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LAMDA and NEA Examinations Teacher

08/06/2026

WHAT A LOVELY EVENING ........................ I was very kindly invited to see Yarm School`s wonderful Dance show on Friday evening in their equally wonderful theatre, by Fatema Soni. It was great to see another side to the talents of several of my students that I normally only see on Zoom. They are even more gorgeous in real life :) Sadly not all are pictured here but I spotted Ammar, Zaara, Aditi, Sanjana, Aishani, Nikki and Jazmin, either on stage or in the audience besides Kaira, Manha, Miesha, Zoyaa and Trish who are pictured here.

I have also been fortunate to meet up with Svara, Laasya and Jay recently when the girls travelled up from Birmingham to be with their cousin over half term

06/06/2026

Her advisor told her to quit. She did the experiment anyway — at night, in secret, after he ordered her off it.

She was 26. A grad student. Candace Pert. Johns Hopkins. 1972.

For decades scientists knew morphine worked on the brain. Nobody knew how. Nobody could find the door it walked through. The biggest labs in the world had tried. Some gave up.

Her boss — Dr. Solomon Snyder, a rising star running his own lab — told her the approach had already failed. Move on. Pick another project.

She ignored him.

She tagged op**te molecules with radioactivity and tracked where they latched on inside brain tissue. Worked nights. Worked weekends. Told no one.

Late 1972. She found it.

The first verified receptor in the human brain. The molecular doorway morphine walks through. The thing every major lab had been hunting and missing for years.

This was not a small thing. It explained how morphine kills pain. How he**in hooks people. It cracked open the discovery of endorphins — the morphine your own brain makes. It rewrote neuroscience from the ground up.

Every opioid sitting in your medicine cabinet works on the receptor a 26-year-old found after she was told to stop.

The papers ran in 1973. Candace Pert. First author. Her name, first.

Then the awards started arriving. And her name vanished off every one.

1978. The Lasker Award. They call it the American Nobel — 28 Lasker winners have gone on to win actual Nobels.

The 1978 Lasker for the op**te receptor went to Snyder. And two other men. For the discovery she made with her own hands.

She found out from a scientist on a rival team. She'd been on the list. Then quietly dropped.

Snyder invited her to the awards luncheon. To sit in the audience. And clap.

She was 31. She had done the experiment. She was first author on the paper that started all of it. And they wanted her in the crowd, applauding the men collecting the prize for her work.

She said no.

She wrote a letter straight to Mary Lasker herself. Made her fury plain. The story leaked. The Washington Post ran it — a young woman erased from the biggest prize in her field.

The establishment closed ranks. Grad students don't share major awards with senior faculty, they said. The lab was Snyder's. The credit was Snyder's.

She got branded difficult. A troublemaker. A pariah.

But here's the part they never put on the plaque.

In 1979 the National Institute on Drug Abuse admitted — in writing, in Science magazine — that leaving her off their own award had been "a significant omission."

Translation: she was right. They knew it. They put it in print.

The Lasker Foundation never apologized. Doesn't matter.

Open any neuroscience textbook today. The discovery of the opioid receptor, 1973. Pert and Snyder. Her name. First.

They handed three men a trophy.

History handed her the discovery.

She was 26. She was told to quit. She did it in secret. And she was right.

Tag the woman in science who was told she couldn't.

