Sidney Cotton – The last plane out of Berlin

Sidney Cotton was a superb pilot, a talented inventor, a businessman-and a spy.

Born and brought up in Queensland, he served with the Royal Naval Air Service in World War I. Over the next twenty years he did everything from delivering mail in Newfoundland and developing colour photography to playing the stockmarket and entering the world of aerial reconnaissance.

Cotton was recruited by MI-6 to fly over Germany and Italy to take photographs of sensitive military sites (often using the best German cameras). He posed as a businessman and, in that guise, met Goering and other high-ranking Nazis. A secret mission to bring Goering to England was aborted, and Cotton escaped from Berlin just as war was declared.

Cotton courted the rich and powerful, and was given his own secret unit-‘Cotton’s Crooks’. But he was sacked after offering to fly a rich businessman out of Paris just before the fall of France.

When the war ended, he made a fortune running guns to India after partition and then lost it in a decade of high living and thwarted business deals in the Middle East. To the end of his life he remained a colourful, enigmatic personality-the classic loner in a world of intrigue and chaos.