SIR CYRIL NEWALL

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 84, 5 October 1940, Page 12

SIR CYRIL NEWALL

SUCCESSOR TO LORD GALWAY

AIR FORCE MARSHAL

DISTINGUISHED CAREER

Air Chief Marshal Sir Cyril Newall, G.C.8., C.M.G., C.8.E., A.M., Chief of the Air Staff, is to be the next Governor-General of New Zealand in succession to Colonel the Rt. Hon. Viscount Galway, P.C., G.C.M.G., D.5.0., 0.8. E., whose" term of office will expire in February. It is officially announced that his Majesty the King has approved Sir Cyril's appointment, and his Majesty has also approved the promotion of the Air Chief Marshal to be Marshal of the Royal Air Force. Sir Cyril has been Chief of the Air Staff since 1937.

Sir Cyril Louis Norton Newall was born in 1886 at an Indian hill station where his father, the late LieutenantColonel William Potter Newall, of the Indian Army, was posted. He was educated at Bedford School and Sandhurst. In 1905 he entered the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, with whom he took part in the Zakkha Kel Expedition of 1908. The next year he transferred to the Ghurkas and served with them until the outbreak of the Great War.

In 1911 when home on leave he first interested himself in flying, and took his Royal Aero Club certificate as a

pilot. Only five pilots who gained their "tickets" in those days are still serving.

Early in the Great War he was seconded to the Royal Flying Corps, and was given command of a flight in the No. 1 Squadron. There were then only about two score machines with the British Expeditionary Force, and they were used for reconnaissance. By 1915 he was squadron commander, and led the: No. 12 Squadron for two years. Ir 1917 he was given command of the No. 41 Bombing Squadron, then the spear-point of the British offensive air-arm.

He emerged from the war having been three times mentioned in dispatches, decorated C.M.G., C.8.E., Albert Medal Ist Class, Brevet-Major, and Officer of the Legion of Honour, Crown of Italy, and Order of Leopold of Belgium, and Belgian Croix de Guerre.

The Albert Medal was awarded for hi.; action when fire broke out in an R.F.C. bomb store in 1916, and he and a mechanic climbed on to the roof and played a hose, through a hole burned by the flames, on to the 2000 highexplosive bombs below. Afterwards he entered the building with three others and put out the fire. After the war he transferred to the R.A.F. and held a number of important staff appointments—Deputy Director of Personnel, Air Commodore, Air Officer Commanding the Special Reserve and Auxiliary Air Force, Director of Operations and Intelligence, and, in 1926, Deputy Chief of the Air Staff. He was also Air A.D.C. to his Majesty. He became a member of the Air Council in 1930, and the next year was placed in command of the Wessex Bombing Area. In 1931, he went out as Air Vice-Marshal to command the Royal Air Force in the Middle East. He was four years absent from England but in 1935 returned as Member of the Air Council for Supply and Organisation. In 1937 he became Chief of the Air Staff. He was created C.B. in 1929, K.C.B. in 1935, and G.C.B. in 1938. In 1922 he married May Dulcie Wendell but his wife died two years later. He married again, in 1925, Olive Tennyson Foster, the daughter of Mrs. Francis Storer Eaton, Boston, United States. He has two daughters and a son.