Born 13 July 1895 in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, Australia.

 In 1919 Jack Treacy would marry my Aunt Eva.

Much more important is the fact that Jack would become a first world war hero and a pioneer of Australian aviation.

There is more information on my Family Tree website

Aunt Eva would write to her Mother in Ascot and enclose newspaper cuttings of their adventures in Australia. 

I used that material to write the website. 

Now in 2022, out of the blue, I have received a pack of more press cuttings from a friend of Jack.  

Thank you so much Kerry.

  And so to a new website in

October 2022

Above

A Studio portrait of 

507 Private (Pte) James Cullin Gaffney, 

8th Reinforcements,  8th Machine Gun Battalion, of Hynam, SA (left), 

and 

1362 2nd Air Mechanic John Henry Arthur (Jack) Treacy, 

4th Reinforcements, 2nd Australian Flying Squadron, of Adelong, NSW,  dressed as a private sitting behind a machine gun. 

There is now some doubt about this photo, (is it Jack?)

Prior to enlisting in the AIF on 20 May 1916, Pte Gaffney served with the 71st Infantry, Citizens Military Forces. He embarked from Melbourne aboard HMAT Medic on 16 December 1916. 

Whilst serving with the 5th Machine Gun Battalion, he was awarded the Military Medal (MM) on 10 October 1919 for his actions in the Division's capture of Peronne, in September 1918. 

Prior to enlistment in the AFC on 3 July 1919, Jack Treacy was an apprenticed mechanical engineer with a Sydney company. He embarked from Melbourne aboard HMAT Orsova on 6 December 1916. 

He was posted to England attached to the Royal Flying Corp in their mobile workshop as a mechanic. Three months later he transferred to the cadet school at Reading and trained as a pilot. 

He was then posted to 66 Squadron training school, where after flying several of their fighting machines for a very limited number of hours, he was presented with his RFC wings, a log book and posted to France. 

Treacy was posted to 3 Squadron performing reconnaissance work. He quickly built up flying hours on bombing, reconnaissance and aerial photography missions and was promoted to Lieutenant and then Captain. On 22 April 1918, Captain Treacy acted as pallbearer at the funeral of Baron von Richthofen. Shortly before the end of the war, Captain Treacy returned to England as a ferry pilot. 

He returned to Australia in December 1919 with his new wife, where he pursued a career in commercial flying.

Sunday Mail Color, July 15, 1979

JACK TREACY:   One of the unsung heroes of our aviation history.

Late in the afternoon of April 22, 1918, six Australian Flying Corps officers stood around a grave in a small French cemetery.

On a word from the chaplain they lowered a simple coffin as a firing party of bush-hatted Australian soldiers fired three volleys into the air.

The coffin had nearly reached the grave bottom when one of the airmen slipped as soil at the edge of the grave crumbled away. He was only prevented from falling in by the quick grasp or a fellow officer.

Thus it was the Australian pioneer airman Jack Treacy, a World War I pilot with the Australian Flying Corps' No. 3 Squadron nearly became the man who went to the grave with Baron von Richthofen the dreaded Red Baron, the most famous fighter ace of all time.

Jack Treacy has outlived his foe by 61 years, and now as a sprightly 84-year-old, lives in retirement at Yamba in Northern New South o Wales.

His flying career, which spanned 40 years, saw Australian aviation grow a from a few ramshackle war disposal aircraft into today's great airline and general aviation industry.

He was not one of the t record-breaking pioneers in the mould of Hinkler, Smithy or Ulm, but one of a larger a band of the unsung heroes of Australian aviation, the men who quietly went their way setting up the tiny bush airlines and flying schools, the one man-one plane businesses that were the embryo of our modern aviation industry.

Jack was born in Wagga in 1895. His father, a one-time world champion pigeon shooter, encouraged his son to take up engineering, and had him apprenticed to a Sydney company.

He completed his apprenticeship as World War I broke out and enlisted straight away as a mechanic in the A.F.C.