~Weird But True

06/06/2026

Nobody expected Hannah Cairo to walk into a graduate mathematics classroom at UC Berkeley.
She was 17. She was from Nassau, Bahamas. She wasn't enrolled — she had simply emailed the professor and asked if she could sit in.
He said yes. That single email changed mathematics.
Growing up, Hannah had no tutor, no classroom, no classmates. She was homeschooled in an island city better known for beaches than blackboards. While other kids her age were navigating high school hallways, she was alone in her room, teaching herself abstract algebra from textbooks — building a world out of equations that nobody around her could share.
At 13, she wrote her first mathematical paper. At 14, she was accepted to a university — but her parents felt she was too young. At 17, she packed her determination and flew to California, where she quietly slipped into a graduate-level course on one of the most complex areas of modern mathematics.
The professor, Ruixiang Zhang, was teaching Fourier restriction theory — the science of understanding how complex patterns break down into simpler wave-like pieces. Think of dropping two stones into a pond at the same time. Where the waves collide and overlap, extraordinary shapes form. Mathematicians have spent lifetimes trying to predict exactly what those shapes can and cannot look like.
As part of the course, Zhang assigned a simplified version of something called the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture — a mathematical statement proposed in the 1980s that the greatest minds in the field had been trying to prove for four decades. Most believed it was true. None had been able to confirm it.
Hannah finished the homework. Then she couldn't let it go.
"Once I start working on a problem, it's kind of addictive," she later said. "I can't stop thinking about it."
For months, she tried to prove the conjecture — and failed. Again and again. But something remarkable happened inside those failures. She wasn't just hitting a wall. She was learning the exact shape of the wall. And slowly, a dangerous question took hold in her mind.
What if it wasn't just hard to prove — what if it was actually wrong?
She flipped her entire approach. Instead of trying to confirm the conjecture, she set out to destroy it. Using fractals and advanced mathematical structures, she constructed a specific scenario — a counterexample — where the conjecture's prediction simply did not hold. In mathematics, one exception is enough. One crack, and the whole foundation falls.
It took weeks to convince Professor Zhang that her construction was correct. When he finally agreed, the reaction across the mathematical world was unlike anything most researchers had ever witnessed.
"We were all shocked, absolutely," said mathematician Itamar Oliveira of the University of Birmingham. "I don't remember ever seeing anything like that."
Her paper appeared online in February 2025. Within months, the teenager from Nassau was standing at a podium in Spain, presenting her findings to the world's leading experts in harmonic analysis — the very field whose four-decade-old assumption she had just overturned.
This fall, she begins her PhD at the University of Maryland. She has received a $100,000 scholarship for her work. Her professors speak of her in the same breath as past students who went on to win the Fields Medal — the highest honor in all of mathematics.
But Hannah doesn't talk about prizes when asked what drives her.
"My vocation is to help other people, to make them happy," she says.
A girl who had no classroom, no mentor, and no one to talk to about the subject she loved — just quietly proved that forty years of expert assumptions were wrong.
Sometimes the most important breakthroughs don't come from the most prestigious institutions.
They come from the person who was never told the problem was impossible.

05/06/2026

"January 1867. A winter morning in Scotland.
A thirteen-year-old boy named David was skating on ice when another skater knocked him down. His skull fractured. He never recovered.
He died the day before his fourteenth birthday.
His younger brother James was six years old. And in that frozen January moment, something happened to him that no child should ever have to experience — he watched his mother disappear into grief so total, so consuming, that she seemed to lose herself entirely.
But here is the strange and heartbreaking thing that James noticed, even at six years old.
In his mother's grief, there was one sliver of terrible comfort.
David would never grow up. He would never change. He would never disappoint her. He would stay exactly as she remembered him — bright, beloved, perfect — frozen at thirteen, forever.
The dead, young James understood with devastating clarity, stay perfect because they never get the chance to grow old enough to let you down.
So he did the only thing a six-year-old boy knows how to do when he wants his mother back.
He tried to become his brother.
He wore David's clothes until they wore through. He copied David's walk, his expressions, his way of speaking. For years, he poured himself into the shape of a boy who no longer existed, trying to fill an absence that could not be filled by anyone still breathing.
He spent his entire childhood haunted by a ghost he was trying to become.

James Matthew Barrie grew up, moved to London, became a successful playwright. He was witty, brilliant, celebrated. But somewhere inside him, that six-year-old boy was still trying to replace his brother.
Then, in the late 1890s, during his daily walks through Kensington Gardens, he met five brothers whose imaginations seemed to generate their own light.
The Llewelyn Davies boys — George, Jack, Peter, Michael, and Nico — played pirates and explorers and fought invisible wars with the absolute conviction that only children possess. They didn't perform childhood. They lived it — completely, unselfconsciously, as if the real world were simply waiting patiently at the edges of Neverland for them to come back whenever they were ready.
Barrie was captivated.
Not because he wanted to be a child again — his own childhood was too haunted for that — but because he recognised something in their play that he had been searching for his entire life.
The pure, untouchable joy of being somewhere time cannot follow you.
He told their stories. He gave shape to their games. He listened to the way children talk about the world — as if magic is a given and rules are merely suggestions.
And in 1904, he brought it all together into something that would outlast all of them.
Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up.
The play opened in London and the audience loved it immediately, with a depth of feeling that surprised even Barrie. The novel followed. It became a classic almost instantly. The story of a boy who lived in eternal youth resonated with something ancient in human beings — the longing to preserve innocence before the world teaches it caution.
Barrie became wealthy beyond anything he'd imagined.
His marriage, which had never been easy, eventually ended. He never had children of his own.
But life was not finished teaching him about love.

