How a photograph led to a search for a long-lost Second World War pilot

I had looked at that picture of my mother hundreds of times as it sat on her dresser in the nursing home where she spent the last 18 months of her life in Qualicum, British Columbia — a beautiful Scottish 19-year-old with dark long curls framing her face and silver wings adorning her dress. A young woman who would eventually immigrate to Canada to Clarkson, Ontario, now Mississauga, with her husband and young family.

But it was only after her death on May 29, 2024, at age 99, that I noticed the flyer’s wings on her dress. How was it possible that I had never registered them before?

My father had served in the British Army during the Second World War, but the wings were emblematic of an air force flyer. Things just weren’t adding up, so I asked my older sister Dianne about them. She responded, “Oh, those belonged to her first fiancé Hubert Smith. He was killed after the war.”

Her first fiancé? I was stunned. I believed my mother, May Mackie, was only ever engaged to my father, Bill Mackie.

Time has a way of marching on, but memories of the Second World War still live on. I decided I needed to find out more about the wings and her former fiancé and began my hunt for answers. Here was a young woman of many facets — a violinist, a passable golfer and an expert baker. Her shortbread was legendary. But I knew nothing of this aspect of her life and my sister only had vague memories of her discussions about Hubert Smith. Several of her close friends in Qualicum Beach knew further details.

One evening in 1944, she decided to go to a dance, rather unwillingly, with her best girlfriend. When the girls arrived at the dance there were service men standing around smiling and trying to approach the girls for a dance. Hubert Smith was one of those young men. But the girls decided to ignore them and went to find their friends instead.

Later it was revealed that Hubert Smith (Hugh) said to one of his friends, “See that girl in the green coat? I’m going to marry her.” My mother was that girl. Hugh did get a dance in with my mother but when he asked if he could see her again, she brushed him off saying she was seeing someone at the time. But she wasn’t, and on the bus ride home she regretted her decision, telling her friends how nice, polite and wonderful he was. At the time it seemed like a missed opportunity never to be seized again.

But after days of thinking about him, and how perhaps she had made a mistake, she looked out the second-floor window of her office building where she worked and there he was, looking up at her. According to my mother, she flew down the stairs where she reunited with Hugh.

They were pretty much inseparable after that and soon became engaged.

Then came the declaration of the war and Hugh was posted to the HMS Implacable, a British aircraft carrier — a 20-year-old pilot who left behind the love of his life, May Stirton. Hugh Smith fought in the Sea of Japan, towards the end of the Second World War, and survived his tour of duty. In another “Canadian Moment”, the HMS Implacable was involved in returning Canadian, Australian and British former prisoners-of-war, arriving in Vancouver harbour in early 1946 before returning to Melbourne, Australia.

On March 7, 1946, Hugh and other pilots set out on a training mission, flying along the Bass Strait that separates Tasmania from the Australian mainland. His plane crashed. His body was never recovered.

There are some discrepancies about how he really died, which my mother would disclose to a close friend named Jennie Homer some seven or eight years before her death.

“While watching the Australian Open from Melbourne, ads to ‘Come Visit Victoria’ kept playing and May became very agitated, pounding her thighs with her fists. One of those commercials showed the coastline outside Port Philip Bay with a series of shots of the Great Ocean Road and the rock formations known as the Twelve Apostles visible out to sea.”

As Jennie recalls, my mother said, “Why do they keep showing those damned rocks!” Jennie pushed on inquiring why the rocks were annoying her so much, but my mother just sat there quietly with tears in her eyes and replied, “There’s a lot you don’t know.” Obviously, the love of her first fiancé still rested with heaviness on her heart.

She explained that a co-pilot friend of Hugh Smith had come to Scotland to tell her about Hugh’s death. He told my mother that Hugh had not died on a training mission due to engine failure but rather a flying accident caused by target practice and a piece of rock hitting the plane and the cockpit, killing him. His plane likely would have been flying at high speed, so being struck by a rock would have caused instantaneous death.

