Professor Harry Norman Green in a tragic aircraft accident in 1927, says Wikipedia. NO, it was a different Harry Norman Green, of the Royal Aircraft Establishment

In researching the story of Professor Harry Norman Green and his work on traumatic shock during the Second World War I came across an intriguing hit in a Google search of his name. The seemingly well-researched and referenced article on Wikipedia identified him as the Harry Norman Green who was involved in a tragic aeroplane accident in 1927. However, a little more research shows this was NOT ‘our’ Harry Green, then clinical assistant to Dr (later Sir) Edward Mellanby, Professor of Pharmacology in Sheffield, but somebody else of the same name, in his case a scientific civil servant who developed techniques for navigation and safer night flying in the 1930s.

Western Daily Press
14 November 2007
British Newspaper Archives

In short, on 9 November 1927, Flying Officer Campbell Mackenzie-Richards, the pilot of a Bristol F2b fighter, was flying in the dark from Croydon aerodrome, where he had been testing experimental navigation equipment, to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. He had a defective compass and could find neither Farnborough nor, on turning back, Croydon. By then he was low on fuel and  told his observer to bail out using a parachute; this the observer did and landed safely. The pilot, however, was killed, with parachute apparently open, after he jumped at, it was believed, too low an altitude. The plane crash a short distance away. Mackenzie-Richards, a well known test pilot and air race competitor had been married for only three months; he left an unborn daughter.

The observer who landed safely was Harry Norman Green. I do not know how the writer of the Wikipedia article (also picked up and reported elsewhere including here) equated this Harry Green with Dr (later Professor) Harry Green. A quick perusal of the newspapers reporting the accident and the inquest clearly indicate they were not one and the same. At the inquest the observer ‘said he was a Technical Officer in the Royal Air Force and had been in the service for two years’ and that he was a ‘a technical officer at the same establishment’ (i.e. Farnborough). This was obviously not Dr Harry Norman Green of Sheffield.

Records available online about Farnborough and the RAF show that Green was an expert in lighting for airfields. In 1932 he produced a report for RAE on the atmospheric transmission of coloured light. He applied for a British patent for his ‘Improvements in or relating to navigation lights’ in 1934. Earlier, in 1930, he published with A.K. Toulmin Smith BA AMIEE “Marking the Modern Air Route: The Lighting of Civil Air Routes and Aerodromes for Night Flying Considered in the Light of Modern Development”*. Both authors were shown as Scientific Research Staff at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. He is also mentioned in the Meteorological Magazine of March 1957 for proposing a technique using flares to measure visibility on airfields.

Further evidence, were any required, is that a Harry N Green was shown in the 1939 Register living with his wife and children at 134 Victoria Road, Farnborough as a ‘Senior Scientific Officer, R.A.E.’. This Harry N. Green’s date of birth was 13 March 1891. A family tree on ancestry.com indicates this was his second wife, his first wife having died in 1932.  In the 1911 Census he is listed as an electrical engineer living in London He was born in Grasmere, now in Cumbria, and died in Surrey in 1967, aged 76, the same year as Professor Harry Norman Green.

Now how do I tell the author of the Wikipedia article on Mackenzie-Richards and his tragic death that he/she got the wrong Harry Norman Green as the observer in the aircraft?

*To enable aircraft to compete with other forms of transport, on a commercial basis, it is essential that services should be run during the hours of darkness. With this end in view the development of night flying facilities has received considerable attention in recent years, and it has been conclusively proved that, when multi‐engined machines are flown over an adequately lighted airway, night flying is both safe and reliable. In the United States, where aircraft are extensively used for carrying mails, more than 15,000 miles are flown every night under all conditions of weather.