Mr.Lowe seems to hold to a particular orthodoxy by which a person is NEVER allowed to change one's mind. *Saul en route to Damascus would not be permitted a conversion were this to be universally applied.
Phil Markham wrote a pamphlett for the Canadian War Museum in the early 1990s which did not question the Bishop story as proclaimed from the alters of orthodoxy. *However, his curiosity was sparked and he set out on a quest by which he hoped to prove the orthodox line to be true.
The reverse happened of course. *He first presented his research and conclusions at a meeting of the North-East Aero Historians held in Ottawa (1994, I think). *Those of us who attended remember most vividly the pained reluctance that he expressed as he produced his findings, and his anxiety to retrieve at least something favourable for Bishop. *Yet when one person attending confronted Phil ("You don't like Bishop, do you ?"), his reply was to the effect "Like or dislike has nothing to do with it - one looks for the facts and follows the trail, regardless of where it leads."
Phil wrote two subsequent articles on Bishop. "The Early Morning Hours of 2 June 1917" was published in OVER THE FRONT, Volume 10 No.3 (Fall 1995) and dealt with the purported VC action. *His second article, which was in the nature of a lawyer testing the credibility of a witness (Bishop) appeared in the JOURNAL OF THE CANADIAN AVIATION HISTORICAL SOCIETY, Volume 34 No.2 and is reproduced as posts 283 through 288 on this thread.
Those of us who knew Phil Markham also know that, had he lived, a book similar to THE MAKING OF
BILLY BISHOP would have appeared under his authorship - although it would have been dragged out of him by those who respected his methodicalness, innovation, eloquence, and integrity. *He was, in all respects, a gentleman and a scholar - too big to be either semantic or doctrinaire.