In 1915 he was sent to England and placed in charge of a Royal Flying Corps mobile workshop.

Soon he had the flying bug. Not content to work on aircraft he wanted to become a pilot and head for the action.

Three months later he was accepted into the Cadet School at Reading for elementary pilot training.

From there he went to No. 66 Training Squadron at Yatesbury. He received his pilot wings after a very skimpy flying course conducted on several different types of early R.F.C. aircraft.

With less than 10 hours' solo flying in his pilot log book he was sent to France to face the then better equipped German Air Force.

It was early 1917 and the average life expectancy of allied pilots was around five weeks.

By “Bloody April, 1917" the Germans had achieved complete air superiority on the Western Front. Their Fokker and Albatross fighters could outrun, out-manoeuvre and out-gun the R.F.C's obsolete machines.

Jack Treacy was posted to the Australian No. 3 Squadron to fly R.E.8 two seat general purpose aircraft. They were mainly used for reconnaissance, artillery spotting, photography and occasional ineffective bombing missions.

Known to their pilots as “Harry Tates” after a British music hall comedian (maybe because their performance was a bit of a laugh), the lumbering R.E.8s suffered terrible losses especially to the newly-formed Richthofen Flying Circus.

So poor was their performance that the Germans considered them the ideal "easy meat" for newly-arrived fighter pilots to cut their teeth on. "The Harry Tates" also were noted as “flamers".

They almost always seemed to catch on fire when hit giving their non parachute equipped crews no chance to escape a terrible death. Crews were often seen to jump to their death thousands of feet up, rather than face an agonising end by fire. Jack Treacy was one of the lucky few. He survived for 200 hours of flying those death traps over enemy lines

He crossed the front on 110 missions conducting aerial photographic survey of enemy installations and trenches. His log book records that he brought back 140 photographs of military targets. He also completed bombing and artillery observation missions. He was attacked on numerous occasions but never shot down.

The Australians were working the sector around the Somme which was the hunting ground of Richthofen's Jasta 11. Many of their losses had been at the hands of the Baron's group of gaudily-painted Fokkers.

On the day the Red Baron was killed he led his Fokkers onto a formation of two No. 3 Squadron R.E.8s. But for once they were unable to make the “kill”. The two pilots, Lts Simpson and Garrett, like Jack Treacy, had learned the art of defensive survival.

By flying in tight circles, each defending the other's tail, they were able to survive until a flight of Sopwith Camels came to their aid. In fact, they even shot down one of Richthofen's formation.

The arrival of the Camels, commanded by Canadian Captain Roy Brown, led to a chain of events that ended with Richthofen’s Fokker Triplane crashing in front of the Allied lines at Corbie Hill, starting a controversy that remains today.

Jack Treacy is not sure who shot him down but he is positive that it was not Roy Brown's Camel.

“It was definitely a machine gunner on the ground," he recalls. “From the position the bullet entered and then exited the Baron's body there is no way it came from Brown's aircraft. "I think it is likely that the machine gunner was Gunner Buie. However, there were a number of others it might have been. Every one around claimed him except the WAACS and the Chinese Labour Battalion !"

The body of the German ace was taken to No. 3 Squadron's base at Poulainville. It was laid on a sheet of galvanised iron in the tent hangar which normally housed Jack Treacy's R.E.8. Besides conducting an autopsy, the authorities called for official photographs to be taken of the Baron's body. While Sergeant John Alexander, the official No. 3 Squadron A.F.C. : photographer, took pictures of the body several squadron pilots were in attendance. Jack Treacy was one of them. He had brought along his own pocket camera. Noticing the terrible bruising and cuts on the dead German's face he suggested that some sort of powder should be used to whiten the battered face. Jack found some baking powder which he applied to the wounds. Then he and Sergeant Alexander took their grisly pictures. An often published picture of the Baron in death clearly shows traces of the baking powder on the lapels of the German's flying coat. "He was a good pilot and of course he was famed for 80 victories but I don't really know why he became a legend," says Jack. “We had good pilots too. “Mannock brought down nearly 80, the Canadian Bishop over 70 and the Frenchman Fonck shot down 75."

