FLIGHT IN ENGLAND
In all these doings England bore but a small part. English aviators were
few; and those who distinguished themselves in public competition had
learned their flying in France. To speak of England's share in these
amazing years of progress is to tell the history of a backward parish,
and to describe its small contribution to a great world-wide movement.
Yet the story, for that very reason, has an extraordinary interest.
England never has been cosmopolitan. All her beginnings, even where she
has led the way and set the fashion to the world, were parochial. If a
change is in question, England makes trial of it, late and reluctantly,
on a small scale, in her own garden. All the noisy exhortations of a
thousand newspapers cannot touch her apprehension or rouse her to
excitement. Next year's fashions do not much preoccupy her mind; she
knows that they will come to her, in due time, from France, to be taken
or rejected. When a change is something more than a fashion, and vital
conditions begin to be affected, her lethargy is broken in a moment and
she is awake and alert. So it was with the fashion of air-travel. The
first aviator's certificate granted by a British authority was issued by
the Royal Aero Club of the United Kingdom to Mr. J. T. C. Moore-Brabazon
in March 1910, when already the exploits of flying men were the theme of
all the world. By the 1st of November in the same year the Royal Aero
Club had issued twenty-two certificates; that is to say, twenty-two
pilots, some of them self-taught, and some trained in France, were
licensed by the sole British authority as competent to handle a machine
in the air. Eight years later, in November 1918, when the armistice put
an end to the active operations of the war, the Royal Air Force was the
largest and strongest of the air forces of the world. We were late in
beginning, but once we had begun we were not slow. We were rich in
engineering skill and in material for the struggle. Best of all, we had
a body of youth fitted by temperament for the work of the air, and
educated, as if by design, to take risks with a light heart--the boys of
the Public Schools of England. As soon as the opportunity came they
offered themselves in thousands for a work which can never be done well
when it is done without zest, and which calls for some of the highest
qualities of character--fearlessness, self-dependence, and swift
decision. The Germans, before the war, used to speak with some contempt,
perhaps with more than they felt, of the English love of sport, which
they liked to think was frivolous and unworthy of a serious nation.
Their forethought and organization, which was intensely, almost
maniacally, serious, was defeated by what they despised; and the love of
sport, or, to give it its noblest name, the chivalry, of their enemies,
which they treated as a foolish relic of romance, proved itself to be
the most practical thing in the world.
The English pioneers of flight, who had learned their flying abroad,
brought back their knowledge, and did what they could to arouse their
country to effort. What their success would have been if the peace of
Europe had continued unbroken and unthreatened it is impossible to say,
but progress would probably have been slow--an affair of sporadic
attempts and scattered adventures. The two strongest motives, patriotic
devotion and commercial gain, would have been lacking. The English have
never been good at preparing for a merely possible war; they are apt,
indeed, to regard such preparation as ill-omened and impious. This
strenuous and self-dependent breed of men, being conscious that they do
not desire war, and believing that he is thrice armed who has his
quarrel just, have always been content, in the face of many warnings, to
repose their main confidence in the virtue of their cause and the
strength of their character. The risks that they run through this
confidence have often been pointed out, but it should also be remembered
that by their reluctance to act on theory they have often been saved
from the elaborate futility and expense of acting on a false theory. The
disaster which has befallen Germany cannot but strengthen them in their
belief that it is dangerous to devote care and thought to preparing for
all imaginable conflicts. So also in the activities of civil life,
before they undertake a large outlay they ask to be assured of solid
gains. They leave it to the adventurers, who have never failed them, to
blaze the track for commerce. Where a new science is concerned, this
mode of progress is slow. Private enterprise and personal rivalry too
often bring with them the tactics of secrecy. Science is not an
individual possession, and the man who tries to appropriate it to
himself often sterilizes his work and forfeits his place in the history
of progress. In his anxiety to assert his own claims he forgets that his
work has been made possible only by what has come to him as a free gift
from others, that his own contribution to human knowledge is a slight
thing, that in protecting himself against imitators he is also depriving
himself of helpers and pupils, and is bartering the dignity of science
for the rewards of a patentee. The Wrights in America and Captain Ferber
in France left behind them a full and frank record of all their doings,
thereby conferring an enormous benefit on others, and securing for
themselves an unassailable position in the history of flight. Much may
be said in favour of the traditional English doctrine of free
competition. Where knowledge is readily accessible, and the field is
open to all, free competition stimulates and rewards industry and skill.
On the other hand, where a new science is struggling into being,
commercial competition often retards it by a network of restrictions and
concealments, and converts knowledge, which ought to be a public trust,
to the darker purposes of private gain. The coming of the war burst
these bonds, and immensely quickened the progress of the science of
flight. Inventors, who are usually poor men, so soon as their country
called on them, put themselves at her disposal, and found their chief
reward in helping to save her at her need.
The course of events during the early years of the twentieth century
left England no time for developing the art of flight in her own
tentative and permissive fashion. The coming of the new art coincided
with the rapid gathering of the storm-cloud that was to burst in the
Great War. In 1903 the Wrights first flew in a power-driven machine. In
1909 the achievements of the Rheims meeting marked the end of the
infancy of the art. In 1912 the Royal Flying Corps was formed. During
this same period of ten years armaments were being piled up by all the
greater European countries, international tension was increasing, and
ominous events, small in themselves, but impressive by the gravity and
solemnity with which they were regarded by the chancelleries of Europe,
recurred in a series of growing intensity and significance. Germany was
not threatened in any part of the world, but Germany was known to
believe in war, and many responsible observers were uneasily and
reluctantly forced to the conviction that Germany intended war, and
would make war for unlimited purposes on any small occasion created or
chosen by herself. The Royal Flying Corps was formed not for far-sighted
ulterior ends, as an instrument of progress and research, but for a very
present need, as a weapon to be placed in the hands of the country on
the day when battle should be joined. Two years before the corps was
formed the aeronautical force at the disposal of the nation was centred
in the balloon factory and balloon school at Aldershot. The naval and
military officers who had interested themselves in aeronautics were few,
but they were competent and enthusiastic; they believed in the air, and
were quick to recognize inventions of promise. The consequence of this
was that the aeroplane and the airship in England, from the very first,
grew up more or less tended by the Government, and received as much
encouragement as could possibly be given under the severe restrictions
of parliamentary finance. Almost every airship that was built was built
by the Government. Almost every pioneer of flight in England sooner or
later came into touch with the Government, and did work for the nation.
As early as 1904 Mr. S. F. Cody, who had been connected in early life
with the theatrical profession in America, and had made many experiments
in aeronautics, was supplying kites to the balloon factory. In 1906 he
was appointed chief instructor in kiting, and in 1908 he built for
himself an aeroplane, similar in type to the machine of Mr. Glenn H.
Curtiss, and made many experimental flights over Laffan's Plain. He was
a picturesque and hardy individualist of the old school; though he had
had no technical training as an engineer, his wide practical knowledge,
his courage, and his exuberant vitality made him a man of mark, and
engaged the admiration of the public. Most of his work was official; he
was killed by the breaking of his machine in the air while flying over
Laffan's Plain, in August 1913. Another early inventor, Lieutenant J. W.
