, at the age of twenty-seven.  However, because of his flying accidents Will now had a complete set of false teeth and there was an absurd RFC rule that no one could fly so "handicapped"! He therefore went as officer in charge of a section at the Farnborough factory which accepted and tested Renault engines for the BE series of aircraft.  However, on the quiet, Will was now flying again by Christmas 1914, initially at Brookland and later in the BE machines at Farnborough.

In February 1915 he delivered a Parasol Bleriot, number 576, to St. Omer and in March such was the need for pilots that he flew out a BE2c number 1657 and joined the No.2 Squadron, RFC at Merville, commanded by Major T.I. Webb-Bowen and his flight commander was Maurice Blake.  Will started operational flying immediately usually flying BE2a number 492 and spent the rest of March and most of April doing recce patrols, artillery spotting and photography and frequently recording in his log the incidence of 'Archie'.  Ivor Lloyd, recently out of Sandhurst, was regularly Will's observer and described how they chased enemy aircraft getting so close that they could fire their revolvers at the pilots.  Lloyd later told Will's family how in two months with the squadron "….he became the life and soul of everything connected with its work and other escapades indulged in by the less serious members of the community".  On several sorties later in April his observer was Sholto Douglas, later to become an Air Vice Marshall in World War II, who was becoming an expert on mounting aerial cameras.  After a month in action the Wing Commander, Lt. Colonel Trenchard, recommended Will for promotion.

The second battle of Ypres had now started and German reinforcements were routed through the railway junction at Courtrai, thirty-five miles beyond the front line.  When 'Trenchard' assigned this target to be bombed by the number two squadron it was Will who took on the task.  

In his last letter to Linda, only to be read upon his death, he described how he would have to carry out the attack at a very low altitude to ensue hitting the target. "….I am off on a trip from which I don't expect to return but which I hope will shorten the war a bit.  I shall probably be blown up by my own bomb or, if not, killed by rifle fire".  He also left a letter addressed to 'Sonny' full of good advice for his son to read on his twenty-first birthday.

Since the BE2a 492 was being repaired from shrapnel damage he selected a BE2b number 687, "a good climber", and took off on a solo mission at 15:05PM carrying a 100 pound bomb.  On reaching Courtrai he ignored Maurice Blake's advice to bomb from altitude and flew down to below 300 feet through a hail of machine gun fire from a church tower and also from hundreds of rifles. A shell drove through the aircraft seat, tearing part of his left thigh away, and a piece of shrapnel took off three fingers from his right hand.  In order to release the bomb he now had to use his left hand to release the stick and lean right over to activate the mechanism followed by an explosion which very nearly sent the plane out of control.  His left leg was now useless and he only had his left hand and right leg with which to fly the machine, added to which, the seat was so badly shattered that it sagged forwards in to the controls.

At this point he could have landed immediately and saved his life but he judged it more important to return and report the success of his mission, determined not to let the Germans have his machine.  He was now becoming faint and decided to fly very low to keep up speed and re-cross the lines as quickly as possible.  It was probably while crossing the Ypres battlefield that he was hit by a bullet that had ripped through his abdomen and came to rest just below the skin of his right rib cage which proved to be his fatal wound.

In his diary, Maurice Blake described Will's arrival at Merville "...About 16:12PM we saw an aeroplane flying very low on the other side of the river and when it turned to land was only 30ft high off the ground.  It was Moorhouse and he had switched on an engine and cleared a hedge on the other bank and made a perfect landing on top ground.  Webb-Bowen and I went to the machine and found that poor old Moorhouse had been badly hit and we sent for a stretcher and cut the anti-drift wires.  He said that it felt as though his stomach had been shot out from beneath him".  Before he died the following afternoon he told Maurice "It's strange dying Blake old boy – unlike anything one has ever done before, like one's first solo flight".

Having earned an immediate DSO, he was also posthumously awarded the first Victoria Cross won in the air, which was Gazette'd on 23 May 1915.  In making the award the authorities had no knowledge of his letter foretelling so exactly what he was to face and little idea of the professionalism and great experience he drew upon or that the Nation had lost a pilot and engineer who could have contributed so much more to aviation in years to come other than a suicidal exploit.

Exceptionally, and at his own request, his body was allowed back to England where he was buried in specially consecrated ground on top of a hill overlooking Parnham House where he and Linda had planned to build a cottage.

In 1991 his surviving relatives decided that the VC Medal group, impossible to put on display to the public for being too valuable, should be sold and the proceeds converted into a Charitable Trust to support activities in aviation of which Will would have approved.  The 1992 the Guinness Book of Records confirmed that Will's VC and campaign medals fetched the highest price ever paid for a medal group.