скачать книгу бесплатно
Other great aeronautical companies were also setting up. The Avro company was formed by A. V. Roe, a marine engineer from Manchester, who had made detailed observations of birds while at sea. In June 1908, four months before Cody’s maiden flight, Roe almost took to the air in a machine of his own design, but he never quite made it off the ground. Geoffrey de Havilland – who would one day design the Mosquito, the Second World War fighter-bomber, and the Comet, the world’s first jet airliner – began work on his first aircraft in the same year, in a shed off the Fulham Road in London. He flew the machine, eighteen months later, from a hilltop on the Hampshire Downs. It took off, flew for thirty-five yards, and crashed. De Havilland suffered only cuts and bruises, but the machine was wrecked.
A crucial boost to designers arrived in 1909 with the introduction of the French Gnôme rotary engine. Rotary engines had a better power-to-weight ratio than conventional engines, they reduced vibration and they were far more efficiently cooled, due to the rotation of the cylinder block around the crankshaft. Copies of the Gnôme engine were soon produced, and powered flight became a far more practical proposition.
It was not long before flying gripped the British public’s imagination. In 1910, Claude Grahame-White, a motorcar dealer, established an aerodrome at Hendon in north London – nowadays the site of the Royal Air Force Museum. ‘London Aerodrome’, as Grahame-White called it, quickly became a venue for aerial displays and joyrides for day-trippers. Eric Furlong was a young man, living in Hendon, whose interest in flying was sparked by visits to the aerodrome. He remembers:
Clarence Winchester was a freelance pilot with his own aeroplane giving joyrides to people for something like £1 a time. He used to put the passenger in the aeroplane and then start frightening them by telling them that they mustn’t touch this, that whatever they do, they were not to lean against that, that wire was absolute death if they got tangled up in it. By the time they took off, the passenger was jelly. When we asked him why he did this, he said, ‘Well, they think they’re getting their money’s worth if they’re really frightened …’
On Sundays, Frederick Handley-Page would send his aircraft, Yellow Peril, down to London Aerodrome, where its pilot would give joyrides. There was one man who refused to take a ‘flip’, however, as Charles Tye recalls:
Every Sunday, we used to take people up for trips. From Hendon, round Hyde Park and back. I don’t suppose the trip lasted more than ten minutes and we used to charge a guinea. One particular Sunday, Handley-Page was there himself and I saw him talking to the actress Gladys Cooper. We hadn’t had a customer for a while, and the pilot, a man named Whitehead, said to me, ‘I wonder if Miss Gladys Cooper wants a trip? Go and ask! And if she doesn’t want a flip, ask Mr. Page if he’d like one. I don’t think he’s ever been in the air before!’ So I went over and just stood aside Mr. Page while he was talking to Gladys Cooper. ‘What do you want, Charlie?’ he asked. I said, ‘Mr. Whitehead is sitting up there and he’s getting fed up. Is anybody coming up?’ He said, ‘No!’ So I said, ‘Well, he says he’d like to take you up as he doesn’t think you’ve been in the air before!’ He looked at Miss Gladys Cooper and he took me aside and whispered in my ear, ‘You go back and tell Whitehead – I build them. I don’t bloody well fly them!’
For a number of years, the military authorities in Britain had financed the development of airships while leaving aircraft production to private enterprise. However shortsighted this may now seem, the fact was that early aircraft could not reach high altitudes, they could not carry great weights and they could not fly at night or in high winds. Airships could do all of these things. They were also considered rather more genteel than aeroplanes. Robert Pigot recalls an agreeable morning spent aboard an airship, while serving with the Royal Flying Corps in 1913:
I was living about fourteen miles from Farnborough, where I was stationed, and one morning, I thought I’d go home for breakfast so I flew my airship over and circled round my house until the butler came out. He fetched the gardener. The two of them pulled me down and tied the airship to a tree at one end and a garden roller at the other. And I went in and had breakfast.
Over time, as aircraft became sturdier and more reliable, the military authorities began to take them more seriously. A 1911 report of the Committee of Imperial Defence declared that aeroplanes could ‘keep army commanders in the field as fully informed as possible of the movements of the enemy’. The idea of entrusting the role of military reconnaissance to a fleet of flying birdcages was unsettling to the armed forces. It was particularly unsettling to the cavalry, whose job reconnaissance had always been, and who still dominated the War Office. There was not yet any official expectation that aircraft could contribute to military operations, drop bombs, or engage in air-to-air combat, but there was now the prospect of a role.
The new thinking was reinforced in April 1911, with the establishment of the Army Aircraft Factory (later renamed the Royal Aircraft Factory) at Farnborough. Under its Superintendent, Mervyn O’Gorman, the Factory assembled a team of designers, who were immediately hampered by the limitations placed on the Factory by its charter, which stated that it could not manufacture new types of aircraft, merely produce conversions from existing aircraft. Geoffrey de Havilland joined the Factory as a designer. He describes how it was possible to circumvent the Factory’s restrictive charter:
We weren’t supposed to design new aeroplanes but we could reconstruct them from a landing wheel or a few old bolts from a crashed machine. In this way, during my time at Farnborough, we designed and built several new aeroplanes. When I’d been at Farnborough for about a year, we designed the BE1. We did it by taking a small part of a broken-down French Voisin and reconstructing it into something totally different. The BE1 was quite a successful aeroplane but it was unstable – meaning that you had to control it all the time. I was not very interested in stability until Edward Busk, who had studied the theory of stability, joined the Factory. He took the BE1 and applied his knowledge to modifying it in order to get stability. He moved the lower plane back about three feet, which was equivalent to moving the centre of gravity forward, he fitted a bigger span tailplane, he fitted a fin in front of the rudder and we ended up with a really stable aeroplane. It was quite astonishing to be able to get into this machine, after the unstable machines of the early days, and fly around with hands and feet off indefinitely. That machine eventually became the BE2c and it was really the start of practical, stable aeroplanes.