The point that Jack Treacy. makes is quite understandable. But probably the key to the Baron's immortality lies not with his fame in life but with the controversy surrounding his death.

It carried on on for decades and is still argued today by the old-timers. It was the mystery and the wild claims about who fired the fatal bullet, that sparked scores of books and hundreds of articles on the German Ace.

It now is generally accepted that Gunners Popkin and Weston of the 25th Machine Gun Company, Fourth Australian Division, were the unsung heroes.

As 1917 went by Jack became one of the “old hands”. He had survived the critical period of inexperience. By the end of the year he had amassed 60 hours flying. Not much by modern standards but a lifetime on the Western Front.

It seems that the macabre moments are often those best recalled years later. Like the particular flight when he was spotting for, and directing the fire of, a British heavy gun battery.

The target was a battery of German artillery entrenched behind the lines near the village of Albert. The enemy fire was being directed from an observation post in a tall tower. It was causing havoc in the mud-filled allied trenches.

Treacy circled the area until his observer fixed the enemy position and signalled the map co-ordinates to their 8 inch howitzer battery. All the time the Australian pilot was anxiously scanning the skies for German fighters. They were lucky. None came.

When the howitzers opened fire they were spot on target. As the airmen watched, a shell fell right into one of the German gun pits. The explosion blew the gun and its luckless crew right out of the pit.

By mid-1918 the Sopwith Camels and S.E.5 fighters of the Royal Flying Corps had regained air superiority and the murderous losses of the observation aircraft had decreased.

Jack was witness at one of the most unusual actions involving a No. 3 Squadron pilot. A Captain Armstrong was airborne on a spotting mission when he closed on a German Albatross single seater on the Allied side of the trenches. As the Australian positioned for an attack he was dumbfounded to see his enemy raise his hands in a signal of surrender. Suspecting a trap he slowly and carefully manoeuvred to a position in close formation beside and slightly astern of the Albatross. There he was clear of the enemy's field of fire and well placed to recommence his attack if the German was playing some trick.

Armstrong then pointed in the direction of his home base and shepherded the German back for a landing. Australian ground crew and off-duty pilots stared in disbelief as the unlikely formation arrived overhead and landed.

A month before the war ended Jack was finally rested from action. He was posted to England as a ferry pilot.

Following the Armistice in November 1918 he took a job with the Bristol-based British and Colonial Aeroplane Company, working under F. S. Barnwell, brilliant designer of the highly successful Bristol fighter. There Jack's earlier engineering training was enhanced by experience in the skills of aircraft design and construction.

By December, 1919 he had returned to Australia complete with an English war bride.

In the early years of peace The turned his hand to just about every type of flying job going. It was hard to make a living. He was just one of a flood of ex-wartime pilots all trying to turn their military skills into a civilian career. Joy-riding, passenger flying, barnstorming, instructing anything to pay the bills and keep flying.

For a while he flew with the fledgling Australian Aircraft and Engineering Company started by an ex-A. V. Roe-England engineer Harry Broadsmith. The pilots did all manner of jobs. The money was in joy-riding the thousands of Australians who wanted a taste of flying.

In 1920, during the two-week Brisbane show, the company took in £3000 from ten-minute flips over Eagle Farm racecourse. In those days that was a small fortune probably equal to $60,000 today.

Jack Treacy made headlines when he delivered an Avro Sunbeam Dyak from the company's newly purchased Mascot airfield and factory, to P. Hogarth of Richmond in North Queensland. The 2900 km flight established a long distance record for the delivery flight of a civil aircraft.

He became Australia's "Flying Picture Show Man'' when he was contracted to Fox Films. With the 1920s the movies had become big business. Every little outback town had a cinema. Often it was only a tin shed or rows of canvas chairs under the stars.

