Peekle

If you caught the Anzac Day fly-past over Sydney Harbour in 2014, then you witnessed Flight Lieutenant Bill Purdy’s skill in the lead aircraft.

Behind him, 40 Tiger Moth aircraft flew in formation. Fully licensed, he’d just turned 91. It’s been a while since. In April, Mr Purdy celebrated his 101st birthday.

Ahead of the event, Mr Purdy spent two days in Newcastle organising his pilots with the command’s commemorative unit. On the day, they traced the vintage Great Tiger Moth Air Race, marking 70 years since the WWII D-Day Landings and Normandy Campaign. The latter involved Mr Purdy – including the famous bombing of Pointe du Hoc on 6 June. In the dying days of the war, his group was among the last of the allied bombers sent up. 

In no time, Mr Purdy had proved integral to the squadron’s success. Family men with in-flight roles began lining up to crew with him, figuring Mr Purdy was the best guarantee of making it home. 

He flew Lancaster bombers attached to No. 463 Squadron’s Bomber Command, and completed 37 ‘enemy engagement ops’ between April and August 1944. The squadron’s average per pilot had been five. He was 21.

Accounts of Mr Purdy’s skills in keeping the enemy at bay are eyebrow-raising and heroic, a fact he disputes. “You don’t have time to be brave; you’re just too busy!” Besides, he said, “Nothing would have been achieved without engineering, maintenance, radio signallers and all the ground staff.”

A sit-down with the veteran pilot at his Muston Street home had to be elbowed between media interviews, and the four days a week spent at Mosman Bowling Club, with whom he recently competed in Hobart, and Elanora Golf Club – where he’s been a member for 65 years.

“But you’re famous, Bill!” the author said, explaining the difficulty. 

“I am only famous because I am alive!” he shot back. 

The memoir.

In 2009, his family pushed him to type a memoir, so he tapped away, and printed 24 pages. The slim volume is a rollicking read, crying out to be a fat book. Mosman Collective was given the unpublished work for this story.

Laconic, self-deprecating, erudite, humble and fiercely intelligent, Mr Purdy reels off memories of mid last century as if each one a fresh event. 

His training and celebrated service occupied three years of his life. But it was his long career in food – its preservation, storage, sale and delivery – and ability to grab opportunities before they knocked, that was the standout. 

Mr Purdy’s skill set ran to management consultancy, change negotiation, diversification, logistics, supply chain, crisis aversion, and mergers and acquisitions, to use today’s labels. He either began a business or acquired one during a volatile period in food preservation and storage.

His memoir reveals a methodical mind that overcame obstacles to grow several grocery companies which, in turn, added stability to a rapidly changing market. The industry was pursuing freezing and dehydration, and grocers big and small had to catch up. 

‘Leave no man behind’ may well have been his motto. It was the action taken by Mr Purdy that fortified the Australian industry against a strike by American giant Nabisco that really took the biscuit. 

He formed a big co-op of domestic grocers, pretty much closed to new members. The tight structure held and traded among itself, maximising economies of scale. In the wash up, Nabisco never cracked 10 percent market share. 

“We ended up with 74.3 percent – probably as high as any company in a competitive environment in Australia had ever achieved,” he said.

The business had taught him self-sufficiency and, after leaning on the bank, he and business partner, ex-Spitfire pilot Jim Summerton, were able to buy premises, warehousing, and cold storage facilities. The last of these saw Mr Purdy’s old flying suit and gloves recycled to cope with -17 degrees Celsius.

They chose a going concern, Crystal Ice at Rozelle, which was owned by two brothers. Weeks before the sale, a third brother had been found floating in the ice tank, a live electric wire in one hand, a half-empty bottle of rum in the other. “Nobody knew whether he’d drowned, frozen to death, been electrocuted, or died of alcoholic poisoning.

“We’d been going for seven years when Max Edgell visited,” he said, of his business that, in today’s coin, had a turnover of $60,000,000 annually. They’d bought Birdseye, but knew nothing about frozen food. So, Edgell’s bought Mr Purdy’s business. It was first-to-market with a full list of frozen goods, and came with a healthy institutional client base.

The deal included a new role for Mr Purdy: general manager of Edgell’s new frozen food division; and for Mr Summerton; marketing manager, canned food. The inclusion of the building swelled the price, perhaps also driven by its exclusive alarm system in case of chemical leak.

Next door there lived an old white cockatoo. “He was our first warning: the bird always picked up the ammonia smell that would sometimes escape from the refrigerant pipes,” Mr Purdy said. “He would fold both wings over his head and scream, ‘Christ! Oh, Christ!’ until we took action.”

