Much has been written about ‘Diary of an Unknown Aviator’ as ‘faction’, but can anyone confirm that this incident actually happened in May, 1918:
??he three of us (John MacGavock Grider, Elliott White Springs, and Lawrence K Callahan) and Nigger (Augustus F Horn) flew up to Maidenhead to call this afternoon. We ground-strafed the place and chased everybody off the terrace at Skindles. Vice was down there and fell off a haystack watching us. Then we steeplechased all the way back down the river and kept our wheels just out of the water. Nigger dipped his once. Cal missed hitting a bridge by inches and Springs landed with about two hundred feet of telephone wire dragging on his undercarriage. There was one funny thing. At one long open stretch there was a punt in front of us right in the middle of the river. A man in a bright blazer was standing up in the stern punting and a girl was sitting in the bow with a big pink parasol. As we dove on them, the man fell overboard and the girl lost her parasol. I looked back to see it floating down the river and the man in the blazer floundering about in a regular whirlpool.??Diary of an Unknown Aviator, John MacGavock Grider (edited/co-written Elliott White Springs), p88=89, May, 1918