Photo courtesy the Yates family Steve Zoltai feature Chiropractic History Assignment The remarkable Harry Yates, DC crap game in London’s Savoy Hotel, the Canadian fl ier had little reason to believe he would be alive in a week’s time, let alone finish his game. Still, Flight Lieut. Harry Yates loved a challenge. Besides, the secret mission offered an op- portunity to settle a personal score and, since he had only been given six months to live, Harry felt he had little to lose. W THE MISSION Steve Zoltai is the collections de- velopment librarian and archivist for CMCC and was previously the Assistant Executive Director of the Health Sciences Information Con- sortium of Toronto.He has worked for several public and private libraries and with the University of Toronto Archives. Steve comes by his interest in things historical honestly – he worked as a field archeologist for the Province of Manitoba.He can be contacted at [email protected]. On June 20, 1919, Harry Yates was in London celebrating his recent London-Paris multiengine flight record when the courier knocked at his door. Three hours later, he was fl ying his Handley Page (HP) bomber to Lympne near the coast. At dawn the next day, he met a British Foreign Offi ce agent and was airborne minutes later on a fi ve thousand kilometre flight to Cairo. The Foreign Office offi cial was Harry St. John Philby, father of the infamous Cold War era British/Soviet double agent, Kim Philby. Philby was being dispatched to Cairo to quell Arab unrest caused by British betrayal of promises of self-determination made by Lawrence of Arabia in exchange for their resistance against the Ottoman Turks.1 Harry was to leapfrog his way across Europe and the Mediterranean, arriving in Cairo in the shortest possible time. The previous London-Cairo record was 15 1/2days held by an Englishman, RAF Maj. A.S.C. MacLaren. Air Ministry ground support was promised along the way. Harry had very personal reasons to attempt the record. Yates had been ordered to train MacLaren to fl y HPs but had never been told the nature of the mission which, doubtless, he would have felt perfectly qualifi ed to do himself. Second, he began to suf- fer chronic stomach pain while training in France. Eventually it became so severe that half his stomach was removed, and the surgeon gave him just six months to live. Harry was effectively operating under a death sentence. Young Harry Yates and the Handley Page bomber. GOING FOR THE RECORD Guy Simser, a Kanata, Ontario, aviation writer, used Harry’s journal entries to recon- struct events along each of the 10 stages of the fl ight plan. Promised Air Ministry ground support consistently failed to show, leaving Harry and crew to fuel and maintain the 16 • CANADIAN CHIROPRACTOR | MAY 2009 www.canadianchiropractor.ca hen the Royal Air Force (RAF) courier inter- rupted young Harry’s
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