Day after day Jack flew from town to town delivering and picking up the cans of precious film. He criss-crossed New South Wales and Queensland a score of times. There were no aerodromes. At the best it was a local racecourse or a clear paddock. Often it was a bush track or a salt pan.

No wind socks to help pick the landing direction. Jack learned to read the wind by washing on a backyard line, ripples on a nearby creek or smoke from a bush fire. These were the real “seat of the pants” flying days.

Often he would do a bit of stunt flying to help with advertising and promoting films. On one such occasion he was looping the loop for a race crowd at Brisbane's Eagle Farm track. He had a. passenger on board, his two-year-old daughter, who, he believed, held a world record for hours in the air for any child. She was strapped tightly in the cockpit as he pulled the aircraft around on its back at the top of the loop. Suddenly a large cushion tumbled out of the open cockpit and plummeted down towards the ground. The huge crowd gasped in terror, then sighed with relief when they realised the falling object was not the child. Showmanship perhaps? It was the era of the spine-chilling barnstormers.

In 1921 he became the first man to land on the site of today's Eagle Farm Airport at Brisbane. Then it was a dairy farm. He advised the newly-formed Civil Aviation Department that it would make an ideal landing ground.

In the same year Australia's greatest solo record-breaker, Bert Hinkler. had brought his tiny Avro Baby biplane from England. He had hoped to fly here but had been stopped in Italy by a Middle Eastern war. He and his Avro had arrived by sea.

During an aerial tour of the country Hinkler severely damaged the aircraft during a landing on a windswept New South Wales beach. Hinkler sold the wreck and returned to England.

Jack Treacy was asked to help rebuild the unique machine and was later allocated the Avro for film delivery flying. He took it all over the country.

The hard, and often frustrating, years of barnstorming and bush flying finally paid off when, in 1928, he was appointed Chief Pilot of the newly-formed Queensland Air Navigation Ltd.

Flying tri motored Fokker Airliners, similar to Smithy's Southern Cross, the fledgling airline linked Brisbane, Rockhampton and Townsville with their first regular air service.  Jack made the inaugural flight to Townsville.

He made his last flight in 1952. At the age of 57 he decided it was time to hang up his wings.

Last year (1978) he was an honoured guest of the Australian Government at the official celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the crossing of the Pacific of Smithy, Ulm and the crew of the “Southern Cross".

Seated among the handful of Australia's surviving early birds, Jack watched as Charles Kingsford-Smith Jnr. landed at Brisbane's Eagle Farm Airport after retracing his famous father's flight.

But the most memorable moment of his two-day visit came when Jack attended a function at the Queensland Museum. He and Syd had moved away from the admirers surrounding Smithy Jnr. and his mother, the former Lady Kingsford-Smith. Slowly, they walked down to the far end of the museum. Above Jack's head hung Bert Hinkler's restored Avro Baby, the same aircraft he had rebuilt and flown for Fox Films.

There was a faraway look and just a hint of a tear, in his eyes. It was as if the memory-dimming veil of 57 years had dropped away. He and the little Baby were again airborne. Battling the outback dust dodging the storms, heading west for the setting sun and some little outback town.

Stowed in the tiny open cockpit the precious cans of film that would that night bring entertainment and the world to the isolated bush people. To them he was the flying picture show man who somehow always managed to get through.

To those Australians, men like Jack Treacy were the real aviation pioneers.

The Sunday Sun 2 January 1983.

60 Years of Aviation

When Qantas Flight 26 touched down at Eagle Farm Farm last Friday at 6pm it marked another milestone in Queensland's aviation history.

At approximately the same time 60 years ago, the first plane to land at Eagle Farm touched down on a grassy L-shaped paddock.

But according to Ted Wixted, an aviation historian attached to the Queensland Museum, the final hours of 1922 are as close as he can get to pinpointing the first landing.