Dunne, joined the balloon factory in 1906, and at once began to carry
out systematic trials with gliders. Encouraged by Colonel J. E. Capper,
who was in charge of the factory, and assisted by Sir Hiram Maxim, he
devised a biplane glider with a box-kite tail, which when it was
suspended from a kind of revolving gallows at the Crystal Palace
attained a speed in the air of seventy miles an hour and rose to a
height of seventy feet. Later on the experiments were transferred to
Blair Atholl in Perthshire, where the power-driven Dunne aeroplane was
produced and flown. It had backward sloping wings which performed the
function of a stabilizing tail. Most aeroplanes are modelled more or
less closely on flying animals; the Dunne aeroplane took hints from the
zannonia leaf, which, being weighted in front by the seed-pod, and
curved back on either side, becomes, as the tips of the leaf wither and
curl, a perfectly stable aerofoil for conveying the seed to a distance.
The gliding powers of the zannonia leaf were first noticed by Ahlborn of
Berlin, and several foreign aeroplanes were modelled on it. The
stability of the Dunne machine was surprising, and it performed many
good flights before the war, but it sacrificed speed and lifting power
to stability, so that its history in the war is a blank. Stability
spells safety, and safety is not the first condition insisted on by war.
An obstinately stable machine is good for trudging along in the air, but
it is not easy to manoeuvre in face of the enemy. The Dunne machine
adjusted itself more readily to the gusts and currents of the air than
to the demands of the pilot. Skilled war-pilots prefer to handle a
machine which is as quick as a squirrel and responds at once to the
pressure of a finger on the control. If the aeroplane had been developed
wholly in peace, some of the stable machines of the early inventors
would have come into their own, and would have had a numerous following.
The first flight ever made over English soil was made by Mr. A. V. Roe,
in a machine of his own construction. Mr. Roe began life as an
apprentice at the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Locomotive Works,
and very early distinguished himself in cycle racing. He then qualified
as a fitter at Portsmouth Dockyard, studied naval engineering at King's
College, London, and spent three years, from 1899 to 1902, in the
merchant service as a marine engineer. The seagulls and the albatross of
the southern seas set him thinking, and he began to make model gliders.
Returned home again, he spent some time as a draughtsman in the motor
industry. The news of the Wrights' achievements found in him a ready
believer, and he wrote to _The Times_ to combat the prevailing
scepticism. His letter was printed, with a foot-note by the engineering
editor to the effect that all attempts at artificial flight on such a
basis as Mr. Roe described were not only dangerous to human life, but
were foredoomed to failure from the engineering standpoint. From 1906
onwards Mr. Roe devoted all his time and all his savings to aviation. In
1907 he made a full-size flying machine and took it to the Brooklands
motor track. He had no sufficient engine power, and while he was waiting
many months for the arrival of a twenty-four horse-power Antoinette
engine from France he induced sympathetic motorists to give him
experimental towing flights. It was difficult, he says, to induce the
motorists to let go at once when the machine began to swerve in the air;
they often held on with inconvenient fidelity, and many of the
experiments ended in a dive and a crash. In the spring of 1908 his
Antoinette engine arrived, and on the 8th of June he made the first
flight ever made in England, covering some sixty yards at a height of
two feet from the ground. Then he received notice to quit Brooklands. He
had never been much favoured by the management, who perhaps thought that
the wreckage of aeroplanes would not add to the popularity of a
motor-racing track, and his experiments had been made under very
difficult conditions, for he was not allowed to sleep in the shed where
his machine was housed, nor to practise with the machine during the
hours when the track was in use. He applied to the War Office for leave
to erect his shed by the side of Mr. Cody's at Laffan's Plain, but was
refused. He then consulted a map of London, and pitched upon Lea
Marshes, where there were some large fields open to the public, and some
railway arches, a couple of which he rented and boarded up. In the
stable of a house at Putney belonging to one of his brothers he had
already built a tractor triplane which he now removed to Lea Marshes.
Under the stress of his misfortunes he had parted with his Antoinette
engine, so he had nothing better for his triplane than a nine
horse-power J.A.P. motor-cycle engine designed by John Alfred Prestwich.
With this, the lowest-powered engine that has ever flown in England, he
made, in June 1909, the first successful flight on an all-British
aeroplane. Thereafter he made many flights; the earliest of these were
short and low, earning him the name of 'Roe the Hopper', but before long
he was making flights of three hundred yards in length at a height of
from six to ten feet. One day in the summer of 1909 a young woman who
had come down to commit suicide in the river Lea saw his machine
skimming about and went home; then she wrote to Mr. Roe urging him to
let her take his place as pilot and so save his life at the expense of
hers. Mr. Roe very tactfully replied that he would gladly let her fly
the machine when he had perfected it, thus offering her something to
look forward to. But his chief troubles were with the local authorities,
who employed a bailiff to watch him and prevent his flying. At
Brooklands Mr. Roe had become accustomed to early rising, and it was
some time before the bailiff caught him in the act of preparing to fly,
but he was caught at last, and police-court proceedings were instituted.
Just at that time Bleriot flew the Channel, and the case was dropped, so
that the authorities were not called upon to decide whether flying is
legal or illegal. As for Mr. Roe, he moved on to Wembley Park, where he
flew with steadily increasing success. In 1910 he made an aviation
partnership with his brother, who had prospered as a manufacturer of
webbing in Manchester. In the same year he had his revenge on
Brooklands, for the new manager, Major Lindsay Lloyd, saw the
possibilities of aviation, and converted the centre of the track into an
aerodrome. There the Roes were welcomed, and there they produced and
flew their thirty-five horse-power tractor triplane. After a visit to
America they settled down to their work and had their revenge on the War
Office by producing the famous Avro machine, so named after its
inventor. In its original form it was a tractor biplane with a Gnome
engine of fifty horse-power, shortly afterwards increased to eighty
horse-power. It became, and has remained, the standard training machine
for the Royal Air Force. It is sufficiently stable, and yet sensitive,
and can fly safely at high or low speeds. It set the fashion to the
world in tractor biplanes. Mr. Roe had never believed in the front
elevators of the early American and French aeroplanes, with the pilot
sitting on the front edge of the plane, exposed to the air; nor in the
tail held out by booms, as it is in the pusher machines, with the
airscrews revolving between the body of the machine and the tail. For
his perfected machine of 1913 he had the advice of experts and
mathematicians, but the general design of the machine was his own,
worked out by pure air-sense, or, in his own words, by 'eye and
experience'. Early in 1914 the German Government bought an Avro
seaplane, which soon after was the first heavier-than-air machine to
make the voyage from the mainland to Heligoland. No machine designed in
the early days of flying can compare with the Avro. As it was in 1913,
so, but for improvements in detail not easy to detect, it remained
throughout the war. Its achievements in the field belong to the
beginnings of the war; it raided the airship sheds at Friedrichshafen,
and, handled by Commander A. W. Bigsworth, it was the first of our
machines to attack and damage a Zeppelin in the air. For fighting
purposes it has had to give way to newer types, but as a training
machine it has never been superseded, and even those aeroplanes which
surpass it in fighting quality are most of them its own children.
