The Edwardians

by Roy Hattersley

  Perhaps the venture would not have fared so well had it not been for Ernest Claremont, the third partner in the enterprise who, because his name did not appear on the radiator grill of the motor cars, is largely forgotten. He kept the dreamers’ feet on the ground. As they grew more enthusiastic about producing the perfect motor car, he continually reminded them that there would be no perfection without commercial viability. His policy was set out to an annual shareholders’ meeting. The Rolls-Royce Company was determined ‘not to attract attention by the payment of large dividends, but to build up a solid business and effect the complete security of the capital invested in it’.11

  Despite Claremont’s prudence, there were some difficult days before the decade closed. Once or twice the banks had to come to the rescue. And there was a moment when it seemed that Rolls-Royce would be taken over by a Canadian adventurer called Max Aitken. But for most of the time things went well – perhaps too well. Charles Rolls liked an adventurous life and with the business running almost as smoothly as Henry Royce’s engines, he increasingly turned to aviation, a passion which he financed by his work in the motor trade.

  Rolls’s aerial ambitions had originally been built around balloons. During a flight above South London in 1901 he had the idea of ‘getting up a balloon club’.12 By 1906, the Gas Light and Coke Company had laid a pipeline to the Hurlingham Club so that the exclusive gathering of enthusiasts could make an ascent each Saturday. To avoid the monotony of marvelling at the same panoramic view each week, Rolls had a balloon tender fitted to his Silver Ghost and rose above whichever part of the county took his fancy. As soon as aeroplanes were a practical prospect, balloons lost their charm. For Rolls, powered flight had two irresistible attractions. It was dangerous and it was being pioneered by the arrangement of competitions.

  The first manned flight passed almost unnoticed in Britain. On 19 December 1903 the Daily Mail recorded, towards the bottom of an inside page, what it quaintly called the achievement of a ‘Balloonless Airship’.

  Messrs Wilbur and Orville Wright of Ohio, yesterday successfully experimented with a flying machine in Kittyhawk, North Carolina. The machine had no balloon attachment and derives its force from propellers worked by a small engine. In the face of a wind blowing twenty-one miles an hour, the machine flew three miles at the rate of eight miles an hour and descended to a point selected in advance.13

  Three years later, Alberto Santos-Dumont flew two hundred yards in twenty-one seconds. It amounted to very little when compared with the Wright brothers’ achievement, but it benefited from the fact that Lord Northcliffe noticed. His excitement was attributable to his apparent ignorance of what had happened at Kittyhawk back in 1903. That was one of the reasons why he upbraided his journalists. ‘It does not matter how far he has flown. He has shown what can be done. In a year’s time, mark my words, that fellow will be flying over here from France. Britain is no longer an island. Nothing so important has happened for a very long time. We must get hold of this thing and make it our own.’14

  Northcliffe was always prepared to make news in order that his newspapers could report it, but he was genuinely excited by the idea of flight. Personal enthusiasm combined with instinct for a good story to produce a determination to take sole command and control of the flying business in Britain. His method of achieving that end was, like all his schemes, based on the assumption that money opens all doors. So he announced that he would award aviation prizes – £1,000 for the first flight across the English Channel from Calais to Dover and £10,000 for a complete flight from London to Manchester. Punch offered the same amount for a flight to Mars. The scepticism proved misplaced.

  For two years Charles Rolls resisted the temptation to abandon everything else in favour of flying. As late as 1908 he gave up his place in an international balloon race because duty called him to the Road Congress in Paris15 where he spoke of the Effect of Road Surfaces on Motor Vehicles. But it was his last public involvement with motors and motoring. Too much was happening in the air for him to remain content with four wheels on the ground – much of it under the supervision of Lord Northcliffe.

