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"Redoubtable Warrior." Arthur Coningham is over six feet tall, and built to scale. Sleek, urbane, convivial, popular, he does not smoke, drinks practically nothing (an occasional sherry, gin-&-bitters or small whiskey with meals). Win ston Churchill once referred to him as "no mere technician but a redoubtable warrior."
Arthur's father, a keen Australian cricketer with flowing blond mustaches, walked out on his team during an England v. Australia Test Match to attend the birth of his son in 1895. Arthur was born in Brisbane, but grew up and was educated in New Zealand, prefers to be known as a New Zealander. "Lloyd George," he says, "is known as a Welshman, yet he was born in Manchester." Coningham's odd nickname, "Mary," is a corruption of Maori, which means a New Zealand aborigine. In the service of a country whose red-blooded he-men are often Cyrils, Cuthberts, Clarences and Vivians, he does not mind being called "Mary." But he strenuously objected to a newspaper article which said he was "a scholarly type." He exploded: "I'm not a scholar — I'm an athlete." During the battle of Alamein he took a swim every morning before breakfast. He plays golf (left-handed), shoots, sails. In 1932 he married a girl who had raced sailboats against him for years. His wife is now as busy as he is; she looks after Empire troops on leave in London. They have one daughter, now eleven.
A Plane for a Horse. On the first day of World War I, Coningham enlisted as an infantryman. Later he bought a horse, joined a cavalry outfit and went to Egypt. There he caught dysentery and enteric, dropped in weight from 170 to 98 lbs., was invalided home. Well again after six months, he went to England, joined the Royal Flying Corps, won the Military Cross and the D.S.O. during a single month. He stayed on in the Royal Air Force after the war, won the Air Force Cross in 1925 for leading a 5,600-mile flight of three De Havillands from Cairo to Nigeria.
In Africa, in World War II, he lived in a trailer with red carpeting, blue doors, curtains. For a while after Tunisia was cleared of the Axis, he lived in a palatial villa, where the King and Queen visited him and Winston Churchill paddled in the pool. Now he lives and works in a London house with his aide and two staff officers. He breakfasts on a cup of tea, holds his morning conference at eight sharp.
Always interested in the next new thing, Coningham is in constant touch with aircraft designers, technicians, manufacturers. The next big thing, he says, will be jet-propelled fighters. "They are going to make our present fighters as obsolete as the monoplane made the biplane."
Some weeks ago, when the Allies were still stalled in Normandy, air-force joke-smiths circulated a cartoon entitled "This Too?"—depicting a couple of Mosquito bombers towing tanks across a wheat field. A junior officer on Coningham's staff scrutinized the cartoon, grinned, said: "We'd better not show it to the chief. He'd want to try it."