A Kiwi hero who saved the lives of people in a Stirlingshire mining village during World War II has been remembered.
Members of the Cowie community came together this week with a group of visitors and VIPs to honour New Zealand Pilot Officer Carlyle Everiss, who died while steering his crashing Spitfire away from the village in 1941.
A scholarship winner from New Zealand, the Vice-Lieutenant of Stirlingshire and Falkirk, a representative of the RAF, and the school community of Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen, were also among those who attended in a ceremony at Cowie Bowling Club on Tuesday, February 4.
The moving ceremony is now an annual event to pay tribute to Pilot Officer Everiss.
The 26-year-old, of the Royal New Zealand Air Force, was based at RAF Grangemouth when he took his Spitfire on a training flight on October 2, 1941.
For unknown reasons, while passing near Cowie, his aircraft went out of control. Witnesses on the ground said that it appeared to be heading down into the village, but that he would have had time to bail out.
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Instead, he stayed with the aircraft and headed it away from built up areas.
The 26-year-old was believed to have been pulled from the wreckage by three local residents but died after being given the last rites.
Residents in Cowie raised £12,000 to erect a bronze bust of the pilot as a memorial, which was unveiled in the village in 2007 at Cowie Bowling Club, which is near the crash site.
Maddie Simpson, this year’s Everiss Scholar from Otaki College in New Zealand, read the poem High Flight, which was written by a young pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force, John Gillespie Magee, who was also killed on a training fight in 1941, in England. It became widely known when President Reagan quoted it after the deaths of crew members of the space shuttle Challenger.
The scholarship was set up as a Scottish thank you to New Zealand, which has hosted a Scottish school leaver since 1937, in memory of the captain of a New Zealand merchant ship, SS Otaki, sunk in 1917. The Otaki Scholar, from Robert Gordon College in Aberdeen, where the captain had been a pupil, has visited New Zealand in each of the years since. The College now hosts the Everiss Scholar, the New Zealand student who visits Scotland.
Also among those attending were Councillor Alasdair MacPherson, who has had a long interest preserving the memory of Carlyle Everiss and helped create the annual ceremony, staff and pupils from Cowie Primary School and St Margaret’s Primary School, and members of the Cowie Bowling Club.
The Vice Lieutenant of Stirlingshire and Falkirk, Alastair Campbell, Squadron Leader Ally Park, representing the RAF, and Robin Macpherson, the Head of Robert Gordon College, were among the guests of honour. A trumpeter and pipers from Robert Gordon College also took part.
Krisha Modi and Jess Thomsen who visited in 2023 were the first Everiss Scholars, beneficiaries of a programme honouring the memory of Pilot Officer Everiss., who had paid for his choice of staying at the controls of his plane, rather than to ditch and see the plane crash into a row of houses, with his life.
Former British High Commissioner in New Zealand, Geordie Fergusson, wrote to local councillors for the Cowie area in 2020 seeking their support for the Everiss Scholars to visit the village to pay tribute at a memorial to the young pilot, which was erected in 2005 thanks to the fundraising efforts of members of Cowie Bowling Club and a donation from local MDF manufacturer Norbord.
At that time, Mr Fergusson said: “As one of the St Margaret’s Primary School pupils attending the ceremony said to headteacher Paul Nugent on the way to the event, some of the pupils might not be alive if P.O. Everiss had bailed out and saved himself.”
PO Everiss, who was one of a number of foreign pilots stationed at Grangemouth during the war, was buried at Grandsable Cemetery near Polmont.