  The Daily Mail decided to lionise the Wright brothers – who, despite being American, it set up as clear-cut Anglo-Saxon rivals to Santos-Dumont. They visited Northcliffe in France, reinforced by President Theodore Roosevelt’s declaration that the Daily Mail’s prizes had increased interest in flying on both sides of the Atlantic. Interest in Britain was heightened to the point at which King Edward VII made a detour in order to meet the brothers at Northcliffe’s French retreat. When they made a second visit in 1909, A. J. Balfour, Tory leader and until 1906 Prime Minister, was there to greet them. Another guest on that occasion reported that Wilbur Wright ‘soars up with evident ease’.16

  Many aviation prizes were established in the years before the Great War. They ranged from Autocar’s £500 for a British aero engine, to Le Matin’s £4,000 for the first flight from Paris to London. Northcliffe was merely following a trend. But he had a popular newspaper with which to publicise his patronage in Britain. It contained the first exclusive interview with Orville Wright, in which the sensation of flying was described as ‘infinitely more exhilarating than motoring, easier and smoother’.17 At a dinner given in honour of the Wrights, Rolls described flying’s attractions differently. ‘No dust, police traps or taxes.’18 But when at last he was taken up by Wilbur Wright, his reaction was less prosaic. ‘Once clear of the ground the feeling of security was perfect.’ He was part of ‘a new world conquered by man’.19

  At the Wrights dinner Rolls mentioned, perhaps inappropriately, the military potential of flight. The Daily Mail reporter who had telegraphed London with the news of the earlier Kittyhawk flights had been sufficiently prescient to add, ‘Aeroplane a war machine. …’20 Northcliffe had ignored the prophecy until Balfour’s visit to his house in France, when one of the party had again raised the military potential of the Wright brothers’ achievement. He then telegraphed the Secretary of State for War urging immediate action, adding that, as a result of Britain’s failure in the field, he was ‘constantly being chaffed by foreign gentlemen’.21 No doubt his embarrassment was increased when foreign gentlemen won both the aviation prizes which bore his name. On 25 July 1909, Louis Blériot landed his biplane on wooded ground between Dover Castle and the sea. Northcliffe, putting the promotion of his papers above his natural chauvinism, arranged (at barely twenty-four hours’ notice) a lunch at the Savoy. The Daily Mail reported that it was attended by ‘all the important people in the country’.22

  Bleriot’s aeroplane, in need of only minimal repair, was brought up from Dover and put on display in Selfridge’s department store. Amongst the thousands of visitors who filed past was Claude Graham-White – like Rolls and Blériot, himself a motor car salesman. He was entranced. Next month he attended the Rheims Aviation Meeting and met Blériot, from whom he bought an as yet unbuilt aeroplane. Graham-White spent six weeks at Blériot’s factory helping with the construction of his purchase. When it was finished, he taxied it out of the hangar and, without any instruction, took off and flew successfully for twenty minutes. He then made a perfect landing.

  Graham-White hoped to open an aviation school in Britain, a project which he thought was more likely to prosper if it could be announced in the blaze of publicity which would surround his receipt of the London to Manchester Aviation Prize. Money seems to have been no object. When he decided that his Blériot XII was not powerful enough to stay the course, he bought a bigger plane from Henri Farman, another pioneer aviator and aircraft builder. At 5.19 a.m. on the morning of Saturday 10 April, 1910, he took off from Park Royal in North London and, after circling a gas-holder near Wormwood Scrubs for the benefit of the Royal Aero Club referee, made for the London and North-Western railway line which he proposed to follow to Rugby, the first stop on the journey to Manchester which no aeroplane could complete in a single flight.

  He landed smoothly, but the undercarriage stuck on a hillock. Whil
e his plane was being repaired, Graham-White talked to reporters. His highest altitude had been 1,100 feet and his average speed had been between thirty and forty miles an hour. ‘It was wretchedly cold all the way and I was cold at the start. My eyes suffered towards the end and my fingers were quite numbed.’ Ladies in his admiring audience, led by Lady Denbigh, lent him their fur wraps.

  On the second leg of the flight, the north wind blew so hard that it twice blew Graham-White’s aircraft round so that it pointed back towards London. But he struggled on until the engine stalled. Although it started again after a 100-feet glide it was impossible to go on that night with an unreliable engine. So there was another landing in another field and another wait while his supporting team found him. Graham-White went to bed in a nearby farmhouse. His mechanics rectified the fault but forgot to tie his plane down. It was blown over in the gale and its upper wing half torn off. The first attempt to win the prize was over. Graham-White returned to Park Royal certain that on his second attempt he would succeed.

