John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
Official Royal Canadian Air Force picture of Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
Born	9 June 1922 Shanghai, Republic of China
Died	11 December 1941 (age 19) Killed in a flying accident over Lincolnshire
Place of burial	Holy Cross Cemetery, Scopwick, Lincolnshire
Service/branch	Royal Canadian Air Force
Years of service	1940 – 1941
Rank	Pilot Officer
Unit	No. 412 Squadron RCAF
Battles/wars	World War II

John Gillespie Magee, Jr. (9 June 1922 – 11 December 1941) was an Anglo-American aviator and poet, made famous for his poem High Flight. Magee served in the Royal Canadian Air Force, which he joined before the United States entered the war; he died in a mid-air collision over Lincolnshire in 1941.

John Gillespie Magee was born in Shanghai, China, to an American father and a British mother, who both worked as Anglican missionaries. His father, John Magee, Sr., was from a family of some wealth and influence in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Magee Senior chose to become an Episcopal priest and was sent as a missionary to China. Whilst there he met his future wife, Faith Emmeline Backhouse, who came from Helmingham in Suffolk and was a member of the Church Missionary Society. Magee's parents married in 1921, and their first child, John Junior, was born 9 June 1922, the eldest of four brothers.

Magee began his education at the American School in Nanking in 1929. In 1931 he moved with his mother to the UK and spent the following four years at St. Clare, a boarding school for boys, near Walmer, in Kent.

He attended Rugby School from 1935 to 1939. He developed his poetry whilst at the school and in 1938 he won the school's Poetry Prize. He was deeply moved by the roll of honour of Rugby pupils who had fallen in the First World War. This list of the fallen included the celebrated war poet Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), whose work Magee greatly admired. Brooke had won the school poetry prize thirty-four years prior to Magee. The prize-winning poem by Magee referred to Brooke's burial at 11 o'clock at night in an olive grove on the Greek island of Skyros.