Air empire: British imperial civil aviation, 1919–39 9781526118493

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British imperial civil aviation, 1919–39

GORDON PIRIE

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general editor John M. MacKenzie When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded more than twenty-five years ago, emphasis was laid upon the conviction that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’. With more than seventy books published, this remains the prime concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary work has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cultural phenomena, as well as examining aspects of gender and sex, frontiers and law, science and the environment, language and literature, migration and patriotic societies, and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to present comparative work on European and American imperialism, and particularly welcomes the submission of books in these areas. The fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects, shows no sign of abating, and this series will continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest possible range of studies in the field. ‘Studies in Imperialism’ is fully organic in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this ever-expanding area of scholarship.

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Air empire

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selected titles AVAILABLE IN THE SERIES FLAGSHIPS OF IMPERIALISM The P&O company and the politics of empire from its origins to 1867  Freda Harcourt

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THE SCOTS IN SOUTH AFRICA Ethnicity, identity, gender and race, 1772–1914   John M. MacKenzie with Nigel R. Dalziel

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MUSEUMS AND EMPIRE Natural history, human cultures and colonial identities John M. MacKenzie

FORTHCOMING TITLES Borders and conflict in South Asia The Radcliffe boundary commission and the partition of Punjab  Lucy P. Chester ENDING BRITISH RULE IN AFRICA Writers in a common cause Carol Polsgrove CHOCOLATE, WOMEN AND EMPIRE  A social and cultural history Emma Robertson

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Air empire british imperial civil aviation,

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1919–39 Gordon Pirie

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS Manchester

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Copyright © Gordon Pirie 2009 The right of Gordon Pirie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS ALTRINCHAM STREET, MANCHESTER M1 7JA, UK www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 0 7190 4111 2  hardback First published 2009 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09   10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or any third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Trump Medieval by Koinonia, Manchester

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Contents

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Acknowledgements—vii List of illustrations—ix General editor’s introduction—xi   1 Introduction

1 Part I Looking up

  2 Ideas and initiatives

10

  3 Empire airway pioneering

26

  4 Conferring and agitating

47

Part II Talking up   5 Organising Empire civil aviation

66

  6 Route reconnaissance

82

  7 Propagating Empire aviation

99

Part III Holding up   8 Trunk route development

112

  9 Route organisation

126

10 Eastern crescent

145

11 African arc

160 Part IV Shoring up

12 Arguing about Imperial Airways

178

13 Reconfiguring Empire aviation

195

14 Transformation

216

15 Conclusion

235 Index—245 [v]

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ack nowl edg e m en ts

Research for the book started in an ex-outpost of the British Empire, and the writing finished there after a decade of dredging and drafting in the heartland of the Commonwealth. In Johannesburg, my inquiries into British imperial aviation were nourished by superb research mentors, scholars and sources at my alma mater, the University of the Witwatersrand. The Postgraduate Appeal Fund generously funded an overseas trip to pursue leads in London. Subsequently, in Cape Town, the University of the Western Cape and the Mellon Fund facilitated a sabbatical to slash and restructure the sprawling and convoluted accumulation of words. Information, ideas, themes and arguments omitted in the rewrite will surface elsewhere. Air Empire has been shaped and made possible by many past and present archivists, curators, librarians and benefactors. This book honours their foresight and work. In the case of South Africa, I acknowledge the Cullen Library (University of the Witwatersrand), the Johannesburg Public Library, the South African National Archives (Pretoria) and, in Cape Town, the South African Library, the Jagger Library (University of Cape Town), and the South African Air Force Museum. A lengthy stay in Britain provided access to other key research resources. In Manchester, the Library at Salford University obtained many books on loan and arranged tens of article photocopies. Gustav Dobryzinski prepared the base maps in the University’s Geography Department. I made extensive use of the city’s Public Library and the John Rylands Library (Manchester University). In a league of its own, the British Library was invaluable. In another London treasure-trove, Terry Barringer helped a wide-eyed novice navigate the extra­ ordinary collections at the Royal Commonwealth Society Library, now sadly defunct. Acknowledgement is due the British National Archives, the Science Museum and Library, the Sudan Archive (Durham University), the British Postal Museum and Archive, and the Cambridge University and London School of Economics manuscripts reading rooms. Peter Elliott, Senior Keeper at the Royal Air Force Museum, was most helpful. It is a pleasure to recognise Howell Green and other volunteers at the British Airways Archives and Museum Collection. The Royal Aeronautical Society funded a research visit to its Library. There, Brian Riddle has been an ongoing source of help. The University of Salford funded research visits to the British Film institute, the National Sound Archive and the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Wrritten Archives. Before digitisation of photographic archives, the Scouloudi Foundation funded travel to do photographic research. The Marc Fitch Fund met the costs of photographic reproduction and licensing. Staff at several organisations responded to written requests. Thanks are due the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal College of Surgeons, the British

[ vii ]

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acknowledgements

Universities Film and Video Council, the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators, the Air League, Pilkington plc, the British Petroleum Archive (Warwick University), the National Women’s Library (London Guildhall University), Punch, the National Trust, the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Balliol College Library, and the International Air Transport Association. Participation at academic meetings in Auckland, Manchester, Vancouver and York helped shape work in progress. Deborah Hart, Jo-Anne King, Richard Phillips and Philip Stickler took trouble acquiring reclusive articles. John Illsley helped with photographs at the final hurdle. Years apart, the late Barrie Gleave (University of Salford) and then Ian Phimister (University of Sheffield) kindly made time to read a version of the text, and offered encouragement. John MacKenzie ploughed through three raw and hefty drafts before reading the final one closely and spotting several errors and indiscretions. More years ago than is decent to recall, John prevented the research being smothered prematurely in what would have been a very slight journal article. I had no grasp of the slog ahead. He and Manchester University Press had no inkling of the time it would take to produce the first draft, let alone resurrect the current text from that deluge of words. I am grateful for their commitment and patience. It is sobering that in roughly the same time it has taken to finish a deskbound study, a generation of younger people actually built the institutions and services that are its subject. Abortive take-offs during the research, and many crash landings, have put into perspective others’ achievements across half the globe, and have been a constant reminder about the relative importance of actions and words. On a Johannesburg–London air journey, Sue Parnell was first to hear about Air Empire; she’ll be the happiest to hear the last of it.

[ viii ]

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list of illust ration s

Maps

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1 ‘Great routes to every part of the British Empire’: generalised geography of main British imperial civil air routes in the 1930s page 16 2 Empire airship routes and bases

69

3 Prominent landing sites for Empire flying in the Middle East, India and Asia 114 4 Prominent landing sites for Empire flying in Africa

122

Figures 1 Patriots and knights: Ross Smith, Quintin Brand and Keith Smith (left to right) in London in 1920 after their pioneering trans­ continental flights (Source: gettyimages #2665013. Under licence).

43

2 ‘Natives mowing’: making an Empire airfield, Northern Rhodesia, 1919 (Source: Sphere, 28 February 1920. Under licence from the Mary Evans Picture Library).

48

3 Londoners on Westminster Bridge watch Sir Alan Cobham land his seaplane on the Thames at the end of his flight to Australia and back, 1 October 1926 (Source: gettyimages #78950043. Under licence).

88

4 Sir Samuel Hoare and functionaries watch Lady Hoare unveil the name of Imperial’s City of Delhi, 10 January 1927 (Source: Templewood S16, Manuscripts Reading Room, Cambridge ­University Library. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library).

104

5 The R101 airship passing St Paul’s Cathedral at the heart of the imperial capital, 14 October 1929 (Source: gettyimages #3137927. Under licence).

133

6 A 1931 Imperial Airways advertisement selling imperial loyalty and time savings to vaguely specified destinations (Source: Air and  Airways, December 1931. Copyright untraceable).

139

7 An armed guard, assigned by the Sheikh of Sharjah to the stockaded landing ground, poses in front of an Imperial Airways HP42 being serviced at Kuwait, 17 April 1934 (Source: gettyimages #2668127. Under licence).

149

8 African spectators, and two uniformed Imperial employees, watch refuelling of City of Karachi at Moshi airfield, Tanganyika, 8

169

[ ix ]

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list of illustrations

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September 1932 (Source: South African Library, Cape Town: MSB 750.2 [1]). 9 Dignitaries and guests watch Lord Londonderry (Air Minister) and Sir Kingsley Wood (Postmaster General) inaugurate the England– Australia airmail at a Croydon ceremony, 8 December 1934 (Source: Topfoto #0435236. Under licence).

186

10 At Southhampton docks, an Imperial flying boat passes a Union Castle liner before its maiden voyage, 6 April 1938. The Capetown Castle would sail 591 passengers to Cape Town in 13 days, 8 days longer than the 17-passenger Empire Class Circe air service to Durban (Source: gettyimages #79666246. Under licence).

212

11 London-centric, modernist 1938 Imperial Airways advertisement showing the best times to Empire destinations (Source: Aeroplane, 4 May 1938. Reprinted with permission).

225

[x]

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G E NE RA L EDIT OR’ S IN TRO DUCTI ON

Communications were the essence of empire, the means whereby its essential commercial, military, administrative and social functions could be conducted. Yet there is a great irony in the history of these technologies: the more sophisticated they became, in many respects they lost their efficacy. It became increasingly impossible for dominant powers to maintain a monopoly. Some indigenous peoples were able to acquire steam power, for example: witness the Sultan of Zanzibar’s fascination with western-style vessels, albeit small ones for local use. Transforming societies, like that of Japan, were soon fully equipped with modern technology. Moreover, imperial powers had also established peripheral settler societies which were able to arrogate such communications systems to themselves, enhancing their own sense of identity and, ultimately, nationalist ambitions as they did so. As with so many aspects of imperialism, those characteristics which conferred superiority and power also carried within them the seeds of their own destruction. These developments often took many decades to work through. But in the case of the major new communications advance of the twentieth century, travel by air, the whole process was compressed into a relatively short period. It should have been clear from the start that the world of airships, in its brief incarnation, and in heavier-than-air flight would quickly be of universal application, impossible to contain within an imperial nexus. Yet, the new conquest of the air was immediately placed in just such an imperial frame. Not just the British, but also perhaps the French, the Belgians, the Dutch and the Portuguese, saw the opportunities of air travel as being ideal means for drawing their empires together. In the British case, as in so many other respects, this was taken to what seemed like atavistic extremes. The Britannia which had ruled the waves could now equally rule the air. Consequently, aerial communications offered unparalleled opportunities to revive, consolidate, and extend imperial relationships. Perhaps this was why the language, the social and class relations, and the propaganda all seemed so backward-looking. The myths of the explorers were resurrected to encompass the brave and dramatic deeds of pioneering aviators. Analogous Elizabethan precedents, however dubious, were revived. The postFirst World War conquest of distance and time through flight was suffused with imperial and heroic rhetoric. It was imagined that imperial metropolitan populations could once again be swept up in these exciting myth-making processes. New generations of children could once again be enthused by such deeds, ‘worthy of the race’, in the parlance of the time. School libraries should stock books about air ‘exploration’ and travel. Thousands of schoolchildren should be gathered in the Royal Albert Hall to hear exciting lectures, as though H. M. Stanley had just returned from the Dark Continent. It was not only the rhetoric that was behindhand. The new medium of the air and its supposed

[ xi ]

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general editor’s introduction

conquest were permeated with long-standing British class and racial attitudes. This fresh enterprise would be conducted by the middle-class, preferably public-school, ‘gentlemen’, lording it over ‘natives’ in time-honoured ways, and remaining convinced that the technology could never be commanded by anybody other than whites – an attitude that was prevalent in Australia as well as in Britain and which flew in the face of the speed with which Indians were trained as pilots. Like so many other aspects of empire, the whole thing – as we now know – was an illusion. In the 1920s, 1930s and even 1940s, air transport was far too primitive to create an effective antidote to the visible stresses and strains of empire. It would not be until the 1960s that shipping would be supplanted, at least for passenger transport, by aeroplanes, and by then the days of the old-style empires were over. The rhetoric was whistling in the wind. Empire was weakening and tottering regardless of what new technologies could achieve. Moreover, the concentration on connections between the so-called ‘mother country’ and colonial territories, symbolised by the name Imperial Airways for Britain’s principal company in the field, was unrealistic. The whole point about aerial transport was that it would be multi-continental, multi-lateral, unconstrained by imperial political relations. In addition, all white-run territories would lay their hands on this technology very quickly, both to facilitate their internal connections and also their communications with other territories in their regions. Intercolonial and internation relations would be forwarded just as successfully – or more so – than interimperial. In any case, as Gordon Pirie well demonstrates, the whole business of air transport, certainly in the British case, was infused with muddle, belt-andbraces attitudes and old-fashioned company ideas. A startling new technology might be expected to bring in its path a fresh approach to management, organisation and the relationships between capital and the state. The conditions of inter-war Britain militated against that and it would be many decades before air transport started to receive the innovative approaches that it really required. This book provides unrivalled insights into the massive hopes engendered by the supposed conquest of the air, and the ways in which these were so swiftly squandered in the rather messy and incompetent ways in which the new technology was developed. Instead of providing fresh oxygen for the survival of Empire, it served almost to hasten its demise. Aerial communication facilitated contacts among nationalists and the rapid connections needed for the whole decolonisation process. John M. MacKenzie

[ xii ]

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Chapte r On e

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Introduction

Empires are geographically extensive. Their founding and persistence depends on overcoming the friction of unusually long distances. People and nature may or may not have to be subdued, but remoteness positively must be subdued. Links are required to create and maintain an empire – to breach the horizon, spread into new land, occupy and unify distant territory, and then to manage, defend and exploit it. Transport is a key tool of empire.1 The capacity to move personnel and equipment far (if not fast) was a prerequisite for the formation of continental empires in Europe and Asia. Horses, wagons and roads were imperial instruments in Roman and Mogul times. Ocean-going ships, as well as sailors and dockyards, were crucial elements in the maritime trading empires established by China, Spain, Portugal, Holland and Britain. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, railways helped to stretch overseas empires along ribbons of steel inland from coastal toeholds.2 Sub­marine cables became additional sinews of empire, precursors of telecommunication circuits in today’s globalised information economy. Road motor vehicles were new agents of significant colonial commercial influence from the 1920s. Almost simultaneously, aeroplanes emerged as imperial instruments unique to the final phase of formal empire. Until the air age dawned one hundred years ago, overseas empires were necessarily maritime empires. The period between the two World Wars was the last when red shading on the world map designated a British Empire. The twentyyear peace dividing the two power struggles of 1914–18 and 1939–45 coincided with the first systematic application of aeronautics to civil tasks. Before the First World War flying machines were recreational. Then, after being demonstrative and destructive weapons, they became instruments of demonstrative commerce and foreign policy. Flight was invigorated by combative aeronautical innovation. [1]

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introduction

Thereafter, promoters presented aviation as a tool of peacetime British imperial interaction because of its superior speed and geographical reach. Aviation appeared to be perfectly suited to the conduct of modern Empire. In prospect were better public administration (quicker personnel travel and document exchange); cheaper and more effective aerial survey and management of natural resources; quicker trade in small, light and precious commodities; less alienating (semi-)permanent overseas settlement; more rapid receipt of letters and news; easier social circulation by imperial elites. Airships, landplanes and seaplanes first transported a new breed of demobbed fame- and fortune-seeking airmen into the British Empire. Merely soaring sensuously was not for them. Flying was still about winning, but now it was about climbing higher, arriving first, reaching further. British military aviation played its part by surveying and testing long-distance air routes that could be used for defending the Empire as well as for civil purposes in the Middle East, India and Africa. Ex-air force men helped build the foundations of the incipient air Empire as pilots, engineers and organisers. Their hard-headed reason and rationality was not the sole motivation. Personal dreams and ambitions, nostalgia, and imperialistic hopes and fears were also elemental. Aviation became the new imperial heroic; brave, dashing pilots became icons and were invested as the new Knights of the British Empire. Connecting imperial core and periphery more quickly was not the only motivation for Britain’s overseas air transport effort. A more profound agenda emerged against a backdrop of social and political stresses in Britain, the Empire and beyond. In the context of Britain’s changing status in the world, and at a time of technological change and international anxiety, there were also lofty expectations that air transport would modernise, maintain, protect, reassert and legitimate Empire. Both logic and romance were at work. Continuities with Britain’s glorious maritime empire were manipulated avidly, and warnings sounded about the lessons of imperial history over thousands of years. Agents in the imperial heartland invoked precedent, destiny and civilising duty. Rhetoric rampaged. The frequent and unashamed way in which politicians, aeronautical officials and commentators used the word ‘propaganda’ in relation to Empire aviation accords well with the way Britain projected itself and imperialism in the 1930s.3 Buoyed by early post-war aeronautical successes, and spurred on by the threat of foreign competition, British industry and the British Government moved to harness new technological possibilities. Liaison was required between several departments of state and aeronautical bodies; reconciling contradictory interests in and with the state [2]

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introduction

bureaucracy was tedious and time consuming. Talk was easier, and the London lecture circuit buzzed with pronouncements; there was less discussion and debate than declaiming. The metropolitan press reported and supported re-invented Empire eagerly using familiar imperial tropes. Three successful, privately funded ‘flights of discovery’ into the Empire in 1919–20 set the scene for future civil flying. They were followed by mail-only military services, then air service for military personnel. In the second half of the 1920s optimistic oratory gave way to concerted Government action and the foundations were laid for British commercial air services into the Empire. The grandly titled Imperial Airways company was established as the ‘chosen instrument’ of organised Empire civil aviation in 1924. It took nearly a decade for the airline to start living up to its name. In the interim, a handful of headline-grabbing flights by senior public officials and private citizens (including women) into and around the Empire inflamed imperial imaginations, set a new standard of speed for Empire travel, and maintained pressure on London. There, Empire aviation was for a time supported by a stable civil aviation administration. Leading the new imperial aeronautical project was a small group of men who, albeit well-schooled and well-connected, were the antithesis of the anti-industrial, anti-business and anti-London set who have often been presented as heading a declining, inter-war Britain. Aside from the flights made by individuals and small teams, plans for air transport in the British Empire followed two strands. The vision was of a commercial and a parastatal organisation operating airships alongside a commercial company flying aeroplanes. The division of work between designers, constructors and operators was never entirely clear. Whichever way the problem was resolved, and however air routes were shared out, the Empire was poised to have a new, faster and more direct transport service. The parallels were the German long-distance airship service to and from South America, and the Dutch aeroplane link to their territorial possessions in the Far East. Britain hoped to deploy both types of civil air transport on its imperial routes. Two Empire air routes dominated the dreams, debates and designs of Empire air proponents, publicists and planners. An air route linking Britain to India and Australia was one; an air service crossing British colonial Africa was the other. Aspirations for a trans-Atlantic air route between Britain and Canada presented a much greater technological challenge. Throughout the inter-war period, the shaping of Empire air services preoccupied London’s aeronautical leaders as well as many politicians, civil servants, conference delegates and newspaper and magazine editors. A major tension arose between the propagandistic [3]

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introduction

value of British imperial air service and the mundane business of performing a safe, economic service. After several false starts, commercial Empire flying started in the early 1930s with aircraft testing flights. Next, there were aircraft delivery flights to air stations in the Empire. It was one thing to complete a few successful trial air journeys to, in and from the Empire; it was quite another to repeat the performance regularly to schedule as a commercial service. One engineering and logistical challenge was to design, construct and operate airframes and engines that could perform in a variety of operating environments. Configuring aircraft appropriately for passengers and airfreight was difficult. Organising economic and comfortable operations on long-distance routes was not easy. It helped that many intermediate landing grounds and principal city destinations were in the British Empire, but acquiring permission to fly over and land in non-imperial territory became a major obstacle to the delivery of Empire air services. London’s expectations that Colonial and Dominion governments would accede to and help fund monopolistic British-based Empire air services were challenged. The geopolitics of Empire air-route development generally involved protracted and delicate negotiations. The following account of the reality and fiction of Britain’s air Empire between 1919 and 1939 assembles and discusses evidence about an agent of the imperial past which has been somewhat overlooked while focusing on other devices, discourses and displays of ­imperialism. Aviation was an instance and expression of late British imperialism, and understanding its dimensions should help build a better ­understanding of Empire. Apart from its intrinsic interest, the material set out here provides a fresh context for testing classic observations and arguments about the British imperial imaginary and its propagation,4 British imperial organisation and technique,5 British imperial decline,6 and the infectiousness of imperial ideas and practices.7 The following chapters shed light on the differentiated roots, channels and instruments of imperialism. They illuminate the embodiment, difficulties, dilemmas, risks, evasions, muddles and struggles of imperialism in practice. The inter-war period was one in which imperial champions thought they had been thrown a lifeline by new technology and in which they acted out unchanged imperial ambitions and attitudes. The peacetime uses of flight were ardently hitched to an imagined imperial future and compromised by a retreating imperial present. In retrospect, the idea and reality of air Empire offers an unusual window on places, people and processes in the twilight years of the British Empire. The first retrospective studies devoted to overseas civil air transport in the inter-war British Empire were written half-a-century ago. [4]

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introduction

Higham’s encyclopaedic 1960 book extended his two magazine articles, overshadowed a 1954 academic paper, and has been the standard reference work on British imperial aviation ever since. Whereas his work focused on policy, technology and economics, Pudney’s marginally earlier book – an insider’s account – had a wider reach and racier style.8 It too was factually dense, informative and inclined to hagiography. Stroud’s survey reached beyond the inter-war period; Hyde’s scholarly analysis treats military and civil aviation.9 All the texts diluted the imperialist element by covering the first British airline’s European as well as Empire services. Other less ambitious airline histories also recall and celebrate the airline generally.10 These corporate histories are tightly drawn and do not break new ground. Similarly, despite their engaging visual artistry, the airline timetables, route maps, advertisements and other ephemera dear to enthusiastic collectors are presented as attaching to an unproblematic, matter-of-fact past.11 Archival information released into the public domain in the last forty-five years might itself justify an updated book about British imperial aviation. Here, in Air Empire, the aim is not just to add new official evidence to the existing record. Rather, the emphasis is on a fresh, broader reading and interpretation of the way aviation and Empire served and reflected one another. Aeronautical enthusiasts whose diet is engineering specifications and design blueprints have little need of any new machine histories. Equally, many airline business histories have been written, and there are copious publications about national aviation policies. Historians, however, would be served well by work written for a wider audience than aeronautical buffs; British imperial, colonial and commonwealth histories are extraordinarily coy about civil aviation. Analysis is needed that deals less with the technical constituents of air transport than with its social, cultural and political reverberations and references. The last fifteen years of research into the forces which aviation articulated and unleashed (as opposed to studies of flight technology and the organisation of flying) has produced startling exemplars.12 In the case of British imperial aviation, scholarship that has enriched the historiography includes, in this publication series, a study of interwar British imperial military flying. Another work examines myths surrounding aeronautical activity (combative, particularly) in modern British history.13 Facets of British imperial civil aviation history have gradually been tackled in a manner that veers away from bland ­narrative.14 Customarily, transport has been treated as something that belongs only in the grand theatre of economics, law, politics and technology. Many of these major castings are now well documented, so more [5]

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introduction

attention is being paid to the way transport has been implicated in more inscrutable processes and structures. It is a characteristic of ‘new history’ in general that the views and voices of experts and officials are understood to be authoritative in only certain respects. In addition, the past is not assumed to be constituted solely of monetised and material phenomena. Discourse and ideas and images, whether spontaneous or carefully constructed, are as much grist for the historian’s mill as are formal policies and physical events. Even in an age of science and reason, analyses ought not to shut out the humanity that suffuses technological innovation and application. Machinery does not neutralise pride, passion, prejudice, partiality, presumption and preferment. Building on and borrowing from innovative transport and aviation histories, the following study of Empire and aviation is more than an uncritical register of technical and organisational accomplishments. More than just a log of what happened in and to non-military flying in the late British Empire, the following chapters examine the sources and strains of Empire aviation. Where, why, and with whom did the idea originate? How did the hopes and ambitions work out in practice? What were the challenges and struggles? How were objectives, successes and failings managed and presented? How did airline and airway building and operation articulate imperial beliefs and practices? The text of Air Empire aims to deepen, contextualise more broadly and enliven the dated, standard accounts of the measurable and observable outcomes of organised Empire civil aviation. The writing probes its historic resonances and the fanciful, conceited discourse that framed air service delivery. The study explores the paternalism, polemic, posturing, symbolism and spectacle surrounding the planning and performance of imperial aviation. The analysis does not pivot on official sources. Evidence from British state papers on civil aviation is used, but the empirical information is interwoven with material recovered from biographies, diaries and memoirs. Using diverse sources helps to problematise conventional information, and encourages reading claims and evidence against the grain. Reports and correspondence in contemporary newspapers and in professional and popular magazines help fix the coordinates of publicity. Alert to the scripting of Empire aviation, the study goes beyond ‘objective’ public history. There are shown to be several strands to Empire aviation, including divergent motives, exaggerated expectations, contested practices, halting and sometimes manipulative and muddled governance, ingrained colonial habit, and propaganda and ceremony that papered over disillusion, dispute and disappointment.

[6]

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introduction

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Notes   1 D. R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire (Oxford, 1981).   2` C. B. Davis et al., Railway Imperialism (Westport CT, 1991).   3 See J. M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: the Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester, 1984).   4 Ibid.; J. M. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, 1986).   5 J. Morris, Farewell the Trumpets: an Imperial Retreat (London, 1978).   6 C. Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (London, 1972).   7 R. Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: the Road to Decolonisation, 1918–1968 (Cambridge, 2006).   8 R. D. S. Higham, ‘Britain’s overseas airlines, 1918–1939’ (Parts 1 and 2), Shell Aviation News (December 1959 and January 1960); A. J. Quin-Harkin, ‘Imperial Airways, 1924–1940’, Journal of Transport History, 1 (1954), 197–215; R. D. S. Higham, Britain’s Imperial Air Routes, 1918–1939 (London, 1960); J. S. Pudney, The Seven Skies: a Study of BOAC and its Forerunners since 1919 (London, 1959).   9 J. Stroud, Annals of British and Commonwealth Air Transport, 1919–1960 (London, 1962); H. M. Hyde, British Air Policy between the Wars, 1918–1939 (London, 1976). 10 For example K. Munson, A Pictorial History of BOAC and Imperial Airways (Shepperton, 1970); A. S. Jackson, Imperial Airways and the First British Airlines, 1919–1940 (Lavenham, 1990). 11 See for instance the electronic archive at www.imperial-airways.com. 12 For example P. Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1992); R. Wohl, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908–1919 (New Haven, 1994); G. de Syon, Zeppelin: Germany and the Airship, 1900–1939 (Baltimore, 2002); R. Wohl, The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920–1950 (New Haven, 2005); S. W. Palmer, Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia (Cambridge, 2006); E. Millward, Women in British Imperial Airspace, 1922–1937 (Montreal, 2008). 13 D. E. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: the Royal Air Force, 1919–1939 (Manchester, 1990); D. Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane: an Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation (Basingstoke, 1991). 14 See for example R. L. McCormack, ‘Imperialism, air transport and colonial development: Kenya, 1920–46’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 17 (1989), 374–95; M. L. J. Dierikx, ‘Struggle for prominence: clashing Dutch and British interests on the colonial air routes, 1918–42’, Journal of Contemporary History, 26 (1991), 333–51; L. Edmonds, ‘Australia, Britain and the Empire Air Mail scheme, 1934–38’, Journal of Transport History, 20 (1999), 91–106; P. J. Lyth, ‘The Empire’s airway: British civil aviation from 1919 to 1939’, Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 78 (2000), 865–87; G. H. Pirie, ‘Passenger traffic in the 1930s on British imperial air routes: refinement and revision’, Journal of Transport History, 25 (2004), 66–84; P. Ewer, ‘A gentlemen’s club in the clouds: reassessing the Empire Air Mail Scheme, 1933–1939’, Journal of Transport History, 28 (2007), 75–92; G. H. Pirie, ‘Incidental tourism: British imperial air travel in the 1930s’, Journal of Tourism History, 1 (2009), 49–66.

[7]

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PART I

Looking up

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Chapte r t wo

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Ideas and initiatives

The air age dawned in the early twentieth century when Britain’s global maritime mastery was waning. It would not have been unreasonable to wonder if rule of the sky was destined to replace rule of the waves. Would British aviation inherit the role of binding together a far-flung Empire? Might aviation reaffirm Britain’s imperial status? Could the Empire be in ascension? Would higher be mightier? Might there be an imperial role for aviation in the fashion that military officials and science fiction writers had been suggesting since the mid-1880s?1

Antecedents In London, sentiment for maintaining imperial tradition was strong. Indeed, in a precocious step that mimicked the establishment of the Navy League, the Aerial League of the British Empire was founded in January 1909 to stimulate interest in aeronautics and its imperial importance. Eminent public figures such as Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and Maj. B. F. S. Baden-Powell (ex-president of the Aeronautical Society, an older organisation with an engineering bent) attended the inaugural meeting at the Mansion House in London with representatives from flying clubs. Messages of support were sent by Winston Churchill and by the imperial grandee Lord Curzon, the ex-Viceroy of India. The launch event attracted attention in the press (which was then bombarded by the League’s letter-writing campaign) and was followed by countrywide public lectures to stir up enthusiasm for aviation. But the babble boiled down to nothing.2 In the gloom and pessimism of late Victorian and early Edwardian Britain, faith and interest in the Empire had waned. In an inwardlooking era the central issue in British aviation was the defence of the island against foreign (especially German) air attack. During the first decade of the twentieth century aeronautical developments posed [ 10 ]

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a new threat to one of Britain’s most enduring concerns: protection from invasion. Whereas a powerful navy had always been Britain’s saviour, now the natural frontier of the sea, and sea power itself, were in question. In the immortal phrase of the newspaper magnate (and aviation promoter-to-be) Lord Northcliffe, England was ‘no longer an island’. He made the remark more than two years before the Frenchman Louis Blériot flew across the English Channel in July 1909, claiming Northcliffe’s tantalising £1,000 prize for the first pilot who could prove his point by flying between England and France. England had not been subjected to hostile external invasion since 1066. The protection offered by a stretch of water was not questioned even in 1783 when France’s Montgolfier brothers made the first manned balloon ascent. Remarking on the event, the Count of Provence (later Louis XVIII) was not war-mongering when declaring that ‘the English, a haughty nation, arrogate to themselves the empire of the sea; the French a buoyant nation, make themselves masters of the air’. No citizen of England felt threatened. Nor was the English public unsettled forty-four years later by Thomas Carlyle’s interpretation of a slightly different European view. In an 1827 edition of the Edinburgh Review the Scottish author-historian quoted a Bavarian writer as saying that providence had given France the empire of the land, England the empire of the sea, and Germany the empire of the air. Interesting sayings were one thing; the effects of aeronautical progress in the first decade of the twentieth century were another. The reality of the abruptly changed geopolitical condition of Britain received huge publicity late in 1906. It was then that Northcliffe’s Daily Mail, read in one-sixth of British households, warned that the isolation of the United Kingdom was threatened: ‘they are not mere dreamers who hold that the time is at hand when air power will be an even more important thing than sea power’. Also in 1906, the Aeronautical Society in London was warned that nations failing to appreciate the importance of aircraft as instruments of destruction (and restorative order) would soon be left in the lurch. H. G. Wells, a trained scientist, author of popular scientific romances and a highly regarded cultural voice, offered a similar caution. His 1908 magazine serial (later published as the polemical novel The War in the Air) rammed home the message with its chilling account of an air war that created mass panic, destroyed civilisation and reduced great nations and Empires to mere names. Pre-war cinema latched onto similar dystopian themes from other science-fiction writers, including Jules Verne.3 Less fantastical was the article which a sober magazine published in 1909 warning about the dangers which ‘aerial fleets’ presented to the pre-eminence, security, democracy and morality of Britain. The author [ 11 ]

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looking up

referred to Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians becoming the ‘subject Empire of some other race’, notably the Chinese or Japanese. Also in 1909, H. G. Wells interpreted Blériot’s flight as a sign that England had lost its lead in the Darwinian struggle for national supremacy. One way of countering an aerial threat was to build a defensive domestic and imperial air force; the naming of the British and Colonial Aeroplane [manufacturing] Company formed in 1910 was no accident. Another way was to negotiate a robust international ban on aircraft in warfare. The cause-conscious John Galsworthy, a renowned English novelist and playwright, made such a plea in 1911 in the pages of the London Times and the Manchester Guardian. Among his literary compatriots, Thomas Hardy was lukewarm, but Arnold Bennett, G. B. Shaw and G. K. Chesterton thought Galsworthy’s commendable position was naive. No eminent figures in arts, religion and science in France or Germany were among the 220 signatories to an international prohibition that Galsworthy tried to initiate.4 All innovation is accompanied by anxiety. Powered flight was no exception, but celebration outweighed despondency in the interval between Wilbur and Orville Wright’s first heavier-than-air flight in the United States of America in 1903 and the start of aerial combat, reconnaissance and bombing in Europe in 1914. On both continents, the air festivals and the avant-garde art and literature that showed off flight traded in its high-minded spirituality and pleasurable intoxication. As time passed, however, the festivals exposed ugly elitism, nationalism and militarism. The 1914–18 war spotlighted the belligerent applications of aviation. Aircraft may not have been decisive in any military campaigns, but their impact extended beyond the battlefront. The war stimulated aircraft production and public awareness of flying. Governments spent more money than ever on aviation; more men took to the air than in peacetime; more families knew somebody who flew; more people worked in aircraft factories and the allied aeronautical industry. Nations became ‘airminded’. The collective consciousness was skilfully manipulated for propagandistic purposes. Pilots became folk heroes. In Britain, as in France and Germany, their antics and victories in the sky became symbols of national standing.5 In view of the boost given to aviation by the First World War, in May 1917 the British Government decided to examine the post-war prospects for civil aviation and the possibility of employing demobilised personnel and surplus wartime aircraft. It was a year since Montagu had urged the need for a Board of Imperial Aviation.6 The brief of the so-called Civil Aerial Transport Committee extended explicitly to domestic, imperial and other international aviation possibilities. In the year before he was appointed Britain’s Director of Propaganda in enemy [ 12 ]

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countries, Lord Northcliffe chaired the sixty-member Committee once before he was called away. It was made up of men from the Foreign, Colonial, India and Meteorological offices, the Admiralty, the Board of Trade, the Air Ministry, and the dominions. They would have been aware of lectures given to the Aeronautical Society that summer. Eighteen months before the War ended the Society convened three meetings in London at which invited speakers addressed aspects of peacetime commercial aviation. First up was George Holt Thomas, the 47-year-old proprietor of several patriotic newspapers, and founder of the Aircraft Manufacturing Company. The Oxford-educated speaker started his May 1917 text – if not his verbal delivery – by asserting that his subject was ‘enormous, and of vital importance to the Empire’. Aviation, he argued, was going to change the world after the fighting more than it had revolutionised warfare. He warned against British apathy about civil aviation and suggested that Germany would exploit the air very eagerly in peacetime. His world map showed estimates of flying times and fares for journeys to New York (2 days), Ceylon (2.5 days), Vancouver (3 days), Cape Town (3.5 days) and Sydney (5 days). Under the stony gaze of sixteen statues of English Kings in Westminster Central Hall, he exhorted his two-and-a-half-thousandstrong audience to remember that just as an island people had needed maritime protection in the past, so the security of an imperial people could be helped by ‘vast aerial fleets’. This time we must be first, Holt Thomas insisted.7 Holt Thomas added an aerial dimension to geopolitics by suggesting the need for a global ‘Allied Aerial Route’ to make Britain and its friends independent of Germany. Delivering the fifth Wilbur Wright Memorial Lecture, a second speaker noted baldly that Germany could not be allowed exclusive use of an air route to India and the East. Lord Montagu, an adviser on mechanical transport services to the Indian Government, was the third speaker. Ten years previously he predicted to a Delhi audience that commercial air services would link England and India by 1927; now he discussed the development of air routes to connect all the scattered territories of Empire. He drew a parallel between the harbours and coaling stations of Empire and the landing places for land- and sea-planes in a post-maritime age. Montagu stressed the comparative aeronautical advantage that imperial Britain had over more compact European states. Holt Thomas emphasised the quality of British aeroplane design. Within months another British aviation pioneer emphasised the courageous and calm temperament of the British ‘race’ that so suited it to flying.8 Only gross ignorance of the simplest elements of imperialism and scientific racialism would have made it possible to use the words nation and race ­interchangeably. [ 13 ]

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Recurrent use of the four-letter word suggests it was neither accidental nor innocuous shorthand for linking aeronautical achievement to some notion of genetic superiority. Other Aeronautical Society initiatives intended to spark interest in aviation included two ‘juvenile’ lectures arranged in January 1918. Between 500 and 600 children of Society members and friends heard the first lecturer say that aircraft were the modern equivalent of Drake’s ships, and that they would change customs as thoroughly as the railway had done previously. The youngsters were urged to imagine flying to a faraway paradise where, among others, luscious fruits grew alongside golden sands where smiling black babies lived. An alternative scenario involved an imaginary flight to see ancient wonders in Greece, Egypt and India. The exercise was intended to make children understand ‘their duty to help develop the flying machine’. In the second youth lecture, the prominent aircraft constructor Sir Handley Page drew a parallel between the revolutionary effects of the telegraph in the nineteenth century and the aeroplane in the twentieth century. No doubt his audience were delighted to hear that air travel might mean they could prolong their school holidays by an extra day. He asked parents to construct aeronautical equivalents of the sea-based tales of far-off lands, pirates, treasure and rescue of helpless maidens from torture, all of which had fired youngsters to make Britain supreme at sea.9 The Civil Aerial Transport Committee reported in February 1918. It suggested that air transport would benefit Britain by increasing friendly communications with foreign nations and, even more, by improving communication between the widely scattered countries that made up the British Empire. The report urged the development of imperial air routes and landing grounds for both economic and political reasons. Underlying its anxiety that the Empire should not lag behind enemy countries in civil aviation, the report also envisaged donating Britain’s surplus war aircraft to Egypt, India and the self-governing dominions, provided they submitted approved schemes for creating an imperial air force. Sending outdated, second-hand equipment abroad was also a way of curtailing storage costs in Britain and preventing ‘stagnation’ of military aircraft. Shortly, Lord Montagu would protest that the subcontinent should no longer be ‘the dumping ground for inferior airplanes’.10 Other suggestions of the Civil Aerial Transport Committee that would have imperial repercussions were that Empire countries retain sovereignty of the air above their territories, and that commercial aircraft should be designed so they could be converted easily to military use. Indeed, convertibility could be made a precondition for allowing [ 14 ]

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civil aviation enterprise. The Committee also advised placing control of civil aviation in the Air Ministry.11 H. G. Wells (who headed the wartime Ministry of Propaganda and was a technological enthusiast as well as a keen supporter of a postimperial League of Free Nations) struck a discordant note in his contribution to the work of the investigating Committee. In a minority report on labour in the air industry he argued that excessive tenderness and financial timidity blinded the committee to the ‘supreme importance’ which the establishment of imperial air services would have for the Empire once hostilities ended. The British islands were small, he wrote, and their people numerically few. The country’s only claim to world importance depended on its inhabitants’ courage and enterprise. They needed to confront the necessity of an air service planned on a world scale. Wells added that if Great Britain did not absorb thousands of aeroplanes and men it had no business pretending to be anything more than second-rate. Retreating from his dire pre-war warnings, he noted in a resounding phrase that Britain ‘cannot be both Imperial and mean’. The ambition for greatness was never in question; paying for it was. Yet the financial implications of rhetoric such as that of the Committee’s acting chairman were easy to gloss over. A ‘boldly conceived air service’, he declared, was ‘essential to our Imperial pretensions’. Charles G. Grey articulated imperial aviation pretensions publicly in 1918. The 43-year-old was the founding editor of the London-based Aeroplane magazine, and the self-appointed apostle of Empire aviation. Once said to have used acid for ink, Grey was the epitome of the Little Englander. His typically arrogant observation was made in the June number of the house magazine of the Over-Seas Club and Patriotic League, one of whose stated objectives was to maintain the Empire’s supremacy on the oceans and in the sky. Looking at the world map, Grey deduced that flying had been invented specifically to link the Empire.12 The idea was not far removed from presumptions – contra Thomas Carlyle – that the air was a specifically British heritage and that a heavenly presence was Britain’s destiny. If some felt that Britain should be supreme in the air as of right, others knew that it would have to be earned. An aircraft manufacturer’s advertisement in the imperial and foreign trade supplement to The Times in April 1918 put it that a people whose predecessors built ships which established Britain’s name overseas had now to construct air-age vessels which would inscribe their country’s name permanently ‘on the roof of the heavens’. [ 15 ]

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Map 1  ‘Great routes to every part of the British Empire’: generalised geography of main British imperial civil air routes in the 1930s

