“What a Tale It Is!”
On the morning of Saturday, 25 August 1928, a passenger plane took off from Victoria, British Columbia’s capital city on Vancouver Island, bound for Seattle some eighty miles to the south across the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The international service had been inaugurated just two weeks before, and the Ford Tri-Motor monoplane—otherwise known as “The Tin Goose”—was the largest and most modern commercial aircraft in the world. But it never arrived at its destination. Twenty minutes into its flight, it ran into thick fog and crashed into the sea near Port Townsend in the state of Washington. None of those on board, two crew and five passengers, survived. It was the worst tragedy so far in North American commercial aviation and for this reason alone made international headlines. But the tragedy involved something more. Amongst the bodies that washed ashore in the days that immediately followed were those of Churchill’s first biographer, Alexander Mac-Callum Scott, and Scott’s wife. Scott’s place in the Churchill story has been badly overlooked.1
Scott was born the same year as Churchill, but in the more modest circumstances of an old ferryman’s cottage in Blantyre, Scotland. He was the son of a market gardener and Presbyterian church elder, who died when Alexander was fourteen. This left his mother Rebecca to bring up her children alone. Thanks to a bursary, Scott went to Glasgow University, where he was a contemporary of the novelist John Buchan, became president of the student union, and
