The Sea View Has Me Again

by Patrick Wright

  Charles Moore Brabazon’s “Bird of Passage” at Shellbeach.

  Visiting Leysdown with his brother Orville in May 1909 (the bowler-hatted pair were taken for a “run” around the site in Rolls’ six-cylinder Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud32), Wilbur Wright is said to have declared the Sheppey flying field “ideal” and “40 times better than the grounds upon which he had experimented in America”.33 Better than those in France too: latterly near Pau, and before that at Le Mans, where Wilbur had left one thoughtful woman in the ticketed audience wondering whether the “whirring locust” in which the American pioneer seemed content to fly round and round without ever soaring far above the ground really would banish “the armies and the navies of the world” into the “barbarous past” as the utopians of the air believed.34

  It was in one of the six licensed flyers that Wilbur and Orville Wright had come to inspect in the Short Brothers’ “Sheds” at Shellbeach, that, on 30 October 1909, Charles Moore-Brabazon went on to win £1,000 from Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail as the first British subject to fly a circular mile in a plane “constructed in Britain, by British subjects, of British raw materials”. (Conditions that had not been passed by the American wild-west showman, Samuel “Buffalo Bill” Cody, who had previously carried himself and some passengers into the air over various distances in his machine, built at the Army Balloon Factory at Farnborough and known as British Army Aeroplane No. 1). “Brab” further distinguished himself a week later, claiming to have made the first air cargo flight on 4 November 1909 (a piglet dubbed “Icarus 2” was carried aloft suspended in a waste-paper basket — in jocular defiance of the well-known adage insisting that the day “When pigs fly” would never come). A month or so later, the Right Hon. C.S. Rolls flew a full fifteen miles in a Short-Wright flyer, passing the coastguard station at Shellness and wheeling round to Eastchurch, where he made the first landing on the Aero Club’s new landing strip — unable, as he explained, to stay up any longer due to the cold numbing his hands.35

  By the spring of 1910, both the Aero Club and Short Brothers, who now employed some eighty people in their sheds at Shellbeach, had realised the limitations of the low-lying and watery land that Wilbur Wright had commended as “a magnificent ground for experiments”.36 With the help of their wealthy members, they had acquired a second site on Stonepitts Farm, a couple of miles inland at Eastchurch. Charles Rolls won “universal attention” by flying his Wright plane from Dover to Calais and back at the beginning of June 1910. He went on to meet his end a few weeks later while flying in a competition at Bournemouth Air Meeting on 12 July: his tail-plane collapsed during his steep descent and he became the first British airman killed in flight. He was soon followed by a second Leysdown pioneer, Cecil Grace, the Chilean-born Irish son of a New York banker who had practiced the airy art with Moore-Brabazon’s “Bird of Passage” and then improved on his prize-winning contribution to the burgeoning “sport of aeronautics”37 by commissioning the Short Brothers’ biplane in which he had recently performed stylish swoops over the warships moored in the naval harbour at Sheerness.38 Grace “disappeared” in December 1910, when headed for Dover from a village outside Calais, where weather conditions had obliged him to curtail an attempt to win the £4,000 prize offered by Baron de Forest for the year’s longest flight from England into the continent (Grace took off on his return journey after a good lunch but missed England, having lost his bearings soon afterwards: his disorientated plane was last seen passing to the east of the Goodwin Sands, heading further out into the foggy North Sea39). At about the same time, another Shellbeach pioneer (who had practised on and later bought “Bird of Passage” from Brabazon), A.E. George, an engineer and racing driver known for his performances on the Isle of Man, crashed a plane of his own design at a flying display in Newcastle and, finding himself unable to raise money to continue, withdrew from the aviation field. By Saturday 10 August 1912, it was the turn of a different Aero Club pioneer, Frank MacLean, described as “a tall, well-built man, fresh-coloured, and with the frankest of eyes”,40 to make the first flight up the Thames from Leysdown. “Soaring over Tower Bridge”, he landed his “waterplane” by Westminster Bridge and came ashore to the cheers of a crowd who were actually awaiting the arrival of a French aviator Mr Beaumont, who had discontinued the last leg of his intended flight from Paris to London after the wind caused his machine to “turn turtle” as he took off from the water at Boulogne.

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  The Wright Brothers’ patents were impressively all-consuming, but they couldn’t capture every flying machine that made the move from Shellbeach to Eastchurch. While the Aero Club’s aviators were “soaring aloft” in their Wright flyers, a man who owed his initial inspiration to H.G. Wells was to be seen “out on the plain” tinkering with a “heavy machine, which is shaped very much like a snowplough with the sides open”.41 This peculiar rig had been designed by Lieutenant John William Dunne, an Anglo-Irish soldier who, having been invalided out of the second Boer War in South Africa, had spent his convalescence experimenting with flight. It was reported in August 1909 that Dunne, whom Wells had first convinced of the over-riding importance of “stability” in any future flying machine, would “very soon”42 be bringing his tail-less biplane to Sheppey for continued experimentation. The first version seen on the island’s flying ground may have been the two-winged model developed from one of Dunne’s first designs and made by the Short Brothers early in 1909 for Professor Alfred Kirkland Huntington, a polo-playing former balloonist who was also Professor of Metallurgy at King’s College London.43 In February 1910, Huntington, who continued to carry out his own customising adjustments to Dunne’s plane, is reported to have made some “satisfactory runs”44 after fitting a Wolseley engine to his contraption, but not yet to have attempted “free flight”. By April, he had been photographed flying his “Dunne-Huntington” model a few inches off the ground.45

