Hoots from the Archive - The Fabulous Flying Fish Brothers

Above the front door of the diminutive Seventh Day Adventist church in Blackpool hangs a modest plaque (pictured above) which memorialises the tragically short lives of three young brothers, all of whom died in operational RAF flights during World War II, including former MGS pupils Allan Kilshaw Fish and Eddie Fish. Blackpool had been the town where the family had settled, and where the boys' father, Joseph, had set up a number of successful cobbler's shops. Although, sadly, not much is known about the two boys' time at MGS, it is clear that Allan had an ear for music, being a regular singer in the MGS choir, his name featuring in many of the concert programmes of the 1920's.

Allan and Eddie's younger brother, Reginald Arnold Fish, a Corporal Air-Gunner, had been killed while flying as a passenger over Burma in 1941 during what is thought to have been a reconnaissance flight, at the age of just 22. He was buried at Taukkyan Cemetery, Burma (now Myanmar). Flight Sergeant-Navigator Allan Kilshaw Fish's fate was to lose his life when his Vickers Wellington plane was shot down whilst on a mission to Kassel, Germany in August 1942. He is buried at Hanover War Cemetery. Finally, completing this grim trio of wartime fatalities, Sergeant-Pilot Eddie Fish met his untimely end when his 'Hadley Page Halifax' was shot down by a German fighter during an operational flight over the Friesian Islands only five months later. It is on these Islands that Eddie is buried, in Vredenhof War Cemetery. The two names of Allan and Eddie were duly added in gold to the long list of WWII casualties on the wall of the school's Memorial Hall (as shown below).

In addition, the July 1943 issue of Ulula recorded the two young men's deaths alongside other recent casualties, in its ominous, all-too-regular 'Roll of Honour Section':

Otto Smart