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ideas and initiatives

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Post-war initiatives After the First World War, the notion of a non-military imperial air service took root quickly. The case made for what was then termed commercial aviation, and what is now more accurately called civil aviation, ranged from bland assertion to reasoned argument. Claims varied from vague to precise, and practical to ethereal. The UnderSecretary of State for Air, Gen. J. E. B. Seely, who spoke at an Imperial Air Fleet Committee dinner in London to celebrate Britain’s military victory, regarded it as axiomatic that there should be commercial air routes in the Empire. Appearing to treat flights as incidental or secondary considerations, and colonies as subsidiary concerns, he declared that Britain could, and must, ‘secure great air routes to all the great Dominions of the Crown’. The sentiment fitted the 50-year-old who had studied at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, and who had already served as Under-Secretary for the Colonies and for War. It was rather more surprising coming from a non-flyer whose Derbyshire constituency was far from London. Aviation was getting a wide grip. In one of its many inter-war reports that circulated views on Empire aviation to a wider audience, the London Times relayed Seely’s message to people who would not have heard him in person. Most particularly, an influential elite in the Home Counties read the acknowledged daily newspaper of record at breakfast tables. Its comprehensive coverage and agreeable tone would in time earn praise from C. G. Grey. He commended the paper for its thorough, restrained and supportive coverage of aviation. Not least, he saluted the way it consistently proclaimed a ‘sane English view’. The Times was, in his view, one institution that could be relied on to take ‘the proper Imperial attitude’. As Seely gauged, immediately after the War it was proper to proclaim that within the lifetime of nearly all his audience there could be ‘great air routes to every part of the British Empire’.13 Steps toward the creation of just such a network included the appointment in February 1919 of Maj.-Gen. (Sir) Frederick Sykes to the newly created post of Controller-General of Aviation. Working within the Air Ministry, Sykes answered to Winston Churchill who held the joint portfolios of Secretary of State for War and Air. Sykes’ task was to extend Britain’s wartime air supremacy to civil flying. No stranger to imperial thinking, his outlook originated during his travels on military service in India, West Africa and South Africa. He had been impressed and inspired by ‘the amazing work which the pioneers of the British race had done in remote quarters of the globe’. Their efforts convinced him that ‘a united Commonwealth of English-speaking peoples would be the surest guarantee of peace, justice, liberty and freedom’. As [ 17 ]

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looking up

regards aviation, Sykes could claim to have been the founder of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC). During the last year of the 1914–18 war he was Chief of Air Staff. He had the opportunity to think about aviation and Empire when he prepared his June 1918 memorandum for the War Cabinet suggesting the creation of an imperial air force. His December 1918 Cabinet memorandum proposed an Air Ministry. Fittingly, as Chief of Air Staff, his lecture to the London Chamber of Commerce in January 1919 was on ‘Commercial Aviation in the Light of War Experience’.14 When Sykes began appointing his staff he created posts relating to air-route planning and to the collection and issuing of commercial information related to flying. The job specification attaching to the latter post was narrower than the Civil Aerial Transport Committee envisaged when it recommended ‘a system of Propaganda throughout the Empire in order to convince the whole nation of the vast importance and possibility of aerial transport’. Sykes wanted his propaganda officer only to advertise the British aeronautical industry in world markets. Sykes’s vision of imperial civil aviation had to do with British trusteeship and destiny. He referred to this at the tail of his address to the Australian and New Zealand Luncheon Club in London in February 1919. The audience cheered. ‘The Imperial aspects of commercial air power could not be over-rated’, he said. Subscribing members of the Over-Seas Club and Patriotic League would also read Sykes’s view that Britain was given the great task of building up a mighty machinery to secure the economic future of its worldwide Commonwealth, and to act as ‘a true and effective guardian of lasting world peace’. If any corroboration were needed it was to be found in Britain’s possession of the appropriate personnel. Sykes told a meeting of the London Chamber of Commerce in January 1919 that ‘the British race’ possessed all the characteristics of the ideal commercial pilot. Moreover, just as Elizabethan sailors and buccaneers paved the way for ‘a race of modern merchant seamen’, so wartime pilots set the stage for the evolution of a British merchant air service. Applause perhaps being too restrained, his audience cheered again.15 The themes touched on by Sykes were piquant. In a 1918 edition of the Empire Review, an RFC Lt-Col had already asserted that aviation would eliminate barriers between all nations, put them in touch, and form ‘a nervous system for the League of Nations’. He added that the development of aviation would also help secure ties between England and the dominions and colonies. A modern mercantilist, he had in mind entirely practical ties and urged people who had the interests of Empire trade at heart to ensure that there would be no obstacles [ 18 ]

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to the development of an efficient ‘Imperial Air Service’. From his perspective of being in charge of RFC personnel, Air Vice-Marshall (Sir) Sefton Brancker detected other practical aviation possibilities abroad. In January 1919 he suggested turning away from the ‘cramped, uncomfortable little country ... with the most accursed weather in the world’ and developing aviation skills and capacity in Empire areas where there were better climates, longer distances and less effective railways. ‘Our future is in the air’, he said: ‘aviation will be the greatest factor in linking up our world-wide Empire.’16 Besides offering a training ground, the sheer size and inaccessibility of so much colonial and dominion territory commended the application of flying to aerial survey there. The usefulness of aviation in virgin lands for map-making, commerce, administration and science were outlined by the Civil Aerial Transport Committee and by several commentators at a time when the Colonial Survey Committee was being established in 1919. The Geographical Journal and Nature (the eminent weekly scientific magazine) published articles on the prospects for aerial photography. The Daily Telegraph carried a piece on the subject by T. E. Lawrence, the legendary ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, a British folk hero from Middle Eastern battlegrounds.17 Never one to be left out of an aviation debate, in May 1919 C. G. Grey explained why he approved the idea of imperial civil aviation. Writing again for the Over-Seas Club and Patriotic League he insisted that rapid transportation by air would do more than any other thing to ‘uphold civilisation’ by consolidating the widespread British Empire. Grey would never have reduced civilisation to mere absence of war, but he did cite approvingly two contemporary science fiction tales. Their author was fellow British reactionary Rudyard Kipling, the Nobel laureate who was often also designated the Empire’s poet laureate. With the Night Mail (1905) was about a trans-Atlantic airship flight in the year 2000. The sequel, As Easy as ABC (1912), foresaw a future in which air transport would link the world so thoroughly that all its inhabitants would know each other too well to bother about fighting. Kipling (who supported the Aerial League and chaired an early meeting) visualised benevolent aviation ushering in a global government. This he named the Aerial Board of Control (with the deceptively innocent acronym ‘ABC’). Its motto would be ‘transportation is civilisation’. Kipling’s science fiction became a pivot for discussion of the relations between technology and power, and identified him with the aviation lobby.18 In 1918/19 it was audacious trying to link air-transport development with peace. The aching coincidence between a ghastly war and a new technology was clear. In Churchill’s words, aeroplanes had been [ 19 ]

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‘fanned into the air on the furious wind of a great struggle when money and danger hardly counted at all in human relations’. Many ordinary British citizens regarded aeroplanes as no more than aerial artillery. They wanted to put the sickening fighting behind them and wished to see the back of aircraft. Among people who were better disposed to the notion of civil flying, many were sceptical about the possibility of converting fighting aircraft to civilian use despite wartime improvements in their safety, reliability and performance. Others reckoned that further aeronautical advances were impossible. The production and use of large civilian airliners alarmed ardent disarmers. The argument that civil aviation was needed to provide a reserve for combat flying clinched the objection.19 The reissue in 1921 of H. G. Wells’s The War in the Air, the ‘first and definitive air-power novel’, sustained public suspicions about intrinsically aggressive aviation. In the same year William le Queux’s The Terror of the Air told of London and New York being bombed by a silent seaplane that could stay airborne for extended periods. Its owners were the ‘uncivilized and uncivilizable Junkers of Prussia’, bent on avenging the two-year-old Versailles peace treaty. London would suffer further fictional assault: in Hugh Addison’s 1923 tale The Battle of London, a squadron of heavy tri-plane bombers flattened Westminster.20 Away from the conflict-weary heart of Empire, aviation was in fact put to use in a manner not far removed from bombast. Some of the first peacetime applications of flying overseas were patrol, policing and defence of imperial space newly enlarged to more than two million square miles by post-War territorial mandates. Only the most tradition-bound militarists adhered to the view that protracted overland expeditions remained the best method of imperial defence in places like Somalia and on the Indian frontier. The Ministry for Reconstruction’s 1919 pamphlet on air transport stressed that the maintenance of an air force backed by a strong commercial fleet was ‘as vital to the safety and prosperity of the British Empire as the maintenance of a strong navy and a strong mercantile marine’. Recourse to maritime parallels was a popular tactic. In March 1919 W. Joynson-Hicks (Member of Parliament for Twickenham, member of the Civil Aerial Transport Committee, and author of a 1912 article entitled ‘Command of the Air’) told the Commons that in the past Britain had command of the sea because of its worldwide coaling stations. Now, he said, Britain could command the air because it held the landing stages of the world.21 A 1922 magazine article written under a pseudonym opened with the argument that because the Empire had been built up and maintained by sea power it was imperative to investigate the possibilities of any new devices as auxiliaries to sea power. The idea was publicised more [ 20 ]

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widely in the summer of the same year by a satirical London magazine. A Punch cartoon depicts the relaxed figure of Britannia contemplating the waves at the seaside. The caption advises the national cipher that if she wants to continue ruling the oceans she will have to rule the air too.22 Britain’s national founding legend about the Sea God (Poseidon) surrendering to Britannia was two hundred years old;23 in search of a new Britannia, would myth-makers in the twentieth century spin an equivalent legend about the capitulation of Uranus, the Sky God? The thought of using aviation to modernise and perpetuate Britain’s glorious maritime Empire dovetailed with the revival of a spirit of imperialism in Britain after the First World War. Victory in 1918 had confirmed rather than diminished the country’s status as a world power. As the imperial historian John MacKenzie observed, it was a position deriving from Britain’s unique imperial status which, in the inter-war years, made it possible to depict the Empire ‘as a saviour from decline’ (even if, now, the evidence for economic decline is disputed). Materially, the challenge facing Britain from 1919 was to survive in an increasingly hostile and competitive world. One way of doing so was to develop self-reliance by tightening and securing the imperial knot. A self-sufficient Empire would buy and sell its own resources in its own internal markets linked by its own transport services. In troubled socio-economic circumstances, including international depression and domestic unemployment, the revival of imperialism also offered a way out of Britain’s post-War quagmire by presenting an alternative to an obsolete social and economic order. At last, imperialism had become a viable ideology, and it stood poised to restore some of the lustre, or even substance, to the imagined or real fading of British global pre-eminence. The air became a ‘refuge for imperial dreams and fantasies’.24 On the face of it the prospects of an air Empire were improved by the release of aviation equipment and personnel after the war. Fighting resources became civil surplus. Having 22,647 aeroplanes and 103 airships, Britain boasted the world’s largest air force. In addition, 26,000 pilots had been instructed and roughly 266,000 other officers and men trained in aviation. Nearly 700 aerodromes had been built. Britain was also home to the world’s biggest aircraft industry. One estimate is that 177,000 people (including tens of thousands of women, and under-age boys) worked in aircraft manufacturing and related activities. Approximately 112,000 of these people were employed in 122 airframe-manufacturing companies that built about 4,000 aeroplanes each month toward the end of the War.25 Whereas British aviation was buoyant, British shipping was dealt a heavy blow between 1914 and 1918. Of the 1914 tonnage of merchant [ 21 ]

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shipping, 38 per cent was sunk and, as part of a post-war cutback in expenditure, naval allocations were cut severely by a factor of seven. By virtue of its robustness, aviation might have seemed about to make the kind of statement about Britain that her navy had done previously. Yet the growth was not sustained. Even before the Government’s savage financial cuts in 1922 several British aircraft works shrank, merged or closed. In 1924 there were some 24,000 jobs in twenty firms. The search for new civil business, including creating manufacturing company airlines in British Africa, was largely fruitless. Staff dispersed. Some went abroad: in 1920 the Vickers company sent employees to China in what turned out to be an abortive mission to kick-start a domestic civil air service. One young ex-RFC pilot was hired as a flying instructor. Most aeronautical workers stayed in England helping roll out military orders, and doing reconditioning, repairs, conversions and spare-parts manufacture. Technicians with aeronautical experience built motor-vehicle bodies, tramway coaches, powerboats and light engineering assemblies. Desperate aeronautical manufacturing companies produced milk churns, pianos, fish fryers and all-metal shop fronts. In one instance aircraft hangars were used to keep pigs and grow mushrooms.26 One opportunity for post-war deployment of aviation capacity was in imperial patrol and defence. Lord Montagu latched onto the subject in his June 1919 lecture to the 165-year-old Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (commonly called the Royal Society of Arts). In a talk about flying to and in India he touched on the military vulnerability of the scattered British Empire, and on the need to extend maritime supremacy into the air. Within India flying offered relief from poor overland communications, not least for expatriate journeys between Indian hill stations and the plains. Even indirect air routes between England and India would save time. Montagu’s estimates were 30 hours each way for passengers. The costs and delays of cable communication would also tumble. He calculated that a 5,000-word air letter would cost 2s 6d and arrive days sooner than a cablegram of the same length which would cost £416. ‘Whatever the future of the world holds for the British Empire’, Montagu declared, ‘we must see that it is as supreme in the air in the coming years as it has been in the past, and is now, on the sea.’ Within weeks, the ex-Premier of Newfoundland told an audience in Birmingham that an ‘Imperial Air Fleet would help link up the far-flung portions of the Empire and produce some tangible illustrations of our common brotherhood’.27 Montagu spoke again about imperial aviation at year-end, also in London, this time to the British Women’s Patriotic League. In his [ 22 ]

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address about ‘Aviation and World Transport’ he noted that at the end of the War the personnel of the Royal Air Force (RAF), which succeeded the RFC from April 1918, outnumbered that of the Navy. The great danger to the Empire lay in the length of its lines of communication: 6,000 sea miles separated Britain from India, the Cape was 5,000 sea miles distant, and Canada was 2,000 sea miles away. Lord Montagu’s view was that during war ‘sister nations’ should be linked with the central head of Empire, and that swift lines of communication strengthened Britain’s position. The ladies of the League reportedly cheered when he said that aviation was going to be a great source of strength and vital to the Empire.28 Despite the imperial rhetoric, such enthusiasm and confidence as there was in post-War Britain for commercial aviation centred on domestic services and on links to Western Europe. In Britain, 52,000 passengers were carried in the first six months after civil flying officially restarted in May 1919. A total of 240 aircraft were certified as airworthy for civil use; 374 pilots were awarded certificates of proficiency. Three commercial airlines handled the traffic. Two in particular were a nursery for ideas and talent that crossed over into Empire aviation. George Holt Thomas, the wealthy proprietor of the Graphic newspaper, created Air Transport and Travel in 1916; it was a subsidiary of his Aircraft Manufacturing Company. In the same year he founded the Society of British Aircraft Constructors – its membership tumbled from eighty in 1918 to eighteen in 1920. In 1919 Holt Thomas wrote a prescient article for the Over-Seas Club and Patriotic League about ‘girdling the globe by air’. Not least of his contributions to British aviation was his choosing Sefton Brancker to manage Air Transport and Travel.29 Another person who was to play a prominent part in Empire aviation, Maj. George Woods Humphery, was appointed general manager of Handley Page Transport at the end of his wartime RAF service. In the early 1920s it was still easier to write and speak animatedly about Empire aviation than to practice it. Lord Montagu of Beaulieu talked about flight in lectures that the London County Council arranged for schoolteachers in January 1920. Sir Frederick Sykes, then Controller-General of Civil Aviation, chaired the meeting at King’s College. He and the audience heard the lecturer predict that fog-free, sunny, windless Egypt was destined to become the Clapham Junction of the air, and that it would be unwise to allow the aerodrome at Heliopolis to be outside British control. For Montagu, it was a matter of right that Britain should be allowed to establish Egypt as a centre for flying in the Empire. Like the first flight between Cairo and Cape Town in December 1919, the lecture would have been one of several [ 23 ]

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indications that persuaded the editors of The Times to lead one edition with an article entitled ‘The Empire and the Air’. They commented approvingly on signs that England – not Britain – was waking up to ‘the great part which the air must play in the future of the Empire’.30 Another awakening of sorts was signalled in 1920 by an initiative to resuscitate the moribund Aerial League of the British Empire. Renamed the Air League of the British Empire, it became one of several British institutions that championed Empire aviation between the wars, albeit mainly the military wing.

Notes   1 M. Paris, ‘Air power and imperial defence 1880–1919’, Journal of Contemporary History, 24 (1989), 209–25.   2 A. Gollin, No Longer an Island: Britain and the Wright Brothers, 1902–1909 (London, 1984); P. Almond, Ninety Years of the Air League (London, 1999); J. L. Pritchard, ‘Major B. F. S. Baden-Powell’, Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 60 (1956), 9–24.   3 Gollin, No Longer an Island, pp. 151–94; M. Paris, From the Wright Brothers to Top Gun: Aviation, Nationalism and Popular Cinema (Manchester, 1995).   4 H. F. Wyatt, ‘The wings of war’, Nineteenth Century (September 1909), 450–6; Daily Mail (27 July 1909); P. Fearon, ‘Aircraft manufacturing’, in N. Buxton and D. H. Aldcroft (eds), British Industry Between the Wars (London, 1979), pp. 216–40; H. V. Marrot, The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy (London, 1935).   5 Wohl, A Passion for Wings; L. Kennett, The First Air War, 1914–1918 (New York, 1991); Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers.   6 D-S-M//6/8. King’s College, London. Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives.   7 G. Holt Thomas, ‘Commercial aeronautics’, Aeronautical Journal, 21 (1917), p.  369.   8 M. O’Gorman, ‘Looking ahead’, Aeronautical Journal, 21 (1917), 439–55; L. Montagu, ‘The world’s air routes and their regulation’, Flight (1917), 653–9; Aeronautical Journal (15 June 1917), pp. 538–9; The Times (22 June 1917), p. 3; C. Grahame-White, ‘Commercial and pleasure flying’, Aeronautical Journal, 23 (1919), 231–56.   9 Thurston, A. P., ‘The aeroplane’, Aeronautical Journal, 22 (1918), 60; Handley Page, F., ‘To Constantinople and back by aeroplane in war time’, Aeronautical Journal, 22 (1918), 418–22. 10 Reports of the Civil Aerial Transport Committee (1918) (Cmd 9218), pp. 10, 15; L. Montagu, ‘Aviation as affecting India’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 67 (1919), p. 549. 11 Reports. 12 Ibid., p. 68; J. Bamford, Croissants at Croydon (Sutton, 1986); C. G. Grey, ‘The aeroplane and the Empire: how aircraft will revolutionise travel overseas’, Overseas (June 1918), 27–32. 13 The Times (22 January 1919), p. 10; Who Was Who, 1897–1996; Aeroplane (6 July 1932; 2 January 1935); Political and Economic Planning, Report on the British Press (London, 1938). 14 F. H. Sykes, From Many Angles: an Autobiography (London, 1942), pp. 20, 269–72; The Times (8 January 1919); Flight (27 February 1919), p. 271. 15 Reports, p. 15; Sykes, From Many Angles, p. 274; F. H. Sykes, ‘The future of aviation in Australasia’, Overseas (1919), p. 47; The Times (8 January 1919), p. 4; (21 February 1919), p. 5. 16 L. Malone, ‘The air and the Empire’, Empire Review, 33 (1919), pp. 60, 2; N.

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MacMillan, Sir Sefton Brancker (London, 1935), p. 216; Pudney, The Seven Skies, p. 17. When ‘pestilential’ weather at Sir Philip Sassoon’s country house in May 1930 prevented the prominent British East African expatriate Denys Finch Hatton trying out his host’s light aeroplane, he ranted about England being a ‘cursed country’. S. Wheeler, Too Close to the Sun: the Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton (London, 2006), p. 219. Reports, p. 13; R. H. Rowe, ‘Survey and imperial enterprise’, World’s Work (1919), 331–4; L. Walmsley, ‘The aeroplane in African observation’, Geographical Journal, 54 (1919), 296–7; Nature (10 June 1920), pp. 457–9; Daily Telegraph (16 November 1920); Daily Mail (19 March 1921). C. G. Grey, ‘Flying boats as a link of Empire’, Overseas (May 1919), p. 51; Almond, Ninety Years of the Air League; A. Lycett, Kipling (London, 1999). The Times (3 February 1920), p. 6; Higham, Britain’s Imperial Air Routes; W. W. Benn, ‘Air policy’, English Review, 36 (1923), pp. 244–50; C. D. Burney, The World, the Air and the Future (London, 1929); D. Carlton, ‘The problem of civil aviation in British disarmament policy’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institute, 111 (1966), 307–16. M. Ceadel, ‘Popular fiction and the next war, 1918–1939’, in F. Gloversmith (ed.), Class, Culture and Social Change (Brighton, 1980), p. 165. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control; Benn, ‘Air policy’, p. 248; Hansard (Commons) (13 March 1919), cols 1532–3. Icarus, ‘Britain’s future aerial navy’, Fortnightly Review (August 1922), p. 281; Punch (14 June 1922). M. Warner, Monuments and Maidens (London, 1985). MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture, p. 8; T. G. August, The Selling of the Empire: British and French Imperialist Propaganda, 1890–1940 (Westport CT, 1985), p. 20; S. Constantine, ‘‘Bringing the Empire alive’: the Empire Marketing Board and imperial propaganda, 1926–1933’, in J. M. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, 1986); A. Sampson, Empires of the Sky (London, 1985), p. 32. P. Fearon, ‘The growth of aviation in Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History, 20 (1985), 21–40; Synopsis of British Air Effort During the War (Cmd 100) (1919). P. M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London, 1976); W. F. F. Sempill, The Air and the Plain Man (London, 1931); C. A. Lewis, Sagittarius Rising (London, 1936); Fearon, ‘Aircraft manufacturing’. Montagu, ‘Aviation as affecting India’; Flight (12 June 1919), p. 779; (10 July 1919), p. 913. The Times (2 December 1919), p. 11; Flight (4 December 1919), p. 1570. Hyde, British Air Policy; G. Holt Thomas, ‘Girdling the globe by air’, Overseas (May 1919), 37–42; K. Hayward, The British Aircraft Industry (Manchester, 1989). The Times (14 January 1920), p. 9; (27 January 1920), p. 13.

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While commercial flying was being organised, and absorbed some decommissioned pilots and planes, the RAF was adapting to peacetime work. One of its most senior members in the field, Maj.-Gen. (Sir) W. G. H. Salmond, the Commanding Air Officer in Cairo, was also becoming anxious about the absence of civil air progress in the Empire. Presumably he was having to deal with private companies that were agitating for operating concessions in Egypt, India and the Sudan, and would have appreciated some policy guidelines. Having met Sykes early in 1919 he judged that ‘the civil side’ was lost about what to do. Rather than wait for some inspired organisational thinking, or some politico-legal breakthrough, Salmond’s pragmatic approach was to start experimental air services and then learn from experience. It appears that on his own initiative he drafted plans for an Imperial Air Transport Company to develop the Cairo–Karachi, Cairo–Cape Town and India–Australia routes. It is perhaps an exaggeration to say that ‘no one at that time questioned … the permanence of the Empire’, but few could have doubted the importance to England of preserving the Empire: ‘the strategic importance of these routes, especially the one to India, as well as their potential commercial value, was obvious’.1 Salmond initially thought of involving existing British air transport companies but he concluded quickly that each was too self-absorbed. Instead, drawing on old imperial templates, he recommended a royal charter company modelled on the (English) East India and British South Africa companies. In March 1919 he argued that a single organisation was ideally suited to infant imperial aviation, whereas competing airlines would cut corners, compromise safety and set aviation back on its heels. Not least, he felt that it would be easiest for the RAF to deal with just one civilian organisation. Imperialists surely liked his prediction that a British overseas airline would gradually ‘eat up’ challengers to become ‘the most powerful in the world’. [ 26 ]

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In May 1919 Churchill began inviting influential men to sit on an advisory committee on civil aviation. Lord Northcliffe declined. Lord Inchcape’s possible prejudices – his lifetime work as a shipping baron – were dismissed: ‘we are a long way off serious competition with ships’, Churchill explained. The successor to the Civil Aerial Transport Committee was considerably smaller, trimmed for quick action. Chaired by Lord Weir, the ex-Secretary of State for Air, its ten-strong membership did not include any dominion or colonial representative. Co-optation or consultation was the only prospect. The Committee took evidence from Holt Thomas, Vickers and Handley Page, among others, before reporting in October.2 Weir’s men abandoned the idea of a charter company in favour of a subsidy arrangement involving airmails and the Crown. By then Holt Thomas had won approval from Sykes, the Crown and the British South Africa Company for a monopoly commercial flying concession in Rhodesia, and he had started negotiations with Persia.3 Never acknowledged as such, an RAF man might justifiably be called the originator of imperial civil aviation. Not only did Salmond produce the key initial plan, he also had it within his power to take the necessary practical steps to arrange the surveying, preparing and test flying of a Middle East and African airway. When work on the African airway started it was five years after The Times had reported coolly that a Frenchman was about to fly between Cairo and Cape Town – and five years since he succeeded flying 2,800 miles from Cairo to Khartoum and back. Imagining a brief interlude between reconnaissance and opening a full-fledged commercial operation, the same newspaper reported (prematurely) that Britain had chosen the world’s least explored continent for its first transcontinental air service. The reason given was that the route was entirely under British control and there would be no delays while permission was sought to fly over foreign territory.4

Crossing the Atlantic Concurrent with the air surveys for Salmond, demobbed pilots in Britain who had developed a taste and enthusiasm for flying set their own personal challenge. Being first to fly across the Atlantic was one. In 1919 two ex-RAF pilots succeeded in getting two-thirds of the way from Newfoundland before crashing. Anticipating a different outcome, the St John’s Evening Telegram had already run its seven-column headline ‘Britannia Rules the Air’. The pilots, Hawker and Grieve, were expected drowned. The British public celebrated wildly when they were rescued. Was salvage really tantamount to ruling the air? [ 27 ]

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The London Times cooed that the flight had more romance than the voyages of the Argonauts and the wanderings of Ulysses. The welcoming crowds at King’s Cross railway terminus in London were certainly captivated. Northcliffe gave Hawker £5,000 for his gallant and patriotic attempt. Introducing Hawker and Grieve’s book about their flight, an admirer defended newspapers against charges of callously orchestrating a welcome to overshadow that given to returning soldiers. He argued that even in failure the two pilots had inherited the spirit of noble gentlemen adventurers; they maintained ‘the great traditions that have made the British Empire what it is’. Referring to the flight not the Empire, he concluded that ‘few failures have been so great a triumph’.5 Soon an American team crossed the Atlantic safely. The pilots stopped in the Azores and Portugal before completing a romantic circle and landing their flying boat at Plymouth from where the Pilgrim Fathers had originally set sail. Two ex-RAF pilots, Capt. J. R. Alcock and Lt A. W. Brown, made the first non-stop Atlantic crossing. In the Northern Hemisphere summer of 1919 they flew east 1,800 miles across the Atlantic from Newfoundland before inadvertently grounding their Vickers Vimy in a bog in County Galway, Ireland. It was a sad but triumphant end for the wood-and-canvas wartime biplane that had been designed to bomb Berlin. Happily, unlike the heroic 1917 namesake battle at Vimy, France, where the Canadian involvement was much greater, the ghastliness was shorter and not fatal. At the end of their path-breaking June flight of nearly sixteen hours, Alcock and Brown had written themselves into history. A slow, joyous, chaotic and tiring journey to and through London awaited the intrepid pilots whom the New York Times praised for overcoming Sir Isaac’s Newton’s gravitational theory. The editorial reckoned that even Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s best imaginings had been bettered and that there would soon be nothing left to conquer. London stores reported a run on confetti and Union Jack flags. The stock market value of Vickers and Rolls Royce shares jumped. Alcock and Brown scooped the Daily Mail prize of £10,000 for the first non-stop Atlantic flight. Churchill presented the award at a celebratory lunch at London’s smart Savoy Hotel. Swathes of aircraft fabric covered dining tables. Flowers were arranged in the colours and shape of the RAF roundel. Coloured Union Jacks were printed on napkins.6 It was rather disingenuous to give French names to seven menu items. However sweet ‘Surprise Britannia’ tasted, to an English-speaker the words looked churlish and undermined the moment. The Atlantic crossing had been ‘by a British pilot and navigator, in a British machine powered by British engines’. Only British earth [ 28 ]

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had been touched: the flight departed from the first British colony and arrived in territory edging toward dominion status. An even deeper reading of Britishness could be constructed. Lord Northcliffe (who, mindful of German belligerence, put up the prize money in 1913) lived out his megalomania and vanity just long enough to tell Alcock that the flight had been ‘a typical exhibition of British courage and organising efficiency’. He judged that the crossing, made more quickly than the average telegraphic transfer of 1919, meant that the Anglo-American world, at least, might substitute air mail for messages ‘garbled’ by telegraphic workers.7 Frontier work in aviation was about reliability and strength that was personal and national, as well as technical. In recognition of a staggering achievement generally, but in celebration of a triumph for British aviation in particular, both Alcock and Brown were made Knights Commander of the British Empire. King George V instituted this order of British secular knighthood as recently as 1917. The only new category of knighthood of the century would in future include more of the King’s subjects who performed an imperial service unique to that century. British endeavour did not slacken. In the month after Alcock and Brown’s flight the R34 airship made the first ever double crossing of the Atlantic (carrying a copy of Kipling’s ‘With the Night Mail’). The crew was British and the risk was Britain’s, but the design was German, copied from downed wartime airships. Publicity was sought for the flight, but ineffectively. The plan to display the progress of the R34 on a large illuminated map in Trafalgar Square came to nothing. The publicity that did occur was not especially imperial. The airship’s cargo was not imperial: it comprised films of the Versailles peace conference, a consignment of platinum for a firm of New York jewellers, and letters and newspapers for the city’s journalists. With the Union Jack fluttering from the control cabin and a band playing ‘God Save the King’, a landing party roped R34 earthward near New York in front of a huge crowd. There followed several days of excited public acclaim and lavish celebration. By comparison, the homecoming was decidedly flat. The airship crew had to be content with the RAF band playing ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’ at Norfolk’s isolated and almost deserted Pulham aerodrome. Senior officers had a formal meeting with the King, a banquet at the Royal Aero Club,8 and a few other dinners. Maj. Scott, Assistant Director of Airship Development, and R34 captain, was made a Commander of the British Empire. Three Air Force Crosses were awarded. Junior officers received minor awards. There were no knighthoods, no lunch at the Savoy, and no menu item named after the crew or the airship. After the [ 29 ]

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flight, Lord Weir hinted at the possibility of opening airmail services in the Empire, starting with a fair-weather route between Egypt and Karachi. He also mentioned that commercial air routes might become an integral part of imperial defence.9 The R34 flight reflected better on military than civilian aviation in post-war Britain. Despite the efforts of several individuals and committees during and immediately after the War, suggestions about the need for independent civil aviation foundered. Some of the blame lies with Churchill. It was he who presided over the subordination of the Air Ministry to the War Ministry and who gave military flying the lion’s share of funding, including research money. This state of affairs prompted Seely to resign as Under-Secretary in November 1919, less than a year into his appointment. He told the House of Commons that Britain could not possibly hope to maintain its position in the world unless it used science to the utmost, especially ‘the science of the air’. The Times elaborated that military control of air development would sterilise innovation, lead to rigid and extravagant operating, and spawn mischievous administrative friction.10 Reflecting on the imperial dimension of flying, in February 1920 Seely penned words whose sentiment would be reiterated time and again: the British Empire, he noted, ‘is the most widely scattered entity that the world has ever known; rapid communication is of more value in knitting it together than in the case of any other Power’. Giving prominence to climatic considerations as the most pertinent to aviation, and presuming on Britain’s geopolitical power, he added that ‘in Egypt we have a centre of quite exceptional value for our purpose; the perfect climate, the general absence of high winds, and the almost complete absence of fog’. Ignoring the prospect of direct air service between England and Empire, Seely judged that Egypt would be ‘an ideal starting point’ for air journeys to India, Australasia, and central, East and South Africa.11 Tiresome bargaining with European powers about rights to fly over their territories or land on their airfields was avoided; this was also a ‘brief moment in history when British power was unchallengeable in the Middle East’.12 Reflecting a widespread dislike of state intervention in private enterprise, and a wish to abandon the control of an industry made necessary by war, Churchill also refused to subsidise civil aviation. He agreed with the Weir Committee that state aid was needed for aviation infrastructure, but disagreed about the need for airline subsidies. The Treasury felt similarly. In December 1919, and again in the following year, Churchill told Parliament that the Government’s only duty was to develop routes and aerodromes, and to legislate. Devising an arbitrary but financially convenient distinction between nurture [ 30 ]

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and nuisance, he declared that the Government’s task was to support civil aviation, not to get in its way. In a phrase that was to become infamous, Churchill insisted that ‘civil aviation must fly by itself; the Government cannot possibly hold it up in the air’. His judgement may well have been ‘the key sentence in British air transport history’, syntactically as well as juridically. For two crucial years after the war, Churchill’s parsimony, negligence and disinterest meant that British aviation lost opportunities close to home and in the Empire. Furthermore, it meant that Britain ‘lost forever its one chance to lead the world in air transport development’.13 Flying successes continued, but in the shape of virtuoso efforts in privately funded, unlikely flying contraptions.

Flying to Australia Even before the Atlantic flights, a Handley Page bomber had been flown from England to Cairo, in 1918, by Brig.-Gen. A. Borton as an RAF aircraft delivery. At year-end, a Handley Page biplane was flown from Ipswich to India. The Indian Viceroy and the Governor of Bengal met General MacEwan and Major Maclaren at Calcutta racecourse in mid-January 1919 after their month-long flight. Next, within months of the two mid-year trans-Atlantic flights, more steps were taken toward long-distance air travel across spaces with a stronger imperial identity. In October 1919 the first of five aircraft departed from England piloted by men hoping to win the prize for being the first to fly to Australia. One editorial intoned that if the venture failed it would be a glorious failure. If it succeeded, however, it would be an aviation landmark ‘dwarfing everything that was done before’. The omens were not good: in the preceding few months eleven airmen had died flying poorly prepared Air Ministry aircraft from England to Egypt using inadequately prepared landing grounds.14 On the other hand it was an auspicious time: ratification of the International Air Convention was removing possible international political complications, and the trans-Atlantic Vimy was about to be positioned in London’s Science Museum, the Valhalla of technical and scientific triumphs. Toward the end of 1919 the Australian brothers Capt. Ross Smith and Lt Keith Smith, and two other crewmen, set off for Australia by air. Ross’s rousing recollections of leaving behind the English coast were flushed with militaristic images of patriotism, power, conquest and victory: ‘thither the legions of Empire, in ceaseless tides, had passed to and from the grim red fields of East and West, all acclaiming thy might, great land of our fathers!’ [ 31 ]

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Ross Smith had flown sectors of the route before, using Borton’s Handley Page to carry baggage, fuel, spares, rations, mail and medicines for Lawrence of Arabia’s men, and to bomb the Turks in Palestine. Later, in an exercise that might have repeated the adrenaline rush Ross Smith felt when shooting down a Turkish plane, Borton and Smith flew the aircraft in stages east to India. The first RAF flight across the 4,000 miles from Cairo to Calcutta landed in mid-December 1918 and was greeted by a crowd at the racecourse. Borton’s original quip about flying to Calcutta to watch the Viceroy’s Cup horse race had almost come true. Smith’s riposte about flying on to Australia for the running of the Melbourne Cup seemed less like a joke. In Delhi, Gen. Salmond was so encouraged by the flight that he requested Air Ministry permission to send Borton and Smith on to explore an air route to Australia, and to survey and arrange suitable landing grounds. They set out in a steamship loaded with 7,000 gallons of aircraft fuel for dumping at selected sites. A ship fire wrecked that operation, but with the help of a loaned Indian Government vessel they spent three months in early 1919 designing an air route through Burma, the Federated Malay States, the Dutch East Indies, Borneo and Siam. They made several contacts that proved useful later. The intention was to return to India and then fly the Vimy along the surveyed route. That plan too was scuppered because the aircraft had been taken back to the Afghan front. And there it stayed after crashing in a storm. Borton and Smith returned to England unfulfilled but in an ideal position to enter a competition just announced by the Australian Government. In London they met and advised prospective competition entrants about what they would encounter. They also reported the scale of investment needed to establish a viable airway east of India. The Public Works Department in Burma estimated that draining and levelling a key airfield site would take 400 ‘coolies’ three months. The capital costs of acquiring and preparing landing grounds along the 1,800 mile Calcutta–Singapore stretch was estimated at more than £124,000 and even one-third higher depending on the exact options selected. Smith managed to have Vickers build him an aircraft identical to Alcock and Brown’s. Alcock himself test-flew the plane from the plant at Brooklands aerodrome outside London. There, according to Smith, the workforce felt that their efforts were more than mere labour: ‘they were producing an ideal from their factory to uphold national prestige’. The Shell petroleum company undertook to lay down fuel supplies along Smith’s planned route; Lord Wakefield’s Castrol company would provide lubricant along the way. The Kodak photographic company offered £800 for the crew that produced the best fifty negatives taken [ 32 ]

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during an Australian flight, and supplied Smith with cameras and dozens of films.15 The Smith brothers and their two mechanics left England on 12 November 1919. They were the fourth of the teams to set out. They received telegrams of good wishes from the King, Prime Minister Lloyd George, Churchill and Sykes. They took with them a letter in which Sykes told the Australian Prime Minister that the flight was the ‘forerunner of aerial services which will weld the whole Empire more strongly than ever’. The Smith team flew over 11,000 miles in twenty-eight days, arriving at Darwin on 10 December. They had spent more time on the ground than in the air. They could have made an equally fast journey by sea, but the personal accomplishment would have been less, and so too the public adulation. The brothers claimed a place in history and shared their £10,000 prize from the Australian Government equally round the four-man crew. The team had satisfied the prize award conditions that the flight was to be made by Australians and completed within 720 consecutive hours in 1919 using only one aeroplane that had to be built in the British Empire and powered by British engines. No other British contributions were specified, but the crew accepted meals and beds at various consular homes and RAF outposts. The British consul at Bandar Abbas gave the Smiths an ostentatious letter which, in Arabic, commanded natives to treat them kindly in the event of a forced landing. Officials in the Dutch East Indies gave exemplary assistance by agreeing to mash bush into airfields. The Australian Government placed a patrol ship in the Timor Sea.16 The Smiths’s Hendon–Darwin flight was a publicity scoop for the British aviation industry. The Rolls Royce engine manufacturers took out a full-page advertisement-cum-congratulation in The Times. The Shell Company also applauded the achievement in the press and capitalised on public interest with an advertising poster mapping the air route. The manufacturers of fuselage spars, wing struts and carburettors placed smaller press notices. Most messages of goodwill referred to long-distance flying as sport, and in terms of adventure. Others saw a wider significance. The King’s congratulatory telegram noted that the Smiths’s efforts would ‘bring Australia nearer to the Mother Country’; whether by virtue of their own flight or by way of repeated similar ventures he did not specify. Making the initial breakthrough was sufficient criterion for royal recognition, and the Australian pilots (but not their technical assistants) were made Knights of the British Empire. Gauging the long-term significance of the shrinkage of distance between the centre and periphery of Empire was more difficult than [ 33 ]

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merely recording the event. A Times leader article, ‘Australia by Air’, did so using a four-column-wide map of the route. It was the first of many whose publication down the years would etch the new lineaments of an air Empire indelibly in the public mind. Ross Smith introduced the route to an even wider audience in the map accompanying his detailed narratives in a 1921 edition of the Washington-based National Geographic magazine, in the Australian Life magazine, and in his 1922 book. At the end of the lengthy texts Ross thanked his crew: their ‘loyalty and devotion to duty’, he wrote, ‘have done much to bind closer the outposts of the Empire through the trails of the skies’. These were Prime Minister W. M. Hughes’s sentiments exactly: presenting the prize cheque at Parliament House in Melbourne, he remarked that the Smiths were ‘Empire builders’ as well as air pioneers.17 Honouring the Smiths added a bit of sparkle to the gloomy atmosphere in post-war London. The brothers were reminders of better times. They were lionised at several receptions, including one from the so-called ‘Australian Natives Association’ that emphatically did not include indigenous people. The men were likened to the famed English sailor-explorers Sir Francis Drake and Sir Martin Frobisher. Their feat was said to have overshadowed the most exuberant invention of Jules Verne. At the lunch where a representative of the Shell-Mex company proposed a toast to the ‘Imperial Air Route’, Sykes declared it ‘one of the finest developments of this old Empire of ours’. Seely avowed that ‘the British Empire would not allow the great science and art of aviation to languish’.18 Ross Smith did not mean to rest on his laurels. In January 1922 he asked the Air Ministry to secure him permission to fly over and land in foreign countries on a flight round the world. The request was a reflection on the undeveloped state of international air law and custom, and on the widespread contacts, influence and resources of the British Government. Motivating his proposal, he pointed out the advantages and prestige to be had for British aviation. Valuable meteorological data would also be acquired. Ross Smith’s death in April at Brooklands halted the plan temporarily. Then, in July, the manager of Vickers’s aviation department felt impelled to write to brother Keith querying whether there was any purpose pursuing the ‘stunt’. The chairman of Vickers was certainly content to let the 1919 flight remain the example to ‘the coming generation of our great Empire’.19 If Ross Smith’s death ended one dream to circle the world in a British aircraft with an Empire crew, it fired the imagination and determination of others. In an aircraft purchased from the Aircraft Disposal Company, Wing-Cdr W. T. Blake set off with a British co-pilot and photographer on an ambitious round-the-world flight on Empire [ 34 ]

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Day, 24 May 1922. The route was not confined to British earth: the northern hemisphere trajectory took in Palestine, Iraq, India, Burma and Canada, but also Mediterranean Europe, Indo-China, Japan, the Aleutians, Labrador, Greenland, Iceland and the Faroes. After an incident-packed 7,000 miles, relying partly on the RAF and on the Maharajah of Bharatpur, Blake ended his association with the flight in India after severe illness. The remaining crew abandoned the venture shortly thereafter when their seaplane experienced difficulties east of Akyab, Burma. The episode left behind more than just aircraft debris. Files of official correspondence about Blake (and with him and the solicitor for his anonymous backer) relate to a string of financial claims and disputed insurance on loaned navigational and radio equipment. Also in dispute were advance deposits against access to RAF fuel and supplies, and misuse of these deposits to pay for other RAF stores and for search and salvage of seaplane and crew by the Chittagong Port Authority. Blake argued that he had incurred many expenses involuntarily and unnecessarily at the insistence of the RAF, and that outdated Air Ministry information and maps had inconvenienced him. The film of the flight having been destroyed, in his bankruptcy Blake sought to recover expenses by writing. Aviation imperialism was less well served by his aborted flight than by his suggestions that an aeroplane service to India was imminently feasible and that an airship link was even more desirable. The financial arguments raged on after the acrimony that erupted in India had settled. There it was claimed that Blake, or one of his crew (with his approval or not), briefed against the RAF to the ‘scurrilous’ Indian press and criticised the RAF at a Rotary Club meeting. The officer commanding the RAF in India complained to London that the antics of the ‘infernal’ Blake – who arrived in India without a map, lived on charity, and borrowed clothes – had set back aviation in the subcontinent by five years. Apologising, Brancker condemned Blake’s ‘low-down, disgraceful behaviour’, and noted that although he had never had much faith in the man or his enterprise he could not have prevented him setting off. He added his hope that one ‘futile individual’ would not bias the RAF in India against future attempts to fly round the world. Writing in his capacity as Britain’s Director of Civil Aviation, Brancker said that he was determined to ensure that someone in the Empire would be the first to do so.20 But no such glorious British success, or even glorious circumnavigation failure, would ever follow Blake’s inglorious calamity.