The early history of Mr. A. V. Roe has been here narrated, not to praise
him, though he deserves praise, nor to blame the Government, though it
is always easy to blame the Government, but to show how things are done
in England. His career, though distinguished, is typical; many other
pioneers and inventors, whose story will never be written, faced
difficulties as he did, and helped to lay the foundations of their
country's excellence in the newly-discovered art. It has become almost
usual, among those who do nothing but write, to insist that the duty of
officials, and other persons publicly appointed, is to save Englishmen
the trouble of thinking and acting for themselves. If the nation were
converted to this belief, the greatness of England would be nearing its
term. But the nation stands in the old ways, and clings to the old
adventurous instincts. As it took to the sea in the sixteenth century to
defeat the Spanish tyranny, so it took to the air in the twentieth
century to defeat the insolence of the Germans. The late Mr. Gladstone
once explained, in the freedom of social conversation, that it is the
duty of a progressive party leader to test the strength of his movement
by leaning back, so that he may be sure that any advance he makes is
adequately supported by the pressure of the forces behind him. It is not
the most heroic view of the duties of a leader, but it has in it some of
the wisdom of an old engineer, whose business compels him to measure
forces accurately. Queen Elizabeth, if she never expounded the doctrine
in relation to the leadership of a nation, at least acted on it. The
English people have always proved themselves equal to the demand thus
made upon them; if initiative be lacking in the leaders, there is plenty
of it among the rank and file. The leaders themselves, once they are
buoyed up and carried forward by the rising tide, often seize their
opportunity, and surpass themselves.
The history of flight in England from 1908, when Mr. Roe and Mr. Cody
first flew, to 1912, when flying became a part of the duty of the
military and naval forces of the Crown, is the history of a ferment, and
cannot be exhibited in any tight or ordered sequence of cause and
effect. Before the Government took in hand the building up of an air
service, there were many beginnings of private organization. A man
cannot fly until he has a machine and a place for starting and
alighting. These are expensive and elaborate requirements, not easily
furnished without co-operation. The Aeronautical Society did much to
make flight possible, but its labours were mainly scientific and
theoretical. In 1901 Mr. F. Hedges Butler earned his place among the
pioneers of the air by founding the Aero Club of the United Kingdom.
This club has played a great and honourable part in the promotion of
aerial navigation. When it was founded no power-driven aeroplane had as
yet carried a man in the air, and the original interest of its members
was in the airship, which had been brought into high credit by M. Santos
Dumont; but they were quick to recognize the coming of the aeroplane,
and the Hon. C. S. Rolls, who helped Mr. Butler to found the club, was
one of the boldest and most skilful of early pilots. The club brought
together inventors and sportsmen, and supplied them with a suitable
ground for their experiments. It undertook the training of aviators, and
from 1910 onwards, issued its certificates, which, when the Government
began to build the Flying Corps, were officially recognized as a warrant
of proficiency in the new art. An immense service was rendered in these
early years by gentlemen adventurers, engineers and pilots, who, all for
love and nothing for reward, built machines and flew them. Some of
these, when the storm broke, became the mainstay of the national force.
To take only two names out of the first hundred to whom the Aero Club
granted its certificate--a list crowded with distinction and
achievement--it is not easy to assess the national debt to Mr. T. O. M.
Sopwith and Mr. Geoffrey de Havilland. It was in the latter part of 1911
that Mr. Sopwith, having flown with skill and distinction on the
machines which he had bought, began to build an aeroplane from his own
designs. At that time there were no aeroplane draughtsmen, and he had to
stand by and instruct his mechanics point by point. He could not afford
to rent a proper workshop; the machine was built in a rough wooden shed,
unsupplied with water, and lighted after dark by paraffin lamps. Six men
built the machine, and Mr. Sopwith flew it from the ground on which the
shed stood. Its performance was better than had ever been obtained from
a machine of equal horse-power. It was subsequently bought by the
Admiralty, and Mr. Sopwith began to build another aeroplane of higher
power, and a flying boat. In 1912 he took premises at Kingston, and
there finished these two machines. The aeroplane was successful; the
flying boat was smashed during its trial flight. Another was put in
hand, and was bought by the Admiralty. Aeroplane designing was in its
experimental stage, so that no large orders were obtainable, and even
where three of a kind were ordered, numerous alterations, demanded
during the process of construction, prevented three of a kind from being
built. These were the beginnings of the famous Sopwith machines, and
especially of the single-seater biplane scout type, with its many
varieties. The Sopwith 'Tabloid', the Sopwith 'Pup', the Sopwith
'Camel', and, last and best of all, the Sopwith 'Snipe', which was new
at the front when the war ended--all these were engines of victory. So
were the equally famous machines designed for the Government by Mr. de
Havilland, of which the D.H. 4 is perhaps the greatest in achievement.
Mr. de Havilland built his first machine early in 1910, at his own cost.
On its trial it travelled some forty yards down a slope under its own
power, then it rose too steeply into the air, and when it was corrected
by Mr. de Havilland, who piloted it, the strain proved too great for the
struts, which were made of American whitewood; the left main plane
doubled up, and the machine, falling heavily to the ground thirty-five
yards from its starting-point, was totally wrecked. The great things of
the air have most of them been done by survivors from wrecks. Mr. de
Havilland went to work again on a much improved machine, designed to be
an army biplane; in December 1910 he became a member of the staff of the
balloon factory at Farnborough, and had a main hand, as shall be told
hereafter, in the best of the Government aeroplane designs.
These are instances only; the story of progress is everywhere the same.
The wonderful national air force was built by the skill and intelligence
of a few men out of the mass of material offered to them by the private
pioneers. The work of these pioneers can best be concisely described in
connexion with the various centres, or aerodromes, where they gathered
together to put their ideas to the test of practice. Not all the early
experimenters were attracted to these communities; some preferred to
work in secret; but the most fruitful work was done in open fellowship.
Among those who, in the days before aerodromes, devoted time and effort
to the problem of flight, Mr. Jose Weiss deserves more than a passing
mention. After experimenting with models, he devised a man-carrying
bird-like glider, twenty-four feet in span, and in the year 1905, while
flight was still no more than a rumour, flew it successfully on the
slopes of Amberley Mount, between Arundel and Pulborough. His pilots
were Mr. Gordon England and Mr. Gerald Leake. The former of these, in a
wind of about twenty-five miles an hour, rose some hundred feet above
his starting-point and then glided safely to earth again. The machine,
says Mr. Weiss, who, shortly before his death in 1919, kindly furnished
this account, had no vertical rudder, and relied on ailerons only, so
that it was difficult to steer. 'The combination of ailerons', he adds,
'with the vertical rudder introduced by the brothers Wright was the
factor which determined the advent of the aeroplane.' The advent of the
aeroplane and its development for war purposes has given an air of
antiquity to the researches of Mr. Weiss. Yet many subtle and delicate
problems connected with soaring and gliding flight are still unsolved;
there was no time for them during the war. Mr. Weiss was firmly
convinced that in moving currents of air flight without an engine is
possible, though he did not under-estimate the difficulties to be
surmounted. His glider was inherently stable, and had funds been
available, might have been made into an efficient power-driven machine.