"On December 22 of that year a well-known Australian pilot, Jack Treacy. flew a motion picture. The Queen Of Sheba, to Brisbane and landed on the other side of the river at Bulimba," he said.

Since the Eagle Farm landing the airstrip has had a chequered career.

In 1926. Queensland And be Northern Territory Aerial Services (now Qantas) started business at Eagle Farm and during the following years Brisbane caught the world's attention when famous airmen and women landed there.

Sir Charles Kingford Smith, Charles Ulm. Harry Lyons and Jim Warner landed in Brisbane after making the first Pacific crossing in 1928.

In the same year Bundaberg-born Bert Hinkler brought his Avro Avian all the way from England to the present site of the Eagle Farm racecourse.

Years later, on December 12 1971. Qantas landed its first Boeing 747 Jumbo.

Although most of Eagle Farm's history will end when Brisbane's new airport opens around 1987. the memory of one of its first aviators may live on.

Aviation authorities are reportedly considering Hinkler International Airport as the new title for Eagle Farm's replacement.

Epilogue

Aviation Pioneer Capt Jack Treacy 13 Jul 1895  --- 30 Jul 1984

Reproduced from “The Daily Examiner” Saturday 11 August 1984

Several Fridays ago two F111 aircraft from the Amberley RAAF base in Queensland flew over Maclean.  This in itself was not a remarkable event, but the flyover this day had a special significance.

It was the air force's way of paying tribute to one of its earliest members, the former Capt Jack Treacy who was buried that day in the Maclean lawn cemetery.

At the age of 89, one of this country's aviation pioneers had died in Sydney several days earlier but was being buried in the part of the country he had come to love the most and in which he spent the last 30 years of his life.

John Henry Arthur Treacy was born in Wagga Wagga on July 13, 1895, and went to school at the Adelong Superior Public School.

On leaving school he took his father's advice and took up engineering as a trade.

He was apprenticed to a Sydney company, but when World War 1 began, he like many other young men of his time, enlisted as a mechanic with the Australian Flying Corps. He was posted to England in 1915 and attached to the Royal Flying Corps in their mobile workshop as a mechanic.  see picture of a typical workshop

However, the thrills of flying called him and three months later transferred to the cadet school at Reading and trained as a pilot.

From here he went to No. 66 Squadron training school at Yatesbury, where after flying several of their fighting machines for a very limited number of hours was presented with his RFC wings, a log book and was posted to France.

In an interview some years ago he admitted that before his posting to France he had managed to log only 10 hours flying time.

“I was very green, although keen and enthusiastic about getting a chance of flying against the Hun," he said.

“At this time our losses were heavy because the German machines were so superior to ours, much more manoeuvrable and better equipped.”

He was posted to No. 3 Australian Squadron, flying RE 8 two-seater aircraft used mainly for reconnaissance work.

These planes were slow and were considered an easy mark for the enemy, particularly Baron von Richthofen and his Flying Circus..

Although well aware of the appalling casualty rate, particularly among the newer pilots, Jack Treacy tackled the job with an aplomb the envy of many more experienced men.

Slowly he built up his flying hours on bombing, reconnaissance and aerial photography missions, and although fired on several times, managed to return safely to his base on every occasion.

His log book, recording the flights, number of rounds fired, bombs dropped and other service details with several close brushes with death mentioned in only a few brief words is now at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

Parachutes were not issued in those days, for in addition to their sheer bulkiness, there were so many struts and wires on the aircraft that they would have been useless.

He quickly built up a knowledge of lifesaving techniques based on hard-won experience, and records more than one incident where quick-thinking and action saved both his life and that of his observer.

On June 6, 1917, he and his observer Lieut N. Jones escaped death when a German Albatross Scout, unable to stay behind Jack Treacy's tight turn manoeuvres, and being fired on by another plane, broke off the engagement.

On April 21, 1918, the greatest German ace of the war, Baron von Richthofen fought his last duel.

