Henderson’s flying companion that day had been another experienced pilot and friend called Harold Redler. Henderson had piloted the plane – a De Havilland – when it took off.
Then, as they had been trained to do, they carefully swapped places in mid-air, by climbing over the fuselage and holding tight to the wing frames, so that Redler could fly while Henderson tested the gun. They flew at high speed and very low altitude through the neck of a gulley as it opened out to the sea.
It was then that things went horribly wrong. Just as the aircraft went into a climbing turn, the wind suddenly whipped it viciously and Redler lost control. The De Havilland slammed into the ground, left wing down, and both men were killed.
Two young men who had survived for months in the intense heat of battle over the front line in France and in the war-torn skies above Britain had been taken out by a freak gust of wind at home during a straightforward training exercise. In that instant, Captain Ian Henderson joined the ranks of the many young RFC aces – several of them his friends – who would not live to see the end of the First World War.
The luck of Black Cat had finally run out. All that was left for the Henderson family to remember their son was a gravestone in Ayrshire, some scraps of correspondence, a few photographs and other personal effects. Plus the rich but fading memories of shared conversations, close embraces, gestures and companionable silences – all testimony to a heroic life spent soaring above the clouds.
WAR REPORT
Personnel: Captain Ian Henderson was born in 1896 into a wealthy Scottish family. His father was a Glaswegian shipbuilder’s son called Sir David Henderson. Sir David was a highly decorated soldier and pioneering military pilot who became a founder of the Royal Flying Corps in 1912. Henderson’s mother, Henrietta Dundas, belonged to an aristocratic Edinburgh family.
Henderson grew up with a younger sister, Angela. He was given an elite school education in England at Eton College and then Sandhurst military college, after which he joined his father’s Scottish regiment – the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders – rising to the rank of Captain.
After war broke out Henderson was sent to fight on the front line but was transferred to the RFC to train as a pilot in the summer of 1915 and served in No. 2, No. 19 and No. 56 Squadrons.
Henderson was officially credited with seven aerial-combat victories and was awarded the Military Cross for gallantry during operations against the enemy. He was sent for further training in Scotland in the spring of 1918 but was killed in a flying accident at Turnberry on the Ayrshire coast on 21 June.
He was buried in nearby Girvan at Doune Cemetery. His name is inscribed, along with other flying-school members who lost their lives, on a tall granite memorial on Turnberry golf course. He was twenty-one years old when he died.
The loss devastated Sir David, who devoted the rest of his career to humanitarian work, including running the International League of Red Cross Societies in Geneva, Switzerland. He was also a strong supporter of the creation of the Scottish National War Memorial in Edinburgh Castle, which commemorates the nation’s war dead. Sir David died in 1921 aged 59.
The Henderson family paid a high price for Sir David and Ian’s love of flying. But the two men left behind the legacy of a new and improved Royal Air Force. Plans for it had been drawn up by Sir David and were implemented in 1917. As a result Sir David Henderson was considered by Sir Hugh Trenchard, Chief of the Air Staff, to be the true founding father of the RAF.
Event Log: ‘The Fokker Scourge’ was a term used by British newspapers in 1915 to describe the threat from German aircraft, which were thought to be winning the war in the skies at that time. The air superiority of the Fliegertruppen – the Imperial German Air Force, later known as the Luftstreitkräfte – had to be overturned. That is one reason why young men such as Captain Ian Henderson were plucked from the ground war in the trenches and placed into the cockpits of RFC aircraft to take on the Germans.
The term ‘Fokker Scourge’ referred mainly to the Fokker Eindecker aircraft, which was a monoplane with a single wing on either side. It was the first aircraft to have a synchronised machine gun that could fire through its propeller straight at its target. RFC aircraft flown by Henderson, such as the BE2 and BE12, were generally outgunned and outmanoeuvred by the Eindecker.
The success of the Eindecker encouraged people to think of all German planes as Fokkers, but another very important German aircraft during the war was a different make – the Albatross D-type. The celebrated German fighter ace Baron Manfred von Richthofen, known as ‘the Red Baron’, who notched up at least eighty kills, made his reputation in an Albatross DIII. He later flew a Fokker DrI triplane – an aircraft with three wings on top of each other.
Eventually, the Fokker Eindecker met its match when the RFC began using more advanced DH2 and FE2b aircraft, and later even more advanced machines such as Ian Henderson’s SE5a.