Billy Kent Purdy, born at Clovelly, was four when the family’s house at Lindfield was built and ready to move in. It was “the original McMansion,” he chuckled.

Learning came swiftly to young Bill, first evident at Lindfield Public School from where he graduated, aged 10, having been bumped from 4th to 6th class. Picked for North Sydney Boys High School, the only one from his year, he felt “extremely lucky” to be there.

A father’s question.

There were options to leave school early. At the end of fourth year, his father asked a question: “What are you going to do with your life?” and suggested professions for the clever student. His son looked at him blankly. 

“For the first time in my life I was faced with this big decision,” Mr Purdy said. “The answer, when it came, was ‘No clue’.”

However, his father seemed to be doing alright, and “we were living fairly well”, so Bill opted for the grocery business, kicking off at one of his father’s Moran & Cato stores, which dotted the north shore. At the time, the grocery chain was the largest in Australia.  

So, Bill enrolled full-time at the elite Wentworth College. To gain more experience, he fronted for the five-hour, Friday afternoon shift at M&C Chatswood. “No pay, of course,” he laughed. 

At college, he learned business correspondence, principles, accounting, bookkeeping, psychology and economics across a year-long course.

Suddenly, something amusing flashed across Mr Purdy’s face. “And there was a little gnome there — gosh, he would’ve been 5 foot 2 — who taught us public speaking and salesmanship,” he said. “The whole experience at Wentworth set me up for life.”

England declares war on Germany.

Bill was serving customers behind the counter at Lindfield when a woman came through the door saying the radio was alive with news England had declared war on Germany, and Australia rapidly called upon to swell its forces.

“I was cutting a half-a-pound of bacon for another customer…,” he recalled. At 16, “I was just too young to think of going,” he said, and would have to “postpone that thought.” 

To join the RAAF, recruits had to be at least 21, unless they had written parental permission. Mr Purdy, now 18, decided to have a go at “permission” and fed a sheet of paper into a typewriter. He typed what he assumed would be their worries and responded to each with firm, succinct answers. This he handed to his father before settling into an uneasy silence. 

“After a while, my father said, ‘Let me think about it’,” he said, with a half-wince, half-smile at a memory now viewed through a father’s lens. Mr Purdy and his wife, Margaret, who died in 2007, had two children: Richard, who stays over often, and Annette, who lives nearby, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. 

Going through his father’s documents after his death in 1978, Mr Purdy found his original question-and-answer page, signed ‘Bill Purdy’ in what looked to be a nervous hand.

Asked how his mother had reacted to seeing the document, he said: “Let me think about it … was Mum upset?” Looking aloft, a finger to his chin, seconds passed. “Well, you’d have to ask her!” 

After a spell he said, “I suspect my mother probably thought she would never see me again, and it was a great shock for her when I finally returned [unannounced] in 1945.” 

His father’s surprise at seeing his son, in the flesh and home safe, was total — yet had to be put aside. Mr Purdy’s friend had a daughter turning 21, and young Bill was invited to the party. He declined. 

The girl’s parents were also keen on a union and, weeks later, the Purdys took their son to Sydney’s top restaurant, Princes in Martin Place, where Mr and Mrs Banyard were waiting – with their daughter. “[There was] this most beautiful young girl, Margaret, who was destined to become my wife.” They were married in 1947 and moved to Mosman. 

Joy turned to tragedy for the Purdy family. Six weeks after Mr Purdy returned from the war, Betty, his elder sister and only sibling, died from septicaemia. “She was only 26.”

Mr Purdy rejoined the family stores and spent time at its wholesale arm. It was at the largest store, Crows Nest, where he was whipped into shape by “the toughest manager”. Stacking a case of canned fruit with what he thought was some dexterity, the man bellowed from behind: “What do you think you are doing? You’re not selling hats, you’re selling groceries! MOVE, MOVE, MOVE!!” He said he “started running and never stopped” until he left three months later.

Now in retail, he’d learned to sprinkle kerosene on the sawdust-coated floor behind the counters, which made it slippery, enabling him to slide from one customer to the next, though not always useful in all contexts.

The only time Mr Purdy encountered live hand-to-hand combat was just after WWII ended and he’d begun again at Chatswood. 

“The girl who weighed and packed biscuits, if I recall, was reasonably presentable,” he said. After a row, the girl told her boyfriend, the boss of small goods, that he was “ditched”; she fancied Bill. The former soldier left the store seething, crossed the road to the pub, where he raged over a liquid lunch. Bill arrived after the kerfuffle, unaware, until the big brute appeared wielding a large knife, screaming. A startled Bill ran a few rounds of the store fighting off his attacker before the manager and two men stepped in to disarm the jilted lover. 