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Across Africa The 1919 Christmas calendar of Empire aviation was eventful. Not only did the Smiths link Britain and Australia by air, but the RAF ended its African air route survey and its programme of establishing basic aviation infrastructure. It is debatable whether or not the work was actually complete, as The Times boasted.21 It was certainly abandoned. Many personnel were recalled for demobilisation. Negotiations began about the disposal of tool stores, and the upkeep of landing grounds was devolved to colonial governments. A usable – if not perfect – network of airfields was available. The provisioning had been expensive: by October the bill was £44,000, almost three times the initial estimate. Unauthorised expenditure by the southern African sector surveyors on taxis and social club membership was but a minor accounting nuisance compared with the British South Africa Company’s £6,000 claim for the assistance it had rendered.22 Maj. Court Treatt, the leader of the southern Africa sector survey party, equated termination of the survey with abandonment of the project to fly the route. Toward the end of November 1919 he warned of the disappointment that would be felt by municipalities and native commissioners whose help had secured cheap land and affordable workers at a time when ending wartime forced labour had led to shortages. In addition, the expectations, generosity and vested interests of African chiefs would be compromised. The Barotse (Lozi) king had built a ‘large and elaborate camp’ near Livingstone aerodrome to accommodate him and his indunas when the first aeroplane arrived. Chief Khama provided construction labour in his district and prepared Serowe landing field at his own expense. He also granted free ground at Palapye where he wanted an airfield. The RAF would in future insist that reconnaissance flights land there to keep him sweet: no work was possible in his territory without his permission and co-operation. The new technology of aviation was proving useful as a way of bolstering the authority of the Empire’s client rulers. Revealingly, Court Treatt reckoned that cancelling the trans-Africa flight ‘might produce a bad effect among the natives and lessen the prestige of the white man’. The tall ex-RFC man might have felt his own integrity and status diminish. Travelling with him later in Africa, his wife noted that he was liked by Africans whom he treated firmly but respectfully: ‘his tact with the natives was remarkable, and he invariably got them to do what he wanted done’. This included the feat of managing ten men from what she termed the notoriously fierce Mashakalumbwe people just south of the Zambezi. A thousand other African labourers working on the aerodromes went in ‘in deadly fear’ [ 36 ]

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of them, but Court Treatt (more like the legendary Livingstone than Selous) was apparently unperturbed and unthreatened.23 In the standard colonial manner, a few white men organised in three survey parties24 supervised physical labour by many Africans. Eight RAF personnel certainly did not prepare personally fifteen bush aerodromes in the southern African sector between Abercorn and Cape Town over six months in 1919. They used local African labour recruited through magistrates and municipalities, or through licensed labour agents who sent runners out to villages. Convict labourers added an airfield to the horseracing course at Bulawayo. Airfield labour practices involved gangs of between thirty-five and forty Africans doing piecework supervised by a headman. Some labourers were assigned to carry water, build huts, fetch meals and do sanitary work. Most labourers cut timber, scuffled grass, stumped trees, dug out roots and burned debris. Men made handles for the tools they were issued. Rock outcrops were removed by blasting. Anthills were demolished. At one site, a gang of forty ‘boys’ spent 560 shifts over two weeks clearing two anthills. A time sheet for Broken Hill aerodrome records 221 Africans working at the site one day at the end of March 1919. Three gangs (113 men) levelled ground, 46 men did stumping, 40 scuffed, 9 filled holes, 4 worked as ‘hammer boys’, and 9 carried water and cooked. Twenty-six sticks of dynamite were used for blasting. Work tasks were altered the next day. An Ndola time sheet shows that whereas all workers did stumping in the last week of April, men had been taken on previously to demolish anthills, level the surface and plant grass. The number of African labourers working on site in April peaked at a little over 600. Monthly averages of 700 airfield workers until August were said to constitute the highest level ever of formal recruitment and employment in the area. The RAF report noted that keeping the labourers working for many months without any trouble or discontent was also something of a record. Wage payments are not recorded, excepting for the monthly sum of £2 paid to a ‘detective’ who acted as an intermediary between the labourers and the officer in charge of the aerodrome. At the end of a year of hard manual labour, often in inhospitable climate, and in places where the tsetse fly made animal haulage impossible, a string of forty-three aerodromes had been established down the length of Africa. Across 5,200 miles, landing sites were on average 124 miles apart. Twenty-four petrol and oil stations were on average 226 miles distant from one another. At a fraction of the cost of a transcontinental railway, the basis had been laid for a service that promised faster transport. The infrastructure was also cheaper to maintain. Writing on the day when the sixth international aircraft [ 37 ]

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exhibition opened in Paris, an aviation correspondent predicted that before commercial aviation would be adopted generally in Europe, aeroplanes would be used extensively in the colonies and in countries where railway communications were bad.25 News about the African air route was greeted enthusiastically in Britain. The editors at The Times were ecstatic. The prospect of an air service between Cairo and the Cape, they wrote, ‘violates the immemorial remoteness of some of the world’s most secluded places’. The breakthrough may have been welcome, but the editors’ gleeful expectations of far-away weekends were unrealistic. Even eighty years later few City tycoons would contemplate flying to the east African highlands for a weekend. Then, as now, Brighton remains considerably closer to London than Nairobi, and not an equivalent effort distance as the editorial speculated. Similarly, even in the jet age, Johannesburg and Cape Town are still less accessible from London than Manchester and St Andrews were in the 1920s. The over-exuberant editorial was on firmer ground reflecting on the immense consequences of the annihilation of distance (‘the chief encumbrance of Empire intercourse’). ‘The fabric of the whole world’s life will be changed’, it claimed, when hours not weeks separate Pretoria or Delhi from London, when it takes days rather than weeks to reach Australia and New Zealand. The editors’ view was that the British Empire stood to benefit from the change far more than any other ‘country’. In a subsequent edition, they forecast that the aeroplane would end Africa’s status as the Dark Continent. Aircraft would fly where previously explorers had only been able to creep. Planes would expand the holding capacity of an overcrowded world; they would expose the darker side of Africa’s ‘uncivilised life’; they would facilitate exploration of the resources in the continent’s unknown interior. Indeed, the aeroplane heralded the beginning of a new and better order. The writer of a piece in the Royal Empire Society’s house journal, United Empire, adopted a common militarist metaphor in trying to capture the expected impact of aviation in Africa. In his view, nothing in the story of Africa, from the time of van Riebeeck to Rhodes and Stanley, was ‘more deeply moving than the efforts to complete her conquest from the air’.26 The gloss was taken off the African achievement when the Weir Committee’s advice was made public in December 1919: the first Empire air route to be developed systematically as a trial and demonstration project would be between Egypt and India. Weir recommended operating air services by private enterprise, aided by state-provision of landing grounds and meteorological and wireless services. His Committee suggested giving preference to mail, with passengers and [ 38 ]

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freight being ancillary business. The Cairo–Karachi route was selected ahead of the Cairo–Cape Town route because it was the easiest: the weather was generally favourable, as were the topography and land surface conditions. There was also the potential to create branch lines off the main trunk routes. A preliminary survey had still to be made of a possible air route between India and Australia before systematic development there could be contemplated.27 Londoners commonly latched onto a railway analogy to comprehend the geography of this new Empire route network: Cairo would be the hinge between Europe, Africa and India/Australia, and was poised to become a junction whose importance would match London’s Clapham or Willesden railway interchanges. In February 1920 four civilian aircraft and crews, and one RAF entry, set out on a Cairo-to-Cape flying expedition in aircraft sponsored variously by the South African Government, the Aircraft Manufacturing Company, Northcliffe’s Times and the London Daily Telegraph. The event originated with Sykes’s 30 December 1919 invitation to Gen. J. Smuts, the South African Prime Minister, to copy the Australians and have his Government give a prize for the first pilots to fly the route. Sykes observed that the trans-Africa aerodromes were complete and were ‘unlikely to reach a higher state of efficiency’. Citing adverse March weather and deteriorating stores pre-positioned along the route, he urged haste. There was a window of eight weeks to counter Court Treatt’s qualms of diminished British stature on the continent, and to make good an ambitious and expensive imperial project. A frantic exchange of telegrams ensued. Sykes suggested a prize of £10,000 but Smuts demurred because a flight might be open to ‘electoral misrepresentation’ in South Africa. The South African High Commissioner in London confirmed Smuts’s proposal of a prize just for South African pilots who completed the exercise, and the RAF nominated two South Africans from its roll. In his memoirs Sykes recalled ‘arranging’ their participation because he was ‘particularly anxious that the honours should fall to the lot of the Union, just as the honours of an Australian flight had to Australians’. The Imperial Air Fleet Committee tried to raise £7,000 to meet the costs of a Vickers aeroplane, aircrew salaries and petrol outside British territories (it would be free otherwise) before Smuts agreed to fund the flying costs.28 One of the English teams challenging to complete the transAfrica airway comprised Maj. H. G. Brackley, Capt. F. Tymms, and their mechanic and rigger. Unlike the technician killed en route by a propeller on his team’s aircraft, Brackley and Tymms survived a forced landing in Egypt, which put their plane beyond repair.29 Both went on [ 39 ]

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to become involved in imperial civil aviation. Brackley, a decorated RAF pilot, Air Superintendent of the defunct Handley Page Transport company, and an entrant in the trans-Atlantic challenge won by Alcock and Brown, would become a colleague of Woods Humphery. Underlining the small social world of early flying, Tymms entered the Air Ministry where he worked under Brancker. Another English trans-Africa flying bid ended in failure. The presence of a fifth man aboard the Vickers Vimy had nothing to do with its end. To the contrary, it was the eminent zoologist who initiated the flight. Then in his mid-fifties, Dr (later, Sir) P. C. Mitchell, the Secretary of the Zoological Society of London, and a Times leader writer, persuaded Northcliffe to buy a plane and hire a crew to fly him as an observer across the newly opened Africa air route. His newspaper intimated that he was expected to use a bird’s-eye view to unlock Africa’s geographical, geological and botanical secrets. The scientific lessons from the flight were expected to involve some interesting (and dangerous) field experiences. One commentator warned of ‘a chance rhinoceros in East Africa’ and of possible encounters with ‘wild or savage men’ such as those Nile Valley Dinka people. Mitchell’s departure from Cairo was not overlooked. From afar Sykes conveyed his best wishes for ‘a great Imperial event’. Goodwill messages were sent from the Prince of Wales, Queen Alexandra, Lord Milner (the Colonial Secretary), Lord Chelmsford (the Indian Viceroy) and Mr W. M. Hughes (the Australian Prime Minister). A large and eminent crowd gathered in Cairo. Lord Allenby, High Commissioner for Egypt and the Sudan, expressed his pleasure that ‘an Englishman, in a British machine, is to be the first passenger by air on a line which will undoubtedly become one of great commercial utility and Imperial importance’. The idea that flying might open a new route of scientific discovery was not uppermost in his mind. Lasting imperial and personal honour did not devolve easily to Britain’s travelling scientists, as those on Shackleton’s ill fated 1914–16 Antarctic expedition discovered. Mitchell was deprived of a higher public profile by engine failure and a tree stump and anthill on the landing ground at Tabora. Dogged for days by mechanical problems (and poor maps), The Times flight was finally wrecked 2,700 miles from Cairo. In his unpublished telegrams about the frequent landings for fuel, water and engine repairs Mitchell vented his ‘indignation’ against Rolls Royce for ‘unpardonable defects’ which did it ‘grave discredit’ long before the engines had done thirty-six hours flying. Yet time on the ground did enable Mitchell to see more of the landscape and its plant and animal life. Following its imperial and foreign news editor’s vigorous negotiations for privileged priority telegraph access, [ 40 ]

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The Times carried masses of editorial and sketch maps in February and March editions. There, and in chapters of his 1937 book where he recalled his ‘golden journey’, Mitchell recorded the topography, plants, small animals and game he saw. There was beauty and variety, danger and fear. His view was of harsh, pestilential country abounding with mosquitoes, centipedes, crocodiles, and large bellowing animals, and occupied by ‘malodorous’, naked natives. Albeit these inhabitants were frighteningly armed, after ‘dubious parley’ of cigarettes and silver coin they became obligingly servile, fetching firewood, milk and water as directed, and running messages. Mitchell presented other cameos of imperial attitudes, experiences and spirit. He took aboard the Vimy a luncheon hamper packed with a bottle of claret from Cairo’s top-notch Shepheard’s Hotel. Gin and freshly killed fowl supplemented the tinned meat and vegetables typical of a camping expedition. At Assuan, the officer in charge of the aerodrome who was leading his visitors on a local trip stopped a train to send a message for lunch; it was delivered by donkey and served formally by an Arab dressed in white and wearing a napkin over his arm. At Jebelein a grave sheikh presented a chit in English to the effect that he was extremely stupid, but trustworthy, and had helped construct the aerodrome. The young English inspector there had expected Mitchell’s plane for several days, lighting flares each evening. A sheep had been slaughtered ceremonially, but the rush to fly on wasted the gesture. Risking being speared for discourtesy, the five-man party declined a native woman of distinction who made ‘very direct suggestions’. They spotted a gunboat steaming upriver carrying munitions for a patrol against the Dinka. A six-mile tramp across rough country to fetch help from the governor at Mongalla epitomised doughty exploration. Mitchell’s aircraft was damaged while landing near Nimule. No messages could be sent ahead because of a broken telegraph line; the dejected crew worked on repairs under the gaze of ‘chattering, stinking’ Africans who begged cigarettes. In Nimule town, villagers rose to salute the white visitors. At Jinja The Times aircraft landed on ground cleared by one thousand Africans. Two hundred labourers kept the ground clear of vegetation and anthills. There was tea, lawn tennis and an official dinner and reception hosted by the Provincial Commissioner. At Tabora, where a Union Jack fluttered, an ‘Arab sultan’ (Swahili) viewed the ‘Endeggi’ (great bird). A guardsman of the King’s African Rifles presented arms when the aircraft engines revved. Long before the denouncement of foreign journalists parachuting into Africa and pronouncing on its affairs, Mitchell wrote of colonial administration that whereas in the Sudan it was directed to the betterment of natives, [ 41 ]

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in East Africa it was to the advantage of the colonists. With forked tongue, he suggested that ‘trouble with the natives’ arose from failure to understand their customs and ways of thinking, and the bewilderment of a ‘low type of mind’ with unintelligible praise or punishment.30 Most news reporting from the concurrent African flights featured observations of animals and landscapes, and matters of aeronautical interest. Some comment had a different slant. Sir Henry Rider Haggard, the renowned writer of African adventure tales, praised the ‘Empire propaganda’ of the flights. His view was that merchants and consumers in Britain would see how vast were their ‘untapped sources of supply in lands that the King’s rule makes their own’. The editors of Flight magazine expected that trans-Africa flights would ‘help the British Empire to quickly re-establish itself as pre-eminent in the world’s affairs’. The sought-after African commentator Maj. E. S. Grogan was captivated by the economic possibilities of aviation in the continent. The established East African legislator and businessman reckoned that aviation would make Africa a more important source of food and raw materials for the outside world and for consumption of British manufactures. He argued passionately that aircraft would relieve the ‘intolerable toil’ of overland movement. The aeroplane, he wrote, floated to its destination ‘in ethereal contempt of both mud and desiccated waterhole’. In Nature the claim was made that aviation would enable less costly and more effective political administration. There would be financial savings from having fewer permanent boundary garrisons and quicker boundary patrols; there would be accelerated postal service, and quicker and cheaper transport of officials and investigators.31 At a stage when aircraft engineering was relatively primitive and African flying conditions little known, it was no surprise that all five aircraft which started the trans-Africa challenge crashed and had to be abandoned. It was a joy that one team completed the journey. The two South African pilots, Lt-Col H. A. P. van Ryneveld and Lt C. J. Q. Brand, arrived in Cape Town in March, carrying (ungarbled) written greetings sent to Smuts from Prime Minister Lloyd-George, Churchill, Sykes and Amery. The pilots and their two Vickers mechanics had consumed forty-five days and three aeroplanes. Flying time for the 6,200-mile journey was 105 hours. Van Ryneveld and Brand lifted off from Brooklands airfield in a Rolls Royce-powered Vickers aircraft named Silver Queen. They began their flight south from Cairo in the same aircraft but damaged it when making a forced night landing near the Sudan border. The engines were salvaged and transported back to Cairo by Nile steamer whose departure was delayed (and billed for by the Sudan Government Railways) for almost twenty hours for the purpose. The RAF made a ­replacement [ 42 ]

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Figure 1  Patriots and knights: Ross Smith, Quintin Brand and Keith Smith (left to right) in London in 1920 after their pioneering trans­continental flights.

Vimy airframe available in Cairo after the South African High Commissioner in London undertook to ship a replacement purchased from the Air Disposal Board. After wrecking the substitute aircraft near Bulawayo, van Ryneveld and Brand eventually landed at Cape Town’s Wynberg airfield in a borrowed, war-surplus de Havilland aircraft originally donated to South Africa by the Air Ministry. Smuts arranged the availability of this relief aircraft that he himself dubbed Voortrekker. The British-manufactured aeroplane was assembled hastily in Pretoria by ex-RAF mechanics hired from the workshops of the South African Railways. Having organised local wagon-and-mule transport for the crated aircraft, Court Treatt (as navigator) and a member of his survey party (who hadn’t piloted for sixteen months) took the flying version north to Bulawayo. Having used more than one aircraft – not to say forsaking monarch for disloyal frontiersman – van Ryneveld and Brand were disqualified from the £10,000 prize that the Daily Mail put up when the flights became public knowledge. Lord Northcliffe was reduced to marking completion of this long-distance flight by hosting a lunch in London [ 43 ]

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where he spoke about the development of commercial aviation as ‘an imperial necessity’. In South Africa, Smuts announced a £2,500 award to each of the pilots; earlier proposals for double that amount had been kept secret. The two handpicked men, one an Afrikaner, were made Knights of the British Empire. This happened only after an unseemly interval of fifty-two days during which an equally eager South African Prime Minister, Governor-General and Colonial Secretary wrestled with a lukewarm Churchill over the grade of award. During a Savoy Hotel lunch celebration the Secretary of State for War and Air hid his reservations under effusive praise for the two pilots to whom, he said, ‘not only the whole British Empire but the whole civilised world was under the deepest obligation’.32 People who followed the progress of the flight across Africa in newspapers and magazines, or who purchased the Air Ministry’s strip map,33 would have learned about the expanse, topography and sights of the continent, and the likely future course of an Empire airway. A French aircrew’s concurrent trans-Saharan flight from Paris to Dakar in February/April 1920 presented no competition. Published photographs of facilities along the easterly British track showed a grass hut occupied by aerodrome officers, an airfield shelter made of grass and decorated with carved birds, a tree trunk improvising as a heavy airfield roller, and a white man supervising Africans clearing bush at an aerodrome. The first-ever aerial photographs of Victoria Falls offered a more sweeping view than David Livingstone ever had. A photograph of two lines of Africans hauling the white men’s aircraft out of mud with ropes was a picture of hapless dependence whose composition nevertheless made it easy to construe as primarily a display of primitive people and untamed nature.34 Van Ryneveld’s published contribution to a colossal book about the imperial transport corridor between the Cape and Cairo helped revive Cecil Rhodes’s dream of continental control.35 The symbolism of the 1920 trans-Africa flight touched on other facets of the British presence. Sixteen years after the ending of the South African War the flight might have been interpreted as evidence that aviation could be conciliatory. The front cover of the 24 April issue of the Sphere was an artist’s impression of a touching reunion. In Bloemfontein, capital of a former Boer republic, Van Ryneveld literally and figuratively flew into his mother’s arms after an eight-year absence from home. Mrs van Ryneveld could not have imagined that an Afrikaner woman, a figure of scourge, would ever receive such prominent and compassionate press in England, even though her pilot son was a decorated war veteran. Whether or not observers of the Africa flight were sensitive to such imperial reversals, most people would have formed the impression [ 44 ]

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that flying was still a sport characterised by risky stunts. Whether the flights improved the prospects for a permanent civil air link across Africa is doubtful. The highly publicised crashes and equipment failure exposed the unsuitability of machinery designed for temperate European environments. Van Ryneveld and Brand’s success may have shown that trans-continental flights could be undertaken by men no longer in their youth, as The Times remarked in a leading article, but it was far from obvious that flying across Africa was safe. Even in disappointment, however, it had its uses. The fuselage from Mitchell’s wrecked aircraft at Tabora became a clubhouse for the Tanganyika Sporting Club. The upper wings were used to roof the new tennis pavilion. No construction material had arrived previously in the Colony in this way. Conventional and commercial applications of flight remained a decade away. Among other reasons, there was unlikely to be sufficient paying traffic (except perhaps for mails) in the African interior to make trans-continental flights a commercial proposition. The Times editors predicted that the next stage in African aviation would be short flights linking up disconnected centres of population, and centres of ‘jungle produce’ such as coffee, cotton and rubber. If they could attract enough passengers, airships were reckoned to be the best chance of making a cross-continent air service payable. In the event that no African cargoes of any kind could bear the high airfreight costs, the minimum that could be expected from flying would be improved hunting. Readers of Nature were told that Mitchell’s remarks on the elephant, giraffe, and antelope that he saw during his flight showed that the aeroplane would be very helpful to sportsmen searching for big game.36

Notes   1 W. Reader, Architect of Air Power: the Life of first Viscount Weir of Eastwood, 1877–1959 (London, 1968), p. 85.   2 Lord Inchcape, the shipping magnate, was appalled at the estimated £4.5m cost of starting the Cairo–Karachi service, arguing that it would be cheaper, more dependable and quicker to run a steamer. Reader, Architect of Air Power, p. 87.   3 National Archives (Kew) (NA), AVIA 2/52, 2/1706, 1711 and 1714.   4 The Times (2 January 1914), p. 8; (5 January 1914), p. 7; (10 June 1919); Sudan Archive (Durham) (SAD), 876/6/1–6; R. L. McCormack, ‘Missed opportunities: Winston Churchill, the Air Ministry, and Africa, 1919–1921’, International History Review, 11 (1989), 205–28.   5 H. G. Hawker and K. M. Grieve, Our Atlantic Attempt (London, 1919), pp. 32–3.   6 G. Wallace, The Flight of Alcock and Brown (London, 1955).   7 Daily Mail (16, 17 June 1919); J. R. Alcock and A. W. Brown, Our Transatlantic Flight (London: Kimber, 1969); Science Museum Library (London) (SML), Mayo 6/1; Hyde, British Air Policy, p. 79; P. Rowe, The Great Atlantic Air Race (Sydney, 1977); The Times (20 December 1919), p. 14; R. Pound and G. Harmsworth, Northcliffe (London, 1959), pp. 325, 727, 34.

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looking up   8 Banqueters were told that Germany used the Zeppelin to carry disease, destruction and death, whereas Britain used it for amity and international goodwill. Flight (31 July 1919), p. 1011.   9 E. M. Maitland, The Log of HMA R34 (London, 1921); P. Abbott, Airship: the Story of R.34 (London, 1994); Illustrated London News (19 July 1919); The Times (25 September 1919), p. 7. 10 Hansard (Commons) (12 November 1919), col. 375; The Times (13 November 1919), p. 13. 11 J. B. Seely, ‘Flying and the future’, Nineteenth Century, 87 (1920), 209–16. 12 Reader, Architect of Air Power, p. 86. 13 Ibid.; McCormack, ‘Missed opportunities’, p. 206. 14 Flight (2, 16 January 1919); (23 October 1919), p. 1386; (30 October 1919), p. 1412. 15 Cambridge University (Manuscripts Reading Room) (CU), Vickers 792: F. G. Ogilvie to P. D. Acland, 19 December 1919; T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Harmondsworth, 1935); R. M. Smith, 14,000 Miles through the Air (London, 1922), pp. 10, 8; NA, AVIA 2/1783. 16 NA, AVIA 2/1709; N. Eustis, Australia’s Greatest Air Race: England–Australia, 1919 (Adelaide, 1969); B. W. Bampfylde, ‘Britain’s role in Asian air transport’, Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society, 51 (1964), 268–79; Smith, 14,000 Miles. 17 The Times (11 December 1919), pp. 15, 16; Sykes, From Many Angles, p. 289; R. M. Smith, ‘From London to Australia by aeroplane’, National Geographic (March 1921), p. 339; Smith, 14,000 Miles, p. 136; Flight (4 March 1920), p. 266. 18 Flight (3 March 1921), pp. 150, 152–5; (10 March 1921) (21 April 1921), p. 270; Daily Telegraph (4 March 1921); Fearon, ‘The growth of aviation’; Higham, Britain’s Imperial Air Routes. 19 CU, Vickers 743: R. Smith to Air Ministry secretary, 21 January 1922; Vickers 567: letter to K. Smith, 27 July 1922. 20 W. T. Blake, Flying Round the World (London, 1923); Modern Transport (4 November 1922), p. 3; NA, AVIA 2/126 & 129. 21 The Times (19 December 1919), p. 11. 22 NA, AVIA 2/66 and 70; 2/1757. In personal communication, John MacKenzie noted that the BSAC was about to lose its charter and was trying to maximise possible compensation. 23 NA, AIR 2/120: Court Treatt to Air Ministry, 22 November 1919; S. Court Treatt, Cape to Cairo (London, 1927), pp. 28, 120. 24 Identified in Flight (12 June 1919), p. 775. 25 NA, DR 9/23: Notes on Aerodromes constructed by No. 3 Africa Survey Party; The Times (3 February 1920), p. 6. 26 H. F. Wilson, ‘Imperial aviation’, United Empire, 11 (1920), 151–3; The Times (27 December 1919), p. 11; (30 January 1920), p. 13. 27 Report on Imperial (Cmd 449) (1920). 28 NA, AVIA 2/1767; Sykes, From Many Angles, p. 290. 29 NA, AVIA 2/50. 30 NA, AVIA 2/48; The Times (7 February 1920), p. 8; (9 February 1920), p. 16; (11 March 1920); P. C. Mitchell, My Fill of Days (London, 1937). 31 Flight (12 February 1920), pp. 189–90; (17 June 1920), p. 643; Nature (12 February 1920), p. 633. 32 McCormack, ‘Missed opportunities’, p. 767; Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe; Flight (27 May 1920), p. 567; NA, AIR 2/120: Survey Party Report No. 6; AVIA 2/49. 33 Higham, Britain’s Imperial Air Routes, p. 148 34 Current History (12 May 1920); Sphere (24 April 1920), pp. 91–3. 35 L. Weinthal (ed.), The Story of the Cape to Cairo Railway and River Route from 1887 to 1922 (London, 1923–26). 36 T. Gwynn-Jones, Farther and Faster: Aviation’s Adventuring Years, 1909–1939 (Washington DC, 1991), p. 184; The Times (13 April 1920), p. 15; Nature (25 March 1920), p. 113; Imperial Airways Gazette (January 1932); Mitchell, My Fill of Days.

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After the whirlwind of activity at the end of 1919 the pace of British aviation progress slackened. Then, in February 1920 (a matter of days before van Ryneveld and Brand took off for Cape Town), Sykes delivered a lecture entitled ‘Imperial Air Routes’ to the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). It was a signal event at one of several unofficial London headquarters of overseas Britannia. The slim, softly spoken man of scholarly appearance stepped onto a stage frequented by explorers and Empire officials at the Society’s premises in Kensington. Those members and visitors used the RGS to spread and gather news of foreign expeditions, discoveries and conditions, and to formulate alternative foreign policy. Aviation had not yet figured prominently in the Society’s affairs. Indeed, in June 1919 the RGS president said that the Society did not welcome ‘propositions with regard to long-distance flight’ unless they would be useful for gathering new geographical information. Meanwhile, the Air Ministry’s descriptive notes about the air route to South Africa pleased the RGS journal editor. Similar information about air routes to Australia would have been welcome had it not appeared first in a 1919 American geographical journal. The notes that appeared under the RGS imprint contained the observation that aviation required information not yet present in existing reports, gazetteers and maps.1 A centuries-old tradition of land- and sea-based Empire observation and commerce confronted a new challenge. Lt-Col Sir Francis Younghusband, ‘the last great imperial ­adventurer’, succeeded to the presidency of the RGS in the second half of 1919. He was already ceremonial vice-president of the Royal Empire Society and the Over-Seas League. His new role gave him substantial public clout that extended into the Colonial Office. Sir Francis aligned the RGS prominently with aviation and aimed to interest the British public in quick communication by air. ‘We realise its immense importance to the Empire’, he said. Younghusband invited Sykes to [ 47 ]

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Figure 2  ‘Natives mowing’: making an Empire airfield, Northern Rhodesia, 1919.

join the RGS, serve on its council and present a lecture. Some months later at its anniversary meeting, Younghusband singled out Sykes’s lecture as ‘the outstanding event’ in the annual programme. But it was [ 48 ]

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more than that, as publicity for his presentation showed. The entire lecture appeared in the Geographical Journal, as was custom. It had been only six years since the RGS mouthpiece had carried Sir Ernest Shackleton’s account of his long-distance expedition in a wooden boat. Sykes’s lecture also formed the basis of an article in the professional magazines Modern Transport (the house journal of the Institute of Transport) and Nature. The lecture got wide press coverage, notably across five columns in The Times.2 Glimpses of a future programme of organised civil aviation in the British Empire were reaching geography teachers, the reading public, scientists and professionals working in transport. Sykes spoke to an influential audience. Churchill, Seely, Amery (the Under-Secretary of State for Colonies), Lord Montagu (a fellow of the Society) and Brancker were present. After dining with Sykes beforehand at the Imperial restaurant, the Prince of Wales attended in his capacity as vice-patron of the RGS. Paying respects to a Society ‘always to the fore in Imperial movements’, Sykes noted (with some exaggeration) that the Empire offered a geographically unequalled platform for establishing air depots, refuelling bases and meteorological and wireless stations ‘in every part of the world’. His lecture mostly described the geography of the projected Empire air routes. He indulged in a little polemic too, exhorting leaders to mobilise the gritty initiative that had always enabled Britain and the Empire to lead the world. He argued that ‘Britain must become the carrier of the world, not only on the sea, but in the air’. One verbal flourish was particularly adroit: ‘We have charted the Earth, we have charted the Heavens. We must chart the Air.’3 The Prince of Wales was first to speak at the conclusion of the lecture. Sykes’s maps showing the projected air routes struck a ­particular chord. Remarking on the tantalising red lines, the Prince mentioned the possibility that he might in future fly round the Empire instead of going by sea. Next, Amery (who would rise to political prominence as an advocate of imperial and commonwealth unity) aired his view that aviation might unify the Empire and ease colonial administration by facilitating leave at home and hill-station. He added that flight might enable people to meet face-to-face more often, and might therefore be more effective imperial cement than any new constitutional schemes. Amery referred, of course, to personal meetings between expatriates and British Residents. Contact between British and non-British people would not change and would become decreasingly effective imperial glue. If they were shown as lantern slides during Sykes’s lecture, nobody commented on two photographs (printed in the Geographical Journal) showing Africans working on an airfield. A gang of four is shown [ 49 ]

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clearing away a huge tree and a line-party of ten is seen ‘weeding’ under the eye of a white male supervisor. The sight of Africans grubbing and levelling in the service of a putative air Empire was clearly thought to be convincing evidence of aviation progress abroad where air-age tools had yet to penetrate. Other editors agreed, like those at the Sphere, an up-market London illustrated newspaper billed as ‘an imperial paper ... bringing news of her children to the Motherland’. A February 1920 issue carried a full-page drawing of a map-carrying British officer in khaki uniform, tie and pith helmet directing scything of wild arum lilies for a future landing ground in Northern Rhodesia.4 Aviation may have been modernising the Empire, but not yet beyond social or geographical recognition. The RGS was a venue for airing aviation exploits and challenges for as long as overseas flying resonated with discovery and exploration. Once, using monthly information from the meteorological office and the Air Ministry, the Geographical Journal published a consolidated survey of climatic conditions (incidents of rain, fog, gales, thunderstorms) along all the likely Empire air routes. The Society also arranged for the surveyor of the air route between Khartoum and Uganda to talk about his work. The survey party confronted seasonal rains, dust storms, lightning, game, elephant grass, swamps and rock outcrops. The narrative of struggle could have come out of the nineteenth century. Like explorers before them, they relied on African porters for overland transport. They trekked by night to avoid the heat. In a new era, however, their load included a gramophone and records. Africans acquired other new tasks: labour gangs cleared vegetation from aircraft landing sites. As ever, African co-operation with an imperial project was less than was hoped. The RGS heard the Dinka people being blamed for the murder of two British army officers, and being condemned as particularly useless Africans: ‘nothing will make them work except the pressure of starvation’. Salmond judged that arranging aerodrome construction under famine conditions was grounds for the award of honours to one RAF supervisor. Others were praised for their determination, ingenuity, dedication despite illness, tactful dealings with civil administrations and ‘exceptional ability in handling large numbers of natives’. The title of either Officer or Member (of the Order) of the British Empire was recommended for twelve RAF officers and four men of other ranks who led the preparation of the African airway. One civilian was put forward for a meritorious service medal.5 American geographers were among those who were told (in characteristically frontier terms) about the tribulations confronting air-age men in ‘primitive’ Africa: a regular trans-African commercial air [ 50 ]

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service would be technically impractical, economically infeasible, climatically uncomfortable and unpredictable (if not dangerous) and environmentally hazardous. Emergency landings had an even chance of wrecking an aeroplane and stranding its crew in waterless terrain ‘infested with lions, buffaloes and rhinos’. Unless pilots were armed they may find the march to the nearest camp, aerodrome or village ‘as full of adventure as a Jules Verne romance’. The author of this stirring account was no fantasist. A veteran of the RFC’s East African campaign, and the author of a 1920 book entitled Flying and Sport in East Africa, he was well acquainted with Africa and flying there.6 His warning, however, might have done more to entice than restrain curiosity. In any event, the increasing availability of maps, meteorological information and a basic infrastructure of landing grounds was the signal to start intrepid African air expeditions.