When the father of the Llewelyn Davies boys died in 1907, then their mother in 1910, Barrie stepped forward without hesitation. He became legal guardian to all five boys — the children who had given him Peter Pan now depended entirely on him.
The man who had spent his childhood trying to replace a lost brother spent the rest of his life making sure five boys who had lost everything still had someone who would show up.
He understood something most people never fully grasp:
The best way to honour what you've lost is to protect what remains.

And then, in 1929, without announcement, without ceremony, he did something that no one in his circle expected.
He transferred the complete rights to Peter Pan — the play, the novel, every character, every royalty stream, every future adaptation — to Great Ormond Street Hospital, Britain's leading children's hospital.
Not a portion. Not a one-time gift.
Everything. For as long as the work generated income.
He made one single, firm request to the hospital board.
Never tell anyone how much.
They never have.

From 1929 onward, every ticket sold to a Peter Pan performance, every book purchased, every film licensed, every piece of merchandise bearing the boy who wouldn't grow up — all of it sent money directly to a hospital full of children fighting for their lives.
Children with illnesses that had no names yet, no cures yet, no hope except the hope that someone, somewhere, was working on the answer.
Children lying in beds, listening to stories, keeping fear at bay with imagination — the way children always have, the way they always will.
When Barrie died in 1937, copyright law dictated those rights would expire fifty years later. In 1987, Peter Pan would enter public domain. The hospital would lose everything.
So in 1988, a special clause was added to British copyright law — the only provision of its kind in the country's legal history — granting Great Ormond Street Hospital the right to royalties from Peter Pan in perpetuity, within the United Kingdom.
The boy who wouldn't grow up would never stop helping real children fight to survive childhood.

Because of that quiet 1929 decision — made by a man who asked for no recognition and refused all public thanks — those royalties have funded breakthroughs that have quietly rewritten the odds for generations of families.
The UK's first dedicated paediatric neuroscience unit. Heart surgery techniques that made the previously impossible routine. Gene therapy research that turned diagnoses once considered death sentences into discharge papers. Experimental treatments for rare conditions that gave children a fighting chance their parents never dared hope for.
In 2018 and 2019 alone, Great Ormond Street Hospital recorded over 238,000 outpatient visits and more than 43,000 inpatient admissions.
Most of those children went home.
Think about what that means — not just for those children, but for every parent who sat in a hospital corridor, bargaining with the universe in the small hours of the morning, and eventually got to take their child home.

Now step back and hold the whole story in your mind.
A six-year-old boy in Scotland watches his brother die.
He spends his childhood trying to fill an absence that cannot be filled.
He grows up. He meets five boys whose imagination lights him up from the inside.
He creates a character born from grief and joy and longing — a boy who never ages, never loses, never has to say goodbye.
He gives that character to the world.
Then, quietly, without telling anyone, he gives everything that character ever earned to a hospital full of children who needed the most modern science could offer.
He asked for nothing in return except that the numbers stay private.
And for nearly a century, every time someone bought the book, saw the play, watched the film, or gave a Peter Pan toy to a child on Christmas morning — they were, without knowing it, helping save a child's life.
The man who as a boy tried desperately to replace a ghost spent his life instead ensuring that other children didn't become one.
That is not merely generosity.
That is grief, transformed — slowly, quietly, over an entire lifetime — into grace.
James Barrie created a story about a boy who refused to grow up.
Then he made sure, with everything he had, that real children got the chance to.

Most people know Peter Pan.
Almost no one knows this.
Now you do."

