The Sea View Has Me Again

by Patrick Wright

  Some of the bungalows may indeed have been strange and makeshift improvisations, but vacant building plots also limited the attractiveness of a claimed El Dorado that, even forty years later, would still be described as “a seaside resort in embryo”.50 The country house, originally known as Borstal Hall, never did become a hotel or boarding school. Indeed, by 1912, George Ramuz himself had moved into the unsold mansion, which would, in the words of a local historian, prove liable both to military occupation, through both world wars, and also “to mysterious fires”, including the conflagration that finally cleared the site in 1948.51 In 1961, Ramuz’s son George, who had inherited the heavily mortgaged and still largely “unknown paradise” of Minster-on-Sea from his father, was interviewed by a local journalist who plainly thought the Ramuzes had made a terrible mess with their chaotic plotland strategies. “You don’t build a seaside resort in five minutes”,52 Ramuz countered defensively, when it was suggested that his failure to entice enough shopkeepers and other small purchasers from London into buying and then building on plots had blighted Sheppey’s chances of redevelopment for half a century. He admitted that the Minster scheme had been an “absolute flop” plagued by many difficulties: the lack of fast trains to Sheerness, the scarcity of fresh water, untraced buyers whose plots lay empty for years and even decades before falling back to Ramuz, the fact that the targeted Londoners “didn’t like it”, the squatters and gypsies — more “pikeys” perhaps — who had to be removed and seen off when they tried to claim squatter’s rights over unused plots. Having inherited a paradise that wouldn’t stop resembling a marginal, unplanned and gap-filled shanty town, he concluded with an English formulation that might have interested Uwe Johnson as he later tried to figure out how Sheppey’s connoisseurs of environmental degradation categorised failed places. According to Ramuz, Minster-on-Sea had turned out to be “a dead end”.53 Hundreds of plots initially intended for self-building holiday makers had been (or were destined to be) compulsorily purchased by the council or sold into the hands of conventional developers by the time George Ramuz died in 1966, leaving an estate valued at £16,587. “Minster-on-Sea” plainly still hadn’t happened five years later. In an editorial at the end of the year, the Sheerness Times Guardian admitted that “Sheppey is like a mini Costa Brava, where not only are the hotels unfinished, they are unbuilt”.54 In Hardy & Ward’s more generous judgement, Minster-on-Sea had been “So long in the making that it never quite made it”.55

  12. ROLLS WITHOUT ROYCE: LEYSDOWN ALOFT

  And the roads in Jerichow-Nord were built strangely wider in various places. And behind the wall of barracks buildings there was more land fenced off than you’d need for drill grounds. The fences ran for miles to the west. And the wide roads went on and on, they never stopped. And for a long time the children of Jerichow would learn the wrong word for air-plane, they learned: fighter, and they learned: bomber.

  — Anniversaries I, p. 409.

  I dreamed that I was standing in a very large meadow, situated in a landscape which I did not recognize. In this meadow a monoplane landed, crashing rather badly some fifty yards away.

  — J.W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time, 1934, p. 51.

  Shortly before midday on Easter Monday 1909, a French inventor named Alfred Bellamy climbed into the car of the Daily Chronicle’s balloon outside the Crystal Palace at Sydenham Hill in south London. Only a few days earlier, he’d had to jettison bottles, plates, fruit, a chicken and probably also the basket containing the airborne lunch he had been enjoying with a business friend when his own balloon, L’Aviateur, in which they had floated up from Wandsworth gas works, suddenly plunged into a “very exciting” descent on a “quiet corner of Buckinghamshire”.1 This time, however, the Frenchman who had laughed so “heartily” as he told that story made a different mistake. Concerned about “buoyancy”, he decided at the last minute against allowing a “representative” of the Daily Chronicle to accompany him, and he lost his only two bags of externally placed ballast almost immediately as he struggled to disentangle the balloon from trees during his “clumsy” ascent.2 Although Bellamy was thought to have assessed the weather and abandoned his original intention of flying this comparatively small balloon to Holland, he was seen at about 12:30, passing low over the marshes to the west of the Medway. A man at Cliffe watched him, apparently jettisoning even more weight as the balloon trailed a ribbon advertising the Daily Chronicle over the village and then being swept up and out over the Isle of Sheppey by a sixty-mile-an-hour wind. The marshes were searched when nothing more was seen or heard of Bellamy, including those along the southern shore of the Isle of Sheppey. The truth, however, emerged a couple of days later. At about 2pm on the day of the flight, the Daily Chronicle’s balloon had been spotted by the skipper of a French steam trawler fishing on the Sandette bank some fourteen miles north of Calais.3 Captain Papotre, who had his nets down at the time, could only watch as the balloon passed his boat just above the water in driving wind and rain, and then crashed into a heavy sea not far away. Interviewed in Calais between fishing trips, he told a reporter for the Daily Chronicle that “even if the aeronaut had maintained his seat when the balloon struck, he would scarcely have been able to live out such a night”.4

