IT was in this month in 1913 that a great Scottish aviation pioneer, Captain Bertram Dickson, died at the age of 39. He is remembered in the history of aviation as the man who flew the world’s first-ever military sortie and he was also the first British member of the armed forces to qualify as a pilot.

Dickson was the first British winner of an aviation contest and his skills as a pilot also led indirectly to the foundation of the Royal Flying Corps, the forerunner of the Royal Air Force. As we shall see, he also notched up an achievement that he certainly did not want.

It is baffling that more is not known about Dickson. Indeed, of his early life, family and schooling, all that can be reported is that he was born in Edinburgh on December 21, 1873, and by the age of 19 he was assisting the geographer Sir Thomas Holdich in the Andes Mountains in a famous expedition that defined the border between Chile and Argentina.

Dickson went to the Royal Military Academy from where he graduated in 1894, being commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery in November, 1894, before gaining promotion to lieutenant and then captain by November 1900. His service until then had taken in British East Africa, South Africa and Somaliland.

The following May there began the great mystery of Dickson’s life, but one which is easily explained.

He was seconded to the Foreign Office and promptly disappeared from the records for seven years.

There’s little doubt that Bertram Dickson became a spy, an early James Bond-type who by 1908 was a military attache in what is now Eastern Turkey but was then part of the Ottoman Empire. Prior to then he had also written articles for geographical journals – a normal cover story for espionage activities.

Early in 1910, Dickson learned to fly at the Henri Farman flying school in France. Having gained his aviator’s certificate, No 71, the first British pilot from the services entered a flying contest and won it with the longest distance flown – believed to have been the first aviation endurance competition.

He repeated his success at air meetings in the UK – he won £400 at Lanark – before he resigned his army commission to work for the British and Colonial Aircraft company. It was while he was working for them that on September 21, 1910, Dickson flew his Bristol Boxkite aircraft in what were reconnaissance try-outs.

Dickson “won” the first sortie and was able to stress the importance of air war readiness to two observers, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener and Home Secretary Winston Churchill who was hugely impressed and would later be Secretary of State for Air.

Dickson then earned an unwanted distinction. On October 3, 1910, he was involved in the world’s first mid-air collision between two powered aircraft. He and the French pilot Rene Thomas survived the accident – for which the courts later blamed Dickson – but the Scot was very seriously injured.

Even as he lay in recuperation, Dickson made his greatest achievement, which was to persuade the British Government to take war in the skies seriously.

Kitchener and Churchill had not forgotten Dickson’s demonstration and as a result of their intervention, in November 1911, the then prime minister Herbert Asquith asked the Imperial Defence Committee to form an investigation into war in the air.

The Technical Sub-Committee for Imperial Defence duly inquired into the subject and it was to that subcommittee that Dickson made this prophetic submission: “In case of a European war, between two countries, both sides would be equipped with large corps of aeroplanes, each trying to obtain information on the other... the efforts which each would exert in order to hinder or prevent the enemy from obtaining information... would lead to the inevitable result of a war in the air, for the supremacy of the air, by armed aeroplanes against each other. This fight for the supremacy of the air in future wars will be of the greatest importance.”

Remember that this was before any country had an independent air force – pilots and planes were attached to army or navy units, and it was an Italian Army Air Corps flying French-built aircraft which first dropped bombs on Libya during the 1911-1912 Italo-Turkish war on October 23, 1911.

It may well have been that Dickson, with his connections to Turkey, had information on this first-ever air raid, and drew his conclusions accordingly.

The Imperial Defence Committee recommended the formation of the Royal Flying Corps which was instituted on April 13, 1912, becoming the RAF six years later when it joined with the Royal Naval Air Service whose founding was largely the work of Dickson’s old contact, Winston Churchill.

Having never really recovered from his injuries sustained in the Milan air accident, Dickson died on September 28, 1913, at Lochrosque Castle near Achnasheen in Ross-shire. He was buried in the Cnoc na Bhain burial ground in Strath Bran. There is a plaque honouring him nearby.