The Factory produced a series of aircraft, each classified by type. The first type, designated BE (Blériot Experimental) was a ‘tractor’ biplane, with the propeller at the front of the aircraft. This is the type described by de Havilland. The second type, designated FE (Farman Experimental), was a ‘pusher’ biplane, with the propeller behind the fuselage. A third type, with the elevators at the front, was named SE (Santos-Dumont Experimental). The final type produced by the Factory was the RE (Reconnaissance Experimental). Different versions of these types constituted the Factory’s output throughout the Great War.
As the Army Aircraft Factory came into being, a body of men was needed to fly the new machines. On 1 April 1911, the Air Battalion, Royal Engineers was created. Consisting initially of 14 officers and 150 other ranks, it was decided that officers could join the battalion from any arm or branch of the army but that the other ranks must come from within the Royal Engineers. Pilots would not be trained ab initio, however. Prior to joining, they would have to learn to fly at their own expense, before being reimbursed on acceptance by the Air Battalion.
While the British High Command could not see beyond the possibilities of aerial reconnaissance, Germany was proposing a far more aggressive function for its airborne fleet. The Germans considered the Zeppelin airships superior to any weapon possessed by any other nation. General von Moltke, the Chief of the German General Staff, announced to his War Ministry that ‘its speediest development is required to enable us at the beginning of a war to strike a first and telling blow, whose practical and moral effect could be quite extraordinary’.
On 13 April 1912, the Air Battalion was superseded by a larger organization: the Royal Flying Corps. This was intended to join together, under a single umbrella, the army aviators of the Air Battalion with a group of naval aviators who had been running their own flying school at Eastchurch, on the Isle of Sheppey. The Royal Flying Corps comprised a military wing, a naval wing and a Central Flying School at Upavon, on Salisbury Plain.
Doubts were expressed about the location of the Central Flying School. The area around Upavon was prone to dangerous air currents, which had brought down many aircraft over the previous few years, causing the area to become known as ‘The Valley of Death’. Another issue was the status of The Royal Flying Corps. As a corps, its leaders would be subordinate to those in the established services, guaranteeing it little say in its own destiny. Nevertheless, it appeared that unity had been imposed on the world of British military aviation.
That unity did not last very long. The Admiralty was not keen to hand control of its flying matters over to an army corps. It therefore rejected the idea of a ‘naval wing’ and announced the formation of the Royal Naval Air Service, under the command of Murray Sueter. This unilateral decision went entirely unchallenged, leaving the Royal Flying Corps to represent the army alone – although, officially, the Royal Naval Air Service did not come into being until July 1914. Philip Joubert de la Ferté, an early member of the Royal Flying Corps, who was to fly one of the first two ‘shows’ of the war in August 1914, remembers the divide between army and navy:
The Admiralty never really accepted the recommendations of the Committee of Imperial Defence. They didn’t want to be organized by the War Office in any way. They paid lip service to the royal warrant for a period of years, but they went along in their own way. When the Royal Flying Corps was formed, Brigadier General David Henderson took the military and naval wings under his charge. He was an authority on reconnaissance – he’d written a book on reconnaissance. He was a soldier, not an airman. Looking at an aeroplane, he could only imagine flying over an enemy force at low speed so that you could literally count the men on the ground. He believed that there should be no aeroplane with an engine more powerful than it should have a speed of more than 100 miles per hour in the air. The Admiralty, on the other hand, was looking into the problem of fighting and offensive operations in the air. It was fully alive to all the possibilities and it wanted bigger and faster aeroplanes than were thought necessary for the army. The navy took a much broader view.
The intention of the War Office was that all military aircraft would be built by the Royal Aircraft Factory but the Admiralty began to turn to private enterprise to design and build its machines. While it was hardly satisfactory that the infant British flying service should consist of two rival organizations, it at least meant that, eventually, a greater choice of aircraft and engines would be available to both branches. Once the war had begun, this would prove crucial.
At the date of its formation, the Royal Flying Corps had only eleven aircraft in active use. An up-to-date, reliable machine was needed that could be produced by the Royal Aircraft Factory. To this end, Military Aeroplane Trials were held on Salisbury Plain in August 1912. The machine which most impressed the judges was designed and built by Samuel Cody. Handley-Page’s assistant, Charles Tye, was present:
I was in the next shed to Cody. All the hangars were built by the government and they wanted a machine for the Royal Flying Corps. There was about fifteen sheds. A. V. Roe had one, Martinsyde had one, we had one, Samuel Cody had one. I used to do a bit of work on Cody’s machine – I used to true it up for him now and again. When I had trips with him, I sat on a bicycle seat behind him with my hands on his shoulders. His machine was a pusher type with the prop behind. We used to call it the ‘Cathedral’ because it was so huge.