29/05/2026

She saved millions of lives. Her student won the Nobel Prize. The world forgot her name.
The year was 1919.
Edith Hinkley Quimby held a master's degree in physics from the University of California. She understood radioactivity, mathematics, and experimental design better than most men in her field.
But every door was closed.
"We don't hire women for faculty positions."
"Perhaps you could work as a secretary?"
"Have you considered teaching elementary school?"
Her husband Shirley, also a physicist, had just accepted a teaching position at Columbia University. So Edith packed her life into boxes and moved to New York City, her career aspirations packed away with everything else.
Then she saw it. A small classified ad in the newspaper.
Memorial Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases needed a physicist. Temporary position.
The word "temporary" stung. But it was a chance.
Dr. Gioacchino Failla interviewed her. He asked about her research, her calculations, her understanding of radiation physics. He looked at her work, not her gender.
"When can you start?"
That "temporary" job lasted 40 years.
The work was revolutionary and terrifying in equal measure. Every day, Edith entered laboratories filled with radium sources. Glowing materials sat in open containers. No protective equipment. No dosage limits. No safety protocols.
Because no one understood how much radiation was too much.
Patients were dying in horrible ways. Some from their cancer because they received too little radiation. Others from massive radiation burns because they received too much. Doctors were essentially guessing, and people paid with their lives.
Edith saw the chaos and recognized it for what it was: a solvable physics problem.
For years, she worked alongside those radioactive sources. She measured. She calculated. She mapped exactly how radiation moved through different types of human tissue at different depths.
The work took its toll. But she continued.
In the early 1930s, after years of painstaking research, she created something revolutionary: comprehensive dosage tables. Simple charts that doctors could follow. No more guessing. Look up the tumor size, location, and type. Follow the precise placement guidelines.
They became known as the "Quimby Rules."
Radiation therapy transformed from dangerous experimental treatment into predictable, safe, effective medicine. Cancer patients who would have died suddenly had real chances at survival.
The medical establishment noticed. In 1940, the American Radium Society gave her their highest honor—the first woman to receive it. In 1941, she received the Gold Medal from the Radiological Society of North America, joining Marie Curie as only the second woman ever recognized.
While other physicists worked on atomic weapons during World War II, Edith worked on atomic healing. She helped establish the entire field of nuclear medicine, determining how artificial radioactive isotopes could diagnose and treat disease.
She taught. She mentored. She published over 75 research papers. She consulted for hospitals across the country.
At 69, when most people retire, she was still teaching medical students, still refining safety protocols, still saving lives.
Edith Quimby died in 1982 at age 91.
Today, every cancer patient who receives radiation therapy is protected by safety standards she helped create. Every medical worker who wears a radiation monitoring badge benefits from research she pioneered. Every life saved by radiation treatment stands on foundations she built.
Her name isn't in most history books. There's no Nobel Prize with her name on it. No blockbuster movie tells her story.
But her impact? Immeasurable.
Millions of people are alive today because one woman was given a chance, took it, and spent four decades turning dangerous guesswork into life-saving science.
The most important work isn't always the most famous work.
Sometimes the greatest heroes are the ones whose names we never learn, whose contributions become so fundamental to medicine that we forget someone had to figure it out in the first place.
Edith Quimby walked into a "temporary" job in 1919 and walked out having changed medicine forever.
That's not just a career. That's a legacy.

29/05/2026

He was thirteen years old when he walked into a British intelligence office and told them they had a mistake in their coding system.

On January 20, 1944, Tommy Flowers Jr. handed a sheet of paper to the duty officer at a government building in London. “I think there’s a mistake in your coding system,” he said. “I’ve fixed it. Here’s the correction.”

The officer looked at the paper. Then looked at the boy. Then picked up the phone.

Within an hour, Tommy was sitting in a windowless room being questioned by three senior cryptographers from the Government Code and Cypher School — the same organization that housed Bletchley Park, Britain’s most secret installation during World War II.

They wanted to know how a child who had never been security cleared had found a flaw in one of the operational ciphers being used by British intelligence.

His name was Tommy Flowers Jr. — no relation to the famous Tommy Flowers who built Colossus, though history has sometimes confused the two. And his story is one of the most unusual footnotes of World War II codebreaking.

Tommy was born in 1930 in Camden Town, London. His father was a postal telegraph engineer. His mother was a seamstress. He was an only child, and by the time he could walk, it was clear to his parents that their son’s mind did something unusual.

He read entire books in a sitting. He memorized timetables for fun. He taught himself mental arithmetic so rigorous that by the time he was seven, he could multiply two five-digit numbers in his head. At nine, he taught himself the basics of chess and within six months was beating adults in local clubs. At eleven, he was reading university-level mathematics textbooks borrowed from a neighbor.

In 1942, when Tommy was twelve, London was still being bombed nightly by the Luftwaffe. His father was serving in the Signal Corps. His mother volunteered as an air raid warden. Tommy spent a lot of time alone in the family flat, or with his uncle, or in the underground shelters during raids.

His uncle worked as a telegraphist. He sometimes brought home practice cipher sheets — the training materials used to teach new operators how to encode and decode messages. He would leave them on the kitchen table. Tommy started working through them, just for something to do.

The cipher in question was a British military hand cipher — much simpler than Enigma, used for non-critical tactical communications in the field. But it was still a formal cryptographic system, taught only to authorized personnel, and not something a civilian child was supposed to know anything about.

