Auxiliary Air Force
Born: July 13th 1914
Died: August 11th 1942
Age at Death: 28
Killed on active service, August 1942
Family from Surrey: G Seth-Smith, Little Tangley, Caterham Valley
Kenneth was born in Caterham Valley, Surrey, on 13 July 1914 to Gordon Seth-Smith and his wife Margaret (née Stedman). A need for speed was in his blood: his father was a pioneering motorist, and the couple’s honeymoon was a round-Britain tour in a single-cylinder Star car.
Seth-Smith won a Mathematics prize at the College, and also appeared as Edith, one of General Stanley’s daughters, in The Pirates of Penzance. After leaving the College he started to train in accountancy. However, this was very much his family’s idea, and he soon switched to Croydon Aerodrome where he did anything and everything, including learning fitting and rigging and earning flying lessons. He was the youngest ever “B” (Commercial) Pilots Licence holder at age 20. He joined General Aircraft, Hanworth, a civil aircraft manufacturer, as demonstration and test pilot. In 1938 he married Joy Tobin, a 17-year-old drama student at RADA. Their only child, Richard, who was born the following year, says that his parents were deeply in love but knew that the war could easily take one of them away so, like many other young couples of the time, they married quickly.
Kenneth’s life assuredly became more dangerous the following year, when he became a test pilot at Brooklands with the Hawker Aircraft Company, flying the early production Hurricanes which were the primary defensive fighter during the Battle of Britain. As Acting Chief Experimental Test Pilot at Hawkers Langley Airfield, on11 August 1942 he was carrying out a speed test in a Hawker Typhoon when his aircraft broke up over the Surrey countryside, killing him. His son Richard trained in aircraft engineering before some 30 years in the motor industry, ultimately owning and running the WW2 built Perranporth airfield in Cornwall.