John Gillespie Magee Jr. (9 June 1922 – 11 December 1941) was a World War II Anglo-American Royal Canadian Air Force fighter pilot and war poet, who wrote the sonnet "High Flight". He was killed in an accidental mid-air collision over England in 1941.
Early life
John Gillespie Magee was born in Shanghai, China, to an American father and a British mother, who both worked as Anglican missionaries. His father, John Magee Sr., was from a family of some wealth and influence in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Magee Senior chose to become an Episcopal priest and was sent as a missionary to China. Whilst there he met his future wife, Faith Emmeline Backhouse, who came from Helmingham in Suffolk and was a member of the Church Missionary Society. Magee's parents married in 1921, and their first child, John Junior, was born 9 June 1922, the eldest of four brothers.
Magee began his education at the American School in Nanking in 1929. In 1931 he moved with his mother to England and spent the following four years at St Clare, a preparatory school for boys, in Walmer, in the county of Kent. From 1935 to 1939 he attended Rugby School, where he developed the ambition to become a poet, and whilst at the school won its Poetry Prize in 1938. He was impressed by the school's Roll of Honour listing its pupils who had fallen in the First World War, which included the Edwardian poet Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), whose writing style Magee emulated. Brooke had won the school's Poetry Prize 34 years prior to Magee. The prize-winning poem by Magee centred upon the burial of Brooke's body at 11 o'clock at night in an olive grove on the Greek island of Skyros in April 1915.
Whilst at Rugby Magee fell in love with Elinor Lyon, the daughter of P. H. B. Lyon, the headmaster. In later life an accomplished children's author, she became the inspiration for many of Magee's poems. Though his love was not returned, he remained friends with Elinor and her family.
Magee visited the United States in 1939, staying with his mother and brothers in Martha's Vineyard. He also visited relatives of his father in Pittsburgh, part of a very wealthy extended family which included the Mellons. One of these relatives was his uncle, Pittsburgh lawyer and Congressman James McDevitt Magee, who had served as a first lieutenant in the United States Army Air Service during the First World War. During Magee's stay in Pittsburgh, he participated to the full in the social life available to him there, including the Rolling Rock Club. His expenditures on these activities attracted critical correspondence from his clergyman father.
Because of the outbreak of World War II, Magee was unable to travel to Britain for his final school year (1939-40) at Rugby, and instead attended Avon Old Farms School in Avon, Connecticut. The school "Provost", or headmaster, Rev. W. Brooke Stabler, later recalled an incident during the winter of 1939-40, when, after a school dance:
Magee climbed a tall tree to rescue a cat; before he had come down out of the tree, there was a circle of admiring and exclaiming girls watching him from the ground . . .
His attitude toward the war gradually evolved from one approaching pacifism to a decision to become a pilot to help protect his friends in Britain. Stabler recalled:
One afternoon, after lying on top of a tower [at the School] for a couple of hours in the sun, Magee turned to his companion and suddenly announced, “Well, I think I’ll join the R.A.F.”
He once again stayed with his family in Martha's Vineyard in the summer of 1940, learning to drive and having a very active social life: Mornings on the beach, surrounded by a bevy of girls . . . dances . . . beach parties . . . occasionally a drop too much of alcohol . . . wild drives around the bay to Vineyard Haven and Edgartown . . . . . and grave discussions with his father on the state of the world or some phase of Christian living. When his father remonstrated with him once on turning night into day, John answered, "My generation does not expect to live long, and we want to enjoy ourselves while we may."
After discussions with his parents, he decided to go to Canada to join the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), with the intention of learning to fly, and then being sent to Britain. Accordingly, while he had been offered a scholarship to Yale University for 1940–41, he did not enroll.