Lt Patrick Randolph

  1933, when 2nd Lieut in the Grenadier Guards, aged 20.

 

  in 1936

 

b 25 Jan 1912 in Chelsea, London.

His parents (American-born Arthur Bertram Randolph and Enid Saffron Pickersgill-Cunliffe) had made the society pages when they had a 'best girl' as well as a best man at their wedding in 1908.

However, his father was killed in WWI, his mother remarried (becoming Saffron Duberly, and 'lady of the manor' in St Neots) and in 1924 she and Mr Duberly sailed off to Jamaica, leaving the 12-year-old Patrick to go with his aunt Adelaide to the USA, presumably to visit family (his grandfather Arthur Randolph Randolph had emigrated and died there in 1885).

It seems that Patrick subsequently lived with his aunt Adelaide and her husband Lionel in Dorset - he always quoted their address as his own, and again visited the USA with her in 1935.

In December of 1933, he and fellow-officer Capt Goschen flew (in Pat's Percival Gull) to Egypt to take up an appointment at the Flying School for 2 years. Whilst there, he took part in the 'Oases Circuit Air Race' along with 31 others from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Jugoslavia, Sweden and Belgium.

He "sportingly flew up for the race round the Isle of Man in 1936 during 48 hours leave and flew back the same night".

He took part in several other races, e.g. the Folkestone Air Trophy in August 1933; the London-Cardiff Race in 1936, and the Manx Air Race in June 1937. He entered for the Schlesinger Race in 1936 (as co-pilot to Lt Misri Chand) but the aeroplane wasn't ready in time.

He owned 4 aeroplanes:

- G-AACV, a 1928 Avro Avian IVM;

- G-ACJW, a 1933 Percival Gull which was sold in Australia in 1934 and became VH-UTC;

- G-ACUL, a 1934 Gull Six (sold in New Zealand, becoming ZK-AES), and finally

- G-AEKD, a 1936 Vega Gull.

It was this aircraft in which he was killed in a crash in Jaipur, India on 12 October 1937, aged 25. P Q Reiss (q.v) was also seriously injured in the same accident.

A few weeks before his death, he and his uncle-in-law Lionel had been the joint executors for the will of his father's half-brother, Judge Joseph Randolph J.P., selling Eastcourt Estate ('A Georgian house with 484 acres, garages, stabling, and 9 cottages').

(His mother Saffron's son by her second marriage was also killed, in WWII. Her second husband died in 1951; she herself died in 1980).

 

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