Hurdles After successful flights to Canada, India, Australia and South Africa, dreamers and enthusiasts had high hopes about the prospects of longdistance flying around the Empire. Some people thought that private enterprise alone could keep it aloft. Indeed, excepting for the R34 and for the RAF African survey, not a penny had been spent by the British Government. That was just as well, for the final £76,000 expenditure on the Cape-to-Cairo air route far exceeded the budget agreed with the Treasury. One aeronautical paper praised the irregularity on account of its imperial value.7 Regardless of where funding originated, the unknown commercial viability of long-distance Empire flying loomed threateningly, and none more so than in light of what was happening to civil aviation in Britain. Services to and from Europe were undermined by the harsh economics of flying converted military aircraft. These were inexpensive to purchase, but they were difficult to maintain and costly to keep airborne. Matters were made worse by low and seasonal passenger demand and by competition from highly subsidised European air transport companies. The speakers who addressed the subject of aviation efficiency at a conference in London in February 1921 were whistling in the wind. By the next month all British airlines had ceased operating. The weather and the outlook for aviation were equally cheerless. Holt Thomas lashed out at the British Government, decrying its lack of initiative, obtuseness and sluggishness. The waste, ruin and humiliation, he thought, taught a lesson about the need to organise a great national airline, which, in time, would have a network of airways serving the British Empire.8 [ 51 ]

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The idea and the pursuit of Empire aviation might have folded had it not been for people who aligned it with Britain’s strategic interests. Even the scientific magazine Nature weighed in with critical comments on England’s ‘enemy today’, namely its eccentric geo­graphical location and even more eccentric climate. An editorial warned that the sheer march of natural events would not make Britain an air power as it had made it a naval power. For good measure the editorial also enthused about manpower and machine power: ‘we have the right kind of personnel for air endurance and skill; the work is temperamentally suited to the British type of youth. The aircraft are the best to be found anywhere’. Lord Northcliffe took up the theme in the preface he penned for Holt Thomas’s 1920 book Aerial Transport. The Empire, he noted, was home to the world’s best flying men. Supported by the mother country’s skilled mechanics and businessmen, they could be relied on to maintain a British aerial profile matching its historic maritime mastery. ‘First to-day, we must remain first for all time.’9 Elemental pre-eminence on water and in the air was linked sentimentally. The two were also materially inseparable. Whether military or civil, an effective overseas air service needed secure landing grounds. Lt-Col Lockwood-Marsh, the Secretary of the Royal Aeronautical Society (granted use of the prefix ‘Royal’ in 1918), made the point when he spoke to the Royal Colonial Institute in London on ‘Imperial Aspects of Aviation’ in May 1920. A string of aerodromes was needed throughout the Empire, he said. It would be just like the chain of coaling stations that fuelled Britain’s maritime Empire.10 While aviation in Britain struggled through 1920, private flying in Canada and Australia especially was making some progress. That good news enabled the authorities to take the view that the onus of linking the Empire by air was not Britain’s alone. Sykes told a meeting of the Royal Aeronautical Society in October 1920 that each dominion and colony should form its own nucleus of air development. Progress was reported at meetings such as that in December 1920 when the managing director of an Australian air transport firm addressed the Institution of Aeronautical Engineers at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). His speech was on ‘Possibilities of Aviation in the Dominions’. Dr Mitchell spoke on a similar theme but chose also to reflect on flying between the Empire’s constituent countries. Commercial flying, he declared, was the most important Empire ‘problem’ at the time. The usual terse press report of audience ‘cheers’ (which failed to distinguish degrees of discernment or acclamation) followed Mitchell’s advice that Britain should not throw away the greatest opportunity it had ever had to use the ‘new bond of unity’.11 [ 52 ]

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Holt Thomas returned from the first International Congress on the Navigation of the Air toward the end of 1920 with much the same feeling. His Paris visit, rather than the concurrent flight across the south-Atlantic by Portuguese aviators, had convinced him that, by hook or crook, Britain had to be made to appreciate the imperial importance of aviation generally and civil aviation in particular.12 The same eager and positive expressions emerged during the Air Conference that the British Government held at the Guildhall in London in October 1920. Delegates were unanimous and emphatic that rapid development of civil aviation was ‘vital to the interests of Empire’, both for developing communication and for defence. With the exception of Sykes’s opening presentation the conference papers tackled aviation from a technical angle and touched on imperial aviation indirectly. The bluster was minimal. Sykes, it appears, had said it all: Britons had undertaken ‘the great pioneer flights of the world’ and the Empire provided ‘the most favourable field for the development of air transport’. Certainly, there was nothing novel in the brief contribution made toward the end of the meeting by B. K. Long, the colonial editor of The Times. He was only reiterating prevailing sentiment in remarking that aviation could do an enormous amount to ensure the prosperity and strength of the Empire. Long’s more significant insight had him pleading for technocrats to publicise aviation better and to convey its essentials in a language and style that would attract and hold public attention. A communicator was needed who grasped the technical issues and could translate and relate those in an engaging fashion. Someone who could do so (while also conjuring with imperial themes) was Rudyard Kipling. His air stories had already caught the monocled eye of C. G. Grey, and he had written a preface for a 1919 book about aircraft. B. K. Long recommended hiring Kipling for whatever fee he asked.13 In 1921, a year more depressed financially than the preceding one, a temporary governmental subsidy payment briefly revived civil aviation in Britain. Talk of Empire air services continued, fanned by press articles such as the one appearing in The Times under the heading ‘Air Bonds of Empire – the Aeroplane’s Role’. The case that good communications were imperative for successful imperialism was developed a little further than mere assertion by referring to historical precedent. The 1921 memorandum on imperial aviation that was issued by the Department of Civil Aviation (and to which Kipling contributed) noted boldly that history proved the close connection between progress, power and communication. The memorandum asserted that no ‘state’ had more to gain from air links than the British Empire. It added that statesmen had failed because they lacked ‘swifter information of the [ 53 ]

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movements of their envoys’, and that the American colonies had been lost because of the impossibility of consultation between British statesmen and American colonists.14 The Prince of Wales spoke to the same themes at the Royal Colonial Institute in mid-1921. He noted that although steam shipping and telegraphy had done a great deal to bridge the gulf between Empire countries, the future of rapid imperial communication was in the air. He expressed his hope that civil aviation would soon build up a great organisation on the same lines as the merchant marine. Appropriately, because the Imperial Conference was then meeting at Downing Street in London, the Prince added that he hoped delegates to the next such gathering would travel by air. With a historical flourish he remarked that just as the roads of the Roman Empire failed to keep pace with the requirements of the times, so modern communications were insufficient for a Commonwealth that extended over every part of the globe. The British Empire, he concluded, had more to gain than any other ‘state’ in the world.15

Airships The strengthening of Empire communications was one of the agenda items at the July 1921 Imperial Conference. Representatives from the dominions and India were taken to visit London’s ‘civil air station’ at Croydon which was then the base for all overseas flights, albeit they were only across the English Channel. Less impressive was the British Government’s announcement that, as an austerity measure, it was abandoning its airship programme after sinking some £40m in development since 1918. One of the first people to protest was Sir Halford Mackinder, chairman of the Imperial Shipping Committee, the first piece of truly imperial machinery. Mackinder fought as an intellectual heavyweight too, and he had topical ideas. The Oxford political geographer was renowned for his argument that future world domination lay with land-based not sea-based powers. Soon, however, he was to lecture at the London School of Economics (where he had been Director in the period 1903–8) on new methods of long-distance communications and their economic and political effects. He may have been given pause for thought by an RSA lecture in 1917 when the speaker updated the view of a nineteenth-century German economist that the sea was the high street of the earth and the parade ground for the display of national strength and enterprise. ‘There is now the air’, the lecturer added crisply.16 People who had practical airshipping interests asked delegates at the Imperial Conference to support fund-raising that would enable trial [ 54 ]

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flights to continue. They spiced their appeals with a shrewd reference to the prospects of using airships to assist emigration from Britain to the rest of the Empire. At the time, settlement of expatriates overseas was considered a necessity to guarantee Empire prosperity and security. The Times predicted that airship lines would ‘work miracles in the migratory disposition of the British peoples’. A year later, midway through 1922, when the Empire Settlement Act had been passed and the British Government had undertaken to spend £3m annually on supporting emigration for the next fifteen years, the newspaper stressed again the importance of physical links with Empire. When there was so great a need for emigration into the Empire, it said, everything that would improve communications over long distances demanded close study.17 Representations to the 1921 Imperial Conference succeeded. A technical committee was appointed to investigate the comparative costs of lighter- and heavier-than-air technology. Confining its analysis to the feasibility of Empire airship transport, the recommendation put to the Conference was that it had a future and should not be strangled. Ignoring the costs of establishing and maintaining airship mooring masts and bases, the accounting calculations identified the route-sectors along which revenue-earning passenger and freight traffic could repay the fuel burned by the existing fleet of four airships. Wind patterns would always be a consideration and might deflect imperial airshipping away from the arcs followed by aeroplanes. As part of its review the technical committee considered proposals for privately operated Empire airship services. A. H. Ashbolt, AgentGeneral for Tasmania, submitted one. As he would tell the RSA in a talk shortly before Christmas in 1921, imperial airshipping would save money and time. There were direct financial savings on transfer of bankers’ documents and on shipments of bullion. Ashbolt estimated that at annual interest rates of 5 per cent a fourteen-day flight would save £150,000 on the Empire’s annual shipment of £80m worth of gold. Regarding passengers, he argued that airship stability, silence and spaciousness compensated for slow speed. Passengers would also benefit from the flight endurance of airships and would not be confined to a maximum ten hours flying per day. On the strength of his talk Ashbolt was invited to talk to the Empire Development Parliamentary Committee.18 Following the support given airships, a Times leader article predicted enthusiastically that within a decade they would carry the swift, longdistance traffic of the Empire. The newspaper’s editors argued that it was unthinkable for Britain to frown on experiment, lay airships in lavender, deflate gasbags, abandon repairs to a damaged airship, and [ 55 ]

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divert skilled personnel to useless temporary employment. One cogent reason was that Europe was at that time ‘alive with competition for the mastery of the long-distance routes of the world’. Germany had taken major strides forward. In 1917 a Zeppelin airship was reported to have flown 5,500 miles over four days across Malta, Egypt and the Sudan to and from central Africa. Carrying twenty-two men and between twelve and twenty tons of military stores from Bulgaria, it was intended to take relief to German troops fighting in the East Africa campaign. British intelligence stopped the airship’s ‘encroachment’ with a sham radio message about the German troops already having capitulated. The airship showed its potency nonetheless, albeit only as far as Khartoum.19 In the face of foreign threat The Times noted with distress that British aviation authorities were waiting ‘with ill-dissembled hostility’ for disagreement to erupt between the Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans about each other’s share in the financial burden of Empire airshipping. Estimates were that each of the dominions would have to contribute £250,000 subsidy for two years. Britain would need to find £300,000 in order to raise £4m in capital from public share subscriptions. The sum was not even half the £660,000 spent on subsidising the cross-Channel aeroplane service for three years. The expense of linking Britain by air to the rest of Empire raised the question of whether equivalent amounts could be spent better, even in imperial aviation. In 1921 a member of London’s Carlton Club (a Conservative Party bastion) suggested that there was a greater need for aviation assistance within colonies than between London and colonial centres. The logic was that the return on investment would be much higher in places where there was no competition from foreign airlines, and in territory not yet served by railway, cable and telegraph. Using lighter aircraft than would be possible on long-distance flights across the Empire would also reduce capital outlay by between one-third and one-quarter. Costs would also be trimmed because aircraft fleets would be smaller, ground organisation would be less sophisticated, and (grateful) passengers in the colonies would (supposedly) accept a lower standard of comfort.20 Cost was not the only consideration in imperial airshipping. Safety had to be taken into account too. Flying was not just a matter of finding places whose distance apart matched the most economical operating range of airships. Even over distances less than ideal the airship advantage could be enhanced by ground conditions. In an article written for the Royal Empire Society, C. G. Grey cited the case of ‘uncivilised or broken country where it would be dangerous to land an aeroplane either by reason of the population or topography’. And [ 56 ]

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the advantages of civil airships were not confined to commercial users. A retired naval commander, F. L. M. Boothby, wrote to The Times that by bringing Bombay within six days of London an imperial airship line would demonstrate to Indians that the British were ‘neither tired nor effete’. Without acknowledging the aeroplane’s existing pacification routines on the Indian frontier, he suggested that a cruise by one or two large airships over India would be more effective than any verbal warning in showing natives that the Empire was still strong. The cost, he suggested, would be more than amply repaid by the feeling of security that airships would engender among expatriates and the ‘loyal ­population’.21 Outside the 1921 Imperial Conference, a supporter of heavier-thanair flying was devising different proposals for an Empire air service. If the principle of Empire aviation was uncontested, the appropriate technology was not. Holt Thomas favoured aeroplanes over airships partly because they were better understood and had been experimented with more extensively. Their critical asset of higher speed also seemed a pity to waste. He argued that unless scientists discovered a new set of trade winds that blew in both directions, airships would be too slow even to outweigh their advantage in carrying capacity. Aeroplanes gave a bumpier and noisier ride, certainly, but Holt Thomas proposed using them only for carriage of mail. He thought the idea of carrying passengers to India in a couple of days was far-fetched. They would be lunatics by the time they arrived, he said. The noise alone would make them nervous wrecks. Holt Thomas did not allude to an inescapable irony of airshipping. Ships of the air offered only a superficially comforting continuity with Britain’s nautical past. For several decades steam technology had made it possible to release Empire shipping from nature’s unpredictable and restrictive wind regimes. Were the proponents of airships really advocating returning Empire transport to the days of erratic schedules and service? Holt Thomas set out his proposal for an Empire airmail service in two lengthy articles (accompanied by a map) on the leader pages of The Times toward the end of 1921. On the basis of experience gained during two years successful flying between London and Paris in difficult weather conditions, he argued that airmail could reach Cairo in twenty-four hours, Calcutta in sixty hours, Cape Town in seventytwo hours, and Sydney in one hundred hours. In comparison with the telegraph, airmails would be more useful as they could convey signed documents, bills of lading, designs and blueprints. The capital cost would be less too, though the point was lost on those who favoured additional investment in submarine cables. The per-word cost of [ 57 ]

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telegrams was also considerably higher than pro rata airmail charges. And, as so much cable traffic was surcharged because it was carried at deferred and weekend rates, airmail would be a bargain for Empire businesses. In times of financial hardship, the most attractive feature of Holt Thomas’s scheme was that it would be self-financing if the Post Office undertook to send all first-class mail by air. His calculations supported his belief that subsidies were ‘an insult to the new methods of transport’, and hinged on his assumption that the subsidised foreign airlines (which had galvanised Government support for British cross-Channel airlines) would not try to carry airmails abroad. A Times leader article intoned that the airmail scheme would be ‘a high service to the social, political and commercial unity of the peoples of the Empire’. Holt Thomas’s public intervention reached further than his airmail proposal. At the same time he spoke out about sluggish and unimaginative British overseas air policy. He excoriated aviation authorities for their lack of imagination and for being obsessed with what aviation could not do. He dismissed the Air Ministry’s 1921 half-yearly report on progress in civil flying as ‘pious’ and condemned the ‘piteous’ divide between rhetoric and action. In plain language he suggested that an imperial air route would already have been established if the Empire had been American. For good measure he raised the German spectre, speculating that as soon as the restrictions imposed on its post-war aviation were lifted, German aircraft would begin flying from one end of the British Empire to the other.22 If the German bogy could not activate British aviation nothing could. It was an old trick. Brancker had used it while speaking at a Rotary Club meeting in Birmingham in 1921. Germany, he warned, was taking up Britain’s ‘heritage of supremacy in the air’. Occasionally, The Times made similar points, but sought to dilute the supposed threat from vaunted German aviation by querying the mental stability of German pilots, some of whom were reputed to still suffer from wartime shell-shock.23 In the contest and muddle over appropriate technology, the fatal crash of the R38 airship in 1921 tipped the balance of aeronautical advantage the way of aeroplanes. Suddenly, the boast about the prestige of an Empire-wide airship service seemed as hollow as traffic switches from conventional ships were unlikely. Weekly Empire airship services in both directions linking London to Bombay, Cape Town and Sydney had been expected to capture a quarter of sea passenger traffic and half the ocean mail. After the R38 crash the New Zealand, South African and Indian governments backed away from Ashbolt’s airship scheme (for which, he told the Victoria League, he had all but been promised the necessary £4m). The council of the British Empire League, which [ 58 ]

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met at the House of Lords in March 1922, made a last-gasp plea for British Government assistance for an Empire airship service. Within days Australians’ interest ended. They had flirted only briefly with the idea of having Germany supply the materials for airship construction, the cost set against reparations.24

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Change Without dominion and colonial support, Empire airshipping floundered. The chance of giving a new physical unity to the Empire was also diminished. Its ‘fundamental weakness – a geographical dispersal which the communications technology of the epoch could not overcome’, remained exposed. The condition was all the more dire because, as the 1921 Imperial Conference showed, the afterglow of wartime imperial co-operation was dissipating. New governments had been elected and the notion of a unified Empire with one foreign and strategic policy was disintegrating under the weight of geography and history. Of the four self-governing dominions, Canada and South Africa shared distaste for entanglement in European affairs. Australia and New Zealand, settled by an almost homogenous people of British descent, were sentimentally closest to Britain but were the furthest away geographically. The diverse and changing Empire could not be expected to hold together without stronger communications. The prospect of an impermanent Empire loomed. In the view of the imperial historian Corelli Barnett, only a ‘facade of spongy platitudes’ disguised the slide from a close strategic alliance to a sentimental association of sovereign states under one Crown. The British Empire was being exposed as a polyglot, rickety rummage-bag containing the ‘random debris of successive historical episodes’. It was, moreover, a notional grouping beset with contradictory, unequal notions of duty and freedom, ‘a strategic absurdity pregnant with difficulties and dangers’.25 The imperial historian Ronald Hyam comments similarly that in the early 1920s Britain was weaker, its rivals stronger, its policies ‘increasingly uncertain and confused’. A ‘declining, dysfunctional empire’, he adds, was ‘on the road to liquidation’.26 Hyam’s judgement is that the decline of Britain and Empire was not immediately apparent. It is indeed unlikely that people interested in aviation analysed the state of the Empire in the piercing terms used now. Political varnish gave them no reason to. And if they had felt despair they might have pursued their aviation ambitions and visions even more vigorously. If the cracks of Empire were being papered over, the failings of British air policy were less well concealed. All [ 59 ]

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was revealed at the second Air Conference, held over two days in the Guildhall in February 1922. Brancker, head of the Air League of the British Empire since the liquidation of Holt Thomas’s Air Transport and Travel company in February 1921, made the exposé. Declaring himself depressed by the absence of new blood, optimism and new ideas, Brancker queried the caution, thrift and division that infected British aviation ‘policy’. While the French and even the ‘poor, beaten and down-trodden’ Germans were making aviation progress, Britain was losing ground, he said. The War Office and the Admiralty were trying to smash the Air Ministry, and jealousies soured relations between the Ministry’s military and civil wings. The Department of Civil Aviation, ‘a flag in the wind of political necessity’, was obsessed with short-term commercialism and competition. Ministers had come and gone in rapid succession without having time to develop policy. Public and governmental confidence in aviation had been destroyed. The Air Conference was not the first to hear Brancker’s grim assessment. In a speech in October 1921 to the North-East Coast Institute of Civil Engineers and Shipbuilders at Newcastle-upon-Tyne he had remarked that ‘progress’ in civil aviation since the end of the War was only notable for the loss of large amounts of money, organisation and goodwill. Among the matters he raised, the conference delegate who represented the Empire’s aviation interests did not overlook imperial themes. Brancker wove them into his speech by arguing in a convoluted way that Britain’s ‘whole future depends on our power in the air, and it is through civil aviation that we shall get the power that is justified by the importance and the size of our Empire’. Untouched by any foreboding about the end of Empire, he presented two options for developing imperial air transport. One was for the British Government to establish ‘a really big and influential national company’ in which it participated and shared control. The other option was for the Colonial and India offices, and the Post Office, to bypass the civil aviation department and persuade their contacts in the Empire to operate air services. On behalf of Holt Thomas, Brancker successfully moved a conference resolution urging the British Government to establish an airmail service throughout the Empire. The motion was to the effect that it was imperative to have rapid imperial communication and to keep pace with the progress made by other nations in civil aviation.27 At the conclusion of the 1922 conference, the Under-Secretary of State for Air, Lord Gorell, announced plans for a board that would control civil aviation. The list of members confirmed that serious attention was at last being paid to the commercial aspects of flying. The board included representatives of the Post Office, the Associated [ 60 ]

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British Chambers of Commerce, the Federation of British Industries, Lloyds insurers, the Royal Aero Club, the Royal Aeronautical Society, and the Society of British Aircraft Constructors. Brancker accepted a seat on the board as the Air League representative. Getting closer to the heart of aviation administration, he could test his suspicions that committees were created to avoid difficult decisions and scare off critics. Despite not having any overseas representatives the first task of the newly established Civil Aviation Board was to investigate the feasibility of an imperial airmail service.28 The investigation took place in an atmosphere of persistent concern for the vulnerability of the Empire, and alongside argument that military aerial capability was essential to defence of the realm. This particular thought was spurred on by a series of articles printed prominently on the leader pages of The Times in March and April 1922 and then later published as a book titled Our Future in the Air. Brig. P. R. C. Groves wrote with authority. His previous appointments had been RFC Chief of Staff in the Middle East, and director of flying operations in the Air Ministry in 1918. He represented Britain at the Versailles peace conference and in the council of the League of Nations. Groves’s arguments made plain that Empire airmails were not going to be the only claimant on the public purse.29 There were other Empire flying services to consider too. Aerial surveying related to forestry, agriculture, irrigation, geology, railway alignment, land registration, archaeology and town mapping was listed in the prize-winning essay presented to the Royal United Services Institute in 1922 by Sqdr-Ldr P. R. Burchall. Such air surveys had already proved their worth in Egypt, Palestine, Canada and India. In the very poorest corners of Empire, like British Guiana, survey aircraft might even form the nucleus of an aerial military reserve.30 As if endorsing Brancker’s criticisms of post-war aviation, in April 1922 Sykes resigned as Controller-General of Aviation. He declined a further year in office on expiry of the three-year term for which he was originally appointed. Like Seely, he stepped down in protest against the financial strictures under which the civil aviation department was being forced to operate. Resources and pretensions remained out of kilter. There were still more words than money; speeches were longer than budgets. Indeed, Government budgets were shrinking, axed by Sir Eric Geddes, the industrialist who had been engaged to slash public expenditure. Money for civil aviation was cut back and the ControllerGeneral’s office was downgraded. It is possible that Sykes may have weathered the storm if his political master had been someone other than Capt. F. E. Guest, a decorated soldier, Winston Churchill’s cousin, and, for a time, his assistant private secretary. Guest’s meteoric rise to [ 61 ]

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succeed Churchill as Air Minister in April 1921 was largely on account of his connections and his being a good sportsman, an entertaining companion and a ‘good fellow’.31 He was no politician and often got his facts and figures wrong. Even his supporters said no one took him very seriously in the House of Commons. Despite Guest (or because of him), Sykes, in his own words, had worked hard to promote civil aviation by ‘intensive propaganda’.32 Besides his landmark presentation to the Royal Geographical Society, he addressed the Belgian Aero Club in Brussels and an aeronautical meeting in Glasgow. He spoke at the University of Liverpool and at international meteorological meetings. He gave speeches to City companies and societies. He wrote that amphibious security would best serve Empire, ‘the rock without which civilisation would have fallen in fragments’. The Scottish branch of the Royal Aeronautical Society heard him argue that the Empire was key to Britain’s continued existence and well-being, and that aviation would surmount obstacles to fuller use of imperial resources.33 Speaking to the Institute of Transport at the Hotel Cecil, Sykes spoke fervently about geography, mobility, human endeavour, sacrifice and destiny. The crescendo was a jangling metaphor about modern communications being ‘the hub, spokes and rim of the flywheel of our Home prosperity and Imperial existence’. Sykes’s immediate destination after stepping down was Cambridge University. There he lectured and wrote his book Aviation in Peace and War. In doing so he may have heeded Kipling’s urging him to reach audiences not yet converted or warned.34

Notes   1 G. de Havilland, Sky Fever (Shrewsbury, 1979); P. French, Younghusband: the Last Great Imperial Adventurer (London, 1994); Geographical Journal, 53 (1919), 339–43; 54 (1919); G. Taylor, ‘Air routes to Australia’, Geographical Review, 7 (1919), 256–61.   2 French, Younghusband; F. H. Sykes, ‘Imperial air routes’, Geographical Journal, 55 (1920), 241–62; Geographical Journal, 56 (1920), 12; Modern Transport, February 1920, p. 14; The Times (3 February 1920), p. 6; Nature (12 February 1920), p. 632; British Library (London) (BL), OIOC, Mss.Eur. F150/6, pp. 2–10.   3 Sykes, ‘Imperial air routes’, pp. 241, 243, 249.   4 Geographical Journal, 55 (1920), 244–6, 264, 269; Sphere (28 February 1920), p. 225. The Sphere’s artist Fortunino Matania drew the image from an unattributed field sketch. Renowned for his Titanic and war art, it was also Matania who depicted van Ryneveld on the front cover of the 24 April 1920 edition.   5 W. F. Willis, ‘A survey for aerodromes in Africa’, Geographical Journal, 55 (1920), 459–64; Geographical Journal, 56 (1920), 128–36; NA, AIR 2/110 (A 20872).   6 L. Walmsley, ‘The recent trans-African flight and its lesson’, Geographical Review, 9 (1920); L. Walmsley, Flying and Sport in East Africa (London, 1920); L. Walmsley, So Many Loves (London, 1944).   7 Flight (21 April 1921), p. 270.   8 Fearon, ‘The growth of aviation’; Higham, Britain’s Imperial Air Routes; G.

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14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

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Holt Thomas, ‘Two years of commercial flying’, Nineteenth Century, 90 (1921), 530–43. Nature (5 February 1920), p. 589; G. Holt Thomas, Aerial Transport (London, 1920). The Times (7 May 1920), p. 11. F. H. Sykes, ‘Civil aviation’, Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 24 (1920), 579–90; The Times (8 October 1920), p. 11; (16 December 1920), p. 6. The Times (25 November 1921). Proceedings of the Air Conference (1920) (Cmd 1157), pp. 1, 16, 126. Kipling’s Preface is in W. H. Berry, The New Traffic: Aircraft (London, 1919). The Times (19 February 1921), p. 11; Memorandum … to Accompany the Air Estimates (1921) (Cmd 1170); Lycett, Kipling. The Times (1 July 1921), p. 9. W. T. Stephenson, Communications (London, 1924); The Times (4 July 1921), p. 14; Daily Telegraph (8 July 1921); M. O’Gorman, ‘Commercial aeronautics’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 116 (1917), p. 45. The Times (5 July 1921), p. 11; (7 October 1921), p. 9; (7 July 1922), p. 8. Conference of Prime Ministers and Representatives … (1921)(Cmd 1474); A. H. Ashbolt, ‘An imperial airship service’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 70 (1921), 102–21. The Times (20 August 1921), p. 9; (22 October 1921), p. 9; Aeronautical Journal, 22 (1918), p. 419; W. F. Makin, ‘Mystery radio over Africa’, Chambers’s Journal (1935), 426–8; D. Botting, Dr Eckener’s Dream Machine (New York, 2001), pp. 84–5. The Times (18 October 1921), p. 12; (1 November 1921). C. G. Grey, ‘Aircraft on Imperial routes’, United Empire, 13 (1922), p. 12; The Times (1 February 1922), p. 6. The Times (8 November 1921), pp. 13, 14; (12 November 1921), p. 11; (14 November 1921), p. 11; (21 December 1921), p. 8; (28 December 1921), p. 4. MacMillan, Sir Sefton Brancker, p. 222; The Times (20 June 1922), pp. 9, 17. V. C. Richmond, ‘Organisation of a colonial airship service’, Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 25 (1921), 588–615; The Times (17 January 1922), p. 7; (25, 28 January 1922); (15 February 1922); (9, 16 March 1922). Barnett, The Collapse of British Power, pp. 74, 167, 78. Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire, p. 1. Proceedings of the Second Air Conference (1922) (Cmd 1619), pp. 86–8; 103–4; The Times (20 October 1921), p. 10. The Times (9 February 1922), p. 5; (2 March 1922), p. 12. P. R. C. Groves, Our Future in the Air (London, 1922). Groves’s book title copied closely Brancker’s 1919 claim about Britain, and the title of three 1912 Pablo Picasso paintings referring to France. P. R. Burchall, ‘An investigation of the possibilities attaching to aerial co-operation with survey, map-making and exploring expeditions’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institute, 67 (1922), 112–27; The Times (24 June 1922), p. 8. H. Penrose, British Aviation: Ominous Skies, 1935–1939 (London, 1980), p. 140. Sykes, From Many Angles, p. 298. F. H. Sykes, Aviation in Peace and War (London, 1922); F. H. Sykes, ‘Some aspects of aeronautical progress’, Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 27 (1923), 606–17; F. H. Sykes, ‘Imperial defence and the air’, Empire Review, 37 (1923), p. 310; F. H. Sykes, ‘Air problems of the empire’, Edinburgh Review, 244 (1926), 264–75. BL, OIOC, Mss.Eur. F150/7: Sykes’s Scrapbook: Hotel Cecil meeting, pp. 125–6; Kipling’s letter dated 30 October 1921, p. 129.

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PART II

Talking up

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Organising Empire civil aviation

Time would show that by virtue of his work for British aviation generally, and Empire aviation in particular, it was a masterstroke choosing Sefton Brancker to succeed Sykes. The person who had been fiercely critical of British aviation at the 1922 Air Conference had not been shut out, nor had he been shut up. Now he had to put up. Brancker was forty-six years old at the time of his appointment to the newly styled job of Director of Civil Aviation. Monocled, short, dapper, high-spirited and charming, he had a keen wit and a gift for languages, and was friendly and spontaneous. He was said to have ‘an international reputation as a typical Englishman not too typical to be understood by foreigners’. Despite his aristocratic pedigree, Brancker engaged well with administrators, engineers, technicians and the men who flew. Having obtained a pilot’s licence himself he was able to see flying as a practical task rather than some mysterious or threatening activity. Yet he also had a boyish regard for pilots, a kind of awe that perpetuated notions of chummy British imperial benevolence in the air age. He was convinced that pilots developed a sixth sense that gave them good judgement. And, ‘if they are sound pilots they are sound chaps generally’.1 Aviation had its share of steely chaps too. One was Cdr (later, Sir) C. D. Burney, an admiral’s son. Burney was no aircraft pilot, but from 1922 he steered a remarkable revival of British airshipping. In March 1922, when the industry was on the verge of extinction, he took up where Ashbolt left off. He proposed a (commercial) Empire airship service comprising six airships surrendered by the Germans for reparations. These airships would fly twice weekly to India, with a weekly extension to Australia. Burney hired Barnes N. Wallis, the scientist and inventor then employed by the Vickers Company, to inspect the airframes. His unfavourable report meant that if Britain was to have airships they would have to be designed and built in Britain unless [ 66 ]

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a way could be found around the post-war restrictions on German airship builders. Before arrangements could be made for construction, funds and permission were sought from the British Government. Burney’s proposals were initially referred to the Committee on Imperial Defence. It fussed about whether to place airships under the control of the Air Council or the Admiralty (which wanted airships for defending Empire ocean trade routes and for scouting). In the meantime Burney explained his scheme to the public. Writing to The Times from his Belgravia home in July 1922, he likened the proposed airship routes to the great trunk railways that had opened up western America and ignited rapid industrial development. He implied that the effect in the Empire would be even greater because it covered a larger area and contained more natural resources and a greater spectrum of climate. Burney indicated how airships could help shrink the modern world: the furthest part of the Empire would be nearer to London than Aberdeen was a hundred years previously. He argued that because European economies were in chaos, Britain had to look to her Empire for alternative markets. Only airships offered sufficient capacity for airfreight.2 Within days of Burney’s exposition, Parliament accepted in principle using airships for commercial and military purposes. The Committee on Imperial Defence approved the strategic value of airships. The Imperial Shipping Committee saw their potential to expedite Indian and Australian mails. A deputation from the Federation of British Industries might have encouraged parliament’s decision. Acceptance of the scheme in principle came too late to affect the outcome of the study of imperial airmail services by the Civil Aviation Advisory Board when it reported in August. Burney had the last word, claiming that an airship link to India would be twenty-eight times cheaper than aeroplane service and faster too. Which country would control this allegedly superior service was a worry. There were reports that the French were willing to erect air stations at Paris, Marseilles, Tunis and Algiers. The Australian Government might also seize the initiative. Sir Keith Smith laid out an airship scheme which Prime Minister Hughes hoped to put before his Parliament: it asked for subsidies in the form of annual dividend and interest guarantees of £91,000 from the British Government, and £60,000 from India and Australia.3 The question of whether to operate Empire air services with aeroplanes or airships dragged on unresolved, mostly due to uncertainties about technology and economics. Organisational upheavals in the Air Ministry were unhelpful although they did not derail the desire for imperial air links. In October 1922 Sir Samuel Hoare succeeded Guest as Secretary of State for Air in Bonar Law’s Conservative administra[ 67 ]

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tion. Unlike his predecessor, Hoare would become a major figure in Empire aviation. Forty-two years of age at the time of his appointment, Hoare had grown up in a wealthy banking family. He was educated at Harrow and Oxford where the cloistered education in late-Victorian times taught fair play, cultivated a naive romanticism, and inoculated boys against the world. If his education left him with the voice and mannerisms of a parson or headmaster, it also cultivated in young Samuel a belief in the ‘type of British Imperialism advocated by Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Milner, and Rudyard Kipling’. Hoare’s imperial enthusiasm was matched by his eagerness to embrace the new technology of flight. Flying on official Government business in Britain whenever he could, he was denounced in a quaint Victorian way by one newspaper for his dangerous and objectionable stunts. Hoare’s support for aviation also showed itself prominently in his willingness to re-open the question of aviation subsidies. Late in 1922 he appointed three businessmen to re-examine Churchill’s idea that aviation should fly by itself. Rather incestuously, he nominated to the committee his brother and two friends, one of whom was the banker Sir Herbert Hambling. The three were chosen because they knew each other well, had quick minds, and agreed to report in a few weeks. The Hambling Committee favoured an airline monopoly operating with a long-term subsidy.4 At the February 1923 Air Conference, the third to be held at the Guildhall, Hoare confirmed his wish to start an Empire air service soon. He also wanted to treat the subject seriously rather than sensationally in a hysterical atmosphere of flying stunts, headline news and wild promises. Speaking on this occasion as Director of Civil Aviation, Brancker outlined the state of civil air transport in and beyond the Empire, and the progress made in the year since he blurted out his criticisms. Burney, by then a Member of Parliament, presented a paper about the imperial potential of airshipping. Holt Thomas, Handley Page, Seely and Ashbolt were among other luminaries who spoke. Holt Thomas successfully put forward a resolution urging the Government to establish an imperial airmail service – to have rapid Empire communication and to keep pace with the progress made by other nations in civil aviation.5 Agitation for imperial air links persisted throughout 1923. When addressing the Institute of Transport in London in July, Brancker whipped up imperial enthusiasm and pointed to the lessons of history. Air transport, he noted tentatively, ‘may well prove to be the most important factor in the preservation of the Empire’. Warming to his subject, Brancker reminded his audience that the Mongol and Roman Empires crumbled when their transport networks could no longer [ 68 ]

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Map 2  Empire airship routes and bases

sustain them. Emboldened by the thought, he preached that air transport ‘will be one of the most important factors in the development and preservation of the British Empire; in fact, the Empire cannot do without it’.6 Similarly, the politician W. W. Benn wrote that ‘if the British Empire is to hold its place in the world it must fly’. Using a little ethnographic imagination he asserted that Britain’s status during peacetime would depend to a large extent upon its citizens becoming ‘a flying race’. The eminent imperial cable and telegraph engineer, Sir Charles Bright, added his weight to the clamour. Aviation, he declared, was ‘of the highest importance to Motherland and Empire’, and not second to wireless or telephony. Any original views which Bright might have had were coloured by his having attended all three air conferences and being a member of the Air League. He had osmosed the prevailing wisdom that aviation would facilitate imperial communication and overseas settlement, develop natural resources, spread prosperity and peace, and prevent imperial dissolution.7 At the Imperial Economic Conference in October 1923 delegates from the dominions and India showed interest in Burney’s airship proposals, and in aerial survey. They also spoke of their willingness to co-ordinate Empire aviation. Gen. Smuts remarked with vigour that communications were the essence of the Empire. Unless more rapid and cheaper communications were provided, he said, it would be ‘almost impossible’ to hold the Empire together. The advantages of aviation [ 69 ]

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in this respect were clear. Compared to submarine cable communication (which became a source of some imperial friction after 1923), flight would be a more visible symbol of imperial unity and would enable face-to-face contact. Outside the conference, Joynson-Hicks told a branch meeting of the Institute of Transport in Manchester that imperial air transport would enable dominion premiers to attend Imperial Conferences more easily and would inaugurate a real Empire parliament. In practice, however, the Empire was unravelling politically in a manner no technology could stop. The facade presented to the British public continued to show an Empire ‘entire and intact’.8 Talk about Empire aviation was handy for demonstrating mutual commitment and co-operation, however vapid. In future, flight would be used to portray a physical coherence to Empire. Empire airshipping continued to attract interest in 1923. A deputation visited the British Prime Minister in March and, while the Imperial Conference was in session, Boothby noted gloomily in The Times that the French had recently flown an ex-German airship for 118 hours over a distance equivalent to that between Britain and India. Britain’s pre-eminence and strategic interests stood exposed; Boothby asked whether they were best served by having airshipping in the hands of one private company. Burney, the proprietor of that company, had by then been to Germany with Wallis to examine the possibility of either building airships in Britain under licence from the Zeppelin company (as the Americans did), or assembling airships from kits designed and manufactured in Germany. The assembly option would have enabled Britain to acquire airships at short notice. They would have been well-tested by long experience and, owing to lower wage payments in Germany, would have cost a third as much as British-built airships. Government concern to protect aeronautical jobs in Britain killed the idea, so Burney invited Wallis to become chief designer to his Airship Guarantee Company, a joint venture with the Vickers aircraft manufacturer. Wallis, an ardent techno-nationalist, felt certain that within two or three years there would be a twice-weekly British-engineered airship service between England and India. Indicating just what a pinnacle that would be in his life, the 35-year-old tactlessly confided to his bride-to-be that he would not care if he died after that.9 The fall of Baldwin’s Conservative government in January 1924, and the start of a Labour administration under Ramsay MacDonald, put to the test whether Empire aviation was a party-political matter. In February, at the annual dinner of the Institute of Transport at the Savoy, Hoare, now out of office, publicly urged the new Minister of Transport to use his influence to expedite the Burney airship scheme [ 70 ]

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and to facilitate the establishment of a new heavier-than-air transport company. With or without prompting, the new Secretary of State for Air, Brig.-Gen. C B. Thomson, a 48-year-old engineer, did not turn his back on air links with the Empire. Nor did he reverse schemes already in progress. At a press conference in February, and in his maiden speech to the House of Lords in March, he mentioned the need to pioneer commercial routes, enlist public interest in aviation, and encourage an ‘air-faring outlook’ to match the seafaring one of days gone by. ‘The chief menace to the Empire is from the air’, he stated.10 What did it matter if he was thinking militarily more than commercially? In respect of airshipping at least, Thomson was helped in his wish to provoke public interest and support by Boothby’s lecture to the Royal Colonial Institute toward the end of January. The latter’s ‘Airships for the Empire’ talk began with a resounding claim that the Empire would crumble if Britain failed to develop an air sense comparable to sea sense, and failed to rear a race of airmen like seamen. Writing of the ‘the immense importance of air power to the future of the Empire’ (for political, military and trade reasons), a Major in the Royal Engineers anticipated that airships constructed by the Dominions would fly along imperial trunk routes which those polities would help to organise.11 Additional support for airshipping came from a contribution written as the tenth volume in a business survey of Empire resources prepared in 1924 by the Federation of British Industries (whose president was Sir Eric Geddes). The anonymous author argued that airships could make the British Empire more self-sufficient in traded commodities. Airships would also make Britain more independent economically. Indeed, they were said to be new instruments of progress that could ‘revolutionise the commercial and political outlook of the whole Empire’. Wallis would have been similarly enthusiastic when lecturing to the Bristol branch of the Royal Colonial Institute in March 1924 about the political and economic impact of commercial airship development on the Empire.12 Thomson acted swiftly to remove the uncertainty that had stalled Empire airshipping. The Burney airship scheme had been under consideration for two years, passing successively through the Amery Committee, the Defence Committee, the Shipping Committee, the Air Mails Committee and the Imperial Conference. In the House of Commons in February, Adm. M. F. Sueter, the Navy’s senior airman between 1909 and 1917, expressed his fear that airshipping was going to be nationalised. Anxiety that the new Labour administration would oppose the Burney-Vickers airship monopoly evaporated when Burney was awarded the contract for a trans-Atlantic airship. Geography came to the rescue and Thomson also announced that the Government [ 71 ]

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would start building its own airship capable of carrying one hundred passengers and ten tons of mail on the India and South Africa routes. Reflecting domestic rather than foreign politics, the Government’s R101 airship built at the Royal Airship Works at Cardington would forever be known as the ‘socialist airship’. The informal designation of Burney’s R101 being built at Howden in Yorkshire was ‘capitalist airship’. Thomson’s links to the R101 airship scheme were reflected in the title he chose on being elevated to the peerage in 1924. He became Lord Thomson of Cardington.13 Thomson’s fondness for names showed itself in the sphere of heavier-than-air transport too. In April 1924 a new British airline was officially incorporated under the name ‘Imperial Airways’. Thomson himself decided on the alluring, euphoric title. A year previously, the Cabinet, and then Parliament, had accepted the recommendation in the Hambling report to establish a monopoly air transport company. Neatly, it was to have capital of £1m and would receive a £1m subsidy on a sliding scale over ten years in return for flying one million miles annually. Lord Weir’s view that such an arrangement would be ‘eyewash and artificiality’14 was about to be tested.

Steering aviation Lord Thomson was Secretary of State for Air for only nine months before the minority Labour government was toppled. In November 1924, Sir Samuel Hoare became, for the second time, the Cabinet minister responsible for civil aviation in Baldwin’s second Conservative administration. He would be Secretary of State for Air until June 1929. Before he once more gave way to Lord Thomson, his five-year period of continuous office was unmatched in inter-war British air affairs. His lengthy service in stable government helped to found Empire air services. Throughout his term Hoare had the services of a clever, dedicated and loyal junior minister, Sir Philip Sassoon. The two leading political figures in aviation were ably advised and assisted without interruption by the same chief civil servant, the Director of Civil Aviation, Sir Sefton Brancker. That, anyway, is the common view. In a draft of his unpublished memoirs Hoare gave Brancker a less glowing testimonial, rating him enthusiastic but ‘deficient in judgement and application’.15 Brancker, Sassoon and Hoare shared an aristocratic upbringing that provided means and education. Their backgrounds also gave them influence, something they would need in their dealings with a ruling class which was generally ignorant and suspicious of technology, and disdainful of ambitious individualism. Mentally, physically and [ 72 ]

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emotionally, all three men took to the air readily. Brancker (like Thomson) was a product of the Royal Military Academy. He qualified as a licensed pilot and was the outspoken publicist who had the common touch. Hoare flew as a passenger whenever he could so as to publicise the safety and efficiency of flight. He admitted that he lacked ‘the talent to paint sensational pictures and stir emotional audiences’ and that he needed long-distance flights ‘for giving colour to my propaganda’. Astute, earnest and correct, Hoare acquired a reputation as a sound performer rather than an inspired leader. Lord Birkenhead called his bookish and prim contemporary ‘the last of a long line of maiden aunts’. His mincing speeches were finely written but were said to lack vigour. They did not hint at any force of character or independence, qualities which he was to display during his subsequent stint as Secretary of State for India (1931–5), and as Foreign Secretary from June 1935.16 Like Brancker, Sassoon qualified as a private pilot. Like Hoare, he showed traces of nervous shyness and had an effeminate, baroque manner. Nevertheless, as an elected Member of Parliament (for Hythe), and as Under-Secretary, Sassoon mastered his parliamentary brief thoroughly. Despite his lisp he spoke authoritatively without notes. His influence on formal policy may have been limited, but Hoare deliberately selected him for his romantic imagination. Apparently, his ‘extreme sensibility’ distinguished him as just the person to patronise and promote infant aviation. His social connections were certainly useful. They extended beyond aviation into a wide circle of notables – and RAF men – with whom he had been associated in the past, and with whom he continued to surround himself. Graduating from Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, Sassoon had been private secretary to the commander-in-chief of the British Army in France, and parliamentary private secretary to Sir Eric Geddes and Prime Minister Lloyd George. Aged thirty-five in 1924, he was reputed to be the richest bachelor in England. His three houses, art collection, light aeroplane and Rolls Royce motorcar displayed lavish taste and considerable resources. He worked unpaid out of interest and pleasure.17 Under Hoare’s guidance, more practical steps were taken to launch Empire aviation in the second half of the 1920s than previously. Not least, it was Hoare who advised Baldwin’s Conservative government in 1924 to appoint Sir Eric Geddes as chairman of Imperial Airways (henceforth, Imperial). Outside government, Geddes was the fourth member of the ruling male elite of Empire aviation in the second half of the 1920s when its foundations were being laid. The ruthless way he axed staff and saved money in government after the First World War evinced courage and determination, and commended him as [ 73 ]

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head of the Government’s ‘chosen instrument’ for overseas aviation. Selecting somebody for the first job of its kind in British aviation must have been like flying blind into cloud, albeit with a member of the Establishment. With no obvious horizon or trajectory it was a show of wobbly conviction (in project not person) that the man selected to steer winged Britannia would only work part time. Fortunately, Geddes was unlikely to suffer qualms or slough off decisions. He had no aviation experience but he had worked in the second most modern transport sector, running railways in India and in northeast England. As such he was acquainted with government subsidies. As organiser of wartime transport he had presumably learned to deal with shortages of equipment and money. Geddes’s experience in transport administration was strengthened by a spell as a Member of Parliament between 1917 and 1921, and as First Lord of the Admiralty and Minister of Transport. He was familiar with the machinery of parliament and state, had contacts in high places, and had insight into foreign negotiations (like his brother who was once ambassador in Washington). Not least, he had tasted success as head of a large international commercial organisation, the Dunlop Rubber Company. A captain of industry, he was unlikely to be either an imperial zealot or an idealistic missionary. Geddes was in his fiftieth year when he began nursing Imperial into life on 1 April 1924. It was exactly eleven years since Lord Northcliffe first advertised the Daily Mail prize for a trans-Atlantic flight. Neither man intended to play the fool on a day customarily used for practical joking. A tall, swarthy Scotsman, Geddes cut an imposing figure. He had a vast capacity for work, was autocratic, and possessed a cyclonic temperament. He was a doer rather than a talker. Colleagues whispered about the ruthless way he tackled new assignments, brushing aside traditions, officials and routine. A quip told by one of his fans, T. P. O’Connor, the father of the House of Commons (and, as president of the British Board of Film Censors, the epitome of moral rectitude), was that in the House ‘Geddes’ was taken to be the plural form of ‘God’. Sir Eric continued as chairman of both Imperial and Dunlop without let-up for thirteen years. He loosened his grip only slightly when relinquishing his position as a director on Imperial’s Board in 1928. Until 1925 his workload included being president of the Federation of British Industries. His Imperial remuneration was token; he held the post mostly out of public spirit. Geddes’s record across several industrial sectors shows that he was a most effective practitioner of scientific, analytical management. Whereas his alleged liking for teamwork is open to question (the pilots’ strike on the very day on which the infant airline was meant to [ 74 ]

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commence service showed that management could not treat human beings as cogs), his inclination to practical management is clear. In the fashion of railway organisations, Imperial hired staff to collect, tabulate, graph and analyse data about aviation performance. The information would also have been useful for assessing the effectiveness of managerial intervention. Measurement and organisation were focused on efficiency. Crucially, in the words of his biographer, Geddes favoured managing ‘without too much regard for the political context or ideological assumptions’. Shareholder value rather than Empire propagation was the Geddes benchmark. His airline was a business first and an imperial instrument second. His task was to manage the airline as a commercial operation assisted by a government subsidy until financial assistance was no longer necessary.18 Somewhere the rhetoric of Empire aviation had slipped. By virtue of his position and his immense personality, Geddes was the most prominent figure at Imperial. Assisting him in senior administration was a small directorship. It included the director of each of the four defunct British airlines and two government nominees. Among the later government appointees were Sir W. F. Nicholson (Balliol; ex-secretary of the Air Ministry) whose term started in 1931, and Maj.-Gen. Sir John Salmond (Sandhurst; ex-Chief of Air Staff) who was appointed in 1933 at the request of the governments of Australia and New Zealand. Geddes insisted that one of the directors be Sir George Beharrell, an accountant. Known as ‘Man Friday’, he coat-tailed Geddes from the North-Eastern Railway company to military service in France (where Geddes became wartime Assistant Director of Transportation in the allied zone), and then to the Admiralty, the Ministry of Transport and to Dunlop (where he became Managing Director). When one Imperial directorship was left vacant in 1937 it was filled by J. L. Maffey (Christ Church; ex-Governor General of the Sudan, and past permanent colonial under-secretary). Further evidence that the upper echelons of Empire aviation shared the educational pedigree of the higher strata of Crown service is that the Oxford-educated solicitor, K. M. Beaumont, acted as Imperial’s legal adviser for fifteen years. Including even Geddes, a formidable part-timer, probably the most important person at Imperial was the man who was hired as General Manager in 1924. Thirty-one years old at the time, George Woods Humphery had trained as a marine engineer and became an RAF pilot during the Great War. Thereafter he worked for Handley Page Transport until its collapse in 1921 when he became Managing Director at Daimler Airway. Succeeding to the post of Imperial’s Managing Director in 1925, the day-to-day operations of the airline were in his hands. Geddes held him in high regard and once boasted that Woods [ 75 ]

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Humphery was among the dozen best executives in England. In 1930 he was promoted to a status more appropriate to his international, quasidiplomatic work when he was elected a board member of the airline. In the main Woods Humphery kept out of the public eye and operated quietly and effectively in the substantial shadow of the chairman. Yet Woods Humphery made Imperial his. A contemporary remembered him as ‘strong and severe ... not so much liked as respected’. He has also been portrayed as blending disarming amenability with supreme self-confidence.19 For fifteen years until his controversial departure in 1938 under Geddes’s successor, Woods Humphery was, in effect, the kingpin of Empire air communications.

