WHEN retired airline captain David Barclay died, aged 75, in February 1981, the Glasgow Herald headline was ‘Pilot who flew 2000 mercy missions’. This photograph shows one of them. The Herald said that Captain Barclay had become a hero on the Outer Isles, where hundreds of people owed their lives to him. He had joined the Scottish Flying Club in 1928 and later enlisted in the RAF, but it was as a pilot in the Scottish Air Ambulance Service from the early 1930s onwards that he was best known. He retired in 1965 after logging more than one and a half million miles during 18,000 flying hours over the Highlands and Islands routes.
The mission pictured here took place in February 1946. Captain Barclay’s daughter, it was reported in The Bulletin, had been in hospital but he sent her a message to apologise for not being with her as he had to rush two sick young patients from North Uist to hospital in Glasgow. It was one of three missions he flew that day, totalling 600 miles in bad weather. At that time he was chief pilot at Scottish Airways and was already an MBE. When he retired in May 1965 he was given a fine send-off on Tiree and Barra and at Renfrew Airport. He received gifts from the islanders, and was piped onto the sands at Barra. The week after his death, pilots, doctors and nurses attended a memorial service for him in a hangar at Glasgow Airport.
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