The trials were that you landed on a ploughed field and you got off again. The only thing was that every machine that landed on that ploughed field couldn’t get off again. Cody was the last one to land on this ploughed field and it had been raked up so much by the time he landed. He had a son with him and I was there too. Cody was sitting up at the top of this machine while the inspector was testing his tank and testing all his controls. When Cody had word to get off, his son called out ‘Look!’ What he’d seen was that there was a space in that field that was nearly bare. The machines that had been trying to take off previously had flattened down the ground. It was like a steamroller had been over it. I believe that if Cody had landed first, he wouldn’t have got off that ploughed field.
Although he won, Cody’s machine was never taken up by the Royal Flying Corps. N. V. Piper remembers why:
In 1912, I was lent to Cody and I worked with him, building a replica of the machine that had won the military trials, the sale of which was part of the prize of those trials. Major Raleigh smashed the replica on a very short flight. He’d been flying an aircraft that had been sluggish on the controls but the Cody was hypersensitive, particularly on the fore and aft control. So he crashed it. We rebuilt it and brought it back, but in the meantime the machine that had won the military trials crashed, and it was decided to drop the Cody machine.
Instead of Cody’s machine, the Royal Flying Corps adopted the BE2, the machine worked on by Geoffrey de Havilland at the Royal Aircraft Factory. A year after the Trials, Cody crashed his machine on Laffan’s Plain. Edward Bolt was present:
Cody took up a passenger, a man that came from Reading. Leon Cody and I were watching and all of a sudden, the machine started wobbling and we could quite clearly see that the passenger was grabbing hold of Cody’s shoulders, which I am sure caused the crash.
Frederick Laws, an NCO with the Royal Flying Corps, ran over to the crumpled aircraft, where he found both Cody and his passenger lying dead. Cody was fifty-one years old. Remembering him, Laws comments, ‘I wouldn’t say he was unbalanced – but he was erratic.’ Erratic he may have been, but with his tireless enthusiasm and air of self-invention, Cody embodies the age of the pioneers. At his funeral, his importance as an aircraft designer was recognized. James Gascoyne, a Royal Flying Corps mechanic, was a wreath bearer:
Cody’s funeral was a very, very ceremonial affair. It lasted about two hours, I suppose. It was an enormous gathering of civilians and soldiers.
Shortly after the Military Trials, in September 1912, the British army held its annual manoeuvres, in East Anglia. During the exercise, a red army, commanded by Sir Douglas Haig was soundly beaten by a blue army, commanded by Sir James Grierson. The deciding factor in Grierson’s victory was his use of aerial reconnaissance. One of Grierson’s aircraft, piloted by Lieutenant Arthur Longmore, with Major Hugh Trenchard (a name to remember) as his observer, spotted the advance of Haig’s troops and immediately reported its findings. Grierson, meanwhile, had hidden his troops from observation, remarking afterwards that he had ordered them ‘to look as like toadstools as they could and to make noises like oysters’. The blue army’s victory, apparently inspired by Lewis Carroll, ensured a role for aviation in a future war.
While the ‘military wing’ concentrated on preparing for the role of reconnaissance, the ‘naval wing’ trod a more experimental path, prompted by Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty. Churchill, always open to novel ideas, had been an early supporter of flying. Philip Joubert de la Ferté remembers:
Churchill had become First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. He got to hear of the activities at Eastchurch and he decided that he should take some interest. Not only did he take an interest, but he learnt to fly. He was a perishing pilot, most dangerous, but he did it and he got to know something about the air, and it was his authority and his enthusiasm which got the Royal Naval Air Service off to a tremendous start.
The Admiralty began investigating the most effective methods of bombing ships and submarines, although not always with sufficient flexibility. In 1912, Victor Goddard, a cadet at Dartmouth Naval College, witnessed the invention of a fellow cadet:
Cadet Robinson had devised a bombsight which allowed for the drift of the aeroplane in the air, and also for its forward speed of flight. This was something which was new to me, and I think it was new to the whole world. At any rate, he was almost certainly the first person to submit a bombsight to a government department. The reply from the Admiralty was that their Lordships saw no application for this invention.
Nevertheless, their Lordships examined other interesting possibilities, including the bombing of longer-range targets such as German airship bases. The navy felt vulnerable to Zeppelin bombing, as their own bases were to be found along the coast, and so a chain of air stations was constructed from which naval airships and aircraft could strike out against enemy raiders. As a result, the Royal Naval Air Service was to become responsible for the defence of the mainland from aerial attack in the forthcoming war.
As the prospect of a European war became more real, it was very clear that aviation would have a part to play, if, at first, only in an observational role. Nevertheless, that prospect ought to have been sufficient for the politicians and generals to predict an aerial escalation. To send an aircraft up to spy on the enemy is to invite preventative measures, and the simplest way to prevent an aircraft from spying is to send another aircraft up to shoot it down. Every aircraft would therefore need the means to defend itself. This had all been foreseen in a Royal Flying Corps training manual, produced a few months before the outbreak of war:
It is probable that one phase of the struggle for the command of the air will resolve itself into a series of combats between individual aeroplanes or pairs of aeroplanes. If the pilots of one side can succeed in obtaining victory in a succession of such combats, they will establish a moral ascendancy over the surviving pilots of the enemy, and be left free to carry out their duties of reconnaissance.
Taken a stage further, if an aircraft is capable of observing the enemy in its activities, it is surely capable of disrupting those very activities by dropping bombs. Yet every aircraft that went to war in the summer of 1914 was completely unarmed and unprepared to carry arms of any kind. When asking why, it should be remembered that at the outbreak of war aeroplanes had been flying for less than eleven years. They were not yet sturdy platforms for guns or bombs. They were flimsy contraptions, liable to tear themselves to pieces if handled roughly or landed steeply. And they were deliberately flimsy in order to minimize the weight of a craft that was breaking the laws of nature by taking to the air in the first place. Aeroplanes were still mistrusted for their very novelty. It was to take a war to demonstrate the extraordinary potential of the flying machine.