Clamouring for aviation Speaking in public, the leaders of putative British Empire civil aviation interpreted the project for outsiders, practising the art and socialising the technology. In November 1924, when Hoare was guest speaker at the annual banquet of the London and Suburban Traders’ Federation, he said that he wanted to strengthen the air defences of London and make it the air junction of the world. Cheers reverberated around the room. In May 1925 he told the annual meeting of the Chelsea Conservative Association that British aviation could have a great effect on Empire resources, and that their development was ‘the real secret’ of British prosperity. In June, the Constitutional Club heard Hoare set out his three goals: enhance the air defence of Britain and the Empire; improve Empire communications; raise the air sense of British people. Hoare spoke on more poignant occasions too. In 1925, after a hazardous flight during which the R33 military airship was close to being destroyed in a storm, Hoare’s speech at an awards ceremony at Pulham airbase praised the bravery of the crew. If the airship had been lost, he said, airship development would have been stopped for a generation. The task of ‘bringing the Empire closer together and penetrating the uttermost corner of the air with British machines’ would have been delayed seriously.20 Also in 1925, in October, the new chairman of the Royal Military Academy added his weight to the call for the development of aviation. It was a sign of the times that owing to his absence on a flying trip in the East, Brancker’s inaugural address had to be read out on his behalf. His discursive paper touched on the undesirability of government subsidies for non-commercial lines of communication, excepting in Britain’s case where the exploitation of air transport and the development of commercial aircraft were activities of prime imperial importance. Brancker ended his paper with a resounding call to support [ 76 ]

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fledgling aviation and keep Britain in the front rank. The nation, he said, depended on its communications more than any other in the world. Unless they were kept at the highest pitch of efficiency the Empire would melt into the mist.21 With the wisdom of hindsight, Brancker and others might have been better advised to press harder for organisational reform than for aeronautical innovation. Some notable public figures came close. One was Sir Harry Brittain, an Oxford-trained barrister, backbench parliamentarian, and founder of the imperial newspaper movement. He spoke up at the Empire Press Conference in Melbourne in 1925. After his talk about an inter-Empire air policy, delegates debated his motion about the importance of improving and facilitating interEmpire communications. An addendum advocated using all the available ‘imperial air resources’ to create an inter-imperial air link. The following year, Burney and Brittain moved a similar resolution at a meeting of the Imperial Communications Committee of the British Empire League held in the House of Commons. The Government was encouraged to link the Empire by all forms of air transport.22 Creating mental images of an Empire knit together by a variety of transport and communications usually involved just drawing more lines on familiar maps. Some speakers stumbled on a cartographic transformation that was visually more striking. In 1928 the chief technical adviser to the Air Ministry showed the Indian section of the Royal Society of Arts a mapping of a London-centric Empire in which flight would telescope the extremities such that Australia was superimposed on Egypt, and South Africa on Gibraltar. Canada would appear off the west coast of Ireland. Two years previously, in Toronto, the peripatetic Brancker presented his audience at the Empire Club of Canada with a similar teaser about the plasticity of imperial geography in the air age. With airships travelling at 60mph, he said, Canada would effectively be one-third closer to the ‘Old Country’. Australia would be as near as Somaliland, India no further than Egypt, and England near French Morocco. He added that flight would shrink the globe and enable faceto-face meetings, thereby promoting understanding, world peace and prosperity.23 In an unstable geopolitical order, some agitation for British aviation progress was made with a wary – and often admiring – eye on Germany. In 1925 a Times editorial reported thousands of spectators gathered in Berlin for light aeroplane trials. The Templehofer review ground, sacred to military displays, dwarfed any British airfield. The country was striding ahead aeronautically with the help of technical universities and flying clubs. Germany is convinced that her future is in the air, The Times editors noted. Warning about the adversary’s ambition, they [ 77 ]

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added that Britain would have to act or would acquiesce in German supremacy. Weimar Germany certainly aimed high, indulging in intellectual enthusiasm for all technology that was thought capable of altering the geography of world power. Scholars of geopolitics rhapsodised about the international leverage of aviation. In 1927 one German writer stressed that ‘in the age of air travel not a speck of the earth’s face can remain hidden’. Another lamented the ‘catastrophic’ loss of German colonies for German aviation.24 In the same year, 1927, German progress in civil aviation was set out clearly in a lecture to the Royal Aeronautical Society. The speaker was Maj. M. Wronksy, the General Manager of Lufthansa, the German domestic airline. No person from Imperial had yet deigned to address the Society. The Society’s leader, the 34-year-old Lord Sempill, chaired the meeting. An experienced British wartime pilot, he lectured the German Aeronautical Society in 1925 (and 1928). From the chair he conceded graciously that whereas the Germans had been air-minded for twenty years (‘a very desirable state of grace’), the British lagged behind. Sempill’s judgement was that seldom, if ever, had such a distinguished audience attended as on that day. Brig.-Gen. P. R. C. Groves was impressed by what he heard. Germany led the world in aviation, he said pithily. He expressed his regret that Wronsky’s admirable lecture had not been broadcast to the whole of England as an antidote to the scepticism and pessimism about air transport. Like Rudyard Kipling before him, Groves argued that German air transport showed the world and Britain that transportation was civilisation, and a force that made for culture and progress. He was sufficiently envious of German enterprise, and sufficiently irritated by British apathy, to claim that if Germany had the same imperial territorial opportunities as Britain, the country would have had about 60,000 miles of air routes compared with its 15,000 miles in 1928, and Britain’s 20,000 miles.25 In length alone, Britain’s airways did not even begin to compare with the 148,000-mile extent of British colonial railways. By dint of their location alone, the service that trains performed for the Empire was greater too. Furthermore, as imperial arteries, the 164,400 nautical miles of submarine cable were unequalled. Groves and Sempill bombarded the British authorities and public with statistics purporting to show Britain’s backwardness in aviation. Comparative data about the size of national aircraft fleets, the geographical reach of flights, and the number of passengers and volume of freight carried, were used to gauge national standing and to assess the cohesiveness and vulnerability of Empire. In 1926 Groves reminded readers of The Times that eight years after the armistice Britain possessed only sixteen commercial aeroplanes. France, by contrast, [ 78 ]

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had more than 250. There were 131 in Germany. A statistic given to diners at the Lyceum Club in London by Lord Sempill at the end of 1927 hardly gave a better impression of an aerial presence: a mere 1 per cent of the 30,000 miles of air routes in Europe were operated by Britain.26 An early presence on international air routes longer than Germany could muster would alter dramatically Britain’s standing in the global air transport league tables. In 1930 Germany was a continental power without any overseas possessions. The country boasted 17,000 miles of airway. That network was only marginally smaller than the 23,000 miles of air route across the whole British Empire. Britain operated little of this route mileage beyond Europe, or between British possessions. With a smaller and less scattered Empire than Britain’s, the French operated 19,400 route miles. Discussing the relative size of air networks measured in air miles, number of night services or comparative flying speeds was conjuring with fluid evidence. Besides, passenger miles were a superior yardstick of performance to route miles, and service ownership was an important consideration. In assessing performance, levels of financial subsidy were also crucial. While he was president of the Royal Aeronautical Society, Brancker told its Leeds branch in 1927 that France subsidised its air service heavily to enable quicker communication with overseas possessions and to form a military reserve. The last thing France thought about was making it a commercial proposition, he declared. Indeed, the Quai d’Orsay’s interest in speedier colonial communication was to bring overseas governors under the Parisian thumb, and aviation did help displace French adventurer-diplomats with civil servants.27 Despite a lurking German threat, in the second half of the 1920s suspicions about aircraft continued to hold back acceptance of aviation in post-war Britain. The sheer size, sound and speed of aircraft were menacing, even just on show. ‘A terrible bomber made me shudder for the sanity and safety of civilisation’ wrote one visitor to the RAF annual display at Hendon in 1926. There, unlike the quizzical attitude of a minority of pacifists and plebeians, the massed promenaders revelled in the staged imperial bombings. Even so, the RAF placated critics by modifying Hendon’s imperial set pieces. Brancker resorted to anecdote to sweep aside conservative and sceptical attitudes to even peacetime applications of flight. In Toronto he related the story of an elderly lady who, while watching aeroplanes unhappily, remarked that she had loathed ‘them things that buzzed’. It was an irrational (and implicitly fogeyish and feminine) attitude, Brancker explained. On her own admission, a bee in underclothes she wore as a little girl triggered the woman’s phobia. And buzzing was not all bad, as the visitor to [ 79 ]

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Hendon admitted. There were even some aircraft that radiated a naive, peaceful domesticity. A small hovering plane at the air show was ‘the sort of toy one would like to possess to sail gently over one’s garden in the cool of the evening to see how the tomatoes were doing’.28 Even when travelling abroad by sea, Brittain and Brancker spread news of aviation developments and drummed up support. Travel to the Empire was actively encouraged, and by none other than Prime Minister Baldwin. Yet he remained remarkably untouched by aviation. He did not have in mind air travel when, in his 1925 Empire Day message, he said that ‘it should be the ambition of all of us to pay at least one visit, however brief, to Britain overseas’. As those who championed air transport never tired of pointing out, brief overseas trips could be stretched if journeys were made by air. The opportunity was creeping closer. Meanwhile, Leo Amery, the Colonial Secretary, travelled by sea when he embarked on a six-month tour of South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada in 1927/28. It was the first Empire pilgrimage of such duration undertaken by a Secretary of State. Air transport progress made it the last such. Lord Thomson also had to sail when, out of office, he visited the United States in 1925 and 1926, and toured Canada with the Empire Parliamentary Association in 1928. Brancker was the first non-military British Government official to fly into the Empire. Hoare would be next. Between return flights to Scandinavia with his wife, and to the Baltic with the RAF, he (and Amery) visited ‘almost every important point from Cairo to the Anglo-Persian oil-fields’ with the RAF in the brief parliamentary Easter recess in 1925.29

Notes   1 B. Collier, Heavenly Adventurer: Sefton Brancker and the Dawn of British Aviation (London, 1959), p. 23.   2 The Times (11 April 1922), p. 14; (21 July 1922), p. 8.   3 L. S. Amery, My Political Life (Vol. 2) (London, 1953); The Times (5 April, 19 June 1922); (27 July 1922), pp. 7, 10; (8, 12 August 1922); First Report on Imperial Air Mail Services (Cmd 1739) (London: Civil Aviation Advisory Board), 1922.   4 Collier, Heavenly Adventurer, p. 168; Hyde, British Air Policy, p. 129; Barnett, The Collapse of British Power, p. 33; Spectator (20 September 1935), p. 419; CU, Templewood XX (5).   5 Proceedings of the Third Air Conference (1923) (Cmd 1848).   6 W. S. Brancker, ‘Air transport’, Journal of the Institute of Transport, 4 (1923), 357–84.   7 Benn, ‘Air policy’, p. 248; C. T. Bright, ‘An imperial air policy’, Quarterly Review, 476 (1923), 74; Who Was Who, 1931–40.   8 Imperial Economic Conference, Proceedings (1923) (Cmd 2009), p. 49; Icarus, ‘Britain’s’, pp. 294–6; W. Joynson-Hicks, ‘An imperial air service’, Journal of the Institute of Transport, 4 (1922), 73–9; R. Boyce, ‘Canada and the Pacific cable controversy, 1923–1928: forgotten source of imperial alienation’, Journal of Imperial and

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12 13 14 15 16 17

18

19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Commonwealth History, 26 (1998), 72–92; Barnett, The Collapse of British Power, p. 195. The Times (10, 21, 27 March 1923); (12 October 1923), p. 8; (6, 9 November 1923); J. E. Morpurgo, Barnes Wallis: a Biography (London, 1972), p. 112; S. W. H. Zaidi, ‘The Janus-face of techno-nationalism: Barnes Wallis and the “Strength of England”’, Technology and Culture, 49 (2008), 62–88. Daily Telegraph (8 February 1924), p. 10; The Times (15 February 1924), p. 14; Hansard (Lords) (4 March 1924), col. 508. F. L. M. Boothby, ‘Airships for the Empire’, United Empire, 15 (1924), 154–65; A. V. T. Wakely, Some Aspects of Imperial Communications (London, 1924), pp. 60, 61. ‘Air Transport’, in Stephenson, Communications, p. 149; Morpurgo, Barnes Wallis. The Times (28 February 1924); Morpurgo, Barnes Wallis; Morris, Farewell the Trumpets, p. 339. Reader, Architect of Air Power, p. 96. CU, Templewood XX (5). Collier, Heavenly Adventurer, p. 168; Hyde, British Air Policy, p. 129; Barnett, The Collapse of British Power, p. 33; S. J. G. Hoare, Empire of the Air: the Advent of the Air Age, 1922–1929 (London, 1957), p. 175; Spectator (20 September 1935), p. 419. Hoare, Empire of the Air, p. 188; S. Jackson, The Sassoons (London, 1968), p. 197; J. A. Cross, Lord Swinton (Oxford, 1982). On the Sassoon family and the strange, small, dark-skinned, flitting Philip see Wheeler, Too Close to the Sun, pp. 28–9, 218–9. K. Grieves, ‘Sir Eric Geddes, Lloyd George and the transport problem, 1918–21’, Journal of Transport History, 13 (1991), 23–42; T. P. O’Connor, ‘Organiser of Imperial Airways’, World Today, 43 (1924), 517–9; K. Grieves, Sir Eric Geddes: Business and Government in War and Peace (Manchester, 1989), p. 137; The Times (8 September 1928), p. 7. C. G. Grey, A History of the Air Ministry (London, 1940), p. 271; J. C. W. Reith, Into the Wind (London, 1949), p. 294; J. M. Kenworthy, Sailors, Statesmen – and Others (London, 1933), p. 84; Bamford, Croissants at Croydon, p. 2; The Times (30 September 1930), p. 19; Who Was Who, 1897–1996. The Times (25 November 1924), p. 16; (27 May 1925), p. 18; (5 June 1925), p. 11; (16  June 1925). W. S. Brancker, ‘The lessons of six years’ experience in air transport’, Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 29 (1925), p. 576. H. E. Brittain, Pilgrims and Pioneers (London, 1945), p. 125; The Times (24 March 1926), p. 10. A. E. Edwards, ‘Air routes of India’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 126 (1928), 650–69; W. S. Brancker, ‘Progress in civil aviation’, Empire Club Speeches, 24 (1926). The Times (5 June 1925); D.T Murphy, ‘Space, race and geopolitical necessity: geopolitical rhetoric in German cultural revanchism’, in A. Godlewska and N. Smith (eds) Geography and Empire (Oxford, 1994), p. 181. Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 31 (1927), 704, 710; 32 (1928), p. 39; Who Was Who, 1897–1996. The Times (27 October 1926), p. 15; (29 November 1927), p. 11. Barnett, The Collapse of British Power; Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 32 (1928), 85; S. Schiff, Saint-Exupéry (London, 1994). Spectator (10 July 1926), p. 45; D. E. Omissi, ‘The Hendon Air Pageant’, in J. M. MacKenzie (ed.), Popular Imperialism and the Military (Manchester, 1992); Brancker, ‘Progress in civil aviation’, p. 121. S. Baldwin, On England (London, 1926), p. 217; Amery, My Political Life (Vol. 2); C. B. Thomson, Air Facts and Problems (London, 1937); Imperial Conference, Appendices (Cmd 2769) (1926), p. 194.

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At the end of November 1924 Brancker set out on a 17,000-mile flight to Rangoon and back. His purpose was to assess the possibilities for a lighter-than-air service to India and beyond, and to investigate sites for airship hangars and mooring masts. Initially he intended to travel by ship, and was offered a first-class return passage by P & O liner at a cost of £750. Instead, a young English pilot named Alan Cobham fixed a more Spartan journey by air. It was he who raised an additional £750 to cover the flight and who piloted Brancker on the journey. Cobham had no difficulty raising the extra money from the aeronautical industry that grasped the propaganda value of a flight by the Director of Civil Aviation. Portentously, the two travelled in an aeroplane belonging to and bearing the name of the airline that was explicitly excluded from airship operations. Britain’s only commercial airline sponsored the Cobham-Brancker flight together with the Society of British Aircraft Constructors, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and the de Havilland aircraft manufacturer. Private capital was thus involved in Empire aviation from the start, but not with equal prominence. Burney’s Airship Guarantee Company was not yet in a position to loan an airship. In his memoirs, Cobham deduced that the heavier-than-air flight changed his passenger’s mind about airshipping; Brancker realised that the facilities that would be needed were aeroplane landing fields rather than mooring masts. But Cobham’s deduction is neither vindicated by any scaling down of Empire airshipping plans nor by Brancker’s address to a committee of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce in February 1925 in which he spoke about a four-day airship flight between England and India by 1927. He predicted that the service would fly one hundred passengers at a fare of £100 each.1 Unlike the grand figures in Empire aviation, Cobham had humble origins and was self-made. He left school early, worked in the London [ 82 ]

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rag trade, and served for a time with the Army Veterinary Corps in the First World War before embarking on flying training. Demobbed with 22,000 other RAF pilots, he took a share in an air transport company giving shows (including aerobatics and wing-walking) and pleasure flights to some five thousand people in 1919 throughout Britain. For nine months after the War he and a flying partner carried ten thousand passengers and turned over £11,000 before their jointly owned organisation collapsed in 1920. When his ‘barnstorming’ days were over, Cobham gained valuable flying experience doing aerial photography in Britain. He also did air taxi work for the de Havilland aircraft hire division. One of his tasks was to fly people who literally had missed their boat. He also flew photographs of country events to London for urgent news publication, and was a flying chauffeur for a wealthy and eccentric American. In the early 1920s he flew annually in the Mediterranean and North Africa. He entered the King’s Cup air races, winning the 1924 series. He was, for a time, chief pilot at de Havilland. His job was to devise and arrange special ‘propaganda’ flights.2 Cobham and Brancker were not the only people venturing East by air. As they were leaving England, so two ‘flying Dutchmen’ (one a pilot for KLM, the Royal Dutch airline) landed in Batavia, capital of the Dutch East Indies. They arrived at the end of November 1924. Their 55-day flight across 10,000 miles from Amsterdam in a Dutch-built Fokker monoplane began on the first day of October. Thousands of people greeted them. Schools and businesses closed and the Government declared a national holiday. Britain noticed. A Times leader article billed the achievement as yet another demonstration of the ease, safety and practical uses of flying. Drawing a parallel with the feat of the seventeenth-century Dutch sailors was irresistible: the ‘fliers’ had the same blood of their pioneer forefathers and were of adventurous and brave stock.3 Any jealousy that the Dutch may have stolen a march on British aviation was eased by the consolation that a Rolls Royce engine powered their aircraft. After visiting twenty cities in Europe, the Middle East and India, Cobham and Brancker returned to London in March 1925. During their travels they were preoccupied with diplomatic negotiations about future over-flying and landing facilities, but their journey itself boosted British air prestige, not least because it proved the reliability of British aircraft. At Croydon aerodrome Brancker volunteered only that the trip had been ‘a nice little joy ride’. When pressed, he conceded that it proved that an air route to the East was feasible.4 The Dutch knew that, and soon the Italians would confirm it. In June their flying boat expedition arrived in Melbourne having taken thirty days to cover 14,300 miles. It returned to Italy via China. [ 83 ]

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As a mark of esteem for Cobham and Brancker, the British Empire League hosted a celebratory lunch at the British Empire Club in St James’s Square. There Brancker made the quirky remark that the Empire had failed to place the dominion (White) population where it was ‘truly required’. He mentioned too that whereas military aviation had put Britain at a military disadvantage, civil aviation ‘could give good things more lavishly to the British Empire than to any other nation’. The gist of both observations would be worked into other aviation motivation talks and writing many times in future. First off, before writing a paper for the Royal Aeronautical Society, Brancker contributed a preface to Cobham’s 1925 book Skyways in which he stressed that Britain had to develop rapid communications ‘or cease to be an Empire’. In London, lining up to honour Cobham became a mark of worldliness, organisational relevance and imperial sensibility. The Royal Aero Club and the Society of British Aircraft Constructors strutted first. They dined Cobham and Brancker at the Savoy Hotel. On his feet during the meal, Sir Philip Sassoon was lyrical. Brancker’s Asian venture had not only had practical results, he said, it had also ‘touched the imagination of the whole nation’. Moreover, it had raised the prestige of British pilots, British aircraft and British aero engines. Sassoon judged that the Cobham-Brancker trip had popularised and encouraged flying more than anything else since the War. He referred to flying as nationalistic, and hinted at future triumphs. Cobham, he said, was one of the finest pilots that the British ‘race’ had produced. Lt-Col (later Lord) J. T. C. Moore-Brabazon ended the dinner proceedings at the Savoy. He spoke with the authority of the first Englishman to fly in England, and as a licensed pilot and Member of Parliament. He expressed his hope that the Cobham-Brancker flight ‘would hasten the time when throughout the world we would see our aircraft at every great town, as we see British ships at every great port, spreading our trade and carrying our flag’.5 His patriotic sentiments drew cheers from the two hundred guests, or so readers must have assumed if the customary indication in parentheses at the foot of newspaper reports was more than just habitual editorial filler.

Africa and Australia Within nine months of his Asian tour with Brancker, Cobham set out on his first African flight. He sensed a great opportunity to exploit the speed of air transport where surface transport was poor. By happy coincidence much of the continent was under the British flag, and patriot Cobham was proud of Britain and the Empire. His encounter [ 84 ]

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with the Indian Raj had convinced him that imperial communications were a noble cause. The fuselage of his British-engined de Havilland plane was emblazoned with words that described his task: ‘Imperial Airways Air Route Survey’. Decals showed that Lord Wakefield, the philanthropic oil magnate, donated lubricant for the adventure, and that British Petroleum donated fuel. The plane was indeed ‘a flying billboard for Britain’s aviation hopes’. The Royal Aero Club’s Flight magazine produced souvenir mail cards that Cobham signed and took with him for delivery. Each card bore an unusually pacific image of Britannia: alongside the flagged shield stood a youthful girl, without helmet or trident, gazing up at a bird she had released into the sky. Cobham flew away from Britain on 16 November 1925. The previous day Hoare gave a BBC radio talk entitled ‘The Importance of Aviation to Great Britain and the British Empire’. Cobham would have felt proud about Sir Samuel singling out British war-pilots as the best in the world and would have been fortified by hearing that they would be ‘the pioneer of Empire peace and Empire unity’. He would have been reassured to know that the Government was ‘anxious to show the British flag in the air’, and to have his project affirmed by a Government minister in terms of distance being ‘the enemy of Empire unity’. Cobham and sky hoarding began a slow journey. After ninety-four hours flying, it ended at the southern tip of the African continent in February 1926. Along the way, Cobham, his mechanic-cum-rigger, and the British Gaumont photographer enjoyed RAF hospitality in Cairo, placed bets on boys running up Giza’s Great Pyramid and flew over Assuan Dam, that ‘British engineering triumph’. They visited Government House in Khartoum and took the Governor-General’s wife for a flip. They watched ‘tribal dancing’, hunted, and flew through the mist over the Victoria Falls. Cobham wired diary jottings and sent photographs to the Daily Mail. In its Empire news section the paper noted his speech at the local British Empire Service League dinner in Broken Hill.6 Such was the renewed romance of Empire. In Cobham’s own words, his journey resembled ‘a triumphal march, or a royal progress’. Such was modern imperial prospecting. At Jinja, Uganda, an enormous crowd of Africans assembled; some chiefs had trekked sixty miles. Cobham grounded his plane heavily while trying to avoid the throng. Unwilling to strain his aircraft again, he decided that in future he would land properly, ‘natives or no natives’. Thousands of people (van Ryneveld among them) met Cobham’s plane at Pretoria. An official reception followed. Five thousand people and one thousand cars awaited him at Johannesburg. This short leg of the flight was filmed from the air by a commercial photographer and was shown to [ 85 ]

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British cinema audiences watching Pathé Gazette newsreels. Admirers wrote messages on the wings of Cobham’s aeroplane congratulating him on his efforts to make Britain ‘mistress of the air’. White hands, it appears, were more delicate and restrained than Black hands: in 1923 in North Africa when a crowd of indigenous people gathered round his plane while on a private flight, Cobham asked the village headman to intervene. He and some police obliged with vigour that surprised and disturbed the Englishman. When Cobham reached Cape Town the day’s parliamentary proceedings ended early so that members could watch his arrival. ‘I’m glad he’s an Englishman’, murmured one parliamentarian. Reflecting back, Cobham wrote that the public interest was not in him, but rather in what his flight represented, namely, closer links between the scattered peoples of the Empire and an end to the isolation of those who lived in small and remote places. In the last regard he referred specifically to the way in which Empire air links might help British people overcome the homesickness and/or loneliness which overseas service entailed. The Britishness of these benefits was compromised by the news that the South African Government was contemplating buying Junkers aircraft from Germany. At the Cape Town Mayor’s civic luncheon Cobham remarked tactfully on the ‘melancholy coincidence’.7 Cobham’s return flight (eighty flying hours, twenty-six stops, fifteen days) from Cape Town outpaced the Windsor Castle mail ship by two days even though his route was one-third longer. Back in London he hand-delivered a letter to King George V from his brother-in-law, the Governor-General of South Africa. An air escort of private and Imperial aircraft preceded the welcome over England. A crowd of spectators gathered at Croydon, testing or suspending superstition about Fridays dated the thirteenth of the month. Without mishap, wider recognition could follow. The Royal Aero Club awarded Cobham its gold medal and, for the second time, its Britannia Trophy. At Hatchett’s restaurant in Piccadilly, the Institute of Aeronautical Engineers presented Cobham with its gold medal; his mechanic received a silver version. Addressing the monthly luncheon meeting of the Overseas League at the Criterion restaurant, Cobham observed that aviation advertised Great Britain and enhanced its prestige. Whereas that had fallen to the navy previously, now aviation could show the British flag across the world. Flying, Cobham said, alerted people to imperial geography and stimulated local interest.8 Writing to Hoare about his gratitude for being awarded the Air Force Cross (the only living civilian thus honoured), Cobham noted the pleasure he derived from ‘aviation propaganda’. Apart from its commercial side he felt that popularising flight had ‘as much to do with the future of Britain’.9 [ 86 ]

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In love with flying, and revelling in his self-appointed role of flying air ambassador and new-generation geographer, the best-known private pilot in Britain and the Empire took off in June 1926 for Australia. On a journey lasting three months Cobham flew 20,000 miles in sixty-eight stages. Arriving in Melbourne in August, he was welcomed by 100,000 people. Estimating a crowd 50 per cent larger, a British newsreel film told of a solitary policeman on a white horse trying to control the chaos, and of spectators shredding a wattle wreath into ‘a thousand souvenirs’. The joy of the visit was soured only by allegations from the Australian Premier, S. M. Bruce, to the effect that British oil companies had refused to supply Cobham with free petrol for his return flight to England if he used petrol from Australian refineries while out there. Cobham cited misunderstanding when settling this tiff in the imperial family.10

Animating air empire Cobham’s return to Britain from Australia on the first day of October 1926 was scripted perfectly. It was showmanship supreme. Following a suggestion made in the office of Capt. (later Sir) F. Tymms, one of Brancker’s assistants at the Air Ministry, Cobham flew his seaplane up the Thames to Hammersmith before looping back to Westminster and landing on the River. Thousands of people gathered along the Embankment, on the bridges, on the tops of open-deck buses and on boats. They greeted their hero with waves, cheers and tossed hats. Sirens and horns blew. Photographers lined up aircraft and London landmarks in their lenses. Hoare, Brancker and the Speaker of Parliament were among the senior officers of state who greeted the icon of early Empire aviation on the riverfront terrace where he felt he was at ‘the mother of parliaments in the heart of the Empire’. Effusive speeches followed. In the Coventry plant where Cobham’s aircraft had been built, workers listened to a radio broadcast of the afternoon’s action in London.11 Within months, the Edison Bell Company cut a gramophone recording of Cobham’s own six-minute description of his flight. For 2s 6d the public could purchase private possession and repeat hearings of modern imperial adventure.12 When Cobham eventually arrived home at his flat in Hampstead, a smaller but touching welcome awaited him. Local boy scouts formed a guard-of-honour for their wandering neighbour. The boys would probably have been in the vanguard of the changed allegiances remarked on by the veteran aviation journalist and writer, Harry Harper. Young boys, he wrote, were turning their adulation away from knights in shining armour and sea captains. Instead, they searched the sky for men to idolise and actions to emulate: ‘the modern Galahad with his [ 87 ]

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Figure 3  Londoners on Westminster Bridge watch Sir Alan Cobham land his seaplane on the Thames at the end of his flight to Australia and back, 1  October 1926.

winged steed’ was the new generation of hero. Harper did not stop there. Britons wanted aviation heroes, he said; they were the men upon whom the Empire would depend in future.13 A 32-year-old pilot whose travel log listed flights to Africa, Asia and Australia was revered. In London, Cobham’s earthbound perambulating started modestly with an appearance in October at a private viewing of his seaplane in Selfridges Oxford Street department store. Fifteen years earlier the retailer had personally arranged to display Blériot’s monoplane in his 6-month-old shop: ‘Blériot and I were changing the world each in our own way’, Selfridge claimed. Social class and flight aligned: members of the House of Lords had a private viewing and 150,000 well-heeled shoppers visited the monoplane over four days. Subsequent displays included the remains of Hawker and Grieves ill-fated Atlantic aircraft. In 1926, the imperial dimensions of aviation were played up: in March, Selfridges displayed the aircraft Cobham used on his Africa flight.14 During the October display Brancker told shoppers and oglers that there were 40,000 miles of airway awaiting development in the Empire. He praised Cobham for having done more [ 88 ]

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to teach the British public about aviation in four years than any one hundred other men he could name. After circuiting the Empire, Cobham circulated among London’s highest society and through the finest restaurants of the imperial capital: the Café Royal, the Criterion, the Holborn. He was invited to events at the Carlton and Cecil hotels and the Forum Club. Lord Wakefield, Cobham’s sponsor, hosted a lunch for 600 people at the Connaught rooms. There Cobham gestured politely that it would have been impossible to fly across the world without the aid of British organisation. He had been assisted with maps and passports, and had been seconded an RAF mechanic. In his speech Brancker settled for the nation-of-seamen, nation-of-airmen routine. Lord Thomson was more rousing with his toast to imperial communications, the ‘arteries and veins of the British Empire’. He hedged his bets as to whether aviation was creating a new spirit of Empire unity or reviving an old one, but he was adamant that Britain’s aviation progress was inculcating ‘a conception of the common destiny and the mission of our race’. Thomson reiterated his view in his ‘Air and Empire’ article in the Observer, the London weekly, taking the opportunity to draw airships into the picture.15 Receiving a lunch invitation from the Air Council was something that happened to foreigners more often than to British citizens. Cobham was a rare exception. When at lunch for seventy people Lord Birkenhead (Secretary of State for India) described the party at the Carlton as ‘Elizabethan’, he was not referring to the last time the state had unstiffened. Rather, he was likening the moment to the knighting of Francis Drake, the first Englishman to sail round the world (1577–80). Cobham knew enough about theatre (he admitted to learning showmanship from his actress wife) and about how to appear overwhelmed by the comparison. He cannot have failed to be proud of having overcome his youthful feelings of inferiority. He affected embarrassment by delivering a simple workaday message: a regular air route should be set up in the generous spirit of pioneers who built railways not as paying propositions, but as essentials for Empire development.16 Yet another motive for imperial aviation was added to the heap. In addition to protecting the Empire, providing aeronautical training, managing and exploiting overseas resources, showing the British flag, and enhancing and promoting British technological expertise, there was now a selfless element. Cobham told the Royal Aeronautical Society that too much emphasis was placed on the economic viability of airlines whereas they should be regarded as a means of opening up and developing countries in the same way that uneconomic railways did. It was unusual in aviation discourse to hear a reference to the [ 89 ]

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steel and steam, which, for more than fifty years had enabled overland expansion of Britain’s maritime Empire. The reference reassured those who believed that history repeats itself, or that technology could be harnessed to repeat history. The parallel served its purpose; it did not matter that Cobham’s widely shared grasp of the role of railways in development was partial and inaccurate. When laying rails overseas, imperial generosity and selflessness were mostly secondary to geopolitical strategy, commercial opportunism and personal aggrandisement. These were trifles in a neatly spun fable about the civilising tools of Empire, a tale whose ideological subtext was that material culture was the measure of a people.17 In this paradigm, aviation was regarded as the newest exemplar of Western superiority. Cobham struggled into tails and white tie two or three times a week. At a dinner of the Old Colony Club at Aldwych House he had to do more than reply graciously to toasts. His speech on that occasion was immodestly entitled ‘Aviation: Present and Future’. Another of Cobham’s engagements was at the behest of the Daily Mail. The largest-circulation national morning newspaper arranged for him to tell thousands of London children about his trip, by then reduced to a line on a giant map. Cobham recalled that ten thousand youngsters squeezed into London’s Royal Albert Hall; the press reported six thousand, closer to real capacity. In London for the tenth Imperial Conference, S. M. Bruce introduced the hero to his audience. In his hour-long illustrated talk Cobham developed his theme that aviation more than anything else was bringing home to the British people what the Empire really meant to the world. He concluded by saying that the ‘wide-flung’ Empire would not stay that way for very long, and that Britain had to lead in the development of long-distance air routes to retain international supremacy.18 Bruce, an English emigrant and Cambridge-trained lawyer, regaled the children with a message about the endurance, enterprise and courage of British people. He told them they were part of the greatest Empire the world had ever seen; a great civilising force, its flag was associated with freedom and liberty. Bruce repeated his remarks in a glowing foreword to Cobham’s book about his flight. The adventure, he wrote, demonstrated to the world the living spirit of Drake, Raleigh, Franklin and Livingstone. It was evidence that ‘the old qualities of the British race remain unimpaired in the hearts of the Empire’s best sons’.19 Eighty years on, the deconstructed Drakeian legend makes for inapposite and unflattering comparisons between Cobham and Queen Elizabeth I’s grubby, devious, unscrupulous, acquisitive pirate.20 Having seen more of the Empire in two years than most people would see in their life, Cobham was made a Knight of the British Empire [ 90 ]

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in 1926. Election to an honorary fellowship of the Royal Aeronautical Society brought scientific recognition. Presenting Sir Alan for the Society’s award, Brancker cited his personal energy and initiative. Invoking a clinging maritime reference, he singled out Cobham’s ‘voyages’ in highlighting the contribution he had made to international understanding and co-operation. The Empire had a peacetime air ace, an aviation ambassador who was charming and persuasive. ‘Everyone knows Cobham’, Brancker said. ‘They like him; they think he is a typical Englishman – I think they are probably right – and after seeing him for a couple of days they come to the conclusion that we are not such a bad race after all’. Brancker’s oratory would have passed as the spontaneous praise he surely intended. It is in the re-reading that it is revealing. It was probably not he alone who thought of the Empire as English rather than British. He was probably not alone either in regarding Cobham as its face and spirit. More than that, he spoke the supreme, universal language. Brancker thought Cobham had a wonderful ability to get people to do things even though he did not speak Polish, Russian, German, Italian or Hindustani. ‘They understand what he wants every time’, Brancker said admiringly. The Cobham phenomenon, it seems, may also have been about making gestures and demands, and exercising a white man’s power. While Brancker spoke, Sir Alan might have winced, recalling how he dragooned assistance from locals in pursuit of his flying goals. He only let that behaviour be known later, writing guiltily that he meant no offence. Offering sincere apologies for hurting anyone, he explained that the slightest mishandling would have damaged his aircraft and ruined his expedition. This darker side of Empire flying practices was not commonly made public in Britain. None of it was told to the Royal Aeronautical Society members or to the delegates at the Imperial Conference who attended Cobham’s election and lecture. The key message was that the Society’s newest honorary fellow was ‘a great international asset’ who was creating imperial communications and helping to achieve the heartfelt goal of international understanding and peace in Europe. The logical leap from pioneering English aviator to European harmoniser must have sounded better then than it looks in print now. It would have been sufficient simply to acknowledge that it was Cobham who first awoke serious interest in the possibilities of Empire air transport.21

African encore In April 1927, the same month that the RAF flew Brancker from Egypt to Tanganyika and back to drum up support for an East African air [ 91 ]

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service, Cobham was making plans to fly round the world. In the end, however, he shrank his stage. Toward year-end he set out for Africa a second time. From Cairo he would fly south to Cape Town along the familiar inland axis, and hug the Atlantic coast on his return flight to Britain. Two years after first flying to Africa, Cobham took off in a Singaporetype flying boat lent to him by the Air Ministry. Hoare was evidently persuaded by Cobham’s argument that the machine would act as ‘sound propaganda’ for British aviation. The Short aircraft constructors and the Rolls Royce engine builders would have thought the same. Certainly Shell-Mex and Wakefield were not just being charitable in offering to lay down petrol and oil dumps en route. Twenty-one corporate sponsors helped defray other expenses. Cobham was responsible for insuring the aircraft and agreed in advance of the flight to pay for damages and repairs. Different interpretations of this agreement created an unpleasant air for more than two years after Cobham’s return. Knight and Air Ministry disputed who was to pay for repairs that were not due to any flying error. For his part, Cobham felt that the value of his mammoth 112–page route report would offset pesky financial considerations. The Ministry considered that its only obligation was to pay for routine engine and airframe reconditioning. Hoare (but not Brancker) felt that Cobham had derived generous experience, publicity and private commercial prospects from his flight, and should be made to pay up.22 It was a mark of how Empire aviation was developing that when Cobham set off on the ‘Sir Charles Wakefield Flight of Survey Round Africa’ there were three other long-distance flights in progress: one to Australia, one non-stop to India, and a third between Cairo and Nigeria. Ominously for Britain, other nationals had begun to fly in African skies. The Belgians had been active from 1925, and their regular air service in the Congo was growing. A Swiss seaplane (with a geologist and a geographer on board) reached Cape Town in February 1927 on a course from Zurich via the Nile River and the Great Lakes. At the time, British air interests in Africa consisted of a series of experimental flights between Khartoum and Kisumu by a subsidiary company of the Blackburn Aeroplane Company. Acting for the Company, Capt. T. A. Gladstone had been intent on establishing an aviation presence in central Africa since March 1925 when he used a river steamer and bicycle to survey a flying boat route. The Sudanese governor told Gladstone and his assistant to pack their kit and return to England, but the Nairobi Chamber of Commerce was keen, and in October 1925 the Kenya legislative council voted funds to test the prospects of an air service.23 [ 92 ]