Inventory: The Royal Aircraft Factory SE5a was a single-seat scout aircraft. Captain Ian Henderson flew this machine in 1917, and shot down several enemy planes from it. The SE5a was faster and more advanced than the aircraft Henderson had flown before, with better cockpit instruments and controls, and a powerful 200-horsepower Hispano-Suiza engine.
The propeller of the SE5a was a tractor, meaning it was mounted in front of a huge H-shaped grille and pulled the aircraft through the air like a tractor pulling a trailer. The SE5a was built by several manufacturers, including Austin Motors, which became a household name after the war as a car manufacturer.
The SE5a had two guns: a .303-inch Vickers machine gun that fired from the nose of the aircraft using a synchronising gear just like a Fokker, so it didn’t damage the propeller, and a gas-operated Lewis machine gun on top of the wings that could fire 500 rounds per minute and hit an enemy aircraft from 800 metres away.
The SE5 type was an even better aircraft than the famous Sopwith Camel, and together these two machines helped the RFC and their allies gain air superiority over the German Luftstreitkräfte in 1917 and go on to victory by the end of 1918.
Author’s Note
Maps and Activities
Where does the action in this book actually take place? Written descriptions are all very well, but it can be hard to get your head around places you don’t know, and events long ago, unless you have a map and some pictures to help.
This is where the internet comes into its own.
You could start by looking up the index of a good old-fashioned printed atlas to find places like ‘Turnberry’ or ‘Jutland’. Turn to the right page and, using the code, find them on the grid. But going online opens up an even wider world of possibilities.
Use an online map service – there are lots to choose from, so get someone to help if you’re not sure where to start. By typing in keywords you can look up locations mentioned in this book and learn all sorts of interesting things.
For instance, if you type in the name ‘Ypres’ – or ‘Ieper’, its official spelling – then you can pinpoint the location of this city, which was a key First World War battle zone.
Try using the ‘get directions’ tools to find out how far Ypres is from your own house.
Select ‘street view’, or similar mode, to see what Ypres looks like today. Further investigation will reveal the fields where many fallen soldiers are buried, and the Cloth Hall, which was rebuilt after the war.
To avoid confusion, try typing in the name of the country mentioned in the story as well as the village, town or city. For example, ‘Loos France’. Hint: Loos is also known as ‘Loos-en-Gohelle’.
An online image search of the locations will give you photographs and illustrations, which can help you further in building up a picture of the place.
Most such images will be recent, but using the right keywords will allow you to look for historic images, too – for example, ‘Romania 1917’ or ‘Scottish Women’s Hospitals Romania’.
What other places and people from this book can you pinpoint, using online maps
and image searches?
Look out for information about exhibitions and activities that may relate to the stories in this book. You could start with the websites of the libraries, museums and archives listed in the next section. Again, a careful keyword search is the easy way to cut to the chase.
Acknowledgements and Further Reading
The real-life stories in this book are based on archival research. Using the key facts of each character’s wartime experiences, I’ve been able to dramatise their stories. Any errors of fact or interpretation here are my responsibility.
I’ve used a range of sources. These include unpublished diaries, memoirs, letters, records, drawings, diagrams and photographs, as well as published articles, books, records, maps, online archives and museum artefacts.
For ‘The Teacher Threw a Bomb’, the story of Private George Ramage at Ypres in 1915, the key sources included a multivolume diary written by Ramage which is kept in the Manuscript Collections of the National Library of Scotland (NLS) in Edinburgh. This story also uses biographical information about Ramage researched by NLS staff.
The regimental diaries of the Gordon Highlanders were also consulted for Ramage’s story and for ‘Hell’s Orchestra’, the story of Private William Wilcock at Loos in 1915. The key source for Wilcock’s story is his diary, which is kept at the Gordon Highlanders Museum and Archive in Aberdeen. In addition, the story uses biographical research carried out by archive staff and volunteers.
‘Fire in the Sea’, the story of Sir Angus Cunninghame-Graham at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, uses sources including a memoir and correspondence kept in the Manuscript Collections of the NLS. This memoir was published in edited form in 1979 by Famedram/Northern Books. Entitled Random Naval Recollections, it spans an exciting career of almost fifty years in the navy of which the Battle of Jutland is but one moment.