If there were still military doubts about the machines, there were also doubts about the men flying them. Many of the early flyers had been daredevils and risk-takers, non-conforming young men who valued adventure above duty, individuality above discipline. Edward Peter was such a man. Charles Tye remembers how, in 1912, Peter had jumped into Handley-Page’s precious machine and made off:
Edward Peter got up and he got into Yellow Peril. And all of a sudden, he was trying the controls – he was working the empennage and working the rudder. Then, he opened up the engine full. I shouted out, ‘What are you up to, Edward? What the devil are you up to? Come you out! Come you out! This machine has never been up before!’ But Edward didn’t take no notice. He simply revved up and went over the chocks and away he went. He ran about 200 yards and he was in the air. He flew that machine as an experienced man. He turned it round and climbed and away he went. Next thing we heard, he’d landed at Brooklands Aerodrome. When he landed, he was interviewed by an official at Brooklands and he got severely reprimanded and they were going to charge him with flying a machine without a licence. Because he had no licence – and this was his first time in an aeroplane!
This was the sort of person who might well progress from civilian flying into the Royal Flying Corps or Royal Naval Air Service and it frightened the conservative majority within the armed forces. Claude Grahame-White, the pioneer and founder of the London Aerodrome, was something of a dandy. This ensured him a dry reception on his arrival in the Royal Naval Air Service, by whom he had been granted a commission. Lance Sieveking tells the tale:
Grahame-White had been given the rank of flight commander and we heard that on his first day, he had presented himself at the admiralty in his beautiful new uniform, a diamond tiepin and white spats. He was a very handsome man. ‘Well, old boy,’ he said jauntily to Lord Edward Grosvenor, in his office over the Admiralty Arch, ‘How will I do? Is it all right?’ Lord Edward looked at him critically and said in a tone of reproach, ‘I think you’ve forgotten one thing. The gold earrings, dear fellow …’
With aviation came a new breed of soldier and sailor; irreverent, questioning, likely to appreciate the ‘wonder of flight’ with which we began this chapter. Despite the best efforts of Hugh Trenchard, the man who was to take command of the Royal Flying Corps in 1915, the First World War flying services were never as regimented as the older services. Standards of dress and mess-room behaviour often fell short of accepted standards. Yet, these were men who were living on their nerves and putting all their energies into an undertaking that they were not likely to survive. These are the men whose voices will be heard in the pages that follow.
2 (#ulink_f421903e-1666-5044-b1d1-900036a40a58)
The Combatants
The following letter was written by a young man to his parents in 1916:
Last night I was just getting into my bed when a sponge full of water came along the room. At once the place was in a fine mess. I threw a jug of water, but the same was returned with interest. Next the place got so full of water that I ran into the garden, falling into a big hole full of mud. I managed to obtain two onions on my way back, and with these attacked the mob. All our beds are wet through. However, at last all got right again and we got our sleep. It was great sport.
The young man was not a schoolboy but a fighter pilot. His name was Albert Ball, and within a year he would earn a Victoria Cross, a Military Cross and three Distinguished Service Orders as arguably the greatest British fighter ace of the war. His letter describes the adolescent horseplay common in the squadrons. Situated in comfortable chateaux and farmhouses behind the lines, these squadrons served as a refuge from the realities of life in the air. When a man was killed, the custom was to carry on as though nothing had happened, to drink and sing, to shed no tears. With their outward confidence, emotional reserve and ‘great sport’, these squadrons brought the world of the English public school to France. It is not surprising that so many letters home were childlike. Albert Ball again:
Am feeling very poo-poo today. Five of my best pals were done in yesterday, and I think it is so rotten.
In terms of background, if not of achievement, Ball was a typical British Great War pilot. Middle class, public school educated, and keen, the squadrons were full of men like him. Frederick Winterbotham was one:
I was born in the reign of Queen Victoria, in 1897, and I always remember my annoyance at the age of three, when I was given a prayer book with Queen Victoria on it, and she died, and I felt that I had been done down because I no longer had a queen. I grew up in a normal household in Stroud in Gloucestershire, where my father had a law business. I suppose my great love was always ponies and horses. It went on throughout my life. I went to an excellent school in Eastbourne and then I went on to Charterhouse, in that hot summer of 1911. I loved Charterhouse. It was the most gorgeous place and we played every sort of sport and game. My only trouble was that I was growing rather too fast and after I’d been there for a couple of years, I was well over six feet and I’d outgrown my strength. I was no longer fit to play games properly – so the medical people said that I should go for a sea voyage. I persuaded my father and mother to send me round the world and I was fortunate in that I had relations and friends in various places.
So it was that I set off in 1913, to Canada, where I helped a man to build a house and clear his land up in the Rockies. Then I went to Vancouver, during the Canadian real estate boom, where I was pestered to buy land. Strange gentlemen would ring me up and say, ‘I see you’ve come from Gloucestershire, you must know the Duke of Beaufort, I’d like to come and see you and sell you some land.’ Actually, I did know the Duke of Beaufort, but I didn’t tell them that.