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Despite the increasing number of long-distance flights, Empire flights retained novelty. They still merited ceremonial departures. There being no aeronautical equivalent to the aristocratic seafaring jamboree at Cowes where the King had seen off the British polar explorers Scott and Shackleton, Cobham’s farewell in mid-November 1927 took place at the Savoy. His speech at a lunch hosted by Brancker rang with imperial references. One of his aims was to convince Africans that air transport must be considered not only as a commercial proposition but also as an important factor in national development. Resourceful people would be able to move about more rapidly than ever before, he said. Mails, medical supplies and ‘other necessities of civilisation’ could be made available more speedily by air transport. On a more threatening note Cobham warned that if Britain did not stir itself in regard to aviation, other countries would steal a march. The whole of Africa was waiting to be developed, he claimed, and the first (foreign) country to establish itself there with air transport would have an immense advantage that would be difficult to overcome. His aim was to ‘to capture flying activities in Africa for British aviation’. He must have supposed he was taking the first steps to entrenching his own newly established aviation company as Africa’s principal carrier, for Brancker led him to believe that Imperial would leave Empire skies south of Cairo open to development by others.24 Conscious, perhaps, of graduating from risky pioneering flying to safer civilian flying, Cobham took with him not only a co-pilot, two engineers and a photographer, but also his wife (and her caged canary). One might interpret Lady Cobham’s role anywhere on a spectrum from providing companionship to providing the patriarchal social order with a highly visible endorsement of the safety of flight. Her husband cast her simply as ‘general secretary or factotum’ who eased his report writing and who was useful at social occasions. Photographs show her sitting at a typewriter in the hull of the flying boat either taking dictation from her husband or working while he read typescript. The Times put a different gloss on Lady Cobham’s presence: it would ‘confirm the old tradition that the far-off countries ... must be open to the civilising and home-making influences of [British] women’.25 How Mrs Cobham regarded her presence on the flight is not recorded. She left no pictorial, written or spoken traces of feeling marginalised and stereotyped, as her husband wanted her to be, and as women generally were. Lady Maud Hoare’s experience during her trip to India with her husband (see Chapter 7) is instructive. Whether being made a Dame of the British Empire by the King compensated her for keeping out of the limelight, or exaggerated her contribution, is difficult to know. Embarrassed or delighted, Lady Hoare had certainly learned not to outshine [ 93 ]

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the men. Truthfully, or self-deprecatingly, she declared that her only useful task was to hand round shoeshine materials so that everyone on board would be ‘sufficiently resplendent’ on landing.26 Keeping up appearances overseas continued to be an imperial imperative in the paradoxically cramped air age. For his African encore Cobham returned to the Thames as his platform. In another carefully choreographed manoeuvre he flew his aeroplane on a low trajectory upriver from Rochester to Reading. The spectacle may be expected to have triggered contradictory emotions. The impression of power and speed was fleeting, but grand. There was pride in progress. But nothing would have been more poignant, surely, than the melancholy realisation that Great Britain’s link with Empire (and great British overseas explorations) would not always start by ships weighing anchor and riding the Thames tide slowly downstream. Countless unremarkable journeys had begun that way. Memorable sailings within the previous two decades included Scott’s and Shackleton’s. Only a quarter of a century had passed since the novelist Joseph Conrad had penned his reading of the great river and its place in the British psyche. The journey to the Heart of Darkness began on the waterway which led ‘to the uttermost ends of the earth’, which was crowded with memories, and which had borne ships with names ‘like jewels flashing in the night of time’. Greatness had floated on that river, Conrad wrote. It had carried ‘hunters for gold, pursuers of fame ... bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire’. Conrad died in 1924 while Imperial was just beginning to flap its wings. As if born in honour of the chronicler of the sea, would the airline be the Empire’s umbilical cord in a new technological time? Air transport was most certainly not meant to end ‘the dreams of men, the seeds of commonwealths, the germs of Empires’.27 ‘Airborne to Africa’ was more than alliteration; it was still extraordinary news. A Times leading article intoned paternally that Africa was like a fairy-tale sleeping beauty, waiting to be awakened by some outside agency before the full extent of its resources could be utilised ‘for its material advancement and more complete civilization’. Cobham, the editorial continued, was setting out so that British air lines would be the first ones established in the once dark continent which owed so much to imperial enterprise. The established Belgian presence was ignored or forgotten even though the paper had previously reported the luncheon that Handley Page (the British aircraft builder) had given at the Savoy for the Belgian aircrew who flew to the Congo. Perhaps their use of British aircraft powered by British-built engines made the flight seem more British than Belgian.28 [ 94 ]

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While on his 25,000-mile, six-month flight around Africa Cobham promoted aviation by flying, speaking and writing. His eminence, if not his position as chief of the amalgamated Cobham-Blackburn airline company, secured him an invitation to attend the East African governors’ conference in Nairobi. He publicised aviation further in an article for a special East Africa and Sudan number of the London Times. The accompanying map of the Cobhams’ Africa flight made an impressive sight, for it virtually encircled the entire continent. The smooth line of progress hid hitches and setbacks. One side-excursion during the flight was a cameo of veiled imperial ‘service’. Cobham’s detour to Nyasaland, eagerly awaited by residents, was more a moneyraising ruse than an honest promise of a future air route. His bluff was detected by a financially cautious colonial administration.29 Whether or not Cobham encountered the same mix of public enthusiasm and official reticence elsewhere in Africa is not stated in his flight report that contains material of mostly aeronautical interest. Other records do reveal that in 1929 the Colonial Secretary in Accra, for instance, objected that instead of facilitating improved local administration, the aerial elevation of officials would mean that they lost touch with Africans. The commanding officer of the Gold Coast regiment, who was also in charge of civil aviation in the colony, rebutted the idea claiming that the same might be said of the introduction of writing, telegraphs, lawyers, religion and education. These, he argued, had all helped to dissolve a system in which administrators governed ‘with little interference and with a possibly illegal but respected personal benevolent despotism’. For some years to come, he suggested, the prestige of an administrator in the colonial interior would be higher if he travelled by aeroplane than by motorcar or hammock.30 Two years after Cobham’s £8,000 proposals for a West African airline service collapsed, colonial officers in the Gold Coast remained reluctant to lavish public funds on aviation services and facilities. Fiscal prudence was the watchword, but it did not necessarily equate with inaction. In 1929, the interior town of Kumasi had a landing field within four days of the arrival of the Provincial Commissioner, Capt. R. S. Rattray (MBE). The 47-year-old had just flown himself from London to Accra after taking flying lessons during his fourmonth home leave. At the end of his twenty-day, nineteen-stop flight, Rattray decided on the airfield site with agreement from the provincial engineer, the regimental commander, and the ex-King. At the latter’s command, approximately 4,000 Ashanti rapidly cleared 700 yards of forest to enlarge the polo ground. The £200 bill was a fraction of the £6,000 estimate based on using paid labour. Forty thousand Africans greeted Rattray’s arrival by air when he inaugurated the new landing [ 95 ]

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facility (including ‘hangar’) within the week. Comparing his reception to that given in Paris in 1927 to the first man to have flown solo across the Atlantic, he boasted that even Charles Lindbergh ‘did not receive a more wild or tumultuous welcome’.31 Not content with only making his mark abroad, Cobham set out on a tour of Britain almost immediately after returning from Africa in May 1928. At the instigation of the Air League of the British Empire he flew to Hull, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast, Liverpool and Cardiff ‘to further arouse interest in British flying’. All were traditional seaport cities whose imperial links remained seaborne. Cobham’s visits were intended to spread ideas of incipient air Empire. Once the domestic tour was complete Wakefield honoured him at a Savoy banquet attended by 300 guests. A photograph of the massed tables appeared in Holt Thomas’s Bystander magazine by way of a topical item.32 Dining in London’s Trocadero Restaurant, more than fifty members and friends of the Royal African Society heard Cobham claim that flying could ‘open up’ Africa as never before. The British Empire League and the Turner’s Company lunched the man of the hour. Awarding him freedom of that Company, the master called Cobham ‘a hero and a champion who has carried our flag into the distant parts of the world’.33 Cobham denied his bravery and argued that, on the contrary, his flights had been made to stress the safety of civil aviation. His line was consistent. In 1927 he had told the London Press Club that so long as people thought it brave to fly civil aviation would never forge ahead; an aviation mentality could only be developed by ‘continuous propaganda’. Later he would write that his chief objective in making long-distance flights had been to ‘de-glamourize the whole business of aviation’.34 The press report of the Turner’s award gives no indication how Cobham rated the technical element of Empire flying relative to the possibility it opened of an all-red, all-British air route free from what he called foreign ‘contamination’. Whatever the man in the flying seat thought, there was no denying the political economy of imperial aviation. When Cobham worked in Africa on an Imperial assignment between November 1929 and April 1930 as part of a team doing an operational and technical survey, the airline’s Managing Director, Woods Humphery, asked him specifically to survey the ‘line of white settlement in East and Central Africa’. A multinational audience would have studied carefully the emerging shape of British imperial civil aviation in the paper Cobham prepared for the congress on international and inter-colonial transport in Paris in 1931.35 When Cobham withdrew from high-profile pioneering in Empire aviation it was not because there was nothing left to do. The magnet of long-distance flying had not lost its attraction, but interest was [ 96 ]

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swinging from trailblazing to testing. Indeed, this was the object of Cobham’s final two flights through Africa in 1927/28 and 1929/30. Successful tests were followed by displays of aircraft performance along established routes, and efforts to enhance speed or endurance. Individual pilots attracted attention to themselves, but in Cobham’s view, it was a displaced affection. The adulation and admiration for the pilot was underpinned by pleasure in the idea, symbol and fulfilment of greater intimacy between elements of Empire. It had been so even in his heyday. ‘The heroic days were over’, he wrote. ‘I was not Blériot; [my mechanic] and I were not Alcock and Brown’. Airfield crowds were not acclaiming their heroism. Rather, he suggested, people who lived heroic lives of their own in remote and undeveloped parts of the Empire were cheering and celebrating the idea of swift and simple air transport for everybody.36

Notes   1 J. Cobham, A Time to Fly (London, 1978), pp. 85, 92; The Times (11 February 1925).   2 The Times (27 October 1926), p. 7; Cobham, A Time to Fly.   3 The Times (25 November 1924), p. 13; (26 November 1924), p. 15.   4 The Times (16 March 1925), p. 15; (18 March 1925), p. 19; Flight (26 March 1925), pp. 180–8.   5 J. Cobham, Skyways (London, 1925), p. vi; The Times (24 March 1925), p. 18 (22 May 1925), p. 13; Flight (26 March 1925), pp. 180–8.   6 Cobham, A Time to Fly; Daily Mail (21, 30 December 1925), pp. 10; (27 January 1926), p. 14; Stamp Magazine (October 1986), p. 110; CU, Templewood V (5). On aviation newsreels and documentary film, see G. H. Pirie, ‘Cinema and British imperial civil aviation, 1919–1939’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 23 (2003), 117–31.   7 Gwynn-Jones, Farther and Faster, p. 206; A. J. Cobham, ‘Seeing the world from the air’, National Geographic, 53 (1928), 349–84; A. J. Cobham, ‘Long-distance flying’, Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 30 (1926), p. 490; Cobham, A Time to Fly, pp. 101–2; The Times (18, 19 February 1926), pp. 14, 13; Daily Mail (16, 17 February 1926), p. 9.   8 Flight (18 March, 22 April, 13 May 1926); The Times (15, 17 April 1926).   9 CU, Templewood V (2): Cobham to Hoare, 23 March 1926. 10 The Times (16 August 1926), p. 10; Pathé Gazette, 30 September 1926; Hansard (Commons) (1 December 1926), cols 1188–9; (8 December 1926), cols 2097–9. 11 The Times (2 October 1926), p. 14; Flight (7 October 1926) pp. 649–63; Airways (January 1927). 12 BL, NSA, 1 CD 0070632C6. 13 H. Harper, Twenty-five Years of Flying (London, 1929), p. 266. 14 G. Honeycombe, Selfridges: 75 years (London, 1984), p. 39. 15 The Times (2, 5 October 1926); Observer (10 October 1926). 16 The Times (6 October 1926); Flight (7 October 1926), pp. 661–2. 17 Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 31 (1927); Davis et al., Railway Imperialism; M. Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, 1989); Headrick, Tools of Empire. 18 Observer (17 October 1926), p. 9; The Times (18 October 1926), p. 11; (27 October 1926).

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talking up 19 Bruce, ‘Foreword’, in A. J. Cobham, Australia and Back (London, 1926). 20 H. Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake: the Queen’s Pirate (New Haven, 1998). 21 Cobham, Australia and Back; Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 31 (1927), 5; Airways (December 1926); W. M. M. Courtenay, Airman Friday (London, 1937), p. 73. 22 NA, AIR 2/340; Aeroplane (27 April 1927). 23 Cobham, A Time to Fly; Air League Bulletin (February 1926); J. K. Twist, ‘Captain Tony Gladstone’, in E. Huxley (ed.), Nine Faces of Kenya (London, 1990), p. 63. 24 Cobham, A Time to Fly; The Times (16 November 1927), p. 7; NA, DR 9/29. 25 Cobham, A Time to Fly, p. 128; A. J. Cobham, Twenty Thousand Miles in a Flyingboat: My Flight Round Africa (London, 1930), p. 95; Air (January 1929), p. 30; C. Cruddas, In Cobham’s Company: Fifty Years of Flight Refuelling Ltd (Wimbourne, 1994); The Times (16 November 1927), p. 15. 26 S. M. Heath and S. W. Murray, Woman and Flying (London, 1929), p. 77. 27 J. Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Harmondsworth, 1902), pp. 6–7. 28 The Times (16 November 1927), p. 15; (23 May 1925), p. 18. 29 The Times (13 March 1928); C. Baker, ‘Nyasaland at the aviation cross roads: Alan Cobham’s flying-boat visit, 1928’, Society of Malawi Journal, 44 (1991), 9–33. 30 NA, AVIA 2/341. 31 R. S. Rattray, ‘A solo flight from England to the Gold Coast’, Blackwood’s Magazine (June 1929), 731–65. 32 The Times (31 May 1928), p. 9; (17 July 1928), p. 11; (27 July 1928); Air (July 1928); Bystander (27 June 1928). 33 The Times (28 June 1928), p. 9; (17July 1928), p. 11; Journal of the Royal African Society, 28 (1929), 71–82. 34 The Times (28 March 1927); Cobham, A Time to Fly, p. 115. 35 D. Jones, The Time Shrinkers: the Development of Civil Aviation between Britain and Africa (London, 1971), p. 90; A. J. Cobham, L’Organisation des transports aériens dans L’Empire Britannique (Paris, 1931). 36 NA, DR 9/32 & 39; Cobham, A Time to Fly, p. 116.

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On the same day that Cobham returned from Australia into the 1926 British autumn, a French civilian airliner crashed in England while on a Paris–London flight. Seven people were killed. It was the second air accident in England in seven weeks. The mix of good and bad news would have been apparent to all the delegates gathered at the tenth Imperial Conference at Downing Street. Sir Samuel Hoare took the podium and brazened out any negative thoughts. In a session devoted to imperial air communications he spoke to the dominion prime ministers and other senior colonial figures about the need for improved links. Careful to disclaim being fanatical or visionary, he suggested that airways, whether for aeroplanes or airships, might soon give unprecedented physical unity to the Empire. Adding detail, Hoare indicated the commercial possibilities and the steps already taken. He requested imperial co-operation in providing and maintaining landing fields and mooring masts along the proposed trunk route through Africa, and through India to Australia. Referring to ‘a long chain of great tensile power’ which aviation could forge, he argued that organised air transport was one of the most effective ways of ending the waste of time that was ‘weakening the vitality and retarding the development of Empire intercourse’. Hoare urged a view of aeroplanes as objects of peace and goodwill – as machines intended for creating something better than ‘concentrated frightfulness’. They should not be instruments for severing nations, he said, but devices for solidifying ‘Imperial thought, Imperial intercourse, and Imperial ideals’. Airships could be used to precisely the same effect, of course. Indeed the two forms of aircraft were complementary. With their greater operating range, airships were considered suitable for flights up to about 3,500 miles in length, and aeroplanes for journeys up to 700 miles. Airships could carry approximately one hundred passengers relatively quietly in spacious surroundings that, not unlike ocean [ 99 ]

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liners, included promenade decks and smoking and dining rooms. The Newfoundland Prime Minister and the parliamentary UnderSecretary of State for India had reservations about an imperial air scheme. The former foresaw a trans-Atlantic airship service bypassing his territory. London’s man in India spoke in place of the Maharajah with whom he sat on the Conference’s air communications sub-committee. He gave early and frank notice that India (which had the largest population in the Empire, and was Britain’s largest export market) would not be dictated to about new imperial projects. Instead, the Indian Government intended to be an equal partner in consultations, participating as a principal in any commercial contract, and retaining ownership of aviation infrastructure. Leo Amery sought out neutral ground in the proceedings by endorsing the potential of aviation and listing ways in which aeroplanes might help unify and develop the Empire. They could be used to spray cotton fields, for instance, and might perhaps eradicate the tsetse fly, ‘the greatest of all obstacles to civilization and progress in Africa’. Nature’s airborne menace now faced airborne obliteration. Civilisation might be served in another way too: aircraft could assist archaeological discovery, itself worthy of an Empire ‘interested in more than just material things’. Airships were set to alter the ‘social structure of the Empire’ by encouraging Empire settlement, not by replacing migrant ships, but by expediting the exchange of letters and enabling expatriates to return home quickly for leave or in an emergency. In the air age, Amery implied casually, overseas settlement might expand one-hundred fold, that is, by the ratio of the number of men who could take a month’s leave to the number who could absent themselves for five or six months. On a local scale, flying would enable white farmers in tropical environments to fly to hill stations for rest and recuperation. Grander still, Amery suggested that air services linking East Africa to England (and to ‘white civilisation rooted in the native soil’ of South Africa), would help implant ‘a guiding influence’ in East Africa. Rather flippantly, he even imagined that Afrikaners would soon trek by aeroplane instead of by ox-wagon.1 The Imperial Conference delegates would not have been caught off guard by the forthright propagation of aviation. Flight was topical and was aired in the serious press. The ex-Air Minister, Lord Thomson, wrote up what might have been his conference speech under the title ‘Air and Empire’ in three successive editions of the Observer; it would have been read by many delegates who scanned the paper for world news on a Sunday. A visit to Croydon aerodrome was laid on. An airship demonstration and flight was programmed. Refurbishing the R33 got around the unreadiness of both the R100 and R101. Poor [ 100 ]

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weather and a malfunctioning lift in the airship mooring mast were minor details. As controlled backup, the Air Ministry prepared a ninety-page memorandum about imperial communications specifically to alert delegates to the value of Empire air transport.2 Delegates would surely have begun to ponder some of the financial ramifications of imperial aviation. For Britons, the price could be discounted against what one writer referred to as a repeat of ‘England’s age of plenty’ triggered by initially unprofitable overseas railways. For colonials, the pill was coated with pointers to peaceable, public-service applications of flight. As it was, these benefits were already being realised on domestic air services in Australia and Canada particularly. There, as in other British overseas territories, ground conditions made access difficult and the sheer extent of territory meant long journeys, irregular visits and slow responses to events in the periphery. Aircraft could be used to prevent smuggling and to perform ambulance and medical duties. Forestry, railway alignment, irrigation, town planning and agriculture stood to benefit. From the air, forest fires could be patrolled easily and extensively, and rivers could be monitored. Crops could be sprayed against insect infestation, and plagues of mosquitoes and locusts could be eliminated. Fisheries could be protected more easily against illegal fishing and shoals could be monitored regularly for harvesting. Aerial survey work in the Empire was a subject of increasing interest. After founding the aerial survey firm known as the Aircraft Operating Company in London in 1923, Maj. H. Hemming began to publicise the activity in lectures and articles.3 The memorandum circulated to conference delegates was meant for official use only. However, the document attracted a level of public interest that warranted printing additional copies for sale at 5s each. There was no financial reward for the compiler, a prominent young Conservative in Cambridge who worked as one of Hoare’s unpaid assistant-private secretaries for the 1923 imperial economic conference. The Times carried a substantial extract from the memorandum, including a map of the existing and proposed aircraft and airship routes. In London’s Spectator, in an article immodestly titled ‘Air and Earth’, Francis Yeats-Brown, the London weekly’s assistant (and literary) editor, wrote that the Air Ministry publication had given Britain ‘the tonics of faith and hope’. He added that it should be on the library shelves of every school that took pride in its geography teaching.4 Enterprising teachers would have known that radio and newspaper reports were also good learning resources. William Courtenay, the aviation impresario, recalled that it was in the mid-1920s when Sir Alan Cobham was grabbing news headlines that he learnt most about the geography of the Empire. Less exciting than flying itself, but more [ 101 ]

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digestible than a hefty ministerial document, news reports about Empire flying were a way of ‘teaching the geography of the Empire in most dramatic fashion’. As the Prince of Wales had remarked after listening to Sykes talk about Empire air routes at the Royal Geographical Society in 1920, geography and aviation were going to be of mutual help. Articulating the link could be awkward. Awarding Cobham its Livingstone Medal, the Royal Scottish Geographical Society saluted his Africa and Australia flights even though he had ‘neither discovered new lands nor extended geographical knowledge in the usually accepted sense’. Instead, the award recognised the ‘organisational qualities and intrepidity of great explorers’ and the likelihood that Cobham’s flights would have far-reaching effects on geographical discovery in the tropics particularly, ‘both upon land and sea’.5 After the Imperial Conference, Hoare indicated that Imperial Airways would in future play a role more in keeping with its name: it would ply Empire routes in addition to European routes. Despite the increase in the anticipated geographical range of services, the airline was not offered any fundamentally different financial assistance. The Air Ministry would pay a subsidy for five years for all services on the so-called ‘all-red routes’. Private risk capital supplemented by Government aid would support the straggling airways of Empire as it had done the tighter knot of European services. Unlike the indirect subsidies that applied to Empire shipping, the Post Office did not arrange to charter cargo space whether it was filled or not. Historically, financial losses in overseas mail shipping had been absorbed and offset in the interest of the political and colonial advantages obtained. Imperial faced a different accounting regime: it would have to be both a profitable commercial company and the ‘executive agent of an uncommercial Imperial policy’. Until it shed its European services in 1936, the airline was held to the same operating criteria on European and Empire routes, irrespective of different traffic densities and different chances of commercial success.6

Delivery and demonstration A week before Christmas in 1926, two new Imperial aircraft (which some papers styled ‘Empire class’) left Croydon on delivery flights to Cairo. From there they would commence flying east in stages toward India as commercial services expanded. Brancker was a non-paying passenger in one of the de Havilland aeroplanes. Of the two women who flew, one, a reporter for Airways magazine, recorded that her journey was so smooth that she was able to use her folding typewriter and thread sewing needles. The news could have settled Lady Hoare’s [ 102 ]

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nerves before she and her husband boarded a third de Havilland. Impressed by progress of civil aviation in Australia where the Government had subsidised an airline, the 47-year-old air minister decided to fly because he needed a striking example of practical air transport to persuade the sceptical British Government and Treasury about the merits of supporting aviation. The air correspondent of the Observer proudly told his Sunday readers that the mission would eclipse every previous one undertaken by air ministers of any country.7 The Hoares left England amid huge interest in the press, not least because of sexist fascination with Lady Maud’s flying wardrobe. Commentators paid no attention to Sir Samuel’s preparation for the flight, namely, intensive exercise on the tennis court at Sir Philip Sassoon’s country house. On 27 December 1926, only four days after delivery of the third new de Havilland Hercules to Imperial, the couple took off for India. Geddes saw them off at Croydon. Among the ten passengers was Hoare’s private secretary, Mr Christopher Bullock (appointed in place of the soldier whom Churchill had inflicted on him in his early days in a shabby hole in Air Ministry headquarters). Others in the group were an engineer, the army photographer who flew with Cobham to the Cape and an RAF batman (evidently only able to shine the Hoares’s shoes on land). Also in the party was the newly appointed RAF commanding air officer in India, Sir Geoffrey Salmond. It was he who hand-painted the Indian air route on one of the world globes next to Rudyard Kipling’s writing desk. One stranger who wanted to join the party was S. Saklatvala, an Indian politician. He naively wrote to Hoare asking if he could fly back to India with him on urgent business ‘without looking presumptuous’, and provided the cost was not excessive.8 Neither Kipling’s globe nor Saklatvala were aboard the Indian flight. Items that were taken included a letter from the King to Viceroy Irwin, and two small Hercules models presented by Geddes. One was for Lady Maud, the other for the Viceroy. There was also a travel document that Hoare judged one of the most curious papers ever issued from Whitehall. A translator at the London School of Oriental Languages must have struggled to convey the stuffy, imperious tone of the laissez-passer in Arabic, Hindi, Turkish, Persian and Urdu. It was, to all intents and purposes, a refinement of the RAF ‘goolie-chit’ which promised in writing a reward intended to dissuade captors from castrating downed airmen. The flummery was laced with archaic detail about Hoare’s honours, position and status. In a prosaic finish, it was noted that the safety of the exalted man and his companions was a matter of closest concern to the English King who would amply reward people who assisted the party on their historic journey. [ 103 ]

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The trip was certainly historic. It was also entwined with history. The Hoares’s experiences en route included landing at ‘the ancient and historic’ city of Baghdad. The event stirred thoughts about King Solomon’s flying carpet. During a lunch stop made at Pasni to please its ‘bigwig’, the Khan of Kalat played his part by giving the Hoares a carpet as a symbol of their conquest of the air. The RAF escort over the Middle East was not the stuff of biblical legend, but it did make Sir Samuel feel ‘even more royal’ than if a sovereign’s household cavalry had escorted him. He considered his flying escort even more impressive than a convoy of cruisers and destroyers. Borrowing from the poetry of his eighteenth-century countryman William Cowper, Hoare added that a prince with such an escort was ‘in every sense a monarch of all he surveys’. Hoare only alluded to the marine support he was actually given. Only rarely did press photographs show the military and the civilian aircraft together on the ground. It fell to a Member of Parliament to wonder about the impression given by nine naval destroyers and rescue craft positioned between Malta and Benghazi. Did they not undermine a flight billed as a way of showing the world and Great Britain that long-distance flight was possible and reliable?9

Figure 4  Sir Samuel Hoare and functionaries watch Lady Hoare unveil the name of Imperial’s City of Delhi, 10 January 1927.

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After a twelve-day flight the Hoares landed in New Delhi in January 1927. The Canadian and Australian premiers cabled messages of congratulation. The London Sunday Times was one of the papers that publicised Geddes’s telegram of congratulation to the Secretary of State whose ‘imperial outlook and determination’ had forged the air link. The Imperial Board, he cabled, ‘believe that India will before long do her part in strengthening and upbuilding this air link in the chain of communications of the glorious Empire of which she is such a prominent part’. A safe flight to India was startling, as Hoare’s pilot would tell the Sussex branch of the Royal Empire Society in his illustrated talk ‘The Wonders of Commercial Aviation’ after his return.10 Flying to India was also a pungent statement of power and prestige, as the Hoares’s reception in New Delhi confirmed. A report in the London Times noted that all government offices were closed and that a crowd of four thousand turned out at the airfield. The paper implied that the seven-mile road into town was lined with people who had walked, cycled, or gone by country cart to see the procession. They had certainly stopped whatever business they were doing to stand and stare. ‘Privileged Indians’, including members of the Viceroy’s council, were invited aboard the Imperial airliner for one of three demonstration flights arranged on site by Woods Humphery, another of the dignitaries on the delivery flights. The Viceroy’s young son and his nanny went aloft too. Hoare considered the vice-regal nursery ‘a valuable centre for flying propaganda’.11 Propagating an interest in aviation while in India involved other publicity stunts too. Having Lady Irwin name the Imperial airliner City of Delhi while in the subcontinent was shrewd. It set the pattern for naming other aircraft after other colonial capitals. The act also honoured Empire and perpetuated maritime tradition rather than challenging it. The Secretary of State’s arrival by air to join the Viceroy on a state visit to Bikaner was novel. The event was also a first for Bikaner’s Maharajah, even eight years after Lord Montagu of Beaulieu predicted that Indian princes would soon travel in ‘gorgeously fitted aeroplanes’, thereby relieving India’s congested railways of the elite’s private trains or coaches. The landing of Hoare’s aeroplane was timed carefully so as not to upstage the arrival of the elephant in the Viceroy’s ceremonial procession. Similar tact may have been needed when Hoare spoke about the future of civil aviation to ‘quick-minded, subtle, and somewhat suspicious Indian legislators’ at the legislative assembly.12

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Propaganda Making propaganda for and from Empire aviation did not come easily to British people renowned for their reserve. Yet the Air Minister had a special obligation to overcome his inhibitions. Hoare set about his task with gusto. Before leaving India he told the Reuters news service of his hope that the flight would be ‘something more than a stray migration of a rare bird’, and that a regular air service would ‘strike a staggering blow to the two great enemies of human intercourse, time and distance’. He kept up the puff back home in England where his inherited title was effectively supplanted by an earned knighthood, and where his wife was invested as a Dame of the British Empire. Fog over the English Channel ruined the spectacle of flying into Croydon, but the surface return trip from Paris to London, and the two-day delay, did not create a cooler welcome or reduce the status of the arriving couple. Hoare attended a celebratory dinner at the Savoy given in his honour by the Royal Aeronautical Society, the Royal Aero Club, the Air League of the British Empire, and the Society of British Aircraft Constructors. Punctual flying, he remarked, was publicly regarded as ‘the outward and visible sign of British enterprise and British efficiency’.13 In the same week Hoare spoke about aviation and Empire at the Working-Men’s College at Crowndale Road in London. Later, he addressed the Oxford University Conservative Association about the Government’s airship programme, the Meteorological Office’s survey work on the air route to India and Australia, and the reductions in travel time which could be expected on air journeys to the East. Hoare was the principal guest speaker at a special ‘Air Night’ arranged by the London Press Club. He also spoke to the Royal Meteorological Society about the necessity of meteorological services along the Indian route. The publication of his address in the Society’s journal helped draw professional attention to Empire aviation. Hoare’s book India by Air, published in August 1927, would have reached a bigger and less specialised readership. Lady Maud and Sir Samuel did set pieces on BBC radio. Both attended an Overseas League lunch, and they spoke at a reception in the town hall in Hoare’s Chelsea constituency. The Women’s Auxiliary Branch of the Chelsea Conservative Association had been kept informed of the flight by airmail letters from Lady Maud that were printed in editions of the constituency magazine.14 Despite his many speaking engagements, Hoare confided in a memorandum to his Cabinet colleagues that he was sceptical about the benefits of what he termed ‘propaganda’. He meant that the effect of air trips such as his Indian one was so great that it would always appear that he was exaggerating when speaking about them. How [ 106 ]

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could he capture faithfully the remarkable enthusiasm among British citizens everywhere he landed? Photographs of crowds at airfields told only part of the story. Expatriates regarded the visit as a sign of the vigour of British enterprise (godlike, Hoare once again slipped in the religious adverbial phrase ‘outward and visible’). He declared that a British minister descending from the clouds and taking just a few weeks to visit the whole line of British influence from Malta to Chitral was a conspicuous show of the mobility on which the Empire depended for its defence and its communications. Hoare evidently was proud of a British machine powered by British engines that had flown thousands of miles over land and sea, in fair and foul weather, without delay or needing repair (and carrying the first woman to fly long-distance). He felt that he had proved a new instrument for eliminating time and distance. It was a device that might be of incalculable value to the future of imperial intercourse. Pioneering stirred British souls abroad, and impressed indigenous people. Hoare told the Cabinet that his flight also ‘gave Indians, Egyptians and Iraqis to think British enterprise was not enfeebled, and that British influence was not contracting’. Using the idiomatic expression of his day, he did not mean to imply that Britain had been bluffing. Much later, in Sir Samuel’s autobiography, both the Hoares again recalled overseas reactions to flight. Lady Maud wrote in an Appendix about how ‘foreigners and native tribes, veiled women, priests and officials all flocked to visit the machine and talk to the travellers’. She had no doubt that for British people the thrill was ‘hope of a closer connection with home, a quicker mail and a shorter journey’. Sir Samuel observed the reactions of two colonial subjects. An Indian whispered about ‘the visible glory of the British Empire’. ‘The white man has God’, said a Nigerian chief, on another occasion. Hoare gleefully repeated the awe-struck chief’s enigmatic remark that the white man’s works were those of God.15 Not all reactions to the Hoares’ flight were straightforward celebrations of change, or of being part of Empire. In the eddies, Viceroy Irwin reported to the Secretary of State for India that Calcutta’s commercial houses were content with surface mails: it would be a bore were items to arrive three days early and upset weekly routine. An English woman in Delhi who flew in the Hercules over the city delighted in the distant sight of brightly coloured clothes which made the urban landscape seem unusually pleasant: seeing ‘all the beauty without having the smells and the dust was a wonderful experience’. In an article in the Manchester Guardian she suggested that the reprieve alone would have made air travel in India more than worthwhile. She also welcomed the attendant social revolution, namely, the possibility of going home [ 107 ]

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to England to be with children during their school holidays. In her view, English women in India would prize air transport most because it would help dispel the dread of family separation ‘which hangs over us all from the day we first set foot in India’. The editors of a vernacular Calcutta weekly paper dreaded something else. Unlike their sycophantic colleagues at the Times of India, they deplored the way the Indian Government promoted imperial communication. Their view was that until India was self-governing the annihilation of distance between the centre and the periphery of Empire would be wholly to the disadvantage of India. Empire aviation, they wrote, ‘will only help the work of exploitation of her resources by her British masters and add to her economic impoverishment ... India has at present no necessity for such costly luxury as aerial transport’.16 Mahatma Gandhi might have agreed: he certainly abhorred trains for hastening evil. Hoare drew attention to civil-aviation progress and prospects in the Empire wherever and whenever he could. In the company of Brancker he attended the May 1927 Colonial Conference in London. There he addressed sessions on civil aviation and the development of colonial territories. He spoke at the very moment that a 25-year-old American pilot, Charles Lindbergh, was flying alone across the Atlantic to Paris, in a journey twice the distance flown by Alcock and Brown. Lindbergh’s middle name, Augustus, rang with an imperial quality, but his motives were personal. They were not open to an imperial reading of even the private flight by two British flyers who left Britain for Karachi on the same day. Unaware of the astonishing effect which Lindbergh’s flight (the ninety-second across the Atlantic) would have, and of the incipient tilt to American global aviation dominance, Hoare only spoke about Britain’s air Empire. He stressed that whereas the British Government could not subsidise internal air services in the colonies and dominions, and would not dictate their air transport policy, he was anxious that any policy adopted would fit into the imperial mosaic that Britain was attempting to design.17

Notes   1 The Times (2 October 1926); (29 October 1926), p. 9; Imperial Conference, Summary (Cmd 2768) (1926), pp. 40–2; Appendices (Cmd 2769), pp. 195, 200, 201, 216, 217.   2 Observer (10, 17, 24 October 1926); Airways (December 1926); CU, Templewood XX (5); Approach Towards a System of Imperial Communications (London: Air Ministry), 1926.   3 Airways (December 1926), p. 105; H. Hemming, ‘Air surveying’, Air League Bulletin, 4 (1925), 18–21, 28–33; (1926), 34–5.   4 Hoare, Empire of the Air, p. 221; The Times (15 December 1926); Spectator (15

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propagating empire aviation January 1927), p. 84.   5 Courtenay, Airman Friday, p. 75; Geographical Journal, 55 (1920), 264; Scottish Geographical Magazine (November 1926), 361.   6 Higham, Britain’s Imperial Air Routes, pp. 42, 304, 314; August, The Selling of the Empire, p. 22.   7 Airways (February 1927); Observer (26 December 1926).   8 Hoare, Empire of the Air; BL, OIOC, Mss.Eur. E240/89; R. Kipling, Something of Myself (Harmondsworth, 1936), p. 170; CU, Templewood V (5) (9).   9 The Times (19 December 1926), p. 9; Hoare, Empire of the Air; S. J. G. Hoare, India by Air (London, 1927), pp. 34, 6, 125; CU, Templewood V (9); Bampfylde, ‘Britain’s role in Asian air transport’; NA, AVIA 2/1841; Hansard (Commons) (12 March 1928), col. 1603. 10 United Empire, 19 (1928), 232; Sunday Times (9 January 1927). 11 The Times (10 January 1927), p. 12; Hoare, India, p. 79. 12 Montagu, ‘Aviation as affecting India’, p. 547; S. J. G. Hoare, The Unbroken Thread (London, 1949), p. 234. 13 BL, OIOC, L, PO/1/31 (iii); S. J. G. Hoare, ‘Flight to India of the Secretary of State for Air’, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 53 (1927), 233–40; Daily Telegraph (3 March 1927). 14 The Times (3, 7, 28 March; 3 December 1927); Observer (6 March 1927); BL, OIOC, Mss.Eur. E240/89; CU, Templewood (V) 9. 15 NA, FO 12253 (E871/1/65), undated Cabinet memorandum by Hoare on his and Lady Hoare’s Indian flight; Hoare, Empire of the Air, pp. 213–7, 299–300. 16 BL, OIOC, L, PO/1/31 (iii), Irwin to Birkenhead, 10 February 1927; Manchester Guardian (3 February 1927); Amrita Bazar Patrika (11 February 1927). 17 Colonial Office Conference (1927) Summary (Cmd 2883), pp. 50–2; Appendices (Cmd 2884), pp. 93–103; The Times (13 May 1927), p. 16; (20 May 1927), p. 13.

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PART III

Holding up

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Trunk route development

The Secretary of State’s flight to India aboard an Imperial Airways aeroplane in 1926/27 was only one step toward the creation of Empire airways. Empire route development took place in stages. The network was not laid out in one grand sweep even though the guiding dream was always two imperial trunk lines, one to South Africa, and one to India and Australia (a commercial air link to Canada awaited reliable long-range aircraft). Contrary perhaps to historic metropolitan visions of imperial rankings, but in keeping with Lord Weir’s statement seven years previously, the first imperial service operated by the eponymous airline was across part of Britain’s ‘undeclared Empire’. Weir did not mention them in 1919, but geo-strategic considerations in the Middle East had become compelling in the interim. It was fitting that the newest agency of Empire first took flight in the newest theatre of British imperialism.

