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Len Daniels – The World’s First Flying Padre

2/4/2023

2 Comments

 
​On return to Adelaide after being wounded in fighting missions over the trenches of the Western Front in World War One, Captain Harry Butler cast a vision for aviation in Australia. “The plane was great in war, but it will be greater in Peace. This…is the beginning of a new era in mail and passenger transport.”  To demonstrate, in 1919, he pioneered the world’s first over-water airmail flight in his crimson Bristol MC fighter plane The Red Devil, flying from Adelaide to his hometown on the Yorke Peninsula in South Australia. It was a breathtaking achievement and he quickly drew wondering crowds to watch his daring stunt flying.
 
Many restless young airmen like Harry finished the war looking for further challenges. Englishman Len Daniels, who had earned his wings piloting bi-planes dubbed ‘the flying bedsteads’ with the Royal Flying Corps in Egypt, arrived in Australia in 1922, in search of a better climate and a theatre to match his passion to be an active missionary. The newly formed Bush Church Aid captured his interest.
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 He was met in Sydney by his new boss S.J. Kirby, who immediately put him on a train to Hay, 700 km away in the Riverina. From there the local bishop proceeded to drive him in withering forty degree heat, a further 400 km, on rough bush tracks complete with sand bogs, to the remote outback town of Wilcannia on the Darling River. ​

The young clergyman had travelled more than the length of his native country to begin life as the shepherd of a sparsely populated parish larger than England. In the following three years, Len piloted his T-model Ford thousands of kilometres loaded with fuel and spares, shovel and wire netting for negotiating sand dunes plus an axe for cutting firewood, bringing counsel and companionship to people on scattered sheep stations. It looked like his hunger for adventure was being well and truly satisfied, but there was another exciting chapter awaiting him.
 
While reporting his arduous life at home in England, a visionary lady heard Len was a pilot and gave him cash with the instruction to pay for an add which read, ‘WANTED - a plane for church work in the Australian Bush.’ The idea caught the imagination of the press and by the end of his tour, the astonished Len had enough to purchase a Cirrus Moth which arrived crated in Melbourne in 1928. The pioneer bush pilot crash-landed en route from Hay, but kindness from a station owner and support from BCA got him airborne again.
 
Only a handful of pilots were brave enough to fly in the Far West in those days. Nancy Bird, Australia’s first woman commercial pilot, told me when she visited Bourke, “Australia is a country God-given for flying.” She also spoke of the anxiety of flying over vast tracts of lonely flat country north of Wilcannia with the Rev Stanley Drummond’s Far West Children’s scheme. She carried bush nurses to Wanaaring and Yantabulla and in emergencies became a flying ambulance driver. Nancy arrived in 1935, a few years after Len took to the air to become the first flying padre in the world.
 
Both of them told of adventures flying without instruments, having only basic maps, navigating by compass and watch, flying low enough when needed to follow tracks or railways and landing on roads in townships or in rough paddocks next to homesteads. There were no meteorological reports, so it meant keeping a sharp eye out for whirlwinds and storms. When hazardous landings in remote locations damaged their planes, running repairs with wire, string or perhaps a broom handle got them back in the air again.
 
During his ten-year stint out West, Len delighted in being able to harness his two great passions – ministering the gospel of Jesus and soaring high in the clouds. He revelled in the absolute quiet – ‘God’s silence’ he called it, where ‘the plane moved like a beautifully balanced, living thing.’ He learned to love the harsh and beautiful Corner-country north of the Darling and to value the hardy people who lived there, whether Aboriginal or white.
 
I’m not certain that bold Harry Butler had a flying preacher in mind when he predicted the plane would be a greater instrument in peace than in war, but Len Daniels helped make it a reality. Within a decade, BCA developed an airborne medical wing which covered South Australia. Len also helped Rev John Flynn in the early days of the Flying Doctor Service. He may not have earned fame as a daring stunt flyer like Harry, but without doubt the unassuming padre wrote a unique chapter into both aviation history and the spiritual life of Australia. 
2 Comments
John G
2/5/2023 02:59:54 pm

Another great story of how stuggles are overcome by being involved with good people wanting to do God's work and help to spread the word to all areas of the outback.

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Dr Elizabeth Green link
4/19/2025 03:07:56 pm

Fascinating facts! Thank you. I have just written a medical memoir, 'No Time for Makeup: The life of a flying doctor and paediatrician' by Exisle Publishing. Strikes me that the parallels between medicine and ministry are not new. It is 90 years this year, 2025, since the RFDS base at Wyndham in North West Australia commenced flying aircraft out to remote places to pick up people who were ill or injured, or to provide medical support. And Flynn of the Inland of course, so pivotal.

I was a flying doctor in Kalgoorlie, the eastern goldfields section of WA in 1988, until 1990, and my husband, Dr Stephen Langford started as a flying doctor in Port Hedland in the Pilbara in 1983 and then continued his emergency work as a flying doctor in Perth and at Jandakot, in Perth, WA for 35 years. He was the innovator behind getting the first jets into the RFDS in 2009 so that patients could be evacuated from remote places like Kununurra, around 2,000 kilometres distant from Perth and be safely flown to tertiary medical care in around three hours, compared with earlier flights of eight hours with a fuel stop of airline meet and transfer of the patient onto another aircraft.

I was a child in Wyndham in 1965, when my father, The Reverend Barry Green headed up north in a LandRover on an epic trek from Perth to Kununurra, with his young family of four. He was sent by the Bush Church Aid Society of Australia, BCA, to be the first Anglican priest in North West Australia. This year it is the 60 year anniversary of that historic milestone.

My dad spoke in the 1970's with The Reverend Len Daniels, first flying parson or padre, who flew in the cloth winged de Havilland Gypsy Moth across his outback parish in Wilcannia. Len Daniels allegedly talked of how he shared with Flynn the practicality of setting up flying bases in the outback to bring medical assistance to those in the bush.

Len Daniels was also my mother's Anglican parish priest from 1941 at St Stephen's in Kurrajong, in the Blue Mountains. Mum is now 87 but recalls Len Daniels speaking about how he and John Flynn discussed aviation and setting up medical bases. Len Daniels begun flying in his aircraft, 'Far West' in 1928. Flynn had watched him do that with great admiration around 1929. My mother also recounts how Len Daniel's bi-fold plane had cloth wings and when he flew out to services his wife would accompany him and take her sewing basket, so that if there was a tear in the wings she would repair it with a needle and thread while her husband took the service!

I think it is such an interesting marriage, the way medicine and ministry have evolved and am so grateful that I have been fortunate to live the story of the development of the RFDS, a vision that both John Flynn and Len Daniels were part of.

I hop you don't mind me sharing this personal recollection and perspective.

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