Marchpane Guest Spot

This Week: Ted Johns

At one in the morning of Sunday 14^th August 1938 a police sergeant at Netheravon, on Salisbury Plain, roused villagers to help search for twenty-eight year old James Emrys Gwynne Johns.

Almost seventy years later, I began a search for the same man. To me, he was Uncle Gwynne. He was born forty years and four days before me and died in the nineteen sixties. Everything I know about him is garnered from yellowing press clippings and relatives old enough to recount a tale or two.

On that particular occasion he had jumped out of an aeroplane and delayed opening his chute for 18,000 feet or 88 seconds. This particular act got him reported in the ‘Sunday Journal and Star’ in Lincoln Nebraska--the only internet record that I could find. Bizarrely, the short piece on him referred to him as a “youth”.

That jump was carried out in darkness. At the time, there were no formal records kept of achievements in what would today be called “free-fall” parachuting. That jump was claimed as the World Record and no-one challenged the claim.

The press describe him of looking more like a schoolmaster than a champion jumper, he is also said to have sustained a number of jumping injuries, including broken limbs.

One report has him sitting astride an aircraft fuselage “as if he were riding a horse” on take off as his equipment wouldn’t fit into the cockpit space!

There’s no doubt he had bottle. The record holder that he displaced for altitude jumping was a Dane - John Tranum. He had died during an ascent for a record attempt, probably as a result of oxygen starvation. Of course, everything you read in the papers, then as now, has to be taken with a pinch of salt, which leaves me wondering what Uncle Gwynne was really like. My search for information continues.