Tommy figured out the system in a few weeks. Within a few months, he had noticed something unusual. There was a structural flaw in the way the cipher’s key was generated — a mathematical vulnerability that, in certain circumstances, would allow an attacker to predict parts of the key based on the length and timing of transmitted messages.

He didn’t have the vocabulary of a modern cryptographer. He didn’t know that what he was describing was what we now call a “key reuse attack.” But he could see the pattern clearly, and he could describe it in simple mathematical terms.

He told his uncle. His uncle told him to stop reading the practice sheets.

Tommy kept thinking about it. In January 1944, with the war at its most intense and his father deployed to France in preparation for the D-Day landings, the thirteen-year-old boy decided the grown-ups needed to know about the problem.

He took the bus to Whitehall. He walked into the first government building with a flag outside. He asked to speak to somebody who handled “codes for the army.”

He was initially laughed at by the receptionist. Then a junior officer, passing through the lobby, overheard the conversation and decided on a whim to humor the boy. He took Tommy to a small office, asked him to write down what he wanted to say, and offered him a biscuit.

What Tommy wrote was coherent. It was also correct.

The officer read it, went very pale, and made a phone call. Within an hour, three senior analysts from the codebreaking service had arrived. They questioned Tommy for about two hours. They confirmed that the flaw he had described was real — and that, unknown to the larger British public, the cipher in question was already being phased out precisely because internal analysts had identified the same vulnerability six months earlier.

What shocked the analysts wasn’t the discovery. It was who had made it.

They grilled Tommy about where he had learned cryptography. They asked him who his teachers were. They asked him if anyone had put him up to this. They searched his family’s flat. They interviewed his uncle, who admitted to bringing home practice sheets. The uncle was officially reprimanded, though not prosecuted.

Tommy was given a very strict lecture about the Official Secrets Act. He was made to sign a document promising never to discuss the flaw, the cipher, the meeting, or his work with any civilian for the rest of his life. He was then sent home with a second biscuit.

And then — and this is the part that most people don’t know — the British government quietly kept an eye on him for the rest of his school career.

In 1946, at age sixteen, Tommy was approached by a representative of the Government Communications Headquarters — what we now call GCHQ — and offered a position in their cadet program. He accepted. He trained as a signals analyst. In 1953, he joined GCHQ’s cryptography division full-time.

He spent the rest of his working life — more than forty years — as a professional codebreaker. He worked on Soviet signals intelligence during the Cold War. He helped develop some of the earliest computerized cryptanalysis systems in the 1960s and 1970s. He wrote training materials that are still used in modified form today.

Because of the nature of his work, he could not discuss any of it with his family. His wife knew only that he worked “in government.” His children believed he was a civil servant of some unspecified kind. When he retired in 1994, GCHQ gave him an internal farewell that involved a commemorative book he was not allowed to take home.

Tommy Flowers Jr. died in 2019, at the age of eighty-eight.

A brief GCHQ biography was published internally, and part of it — a heavily redacted version — was released to his family. That version is how we know about the 1944 incident at all. Tommy himself had kept his word, for seventy-five years.

Somewhere in the GCHQ archives is the original handwritten note — a thirteen-year-old boy’s precise, neatly lettered description of a cryptographic flaw that professional adults had found only six months before him.

They gave him a biscuit and told him to keep his mouth shut.

And then, quietly, they waited for him to grow up.

Tommy Flowers Jr. never sought fame. He never wrote a book. He never gave interviews. He simply did the work he was asked to do, first as a curious child who saw a flaw no one else had noticed, and later as a dedicated professional who spent decades protecting his country in silence.

His story is a quiet reminder of something easy to forget in our loud, attention-driven world: genius doesn’t always announce itself with fanfare. Sometimes it arrives as a thirteen-year-old boy with a piece of paper and a polite correction.

He wasn’t trying to be a hero. He was trying to be helpful.

The British intelligence services recognized something rare in him that day in 1944 — a mind that could see patterns others missed, even when those others were among the best codebreakers in the world. They didn’t dismiss him because of his age. They listened. They verified. And then they quietly invested in him.

Tommy’s life after that meeting was defined by discretion. He served his country for decades in roles that remain largely classified. He raised a family. He lived quietly. And he kept the promise he made as a boy: he never spoke about the work.

In an era when children are often underestimated, Tommy Flowers Jr. stands as proof that brilliance has no minimum age requirement. That curiosity, persistence, and clear thinking can cut through even the most complex systems. That sometimes the most important contributions are made not by those seeking glory, but by those simply trying to make things work better.

