Airman’s details are found in old Visiters

WARTIME editions of the Southport Visiter have shed some light on the background of an airman killed by tragic error.
In November, LookBack publicised the quest of Surrey’s Wings Museum to track down the relatives or next of kin of Ernest Fleetwood Street Till, who served under the name of Pilot Officer EFS Travis.
PO Travis died aged 34 in June 1944 at Surrey’s Redhill Aerodrome, when the guns of a Spitfire fighter aircraft were accidentally fired.
Now reader John Rowlands of Formby has managed to uncover some details of PO Travis’s life in Southport.
The airman, who signed up to the Royal Air Force in October 1942, is listed as one of the fallen on Formby’s War Memorial.
PO Travis named Formby as his home and was married to a Formby woman named Elizabeth Everard Travis, whose address is recorded as Altcar Lodge.
But Mr Rowlands’s trawl through copied of the Visiter from 1944, plus the archives of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, has uncovered evidence of a link to Southport. Reports suggest that PO Travis’s mother lived in Manchester Road and that he was “a well-known local sportsman�.
Prior to the RAF, he worked in Southport evacuation office, and he was a member of Churchtown Conservative Club and North Meols Tennis Club.
Mr Rowlands has also discovered that EFS Travis, who is buried in Birkdale Cemetery, achieved the more senior rank of flying control officer.
LookBack has passed on the findings to the Wings Museum, which now plans to post a memorial plaque at the site where the airman died.