Michael "Marvelous Mikey" Cipriani

Jules Cipriani had seven sons and seven daughters. One of his son's was Michael (Mikey) Cipriani, a solicitor by profession, and one of Trinidad's pioneer aviators. A popular sporting hero, he was known as "Marvelous Mikey" (Trinidad Guardian) by Trinidad's sporting fraternity, at one time champion cyclist and athlete of Trinidad and of the West Indies. (Ibid.) A West Indian hero during the first European war in which he served as a gunnery sergeant in the Second Life Guards, "Marvelous Mikey" in 1917 was attached as a machine gun sergeant to the French troops defending Verdun at which time he acquitted himself well. (Ibid.) He became very interested in aviation and flew on several missions over the western front during the closing years of the war. He represented Trinidad in colonial cricket and also in football and "shone in every position on the field". He was considered during the 1920s and 1930s as the "greatest athlete Trinidad has ever known". He was very popular among the people at large, he was one of their own, a born creole. He moved at every level of society. When he died at the age of 40, a victim of a plane crash in the northern mountains of Trinidad, the entire country devotedly mourned his death. His body was taken from the wreckage of his aeroplane "Humming Bird" and brought to Port-of-Spain, where thousands of people attended his funeral, people of every class, colour and creed, from the representative of the British Crown to the barefoot in the street. (Ibid.)