David Beaty
1919-1999
David Beaty loved Slindon and this beautiful churchyard where he is buried. He moved to the village with his wife Betty at the end of the 1980s. However, it was a church many miles away that witnessed his birth. David was the son of a missionary, Arthur Stanley Beaty, and he was born in the town of Hatton that nestles beneath Adam’s Peak in the Nuwara Eliya area in the central province of the island of Sri-Lanka. David loved the changing moods and vistas of Slindon woods as once he had loved the tortuous paths and fascinating wild life of the jungle around Hatton .
David was a man born to adventure and to being a witness to history. He was a life-long author and raconteur. He could keep you spellbound with his stories and as a child with his three sisters he would devour novels, many about the far-off shores of England. He came early to the art of writing, a life-long passion, and was always to be seen with a pen in his hand.
When he was nine, he travelled by ship to Bath to start school at Kingswood. In 1937 he won an Exhibition to Merton College, Oxford to study History. However, this was to be a short-lived sojourn as the storm clouds were gathering over Europe and at the outbreak of war he joined RAF Coastal Command, seeing four tours of operation in the fiercest theatres of conflict. He flew in the battle against U-boats in the Atlantic, the defence of Malta, and the protection of the D-Day Landings. He became a Squadron Leader and with his crew attacked the U-boat pens in the Baltic. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and later a Bar for significant valour and incredible courage and sheer cool under extreme and terrifying circumstances when his aircraft was shot-up attacking U-boats. At the end of the war, he was hooked on flying and he had met his other love, his wife Betty, a W.A.A.F. officer who was a social worker in her peace-time persona.
David loved being in the air and had been assessed by the R.A.F. as an exceptional pilot. David joined BOAC as a Captain and brought his courage and vision to the expanding area of civil aviation. He was based at Filton in Bristol and during his time there saw the development of commercial flight. He was struck then by the incredible courage demonstrated by peace-time aircrew and by the need to support them in this growing industry, most particularly in training and in legislation to ensure that flying hours for pilots were reasonable and safe. It was a theme that he was to return to later in his life. However, the writing bug had taken hold and following significant success with his novel “The Wind of the Sea”, he left BOAC in 1953 to pursue full-time writing. He wrote twenty-four novels and five non-fiction books. In the 1970s he returned to his own studies when he undertook an MPhil in Psychology at London University. He returned to his notion of the importance to safety of the pilot in the cockpit in his two books on aircraft safety – “The Human Factor” and “The Naked Pilot”, both of which examined the human factors in aircraft accidents and how careful understanding of the mix of human behaviour with machines might anticipate, and so prevent, possible errors. For example, the notion of a rigid hierarchy in the air might lead to a junior member of the crew’s contribution being ignored, with potentially disastrous consequences. International training, policy and practice have stemmed from these publications. An awareness of the way in which human beings operate under stress and in relation to each other in the cockpit has been David’s invaluable legacy, and for which he was appointed MBE in 1992.
He wrote 24 novels, two of which were made into films, one being bought by Alfred Hitchcock and five non fiction. His novels were translated all over the world. His study of human factors in air accidents was mandatory for all EEC pilots.
David Beaty died in December 1999, still writing and still engaged with the world of air safety. At his funeral in 1999, his nephew John read Magee’s poem “High Flight”, a beautiful tribute that encapsulated the symbiosis of man, machine and heaven:
“I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace
“And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod”
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
“Put out my hand and touched the face of God.”
John Gillespie Magee Jr., (1941)
In a fitting continuation of David’s book “Light Perpetual”, which commemorates memorial windows to aviators in churches throughout the UK, on the South side of the church you can see the beautiful memorial window Where never lark, or even eagle, flew-” engraved by Simon Whistler which is his pictorial celebration of David Beaty’s life. The river depicts his happy marriage and writing partnership with Betty, also a writer. The three trees show his three daughters and the soaring bird his love of flight and his capacity to see the long view.