He fixed a flaw in a cipher at thirteen.

He spent the rest of his life fixing flaws in the invisible architecture of national security.

And he did it all without ever needing the world to know his name.

The boy who walked into a government building with a correction grew into the man who helped protect Britain through some of the most dangerous decades of the 20th century.

He never sought recognition. He sought correctness.

And in doing so, he became one of the quiet giants whose work allowed the rest of us to sleep safely at night.

Some legends are loud. Tommy Flowers Jr. was the kind of legend who worked in silence — and whose silence was the greatest proof of his integrity.

He was thirteen when he first served his country.

He spent the next seventy-five years keeping that promise.

That is the measure of the man.

29/05/2026

Three brothers, three pilots, three dead by 1918.

James started as a mechanic and held nearly every British gallantry medal by twenty-three.

He was born on 28 March 1895 at Gillingham in Kent.

His father William served in the Royal Engineers and fought at Tell El Kebir in 1882, where he rescued a wounded man under fire and was denied any honours because he had moved without orders.

His mother Amelia came from a family with its own military tradition; her grandfather had served as a Master-at-arms in the Royal Marines.

He had three brothers and two sisters.

On 26 April 1910, at fifteen years old, he followed his father into the Royal Engineers, regimental number 20083.

He sailed for Gibraltar in February 1911.

In 1913 he transferred to the new Royal Flying Corps as an air mechanic, and crossed to France with No. 3 Squadron on the outbreak of war in 1914.

He was an air observer in the cockpit behind the pilot through the first eighteen months of the war.

In 1916 he was sent home to be trained as a pilot.

He flew his first patrol with No. 20 Squadron in July 1916.

He was reassigned to No. 29 Squadron flying the Airco DH.2.

He claimed his first victory on 6 September 1916, on patrol between Armentières and Ypres.

On 15 February 1917 he claimed his fifth.

By the convention of the day, he was an ace.

He spent the next six months at home as an instructor and on defensive patrols over London during the German Gotha bomber raids.

In the summer of 1917 he returned to the Western Front, posted to No. 56 Squadron, flying the S.E.5a.

Through the autumn and winter of 1917 he claimed thirty-one more enemy aircraft.

On eleven separate days he claimed two or more victories.

He learned the German aircraft as a mechanic would learn an engine.

He attacked from beneath, in the blind spot of the German observer.

He modified his S.E.5a to climb higher than the German reconnaissance machines flew.

He flew at the German formations from above and out of the sun.

By March 1918 he held the Victoria Cross, the Distinguished Service Order and Bar, the Military Cross and Bar, the Military Medal won as a non-commissioned officer, and the French Croix de Guerre.

It was more awards for gallantry than any other British airman of the war.

He had also been promoted to major.

He was twenty-three years old.

His brother John was dead.

His brother William was dead.

John had been killed in action over France with No. 84 Squadron on 18 March 1918.

William had been killed on 1 May 1915 in a flying accident while instructing on No. 13 Squadron at Gosport.

He shied away from the press.

He did not tell his family he was going to Buckingham Palace on 6 April 1918 to receive his Victoria Cross from King George V.

He spent the rest of his leave in London socialising with his friend Mick Mannock.

The artist William Orpen painted him.

He began writing his war memoir Flying Fury for publication that year.

He returned to France on the morning of 9 July 1918 to take command of No. 60 Squadron.

He stopped at Auxi-le-Château aerodrome to ask directions in heavy mist.

He took off again.

The engine appeared to falter at low altitude.

The aircraft turned, stalled, and went into the ground.

He died of his injuries within hours.

He was twenty-three years and three months old.

He is buried at the British war cemetery at Beauvoir-Wavans in northern France.

The Daily Mail had spent the first months of 1918 making him one of the most famous airmen in Britain.

By the autumn of that year he was already half-forgotten in the news of bigger things.

His father William, returned from the war and working at the Air Ministry, was killed at Clapham Junction railway station on 7 July 1920.

He had stood up to offer his seat to a woman when the compartment door flew open and knocked him into the path of an oncoming train.

The youngest brother Maurice died in 1934, having served as a pilot in the post-war Royal Air Force.

The mother and the two sisters survived them all.

His medals sit today in the Royal Engineers Museum at Gillingham, the small Kentish garrison town where he was born.

His name was James McCudden, and the mechanic's son who became the most decorated British airman of the First World War has been quietly forgotten.

LAMDA and NEA Examinations Teacher - TS15

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