John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

John Gillespie Magee Jr. (9 June 1922 – 11 December 1941) was a World War II Anglo-American Royal Canadian Air Force fighter pilot and war poet, who wrote the sonnet "High Flight". He was killed in an accidental mid-air collision over England in 1941. Early life John Gillespie Magee was born in Shanghai, China, to an American father and a British mother, who both worked as Anglican missionaries. His father, John Magee Sr., was from a family of some wealth and influence in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Magee Senior chose to become an Episcopal priest and was sent as a missionary to China. Whilst there he met his future wife, Faith Emmeline Backhouse, who came from Helmingham in Suffolk and was a member of the Church Missionary Society. Magee's parents married in 1921, and their first child, John Junior, was born 9 June 1922, the eldest of four brothers. Magee began his education at the American School in Nanking in 1929. In 1931 he moved with his mother to England and spent the following four years at St Clare, a preparatory school for boys, in Walmer, in the county of Kent. From 1935 to 1939 he attended Rugby School, where he developed the ambition to become a poet, and whilst at the school won its Poetry Prize in 1938. He was impressed by the school's Roll of Honour listing its pupils who had fallen in the First World War, which included the Edwardian poet Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), whose writing style Magee emulated. Brooke had won the school's Poetry Prize 34 years prior to Magee. The prize-winning poem by Magee centred upon the burial of Brooke's body at 11 o'clock at night in an olive grove on the Greek island of Skyros in April 1915.