  The late Monsieur Bellamy was not just a balloonist. There were also motorised inventions among the machines this forgotten engineer had tinkered into existence in the factory he rented on the Uxbridge Road in west London.5 His propeller-driven “hydroplane” floated on two canvas-decked canoes, and thousands had recently gathered on Hammersmith Bridge to watch it “tearing up and down the Thames”, belching flames and smoke but creating no discernible wash even when roaring along at forty miles an hour.6 As for his aeroplane, M. Bellamy, who had registered plans for a propeller-driven flying machine at the patent office in Paris in January 1903, had recently told reporters that he hoped soon to be making trial flights at Richmond but had so far been stymied by “the lack of any shed on a suitable ground”.7 That consideration alone might have encouraged the “intrepid Parisian”8 to glance down with a mixture of resentment and yearning as the wind swept him seaward over the Sheppey marshes, where a group of like-minded competitors were preparing to erect large tin sheds near an ancient farmhouse between Leysdown and Shellbeach.

  *

  The failure of the “on-Sea” scenario to unfold as easily as F.G. Wheatley and Son had promised in the first years of the twentieth century left this flat and no longer so disconnected stretch of coast open to other forms of exploitation. While the pioneering plotlanders were still awaiting the three-mile-long Marine Parade that never happened, the flat marshland reaching down towards Shellness was becoming famous for something quite different. “Altogether”, wrote the Eastern Daily Press on 23 April 1909, “signs are not wanting that Shellbeach will soon be the popular rendezvous for all whose inclinations tempt them aloft, as well as those who are merely curious to see others fly”.9 Thanks to an association known as the Aero Club, formed in 1901 by a company of amateur gentlemen-adventurers with an interest in ballooning, an area of marshland in this “out-of-the-world-place”10 would soon come to be recognised as “the birthplace of British aviation”.11 As Arthur Mee would predict years later, “in the long, long years to come, men will come to this place and say, ‘this is where it happened’”.12

  To some early observers, the project was just a posh boys’ jape. “A miscalculation would give them a bath”, so a report in the Daily Telegraph & Courier joked a week or two after the first successful flight: “The Swale, perhaps, is not an ideal bathing pool, but a ducking here would be in sight of Herne Bay, and that would remind one of a summer vacation”.13 Joking aside, however, respect was also considered due to the public-spirited engineers and would-be aviators who had stepped in with their private means as well as their own often “fantastic” looking contrivances to carry on with a dangerous project the War Office had chosen to abandon.

  Impatient with the fact that Britain was “distinctly b
ehind”14 America and France in the development of flying machines of the kind that, in December 1903, the Wright brothers had first coaxed off sandy ground near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Britain’s wealthy young exponents of “aero auto-mobilism” created a “flying ground” here in April 1909, using land at Shellbeach that the Aero Club acquired with the help of its wealthy members. The triangular site was found by Griffith Brewer, a balloonist and founding member. In 1908, he had become British patent agent to the Wright brothers and he knew that the Club must have a flying ground before the American innovators would license British construction of one of their flyers. Muswell Manor, the remote farmhouse that had previously served as the sales HQ of the Shellness and Leysdown Estate Company,15 was acquired as a club house by the Irish engineer Frank MacLean, a would-be airman who was also interested in astronomy and solar eclipses. “It is Land’s End”, so one visiting journalist would allege “and Muscle Manor [sic] is the last house in the world”.16 Writing in the Morning Post, the motoring correspondent Hugo Massac Buist described the manor house more appreciatively as “an exceedingly picturesque and comfortable building… a great part of it between four and five hundred years old”. Himself a member of the Aero Club, he enjoyed the “delightful contrast between the building and those ultra-moderns who now use it”.17

