The Man With His Head in the Clouds

by Richard O. Smith

  (The German Ocean was a former name for the North Sea until Germany’s persistent military misdemeanours - the nation spending the first half of the 20th Century on Europe’s naughty step - lost the country its eponymous ocean when it was renamed the North Sea.)

  Startled agricultural labourers suspicious that Sadler’s balloon was an unfriendly alien appear as a leitmotiv during his landing episodes. Presumably such lone labourers were the equivalent of those Texan rednecks proclaiming their conviction to cheap documentary filmmakers that they were abducted and probed by visiting aliens. Sadler, like earthbound aliens, appears to have regularly picked upon a lone village idiot, thus guaranteeing that the idiot’s story, free of confirming witnesses, would not be believed when later recounted in the village pub.

  A few days later, more of the story emerged, and it was apparent that Sadler and his companion had been the architects of their own misfortune. The Whitehall Evening Post of 10 May 1785 states: “in addition to our previous report of Mr Sadler, we are assured as to the authenticity of this account”. The landing may have been sudden because the two intrepid aeronauts were “intimidated at the sight of the seas”. The looming vast greyness of the North Sea appears to have panicked William Windham - not the first time an MP has experienced a panic and instigated a U-turn over the prospect of continental Europe.

  Spying the North Sea coastline ahead, Windham started to randomly throw items overboard in the mistaken belief this would help facilitate an impending landing. And there was a lot of ballast to throw overboard. Sadler had packed the balloon with over 300lbs, which led the newspaper to conclude they were “planning a longer excursion than any of his predecessors”. Rumour had it that the pair had intended to reach the continent - a pioneering accomplishment if it had succeeded. The Times was adamant in its speculation that this was the intention: “By the course they went it was expected that they would reach the continent the next day, and if the wind continued as it then was, they will descend in Flanders,” it announced, before concluding with outrageous hubris, “unless they should be inclined to go further.”

  The reporter claimed to have observed evidence: “Mr Sadler and co. took out provisions for a two day voyage.” The General Evening Post asserted that “it was the intention of Mr Sadler to remain in the atmosphere longer than anyone has yet done”, citing again the huge onboard ballast as evidence for this supposition. Certainly the ballast, the early morning take-off (Sadler typically preferred early afternoon ascents) to maximise daylight and the extra provisions are circumstantial evidence to support this theory, though it remains speculation. Such an attempt would offset any lingering disappointment over Sadler becoming a non-runner in the cross Channel race a few months earlier. It may seem odd that in selecting a co-pilot for such a lengthy journey he didn’t pick someone with more ballooning experience - but Windham would have been likely to provide the crucial funds.

  Yet, with considerable ballast aboard, the pair pressed on with their sudden decision to land, and not risk crossing the German Ocean. Another reason for Sadler suddenly attempting to crash land could well have been a driving wind, thus forcing an inflight reappraisal of the risks provided by the North Sea. Once over open sea, landing would almost certainly have proved deadly.

  But the Whitehall Evening Post also reported that Sadler discovered his valve was malfunctioning “with the pipe not discharging the gas fast enough”. Sadler forced as much air as he could out of the envelope, while probably bellowing at Windham to stop jettisoning any more sandbags. Hitting the ground at a much faster descent speed than Sadler knew was safe, they bounced into the air again as the wind sent their envelope back skywards. This same procedure occurred several times, before Sadler shouted to Windham to jump clear of the basket the next time there were close enough to earth.

  This they both accomplished, fortuitously sustaining only superficial injuries, escaping from the basket. The balloon immediately surged upwards and rapidly departed out to sea.

  The pair eventually found themselves on terra firma only a few miles short of the coastline. With a broken valve, depreciating provisions, driving wind and panicked misunderstanding of how ballast worked, Windham’s earlier decision to write a will had, at one point, looked like a remarkably expedient one.