  With their swept-back wings and their absence of anything resembling a tail, Dunne’s “flying arrow” prototypes had seemed highly unlikely to early onlookers in Sheppey. Not so, however, to the Daily Express correspondent who interviewed Dunne at Eastchurch in the summer of 1913. Dunne had already let it be known that his planes were partly inspired by his study of the winged and gliding seeds of the Zanonia plant. He now added to the contrary charms of a story that was being fêted as a “triumph of dogged British pluck over official rebuff”46 by attributing his design to the realisation that “big sea birds such as fight their way through storms are practically tailless. They balance themselves in the air by flexion of the tips of their wings. That is exactly how my machine is controlled.”47

  The first incarnation of Dunne’s vision had been a glider designed at the order of the British army’s balloon factory at Farnborough. Since 1907, Dunne had been testing his plane secretly, together with the American showman “Colonel Cody” and Lieutenant Launcelot D.L. Gibbs of the Hampshire Militia Artillery, at the Duke of Atholl’s remote Blair Atholl estate in the Scottish highlands.48 Unfortunately, the Army Council has pulled the plug on the initiative, leaving the Marquis of Tullibardine to complain that its officials had been too “apathetic” to finance a guard for the trial site or even an engine sufficiently powerful to lift Dunne’s device into the air. Dunne himself was more tactful, explaining that the cancellation followed the military authority’s decision to concentrate on “dirigible airships”,49 and admitting that his flying machine, on which he continued to work through a private company named the Blair Atholl Aeroplane Syndicate, was “at present” of “little use for military purposes” — incapable even of rising “out of revolver range”.50

  Having survived the withdrawal of the War Office and entered a partnership with the French Nieuport company, Dunne had followed the Aero Club’s move from Shellbeach to Eastchurch in order to work with the Short Brothers on further models of his “inherently stable” design. Orville Wright and his vigilant patent agent Griffith Brewer were among the witnesses, when, on 20 December 1910, Du
nne took his D.5 model for two short flights over Sheppey in order to demonstrate that it was possible to steer and bank correctly using wing flaps instead of the “three-rudder” system employed on Wright flyers, and also to show, when descending, that the “automatic stability”51 of his design made it possible to stay in the air for a considerable time without touching the controls. Dunne’s “flying arrow” — he himself would explain that it was shaped “like a broad arrow-head minus the shaft”52 — may not yet have been ready to allow him to demonstrate its ability, when banked at a steep angle, to fly “in a circle of only 100 yards”, thereby coming close to the much-desired “hoverer” of aeronautical fantasy.53 He did, however, successfully make his point. It was reported that, even though he narrowly missed a windmill and momentarily mistook his distance from the ground when landing, the experimental aviator had nevertheless managed to keep his unruddered and tailless biplane in the air for long enough to take his hands off the controls and, on his second flight, to pencil some notes on sheets of paper provided for him by one of the observers while the plane looked after itself.54 The latter task was carried out in support of Dunne’s own belief that his machines would prove more useful for military “scouting purposes”55 than Wright fliers, which required the full and constant engagement of the operator to maintain the plane’s balance.

  Dunne’s first “Shock-resistant” prototype, in which stability was to be obtained by “automatic” means rather than by “the skill of the operator”,56 may well have appeared insufficiently scientific to justify continued funding from the Secretary of State for War, R.B. Haldane.57 Yet Dunne had made his first cow-scattering flight in a Dunne biplane in 1910 (“the sensation was most extraordinary”) and by August 1911 he was completing circuits above the Eastchurch flying ground in his “latest monoplane”.58 By 1913, one of his offbeat D8 biplanes which, as he had once told a correspondent for the Times, worked “on the boomerang principle — that is, it soars in a circle”59 — would be boarded at Eastchurch by the famous French military aviator, Major Felix, who took off, after some short experimental flights, with the aim of crossing the English Channel. “Despite a strong wind and frequent showers of rain”, he successfully landed at Villacoublay aerodrome in north-central France — stepping down to predict that the “existing types” of aeroplane — i.e. those built along the lines of the Wright brothers’ patented models — would have disappeared in two years’ time, to be replaced by machines of the Dunne type. Going further, Major Felix anticipated that the pilots who “safely guided” these new automatic machines, would “hardly believe that men could ever have trusted themselves in the three-control, tail-guided, straight-planed aircraft of today”.60

  Dunne biplane at Eastchurch.