Other sources used for ‘Fire in the Sea’ include The Great Dreadnought: The Strange Story of HMS Agincourt, the Mightiest Battleship of World War I by Richard Hough (Harper & Row, 1967); British Battleships 1914–1918 (1) The Early Dreadnoughts by Angus Konstam (Osprey, 2013); and The Dreadnought Project at www.dreadnoughtproject.org (2013).
‘A Hasty Retreat’, the story of Mary Lee Milne, Dr Inglis and the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in Romania in 1916, uses sources including the journals of Milne, kept at the NLS Manuscript Collections, as well as the article ‘The Dobruja Retreat’, published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1918. This story also draws upon biographical information researched by staff at the NLS. This story has been radically simplified and the name ‘Viktor’ given to an unnamed Serbian soldier.
Other sources for ‘A Hasty Retreat’ include Dr Elsie Inglis by Frances Balfour (Doran, 1919); Elsie Inglis: the woman with the torch by Eva Shaw McLaren (Macmillan, 1920); In the service of life: the story of Elsie Inglis and the Scottish Women’s Hospitals by Leah Leneman (Mercat, 1994); and Between the Lines: Letters and Diaries from Elsie Inglis’s Russian Unit by Audrey Fawcett Cahill (Pentland, 1999).
The key sources for ‘Flight of the Black Cat’, the story of Captain Ian Henderson of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and Royal Flying Corps, include the private correspondence and papers of Henderson and his immediate family kept at the Archive Collection of the Royal Air Force at Hendon in London. In addition, the classic memoir Sagittarius Rising by former RFC pilot Cecil Lewis (Frontline, 2009) contains important references to Ian Henderson, as does Royal Flying Corps Head Quarters, 1914–1918 by Maurice Baring (G Bell, 1920).
Other primary sources consulted include the papers and correspondence of Sir David Henderson, kept in the Manuscript Collections of the NLS, as well as copies of the regimental diaries of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders held at the Archives and Special Collections of the Mitchell Library in Glasgow.
Further sources for the story of the Hendersons and the RFC include The Royal Flying Corps in World War One by Ralph Barker (Robinson, 2002); No Empty Chairs: The Short and Heroic Lives of the Young Aviators Who Fought and Died in the First World War by Ian Mackersey (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2012); and Fighter Heroes of WWI: The extraordinary story of the pioneering airmen of the Great War by Joshua Levine (HarperCollins, 2009).
More generally, the author consulted a number of other texts about the war, including the The Great War by Corelli Barnett (Park Lane Press, 1979) and various entries in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
For anyone who wants to understand the impact of the war on Scotland, and vice versa, The Flowers of the Forest: Scotland and the First World War by Trevor Royle (Birlinn, 2007) and Scottish Voices from the Great War by Derek Young (Tempus, 2006) are essential reading.
The lines of poetry by Wilfed Owen quoted in the introduction are from Apologia pro Poemate Meo (In Defence of My Poetry) written upon Owen’s release from Craiglockhart Military Hospital, Edinburgh, in November 1917. It was taken from Wilfred Owen: The War Poems, edited by Jon Stallworthy, (Chatto & Windus, 1994). For more information about Wilfred Owen, visit www.wilfredowen.org.uk.
The lines of poetry by Ewart Alan Mackintosh are from Recruiting, a poem Mackintosh wrote in response to an army recruiting poster whose ‘patriotic’ drive to entice more young men to their deaths in the war angered him. It is taken from War: The Liberator, and other pieces, with a memoir by Ewart Alan Mackintosh (John Lane, 1918).
Any genuine omissions or errors regarding appropriate acknowledgement and usage of source material will be made good in future editions.
The author would like to thank staff (and volunteers) at the NLS, the RAF Museum archive, the Gordon Highlanders Museum, the Mitchell Library and the ‘Edinburgh’s War’ project at Edinburgh City Libraries/Edinburgh University. Among the many individuals who informed my thinking or contributed their time, advice and/or assistance to various aspects of this book and related work I would like to thank Alison Metcalfe, Bryan Legate, Jesper Ericsson, Tess Maclean, Bert Innes, Alistair McEwen, Beverley Casebow, Andrew Simmons, Lindsey Fraser and the editorial team at Birlinn, and illustrator extraordinaire Chris Brown. Thanks also to Faither and Uncle John.
Allan Burnett, January 2014
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