  A few days later the balloon was seen again, bobbing on the surface of the North Sea where it was rescued by a passing schooner. Under the minimalist headline “BALLOON”, the owner of the ship bound for Sunderland announced its discovery (and profitable cargo) by placing the following advertisement in several newspapers: “Mr Sadler’s balloon taken up in the sea. The owner, by applying to John Blunt, Cross Lane, St Mary at Hill, Thames Street, may have information thereof.” Never has an omitted word been so heavily implied: “Reward”.

  Despite the accident, such was the closeness of the relationship between Sadler and Windham that Sadler’s son was christened Windham after the politician, who in turn was appointed as godfather. Windham, an Old Etonian and a disturbingly unreformed supporter of bull baiting, did not perish in his balloon flights with Sadler, but instead had an honourable death in 1810 - dying of injuries sustained in rescuing books from a library fire.

  But if Sadler had made a powerful ally in the MP, he succeeded in making equally powerful enemies: Oxford University among them. Windham later wrote: “I hope for the advantage of Sadler who I really consider as a prodigy. And who is oppressed to the disgrace of the University, I believe from pique and jealousy of his superior science.” As we shall see, other potent enemies were to follow; the Royal Navy literally threw him out of Portsmouth, even though he had provided them with vastly more efficient re-engineered firepower. Lord Nelson had earlier gone public in supporting Sadler, his cannon and rifle designs thought to be instrumental in enabling the British to defeat Napoleon. If it wasn’t for Sadler, we could now all be eating croissants and pains au chocolat for breakfast. Oh. We do anyway.

  ***

  But for now Sadler was a household name. Everyone, regardless of status, would have known about James Sadler in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. And therein lies his uniquely classless appeal. He was an egalitarian fascination: democratic in an undemocratic age. As a Lincolnshire newspaper eloquently described his popularity across the spectrum of class in 1811: “Spectators flock from the titled Peer to the humble cabbage seller to see Sadler”.

  Another observer, possibly perched on one of the many trees used by onlookers to gain a vantage-point at his second manned flight in 1784, wrote that Sadler was “watched by a surprising concourse of people of all ranks; the roads, streets, fields, trees, buildings, and towers of the parts adjacent being crowded beyond description.” Sadler was not only always a hot ticket in whatever town he visited, but also a unique ticket - one that had equal appeal among all classes, genders, ages and intellects.

  A sign of Sadler’s celebrity, and confirmation of the public’s affection for him, occurred moments after he had survived yet another dangerous flight. Obviously suffering too many bruises and suspected fractures, and realising that the description of his antics as “death-defying” would eventually lose its second word, he was to give up flying a few months later. A crash landing in Heckington, Lincolnshire, in 1811 happened with such an impact that Sadler was bundled out of the balloon seconds before it rose upwards again with his stranded co-pilot still aboard. Losing a shoe in the crash, Sadler approached the local miller and “begged if he could borrow a shoe”. “No,” came the unambiguous response. The mean miller would not sell him a shoe, even if he was the intrepid celebrated aeronaut. Sadler offered him a generous shilling, which the miller refused. According to the local Lincolnshire paper of October 1811: “The inhuman boor refused seven shillings for a shoe, taking more, though it was not worth two pence.” The profiteering perpetrator was, however, “recognised amongst the crowd and forced to refund amidst the execrations of all present.” Hence the mon
ey-grubbing miller was fingered by Sadler, and the mob forced him to pay back his exploitative gains. A vignette which portrays the level of affection the public held for Sadler, even if there were individuals like a Lincolnshire miller immune to the aeronaut’s celebrity appeal.

  In a pre-photographic age, Sadler would have been recognised due to his portrait being sold as a mass-produced sheet of paper. Although formal portraits can be idealised images, they do at least give us a glimpse of him - captured at different ages in his career. Sadler flew well into his fifties, which for the early nineteenth century would be quite an age to perform daredevil stunts with almost guaranteed violent crash landings. As, indeed, it would today - at any age.