The Etrich glider, which was invented at about the same time in Austria
and closely resembles the Weiss machine, became the model and basis for
the famous German Taube type of monoplane.
Once flying had begun in England it was not very long before home-built
aeroplanes were obtainable. Most of the pioneers built their own
machines. The first aeroplane factory for the supply of machines to
customers was set up by Mr. T. Howard Wright in two of the arches of
the London, Chatham and Dover Railway at Battersea, alongside of certain
other arches occupied by the balloon factory of Messrs. Eustace and
Oswald Short, who were at that time the official balloon constructors to
the Aero Club. Like the Voisins in France Mr. Howard Wright put his
skill at the service of others. During the winter of 1908-9 he was
engaged in building experimental aeroplanes of strange design, chiefly
for foreign customers. His own biplane, which resembled the Henri Farman
machine, made its appearance in 1910. He also built a type of monoplane,
known as the Avis, for the Scottish Aviation Company, a firm in which
the Hon. Alan Boyle and Mr. J. Herbert Spottiswoode were interested. On
this monoplane Mr. Boyle made the first cross-country trip in England;
the trip lasted for five minutes, and was made over the ground just
outside the Brooklands track. It was on this monoplane also that Mr.
Sopwith, who understood motor racing, rapidly learned to fly, and a
little later, before he became a designer and manufacturer, it was on a
Howard Wright biplane that he flew from Eastchurch to a point in
Belgium, thus winning Baron de Forest's prize for the longest flight
into the continent of Europe. After a time Mr. Howard Wright joined the
Coventry Ordnance Works, where he built a machine for the Military
Trials of 1912, and he subsequently took charge of the aviation
department of the torpedo-boat firm of Messrs. J. S. White and Co. of
Cowes.
The Short brothers followed suit. After seeing Wilbur Wright fly at Le
Mans, in 1908, Mr. Eustace Short engaged the help of his brother, Mr.
Horace Short, who was an expert in steam-turbines, and they established
a primitive aerodrome at Shellness, on the marshes of the Isle of
Sheppey, near the terminus of the Sheppey Railway. Here the more
enthusiastic of the members of the Aero Club set to work with
aeroplanes. The leading pioneers were Mr. Frank McClean, Mr. Alec
Ogilvie, Mr. Moore-Brabazon, and Mr. Percy Grace, all of whom at a later
date held commissions in one or other of the national air services; and
two more, who held no such commissions, because before the Flying Corps
was in being they had given their lives to the cause--Mr. Cecil Grace
and the Hon. Charles Rolls. None of these men was in the business for
profit, they were sportsmen and something more than sportsmen; they
loved the new adventure and they spent their own money freely, but
pleasure was not their goal; they understood what flying meant for the
welfare of their country, and they worked for the safety and progress of
the British Empire. It was at Shellness in October 1909 that Mr.
Moore-Brabazon, on a machine designed and built by Mr. Horace Short and
fitted with a Green engine, flew the first circular mile ever flown on a
British aeroplane. There were many other experiments and achievements at
Shellness. These were the days, says Mr. C. G. Grey (to whose knowledge
of early aviation this book is much indebted), when the watchers lay
flat on the ground in order to be sure that the aeroplane had really
left it. At the close of 1909, Mr. Frank McClean, who devoted his whole
fortune to the cause of aviation, purchased a large tract of ground,
level and free from ditches, in the middle of the Isle of Sheppey, close
to the railway station at Eastchurch, and gave the use of it free to the
Aero Club. To this ground the Short brothers, who, besides building
their own machines, had taken over the Wright patents for Great Britain,
removed their factory, and Eastchurch very quickly became the scientific
centre of British aviation. Early in 1911 the Admiralty were persuaded
to allow four naval officers to learn to fly. The machines on which they
learned were supplied free of cost by Mr. McClean, and another member
of the Aero Club, Mr. G. B. Cockburn, who was the solitary
representative of Great Britain at the Rheims meeting of 1909, supplied
the tuition, also free of cost. The instructor naturally marked out for
this purpose, says Mr. Cockburn, was Mr. Cecil Grace, a fine pilot, a
great sportsman, and a man quite untouched by the spirit of
commercialism, but only a few weeks earlier he had been lost while
flying over the Channel from France to England. So Mr. Cockburn
undertook the task, and for about six weeks took up his residence at
Eastchurch. The four naval officers were Lieutenants C. R. Samson, R.
Gregory, and A. M. Longmore, of the Royal Navy; and Captain E. L.
Gerrard, of the Royal Marine Light Infantry. They were keen and apt
pupils, as they needs must have been to qualify for their certificates
in six weeks of bad weather, which included one considerable snow-storm.
Instruction in those days was no easy matter; the machines were pushers;
the pilot sat in front with the control on his right hand, the pupil sat
huddled up behind the instructor, catching hold of the control by
stretching his arm over the instructor's shoulder, and getting
occasional jabs in the forearm from the instructor's elbows as a hint to
let go. Mr. Cockburn weighed over fourteen stone, and Captain Gerrard
only a little less, so the old fifty horse-power Gnome engine had all it
could do to get the machine off the ground. In a straight flight along
the aerodrome the height attained was often no more than from twenty to
thirty feet; then the machine had to make a turn at that dangerously
small elevation, or fly into the trees at the end. Fortunately the
aerodrome was clear except for a few week-end pilots who practised on
Saturdays and Sundays; the instructor and his pupils were energetic,
flying at dawn and at dusk to avoid the high winds; and the training was
completed with only two crashes, neither of them very serious. The navy
pupils were encouraged throughout by frequent visits from their senior
officer at Sheerness, Captain Godfrey Paine, who befriended aviation
from the first. Eastchurch soon became the recognized centre for the
training of naval officers in the use of aeroplanes, and when, upon the
death of Mr. Horace Short, in 1917, the Short brothers vacated
Eastchurch, and concentrated at their Rochester works, Eastchurch passed
wholly under naval control. No honour or reward that could be given to
the members of the Royal Aero Club, and especially to Mr. McClean and
Mr. Cockburn, can possibly equal this, that they were part founders of
the Naval Air Service.
If Eastchurch was the earliest centre of scientific experiment and
practical training in aviation, it was at the great Brooklands aerodrome
that flying first became popular. Mr. Roe had been allowed to use a shed
in the paddock for his first aeroplane, and had made his first flight
there, at a very humble elevation, but the conversion of the centre of
the track into an aerodrome was not effected till late in 1909. The
motor-racing track, about three and a half miles in length, enclosed a
piece of land which was partly farmland and partly wilderness, watered
by the river Wey. On the west side of it there was the Weybridge sewage
farm, which, when flying began, added new terrors to a forced descent.
