Mills - Capt. Frederick Dudley Travers DFC - Frederick Dudley Travers was born in Yorkshire on 15th February 1897 and was commissioned in 1915 as a Lieutenant in the Hertfordshire Yeomanry. He was soon in the Middle East, and first experienced enemy fire at the relief of Kut-el-Amara. Bored with life in the heat and desert dust of Macedonia after the fall of Baghdad, he responded to a notice calling for volunteers for the Royal Flying Corps. He was accepted and after two and a half hours solo flying, qualified as a pilot. He had had only ten hours solo flying when he shot down unaided his first enemy aircraft. He served with the RFC and the RAF in Egypt, Macedonia, Turkey, Rumania and in 47 squadron with his closest friend and famous ace, Col. F. Minchen DSO, MC, DFC.

Dudley was officially credited with 12 enemy aircraft, 2 of which were destroyed in one battle. He was twice mentioned in despatches, and awarded the DFC and French Croix de Guerre with palm. He piloted the Salonika-Constantinople air mail in 1919, and was a member of the British Military Mission to Rumania in 1920. His civil flying career began in 1925, when he operated his own one-man-band air taxi service - one of the many air taxi services which started up after the 1914-18 war. From 1926 until 1939 Captain Dudley Travers' missions through Africa and to the Far East were synonymous with the development of British civil aviation in those areas. His achievements with BOAC suggest the cumulative weight of his long experience. ………………….[more] Captain Frederick Dudley Travers, another remarkable Muthaiga Member, died in Nairobi in 1970, aged 73.