Famous aviator Thomas Octave Murdoch Sopwith was born in January 1888, the son of Thomas Sopwith Sr and his wife, Lydia Gertrude Messiter. The elder Thomas Sopwith worked as a civil engineer and the managing director of the Spanish Lead Mines Company in Linares, Jaén, Spain. In turn his father, also named Thomas, had been a mining and railway engineer and so we can see that engineering was very much in the Sopwith family genes. Sadly, on 30 July 1898, when the younger Thomas was just a boy of 10 and on a family holiday in Scotland at the Isle of Lismore near Oban, a gun that had been lying across his knee went off, killing his father. This traumatic accident remained with Sopwith for the rest of his life.