Having seen Canada, I crossed the Pacific to China in a big new ship that was full of dead Chinese, going home to be buried, and American missionaries, going out to China. I loved Japan, I had a marvellous time. In those days, the Japanese loved the English, and all the women wore kimonos and walked in wooden sandals. The drains in the villages were all open, you rode in a rickshaw and you drank green tea.
Leaving Japan, I went down to Shanghai, to see the British colony down there. Unfortunately, a man came aboard the boat, and took the next cabin to myself, and he had a rash all over him. I mentioned this, and a doctor was brought, and of course, it was smallpox. I was rather lucky. I’d had measles before I left England, and I was well vaccinated, and I didn’t catch it. Then I went on to Hong Kong, where I had friends, and then down to Australia. And in Australia, I went to live on a sheep station that belonged to a friend of ours from Gloucestershire. I was a jackaroo, 180 miles north of the nearest railway line, right out in the desert. I loved it. If it hadn’t been for the coming war, I might have stayed there. I adored the life.
However, I did come home. I stopped in New Zealand to see where my grandfather had once owned what is now the great suburb of Remuera, outside Auckland. Unfortunately, he sold it a bit too soon. Then, I came home, via India, and on the way, I remember hearing news that the Kaiser had taken a very large percentage out of all the fortunes of the rich Germans. It was a wealth tax, and I remember discussing it with people on board the ship, asking why he wanted all this money, and we all came to the conclusion that there was trouble coming.
Back home, in England, in 1914, I went back to Charterhouse for a term, and took my entrance exam to Trinity, Cambridge. But then, of course, came the outbreak of war. I was in camp with the Charterhouse Officer Training Corps, in Staffordshire, at the time. I went back home in my uniform to Gloucestershire, and people were making a fuss of anybody in uniform, and a woman came up to me at Gloucester Station, and she asked me to hold her baby for a minute, while she went and got something, but she didn’t come back …
I wanted to join up. I’d always been keen on horses, and I thought I’d join the local Gloucestershire Yeomanry, which was one of the very good yeomanry regiments. So, at the age of seventeen, I became a subaltern in the Yeomanry, where I had a glorious two years, training men and horses. I was given a hundred butchers’ boys and grocers’ boys from Gloucester who’d ridden nothing but a bicycle, and a hundred Canadian horses that had never been ridden at all, and I had to put them together and make them into a squadron of cavalry. Which was quite an interesting job, actually. But before long, cavalry weren’t wanted any more and we had to get rid of our horses. I suppose it was one of the most traumatic days that I ever remember, because we all loved our horses, and we had to take them away and load them onto a train and send them off, goodness knows where, after having trained them up for two years. They then said that they were going to give us bicycles but I didn’t really fancy that very much.
I’d met a man quite recently, who’d been flying and he’d been explaining to me how he was cooperating with a new, very secret weapon, called a ‘tank’ and it was the greatest fun. So I went back and told my colonel that I was going to go flying. He was a little bit cross, but I said, no, it’s the thing for me, so off I went. I went to see some people in London, in the War Office. There was a very nice young cavalry officer who was interviewing possible candidates for the Royal Flying Corps. He noted my shoulder straps, and he said, ‘Ah, you’re Gloucester Yeomanry. You ride a horse?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do.’ ‘Do you know where the pole star is?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think I could find it.’ ‘You’ll do,’ he said.
British society in 1914, patriotic and obedient, was firmly ordered by class. Frederick Winterbotham represented the next generation of officers and empire builders. Young men like him, and those from every social class for that matter, knew their place. They were born with a role to fulfil, and, when war came, a new and appropriate role was assigned, and carried out unhesitatingly. For all that the new flying services attracted men of originality and disregard for military custom, their originality usually only extended to their immediate world. Larger moral and political conventions remained unchallenged. The structure of the flying services neatly reflected the social order; officers came from one background, the rank and file from another. In general, pilots were officers, while the riggers who tended the airframes, and the fitters who looked after the engines, were in the ranks. Occasionally, however, the social order blurred. Within the squadrons there were a number of sergeant pilots, from humble backgrounds, who lived and messed separately to the officers, but who experienced precisely the same dangers. Among these were men who had learnt to fly in the pre-war pioneering days. Donald Clappen was one of them:
I was always interested in flying. I used to take the aviation journals, Flight and Aeroplane. Then in July 1911, the Gordon Bennett Cup took place at Eastchurch. I was living at Westcliff-on-Sea at the time, and I took an excursion boat across to Sheerness and I saw all the famous pilots flying. The Gordon Bennett Cup was an international affair. Pilots represented their countries. I saw not only my first flying, but also my first crash.
It appears that Gustav Hamel, a famous British pilot, was flying practice laps in a Blériot, but found that his time was slightly slower than that of a rival Nieuport machine. Blériot himself was present, and he decided to cut about a foot off of each wing. This went well. Hamel was faster in his next practice circuit. But in the actual race, he got to the first pylon, overbanked and flew straight into the ground, with the engine running full on. He was thrown twenty-five or thirty yards, rolling over and over. The machine was a total wreck, but Hamel was only badly bruised, and didn’t even break a bone.
It was as big a crash as one could ever wish to see – yet he got up almost unhurt. That made me think that aviation was not quite as dangerous as I had believed. However, everyone thought I was quite mad to want to learn to fly. In fact, so much so, that I hardly told anyone of my interest – not even my own parents. That’s why I started off by getting myself apprenticed to the Chanter School of Flying at Hendon, just as a start. They had an advertisement in one of the aviation journals.
