the British Empire. On 1 August 1919 he resigned his commission with the Royal Garrison Artillery and took a permanent commission in the newly formed Royal Air Force as a lieutenant-colonel. In 1920 Rees was presented with a sword and the freedom of Caernarfon. In June 1920, he took command of the flying wing at RAF College Cranwell, becoming the assistant commandant in March 1923. Promoted to group captain after the RAF moved away from the Army rank structure, Rees became deputy director in the Air Ministry directorate of training and in January 1925 he became an additional air aide-de-camp to the King. Rees was posted to RAF Amman in May 1926 and given command of the RAF Transjordan and Palestine in October 1926. He had a keen interest in archaeology, and while flying on the Cairo to Baghdad route during this period, he took some of the earliest archaeological aerial photographs of sites in eastern Transjordan (now Jordan), and published several articles in Antiquity and the journal of the Palestine Exploration Fund. He is considered a father of the archaeological studies of this remote area, and a pioneer of aerial archaeology. Rees returned to England in October 1926 to take command of the RAF Depot at Uxbridge before he retired from the RAF in 1931 with the rank of group captain. In 1933, he sailed single-handedly across the Atlantic from Wales to Nassau in the Bahamas in a ketch. For this achievement he was awarded the prestigious Blue Water Medal by the Cruising Club of America in 1934. When the Second World War broke out, Rees returned to the United Kingdom from the Bahamas and once again joined the RAF. He relinquished his rank of group captain in January 1941 at his own request and was granted the rank of wing commander. He served in Africa. On 21 November 1942 Rees reverted to the rank of group captain on the retired list. Rees returned home to the Bahamas and on 12 August 1947, aged 62, he married Sylvia Williams, a young local woman. They had three children. Rees died at the Princess Margaret Hospital in Nassau on 28 September 1955 from leukaemia. He was buried at Nassau war cemetery. Described as a real gentleman, during his time in Transjordan and possibly during other parts of his career, Rees was known to give his pay to service charities. An RAF