  Mass-produced print of Sadler, 1812 (Library of Congress, Washington DC)

  Portraits serve to embalm time, and they at least allow us to glimpse the man’s physical characteristics. He always looks kindly - proud without bordering upon arrogance or hubris. Maybe that’s how the portrait was supposed to portray him. But it’s an image that my research has not contravened. Maybe when Sadler was rejected by such powerful enemies as the Royal Navy and Oxford University it was because he was an uneducated pastry cook, a man devoid of breeding or education. Maybe he represents the pivotal point in history where this changed, ushering in if not an egalitarian, then at least a meritocratic approach alongside all the usual passes to success: status, opportunity issued by breeding, nobility and education. The eighteenth-century public and today’s certainly shared the same affection and taste for a risk taker.

  Although an American might once have observed that dinner parties are what the British do instead of having friends (it’s OK, since he was an American, there’s a high statistical likelihood he’s been shot by now), Sadler certainly would have appeared on the dinner party A-List of his period. He was written about and praised by John Constable and Lord Nelson; he was revered by his self-confessed fan Percy Shelley; and he so impressed Dr, Samuel Johnson that the Good Doctor practically rose from his death bed to meet him and present him with a vital artefact.

  The poet Samuel Westley wrote to the composer Vincent Novello in 1812 informing him, “he has puffed my deserter’s meditations to the size of Mr Sadler’s balloon” - showing, even incomprehensibly, that Sadler was in the public’s consciousness as a household reference. His contacts book must have been the envy of royalty.

  Indeed, Sadler was even granted an audience with the queen. On 2 August 1814 he was invited to meet Queen Charlotte, the wife of “mad” King George III, and her princesses. After dining in the grand Mayfair house of Princess Sophia of Gloucester, “they returned to the queen’s palace where Mr Sadler was introduced to them and gave a full account of his aerial voyage sixteen miles beyond Gravesend to Her Highness.” Sadler had also brought along his balloon basket to show to the Queen, and demonstrated his pilot tasks. “Sadler explained to Her Majesty how he travelled and his operations within the balloon,” revealed The Morning Post.

  ***

  In the latter half of the eighteenth century, the biggest celebrity in town, the one everyone aspired to pleasing most and whose acerbic tongue and pen was most feared - was the Good Doctor. Dr. Samuel Johnson spelt the word “balloon” incorrectly, with only one “o”. He should have used the dictionary - if he had one about. He genuinely refused to incorporate any French words into his landmark two-volume 1755 dictionary; such was the extent of the famed lexicographer’s dislike of the French. The words “champagne” and “bourgeois” were deemed unworthy of entry, omitted as a fait accompli by the enfant terrible of words. Johnson, we have seen, was previously a balloon sceptic, branding aeronauts as showmen and charlatans intent on fleecing a susceptible public vicariously aroused by blanket media coverage. Balloons were portrayed as relentlessly modern, representative of mankind’s ability to go onwards and upwards, in both a literal and figurative sense. But these accomplishments were often merely filled with hot air (yes, also in a figurative and literal sense). And Johnson aimed his verbal vitriol onto them at an early stage. The Prime Minister of the day may have taken time out to see a balloonist sail over his Downing Street garden in the 1780s, but Johnson pointed out that anyone prepared to be distracted by such side shows in the sky was a “lackbrain clotpoll”. It is not necessary to consult the dictionary - his or anyone else’s - to decipher those two words.

  And although becoming increasing curmudgeonly as he aged was a vital part of the Johnson brand (his hometown of Lichfield in Staffordshire is bizarrely included in Johnson’s dictionary and defined as “city of the dead”), it doesn’t deflect from the fact he had a point. He also defined oats as being food for horses in England, but the staple diet of the people in Scotland. And when a benefactor of his precious dictionary refused to provide him with promised funding, Johnson merely exacted his revenge via the lexicographical route and defined the word patron as “commonly a wretch”. The word dull is simply explained as “to make dictionaries”.