  When he arrived back in London he was given the bad news. Louis Paulhan, a Frenchman, meant to make it a competition. When he had heard that Graham-White had begun, but not completed, the flight to Manchester, he had abandoned the exhibition of German dirigibles in Cologne and left at once for London. Paulhan also possessed a Farman-designed aeroplane. He broke it down into its constituent parts so that it could be transported on the boat train. It arrived on 27 April and was immediately reassembled. On the same day, Graham-White confirmed with his mechanics that his plane was fit to fly. After an early afternoon test flight, he went to bed. He would need all his strength for the race which began next morning.

  The race began that evening. At half-past five, Louis Paulhan – without waiting to test his plane’s airworthiness in a trial flight – took off and headed for Hampstead Cemetery where, standing on a grave, the Royal Aero Club Referee waved him on his way. Twenty-seven minutes later, Graham-White was wakened and told that Paulhan was in the air. He was ‘greatly vexed’ by the Frenchman’s unsporting behaviour but confident that he could catch and overtake him. He took off at half-past six, cheered on his way by hundreds of supporters who, having read the evening paper, had hurried to Park Royal to see the man whom they expected would, next day, become Britain’s champion in a contest to decide which country ruled the air. The London to Manchester Aviation Prize had become a race for national glory.

  Graham-White covered almost sixty miles before dark. Then he landed at Roade in Northamptonshire with the intention of continuing his flight at first light on the following day. His plane was almost immediately surrounded by a crowd, mostly made up of people who had looked for two aeroplanes approaching from the south. Unfortunately for the patriots among them, one plane had passed overhead almost an hour before the other. Paulhan was almost sixty miles ahead. There was only one way in which Graham-White could hope to win. After pausing only to sign autographs by the light of bicycle lamps, he set out on the first night flight in aviation history.

  Friends in motor cars drove along the road to Manchester, hoping that he would follow their headlights to victory. He made good progress as far as Nuneaton. Then his engine failed again and he was forced to land at Polesworth. It was just after four o’clock on a cold spring morning, but three thousand people had gathered round the plane by the time that he left, an hour later, on what he hoped would be the final leg of the race. The high wind in the Trent Valley confounded him again. When he landed at Whittington he was told that Paulhan was already in Manchester. Gallantly he announced the bad news to the crowd which had hoped to cheer him on his way and, like a true Englishman, offered his sincere congratulations to the man who had beaten him.

  Paulhan had tried to fly above the wind, but his hopes of ‘finding a calmer patch’ were not realised. He minimised neither the difficulties nor the dangers which he faced. ‘I was almost torn from my seat. I had to hold on to the controls with all my strength.’ However, both his engine and his nerve had held out, and the mechanics who travelled north on a special LNER train were not needed. Paradoxically, by using the railway to provide his support, Paulhan was able to gain most of the publicity as well as win the prize. Journalists who had travelled with his entourage had telegraphed news of his progress from every station.

  Overnight the race became a sensation. In New York, the Evening Post described the gladiatorial contest as ‘not the greatest of all the century but the greatest of all time’. The Times employed deep purple prose to describe how Manchester reacted to the whisper that a signalman had telephoned Piccadilly Station with the news that an aeroplane was five miles down the line.

