Keith Fergus Arnold

Keith Fergus Arnold was born in April 1911 in Kindersley, Saskatchewan, Canada, the son of Harry Watson Arnold and Eva Mary Arnold of Saskatoon, where he attended local schools before studying at the University of Saskatchewan. He was commissioned into the Royal Air Force and served with No. 217 Squadron, a Coastal Command unit based at RAF St. Eval in Cornwall, before moving to the Photographic Development Unit, where his work earned him the Distinguished Flying Cross, gazetted on 25 April 1941. By the summer of 1941 he was flying with the Overseas Aircraft Delivery Flight, whose crews ferried newly built aircraft from American factories across the Atlantic to operational RAF stations in Britain. On 25 July 1941, Arnold took off from Limavady in Northern Ireland at the controls of a new Lockheed Hudson V, serial AE640, bound for Prestwick in Scotland, but in deteriorating weather the aircraft struck high ground at Feorlan on the south-eastern slope of the Mull of Kintyre; all three men aboard were killed, Arnold at the age of 30. His death came only two months after his brother, Pilot Officer Victor Charles Arnold of the Royal Canadian Air Force, had also been killed. Flight Lieutenant Arnold is buried at St. Eval Churchyard, Cornwall, in Row 2, Grave 12.