  Johnson had been initially intrigued by balloons, even enthralled by them, declaring that they had the potential “to bring down the state of regions yet unexplored”. He imagined “the earth a mile below me, without a stronger impression on my brain than I should like to feel.” But he quickly became agnostic to the widespread belief that balloons were the force for the future, before offering open hostility to aeronautics, even thundering in a 1783 letter: “I know not that they can be of any particular use.” Sadler was to singlehandedly rotate Johnson’s view.

  Later, only a few weeks from his deathbed, the Good Doctor donated a scientific instrument to Sadler for aeronautic usage: an expensive barometer. When losing altitude at an alarming rate over a stormy Bristol Channel with darkness approaching, Sadler was forced to hurl Dr. Johnson’s precious gift overboard as a life-saving attempt to jettison ballast and regain height. Sadler later lamented that this act had caused one of the greatest heartaches of his life. One newspaper, The Caledonian Mercury, reported that Sadler had earlier refused an offer of 200 guineas for Johnson’s gift.

  Other celebrities of the age scrambled to embrace fashionable flight. The Lakeland poets, who dressed and acted like a Camden-based indie rock band strutting around the Lake District, admitted inspiration from aeronautical pioneers, often adopting the balloon-as-metaphor approach in their work. Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared balloons “uplifting and terrifying”, which is an accurate description (although he may have been at the laughing gas again, as was his proclivity). Indeed, it is debatable whether Sadler ever got higher than the Lakeland poets with their nitrous oxide habit.

  Lake poet William Wordsworth begins his 1817 poem Peter Bell with the image of a balloon boat (wooden boats being the forerunners to later, crucially lighter, wicker baskets).

  There’s something in a flying horse,

  There’s something in a huge balloon;

  But through the clouds I’ll never float

  Until I have a little Boat,

  Shaped like the crescent-moon.

  And now I ‘have’ a little Boat

  In shape a very crescent-moon

  Fast through the clouds my boat can sail;

  But if perchance your faith should fail,

  Look up - and you shall see me soon!

  His sister Dorothy was not exempt from catching the then commonly circulating balloonomania infection, and eagerly wrote about the subject in her capacity as a compulsive letter writer. Twice a day she would make the hilly eight-mile round trip on foot between Dove Cottage in Grasmere to the post office at Ambleside to check if she had received any correspondence - the equivalent of today’s compulsive email checking. (Though imagine her reaction after enduring an eight-mile walk in characteristic Lake District rain, only to discover that the two items she collected were both junk mail letters offering cheap Viagra.)

  In Hilary Term 1811, while reading chemistry at University College, Oxford and experimen
ting as a side-line in the then fledgling science of electricity, Percy Shelley witnessed Sadler fly. Inspired by what he had seen, Shelley enthused: “Why are we so ignorant of the interior of Africa? Why do we not despatch intrepid aeronauts to cross it in every direction to survey the whole peninsula in a few weeks? The shadow of the first balloon as it glided over that unhappy country would virtually emancipate every slave, and would annihilate slavery forever.”

  Later that same term Shelley was expelled from Oxford, sent down for distributing his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism, and for conducting a prank in the High Street where he tiptoed towards townswomen whilst they were distracted in conversation with each other whereupon he swapped over new-born babies in their prams. Women, eh? You never know what’s going to upset them.

  Oddly, whereas the period from 1780 to 1820 is packed with balloon enthusing celebrities, famous people seem less prone to “come out” as balloon aficionados in modern times. With, that is, the notable exception of Richard Branson.

  Virgin on Disaster: Sex and Phobias

  I lost my virginity in a Lincolnshire farmer’s field. This is not uncommon in Lincolnshire, although what was less typical for the county was that my experience involved a female human, not a farm animal.

  No, it was not with Charlotte Jones, but it was within view of her house. It was also in a cornfield, so like most occurrences in my life the action took place on ground level. Amazingly a hot air balloon contributed to the experience.