On this day, two R E8s from Treacy's No. 3 squadron were on a photo reconnaissance mission 7000 feet over Hamel on the Somme when they were spotted by members of Richthofen's Jasta 11 group.

The two British planes flew into a slow wheeling defensive turn and even managed to shoot one German plane down before the other three decided to break off the engagement.

However they had drifted over British positions and anti-aircraft fire attracted the attention of a group of Sopwith Camels led by Canadian Roy Brown.

Controversy still rages as to whether it was a bullet from Brown's guns, artillery fire or fire from Australian riflemen and machine gunners which brought down the Red Baron's aircraft

The next afternoon Jack Treacy and five other pilots, all captains, Richthofen's equivalent rank, acted as pallbearers for the funeral at Bertangles.

Suddenly as they were lowering the coffin into the ground, Treacy felt the ground crumbling under him, and but for the quick thinking of a nearby officer would have plunged into the grave on top of the coffin.

During his war years, he flew more than 200 hours over enemy lines on 110 missions, and brought back some 140 photographs of enemy targets.

"I was attacked many times, but never brought down, despite a life expectancy for new pilots of about five weeks," he said.

Just before the end of the war he returned to England as a ferry pilot and after the armistice took a job for a few months with the British and Colonial Aircraft and Engineering Co.

On June 11, 1919, he married his wife Eva, in Windsor and they returned to Australia in December.

He joined the Australian Aircraft and Engineering Co flying their aircraft on delivery flights as well as taking many Australians up for joy flights.

He delivered an Avro 504K from his company's newly-purchased Mascot airfield to Richmond in North Queensland with the 2900 km flight making Australian history as the long distance record for the delivery flight of a civil aircraft.

During those years as well as the joy flights, he flew for the Fox Films group delivering drums of movie films all over NSW, and earned himself the title of the Flying Picture Show Man.

In most instances there were no airfields and the landings were made in paddocks on the outskirts of the towns, roads or on racecourses.

At this stage he was flying a rebuilt Avro which had previously been owned by Bert Hinkler.

As there were no air-socks on these sites, he had to watch flapping washing on clothes lines, ripples on water or smoke from chimneys to know the wind direction.

During the early 1920s Jack Treacy landed on a dairy farm owned by a man named Wilson at Eagle Farm near Brisbane and reported the site as suitable for an airfield to the Civil Aviation Department, thus becoming the first man to land on what is now Brisbane's main airport.

He was issued with commercial pilot's licence No. 23 and aircraft engineer's licence No. 100 and in 1928 was appointed chief pilot for the Queensland Air Navigation Ltd flying Avro 10 tri-motor planes similar to Kingsford Smith's Southern Cross.

In one of these aircraft he flew the inaugural flight from Brisbane to Townsville on March 31, 1930.

Later he flew commercially in New Guinea in a little two-seater biplane with an 80 horsepower motor ferrying cargo and passengers in and around the highlands.

In 1952 he gave up flying at the age of 57 and retired to Yamba and spent the following years quietly fishing and relaxing.

However, he never lost his love of aircraft.

He was an honoured guest at the ceremony at Eagle Farm airport in 1978 when Charles Kingsford Smith jnr. touched down to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his father's flight.

Later that day came another moving moment when he was shown his old Avro, the one previously owned by Bert Hinkler, hanging in the aviation section of the Queensland Museum,

In his last years Jack retained a vivid memory of the early days of Australian aviation, having met and known well, many of the great names of those years.

He is still remembered by the RAAF, that service of which he was an early member, and Fit Lieut Geoffrey Boxell from the RAAF base at Amberley represented the service at his funeral.

The F111 flypast was another gesture by the service.

All his service records are now held at the Australian War Memorial, while his civil records have been sent to the National Library in Canberra.

His records of Queensland flying are held by the John Oxley State Library in Briskan

Below are clips from Wikipedia

of

The Red Baron's funeral.