When Mr. Henri Farman visited England, in January 1908, he inspected
Brooklands and expressed an unfavourable opinion of its fitness as a
site for an aerodrome. So nothing was done until the visit of M. Louis
Paulhan, late in 1909. The performances of M. Paulhan at the Rheims
meeting, and later at the Blackpool meeting, excited much admiration,
and Mr. G. Holt Thomas, who had long studied aviation, and never grew
tired of advocating its claims, determined to engage popular interest
and, if possible, official support by bringing Paulhan to London, there
to display his powers. By arrangement with Mr. Locke King, the
proprietor of Brooklands, and Major Lindsay Lloyd, the new manager, one
of the fields of the farm was cleared of obstacles and was mowed and
rolled, as a landing ground for Paulhan. There in the closing days of
October 1909 Paulhan gave many exhibition flights on a Farman biplane.
The longest of these, which lasted nearly three hours and covered
ninety-six miles, was made on the 1st of November and was witnessed by
Lord Roberts. The exhibition was not a financial success; thousands of
spectators watched the flying from outside the ground, without
contributing to the expenses; but it impressed the committee of the
Brooklands Automobile Racing Club, and they resolved to turn the
interior of their track into an aerodrome. Obstacles were removed, pits
and ponds were filled in, the solider portions of the ground were
furnished with a fairly good grass surface, rows of wooden sheds were
erected, and the pioneers of the new art were invited by public
advertisement to become their tenants. By the spring of 1910 many
aeroplanes were at work on the Brooklands ground, most of them running
about it in the earnest endeavour to get up sufficient speed to rise
into the air.
There were no instructors. Among the earliest of the pioneers was the
Hon. Alan Boyle, and an account which he has kindly supplied, telling
how he learned to fly his little Avis machine, describes the usual
method of the learners. 'I asked Mr. Howard Wright', he says, 'to build
me this monoplane, which we placed upon the market as proprietors....
She was fitted with an Anzani engine of nominal twenty-five horse-power,
but which really gave about eighteen to twenty horse-power.... She
usually ran for about five minutes, and then got overheated and tired
and struck work.... I took my little Avis to Brooklands about February
1910, after it had been exhibited at the Aero Show. I partitioned off a
corner of my shed, and slept in a hammock, so that I was able to take
advantage of the still hours in the early morning. It is amusing to look
back now and remember how I used to watch anxiously a little flag which
I flew above my shed, to see what strength of wind was blowing. At first
I never used to go out until the flag was practically hanging from the
mast, or was only flapping very gently in the light air, which occurred
usually in the very early morning. At that time there were at
Brooklands, I think, the following: Grahame-White, who was even then a
comparatively experienced pilot; Charles Lane, who like me had brought
out a monoplane, but with a curious tail, a fixed cambered surface with
another elevating plane above and within eight inches or so of it.
However, it flew very steadily indeed, when it was tested some months
later.... A. V. Roe was also there experimenting with his triplanes.
Later on he got them flying well. He did the most astonishing things
with them. They were beautiful little machines and beautifully built,
and it was a delight to watch them in the air. It was wonderful the way
in which they answered to the helm. He used to go straight to a point,
put his rudder over, and without any fuss or "bank" or anything, you
would suddenly find the machine pointing in the exact opposite
direction.... Then there were also there, with Bleriot machines, Messrs.
James Radley and Graham Gilmour. The latter was afterwards killed.
Radley got his certificate on the same day as I. We were all learners at
Brooklands in those days: I am the possessor of a silver cup kindly
presented by the Brooklands Race Club authorities for making a circular
flight, which shows we were not very advanced. In fact no one except
Grahame-White and A. V. Roe knew anything about it at all, and they
didn't know much.
'I started by simply rolling about the ground in the ordinary way, and
then in a short time opened her out and made short hops in an endeavour
to get off the ground. I remember quite well, after I had been out,
walking along my wheel tracks and examining them, and being fearfully
pleased when I saw them disappear for a yard or two. That showed that I
had flown.
'After I had done this sort of thing for about a month, Mr. Manning came
down and produced a larger jet for my engine, and warned me that if the
machine would fly, she would do so now with the extra power the new jet
would give the engine. He then sat down to pick up the pieces, and off I
went! After making a few hops to get my hand in I opened her out and
made a long steady flight of about a hundred yards, six feet up, and
landed shouting. I had waited and worked for that for some time, so you
can imagine my delight.
'I did "straights" for some weeks and then started to do curves, and of
course the banking of the machine terrified me. However, I grew used to
that, and made my curves shorter and shorter until at last I thought I
would try for a circle. I pointed the Avis to a part of the ground which
had not yet been levelled, and of course once I was over that I jolly
well had to get round somehow: so I made my first circuit. After I had
been doing circuits for some time and had begun to have a little
confidence in myself, I decided that it was necessary to do a
_volplane_. I made inquiries and was told that immediately I shut off
the engine it was necessary to put the nose of the machine down to
approximately her gliding angle, otherwise she would "stall" and glide
back on her tail. You will sympathize with me when I say that I
preferred to avoid this latter alternative, although as a matter of
fact, having a flat tail which carried no weight, she would no doubt
have taken up her gliding angle naturally. Anyway, I didn't know this,
and in April (I think) in some trepidation I got over that step in my
progress. I confess that I went four times round Brooklands with my hand
on the switch before I could make up my mind to do the deed, and of
course when I did so, I found there was nothing in it, and realized the
delight of coming down without the noise of the engine in my ears. So
much for learning to fly.'
Brooklands was a well-known place; large crowds of people had often
visited it to see the motor races; and it was near London; so that from
the first it attracted sportsmen and aeroplane designers. It became the
experimental ground of the British aircraft industry. Among its early
tenants were the British and Colonial Aeroplane Company, founded by the
late Sir George White of Bristol, and commonly known as the Bristol
Company; Messrs. Martin and Handasyde, the makers of the Martinsyde
machines; Mr. A. V. Roe; the Scottish Aviation Company, with their Avis
monoplanes; Mr. J. V. Neal, who, in the endeavour to avoid the Wrights'
patents, produced a curious biplane with a new system of control, and
many others. Sheds were occupied by Mr. Douglas Graham Gilmour, one of
the finest pilots in his day that this country had produced, who was
killed in an accident at Richmond, and by Mr. F. P. Raynham, who became
notable as a test-pilot. Many sportsmen rented sheds and tried their
hands at building machines. Mrs. Hewlett, the wife of the novelist,
having learned to fly, started a school at Brooklands in partnership
with M. Blondeau, a French engineer and pilot. Her son, like the
swallows, was taught to fly by his mother. By the middle of 1911 a whole
village of sheds had grown up. Most of the tenants were men of means,
but they spent so much money on their experiments that they had very
little left for the amenities of life. Mr. C. G. Grey remembers men, the
possessors of comfortable incomes, who lived for years on thirty or
forty shillings a week, and spent the rest on their aeroplanes. It was
a society like the early Christians; it practised fellowship and
community of goods. To the eyes of a casual visitor there was no
apparent difference between the owner of an aeroplane and his mechanics;
all alike lived in overalls, except in hot weather, when overalls gave
place to pyjamas. If any one lacked tools or materials he borrowed them
from another shed; they were lent with goodwill, though the owner knew
that his only chance of seeing them again was to borrow them back. The
social centre of the place was a shed in the middle of the front row,
which was let by Major Lindsay Lloyd as a restaurant, and was called
'The Blue Bird'. This restaurant was run by the wife of one of the
community; it united in itself all the utilities of a public-house, a
club, a parliament, and a town-hall. Living as they did for ends of
their own and apart from the great world, the brotherhood naturally took
pride in themselves as a chosen people, dedicated to high purposes, and
they scorned the Philistines who came in crowds to see the motor racing.
