John Noel Dowland

John Noel Dowland was born on 6 November 1914 in Lewisham, London, the son of the Reverend Frank Michael Dowland MC and his wife Irene, who lived at Ruscombe Vicarage, Twyford, Berkshire. He was commissioned into the Royal Air Force and by early 1940 held the rank of Flight Lieutenant, serving in an armaments capacity at RAF Manby in Lincolnshire. On 11 February 1940 he was called to the docks at Immingham, where an unexploded German bomb had embedded itself at a severe angle in the hull of the grain ship SS Kildare; working alongside civilian armament instructor Leonard Harrison, Dowland ordered his men clear, assessed a fuse of a type entirely new to him, and successfully rendered the weapon safe. He performed a second act of the same kind on a trawler in June 1940, and it was for both episodes together that the London Gazette of 7 January 1941 announced the award of the George Cross, citing his “conspicuous courage and devotion to duty in circumstances of exceptional danger and difficulty.” Promoted to Wing Commander, he was posted to Malta and flew Martin Maryland reconnaissance aircraft with No. 69 Squadron RAF from Luqa airfield. On 13 January 1942, returning from a photographic sortie over an enemy convoy off Pantelleria, his aircraft was engaged by Luftwaffe fighters; his gunner shot down one of the attackers, Dowland ordered his observer to bail out carrying the photographs, but he and his wireless operator and air gunner, Pilot Officer Robert Gridley, were killed when the fuel-exhausted Maryland came down in the sea off Cambridge Battery, Sliema. He was 27 years old and is buried in the Malta (Capuccini) Naval Cemetery, in the Officers’ collective grave, Plot E, Grave 14; his George Cross was presented posthumously to his father by King George VI at Buckingham Palace on 17 March 1942.