The Middle East Without any pomp and ceremony in London, Imperial took control of the Middle East air route in January 1927. A senior figure in the American aviation establishment wrote that the service would be the forerunner of other daring airmail lines that would bind Britain’s colonies. He added that flight would change the way people spoke about Empire. But for the nuisance that planet Earth rotates faster than any aeroplane could then fly, Britons may indeed have had a new brag: ‘instead of saying the sun never sets upon the Empire, the boast will be that mail can reach any part of the Kingdom before the sun sets’.1 Neither mail nor passengers would ever enjoy service even remotely approaching such levels. In the cradle of Imperial’s overseas service even the high-standing resident medical adviser to Iraq’s royal house and British embassy, Sir H. C. Sinderson, resorted to the RAF rather [ 112 ]

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than Imperial when he needed to reach England urgently in 1927. Sir John Salmond, the commanding air officer in Iraq, granted Sinderson passage on the next RAF plane to Egypt from where he proceeded by sea to be with his wife who had become ill during pregnancy.2 The Middle East sector was initially organised and flown by the RAF to eliminate the roundabout sea journey to Iraq, a British territorial mandate since 1919, and the site of concerted British imperial air policing.3 The new Imperial link capitalised on the original RAF airmail service between Ramadi and Amman that began in 1921 as service airmail. Gradually the military route elongated eastward to Basra and westward to Cairo. In its first year of operation the route was flown to a high standard despite harsh ground and air conditions. Flights, which, on average, were delayed by less than thirty minutes, carried 1,133 personnel and almost two million letters. The decision to start imperial civil services on a sector disconnected from any of the main imperial centres may have seemed odd, but it was safe. Holt Thomas would have been one of the bemused onlookers. At the 1923 Air Conference he likened the choice to opening an Ascot train service ‘but starting halfway down, omitting London, and ending ten miles from the racecourse’.4 A more obviously commercial element of British overseas air routes started in 1929 when the Middle Eastern service became a link in the Indian service. Halford Mackinder’s ‘naval high street of the British Empire’ had now become its highest thoroughfare. Reaching India on a civilian air service was like reaching the stars. The sub-continent had long been viewed as the keystone in the imperial arch. In the words of one imperial historian, India conferred prestige and made Britons feel grand: ‘nothing made the British feel so imperial as India’. Sefton Brancker’s biographer alludes to how, as Director of Civil Aviation, he might have been affected by the thought of India with its ‘teeming millions’, its vast wealth and dire poverty, its limitless appeal to romantics. After the brightest jewel in the imperial crown had ceased to be a good investment, perhaps he, like other Englishmen, considered it his ‘sacred duty’ to strengthen Britain’s bond with India. In this atmosphere an all-red route to India and the Far East was ‘emotionally satisfying and comparatively easy to justify by vague appeals to strategy’.5 As early as 1911, indeed, there had been talk of an air route between England and India. Several maharajahs put up prize money for the first flight. Imperialists focused on British commercial markets. The possibility of imperial propaganda did not pass unnoticed. It would not have been just one writer who anticipated ‘the extraordinary effect and sensation it will have on the Oriental mind in the way of enhancing British prestige in the districts traversed. The imaginations of the [ 113 ]

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Map 3  Prominent landing sites for Empire flying in the Middle East, India and Asia

Arabs, Turks, and Persians cannot fail to be deeply stirred by the idea, and the political effect should be very great’.6 Reaching the stars was difficult. Establishing an airway along the northern shores of the Persian Gulf from Basra to Karachi was slow and politically fraught. The corridor was first agreed by Brancker and the Kajar Shah in 1925 but Persia refused to ratify the scheme after the latter was deposed in 1926: the Shah Riza’s new government suspected Britain of having a hand in the concurrent mutinies and tribal violence. Teheran’s loose offer of a longer, more difficult and more expensive flying concession across Persia’s mountainous and isolated interior some time in the future was not received enthusiastically in London. If the accusations of narrow-minded nationalism and obstructionism reached Teheran they fell on deaf ears. Britain could but watch with envy and alarm while Germany’s Junkers company profited from its successful air service inside Persia. The success of such co-operation was interpreted for the British public as confirmation of Persian backwardness and smart German opportunism. Lord Thomson, re-appointed Air Minister in Ramsay MacDonald’s second minority Labour government, was astonished that Persians had overcome their ‘natural preference for the ground’. Giving the Anniversary Lecture at the Royal Central Asian Society in 1930 he suggested that Persians [ 114 ]

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would be ‘the last race in the world to take up aviation’. Dressing up a warning as a compliment, he gave Junkers the credit for chivvying them: ‘whenever one consults an aviation map of the world, one is quite likely to find a very pushing, active, and highly competent representative of Junkers’.7 After the Hoares’s 1927 flight the delayed start of the regular air service to India entailed financial losses for Imperial and the British Government. In addition, it created an aura of imperial insecurity and impotence. As in all Empire aviation affairs, the airline worked alongside the Air Ministry and the dominion and colonial offices to find a resolution. Unfortunately their interests (and approach) did not always match those of the tiptoeing Foreign Office, which became involved diplomatically because of Persia’s status as a non-Empire country. Amid interminable delays and frustrations Britain did some duplicitous deals with Dutch and French aviation interests in the Middle East in an attempt to exclude them from operating in Iraq on strategic and commercial grounds. The cost of mounting search-andrescue parties in the desert was a satisfactory if incomplete explanation. It barely concealed British scorn for the capability of foreign-built aircraft and their non-British pilots. The aim was to deny air links with Teheran until Persia relented on the Gulf route, and to keep European competitor airlines out of the Middle East until Britain had established a presence and a market. But care had to be taken not to offend Dutch and French sensibilities: reciprocity was central to air route operation over foreign territory, and Britain would need concessions in southeast Asia where France and Holland called the tune.8 These manoeuvrings only occurred because there was a British air interest overseas to protect, something that would not have been the case if Hoare had not intervened to support Imperial at a bleak time. His critical report on the state of British commercial air transport led to the establishment of a secretive Cabinet advisory committee at the end of 1927. Paradoxically, the parlous financial state of Imperial was an important impetus to the start of Empire air services. The airline’s initial concentration on Europe was a residue of a subsidy arrangement that applied only to European operations. Faced with grim weather, short daylight hours, heavily subsidised competition from European airlines, short route sectors with expensive overhead (airport) costs, and effective land transport alternatives, the airline had struggled to perform. Geddes claimed that it only kept going between London and Cologne because of Woods-Humphery’s friendship with Wronsky. By mid-1927 it seemed that the three-year-old airline might fold. The President of the Board of Trade, Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, chaired six meetings of the Cabinet committee. He interrupted Hoare’s [ 115 ]

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leading evidence with the observation that aircraft were less useful for trade than for showing the flag. Hoare himself spoke revealingly about getting in first in British spheres of influence and keeping out competitors as long as possible. The committee heard that it was impossible to extract more economies from the current aircraft fleet, that the original subsidy plans had made no provision for obsolescence and replacement, and that the sharply reducing scale of subsidy in the 1928 financial year would not be balanced by profits. One way forward was to refocus the work of the airline away from Europe and to cut the fixed costs of flying by developing long-distance route sectors which required less expensive ground infrastructure. In his testimony Geddes pointed to a year of experience and successful operating away from Britain and Europe. He argued for monopoly operating rights on overseas routes and for a share of the Empire’s sea-borne postal traffic. The propaganda and military-security value of imperial flying was not overlooked in the committee. Repeated requests from the Foreign Office to establish a British air service in Egypt strengthened the case: European airlines wanted to fly there and the legal grounds for continued British obstructionism were dubious. One member of the Cabinet committee, the Treasury Financial Secretary, expressed doubts about civil aviation generally. Rare in any forum, his was a brave, hopeless stand. He doubted whether Imperial would liquidate. He asked if the public was as interested in aviation as the Air Ministry imagined, and whether taxpayers might not prefer reduced state expenditure. Confronted with more-or-less incomparable and inconclusive financial data about European and British airline performance, he supposed that Imperial could ‘organise an agitation’ to force the Government to increase subsidy on ‘wholly illusory comparisons’. With a sharp sting, he expressed his doubt that British prestige would be adversely affected by the misfortunes of British aviation. Finally, he thought it unimportant to show the flag on routes that crossed territory already mostly British. The Cabinet committee listened, but was persuaded instead to relieve Imperial of its handicaps in Europe, and to avoid the prospect that if the solitary existing British airline failed then investors might not be forthcoming ever again. It was a decisive moment. Empire civil aviation came to the rescue of all British civil aviation: partitioning European from Empire spheres of operation opened a space for other carriers in a less risky, short-haul market. A new ten-year subsidy scheme of wider geographical applicability was devised for Imperial; it was also more generous and more supportive of aeronautical ­innovation.9 Financially revived, and geographically refocused, Imperial finally got Persian permission to commence civil air services along the [ 116 ]

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northern side of the Gulf as from January 1929. The three-year-long permit to operate on a restricted schedule of stops hardly met flight safety standards. It also threatened to end the Indian service before the airline had served out its ten-year agreement with the British Government. Identical permits given to the Dutch and French eliminated British hopes of a head start. Veiling these details, Sir Harry Brittain emphasised the romantic aspects. His popular book By Air described the service over 4,850 miles between Croydon and Karachi as ‘the modern flying carpet which any Sinbad in London now finds at his disposal’. The Times ignored obstructions that the Italian and Greek governments placed in the way of British flights over their countries (for a while, in 1929, these included Italian insistence that British flights via Italy should visit Tobruk). Instead, the paper praised the way non-Empire Mediterranean countries had been sufficiently broadminded to see the ‘wider possibilities and advantages of a service originally planned in the interest of the British Empire’. The new route to the East, it was claimed, was one ‘from which not only the Empire but the peoples of other nations will derive great and lasting benefit’.10 Acting on short notice, beneficent Britain hurriedly organised facilities and landing grounds in Persia. The first of the weekly, seven-day flights to Karachi droned down the Gulf in April 1929, coinciding with Imperial’s fifth birthday. The passengers who boarded the City of Glasgow at Croydon were Hoare, Bullock, Air Vice-Marshal Sir Vyell Vyvyan (the Air Ministry representative at Imperial) and Maj. H. G. Brackley, the airline’s Air Superintendent. At a low-key farewell before boarding, Hoare said that he regarded the flight as the beginning of ‘real British civil aviation’. Previous trips were trials made over short distances so that people could see that flying was safe; taking mails five or six thousand miles was a different matter. Hoare felt it was the beginning of air services connecting many parts of ‘our great Empire’. The City of Jerusalem shouldered the imperial load on the Egypt– India leg. A letter to the Viceroy from Wedgwood Benn, Secretary of State for India, accounted for only a tiny proportion of the weight. The first letter ever to reach India within one week of despatch from England acclaimed ‘a new achievement in the compression of time and space’.11 Hoare and Bullock disembarked at Alexandria and flew south to Malakal with the RAF. Sir Samuel rejoined the homeward-bound City of Glasgow in time for the re-assembly of parliament. His companions on this second leg were Sir Vyell Vyvyan, and Sir Geoffrey Salmond who was returning for his first home leave. Bullock, exhausted, was left recuperating in a nursing home in Alexandria. Sir Samuel had made his second Empire propaganda flight. He believed that his 5,000-mile, [ 117 ]

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six-day return journey along the putative African civil air route would ‘create a general interest in the project, and bring it in a conspicuous manner before the eyes of the people in Africa who were likely to benefit from it’. He must have had in mind Britain’s ‘chief men’ in the Sudan (notably the ‘self-possessed, unruffled and very alert’ young Oxbridge graduates), not the Shilluk men whom he recalled only as tall, scantily clothed assegai carriers.12

India No sectors would be established easily on the air highway between Britain and Australia. The formation of the Gulf route had been, in Air-Marshal R. Brooke-Popham’s view, ‘one of the romances of the British Empire’. Moreover, it bore the same relationship to British imperial civil air interests as the Suez Canal bore to British imperial maritime interests. The Middle East was particularly fraught, but India was no pushover. Aviation in India lost its pre-war momentum. Early in 1911 a demonstration flight at Calcutta racecourse (by an aircraft of the Bristol-based British and Colonial Aeroplane Company that was ‘doing such good “missionary” work in the Indian Empire’) was attended by a Viceregal party, the Lieut.-Governor of Bengal and half-a-million spectators. A pre-war air show at Bombay was disappointing, but at Calcutta ‘10,000 natives and 5,000 Europeans’ crowded the race ground; ‘millions’ thronged outside.13 This enthusiasm petered out. Britain’s post-war gift of one hundred war surplus aeroplanes may have sweetened local governments, ruling princes, the RAF, aero clubs and aviation schools, but the stimulation of organised flight was short-lived. Securing unquestioned co-operation in aviation was a far-distant hope in Britain’s prize possession where even domestic aviation lacked fizz. Handley Page’s post-war corporate venture into India lasted barely three years before he withdrew his pilots, mechanics and three aircraft in 1922.14 In 1925 a survey of Indian aviation prospects by The Times’s Delhi correspondent sketched a bleak state of affairs. The Indian Air Board had become inactive; pilots were discouraged by their experiences and by the Indian climate. The failure of a costly experimental service between Bombay and Karachi had dented belief in the possibility of internal air routes. Firms hoping to run commercial services had failed; states that started flying corps had abandoned their schemes. Hoare blamed the decay on India’s version of Geddes’s ‘Axe’. His view was that the Inchcape Committee had done even more harm in India. Public expenditure there was cut to the point that aircraft were not being maintained. After accidents had increased sensationally, aircraft [ 118 ]

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were forbidden to fly. If there was to be an airway in India, particularly one that could be used to get from the Middle East to Australia, it looked as if further British intervention would be required. A transcontinental airway established primarily for imperial use was not one that Indians were keen to finance. Indeed, a leading article in the Times of India in 1925 was critical of the proposal by the Indian Government to pay a £33,000 subsidy to a proposed air service between Karachi and Kantari. The editors argued that it was an Empire project, the costs of which should be borne by British private enterprise or the British Government. No benefit would accrue to India, they protested. Mail service would not improve because any time saved in the air would be cancelled by transhipments. There would be few passengers owing to baggage difficulties, and freight was excluded. The editorial was firm even that a small subsidy needed to be nipped in the bud: one subsidy would lead to another.15 The disorganisation in Indian aviation meant that there remained a great deal to do by way of surveying air routes, advising about subsidies and overseeing submission of tenders for the operation of internal air routes. In a battle reminiscent of the struggle for the title of the nation’s prime maritime port, interests in Calcutta and Karachi locked horns over the most appropriate centre for Indian air traffic. Geographically, Delhi was an obvious hub location. Certainly it did not have the tarnished record of Calcutta where initial efforts to establish aviation lay in ruins. There, three derelict aircraft and a couple of Indian watchmen presided over an overgrown meadow on the verge of a swamp fourteen miles from the city to which there was no telephone connection or organised transport. The Daily Telegraph’s Calcutta correspondent criticised the scan­­ dalous bog-like conditions and scrap yard scene confronting Sir Alan Cobham when he landed there in 1926. A scathing editorial in a 1926 number of The Near East and India lashed out at the apathy of the Indian authorities. Its parting shot was patronising advice that if they refused to act swiftly, a powerful official should be sent from England ‘to compel them to do in the interest of the Empire what they persistently neglect to do in the interest of India and of themselves’. Viceroy Irwin protested about ill-informed criticism and declared that the Indian Assembly had never declined funds for civil aviation. On the contrary, it had increased them five-fold. Nevertheless, within ten months a British official was in post: Lt-Col F. C. Shelmerdine (who had worked on the Cairo–Cape air survey and had been one of Brancker’s senior assistants in the Department of Civil Aviation) was appointed on a five-year contract as first Director of Civil Aviation in [ 119 ]

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India with effect from October 1927.16 The idea that India should dance to Britain’s tune, or indeed that any countries through which the imperial air routes passed should bear their share of costs, struck one expatriate as preposterous. Mr T. S. Impey, Secretary of the Aero Club of India, did not object to interference in Indian affairs, as he might have. Rather, he regarded sharing as dereliction of Empire. In his personal capacity he wrote to the London Times in 1926 from the Hotel Cecil in Simla to challenge the idea. It was unwise and shortsighted, he said, to wait for others to do Britain’s work in creating worldwide air commerce. Precisely that kind of deplorable practice, he said, had made the greatest Empire in the world the most backward in aviation. Cleverly appealing to the past so beloved of the promoters of Empire aviation, Impey noted that history taught that ‘powerful nations lost their energies and existence’ when the commerce on which they had become dependent was diverted to other countries. He accused Britain of encouraging other nations to capture British mail and passenger services, and eventually to seize the riches of the British Empire. Whereas India’s trade was currently carried aboard the Empire’s great steamer lines, he wrote, in future it would be conducted by the faster air services which non-Empire countries were subsidising for their own benefit. Thousands of miles from Whitehall, he was astonished to find that politicians appeared willing to watch Britain’s commercial stability threatened ‘because of the feeble excuse that we have got a right to expect our brothers overseas to ensure our commerce for us’. Impey advised diverting a few million pounds spent lavishly on Empire air defence in order to bring British commercial aviation into some semblance of equal efficiency with the RAF. He ended his attack by asking how it could be expected that a country like India, which knew little or nothing of aviation, would vote money to assist ‘the mother country’ to create new communications. It was patently obvious, he said, that Britain should first establish air links for its own commerce and industry, at all events until Indians wished to take them into their own hands.17 Some Indians had wanted to grasp the air for themselves from the outset. Their wish fell within the letter of the pertinent Indian postal legislation but London saw only bloody-minded recalcitrance. The Post Office, the India and Foreign offices, as well as the Air Council and Imperial, were appalled by Indian obstinacy. They thought it conflicted with the imperial spirit, and set a precedent for non-cooperation in other countries. In 1928, only a year after Hoare’s triumphal Indian air journey, there emerged in London a feeling that the Indian Government was pandering to the interests of a few nationalist Indian [ 120 ]

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politicians. Toward the end of the year when the Indian Government publicly called for tenders to fly the Karachi–Rangoon route, one of Imperial’s directors, Vice-Chairman Lord Chetwynd, was in India trying to secure the route for his airline. The anxiety was that a service which went to an undesirable, inexperienced mushroom firm with inadequate finance would imperil the imperial air project. The secretaries of state for Air and for India asked Viceroy Irwin to add his weight to the British cause. Quite properly, he declined to interfere.18 The Indian Assembly’s higher regard for internal air routes (notably Karachi–Delhi) than for a trans-India imperial air route continued to rattle Britain into 1929 and 1930. Writing to the Secretary of State for India, Thomson urged accelerated planning in light of foreign competition and Australian readiness to subsidise a route north to Singapore. In a letter copied to the Viceroy he tried to explain the indivisibility of imperial air benefits. His view was that Indian subjects throughout the Empire (in East Africa, Iraq, the Malay States and the Straits Settlements) stood to benefit from imperial air links to which India made no financial contribution. His argument about short-sighted priorities was underwritten by an entirely selfish concern that the Indian Government would fix trans-India carriage at rates that would effectively kill off imperial traffic west of Karachi and east of Calcutta. The prospect of Indian control of air services in the subcontinent gave vent to racist feelings and other sharp exchanges. In March 1928 a member of the House of Lords telegraphed an enquiry about the confidence European travellers would have in an Indianised air service. Similarly, during his delicate aviation negotiations in India, Chetwynd wondered aloud who would ever fly with an Indian pilot. In 1930 Woods Humphery added fuel to the fire when he asked if it was British Government policy to allow Indians to develop an independent air-transport industry. The question provoked rage from a member of the Governor-General’s Executive Council and Head of the Indian Department of Commerce, Sir Joseph Bhore. The same year, Thomson told Geddes bluntly that the Indian Government was prone to take exception to anything that could be interpreted as dictation. Brancker was told by his personal secretary that the Indian government had simply washed its hands of ‘the big imperial project’, namely, an air service through to Australia via India.19

Africa While the easterly limb of the Imperial trunk route was being formed and contested, another air frontier was being extended: making preparations for regular commercial service down the length of Africa was [ 121 ]

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Map 4  Prominent landing sites for Empire flying in Africa

the second major Empire aviation project. The establishment of the African airway was not a simple matter of the approved imperial company descending from empty skies to hog the airspace and ­appropriate all the traffic. In British Africa Imperial did not have to [ 122 ]

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contend with geopolitics as it did in Europe or the Middle East, but it did have to contend with precursors, the Air Ministry, and several different colonial governments. Egypt was the only non-British sovereign state that had to be dealt with, and it gave Imperial a twentyyear operating permit. The penetration of other African airspace by European states helped concentrate British minds. France’s air interests had spread beyond West Africa into Equatorial Africa. By 1930 the first French flights had been made from Paris to Madagascar and Réunion Island via Algeria, Chad and the Congo. A French aircraft completed a round trip between Paris and Cape Town in 1928. By the end of 1927 the Belgians were operating a twice-monthly 1,400-mile domestic air service in the Congo between Boma and Elisabethville. In October 1928 a flight of two Portuguese aircraft reached Lourenço Marques from Lisbon.20 Sandwiched between Cobham’s African flights in 1925 and 1927/28, the Air Ministry in London announced in August 1926 that a survey of the Khartoum–Kisumu air route would begin at the end of the year. A Times editorial queried why it had been left to private enterprise to initiate a venture so clearly of imperial concern. The 1,400mile route, for which there was no viable overland alternative, was being studied with a view to an experimental seaplane service by the North Sea Aerial and Transport Company, a subsidiary of the Blackburn Aeroplane Company. In a private-public partnership that set the standard for African airway development, the company directors put up £4,000, and the governments of Uganda, Kenya and Sudan stumped up a further £7,000. As the air route crept southward, other governments began to express interest and offer support. Commercial and political organisations were also drawn in. In 1928 and 1929 the associated chambers of commerce of East Africa, and the Closer Union Commission, resolved to encourage aviation between Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika. Also in 1929, the governments of the Union of South Africa, Sudan, Kenya and Tanganyika agreed to help finance the trans-Africa air route. Another Times leader article enthused about the ‘great co-operative partnership’ that proved ‘the solidarity of the Empire’. If there were any clashes of self-interest they were buried in the wider group interest. The editors sensed that aviation was effectively a lead-project, a blueprint for other joint ventures that might draw together the Empire’s scattered members and improve mutual understanding.21 African colonial governments and commercial companies were interested in north-south trunk route services and in feeder and taxi services. Small air transport businesses were ideally positioned to play the subsidiary role. From its base at Hanworth aerodrome in West [ 123 ]

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London, the National Flying Services Company established an enterprise in Nairobi in 1929. It comprised three pilots and three light aircraft. Among the pilots was a Miss Winifred Spooner who had been placed fifth in an entry of forty-six pilots in a round-Europe competition for light aeroplanes.22 Her appointment was a notable break from male exclusivity in commercial air work. In aviation, as in other spheres, the Empire offered opportunities not available in Britain. Capt. F. E. Guest’s National Flying Services Company did not confine its horizons to local air ferries. In 1929, Guest financed an expedition to scrutinise aviation opportunities as far south as Cape Town. In the end, he was unable to profit from the numerous meetings with enthusiastic state officials, business leaders and prominent citizens in the Rhodesias and in South Africa, but the contacts laid an invaluable platform for Imperial. More immediately, Guest’s survey party was rewarded by entertainment putting them in touch with ‘the cream of European society in Africa’. They filled their leisure hours with visits to a theatre, a concert and a film screening, and a mayoral champagne party. Other distractions included horse-riding, moonlit swimming, picnicking and shooting. One of the revellers was Capt. F. Tymms. He began his career as an RAF route surveyor and was a contender in the trans-Africa challenge won by van Ryneveld and Brand in 1919. Later he became Brancker’s technical assistant in the Air Ministry where he compiled information about Empire air routes and fashioned regulations and legislation. In August 1927, aged thirty-eight, Tymms was appointed superintendent of the Cairo–Karachi air route. He held the position briefly before he began a detailed survey of landing grounds (size, ownership, cost) and logistical (fuel availability, hotel and catering) and trade support for aviation in Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika where the prospects of closer intercolonial co-operation were under the spotlight. Leaving his wife in Egypt, Tymms spent eight months in 1928 on a 14,000-mile overland tour. Like a modern missionary, he travelled with a string of porters laden with safari beds, food and cooking utensils. He claimed expenses for hiring rickshaws, canoes and the Cobham-Blackburn car. While the Air Ministry and the Colonial Office disputed payment of Tymms’s salary, foreign allowance and pension, he was ringing up a printing bill for copies of his detailed 330-page report. In Nairobi, Tymms also addressed himself to application of the 1922 and 1927 parliamentary air navigation legislation to British overseas territories, and he advised colonial governors on aviation matters over which they had discretion.23 Between November 1929 and May 1930 Tymms was once again in Africa, negotiating and surveying the entire Cape-toCairo trunk route.24 [ 124 ]

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Notes   1   2   3   4

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  5   6   7   8   9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24

W. J. Davis, The World’s Wings (New York, 1927), p. 22. H. C. Sinderson, Ten Thousand and One Nights (London, 1973), p. 76. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control. Journal of the Central Asian Society, 8 (1921), 113; R. M. Hill, ‘Experiences on the Cairo Baghdad air mail’, Royal Aeronautical Society Journal, 32 (1928), 385–410; The Times (26 January 1928); Proceedings of the Third Air Conference (1923) (Cmd 1848), p. 89. H. J. Mackinder, India: Eight Lectures (London, 1910); Barnett, The Collapse of British Power, pp. 137–8; Collier, Heavenly Adventurer, p. 169. Flight (9 November 1912), p. 1020. C. B. Thomson, ‘The development of aviation in Asia’, Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society, 17 (1930), p. 278; The Times (8 February 1930), pp. 274–5. NA, AIR 2/1220; FO 12254 (E2534/1/65). NA, CAB 27/354: Reports of the Cabinet Committee on the Future of British Commercial Air Transport, November–December 1927. H. E. Brittain, By Air (London, 1933), p. 118; The Times (5 February 1929), p. 15; (30 March 1929), p. 13. The Times (30 March 1929); (1 April 1929, p. 10); BL, OIOC L, PO/1/31 (ii), p. 250. Flight (4 April 1929); CU, Templewood XX (5); Hoare, Empire of the Air, pp. 301, 306–7. Flight (4 March 1911; 9 November 1912). G. W. Bentley, ‘The development of the air route in the Persian Gulf’, Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society, 20 (1933), pp. 173, 187; Edwards, ‘Air routes of India’. The Times (16 February, 17 September 1925); CU, Templewood XX (5). BL, OIOC L, PO/1/31 (iii); Near East and India (16 December 1926), pp. 699–700. The Times (11 September, 4 October 1926). BL, OIOC, L, PO/1/31 (iii). BL, OIOC, L, PO/1/31 (ii): Thomson to Wedgwood Benn, 25 June 1929; L, PO/1/41 (xiv): Thomson to Wedgwood Benn, 21 August, 14 October 1929; NA, AIR 2/1301: Thomson to Geddes, 15 January 1930; Bullock to Brancker, 3 February 1930; Thomson to Wedgwood Benn, 14 April 1930; A. Sen, Glimpses into Indian Aviation History (Aviation News Service, 1998), p. 57. B. Mackworth-Prade, Aviation: the Pioneer Years (London, 1990). Jones, The Time Shrinkers; The Times (16 August 1926); (16 March 1929), p. 13. The Times (17 September 1929), p. 15. F. Tymms, ‘Prospects of civil aviation in East Africa’, Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 33 (1929), 1050–81; Jones, The Time Shrinkers, p. 94; NA, CO 822/14/9; AVIA 2/291; DR 9/31; E. A. Johnston, To Organise the Air (Cranfield, 1995). Jones, The Time Shrinkers, pp. 90–5. Jones notes that Tymms diarised his Salisbury meeting with Sir Alan Cobham along with the remark ‘now for an avalanche of talk’ (p. 90).

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While practical steps were gradually being taken to develop airline routes and services in Africa, India and the Middle East, in Britain the only signs that organised Empire aviation was alive in the late 1920s and early 1930s were occasional news items and speeches. Private flying (much of it along the mapped but fictional airline routes) garnered more public attention. Building on the earlier accomplishments of the Smiths, van Ryneveld and Brand, and Cobham, a new generation of pioneering flights made the prospect of an imperial civil air service seem less remote. Record-breaking cross-Empire flights by pilots such as Lady Bailey, Jean Batten, Lady Heath, Beryl Markham, Bert Hinkler, Amy Johnson, Lt-Cmdr G. Kidston, Charles Kingsford Smith, Jim Mollison and C.  W.  A. Scott, grabbed the press headlines.1 Like the first flight over Mount Everest in 1933 (British aeronautical enterprise lifted Empire to the highest peak),2 and the England–Australia (MacRobertson) Air Race the following year (which halved the fastest time to an extremity of Empire),3 these solo efforts overshadowed organised civil flying. While Empire airline preparations stumbled ahead largely out of public view (excepting for one very public calamity discussed below), these eye-catching and successful flights stirred Empire airmindedness. The associated fanfare roused enthusiasm for air Empire. After a decade of rhetoric the slow progress of Empire civil aviation frustrated and infuriated some people. One of those was Lt-Cmdr J. M. Kenworthy. In March 1928, a fortnight before Groves was scheduled to speak publicly in Liverpool about ‘Britain’s Place in World Aviation’, Kenworthy launched a blistering attack in Parliament. His target was Hoare, whom he wished to impeach for neglecting what many regarded as the most vital need of the Empire – air communication. Nobody in the entire world, he claimed, would benefit more by the heaven-sent invention of aeroplanes that would link the Empire and ‘prevent it [ 126 ]

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falling to pieces’. He berated the Air Ministry for employing bureaucrats instead of thinkers.4 Whatever Hoare’s practical record in helping aviation and hiring appropriate personnel, he never gave up promoting Empire aviation. In his eloquent lecture to the Scottish Geographical Society in Edinburgh in October 1928 he conceded that the aeroplane had ceased to be a benign subject of romance, or an object of intellectual speculation, as it had been to Solomon, Roger Bacon and Leonardo da Vinci. If the glamour had worn off and aeroplanes had become mere utilities, that did not justify neglect. When they ceased to be curiosities and playthings they became tools of wartime destruction. Now, said Hoare, aircraft could be used to destroy distance, ‘the great enemy of imperial solidarity’. The English public who saw his catchy phrase reproduced in The Times might have felt more warmly about the bombastic discourse than French readers of a translated version of the lecture. In rhetorical style Hoare asked whether distance was not the only real obstacle to Imperial unity. Was it not distance and the impossibility of rapid consultation between British statesmen and American colonists that lost Britain its American Empire in the eighteenth century? Would not the aeroplane and airship (together with cable, telephone and wireless) almost eliminate distance and enhance the ‘course of Imperial unity’? Hoare’s lecture confirmed that the two trunk routes to South Africa and Australia remained centrepieces of the Empire airway master plan. He forecast that they would be the two most important aeroplane lines in the world. Perhaps he thought that Scots far away from the London-centred Empire aviation debate would be dazzled by news that air service would improve the lot of scattered British communities and families isolated from their old homes and interests’.5 Hoare’s theme and phraseology was catchy. In a December 1929 radio broadcast from London, which coincided with the publication of his grandly titled book The World, The Air and The Future, C. D. Burney spoke of defeating the Empire’s two great enemies, time and distance. The nearest part of the Empire was 1,500 miles from London, and the furthest was 12,000 miles distant. By the end of 1929 there were few novel ways of embroidering the familiar chorus. Saying that swift aircraft would tie together, materially sustain and realise the dream of a great Empire was not one of them. More original was Burney’s mystical claim that air transport would co-ordinate ‘all those cultural and intangible aspects of human nature in which is embodied the spirit of a great people’.6 The Secretary of State for Air usually accentuated the positive, peaceful aspects of flight. He managed to do so even when talking about [ 127 ]

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‘Air Defences of the Empire’. Back from Scotland, Hoare addressed the 1928 annual luncheon of the Conservative Women’s Reform Association in the Hyde Park Hotel. He referred to civil aviation as ‘a bond of union’ and ‘a new civilizing force’. But in a country where the scars of war had only had a decade to heal, the military potential of civil aviation was hard to ignore. The view of The Times air correspondent in 1927 that every little air transport concern was a ready-made air garrison provided a perfect rationale for ensuring that small-scale feeder lines such as those in Africa were kept intact. Others argued more generally that maintaining a military capability was one of several reasons to build Empire airways. In a Christmas season apparently reduced to gestures of goodwill only toward fellow nationals, an article in the New Statesman in 1929 pulled no punches. It claimed that no bombs would fall on Britain while the Empire was socially and economically integrated, and that any attacks could be repulsed by a home aircraft industry rapidly converting civilian aircraft into bombers.7 Militarism permeated aviation thinking easily. The lessons of the first air war could be reworked skilfully to suggest even peaceful foreign visitations and the imperative of subsidies. Lord Thomson performed the trick when speaking in his second term as Air Minister. He looked forward to the day when British aeroplanes would reach into the remotest places, not to drop bombs but to familiarise the inhabitants with British personnel, manners and customs. ‘The moral effect and the enhancement of national prestige as a result of seeing aeroplanes daily and punctually in such places cannot be overestimated’, he remarked. Both The Times and the Aeroplane published the dire warning Thomson gave at the British Empire League luncheon in the British Empire Club in St James in February 1930. In a speech titled ‘Aviation and the British Empire’, he noted that air developments, unlike those in the merchant marine, had grown in the hothouse of war. Thomson deduced that if aviation had been forced artificially, it had to be sustained artificially. If not, he cautioned, the British people would ‘drop out of the march of human progress’.8 Other commentators on Empire aviation in the late 1920s stressed that Britain was well placed to benefit from, to participate in, and even to lead this human advance. Avoiding the Wellsian spectre of relapsing into a second-class power involved making an active choice to maintain and extend air capability. Despite the ‘pitiably limited’ air network and the pilot shortage, the Air Ministry’s report on the state of civil flying in 1927/28 found promising signs. As reported in the Spectator, officialdom did not decry superlatives: Imperial was said to be the safest and best-administered airline in the world, its pilots among the best too. Even if Britain was notoriously slow to adopt [ 128 ]

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novelties, the maturing airways were becoming an incentive to revisit the qualities that had previously made Britain great. The airways, it was deduced, could lead current and future generations to ‘infinite horizons’. The construction of airships was taken to hold additional promise: they would allow Britain to compete with foreign nations and ‘gain the air centrality of the world’ in a way that the restricted economic payload of aeroplanes still did not make possible.9 Thomson spoke fondly of ‘traditional’ British skill and enterprise in design, manufacture and long-range navigation being used to bring the Empire’s people closer together. At the seventh international aero exhibition at Kensington Olympia in London in July 1929 he announced his hope that the British air transport system would become as great as the British mercantile marine, supported by an aircraft industry as great as the nation’s shipbuilding industry. Simultaneously, when visiting South Africa, the Director of Research at the British Admiralty praised airships as the future of long-distance Empire air travel. Addressing a City Hall audience during the Johannesburg meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he spoke of airshipping as replicating ‘the spirit of adventure which sent Livingstone to Africa and Scott to the Pole’. A year later, Thomson told the House of Lords that it was unnecessary to point out the likely significance of airships ‘to our race and to our Empire’.10 Slow progress implementing Empire airways intensified selfcongratulation, persuasion and propaganda. In 1929 Sassoon wrote grandly that the Empire had a unique opportunity to ensure that the power of flight would confer a blessing on humanity. He was adamant too that the Empire had most to gain from the speedy development of civil air transport. The story of flying accomplishments in the Empire, he predicted, would be ‘an unexpected revelation of the leading part which British energy and enterprise are playing in a widespread movement’. Sassoon, who once boasted that Britain had the world’s best aircraft and pilots, recycled an old refrain: just as sea communications had built up the British Empire, so ‘air communications must preserve it’. Others spoke out about the promising future for imperial aviation. Brancker did so at the court and livery dinner of the Worshipful Company of Woolmen in 1928. The following year, the President of the Royal Aeronautical Society also centred his hopes on a curt assessment of Britain’s human resources: Anglo-Saxons had a peculiar aptitude for flying, he said.11 Beyond Whitehall, and away from the science-and-snacks circuit, two imperial organisations kept up publicity and pressure for effective Empire air services. They did so even as Britain’s first air services beyond Europe struggled into existence. At the annual general meeting [ 129 ]

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of the Empire Press Union in 1929, Sir Harry Brittain pleaded for more rapid development. He asked for Ceylon to be included in air services to Bombay, and for British civil aviation to root in the West Indies before the Americans, French and Germans snapped up the chance to use the islands for air services between North and South America: a British official investigation into West Indies aviation had apparently lain unpublished for eighteen months. Reflecting on the gradations of Empire, a Flight leader article the following year argued that an imperial power could not with any decency tell the smallest colonies to manage their own air affairs: ‘the spirit of Empire and the spirit of flying alike forbid such an attitude’.12 Brittain continued his agitation at the twelfth triennial congress of the Federation of Chambers of Commerce of the British Empire. Delegates at the 1930 London meeting resolved to press for a flat airmail rate, for increased facilities for the study of aeronautics throughout the Empire, and for local authorities to be made aware of the need for aerodromes. Their call for air surveys of unmapped areas of the Empire was made in the same year that Lord Sempill suggested using aerial surveys to map the Empire territories which were to be ‘opened up’ by overseas emigration and settlement. The resolutions which Brittain proposed, and had approved, were that dominion and colonial governments should subsidise the initial development of air transport in their territories, and that the governments of countries straddled by the Australia route should be urged to establish ground facilities.13

Airship trials Airshipping made the first breakthrough in Britain’s organised Empire aviation in the 1930s. The R100 airship made the first long-distance flight. For the first time, public delight about pioneering overseas flights erupted in a corner of Empire other than Africa, India or Australia. Five days before Amy Johnson returned to London from her triumphant solo flight to Australia in the northern hemisphere summer of 1930, Canadians indulged in wild celebrations of their own when Burney’s airship docked at St Hubert, seven miles from Montreal. Seventy-eight hours after departing from Cardington, the flying crew and sixteen passengers were met by a bevy of celebrities and faced a press conference. At the aerodrome, a battalion of Canadian infantry had been stationed to control traffic generated by an estimated ten thousand people. Several hot dog stalls and a circus on the airfield traded to a captive market. The Canadian Pacific Railway had laid down a special siding for excursion trains. No postal facilities were required, as the British Post Office had barred mails. [ 130 ]

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The deputy-engineer of the Airship Guarantee Company, Nevil S. Norway (nom de plume Nevil Shute), estimated that there were 300,000 Sunday visitors to the airport, equivalent to a third of the entire population of Montreal. Over the course of thirteen days, 600,000 people visited St Hubert. Some spectators travelled 3,000 miles from the west coast to see the airship. Every hotel was full. Roads were choked with cars. The R100 featured on advertisements all over the city. Cigarette makers welcomed the airship from hoardings. Shopkeepers posted greetings in store windows. There were R100 poems, picture postcards and lapel buttons. A song in French and English was cut on a gramophone record. It saluted the commander and crew, as well as the airship, ‘the mightiest monarch that o’er the ocean flew’. More than 140,000 shoes were unlaced for public tours of the R100. Distinguished Canadians were treated to a 26-hour demonstration flight. An estimated 200,000 people saw the airship fly. A bell peal rang out ‘God Save the King’. A huge Union Jack flew at the Toronto city hall where Maj. Scott – at the helm again – made a fundraising speech. In Montreal, Burney spoke about how air transport would develop imperial economic and political structures. Reflecting rather pompously on the whole experience, Norway recalled that the crew were all ‘much educated by this evidence of the Imperial bond’. Although the enthusiasm was partly attributable to Canadians wanting to show their southern neighbour that Britain could build bigger and better airships, he claimed that the excitement was mostly just plain enthusiasm for the Empire. To the Canadians R100 was ‘a magnificent gesture sent to them by the Mother Country’.14 Burney admitted the flight was bold and took the opportunity to tell an official reception that faint-hearted policies never achieved anything: ‘this great Empire of ours has been made of bold steps’.15 The R100 arrived back in England with thirteen Canadian passengers on a Saturday in mid-August 1930. One of the people on board remembered that every boat in the Bristol-channel sounded its siren. An unofficial escort of aeroplanes met the airship. Families and their servants standing on the ample lawns of historic halls in the Cotswolds gazed upward as the R100 chugged past. A grand homecoming seemed imminent, equalling, perhaps, the farewell enthusiasm of tens of thousands of Canadians who watched the airship’s departure fifty-seven hours previously. As with the R34 flight, nothing of the sort happened. Lord Thomson and his friends, and fewer than a thousand other people, gathered at the Royal Airship Works at Cardington. Norway recalled the number of cars growing slowly to two hundred. ‘We slink in unhonoured and unsung in the English style’, wrote the Oxford[ 131 ]

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trained engineer in his diary. The welcoming party managed only ‘a genteel cheer’. Sensitive microphones may just have caught it on the BBC broadcast. The London daily newspapers were preoccupied with the fifth and final cricket test between England and Australia; transAtlantic shipping had become incident-free; ‘Amy-mania’ building up around Amy Johnson would soon engulf the news. The crew shrugged off disappointment with a stiff upper-lip.16 No one knew that no British airship would ever again connect Britain and Canada. Britain’s next grand imperial airship venture started within months. After Canada it was the turn of Egypt and India to see the new genus of imperial flagship. On this occasion the Labour government’s pet would be displayed. It would not be the first civil-airship launch, but it would be the first big British star in Eastern skies. Care had been taken to ward off an impostor: Britain declined Germany’s Graf Zeppelin an Egyptian permit during its early 1929 Mediterranean flight. The competition’s eyes were kept off military installations in the Canal Zone, British aviation prestige remained intact, and the recently completed airship mast at Ismailia was kept virginal for its British visitor. A second successful British flight would further disprove the scepticism about airship technology that had attracted unprecedented animosity and ridicule. Lord Thomson stood to benefit from a successful airship flight which would have boosted confidence in the country’s economic future at a time when squabbling Labour ministers seemed helpless before the rising tide of unemployment in the Depression. And, if Thomson were to travel on the R101’s inaugural flight to India as he indicated he would, the flight would acquire tremendous cachet. It has been suggested that Thomson wanted a successful return flight to India to give the October 1930 Imperial Conference in London (the first since 1926) yet more evidence about the practicality and safety of an Empire airship service. Suitably impressed by a Canadian and an Indian flight, conference delegates would ‘applaud the ingenuity of the Mother Country’ and would respond by constructing airship bases and mooring masts. Their enthusiasm and support would tie their countries to Britain more firmly than even Balfour’s doctrine of dominion status adopted at the 1926 meeting.17 Not everyone was enthusiastic. C. G. Grey queried Thomson’s optimism about the journey: what influence could the Secretary of State have on ‘a lot of rebellious Dravidians, stirred up by Russian Bolshevik propaganda and spoiled by our absurd endeavours to educate the uneducatable’? Had it materialised, Thomson’s alleged ambition for the Viceregal post itself might have had some impact.18 In October 1930 the huge R101 set off sedately to the sounds of a brass band belting ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and the anthem which [ 132 ]

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Figure 5  The R101 airship passing St Paul’s Cathedral at the heart of the imperial capital, 14 October 1929.

implored God to save just the King. In Thomson’s own words, the venture was the next step in linking London with its Empire, ‘that everlasting entity’.19 His journey would prove that ‘the air and the four corners of the earth are ours to command’.20 A fairy tale was about to [ 133 ]