On race days the Philistines were permitted, for reasons connected with
the balance sheet, to have tea at 'The Blue Bird'; some of them would
wander over the aerodrome, and even into the sheds, to ask the sort of
question that is often asked by those who will not undertake the
liabilities but think it graceful to assume the airs of a patron.
After a few years, when aeroplane construction and design settled down
into a regular industry, the glory of this primitive Arcadian community
passed away, and its members were scattered far and wide. Brooklands
became a place of business; in one row of sheds the Bristol Company, in
another Messrs. Vickers, established schools where many distinguished
pilots who served their country in the war learned to make their first
flights. Before the war broke out the British branch of the Bleriot
Company had also taken a number of sheds, and had transformed them into
a regular aircraft factory; the Martin and Handasyde firm had adapted
three or four sheds, and were building a couple of monoplanes for a
transatlantic attempt by that brilliant flyer, the late Mr. Gustav
Hamel. In June of 1914 he was drowned in flying the English Channel, and
the firm suffered a severe set-back. Lastly, when the war came, the
Brooklands aerodrome, with all its flyable machines, was taken over by
the military authorities, and the days of ease and innocence were ended.
A large Vickers factory was built, and turned out many machines for the
Flying Corps; the Bleriot and the Martinsyde firms also continued their
activities for a couple of years, and then moved, the one to Addlestone,
the other to Woking. During the war Brooklands was used as a training
station, a wireless experimental depot, and an acceptance park by the
Royal Flying Corps, which permitted the use of it, for experimental
flying, to the Vickers, Martinsyde, and Bleriot firms.
Other early aerodromes, almost contemporary with Brooklands, were
Hendon, in the northern suburbs of London, and Larkhill, on Salisbury
Plain, a few miles from Amesbury. The Hendon aerodrome, like Brooklands,
owed its first fame to the initiative of Mr. Holt Thomas. After the
Brooklands adventure he kept in touch with M. Louis Paulhan, and in
April 1910 persuaded him to make an attempt to win the L10,000 prize
offered by the _Daily Mail_ for a flight from London to Manchester.
During the previous winter M. Paulhan had been flying with success in
America, while his rival, Mr. Grahame-White, had been busy with his
flying school at Pau, in the south of France. Mr. Grahame-White brought
a Farman biplane to London, and obtained permission to use Wormwood
Scrubbs for his starting-place. Mr. Holt Thomas, looking for a
starting-place for Paulhan, heard of a field at Hendon which was being
used by a firm of electrical engineers for experiments with a small
monoplane, and got leave to start Paulhan thence. After Paulhan's
success, Mr. Grahame-White and his business partner, the late Mr.
Richard T. Gates, visited Hendon, and finding that the field was one of
a number bordering the Midland Railway without any roads cutting across
them, fixed on the place as the site of what was afterwards called the
London aerodrome. Here the Grahame-White Aviation Company made it their
business, from 1911 onwards, to familiarize Londoners with the spectacle
of flying and with its practice. They built a number of sheds and let
them to manufacturing firms. One of these was the Aircraft Manufacturing
Company, formed in 1911 by Mr. Holt Thomas, who at that time was working
the British rights for the French Farman Company. Another was the W. H.
Ewen Aviation Company, which subsequently became the British Caudron
Company. A third was the British Deperdussin Company; the wonderful
little Deperdussin monoplane, in the 1912 Gordon Bennett Trials at
Rheims, carried its pilot, M. Vedrines, at a speed of nearly two miles a
minute for a flight of over an hour. Hendon, moreover, laid itself out
to attract spectators. There were stands and enclosures, with prices of
admission to suit all purses. Aeroplane racing was a regular feature of
the meetings. As early as 1911 about a hundred and twenty members of the
two Houses of Parliament paid a visit to the place by invitation and
were some of them taken into the air. In July 1911 two great races,
modelled on the _Circuit de l'Est_ of 1910, made Hendon one of their
stages. The earlier of these, somewhat magniloquently called the
'Circuit of Europe', was organized by a syndicate of newspapers. The
appointed course was from Paris to Paris by way of Liege, Utrecht,
Brussels, and London--a distance of about a thousand miles. The second,
not many days later, organized by the _Daily Mail_ newspaper, and called
the 'Circuit of Britain', laid its course from Brooklands to Brooklands,
by way of Edinburgh and Glasgow, Exeter and Brighton, with Hendon as the
first stopping-place on the outward journey. Both competitions were won
by Lieutenant Conneau of the French navy, who flew under the name of
'Beaumont'. Whether because only one Englishman (Mr. James Valentine)
took part in the earlier competition, or because the second was better
advertised and first awoke the public to the significance of aviation,
it was to witness the second that enthusiastic crowds first flocked to
Hendon. Mr. Holt Thomas, who helped to organize the 'Circuit of Europe',
found a stolid indifference in the English public. As he drove to Hendon
along the Edgware road he noticed that the people on their way to the
aerodrome were mostly French. Indeed, he adds, at the aerodrome itself
there were almost more police than public to witness what was a great
event in the history of flight. For the 'Circuit of Britain', on the
other hand, an enormous crowd gathered at Hendon. The fields on Hendon
Hill were black with spectators. One farmer, remembering to make hay
while the sun shone, erected a canvas screen all along the upper part of
his field, and by charging threepence for admission to the other side
reaped a good harvest. The competitors arrived on a Saturday afternoon,
and left again for the north early on the Monday morning. Thousands of
spectators spent Sunday night in the fields, gathering round bonfires or
singing to keep themselves warm. In this competition the French
monoplane pilots carried off the honours; Beaumont was first, and
Vedrines second. The only competitor who completed the full course on a
British-built machine was the stalwart and persevering Mr. Cody on his
own biplane.