The Chanter School was rather a ropey concern. It had two Blériots and a machine which they were building themselves. They ceased to exist in October or November 1911, by which time I’d learnt to sweep the floor and push the machines about. I then got in touch with the Blériot Aviation Company, also at Hendon, and asked if I could join them as an apprentice, with a view to becoming a flying pupil at a later date.
I joined Blériot in November 1911, and I was just a general dogsbody at first, but I was allowed to fly. Learning was entirely a solo effort. There were no dual-control machines, nor were there any machines that could take up a passenger. At first, the aircraft was raised onto a pedestal, showing what it was like, and the view one would get as a pilot in the flying position. Then one was put into the machine, told to keep straight ahead, towards a tree or something like that on the other side of the aerodrome. One learnt to roll across the ground. From thence, one started by doing short hops, followed by longer hops, until one could fly straight across the other side of the aerodrome. After that, one was able to do half circuits, one to the left and then to the right, and so forth, until one was able to fly in a complete circuit around the aerodrome.
The first time I flew was quite by accident. I was in a machine which was not supposed to fly. It had been detuned. I was rolling across the ground, doing a straight, as I thought, when suddenly I found the ground receding under me. Of course, this was so unexpected that I pushed my stick down and landed with a bit of a crash and found myself with the undercarriage spread all around me and the prop broken. My instructor – Monsieur Salmet – came rushing up to me, ‘Why you fly? Why you fly?’ I had no answer. I didn’t know.
What had happened was that a gust of wind had caught my plane and it had taken off without my expecting it to. In those days, no one ever flew unless it was dead calm. My punishment was that I was not allowed to practise on an aircraft until I had participated in the repair of the machine, which took some months. That put me back quite a lot, but I still qualified for my pilot’s certificate when I turned eighteen. After that, I was made a sort of assistant instructor, but I was also expected to do absolutely everything connected with the running, repairing and mending of the aircraft, tuning up of the engines. I did everything concerned with the maintenance of the machines.
In general, the majority of pupils were army officers, who were learning to fly with a view to joining the Royal Flying Corps, which had started in 1912. There were a few others – some rich people who went on to buy their own aircraft. And most weekends, at Hendon, there were competitions and flying displays. It was quite a fashionable affair, almost like Ascot, with people flocking down to see the flying.
I was assistant instructor until April 1914, but then Blériot moved to Brooklands, and I became an instructor at the Hall School of Flying at Hendon, which consisted of two Blériots, a Deperdussin, a Caudron and an Avro. I received a pound a week, and we taught a few pupils.
I was on holiday in Scotland when the war broke out. It didn’t upset my holiday. I was thinking this war would be of the nature of the Boer War. But when I got back to Hendon, I found that the cry had gone out for pilots for the Flying Corps, and that a few of the instructors had actually become sergeant pilots. So I promptly put my name down. I signed the papers and waited. I continued instructing with the Hall School – but nothing happened. A lot of my friends were joining up, anxious to get into the war as quickly as possible, as everyone thought the war would be finished by Christmas. I found they were joining the London Scottish, so I spent all day queuing and found myself a perfectly good private in the London Scottish territorial battalion.
By April 1915, I was looking up with great envy from the trenches at the aircraft flying above, so I put in another application to join the Royal Flying Corps. I said that I’d already applied, but had had no reply. My colonel was not very keen because he was losing a lot of his personnel. So he instructed that he would pass on any application if the applicant could get somebody to apply for him from whatever regiment he wished to join. In my case, I knew nobody in the Royal Flying Corps.
Just a week before the Battle of Loos – we were resting behind the trenches – I went up to Auchel where I was watching the aircraft with envy. As I stood, watching the machines landing, a general emerged from the office. As he stepped into his car, acting on the spur of the moment, I said, ‘Please sir, may I speak?’ He looked round, astonished, and didn’t say anything. I pulled out my application papers and told him my story, the fact that I was a qualified pilot, that I wanted to join the Royal Flying Corps but had some difficulty getting anyone to apply for me, that I had replied and had heard nothing more about it. In a very deep voice, he told another officer, also a brass hat, ‘Make a note of that; make a note of that’ … and so on. He said, ‘I’ll see what we can do.’ In the meantime, he called to an airman and said ‘Is there a transport going back towards the trenches, to Béthune? If so, make sure this soldier gets a lift back.’ With that I saluted smartly and off he went. In the tender which took me back to Béthune, I asked the driver, ‘Who was I speaking to?’ ‘Blimey,’ he said, ‘You’ve got a nerve! That was General Trenchard. He’s in charge of the Royal Flying Corps!’
After that, I went through the Battle of Loos, twice over the top. We had a pretty bad time. Each time, I was lucky to get away with it. At one point, there was only one other fellow left in my section. On 9 October, as I was coming out of the trenches, I was greeted by a telegram which said, ‘Report at once to the War Office.’ That night, not having slept for days, dirty and filthy, I was given a first-class warrant and I found myself back in London on a Sunday morning. I wasn’t feeling too good, and I was sent to a specialist, who pronounced that I needed three weeks’ rest. After that, I was in the Royal Flying Corps.
Cecil King was a working-class boy who joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1913. He was to become a rigger and, ultimately, a flight sergeant:
Originally, I was an apprentice to a wheelwright and coach builder in the country, but after I’d come through my apprenticeship, I came to London. I did roughly a year’s work in a London workshop, which was partially underground, and very depressing, and I wanted to get into a more open-air life. I cast about to see what I would do and one day, when I was walking in Kingston, I met two soldiers. They had an unusual badge, with the letters RFC, on their shoulders. I got into a conversation with them and they told me they were members of a new unit called the Royal Flying Corps, which had just started – and why didn’t I join?