  The Aero Club launched its initiative after the War Office had stopped funding its own experiments with powered flight and rejected the Wright brothers’ offer of collaboration.18 It’s members set about creating a private “flying ground” and also a plane-building workshop run by the Battersea firm engaged as aeronautical engineers to the Aero Club. Having acquired their licence to build a first flying machine from Orville and Wilbur Wright, the Short Brothers would expand their operations rapidly as they added the manufacture of six individually commissioned Wright flyers to the seven or so other types of plane on which they were also working. A grassy “street” of workshops (“a ‘village’ of tin sheds”19) is said to have gone up in no time at all (“like mushrooms, they almost spring up in a night”20), thanks partly to a south London manufacturer of iron buildings, who was happy to add “aeroplane garages” to his existing offering of tin chapels, school rooms, golf and tennis pavilions, bungalows, and more modest metal huts for shepherds and keepers. Indeed, it was speculated that W. Harbrow’s hangars of timber, felt and galvanised iron, in which women were employed to stitch and sew the men’s flying machines into existence, would soon be surrounded by a new clutch of “flight bungalows” too.21 The Aero Club’s secretary, Commander Harold E. Perrin (nickname: “Harold the Hearty”), expected his landing strip soon to be receiving planes from all over the country — since “hundreds of inventors”, inspired by the success of the Wright brothers in America, were working “secretly and steadily” on many different types of flying machine, and all were free to join the Aero Club for a subscription of 10s. a year.22

  By March 1909, it was revealed that the Club had also found a new use for the coastguard station at Shellness, one of many to be closed down as the Admiralty set about reducing Britain’s naval-run coastguard force and passing its responsibilities to a smaller civilian service under the Board of Customs. In Ireland, the Women’s National Health Association urged a policy of leasing redundant coastguard stations from the Admiralty and turning them into isolation hospitals and convalescent homes for patients with tuberculosis.23 Shellness, however, now faced the different prospect of being “converted for sleeping and other accommodation”24 as required by the Aero Club’s people at Shellbeach. (According to Buist, these houses would be made available for members to rent at 5s. a week each.) An artesian well on the Club’s property guaranteed plentiful water, and a phone line was being installed in the club house and also in the sheds (callers were requested to ask for “Shellbeach, Minster, Sheppey”). Some club members were already talking about the pleasures of “canoeing about the waterways” on their newly acquired triangle of marsh. It was envisaged that drawbridges could be placed across the watery fleets, and that dykes might be added to make the club’s futurist flying ground “entirely private” and, indeed, “a little island itself”.

  Shellness Coastguard Station from the north, Flight, 1909.

  Yet the Aero Club had more serious work to oversee too. Griffith Brewer reported on Sheppey’s emerging “Champ d’Aviation” in the Field of 17 April 1909. Noting the speed at which the flying ground was being created, he praised “the pioneers who are about to risk their necks in order to bring this country up to the level of those on the Continent in the science of mechanical flight”.25 As a member of one of the Aero Club committees responsible for the development, he commended the Short Brothers’ first workshop (120 by forty-five feet with sliding doors and “a good wooden floor”) and helped select the site for the additional “sheds” in which further planes would be built and serviced. The men had also pegged out the route of the two-mile flying circuit that their labourers would create by filling in hollows, bridging ditches and scything down “rank grass” before the mowing machine and roller could be applied. Considering that this had to be at least a hundred feet wide in all places, the airman could have done without the two drainage ditches cutting across their land, but the surrounding dyke would at least allow the Club to gratify the public’s “natural desire to view the flights at a safe distance”. Brewer also repeated that the flying ground should not be considered the preserve of a wealthy few. Any aeronautical adventurer could subscribe to use the Club’s facilities and compete for the cash prizes with which the Aero Club hoped to encourage the rapid development of British aviation: £55 for the first four men to fly 250 yards at Shellbeach, for example, and a further £50 for the first three who stayed aloft for a mile.