“This helped persuade me that the retail side was far too dangerous for a nice fellow like me,” the bomber pilot said. 

Flying had its moments.

It was midway through WWII when Bill Purdy enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force and began training, which would become more intensive and specialised across his service.

Tales of his working life, his training and missions were arguably more hair-raising than his average war adventure. His store of anecdotes is lengthy, yet there’s restraint and refinement in each one’s delivery – as though he’s reading the nightly news. 

Mr Purdy talks of learning to land an aircraft. With his instructor, he would practise skimming rows of metre-high wheat in a paddock, pretending the yellow carpet was the ground, he would ‘land’, touch the surface, then it was full throttle to begin again. One day, at full throttle, the engine coughed on ascent, and the plane found the ground, slashing the crop in its path. The farmer rushed to the scene, and was met with a plane on the other side of a fence, and two pilots whose cockpits were stuffed with wheat. 

The next day, another run over the same field revealed a swathe of earth, courtesy of Mr Purdy’s “early harvesting”.

An essential manoeuvre performed every session – rolling the plane – could be tricky for one prone to motion sickness. Both he and his Tiger Moth instructor “found out that I could spin the aircraft once, or I could do it twice and be sick.”

At Bradfield Park camp, Mr Purdy was shocked to find himself sharing a dormitory with 30 others, describing a woeful lack of privacy among crude surroundings.

But he’d settled in well enough to sleep through the siren’s wail alerting all to the presence of Japanese submarines in the harbour. Some time later he woke to find the dormitory empty and his roommates returning with the news, when a second siren sounded. Bill was front and centre.

Another time sees Mr Purdy back at Bradfield, A few kilometres from home, he felt lucky to be able to bed-down there.

His luck ran out the day they were hurriedly put on a bus for the airport. Unlike the others, Bill’s clothing was being laundered by his mother. Told to pack and board the bus, there was no time to bolt home where his clothes were still in the wash. The poor sod had no choice but to board in what he was wearing. While away in Brisbane, every night he’d hand wash what he stood up in, praying the few bits would be dry enough to wear by sun-up. 

Night flying was lit by six, kerosene, gooseneck flares – “and nothing else,” Mr Purdy said, adding visibility only emerged when five metres above ground. His first solo run was terrifying. 

“The port engine suddenly burst into flames,” he said. Following procedure, he cut off petrol and power, and wildly flicked his navigation lights to signal trouble. He had no radio. Landing on one engine was without incident, though he was chastised for not returning his nav lights to ‘ON’ after the flick-fest. “No one knew where I was until I suddenly appeared [in front of them] on my final leg.”

A sobering memory has a crew returning to base bragging about a target they’d smashed, when they hadn’t. They went up again, and never came back. As a result, Flight Officer Purdy, only ever recorded ‘Uneventful’ when writing up his report – despite aircraft limping home, mishaps due to lost battery power, wings studded with bullet holes, and a Sterling’s undercarriage left on the tarmac.

Among the memoir’s notable omissions is any mention of his presence at Buckingham Palace, nor the medals, nor honours that were bestowed. No note that the secretary of Australia’s Department of Air had sent his father a letter at war’s end, with an official citation from England’s Ministry of Air. This described his son’s “numerous sorties” that had earned him the Distinguished Flying Cross, pinned to his chest by George V.

In 2012, Queen Elizabeth II did the same, and stood beside him as he opened a bomber command memorial in London’s Hyde Park. Mr Purdy returned for the Normandy Invasion’s 70^th anniversary, surrounded by heads of state, including Obama and Putin. Again, no mention there. Nor of his elevation to France’s Legion of Honour, the country’s highest decoration.

A career in the cockpit.

“I learned to fly courtesy of the Air Force,” he said, and had flown several planes – from the heavy-hauler Stirling to the pocket-sized Cessna. Aircraft were “technically” designed so almost any pilot could step in and take over if needed, he said. “It is a safety precaution.”

Tiger Moths were “uncomfortable things,” he said. “In 1951, 16 of us were dragged back to do an instructor’s course, and were completely kitted out again, right down to the never-used boot brush!” The brush became a souvenir, and one he still had.

“After this course I had a civilian instructor’s licence and commercial licence, which I still have.”

His pilot’s licence had lapsed, but he only needed a medical to make another flight a reality.

“I’d get the medical done if I intended to go anywhere,” Mr Purdy said. “But that would mean finding someone silly enough to loan me an aircraft…”

The memoir closes with advice for his grandchildren to pass onto their own, and that came to him from his father. All very sensible – but there is one pearler:

“Never chase after a girl/boy. They are like buses. Another one will be along in a minute.”

(Mr Purdy was interviewed for this story in April 2023.)