Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. Bishop was alone in the sky again. He hardly realized it at the time, but this had indeed been his finest achievement in the air. During his final sortie he had downed five aircraft in the space of 15 minutes. It was a fitting way to end a remarkable combat flying career.

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The young Canadian who would one day become Canada’s ace of aces was born in Owen Sound, a small town in Ontario, on February 8, 1894. Blond, blue-eyed William Avery was the third son in William and Mary Bishop’s family of four children. His father, the Grey County registrar, held conservative views typical of middle-class fathers in the late 19th century. Young Billy became the target of teasing when he was sent to school dressed as a miniature bureaucrat in gray suit and tie, but he quickly learned to stand up for himself — and often for his younger companions. His fists usually did the talking.

Although Billy Bishop did not like team sports such as football and lacrosse, he did enjoy individual pursuits like shooting, riding and swimming. He was handsome, intelligent and charming, but he was always an indifferent student. In fact, he came to hate school, cutting classes in high school to play pool downtown. His teachers rarely succeeded in hiding their low expectations for him. Realizing he would never excel academically, he refused to apply himself to his studies.

Bishop did, however, show great determination to perfect the skills he enjoyed. One of these was shooting. When his father gave him a .22-caliber rifle for Christmas and offered him 25 cents for every squirrel he bagged, Billy — who had a great eye and steady hand — turned his marksmanship into entrepreneurial success at home and throughout his neighborhood. He became a crack shot.

After reading newspaper accounts of the first heavier-than-air flight in Canada (and the British empire) by Canadian John McCurdy in his Silver Dart in 1909, 15-year-old Bishop determined to build his own aircraft. His version of the now famous biplane, crudely constructed from wood, cardboard, wire and strong string, carried him — mostly vertically — from the roof of his family’s Victorian home to crash in a heap on the lawn below. Out of the wreck crawled the irrepressible Billy, slightly injured but not in any way cowed. As it turned out, he would live through many violent landings as a real pilot. In fact, Bishop’s landing skills remained relatively underdeveloped during his whole flying career.

Billy and his younger sister, Louie, were very close. Bribed by Louie to entertain a visiting girlfriend, Bishop secretly checked out the girl he was later to marry through the parlor curtains before agreeing. Margaret Burden, granddaughter of the great Toronto retailer Timothy Eaton, would marry Billy while he was home on leave from the front several years later in 1917. Although he was secretly impressed with Margaret on their first meeting, he charged his sister $5 for his entertainment services.

At age 17, Billy followed his elder brother, Worth, to the Royal Military College (RMC) at Kingston, Ontario, Canada’s equivalent of England’s Sandhurst and America’s West Point. He was following in the footsteps of a brother who had achieved a sterling record there. Having been more or less his own master up to this point in his life, however, the younger Bishop chafed under the strict discipline of the RMC. He also found it hard to accept the standard rough treatment given recruits by upperclassmen. Not surprisingly, his first year at RMC was a flop. His second year went better, but in his third year his resolve deteriorated and things fell apart. Bishop was caught cheating on an exam when he absent-mindedly handed in his crib sheet with his exam paper. He was awaiting word of his punishment, which almost certainly would have been dismissal, when the outbreak of war saved him that embarrassment. Even though his military training was far from complete, he was accepted as an officer in a Toronto militia regiment, the Mississauga Horse. Like future German ace of aces Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen, he entered the war as a cavalryman. Before he embarked for England, he proposed to Margaret and she accepted.

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