Wing Commander JM Fairweather

The Dreaded Telegram

Forty-two-year-old James MacGregor Fairweather commissioned in the RFC in 1917 and was awarded the “Distinguished Flying Cross” after the 1918 Baltic Campaign. Wing Commander Fairweather took command of No. 3 British Air Mission in Belgium in November 1939 under Air Marshal Barratt, Commander of the British Air Forces in France. Six months later, Fairweather and his unit, forced to evacuate after Hitler’s “Low Countries” invasion,sailed out of Ostend on the SS Abukir in the late evening of May 27th bound for Dover with over 480 other passengers and crew.

The Dreaded Telegram

Torpedoed off the Belgian coast, the E Boat then gunned down people in the water leaving only twenty-four survivors. The telegram delivered to Mrs Kathleen Fairweather at their Kenilworth home in Cape Town a few days later included the chilling words “missing presumed drowned” but she would not have known that her husband, the first South African World War One veteran in the RAF to lose his life in the Second World War was by then one of almost 2 000 torpedo losses. Wing Commander JM Fairweather DFC is remembered at Rondebosch Boys High in Cape Town and Queens College in the Eastern Cape.