Jock Elliott delivered this eulogy for his father Peter on 8 June 1998
If the measure of a man is how many people turn up to his funeral on a cold and rainy day, then Peter Elliott was a pretty remarkable man.
Those of you here today have known Pete for ten, twenty, thirty years. I’ve known him for 51 years and there’s 25 years on top of that and I’d like to tell you a bit more about Pete and fill in some of the gaps.
Pete’s father Johnnie came back from World War One (as so many men didn’t, as the monument out there attests). He took his bride Elsie Dodson, an English girl. They lived in Dungog, a sleepy country town in New South Wales and there, Peter was born in 1922 followed a few years later by his only sister Wendy.
Pete went straight from school in 1941 and joined the RAAF. He flew with the 50 Squadron and 61 Squadron here in England, flying Manchesters and Lancasters.
He did several tours of duty and was commissioned and promoted to Flying Officer. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal in 1943 for operations over Germany and Italy and they didn’t hand that out with the rations.
After the war, he was demobbed and flew for the Australian National Airways. He was their youngest ever Captain.
He was very talented and I’ll just digress here and mention that when I was three, he invented for me a toy ride-on mechanical elephant, so that when I sat in the saddle and leant to the left, the right legs moved forward, and when I leant to the right, the left legs moved forward. It walked. It was brilliant. It was worth millions, but once he was happy that it worked, he lost interest.
He also redesigned the fuel flow system on the company’s DC4 aircraft which saved them a fortune, but typically of Pete, he never saw a penny of it. Which is one of the reasons he left Australia in 1960 and came to the UK.
In the sort of extravagant honesty that was the bane of Pete’s life, not to mention his family’s, he left before gaining jet training and that lack of qualification condemned him to flying with some very doubtful operators for the balance of his flying career until his retirement in 1975.
He was a very fine pilot but never received the financial rewards that his skill, knowledge and courage deserved.
Now for the artist, Pete always drew and painted. I have many of the sketches he produced during the war, as do Joan and Warren.
In 1949, he attended Art School at the National Gallery in Melbourne where he studied under Bill Dargie, later Sir William Dargie who did the portrait of the Queen in the yellow dress.
Pete was a very fine portrait painter, twice placing second to Sir William Dobell in the Archibald prize, which was very good company to come second to. Pete’s work has been shown in the Royal Society for Portrait Painters four times.
Pete was a never a commercial painter, nor a political one and the politics of society portrait painting was a game he would not play. But for all the lack of fame and fortune that attended Pete’s artistic career, his work holds pride of place in a surprising number of homes and galleries.
Now for the private man. Pete married my mother Shirley in 1946. She was an airline hostess. In the fifteen years of their marriage, they produced me and I live in Brisbane, my brother Andrew who lives in Townsville, my sister Jane who lives in Israel and my sister Yvonne who lives in Sydney. From this crop springs three grandchildren, Michael, Gal and Ron.
And then he met and married the rock and anchor of his last 32 years, Joan, from which union came their son Warren.
Distance has kept us apart as a family more than any other factor.
Pete has a pretty good family. In many ways, he has not been a good provider but if we never got any money from Pete, we all got some measure of artistic talent, a sense of humour, an essential honesty and a liking for a cold drink on a hot day, or even a cold day.
Rudyard Kipling’s hero Kim was known in the market places of India as “little friend of all the world”.
In the market place and streets and bars of a hundred cities but more recently here in Halesowen, Pete was indeed like Kim, the friend of all the world.
He wanted to be remembered as a good pilot, a good painter and a good bloke.
And as long as his friends remember him as such, then he will be with us.
Shirley Elliott (Peter’s first wife) 
Warren Elliott (Peter’s son, 2nd marriage) 
Jane Elliott (Peter’s third child) 
Jamaican Man 
Joan Elliott (peter’s second wife) 
Portrait Englishman 
Jamaican Boy 
Unknown woman 
Jane Elliott as a baby
I knew Pete many years ago in the late 60’s when he flew as a Free Lance pilot with Autair International Airways at Luton Airport. He was living in Brighton then and I was one of the Crew Bus drivers with Autair. He would sometimes come up to Luton on the Milk Train arriving early in the morning and I would collect him from the station and take him to Autair operations. He was a lovely chap and very popular, except with the Chief Pilot because Pete would rarely wear a uniform and certainly not a hat, he used to get away with just wearing a big pilots overcoat in public.
I remember collecting him from the station one morning and he had an earthenware bowl in his hands with a muslin cover tied over the top. I asked him what it was and he said his land lady had made him some stew for his lunch so he would get the girls on the flight to heat it up for him. He used to give me minatures of Drambuie sometimes, which he said was perfect for breakfast! I am writing my life history, mainly for my family and he was certainly a small part of it. I an pleased he ended up in St Lucia a happy man, he deserved it. I just googled his name and came up with your Eulogy which was a lovely surprise.
My best regards
Clive Barton
Hello Clive,
I just saw your message, so apologies for being very very late in replying!! It’s so lovely to hear your anecdotes about Pete. The internet is not always a good place but it is a wonderful medium for making connections such as this. Neither myself nor my family would have known about this part of his life so I am thrilled to pass this onto them. Thank-you for taking the time to write and I wish you all the best with penning your life history, though if you took his advice and are having Drambuie for breakfast, then that may have slowed you down.
Best wishes
Yvonne 🙂
Amazing read and paintings I haven’t seen before…that Jamaican bloke taught me how to sail. Smiley his name was, taught me well.. he was my best ever friend, I grew up with him! Far from a western world though, all the way in the West Indies. We were best friends though. I remember laying on Telescope bay at the beach, thinking and dreaming about sailing with him, just to look to the left and seeing him just fly onto the sand next to me! Amazing..
By the way, that person with the funny hat is actually a girl! (She was my girlfriend:-)
PS. I wasn’t as miserable as I looked…
-Warren