"My pilots are dying" is the distressed feeling I have experienced lately, first with the passing of Mervyn Thompson on April 1, and now with Bobby Thomas and Michael Anthony both during this past week. Why your pilots, I am sure is the question being asked. Because for ten years of my life between 1968 and 1978, as secretary to the Fleet Managers and finally to the General Manager Flight Operations at BWIA, I interacted with these men on a daily basis, sorting out from uniforms, to flight manuals and amendments, annual leave, travel allowances and more.
The sense of loss when Mervyn passed away was unfathomable. He was not a childhood friend, and when he did come into Kent House, he was one of the pilots who never got into too long a conversation. I started delving into my innermost being to see if I could come up with an answer to the grief that I felt. And it was a mutual friend who pointed out "the pilots were like family for the ten years that you worked with them, you saw them oftener than your own family" she said.
I had seen Mervyn exactly one week prior to his passing, and I knew it was the last time that I would be seeing him alive. He was still the same gracious person who answered with the same quiet smile that for him "it was one day up and one day down, and somehow I knew instinctively that there were more down days than up days.
He was exactly as his niece said in her eulogy "a solitary man" who had never married. And the one pilot whom I cannot remember ever coming into Kent House accompanied by any of his peers. He was definitely a loner who would appear quietly, discuss whatever the business of the moment with his quiet smile and go on his way. The one continuous piece of interaction we had was my always trying to find out what his middle initial "H" stood for. And one day I guessed it, he was surprised and made me promise never to repeat it. I explained to him that my godfather's middle name which I had always found unusual, was the same.
Bobby, on the other hand, always had time for a joke or conversation on what was going on at Kent House. What is ironic is the fact that Bobby returned to Trinidad in March from a two year posting in Jamaica to take up the position of Flight Inspector with the Director of Civil Aviation's office at Piarco, which had been vacated by Thompson, who was then terminally ill with cancer of the pancreas. Within one week Bobby was diagnosed with cancer of the lower abdomen which had metastasised in the liver.
Says Mervyn Rose, a former BWIA Captain, now himself a Flight Inspector, who had spent two years to 1998 at Air Lanka in Sri Lanka with his close friend Bobby: "It's unbelievable but Bobby was sitting at the same desk used by Mervyn Thompson."
I did not know Bobby as a media colleague, it was in the world of aviation that we met, and my eulogy would be that the Bobby I knew was a lovely human being who had climbed every mountain that he put his mind to, but in his make up were many of life's frailties, as is the case with us all.
He could be exasperatingly funny, like the time a Customs Officer questioned him about a sandwich he had brought off the aircraft. "Is that ham in the sandwich" asked the officer, to which Bobby replied "and don't forget the mustard too, sir." Needless to say, the officer was not amused.
The last time I saw Bobby, three weeks before his passing, he was at his lowest and weakest ebb, but told us, his two colleagues Edmund Headley and Junior Stoute with whom I had gone to visit him at Mount Hope, as we entered the hospital room "please no sad faces in this room." He could barely speak but was sure that "it was now all in the Lord's hands" whichever way things went.
May God grant eternal rest to Captains Mervyn Thompson, Bobby Thomas, and Michael Anthony whose passing took place in Hamilton, Ontario.