I’d never heard of the Royal Flying Corps, and I didn’t know there was a military regiment concerned with flying. Actually, I wasn’t bothered about that – I just knew it would be out in the open air and on big open fields. That’s what I wanted. I was interested in flying, though. In 1911, I’d seen Gustav Hamel flying at Hendon. I remember the announcer said, ‘This is Gustav Hamel on an aeroplane with a Gnome engine.’ The crowd thought he’d said, ‘No engine’ and there was quite a stir.
But after I’d met these two members of the Royal Flying Corps, I went to a recruiting sergeant and asked him about it, and he said, ‘Yes, I think something like that has started, and if you’d like to join, I’ll find out for you.’ I decided I would go a bit further with it. I went to Kingston Barracks and made my final decision. I was sworn into the army there, and I expressed a desire to go in the RFC, so I was given a railway warrant and sent down to Aldershot. When I got there, I asked the first serviceman I saw, ‘Where are the barracks of the Royal Flying Corps?’ and he said, ‘Never heard of it.’
But by inquiring once or twice more I finally found that the Royal Flying Corps shared barracks with the Black Watch so I reported there, and I was sent up to a small building on the aerodrome at Farnborough where all the further particulars of my enlistment were taken down. I was sent back to the barracks for my first night. And when I woke up in the morning I heard the trumpets from the South Camp – that was the cavalry – and the bugles from the North Camp; and I was delighted. I thought, ‘I’m really and truly in the army.’
When war was declared on 4 August 1914, many of the men who were to fly were scattered across the globe. Charles Chabot was living in Bangkok:
The European population of Bangkok at this time was absolutely minimal. A hundred would cover the entire European population of Siam. Nevertheless we had enough English people to rake up a rugby football team. The Germans had a rugby team as well. As the final game of the season, the Germans challenged us and this match was to be followed by dinner at the German club. So we played the game and we were beaten by the Germans and we congregated for the party after the match. We were all mixed up around the table – a German here, an Englishman here, next to him a German, next to him a Frenchman and so on. It began and it was like every other rugby football dinner since time immemorial. And then came a bang at the door and a runner came in from the French Embassy with the extraordinary news of the outbreak of war and he was quickly followed by another runner from the German Embassy. We’d never thought of other chaps in terms of war and we didn’t know what we ought to do, whether we ought to seize a knife off the table and plunge it into the next chap, or what. After a little bit of discussion, we decided that as far as we were concerned, the war was going to start tomorrow. The party proceeded and that was that.
In Britain, the prevailing mood in August 1914 was euphoric. Leslie Kemp remembers:
The war came and threw everything and everybody out of balance. The enthusiasm for the war was really fantastic. There were actresses singing, there were concerts in Trafalgar Square and, if you enlisted, you were given the ‘King’s Shilling’. It was entirely different to the atmosphere that prevailed at the start of the Second World War.
Young men with romantic dreams of flying seized their opportunity. Charles Burne:
When I went home and told my father that I wanted to join the Royal Naval Air Service, he signed the papers but he said, ‘Don’t start flying. It’s only damn fools and birds that fly.’
At the beginning of the war, a man with specialist knowledge was a welcome addition to the flying services. William Richards, self-taught and highly motivated, was such a man:
My father and my mother emigrated separately in the eighties, around 1884. My father was from Cornwall, at a time when the Cornish tin mines were in difficulty and closing down. And people concerned with that sort of work, at that time, were emigrating. At the age of twenty-one, he went to New Zealand. My mother’s was an agricultural family in Essex. When she was about fourteen, they moved to New Zealand. She was that much younger than my father.
They met at Dougville, eight or nine years after arrival in New Zealand, and they fell in love, married, and there’s no doubt about it, it was a very happy and romantic marriage. She was a lovely person. I was born a year after their marriage on St George’s Day in 1893. They’d set up home in Auckland, in Queen Street, at that time, scarcely developed. They set up home in a kind of colonial style, and there’s no question that they were very happy. I have the photographs of myself as a baby, and they go to show that’s what it was – a happy home.
My mother contracted some sort of tropical fever at the age of twenty-five, and when I was a year and ten months old, she was taken from us, leaving my father with me, more or less in arms, to cope with a tragic situation. Friends came to his help, and I was looked after for a time, but it was quite clear to him that he couldn’t carry on. It so happened that a relative in Cornwall had lost her first baby, and been told that she couldn’t have another, and she, knowing my father’s predicament, wrote to him, suggesting that if he cared to bring me to England, she would take care of me.
So she became, in a way, my foster mother. We lived on a farm, very isolated. I had no contact with any other children excepting when I later went to a village school at St Neot. So I was mixing very freely with grown-ups, all of them occupied in agricultural work. My only playmate, as a matter of fact, was a sporting dog. And I became rather self contained, independent, perhaps a little bit difficult, being alone in that way. I developed into rather an interesting child, in that I insisted that I would set my own way of life, and form my own ideas. I had quite strong ideas as a child. When I reached the age of ten, the dear lady who had been looking after me decided to go to America with her husband, and my father felt it necessary that a home should be provided for me, so he decided to marry. And he did. He just married, not for any romantic reason. Just to make a home.