  Every eye was directed to the sky-line of houses and trees to the south. The eastern horizon was crimson with the light of threatening sunrise. Overhead the sky was dull and grey and a light cold drizzle was driving along a south westerly wind …

  Suddenly there was a scattered volley of breathless exclamations. ‘Here he is. Paulhan is coming!’ Over the tops of the trees appeared, small and faint at first, but rapidly increasing in size, the now familiar outline of an aeroplane. From the crowd arose cheer after cheer. No one cared then whether the aviator who approached was a Frenchman or Englishman. It was enough that he was a hero of the air.23

  As with Blériot so with Paulhan. The Daily Mail organised an immediate celebration lunch at the Savoy. It was attended by such notables as H. G. Wells and Hiram Maxim, the eponymous inventor of the latest model in machine guns. Graham-White was presented with a ‘100 Guinea Cup’ by way of consolation and (because the British love a gallant loser) became in the folklore, one of the pioneers of aviation. It was generally agreed to have been a good day for powered flight and flying. Before the lunch was over it was to become an even better one as the result of a near-catastrophe in Germany, about which the guests were to read on the following morning.

  A Daily Mail reporter, influenced by Northcliffe’s earlier passion for balloons, had been a passenger on the maiden flight of the massive Deutschland Zeppelin VII. He had enjoyed the trip so much that he had flown with the dirigible on its second outing. It crashed after ‘the swerving, diving, rain-beaten airship fought inch by inch’24 to stay in the air. No lives were lost, but the combination of Paulhan’s triumph and Count Zeppelin’s near tragedy confirmed Northcliffe’s belief that the future lay with aeroplanes – and that he should play a major part in their development. At the end of the London-to-Manchester lunch he announced his sponsorship of a new £10,000 prize. The ‘Great Cross-Country Race’ would convince the general public that the future belonged to the aeroplane and the Daily Mail.

  There were disasters and death in every form of early flying. Charles Rolls, who became a national hero after completing a ninety-minute non-stop flight to France and back, was killed in a crash-landing at Bournemouth while giving a flying display as part of the resort’s Centenary Celebration. A few months earlier, he had asked to be relieved of his duties at Rolls-Royce, which he found ‘irksome’. The company agreed, although it was already facing the strain of temporarily losing the services of Henry Royce. The Board of Directors had required him to take a holiday because of the fear that overwork was jeopardising his future and, therefore, the company’s long-term prospects. The two different reasons for the men’s absence from the motor industry reveal a great deal about their partnership. The reaction to Charles Rolls’s death was equally indicative of public attitudes towards flying. He had made a glorious sacrifice in a noble cause. The cause was Britain’s future leadership of the world’s most exciting innovation – and the increased circulation of the Daily Mail.

  Northcliffe did all he could to build interest in ‘the first great cross-country contest between the champions of various nations’. His papers exalted the character of the pilots as much as they praised the quality of the planes. Both ‘freak machines’ and ‘inexperienced airmen’ were excluded from the contest. ‘Personality’, Mail readers were told, ‘is the secret of success in an aerial contest
.’ It was proud to be associated with all the ‘merry, careless, cigarette-smoking airmen’.

  It took the Royal Aero Club a year to devise the rules and work out the stopping places on each leg of the race – Hendon, Harrogate, Newcastle, Edinburgh and almost every other large town in Great Britain. Nobody called it an imitation of the Century Road Race which had been contested over the same distance. The Daily Mail published biographies of the twenty-four accepted competitors and a race card not unlike one which might be obtained at Ascot or Newmarket.

  The general public was invited to attend the staggered take-off at Hendon on 22 July 1911. A ticket to the enclosure cost two and sixpence for an individual and five shillings for a car. If the Daily Mail is to be believed, the crowd was ‘vast beyond reckoning’. The enthusiasm was just as great at each of the places at which the pilots landed after the completion of each leg of the race. On the last day of the race the enthusiasm at Hendon was irrepressible at finishing-post as well as starting-line.

  Gathered before midnight, an army of sightseers passed through the black night and grey dawn. Within a mile of the aerodrome, men and women slept by the roadside, heedless of the throng which passed onwards chanting choruses. There were native French too. From one group encamped there arose the cry, Vive la France, whenever the click of tools from a shed punctuated the oft-repeated singing of the Marseillaise.25

  The French were right to celebrate. André Beaumont, the favourite from the start, had won. Britain, said the flying fraternity, echoing Northcliffe ten years earlier, was no longer an island. It was, however, still a great maritime nation, which earned its living and safeguarded its borders because of the special relationship it enjoyed with ships and the sea.