The Chronicle

BULAWAYO, Tuesday, August 16,1966 — Mrs Rae Travers, wife of the Captain Patrick Anthony Travers, top officer of the CAA organisation was a Selukwe girl working in Bulawayo during World War 2 when she first met him at a dance at the RAF Initial Training Wing (now the Trade Fair grounds).

In 22 years outside Rhodesia as a wife of a man in the higher echelons of international aviation, she has lived in several countries and has circled the world three times.

She is soon to have another long flight in October she will accompany her husband to an international air conference in Mexico City.

Captain Travers was chief flying instructor at Heany RAF Station when they met. Soon after, he was seconded to BOAC for its new Middle East Service.

They married in Cairo in 1944. For 10 years, until he made his last flight (when he piloted the Queen on her tour of Uganda in 1954) his wife used to scan the skies.

“Watching the clouds”, she called it, when we chatted about those years during her recent brief visit to Bulawayo. Years of watching with wifely concern and pride, his smooth take-offs and his happy landings. Anxiety was never far away,” she confessed, “but I would never have chosen any other life, even if I could”.

In 1954 Captain Travers became sales manager, then general manger of East African Airways, to which he transferred a few years earlier as a pilot. For 19 years Kenya was their home, and it won their hearts.

“A most beautiful and friendly land”, she said Miss Travers was Miss Rae Stevenson, second daughter of Captain and Mrs RHR Stevenson of Selukwe. Mrs Stevenson died last February, just a few weeks her daughter had broken such a long absence to come and live near her.