I was independent minded and I refused to accept my stepmother. And it wasn’t long before, on the excuse of going to spend a holiday with some friends in another part of Cornwall, I left home and refused to return. And from then on, I continued from one thing to another, living in different places, lodging with different persons, being employed in different things. I worked in the tin mines, and because I’d developed an interest in machinery, I was given some responsibility, even at a very young age. I was looking after power equipment, and doing survey work along the valleys for tin.
In the meantime, I took an interest in politics. At the age of eighteen, I stood with Isaac Foot, the father of Michael Foot, on his platform in Bolventor. I wrote letters for people in the farms who were scarcely literate. I had educated myself entirely – I was never coached, assisted or guided. I don’t think I was helped at any time. I just pursued my own way. I was good tempered, bright, inquisitive and well inclined to learn anything and everything from observation and experience. I gained a lot of experience.
It started to appear to me that I had a purpose in life. I was at that age, in my later teens, when a teenager develops this disposition. And I thought that my purpose could well be served if I were to adopt a religious career. I came under the influence of a book that was published at that time by the minister of the City Temple, Archie Campbell, The New Theology, which suited my ideas of religion. I was old enough to draw certain conclusions about the difference between fundamental religion, evangelical religion, and the more liberal attitude to religious dogma and doctrine. In that connection, I spoke in public on many occasions. And the local stewards of the Church nominated me for the ministry.
I accepted the nomination and acted on it. I went to London, where I was examined by a committee with the purpose of going to theological college, but I was turned down because my self-education had only equipped me for certain things. For example, they asked what books I had read. I couldn’t answer. I just hadn’t had books, the classics, and that kind of thing. I was just so completely self-educated, in a rag-tag fashion, quite uncontrolled, without direction. The committee put me back for a year, as a result of my inability to quote Shakespeare. My attitude of mind was, whilst religious to a degree, critical of a number of things that I could not accept, and I decided that my future would be secular and not religious. I turned immediately to earning my living in a commercial or engineering way, and dropped any idea of pursuing a religious life.
So I went to London with £5 in my pocket, knowing nothing more than that the streets of London were paved with gold, and my future was what I could make of it. I booked in at the YMCA in Tottenham Court Road, and within twenty-four hours I had a job at the London County Council as a temporary assistant.
By then, I had studied electricity and magnetism in books, and I’d given myself a fairly good grounding. And at the time, the big trans-continental wireless stations, Poldhu, Eiffel Tower and Nauen, were operating, and it was possible with a simple piece of apparatus – a crystal and a pair of headphones – to pick up those signals, and if you knew Morse code, you could read what they were saying. So I learnt the Morse code, and followed these transmissions as a kind of hobby. And in that way, wireless became my forte.
At the outbreak of war, I was fired with the idea, and I walked into a recruiting station and offered myself. They examined me as to who I was, and what I could do, and it came out that I knew Morse, and I was booked as one of the very, very few wireless operators for the Royal Flying Corps. One thing followed another. I was sent to study under Professor Price at the London Polytechnic for two months, and then I was handed a New Testament, a revolver, and I was told to proceed to 4 Squadron in France.
Archibald James began the war as a well-connected young subaltern in the 3rd Hussars:
My primary recollection of the first winter of the war is of mud, Flanders clay, our wretched horses standing on long picket lines, hock-deep in mud, misery, living on bully beef and biscuit, and great discomfort. We were employed as dismounted cavalry to take over trench lines, usually for a short time before infantry became available. The British front had been extended to the north. And the line in the north of Flanders was held mainly by old French Territorials. The trenches were very sketchy. And we were quite ill-adapted to this sort of work and quite unsuitably clothed for it, as indeed, at that stage of the war, were the infantry for trench warfare.
The worst episode of this period was three miserable days when we stood to in the afternoon, then rode about ten miles. On the way it came on to pour with rain. And by the time we got to about a mile and a half from the trenches we were to take over, we were all absolutely soaked to the skin. My trench was an isolated length, with no idea how far away the German trenches were. In the night, it stopped raining and started to freeze hard. We had three days in these wretched little trenches, frozen miserable. And we had the greatest difficulty getting rations up because, from one flank, the Germans overlooked our rear. And when we got back to billets after three nights in these trenches, we had without exception what became known as trench feet. We had one-third of the regiment out of action for a week while their wretched feet thawed out. My feet were throbbing with pain for at least a week.
We were then sent to take over from another cavalry regiment who had been occupying a trench line in Sanctuary Wood for three days. Our period was to be three days also. The wood was still composed of young larch trees which had been fairly heavily knocked about by rifle fire. The trench had been constructed shortly before by French Territorials. It had been too wet to dig down and the parapet consisted largely of dead French bodies covered over with a superficial covering of earth. There was no wire in front of us. And the German trenches were about thirty yards away. It was here that I received my first utterly trivial wound.
Opposite my troop front – as I say at thirty yards’ range – were the German trenches. And I quickly noticed, looking through a loophole, that opposite me was a place where the German trenches, for some reason, were shallower. And when a man walked along them, he appeared up to about the middle of his upper arm. This seemed to me to offer an opportunity. So I took a rifle from one of my troopers and posted myself at a loophole waiting for the next German to come along.
In due course, the German appeared. I’m a good rifle shot and it was no question that I’d got him. But what I hadn’t realized was that a German was watching the end of my rifle and had a shot at me. And as our trench wall was in no way bulletproof, the bullet hit me under my left arm and merely grazed the skin. But it certainly discouraged me from any further sniping.
