Just outside Sechelt, there once stood a house named Rexwood. Jane Nickson named it in memory of her son, who in 1912 pre-empted the land and built a house there.
Two years later, on Dec. 4, 1914, age 23, he enlisted in Vancouver to fight in World War I as a private in the BC Horse Cavalry.
John Reginald ‘Rex’ Nickson, was five foot 11 inches tall with brown hair and brown eyes and was born in Vancouver. His father, as superintendent of waterworks for the City of Vancouver, had installed the city’s first water system from Capilano dam to all parts of the city, placing the first pipes under the First Narrows.
Nickson served for two years in the trenches of France with the 2nd Regiment Canadian Mounted Rifles as a bomb thrower, but in July 1916 he was repeatedly in the field hospital with infected legs, and was then appointed groom for Capt. William Wasborough Foster, who was to become a legendary hero of WWI. In February 1917, Nickson was discharged from the army for medical reasons and was to be sent home, but by April his discharge had been cancelled and he was approved for a transfer to the Royal Flying Corps.
He qualified as a pilot on July 6, 1917, and as a qualified Flying Officer on Aug. 29, 1917. He served with two other squadrons before being posted to 35 TS at Port Meadow, near Oxford, England, where he was awaiting orders to serve in France.
He was killed, aged 26, on Jan. 2, 1918, piloting a powerful Bristol Fighter as it approached to land over Wytham, near Oxford. It stalled at 300 feet and crashed, killing both Nickson and his American passenger, Lt. William Smith Ely, aged 22. They are buried side by side in Wolvercote cemetery near Oxford. Nickson is also remembered on his parents’ grave in Vancouver’s Mountain View Cemetery.
A memorial to the airmen who lost their lives at Port Meadow, including Nickson, has been erected and was unveiled in May 2018.
Nickson was survived by his mother, two brothers and five sisters. Members of the family continued to live on the waterfront property in West Sechelt until they died, when it was left to Capilano College. The Silverstone development now occupies the land on the waterfront where Rexwood once stood.
