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Making Twenty-One Hops t<br />
Twenty-one Hops to Nairobi<br />
– I know that sounds like an<br />
old movie title, but this is a<br />
brief account of a Christian<br />
organisation, which grew from<br />
one man’s vision of peace at the end of<br />
the Second World War and an epic flight<br />
from London to Nairobi to establish the<br />
world’s busiest humanitarian airline –<br />
Mission Aviation Fellowship.<br />
The visionary was Murray Kendon,<br />
a New Zealand pilot with RAF Coastal<br />
Command, who believed that if planes<br />
could be used for war, they could also<br />
be used for peace – to bring help and<br />
hope to impoverished people in isolated<br />
places and show them God’s love. He<br />
also believed that his vision should be<br />
carried out in partnership with overseas<br />
churches and missions – a taskforce of<br />
specialists serving God worldwide.<br />
In 1944, Murray took his ideas to Dr<br />
Thomas Cochrane, a pioneer medical<br />
missionary in China and founder of the<br />
Mildmay Movement, who asked him<br />
if he could begin the project at once.<br />
After much soul searching and praying,<br />
it became clear to Murray that God had<br />
given him not only the vision but also<br />
the call to make MAF become a reality.<br />
Jack Hemmings and Stuart King<br />
The following year, he was demobbed<br />
from the RAF and moved to the Mildmay<br />
Centre in London. And in the dying<br />
embers of World War Two, MAF was born.<br />
Murray was joined there by other<br />
ex-RAF officers: Squadron Leader Jack<br />
Hemmings, who had won the Air Force<br />
Cross in India, and Flight Lieutenant<br />
Stuart King, engineer officer for 247<br />
Fighter Squadron during the D-Day<br />
landings, who learned to fly soon after.<br />
Having considered mission fields as far<br />
away as China, it was finally agreed by<br />
all at MAF to start in Africa with a tenmonth<br />
air and ground survey. Two years<br />
later, on January 13, 1948, Jack and<br />
Stuart took off from Croydon Airport in a<br />
twin-engine Miles Gemini for Paris – the<br />
first of 21 hops to Nairobi.<br />
Each stop, of course, was for<br />
refuelling, sometimes with layovers for<br />
the pilots. From Paris, they continued<br />
down to Lyon and Marseilles, then<br />
across the Mediterranean to Corsica<br />
and Tunis. Two days and five hops<br />
later, they were in Cairo, where they<br />
upgraded their radio transmitter for future<br />
St Chad’s Church, Linden Avenue, Woodseats<br />
Church Office: Linden Avenue, Sheffield S8 0GA<br />
Tel: (0114) 274 5086<br />
Page 12<br />
email: office@stchads.org<br />
website: www.stchads.org
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