Back to search results. Profession: Managing Director, Messrs. Noon and Pearce, Airspray Co. Nyali Beach Hotel Ltd. Wara Ltd. He had later taken up flying as a career and had been a pilot with Wilson Airways Kenya. It was in that he went flying for the first time, with none less a personality than the famous Tom Campbell Black of Wilson Airways who the following year came first in the London-Melbourne Air Race.
After a long and exhausting day of taking up many people on sedate joy flips round the airfield who wanted to know for themselves "what this flying thing was all about," with the young Alec as his last passenger of the day Campbell Black "went absolutely haywire" and put the de Havilland Gipsy Moth through all her paces.
Alec was completely "sold". Two years later he himself learned to fly, although his lessons were "on the quiet".
His mother and stepfather wanted him to continue coffee farming at their Mchana estates at Ruiru. Alec was chairman of the hotel at the time of changing hands. Noon Alec's stepfather for Alec's flying lessons that the cat was properly out of the bag, though even from his public school Canford, in England, Alec had written that he wanted to join the RAF. When she realised his determination, she and his stepfather told him to go ahead and get his certificates.
He was 25 years old when he got his Private Pilot's Licence No. Puss Moths were sent off scouring the Indian Ocean for submarines they never found. He and his colleagues formed a valuable nucleus of pilots with experience of flying over Africa and were used mainly for transport operations with emphasis on VIP's. Night after night Alec flew Dakotas with supplies for Malta, "invaders" for Sicily, partisans for Poland and Yugoslavia, and supplies to Cairo that couldn't get through by sea.