  The Daily Express’s “special correspondent” informed MPs that he confidently expected Dunne’s tail-less machines to become “as easily within the reach of the average middle-class man as is the two-seater motor car to-day. A child or an invalid can fly it”.61 Just as the “modern roadster” had displaced the “bone-shakers” in which people had somehow been prepared to risk their lives thirty years before, Dunne’s invention impressed this excited witness as an evolutionary leap thanks to which the Wright Brothers’ primitive contraptions would soon be consigned to the scrapheap of history. Having previously abandoned Dunne’s experiments, the War Office had by now ordered two models. The future also looked bright to Professor Huntington of King’s College London, who had decided that even his own tinkered-up early Dunne prototype — now known as “the Dunne-Huntington Machine” — was “a very practical machine for service purposes”.62 Others, however, who remained committed to “the skills of the operator” and to the military possibility of firing guns from the air, resisted this wave of enthusiasm and continued to dismiss Dunne’s alternative as the “mad scheme of flying”.63

  By 1914, versions of Dunne’s D8 were being built and flown in the USA and Canada, but Dunne himself had withdrawn from the project, partly on account of his poor health, in order to devote his time to redesigning the trout fly and pursuing more “philosophical” investigations into the nature of time. In An Experiment with Time, published two decades later, he would explain how he himself had experienced “precognition” in dreams, seeing things that were yet to happen, and concluded from this experience that linear time was a mental construct imposed on a “Serial universe” in which nothing really dies and past and future would be recognised as continuous where it not for the “mentally imposed barrier” of the “present moment”.64

  A greater openness to the “serialism” explored in Dunne’s An Experiment with Time might have benefitted those partisans of the Wright flyer who had laughed as the inventor tried to coax his all-British “Snow-plough” into the skies above the Isle of Sheppey. The twentieth century would see the aeroplane develop in ways that did indeed, as Uwe Johnson noted, soon require a new vocabulary from schoolchildren (“they learned: fighter, and they learned: bomber”), and elements of Dunne’s idea were carried forward in the same procession. There was nothing arrow-like or “swept” about the wings of the Wapiti biplane from which Jean Chesterton was shot in her rowing boat off Shellbeach in 1933. In Germany by that time, however, the engineer Adolf Busemann was already thinking about the supersonic speeds that might one day be achieved by “swept wing” aircraft. A prototype of the Messerschmidt P.1101, a fighter jet based on his later researches, was still under construction at the end of the Second World War. There were definitely also “swept wings” on the eight-engine American B-52s which, as Uwe Johnson notes in Anniversaries (a book whose skies are crossed by precisely logged planes), did such damage after joining America’s bombing missions over north Vietnam in April 1966. As for the tailless “flying wing” idea, this was also tested in Germany, as part of Reichsmarshal Herman Göring’s frantic search for “wonder weapons” during the last months of the Second World War. A captured prototype developed by Gotha from the Horten brothers’ Ho 229 was shipped to America (as was the incomplete Messerschmidt P.1101 and, by 1947, Adolf Busemann himself), where the flying wing idea would break into reality forty years later with the first flight of the B2 Stealth bomber in 1989.

  In the early days of flight on Sheppey, one of the stunts favoured by the aviator C.R. Rolls, was to fly over the Royal Navy’s warships anchored on the Nore off Sheerness, where he would be greeted by a chorus of sirens and cheers from the sailors on deck. By 1911, the pilots who enjoyed performing such tricks were qualifying members of the training school for naval pilots set up at Eastchurch on a voluntary basis by the now “Royal” Aero Club.65 The scheme began with four trainees at first, but expanded soon enough thanks partly to the enthusiasm of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, who came to Eastchurch to train as a pilot himself (a desire that was reduced if not extinguished by the end of 1913, after Captain Gilbert Wildman Lushington was killed crashing the biplane in which he had trained Churchill shortly before).

  Eastchurch had by then become the operations centre for the Royal Naval Service School, while Shellness was retained as the “Aerial Fighting and Gunnery School”. The combined establishment went to the newly formed Royal Air Force in 1918, by which time Short Brothers had quit Eastchurch for Rochester on the Medway in order to concentrate on building seaplanes. RAF Eastchurch, as the airbase came to be called, was used by Coastal Command, responsible for the protection of Allied shipping, while also serving as an Armament Training Centre for the RAF. During the early months of the Second World War, it was employed as a receiving and training centre for Polish airman entering service alongside British forces. Bombed repeatedly by the Luftwaffe and effectively put out of action during the Battle of Britain, it was brought back into use and the permitted residents of Sheppey got used to seeing a considerable variety of planes flying overhead, from Hawker Typhoons to American Flying Fortresses. The Air Armaments School’s gunnery range at Shellness was not deflected from its national purpose by the death of Jean Chesterton in 1933 �
�� nor, for that matter, by the loss of the trainee airmen who died after stepping on the wrong floor panel and falling from their plane or accidentally shooting their own propellers to bits. The range was used for bombing as well as gunnery practice throughout the Second World War, including the rocket-firing practice carried out here for Hawker Typhoon squadrons in 1944. You could easily miss any sight of this history at Shellbeach now, but the case for vigilance remains strong. In October 2011, naval disposal experts found no fewer than sixty-one items of unexploded ordnance — bombs, depth charges, shells — during a two-day trawl of the nudist beach.66