The man who makes a machine and the man who flies one are the heroes of
the epic of flight. Next to them, all credit must be given to the
public-spirited financiers and patrons who encouraged flight, especially
to those of them who were not deceived, and knew that they are the
servants, not the masters, of the conquerors of the air. As a promoter
of flight Mr. Holt Thomas deserves more than a passing mention. He
worked early and late for the progress of the art and for its
recognition by the Government. He was fond of calling attention to
comparative figures, pointing out, for instance, in April 1909, that the
sum already spent by Germany on military aeronautics was about L400,000;
by France about L47,000; and by Great Britain about L5,000. He
befriended and rewarded distinguished aviators. In September 1910 he
attended the military manoeuvres in France, the first in which
aeroplanes were used for reconnaissance, and there, among the experts of
many nations, came across no other Englishman. He also attended the
British manoeuvres of the same year, where Captain Bertram Dickson made
some reconnaissance flights. In 1911 he founded the Aircraft
Manufacturing Company. He foresaw a great future for military aviation
and constantly did battle with the argument, fashionable among some
soldiers, that the British army, being a small army, required only a
small air force. He held, from the first, that a national air force had
many tasks to fulfil other than reconnaissance, and that it should be a
separate organization, distinct from both army and navy. Men like Mr.
Thomas, who, though they had no official standing, devoted study and
effort to the problems of military aviation, were not a little
serviceable to the country; they agitated the question, and kept it
alive in the public mind. When the Royal Flying Corps at last was formed
they might justly claim that they had helped it into existence.
The only other aerodrome which need here be mentioned is the Larkhill
aerodrome, often called the Salisbury Plain aerodrome, or the Bristol
Flying School. Eastchurch saw the beginnings of naval flying; Larkhill
was the earliest centre of military flying. In 1909 Captain J. D. B.
Fulton, of the Royal Field Artillery, was stationed at Bulford camp. M.
Bleriot's cross-Channel flight, in July of that year, excited his
interest, and he set himself to build a monoplane of the Bleriot type.
This proved to be a slow business, so he bought from the Grahame-White
firm a Bleriot machine fitted with a twenty-eight horse-power Anzani
engine, and began to experiment with it on the plain. Captain Fulton was
a highly skilled mechanical engineer; some of his patents for
improvements in field guns had been adopted by the War Office, and from
the proceeds of these he was able to meet the costs of his experiments.
His title to be called the founder of military aviation in Great Britain
must be shared with others, especially with Captain Bertram Dickson,
also of the Royal Field Artillery, who was the first British officer to
fly. After seeing the flying at the Rheims meeting in August 1909,
Captain Dickson procured a Henri Farman biplane, and learned, at
Chalons, to fly it. He was a natural flyer, as Captain Fulton was a
natural engineer. During 1910 he attended many aviation meetings in
France; at Tours and elsewhere he held his own in competition with some
of the most famous of French aviators. His ruling passion was not sport,
but patriotism; he was chiefly concerned to put the aeroplane as a
weapon into the hands of his country. In the summer of 1910 he made the
acquaintance of Sir George White of Bristol, and joined the staff of the
British and Colonial Aeroplane Company. At the army manoeuvres of that
autumn he appeared, a herald of the future, on a Bristol biplane, but
found some difficulty in persuading the officers in command to make use
of his services. The cavalry, in particular, were not friendly to the
aeroplane, which, it was believed, would frighten the horses; and when a
reconnaissance flight was arranged and had to be put off because the
wind was high and gusty, aviation fell in esteem. Nevertheless, some of
Captain Dickson's flights served to show how an aeroplane might help an
army. It was natural enough that the cavalry should prefer to carry on
the work of reconnaissance in the usual way. Men believe in the weapons
they are skilled to handle. When the rapier was introduced into England
in the sixteenth century, it found no friends among the masters of the
broadsword; its vogue was gained among young gentlemen educated in
France and Italy. To let an aeroplane attempt their work would have
seemed to the cavalry like dropping the bone to catch at the shadow. But
youth will be served, and in a very few years the shadow cast by Captain
Dickson's aeroplane spread and multiplied and covered the field of
battle. His own career came to an untimely end. A few weeks after the
manoeuvres he suffered a severe accident at the Milan aviation meeting,
where he performed some of those admirable glides from a height, with
the engine off, for which he had become famous. Just after one of these
he had opened the throttle of his engine, and was rising again, when
another aviator, called Thomas, who was rapidly planing down on an
Antoinette, crashed into him from above. He lay between life and death
for some weeks, and in his delirium talked incessantly of his work, and
of the War Office, and of what he hoped to do for it. His health had
been severely strained by the early work he had done in tropical
countries, where he had been employed in exploration and the
delimitation of boundaries; though he recovered from his accident and
flew again, he grew steadily worse, and died in Scotland on the 28th of
September 1913.
Along with Captain Fulton and Captain Dickson a third army aviator must
be mentioned--Lieutenant Lancelot Gibbs, who also learned to fly at
Chalons, and was present, on a Farman biplane, at the manoeuvres of
1910. At the Wolverhampton meeting, earlier in the same year, he had had
a slight accident which injured his spine, so that before very long he
had to give up flying. He had flown at many early meetings, and had
distinguished himself in duration flights. The dangers encountered by
these pioneers may be illustrated from the experiences of Lieutenant
Gibbs in Spain. He had arranged to give an exhibition of flying at
Durango, near Bilbao, in April 1910. The delivery of his machine, which
was sent from Paris by the Spanish railways, was delayed, and many hours
of work had to be spent on it before it could fly, so that the thirty
thousand people who had assembled were kept waiting for more than an
hour. They grew impatient, and when the machine was wheeled out of its
shed, so that they might see the work of preparing it, they crowded
round it and handled it roughly. It had to be taken back into the shed
again. Thereupon they began to throw stones, which disabled the mechanic
and broke the shed. One of them advanced to Lieutenant Gibbs with a
drawn knife and said that flying was an impossibility, there was no such
thing as aviation, and therefore they were going to knife him. The crowd
shouted 'Down with science, long live religion!' Lieutenant Gibbs saved
himself by his courage and calm, and was taken away by an escort, under
a heavy shower of stones, to the judge's house. Within half an hour the
shed, with all it contained, was burned to the ground.
These three soldiers, Captain Fulton, Captain Dickson, and Lieutenant
Gibbs, have earned their place in history as the first British military
aviators. Of the three Captain Fulton had most to do with Salisbury
Plain and the beginnings of the air force. Some civilians were also at
work. During the manoeuvres of 1910 Mr. Robert Loraine, in a Bristol
machine fitted with transmitting apparatus, succeeded in sending
wireless messages, from a distance of a quarter of a mile, to a
temporary receiving station rigged up at Larkhill. The earliest
permanent establishment at Larkhill seems to have been an aeroplane shed
tenanted by Mr. H. Barber, who subsequently held a commission in the Air
Force. Mr. Barber was a man of independent means, and being convinced
that flying would play a great part in war, he spent his time in
devising aeroplanes for naval and military purposes. He founded a firm
of his own, called 'The Aeronautical Syndicate', and produced a type of
monoplane with elevator in front, which, in its later development, was
named the 'Valkyrie'. He taught a good many people to fly, but none of
them, except himself, became expert pilots. The 'Valkyrie' was the last
survivor of the earliest type of flying machine, often called the
'Canard' type, because the elevator is extended in front like the head
of a duck in flight, and serves to balance the machine. When this type
of machine was at last superseded by the more shapely modern design, Mr.
Barber's syndicate died a natural death. At the outbreak of war he
joined the Royal Flying Corps, and became one of its leading technical
instructors, with the rank of captain.
