A notable fact regarding our airmen—I fancy the Minister for
Education referred to it in a speech within the past week— is that the great majority of them must have been born in or immediately after the last war. We used to be told in a hundred articles and speeches how disastrous that conflict was for the national physique and to what nervous and other ills the babies of the years 1914-18 would be subject. Yet I suppose the average age of pilots is somewhere about 24, which means that a large proportion of them must have been born in one or other of the war years; there would appear to be nothing conspicuously wrong with them. Incidentally, in case there may be a temptation to class the pilots as " typical public- school products," it would be found, I think, on examination that the majority of them hail from schools not represented in the Headmasters' Conference. But such distinctions are being rapidly washed out in any case.
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