It’s not hard to imagine a testosterone-driven young man flying a fighter armed with machine guns and cannons, flying dangerously close to those rocks.

This discrepancy in his death began our family’s quest to return those golden wings to any surviving relatives of Hubert Smith. The coincidences that would reveal themselves were utterly surprising.

In early December 2024, I asked my cousin Philip Mackie who lived in Devizes, England, to help in the search. He was a bit of an amateur historian and tech savvy. As Philip began his search he came upon a war memorial in Portsmouth that bore Hugh’s name, and a search of military war grave sites led to some rudimentary information.

Hubert Fuller Smith was born to Henry and Chrystabel Smith of Bournemouth, England, close to where my cousin grew up. He was born in the summer of 1925, but his full date of birth is unknown. His date of death was confirmed to be March 7, 1946, as we already knew.

Naval records revealed much about the HMS Implacable, but no mention of Hugh could be found. My cousin Philip’s search led him to a Commonwealth war graves site on which a man named Alan Smith has posted about his lost relative, Hubert Smith. This was the connection we were looking for.

The site gave us Alan’s email and I sent out feelers with trepidation, sharing the story of my mother’s involvement with his long-lost relative.

With great surprise, Alan’s positive response opened the world of Hugh Smith, for Alan was a military historian and had extensively researched Hugh’s history. But there was one part missing. He knew nothing of the part my mother had played in his life.

And then other coincidences in our lives came to the surface. Alan Smith and his family lived in Hamilton, Ont., 50 kilometres from my sister Dianne’s home in Guelph, Ont. So, our two families had lived only a brief distance away.

We also found out from one of Hugh’s uncles in Hamilton that the young pilot had visited the city between his posting to Scotland and deployment on the HMS Implacable. It seemed unimaginable that we all moved in such small circles.

My mother eventually married a lithe Scottish man named Bill Mackie in Dundee, Scotland, after the war, in 1947. My father never spoke of the war, despite our prodding. He was perhaps too traumatized to revisit what so many young men experienced.

To us, my mother and father seemed to have a happy and long marriage with my father passing away at the age of 79 in 1998. However, my father and my sister were rummaging through some old photos in the 1960s and they came across a picture of Hugh and he confronted my mother with it. My mother explained that Hugh was now deceased and couldn’t hurt my father anymore.

The extent of what my father knew about Hugh remains a mystery. Perhaps he had sketchy details but my mother decided to keep the details to a minimum, not to hurt my father, but to keep the love to herself. This is only speculation on my part.

When war breaks out it separates us but also binds us in the stories and histories that live on. My sister Dianne asked recently if our mother would want this story told publicly. My mother’s good friend Jennie Homer responded: “You know the close relationship I had with May — and I have to say that I am very confident that she’d be happy to know that their story is being shared.  She wouldn’t have wanted it out there while she was still living, mind you. I am also positive that she’d have been very grateful to Alan (Smith) for having taken such an interest in Hubert’s life, time and sad end. That would have meant a lot to her.”

Gustav Mahler’s 6th Symphony, The Heroic, has been playing as I write this. In the last movement, a mighty hammer blow strikes three times to signal the three mighty blows of fate, the third of which “fells the hero of the piece like a tree”.  Hugh Smith’s tragic story was one such mighty blow, the hammer falling on his young life off the coast of Australia. My mother appeared to have carried the pain of his loss for her entire life, only recounting the story of her relationship with him in detail when a memory was triggered by the sight of those sea stacks off the coast of Australia.

We returned the wings to the Smith family in Hamilton on Nov. 6, 2025, at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum, in time for Remembrance Day. A memorial will be set up in the museum documenting the relationship and will display the wings. We hope the Smith family found solace in their return after nearly 80 years.

Iain Mackie is a retired physician living in Vancouver B.C., and Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of British Columbia. Ruta Pocius is a published journalist.

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