The second shed erected at Larkhill was built by the War Office and was
intended for the use of the Hon. C. S. Rolls, so that he might give
instruction to army pilots. The death of Mr. Rolls at the Bournemouth
meeting in July 19th (one of the heaviest losses that aviation has
suffered in this country) put an end to that scheme, and the shed was
assigned, later on, to Captain Fulton. The third shed was erected by Mr.
G. B. Cockburn, who on his return from France applied to the War Office
for leave to carry on at Larkhill. Mr. Cockburn was the first, he says,
actually to fly over Salisbury Plain. He worked hand in hand with
Captain Fulton, to whom he lent his Farman machine (the first machine
built by Henri Farman after he left the Voisin firm) in order that
Captain Fulton might pass the tests for the pilot's certificate in
November 1910. The two together did much good work at Larkhill, and were
successful in gaining a certain measure of recognition for the aeroplane
among the army units on the plain.
From these beginnings Larkhill rapidly developed. Towards the end of
1910 the Bristol Company, having come to an agreement with the War
Office, established themselves at Larkhill in a solidly built row of
sheds. The Government were not as yet prepared to undertake any large
expenditure upon aeroplanes; their attitude was tentative; they had been
advised by the Committee of Imperial Defence that the experiments with
aeroplanes, hitherto carried out at the balloon school, should be
discontinued, but that advantage should be taken of private enterprise
in this branch of aeronautics. Accordingly, the Bristol Company opened
at Larkhill the Bristol School of Aviation, which remained in existence
until the outbreak of the war. The chief instructor was M. Henry
Jullerot, one of the best pilots in France; he was assisted by Mr.
Gordon England, who had shown so much skill in handling the gliders of
Mr. Weiss, and by Mr. Harry Busteed, the first notable Australian pilot.
Salisbury Plain is perhaps the best stretch of country in England for
the training of aviators; the school grew and prospered; the Bristol
machine proved to be excellently well fitted for the purposes of
instruction, and the pupils, being relieved from the dangers that attend
a forced landing in populous country, distinguished themselves by their
bold flying. There were many camps of soldiers in the neighbourhood, so
that the work done at Larkhill did much to convert the army to a belief
in aviation. The tokens of the conversion were soon visible. On the 28th
of February 1911 an Army Order was issued, creating the Air Battalion of
the Royal Engineers. It ran as follows: 'With a view to meeting Army
requirements consequent on recent developments in aerial science it has
been decided to organize an Air Battalion, to which will be entrusted
the duty of creating a body of expert airmen.... The training and
instruction of men in handling kites, balloons and aeroplanes, and other
forms of aircraft, will also devolve upon this battalion. The
establishment of this battalion will be organized into (i) headquarters
and (ii) two companies.... The officers will be selected from any
regular arm or branch of the Service on the active list.... A selected
candidate will, on joining the Air Battalion, go through a six months'
probationary course.... An officer who satisfactorily completes the
probationary period will be appointed to the Air Battalion for a period
of four years.... The Warrant officers, non-commissioned officers, and
men will be selected from the Corps of Royal Engineers. The existing
Balloon School will be superseded by the Air Battalion, and the new
organization will be regarded as taking effect from April 1st, 1911.'
The formation of the Air Battalion was a great step in advance. Up to
this time flying had been a hobby or fancy of individual men; it was now
organized and provided for as a part of the duty of the army. The
battalion was duly formed under the command of Sir Alexander Bannerman,
with Captain P. W. L. Broke-Smith, of the Royal Engineers, as adjutant.
Airships were assigned to No. 1 Company and aeroplanes to No. 2 Company.
This latter company, commanded by Captain Fulton, went into camp at
Larkhill about the end of April. When Mr. Cockburn, after completing
the course of instruction that he gave at Eastchurch, returned to
Larkhill, he found the battalion in process of formation. Its history,
and its development, a year later, into the Royal Flying Corps, must be
narrated in the next chapter, and the steps traced by which a small
balloon factory at Chatham, started in the year 1882, was transformed
into the Air Force of to-day. A few words may here be added concerning
Captain Fulton and Mr. Cockburn, who bore so large a part in the
creation of an air force. While he held his command in the Air
Battalion, Captain Fulton did all he could to get it recognized as a
separate branch of the army, distinct from the Royal Engineers. When the
Royal Flying Corps was formed he was appointed to the Central Flying
School as instructor, and was put in charge of the workshops there.
Thence he passed to the aeronautical inspection department, which was
placed entirely under his control and became, what it has remained, one
of the foundations of the strength and efficiency of the air force. He
could not be spared from this work for combatant service, so he saw
little of the war at the front; but more flying officers than ever heard
his name owe him a debt of gratitude for his faithful work in providing
for their safety. He died of an affection of the throat in November
1915. Mr. Cockburn, who was continuously at work on Salisbury Plain for
a period of something like four years, continued, as a civilian, to give
his help, first in the aeronautical inspection department, and, later
on, in the investigation of aeroplane accidents.
The account which has now been given of the early years of flying in
England may serve to show what a wealth of private enterprise lay ready
to the hand of the Government when the building of the air force began.
The Royal Air Force, like the tree of the Gospel parable, grew from a
small seed, but it was nourished in a rich soil. The great experiment
of flying attracted a multitude of adventurous minds, and prepared
recruits for the nation long before the nation asked for them. This
early predominance of private enterprise, it is worth remarking, told in
favour of military rather than naval flying, and, when the Flying Corps
was formed, started the Military Wing at an advantage. Little has been
said as yet, because in truth there is little to say, of pioneer work in
the air done by sailors. Yet no one would dare to assert that the
average sailor is less resourceful, less inventive, less open to new
ideas, than the average soldier. No doubt there were many senior
officers in the navy, as there were many in the army, who in the early
days regarded aviation with professional impatience and scorn. Further,
the higher command of the navy were not quick, when aircraft became
practically efficient, to divine or devise a use for them. The
difficulty of employing them over the sea was formidable, and none of
their uses was quite so obvious as their use (questioned by more than
one distinguished army general) for reconnaissance in a land campaign.
But the real difference which told in favour of military aviation lay in
the nature of the services. A sailor is attached to his ship, and flying
is an art which of necessity must be practised and developed, in its
beginnings, over wide level tracts of land. The value of the airship for
distant reconnaissance at sea is now fully recognized, but airship
building is not a possible hobby for a young naval officer. Those naval
officers who believed in the future of the new weapon were reduced to
attempting to influence the Government, so that it might undertake the
necessary work. While the army officer could attend aviation meetings
and demonstrate his opinions in practice, his less fortunate brother in
the navy had no resource but to engage in a melancholy course of
politics, with small prospects of public result, and smaller prospects
of private advancement.
The consequence of all this is that the history of the work done by the
navy with aeroplanes and airships is essentially a history of official
decisions and official acts. Great credit must be given to individual
navy men for their insight and persistence in advocating the claims of
the air, but the history of the work done can be fully narrated, without
further preamble, in an account of the origin and growth of the national
air force.