  The Marquis de St Mars: “The amateur champion skater of France, at practice on the rink at Engelberg”. Tatler, 26 Jan 1910.

  By June 1909, the Aero Club was raising funds from its members in order not just to “take over” Muswell Manor permanently, but also to “acquire the golf course”26 directly to the north of it (presumably the one promised in F.G. Saunders and Son’s advertisements) and the shooting rights over an adjoining one thousand acres.27 Should these additional facilities prove insufficient to the leisure requirements of the Aero Club’s gentleman amateurs, it was estimated that a croquet lawn, tennis courts and a bowling green might easily be added to the “more or less ready-made” cricket or football ground within the experimental estate. Further comfort was promised by another of the first buildings erected on a site that would be increasingly occupied by hangars and factory sheds. Buist announced that Frank McLean’s “pretty little bungalow”, which was equipped with a veranda, a hot and cold running-water lavatory, a cooking stove and “a number of other little luxuries”, had proved sufficient to tempt a French motorcycling enthusiast, champion skater and accomplished grouse-bagger named the Marquis de St Mars to apply for the post of club chef on “board wages”.28 Little doubt, then, that the air-minded pioneers gathering between Leysdown and Shellness would find Sheppey more congenial than the French flying grounds at Châlons near Pau, where “the most violent dissipation” available to the bored aviator grounded by poor weather, was, so one experienced knight of the air complained, to “cook scrambled eggs and read newspapers some days old”.

  A reporter for Pearson’s Weekly took the two-hour train journey from London at the end of that busy first summer. Arriving in September 1909 to explore the possibility of buying a heavier-than-air flying machine, he stepped off the light railway to discover that Leysdown was “not a town or even a village; it is just a terminal station, and a very small one at that. Beyond it are only sand dunes and the English Channel”.29 He found the Short Brothers’ aeroplane factory at Shellbeach a mile or so to the south: “It consists of a collection of huge corrugated-iron sheds… these, I was informed, are aeroplane garages, constructed to the order of wealthy amateur aeroplanists, some of whom, at all events, are doubtless destined to emerge from obscurity in
the near future”. At that moment, “a clean-limbed young Briton” who was obviously one of these pioneers “bowled-up in his motor-car” in order to have a practice in his new pattern biplane “Albatross” — a cross between a French Voisin and a Wright flyer, with certain improvements introduced by the Short Brothers. Henry Short told the visiting enquirer that he preferred landing wheels rather than the sledge-runners used by the Wright brothers, and that, while he did indeed build monoplanes, he considered biplanes to be more stable and the best kind of flying machine so far evolved. He told the journalist he could provide these flying frames — “with 35–40 horsepower engines, water-cooled, and of English make throughout” — for £850 apiece.

  The founding members of the Aero Club may not actually have been named Algernon or Biggles, but they were of the aristocratic daredevil type and well able to finance their interest in the skies. One of their company was Charles Stewart Rolls, who had made his way through Eton and Cambridge (Engineering) to become a pioneer of the motor car: he was the Rolls in Rolls-Royce and a record-breaking balloonist as well as a racing driver who, in 1906, had driven one of his firm’s cars from Monte Carlo to London in just over twenty-eight hours. However, the man awarded the title of British Aviator No. 1 by the Aero Club was “a tall, broad-shouldered genial Irishman from Co. Meath” who had experimented with model gliders and become interested in the mysteries of internal combustion while at Harrow, before embarking on a soon-interrupted course of studies of engineering at Cambridge.30 Known to his friends as “Brab”, Charles Moore Brabazon, who was also a yachtsman and a “tobogganist” who’d repeatedly made his mark on the Cresta Run, had bought an Alfred Voisin biplane in France for £1,000. Having maintained “perfect stability” during flights of two, three and five kilometres at Châlons on 27 February 1909,31 he brought the “Bird of Passage” to Leysdown, where he carried off the first British flight of a heavier-than-air machine on 30 April. There was nothing remotely lofty about his departure from terra firma, but he managed to stay off the ground for more than a minute, and was considered lucky to have survived the crash in which his brief adventure ended.