The William Woods Story
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In the cockpit of "Bill the Conk" • 24 missions completed • 8 still to fly
"The first mission was Frankfurt. Eight hours, all of it at night. We crossed the coast and almost immediately I was coned — picked up by one searchlight, then another, then a dozen of them locked onto us. You can't see a thing. You're completely blind, just white light everywhere, and you know every fighter for miles is coming for you. I threw the Lancaster into a diving spin — full stick, hard rudder — and behind me I could hear the rear gunners opening up on the Messerschmitts. The whole aircraft shaking. Somehow we broke free. Somehow we made it to the target, dropped our bombs, and got home. Eight hours. That was my first trip. I had thirty-one more to go."
Real wartime film of the Avro Lancaster — the aircraft Bill Woods flew on 32 missions over occupied Europe. The average crew survived roughly ten.
The ambient audio on this page includes real cockpit recordings of Lancaster crews coming under fire over Germany — unedited voices from missions just like Bill's.
Avro Lancaster Bomber — Rare WWII Colour Film • Crown Copyright / Public Domain
In the 1930s, an Australian family reaches into the bathroom cabinet and pulls out a bottle of Woods' Great Peppermint Cure. They don't think about where it came from. They don't think about the family that put it there — the same family that brought Nivea to Australia.
Young Bill Woods grew up in Darling Point, between the holiday house at Cronulla and the farm at Oberon. He was dux at Edgecliff Prep, alongside Lawrence Street — who would become Chief Justice of New South Wales. Then boarding school at Kings, which he endured rather than enjoyed. He had five siblings. The eldest, Innes, was the golden boy. And then Innes received a diagnosis that was almost certainly wrong. The house fell silent. Innes took his own life.
"The saddest day of my life was when I picked up the phone and was told Innes had hanged himself. I was devastated. It affected me greatly."
— Bill Woods
Walking from their Lancaster • RAF Station, England
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He shipped out on a troopship that stopped in wartime New York. He trained as a Lancaster pilot. Then he flew — again and again and again — over Germany, through flak that tore men apart.
On a night flight to Stuttgart, a third of the way there, one of his four engines failed. The Lancaster, heavy with 12,000 pounds of bombs, couldn't climb to safe altitude. Pilots were expected to complete their mission. Bill was twenty years old with six crew and their families to consider. He put it to a vote. They turned the plane around and dropped the bombs in the English Channel.
Thirty-two missions. Sixty percent of Lancaster crews were killed. The average didn't survive ten. Bill came home. Tuberculosis took his lung. Electro-shock therapy tried to treat what nobody yet called PTSD. He chose to live. He picked up a textbook. The first chapter: Anatomy.
Between missions, Bill did rounds with his uncle — a doctor in England. It was during this downtime that he discovered his calling to help people. He couldn't have known then that he'd go on to transform Australian healthcare, or that the two pathology practices he founded would one day employ over 5,000 people.
Doctors told him to live a quiet life. He ignored them and finished his medical degree. He became the only doctor for a vast stretch of the South Coast — Batemans Bay and the surrounding areas. A 24/7 job, first to attend horrific road accidents on one of Australia's deadliest stretches of road.
But much of his time was spent with the local Aboriginal people — the Yuin tribe. He delivered their babies in their gunyahs, administered medicines, looked after their children. All for free. He was one of the few white people warmly welcomed into the community. War had stripped away any sense of social hierarchy. Pain was pain.
He married Pat Watson. Their son John was born. Then Pat's schizophrenia emerged. She was taken away. He married Huleh Way, who brought light back — and then lost her too, when she slipped between the platform and a train at Strathfield station on her way to work. Twice loved. Twice left alone.
The crew of "Bill the Conk" • Of every 100 Bomber Command aircrew, only 40 survived the war
With Bronté Douglas, Bill brought automated pathology testing from America to Australia — a boon that changed the industry. Douglas Hanly Moir became the pre-eminent pathology house in the country. Under his tutelage, Colin Laverty founded Laverty Pathology. Together, these practices now employ over 5,000 people.
Then the racehorses — hundreds of them. One, a champion two-year-old colt called Star Shower, won its first five starts. Roy Higgins called his Blue Diamond Stakes win — with a severed tendon — the best he'd ever seen. The horse was sent to stud but declared infertile. Bill bought him for a pittance, rejigged his diet, and made him one of Australia's top breeding prospects. Six stakes winners from his progeny. The toast of the industry. Alan Jones, Johnny Tapp — they all came calling.
But before any of that unravelled, Bill buried his son. John — from his first marriage to Pat Watson — killed himself. He was nineteen. Bill was fifty-five. He had already lost a brother this way. Now a son. He carried that weight into everything that followed.
Then, a decade later, it all collapsed. A trusted friend. A guarantee signed in good faith. A quarter-billion-dollar fortune — gone. Bill was sixty-seven. Bankrupt. Most men would stop here.
For sixty-five years, Bill Woods lived with one lung. He flew bombers, survived tuberculosis, built empires, went bankrupt, and rebuilt. All on half the air the rest of us breathe.
Bill Woods' own aircraft, bombs laid out for loading before a mission • Each sortie carried 12,000 pounds of ordnance
He married Ann — the flaming red head, as he called her — at Concord Hospital. She was twenty-six years his junior. The whispers didn't matter. They would endure forty-four extraordinary years together. His daily routine: a boiling hot cup of tea brought to her every morning, and fresh bread he baked for her every Sunday.
Fellow doctors rallied around him. He rebuilt his practice and worked until he was eighty. They found faith. They raised four more children. He never missed an athletics meet, a football game, a tennis match.
He died at ninety — on the feast day of Saint Mary MacKillop, Australia's first saint. With oxygen and morphine, sedated and eyes closed, his daughter tested his faculties and asked him to spell "phlegm." He slowly lifted his mask and spelled out P-H-L-E-G-M, then nodded back off to sleep. His wits were with him until the end. When asked at eighty-two how important he thought his life story was, he replied: "I just hope it's not all boring, that's all."
In the years before he died, Bill sat down and told his story in his own words. Over six hours of recorded interviews — funny, unflinching, and unmistakably Australian. Here is a moment from those conversations for his family.
Bill Woods, recorded interview • 2006
Full interviews will accompany the serialised biography
Firsthand accounts from the men who flew. The aircraft that carried Bill Woods — and 125,000 others — into the most dangerous skies of the Second World War.
The Lancaster at War • Spark Documentary
The extraordinary true story of William Woods — Lancaster pilot, doctor, pathology pioneer, racing man, and the most resilient Australian you've never heard of.
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