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come true. The shimmering symbolism was memorable sixty years later: the moment was remembered as ‘the culmination of six years of pioneering endeavour and the brink of realisation for an Imperial dream’. Empire and mother country would be joined as never before by a comfortable, quick, regular and safe means of transport. Australia, India and Canada would be reached in half the time it took steamships. ‘Perhaps even more than all these things, there would be a prestige of the air corresponding to that of the great ocean liners on the north Atlantic route; it would be world-wide and it would be British’.21 Seven hours out from Cardington, after wallowing forward slowly in foul weather, R101 crashed and exploded. Within little more than two minutes at Beauvais in northern France, embers were the only remaining glow of British airshipping. All except six people on board were killed. Thomson and Brancker were among the dead. Was Empire transient too? Would there be fewer corners to command? The only certainty was that there were two fewer imperial commanders. On Monday 6 October 1930, one million buyers of Britain’s popular pictorial tabloid, the Daily Sketch, stared aghast at a full front-page photograph of the R101’s bare, twisted girders. The overhead shot was taken from a little aeroplane that circled the wrecked goliath. Cinema newsreels choked with images. None showed the remains of Thomson’s ton of personal luggage or the 600-foot-long ceremonial carpet, crates of champagne and boxes of silverware loaded for state banquets. Britain was shattered by an event instantly constructed as heroic, imperial tragedy. Prime Minister MacDonald was distraught at the death of Thomson, his closest friend in politics. Yet, in an emotional address to his Labour party’s Llandudno conference, the first citizen of Empire defiantly held the line about glorious sacrifice and historical continuity: ‘we shall conquer the air as we have conquered the desert and conquered the sea’.22 It was a bold utterance by a man whom history has judged to have been out of his depth in foreign policy. This was the rhetoric and ‘extravagant nonsense’ of Whitehall’s ‘visionary idealists’ who rallied round aviation. It was a bold claim at a time of economic depression which left Britain ‘weak and demoralised and the ruling elite half-paralysed’. With Thomson and Brancker gone, the governance of Empire aviation was in the hands of weak, shortsighted, second-rate Cabinets where the high turnover of foreign secretaries contributed to policy confusion.23 Editorials and obituaries about gallant and dedicated men tumbled from British presses. Writing gravely in the London Times about the grievous blow to the Empire, Hoare forgot that the domestic price of British imperial aviation included widowhood. He mentioned only that another band of ‘pioneers’ had given their all ‘on the long trail of [ 134 ]

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the Empire’s advance’. The idea of a great airship age perished with them. Their visions would never materialise. Thomson’s audience at the Imperial Press Conference in June had only his dreams to cling to: there would never actually be a forest of airship masts to which airships would fly as yachts sailed to buoys. The ambition and confidence in Thomson’s address to a plenary session at the July 1930 Colonial Office conference suddenly seemed vacuous. There he foretold the establishment of an efficient Empire-wide air transport system manned, equipped and maintained by an Empire-wide aircraft industry which would consolidate Britain’s lead in engine manufacture. Despite high hopes the Empire never did see the grand spectacle of airships ‘dipping their ensigns in the empyrean’. In the words of the Empire historian Jan Morris, technique, the foundation of British power, and often even the actual cause of Empire, had faltered again.24 In that respect the R101 nosedive was comparable to the Titanic disaster of 1912. Forty-eight people died, far fewer than the fifteen hundred in the Atlantic accident, but death was only part of the misery. For a second time, prestigious, supposedly state-of-the-art British passenger transport had failed on a maiden voyage. This time, an Empire dream was shattered. Building the airship had involved a huge investment of money and political and technical energy. The commitment and expectations had verged on the spiritual. The hopes probably did not equate with the store that Germany set by its airships, and the crash at Beauvais did not have the lasting significance of the collision with an Atlantic iceberg. R101 never spawned a single film, let alone five, and the clumsy alphanumeric name never became a metaphor like Titanic. The crash was gripping nevertheless. The boy who once stood in a Leicester suburban street watching the R101 pass overhead was not too young to be shocked. He remembered that he had shot at the airship with his air rifle, and was convinced that the crash was his fault.25 The crash victims were honoured at services in Westminster Cathedral and in St Paul’s (‘the Empire’s Valhalla’, according to a Pathé Gazette newsreel). Mourners filed past the row of coffins draped with Union Jack flags in Westminster Hall. In the streets of the imperial capital, where two months previously people had gathered to celebrate Amy Johnson’s triumphant flight to Australia, silent crowds paid tribute. More than half-a-million people lined the ceremonial route to Euston railway station; it was the greatest peacetime pageant since the coronation of King George V in 1910. A two-mile-long procession of twenty-four gun carriages passed with their load of forty-eight coffins. A train ferried the coffins fifty miles to Bedford through traffic signals opened as for a royal funeral. An RAF guard of honour stood [ 135 ]

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with bowed heads and reversed rifles flanking the three-mile road to St Mary’s churchyard in Cardington.26 The practical and symbolic consequences of the R101 debacle for aviation and Empire were both significant. The material loss may have been less serious than supposed at the time. Airship service would not have lasted for more than a few years anyway in view of the rapid progress of heavier-than-air technology. For that reason alone, Imperial Airways had a lucky escape. At the end of the 1920s the airline had been asked to manage an Empire airship service; it declined on grounds that it could not spare the technical or managerial staff. Acceptance could have had dire consequences for the organisation and for Empire aviation. Imperial could not have weathered a disaster when it had only recently started to pay dividends (half the anticipated size) to long-suffering investors. Furthermore, the absence of airship service did not prematurely weaken Empire in a way that proponents of urgent air links argued it might even before the crash. At a time when imperial sentiment and political geography were more than ever in conflict, the highly publicised accident was certainly a setback to improved imperial relations. Yet it was not the fault of the R101 that the Imperial Conference was not held again until 1937. One view is that by 1930 the Empire was disintegrating anyway, embalmed in potently sentimental myth and propaganda.27 In 1926 Brancker ended a lecture given to the Royal Aeronautical Society by the R101’s chief designer by saying that there were no bounds to what the success of airshipping would mean to the British Empire.28 He did not contemplate failure. He neither indicated what it would mean nor how to cope with it. The task of finding a way forward fell to others. The top job in British civil aviation administration went to someone with Empire experience: Lt-Col F. C. Shelmerdine had worked on the Cairo–Cape air survey and had been one of Brancker’s senior assistants in the Department of Civil Aviation. He was recalled from India where he had worked on a five-year contract as first Director of Civil Aviation from October 1927. Shelmerdine escaped from the criticism that surely could have erupted over the £61,000 which the Indian Government had spent building the Karachi mooring tower. Further losses were incurred by remitting import duties on the import of 4,000 tons of milled steel that added £19,000 to the order books of a British engineering contractor and a mill in Glasgow. The contract to erect the giant 850 × 180 × 180 ft airship shed was won by tender, and the £186,000 bill was met by the Air Ministry which paid wharfage charges and £6,565 for an eightmile railway spur. Into 1934 the main users of the shed were troops who could play two games of football at once under shelter from the [ 136 ]

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sun. Polo might also have been played. Imperial used the shed without charge as an aircraft shelter and workshop. Eighteen men continued to paint the vast hangar continually until 1939 when it was used to house three thousand troops. Annual net expenditure at the Karachi airship base was £2,200 throughout the 1930s. The local railway company purchased the railway in 1933 for 80 per cent less than cost. In 1941 it purchased the airship shed and mooring tower, demolishing them and using the steel for bridge building.29 The person who had to deal with these relict uses was Capt. F. Tymms, who, before succeeding Shelmerdine in 1931, was Chief Technical Assistant in the directorate of Civil Aviation in London. During a stint of eleven years in India, the unobtrusive, diligent public administrator was rewarded with a CIE (Companion [of the Order] of the Indian Empire). Later, he represented Britain on the grander stage of international aviation. In retrospect it would appear that, as in other spheres such as railway engineering and public health, the Empire was fulfilling its role as a nursery for talent. But in the mid-1930s, Britain’s Director of Postal Services who negotiated with Tymms in Delhi saw an imperial outhouse rather than an imperial hothouse. His view was that Tymms was ‘a man of very poor calibre, of the promoted clerk type, who was utterly incapable of taking any broad vision’.30 After the R101 crash, the secret suggestion made by the Chief of Air Staff to send the R100 on a redemptive flight to India came to nothing. In the grip of economic depression, the imperative of pruning public expenditure meant cutting projects, especially risky ones. An April 1931 Cabinet paper shows that the Government had already spent over £2.35m on airship construction, a sum twice as much as the capitalisation of Imperial, and twice its entire ten-year subsidy. After a lengthy parliamentary debate in May, in November 1930 it was announced that Burney’s Airship Guarantee Company at Howden would close at month end. The R100 was dismantled and steamrollered. Drawing a parallel with Francis Drake’s round-the-world ship (aboard which he was knighted), a commentator remarked that ‘the peer of the Golden Hind was sold for scrap’.31 A skeletal staff – half of the 860 personnel employed at the Royal Airship Works at the time of the crash – was retained to maintain the airship base and mast at Cardington. In August 1931 the Cabinet decided to abandon airship development. Burney would never fly by airship to his retirement homes in Bermuda or Rhodesia. Without spotting the irony, he named his retreat ‘Little England’.32 After 1931, only heavier-than-air craft would ever fly the British flag on civil air services. The failure was punishing. Financial, material, institutional and personnel losses were compounded by shattered [ 137 ]

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visions, damaged morale and wounded national pride. It was now just fantasy that the prevailing winds that had propelled sailing ships around Britain’s seaborne Empire would energise and direct imperial transport in a new technological age. The windjammer days were over. Steamships had undone the knot that tied Britain’s overseas exploits to the winds; airships were not about to reclaim the scarlet girdle that bound together British earth. Moreover, the maritime imperial markers at Suez and Gibraltar would be skirted by the new links of air Empire.

Airplane monopoly Without airship competition, Imperial Airways had the intercontinental Empire trunk routes to itself from 1931 onward. The task of opening air routes and services across Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa would crystallise dreams about a vast Empire bound together by a web of long-distance air routes flown by a British airline. But a lot of work remained to be done: thinking imperially was still easier than flying imperially. The British Empire had reached its maximum size, one-hundred-and-fifty times larger than Great Britain. It was the world’s biggest-ever Empire, covering a quarter of the habitable surface area of the globe. It was also home to approximately the same proportion of the world population. After the R101 debacle, the Air Ministry, Geddes and Woods Humphery took for granted that a British airline headquartered in the imperial capital would operate the principal trunk service in the Empire. Airship nostalgia and waste aside, exclusive use of landplanes would make more cost-effective use of expensive capital equipment, pilots and overseas airfield infrastructure. Few queried the economic sense of confining British air services to the Empire – not even British shipping had been restricted to inter-colonial trade. Was it a grave mistake simply to follow the flag?33 Either way, British honour, prestige and entitlement were at stake. Even in just the imperial theatre, the presumption that Britain would be supreme in long-distance civil aviation would have become practice more quickly and smoothly had the Empire not been geographically fractured, and had there not been fractious voices in the colonies and dominions. In practice, imperial mothering had to contend with truculent offspring, petulant neighbours and international civil aviation law. From the British point of view, and that of Imperial, operating a continuous trunk air service throughout the Empire was more desirable than a segmented service operated by different interests. Unified control, co-operation, seamless service and security of tenure were the [ 138 ]

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Figure 6  A 1931 Imperial Airways advertisement selling imperial loyalty and time savings to vaguely specified destinations.

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watchwords. Sectional ownership, by contrast, would hamper longterm planning, delay aerodrome construction and spawn confusing revenue-sharing arrangements. Mismatches between the freight and passenger capacity of aircraft operated by different airlines were likely. By contrast, unified control enabled cross-subsidy between more route sectors. It also allowed more coherent timetabling, tariff setting and capacity planning, and attracted lower insurance premiums. Centralised administration was also thought to be an advantage in negotiating flying and landing concessions. These arguments for a British trunk monopoly were put forward without prejudice to local enterprise that was seen as best suited to feeder routes. Geddes aired his preference for this master-servant arrangement before a 1927 Cabinet committee: ‘I do not mind how many little wild-cat scheme[s] come in through Persia or Kenya or anywhere else as long as we can stick to the one main route’.34 At the Imperial Press Conference in July 1930 he explained that fragmentation of routes and services would create bottlenecks and chaos. In India, for example, incoming Imperial flights carrying three tons of cargo and between twenty and forty passengers could not disgorge their entire loads onto smaller local aircraft bound for Delhi and Calcutta carrying loads limited to a quarter of a ton. The practicality of British-dominated Empire airways was overlain by the notion that Britain alone grasped the wider picture and was able to mediate any interests that might be narrower than those of the Empire as a whole. Geddes courted co-operation from the Australian Prime Minister in 1929 by explaining that the mission of Imperial was an Empire one, and that the airline Board aspired to make the company imperial in constitution as well as in name. The view in London was that the England–Australia line should be an Empire investment. Unilateral colonial interests had to be harmonised with those of the collective. The step required joint action at the very least: ‘when the task is Imperial in extent, reaching to the ends of the Earth, it surpasses the bounds of self-supporting economic development. The investment is to be made for a subsequent harvest in trade, Imperial security, social and intellectual progress, and so it must be the responsibility of the Governments in joint action’. The leverage sought from Empire airways went even further. The homily with which Geddes concluded his airline’s 1933 annual general meeting revealed his belief that transport could spread international understanding. More even than that, he felt it was key to ensuring nothing less than the future of civilisation itself.35 One way of trying to secure co-operation in long-distance civil aviation was to have Empire-wide interests represented on the Imperial [ 140 ]

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Board. The airline’s articles of establishment contained no stipulations requiring or preventing appointment of representatives of British dominions, colonies and protectorates. African interests worried that even the Government-nominated directors had been appointed mindful of the Indian route only. No Indian representatives actually sat on the Imperial Board; from Imperial’s point of view Indian nationalism had more than effectively worked its way into operations by 1930. Saddling the Board with too many members and opening the door to additional factions was unappetising. Bullock suggested using a colonial Crown agent to represent African interests in toto.36 In 1930 Geddes told the Imperial Press Conference merely that he intended to make representative appointments. The aim was to safeguard overseas interests in the same way that two representatives from the metropolitan government safeguarded Empire interests. The appointments would maintain and strengthen dominion and colonial interest in aviation, and Imperial could tap their knowledge of local conditions, and gauge how best to meet their interests.37 Dangling the carrot of managerial democracy was one way to smooth the path for a British monopoly on imperial routes. Whereas the strategy had a chance of working in the Empire, unfortunately it was impossible to apply on Empire air-route stages closest to London. In Europe, nationalism and international law wrecked the prospect of ‘freedom of innocent passage’ for British aircraft flying between Croydon and Cairo en route to and from Africa, India and Australia. European obstructionism arose from two post-war agreements. First, the Versailles peace treaty forbade Germany to allow over-flying by foreign aircraft exceeding sixty horsepower. The restriction was a concern only while Britain sought a north-European air route to the East. A second agreement set the stage for international civil aviation generally, but had no bearing on British aircraft in skies over British Empire countries. The 1919 International Convention for Aerial Navigation (ICAN) endorsed the principle of national aerial sovereignty. At the instigation of the British Foreign Office this principle of exclusive national rights to sky over nation states had been adopted at the first ICAN meeting in 1910. In less defensive mood at the 1919 ICAN discussions in Paris, Britain proposed a diluted version of sovereignty, but the convention preferred a strict curtailment of freedom of the skies.38 The implications of these two measures for British Empire aviation were that despite publicly favouring free skies for civilian flying, Germany perforce blocked the corridor that Imperial would have liked to use to reach India via Prague. Later, on the fair-weather southern European trajectory that Britain came to favour, the piecemeal and [ 141 ]

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grudging over-flying permission granted by France, Italy and Greece proved even more obstructive. Some observers sensed blackmail. The expectation of the British Government, the Foreign Office and the Air Ministry that British aircraft would have an unquestioned right to fly across all countries, whether part of the Empire or not, was dashed. Instead, flying over foreign countries was subject to diplomacy, negotiation and bargaining. Geopolitics in southern Europe meant that Britain’s imperial ‘air’ services involved a compromising and inconvenient 975-mile rail journey across France and Italy. The message of goodwill sent by Italy’s Premier and Air Minister, Signor Mussolini, to a British aeronautical magazine in 1927 had got corrupted. And, a meeting between the British and French air ministers in August 1929 regarding co-operation in air-transport development had been confined to airspaces beyond Europe. So, until 1934 it was impossible to travel all the way by air between London and Empire outposts (except by using the Dutch airline, KLM). Being messed about by Europeans was offensive. A / Cmdre Chamier, Secretary-General of the Air League of the British Empire, went so far as to say that Britain would have no Empire air routes worthy of the name so long as they crossed Europe. An ‘all red’ route to the East was far from being a reality even beyond Europe. The vaunted British air route to India did not cross British territory anywhere east of Greenwich until the short stretch between Gwadar and Karachi.39 Before he died in the R101 tragedy Brancker was exasperated by what he termed the ‘small and small-minded nations’ which insisted on their right to carry all traffic passing over their territory in their own aircraft. The outcome, he predicted, would be liquidation of Imperial, or vastly increased subsidies.40 While Brancker sniped at foreigners, others in Britain snapped at British practices. C. G. Grey was critical of the Foreign Office’s weak-kneed approach, and suggested that Britain dish out some of its own conditions. His view was that the scattered dominions and colonies could jam the airways of every other country, except the United States, if only the Foreign Office had more backbone.41 It was not only international air law that put Britain’s imperial aviation at the mercy of foreigners. The country’s inter-war foreign policy itself was also unhelpful, being more concerned with economic than political issues. Restraining and appeasing foreign discontents was a higher priority than smashing them. The problems of starting air services to India and South Africa were glaring examples of where a more vigorous foreign policy might have reaped quicker results. In addition, more sophisticated aeronautical technology might have [ 142 ]

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made it possible to escape the restrictive and undignified politics of the air. Yet an economical aeroplane with a flying range that allowed the Empire airline to avoid foreign air space and foreign soil was never built – or ordered.42 The standard explanation for this state of affairs is that the British, notoriously, were victims of various national characteristics of the epoch, notably, ‘lack of awareness, understanding, interest or even liking for modern technology; sloth; and a laissez-faire reluctance to organise anything on a national scale’.43 Certainly, late imperial aspirations germinated in imperfect conditions.

Notes   1 The retrospective literature on these pioneers includes chapter 5 in R. Blythe, The Age of Illusion (Harmondsworth, 1963); R. D. Mackenzie, Solo: the Bert Hinkler Story (Sydney, 1963); I. Mackersey, Jean Batten: the Garbo of the Skies (London, 1991); E. Trzebinski, The Lives of Beryl Markham (London, 1993); I. Mackersey, Smithy: the Life of Sir Charles Kingsford Smith (London, 1998); J. Falloon, Throttle Full Open: a Life of Lady Bailey, Irish Aviatrix (Dublin, 1999); J. Lloyd, ‘The impossible aviatrix’, Australian Feminist Studies, 15 (2000), 137–52; M. Gillies, Amy Johnson: Queen of the Air (London, 2003); B. Rieger, ‘“Fast couples”: technology, gender and modernity in Britain and Germany during the nineteen-thirties’, Historical Research, 76 (2003), 364–88; L. Naughton, Lady Icarus: The Life of Irish Aviator Lady Mary Heath (Dublin, 2004); Millward, Women in British Imperial Airspace.   2 The principal secondary literature includes L. V. S. Blacker, ‘The aerial conquest of Everest’, National Geographic, 64 (1933), 128–62; P. F. M. Fellowes, ‘The Houston– Everest flight’, Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 38 (1934), 689–704; P. F. M. Fellowes, et al., First over Everest: the Houston–Mount Everest Expedition (London, 1933); D. Douglas-Hamilton and D. F. McIntyre, The Pilots’ Book of Everest (London, 1936).   3 O. Cathcart-Jones, Aviation Memoirs (London: Hutchinson, 1934); C. W. A. Scott, Scott’s Book (London, 1934); A. Swinson, The Great Air Race: England–Australia, 1934 (London, 1968).   4 The Times (26 March 1928), p. 23; Hansard (Commons) (12 March 1928), cols 1596–7.   5 S. J. G. Hoare, ‘Aviation and the British Empire’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 45 (1929), pp. 2–3, 5; S. J. G. Hoare, ‘L’aviation britannique et ses relations avec l’empire’, Revue Politique et Littéraire: Revue Bleue, 67 (1929), 673–6; The Times (26 October 1928).   6 C. D. Burney, ‘Empire air communications’, United Empire, 21 (1930), 135–42.   7 The Times (30 November 1928), p. 13; (27 February 1927), p. 9; New Statesman (21 December 1929), p. 361.   8 Thomson, ‘Development’, p. 9; Aeroplane (12 February 1930).   9 Spectator (25 August 1928), p. 250. 10 P. G. Masefield, To Ride the Storm: the Story of the Airship R101 (London, 1982), pp. 49, 87; Star (Johannesburg) (31 July 1929), p. 19; Hansard (Lords) (3 June 1930), cols 1359–63. 11 E. W. Salt, Imperial Air Routes (London, 1930), p. 2; Air Annual of the British Empire, 1 (1929), p. 123; The Times (17 January 1928), p. 19; United Empire, 20 (1929), p. 706. 12 The Times (13 February 1929), p. 9; Flight (4 April 1930), p. 358. 13 The Times (28 May 1930), p. 11; United Empire, 21 (1930), p. 142. 14 N. Shute, ‘The airship venture’, Blackwood’s Magazine (May 1933), pp. 624–5.

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holding up 15 J. Duggan and H. C. Meyer, Airships in International Affairs, 1890–1940 (Basingstoke, 2001); G. Meager, My Airship Flights, 1915–1930 (London, 1970); L. Baily, BBC Scrapbooks, Vol. 2, 1918–1939 (London, 1968); B. Countryman, R100 in Canada (Erin, Ontario, 1982), p. 73. 16 N. Norway, Slide Rule (London, 1954), p. 125; Spectator (19 July 1935), pp. 91–2. 17 Duggan and Meyer, Airships in International Affairs; Masefield, To Ride the Storm; Morpurgo, Barnes Wallis; P. Sassoon, ‘Aviation to-day and to-morrow’, Empire Review, 51 (1930), 171–6. 18 Aeroplane (9 July 1930), p. 144; Norway, Slide Rule. 19 D. Judd, Empire: the British Imperial Experience from 1765 to the Present (London, 1996), p. 285. 20 R. D. S. Higham, The British Rigid Airship, 1908–1931 (London, 1961), p. 306. 21 Frankland, ‘Foreword’, in Masefield, To Ride the Storm. 22 D. Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (London, 1977), p. 568. 23 Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire, pp. 72–5. 24 The Times (28 June 1930), p. 9; (5 October 1930); NA, DO 35/245/3; Morris, Farewell the Trumpets, pp. 342–4. 25 Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers; S. Biel, Down with the Old Canoe: a Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster (New York, 1996); M. Green, The Boy who Shot Down an Airship (London, 1988). 26 Masefield, To Ride the Storm; Morpurgo, Barnes Wallis; J. Leasor, The Millionth Chance (London, 1957); H. C. Meyer, Airshipmen, Businessmen and Politics, 1890–1940 (Washington, D.C., 1991); G. Chamberlain, Airships: Cardington (Lavenham, 1984); BNIS, Pathé Gazette (13 October 1930). 27 Higham, The British Rigid Airship; Barnett, The Collapse of British Power. 28 Masefield, To Ride the Storm, p. 318. 29 NA, AIR 2/2177; BL, OIOC, L/E/9/151 & 152. The Ismailia facility cost £93,000 (including mooring mast contracted to the Cleveland Bridge and Engineering Company). The Canadian Government paid £120,000 to build and equip the St Hubert mooring tower. 30 S. H. Smith, Indian Airways (Part 1) (Sutton Coldfield, 1926); Fellowes, et al., First over Everest; Leasor, Millionth; Johnston, To Organise the Air; British Postal Museum and Archive (London) (BPMA), PO 33/5525 (2): F. H. Williamson to Banks, 9 February 1935. 31 BL, OIOC, L/E/9/152: Cabinet Paper CP94(31); The Times (3 November 1930), p. 12; G. Bolton, ‘From Canada by airship’, Spectator (19 July 1935), 92; Morpurgo, Barnes Wallis; Norway, Slide Rule. 32 Hansard (Commons) (14 May 1931), cols 1393–1487; Who Was Who, 1897–1996. 33 Financial News (8 July 1930); The Times (2 August 1930, 3 November 1930, p. 12). 34 NA, CAB 27/354. 35 NA, AIR 2/1301; Aeroplane (25 July 1934), p. 120; The Times (31 October 1933), p. 20. 36 NA, CO 822/23/8; AVIA 2/422. 37 The Times (3 July 1930), p. 8; Near East and India (10 July 1930), p. 47. 38 J. C. Cooper, ‘Some historic phases of British international civil aviation policy’, International Affairs, 23 (1947); R. D. S. Higham, ‘The British government and overseas airlines 1918–1939: a failure of laissez faire’, Journal of Air Law and Commerce, 26 (1959), 1–12. 39 The Times (26 November 1924; 5 November 1927; 26 January 1928; 7 August 1929; 21 September 1933); Airways (November 1927), p. 80; Aeroplane (8 February, 22 March 1933). 40 NA, AIR 2/1301. 41 Aeroplane (28 November 1934), p. 663. 42 F. S. Northedge, The Troubled Giant: Britain among the Great Powers, 1916–1939 (London, 1966); Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane. 43 Barnett, The Collapse of British Power, p. 213.

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If not British Empire aviation as a whole, then certainly Imperial Airways developed a sense of entitlement on the air route east from Europe to India and beyond. General Manager Burchall set out the matter tartly in 1936: Dutch and French air services were established mainly over a route pioneered by Great Britain, using its aeroplanes and navigational aids, as well as those of territories overflown, of which none was Dutch and only one French. His matter-of-fact reportage about the imbalance between British, Dutch and French aerodrome provision and use along the Eastern airway concealed indignation: none of sixteen used by the Dutch had been provided at Dutch expense, and the French funded only three of sixteen they used. Seventeen out of twenty-three airfields used by Britain had been built at their own cost. The French used nine airports provided at British expense, and the Dutch used eleven; the British used only one French and no Dutch facility.1 Grudges about inter-airline dues and obligations would also have reflected the stresses of establishing Britain’s eastern airway.

The Middle East Imperial’s three-year tenure of the south Persian air route had scarcely begun before attention was being given to whether and how it might be secured beyond the March 1932 expiry date. One hope was that Persia might prolong its concession: as a member of the League of Nations in poor financial credit, it would be anxious to avoid inter­ national criticism. There was also the option of reconsidering the offer of a flight path across central Persia. Sceptics thought the offer might turn out to be a red herring and, on principle, opposed pandering. An alternative strategy was to continue making plans for an airway along the southern side of the Gulf; even the hint of a switch might just call the Persian bluff. Financial inducements were contemplated but [ 145 ]

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rejected quickly on the basis that using bribes to win aerial favours opened Britain to the possibility of being blackmailed for aerial concessions elsewhere. Another avenue out of the impasse was to invoke Britain’s ‘most-favoured nation status’ (accorded in terms of an 1857 Anglo-Persian treaty) and apply it to the Empire airline. Persia’s interpretation of the 1919 ICAN decision on sovereignty of national airspace had been strict and literal. It was one endorsed by the 1929 Paris ICAN meeting: contradictions between clauses about sovereignty and innocent passage were resolved in favour of sovereignty despite British protest. In this context, renewal of Imperial’s permit was drawn into wider Anglo-Persian negotiations that included arrangements for settling war debts. At the Foreign Office the tactic was to show Persia that Britain was not desperate for help in continuing the India service and would not be blackmailed. Nevertheless, in the early 1930s Britain considered offering Persia several inducements to prolong Imperial’s toehold on the Gulf littoral. Relocation of the British residency at Bushire might have pleased the Persians. So too might removal of the Admiralty’s coaling station from Henjam in the Strait of Hormuz to Bahrein. Britain also contemplated re-equipping the Duzdap–Quetta railway. This had lain idle for years after it was thrust across the border without Persian permission. Apart from British Government incentives, Imperial had a chance to ingratiate itself with Persia from mid-1931 when Junkers’ cosy relations with Teheran cooled in the face of unpaid bills and suspicions of fraud; Imperial could have offered to fill to the vacuum even before its contract expired in February 1932.2 Negotiating with Persia over the Indian air route was a tedious and frustrating exercise in diplomacy. To its chagrin, the crawl reflected badly on the imperial power. In Whitehall, peeved Government officials were reduced to describing Persia’s intransigence as arbitrary, unreasonable and even ungentlemanly. On the back of its other antiBritish actions (abolition of Anglo-Indian control of Persian telegraphs, and cancellation of the note-issuing monopoly of the Imperial Bank of Persia), the air route affair aroused passionate imperial sentiments in Britain. Courtenay was probably typical in judging the adversary unduly nationalistic, bombastic and puffed up. Two English people who had no vested interests agreed. After an overland journey to and in Persia, during which his only encounter with aviation was a terrifying Junkers flight out of Teheran’s ‘haphazard’ airport, the aptly named Mr Tweedy assessed the Persian foreign minister as Russian-inclined, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist. The country, he wrote, was ‘in a state of half-baked transition’, managed by a showy, conceited, insolent regime. Seven years previously, the writer Vita Sackville-West had [ 146 ]

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found Persia ‘a lax, limp nation’. Teheran, she wrote, was ‘shoddy’, and Persians were ‘childish and untaught’.3 Stereotyping sticks. In the face of Persian ‘puerility’, the British Government appeared pusillanimous. In a more robust age, Courtenay wrote, a handful of British soldiers under an Irish sergeant could have captured the Gulf ports without bloodshed, annexed them to the British Empire, and allowed Imperial to fly lawfully and without unwarranted interference. The pugnacious C. G. Grey agreed, reminding readers of the Aeroplane that in ‘the good old days’ of Palmerston or even Disraeli, Britain would have landed a company of troops on whatever aerodrome it liked in defiance of the entire Persian army. Now, he added morosely, ‘we are a trifle too mealy-mouthed and diplomatic for that kind of obviously sensible action’.4 Grey’s fiery magazine columns did not only report, they also helped shape public opinion; Empire aviation was a vehicle for formulating imperial attitudes. Reading Grey, many people would have been appalled by Britain’s ineffective wriggling over the Persian airway. His interpretation of an incident involving the junior air minister Sir Philip Sassoon and Sir Denys Bray, Foreign Secretary to the Indian Government, is telling. The two men were detained (for less than a day) at Basra aerodrome in October 1928. Humiliatingly, their captors and interrogators were ‘half a dozen barefooted, ragged, verminous Persian soldiers’ and ‘officials who would not be given jobs as street sweepers’ in Britain. The episode, Grey wrote, was enough to make Queen Victoria turn in her grave. He recalled fondly the occasion two or three years before the Indian Mutiny when a British major had defeated the whole Persian army with one battalion of Sepoys. Grey reflected how ‘in the days when the British Empire was worth actually calling an Empire’, the airline crew and the passengers would have punched heads and kicked bottoms at Basra before taking off and saying no more.5 The episode involving Sassoon spotlighted Britain’s declining willingness and capacity to exercise power. This was a time, indeed, when Britain was daunted by the complexities of events overseas, acted passively and unimaginatively, and muddled and fumbled its way.6 As the 1932 concession deadline approached, negotiations with Persia became an exercise in brinkmanship. Increasingly, Britain pinned hopes on extracting a temporary extension that would enable last-minute preparation of the Arabian route. Collective international protest was another possibility: Britain could band together with the Dutch and the French to press the Persians to open the coastal Gulf route permanently. Both European countries had a warmer relationship with Persia than did Britain, and Brancker, for one, argued that whereas the Persians were suspicious of Britain they had nothing to [ 147 ]

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fear from the French and Dutch. Yet co-operation between the three west European countries was not without risk: if their joint representation to Teheran failed, Britain would be obliged to invite rival national airlines to use the Arabian air route which it wanted for exclusive use. In 1932 Imperial’s Persian permit was extended temporarily. Up to the last minute, however, Britain worked with mounting panic to ensure that there would be some way to fly to India even if Persia remained obdurate. A route along the opposite side of the Gulf was the last resort. Some advisers favoured flying the route permanently. C. G. Grey was in favour on the grounds that renewing agreement with Persia would have ‘entailed methods and means which any Englishman would naturally consider humiliating when dealing with Oriental people’. Clinging to the remnants of imperial superiority, he argued that Britain would do better on a route where it was entitled to be master. Within months he was writing that, in fact, Britain also only flew down the Arabian side of the Gulf ‘by leave of a lot of little Arab squireens’.7 Whereas the Arabian route was well suited to military flying, its course was hardly ideal for civilian traffic. As a connection between Europe and India it was longer than the more direct Persian one. Other disadvantages included the sea crossing at the Straits of Hormuz, and a physical environment even more unpleasant than on the opposite shores of the Gulf. The heat could be excruciating, the flies a pest. It was feared that Imperial staff at Khasab on the Oman Peninsula would ‘go off their heads’. The physical inhospitability of the Arabian coast was compounded by cultural considerations. Lt-Col (Sir) H. V. Biscoe, Britain’s longserving Political Resident in the Gulf, held out little prospect for straightforward dealings with the trucial sheikhs in the seven principalities. Over several years his candid advice was to keep well away from ‘petty’ potentates and ‘primitive’ Arabs whom he regarded as ‘little removed from savages’. They were, he declared, ‘quite the stupidest people with whom it has been my misfortune to deal’, less intelligent even than country yokels in Britain.8 Of course, caricature would never have been a formal part of British imperial foreign policy. Political obstacles were among the most telling ones with which Britain had to contend on the Arabian coast where ‘even the smaller nations took turns at twisting the lion’s tale’.9 Britain’s long-standing policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of Arabia was more than a trifling consideration in the Foreign Office, and the sheikhs guarded their independence jealously. The Ibn Saud, for instance, effectively ruled out coastal landings between Kuwait and Bahrein by [ 148 ]

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refusing permission for the RAF to conduct reconnaissance flights. Where landings were possible local people might be hostile. Biscoe anticipated the need to defend aerodromes with guards at great expense while simultaneously provoking more aggression. In some places landing sites would have to be taken by force. At Kalba, for example, it was likely that an emergency landing ground would only be obtained by threatening to bomb the sheikh or seize his dhows. Even Biscoe judged that such a step would be a rather extreme one to take against a ruler who refused to grant air facilities in his own territory. But at Ras-al-Khaimah, just such a step was taken: seizing eight pearling dhows and threatening destruction of forts obtained the ‘worthless and obstructive’ sheikh’s co-operation. The imperative of safeguarding airline personnel, passengers and equipment at aerodromes in Arabia was given careful attention. At Sharjah, consideration was given to anchoring a hospitality vessel offshore. In the end the aerodrome and rest camp were surrounded by barbed wire. For the first few civil flights, RAF aircraft were in the vicinity and a naval sloop was stationed offshore. Payments had to be made to keep at bay the marauding Bedouin and the sheikh’s querulous relations. Even so, despite the Sharjah sheikh offering to share his

Figure 7  An armed guard, assigned by the Sheikh of Sharjah to the ­stockaded landing ground, poses in front of an Imperial Airways HP42 being serviced at Kuwait, 17 April 1934.

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subsidy payments, he was threatened with death by his brothers and by the sheikh of Ras-al-Khaimah. British authorities hoped that the premium paid for Sharjah would lessen when other sheikhs asked for an air station. The latter, however, warned the sheikh at Ras-al-Khaimah not to accord facilities to the British. Family feuding at Sharjah was only one element of local politics to contend with. Its selection as a landing site infuriated the residents of Dubai. They thought that the British India Steam Navigation Company would divert to Sharjah and rob their town of the shipping service that had helped it surpass Sharjah to become the regional emporium. Terminating southbound air services at Basra and transferring passengers to a ship for onward passage to Karachi could have avoided the various difficulties that Imperial faced in the trucial states. But the spectre of Britain regressing to steamships in the air age was galling. Besides, the option made little financial sense: Imperial would have been entitled to compensation in terms of a force majeure clause in their operating agreement. Estimates were that the exchequer would have to pay the airline £30,000 annually until 1939, even allowing for the falling away of the yearly £38,500 subsidy payment. A less expensive option was to fly the Basra–Karachi stretch using flying boats. From the point of view of aviation diplomacy this scheme had the added attraction that it would be easy to exclude French and Dutch airlines whose aircraft fleets comprised only landplanes. Imperial toyed with the flying-boat option until March 1932 when it disclosed plans to operate the Arabian service with landplanes. The decision had engineering merit: the same aircraft would still be used west of Karachi and on the Indian subcontinent. Imperial also retained the flexibility of being able to switch to the Persian route without delay if necessary. Furthermore, the use of landplanes made it possible to eliminate the night-stop that the flying boat service required. Accordingly, it was possible to maintain the existing timetable of flights to and from India. Using landplanes also avoided the initial capital cost (£28,500) of new aircraft and installations and the added annual operating expenses (£26,000) of flying-boat operations. The availability of landplanes with a 50 per cent higher payload capacity than the first generation of civilian flying boats was also decisive.10

India Britain’s prime anxiety about air services in and across India arose out of a concern for efficient, regular Empire service. Obstacles or exclusions which favoured the economic interests of other national carriers, or which gave political privileges to non-Empire countries were consid[ 150 ]

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ered out of order. Temporary landing and refuelling concessions made to the Dutch and French Empire airlines were embarrassing yet acceptable, but mail-traffic rights were another matter. Geddes sent Thomson a memorandum (opened posthumously by his successor) setting out in forthright terms the imperative of preventing the ‘invasion’ of Empire by foreign civil air transport operations and aircraft.11 While British plans for aviation through India to Australia were still inchoate, the Dutch offered to operate a temporary trans-India airmailonly service between England and Australia as from October 1932. Whitehall fumbled the proposal deliberately even though the service was quick and would not cost British postal users anything extra. A high-level meeting in the Air Ministry heard the view that Britain should not present the Dutch postal authority with a golden goose that would decrease its subsidy to KLM on eastern routes. Although the Postmaster-General argued that some airmail service would be better than none, and that duplicate services were un-businesslike, the objection was sustained that enabling the Dutch to link Holland with their own colonies was different from facilitating Dutch flights to a British dominion in advance of British services. Weighty political considerations carried the day. In a memorandum for a Cabinet meeting that year, the new Air Minister, Lord Londonderry, declared it ‘unthinkable’ to allow the Dutch to be the first to link England and Australia by air: ‘to do so would surely strike a most damaging blow to our Imperial prestige’.12 Earlier, German aviation interests in India were repelled. The request made by Junkers in 1929 to extend its Berlin–Teheran–Bushire route across India via Karachi and Bombay to Colombo in Ceylon was refused even though the proposal was just for a weekly mail service without any Indian Government subsidy. Brancker blocked the idea by arguing that Junkers aircraft would not get an airworthiness certificate for operating in the British Empire. Undaunted, Junkers replied that they would domicile their company in Goa and obtain a Portuguese certificate of airworthiness. As a member of ICAN, India would be obliged to honour the certification. Indeed, the country might have done so gladly at a time of widespread disenchantment with the colonial overlord.13 In the 1930s strong and persistent Indian opposition gathered around the suspicion that if Imperial was permitted to run local air services in India, or even across India, it might acquire the same intolerance and economic superiority that certain leading British steamship companies exhibited. Indians were also keen to use fledgling aviation to assert their own individuality and nationhood. The Indian Department of Industries and Labour (which had responsibility for aviation) insisted [ 151 ]

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that nationalist interests wanted a fair start in air transport. They did not want to be blocked by ‘dominating, powerful and monopolistic outside interests’. If Imperial was genuinely and sincerely keen to develop Indian aviation, and could offer immediate service, then the Department would reluctantly and conditionally relent.14 Reacting to the Indian Government’s refusal to let Imperial fly beyond Karachi, C. G. Grey snorted ‘that is how our Imperial air line is treated by a government of coloured folk’. He expected loyalty and co-operation from Indians, but sensed disunity within the subcontinent. He had previously greeted reports of growing interest in flying clubs with the caustic remark that they would make for quite a nice little air war when India broke up. Hoare himself protested that the Indian authorities did not fully appreciate what Imperial would do for the country: it would participate in international aviation earlier than otherwise and could tap into the experience of the premier commercial airline of the Empire. Much later, an eminent aviation historian diagnosed the Indian attitude as confusion between cabotage and sabotage.15 Where, indeed, was the line between reserving domestic traffic for home carriers and wrecking the prospects for fledgling international airlines? Imperial did not gain outright control on the trans-India air route. Instead, in December 1929, the Indian Government signed a two-year charter with Imperial to fly between Karachi and Delhi. The arrangement was a financial drain: the annual cost to the Indian Government was £35,000, but annual takings never exceeded £3,700. With the India Office adamant that Indian revenues could not stand the financial strain of constructing the Karachi–Rangoon link, plans for an Indian state air service to points east were abandoned in the early 1930s when economic depression made the outlook even bleaker. When the Imperial charter ended in 1931, the Delhi Flying Club contracted to fly mail to and from Karachi. Capt. Stack called the arrangement ‘playing at aviation’, and awaited a more substantial intervention from the expatriate British community and ‘the educated Indian’ – perhaps Tata in Bombay, or the Maharajah of Jodhpur.16 Early in 1932 the Associated Chambers of Commerce of both India and Burma resolved to pressure authorities to draw Calcutta and Rangoon into the Empire air net. The Dutch had been flying through Rangoon to Batavia for a year, and the French to Saigon for six months, but both European airlines were barred from handling airmail traffic within the British Empire. Londonderry’s 1932 Cabinet memorandum stressed the importance of funding the Karachi–Singapore link. The additional expenditure would still leave Britain spending less on aviation subsidies than Italy, Germany, France and the USA (which [ 152 ]

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respectively spent twice, three, four and ten times as much, albeit on much larger airlines). Progress with the Indian airway project was assured in September 1932 by an agreement initialled in London by Bullock and Sir Joseph Bhore. Operations on the Karachi–Singapore route would be shared equally by Imperial and by an Indian company in which Imperial would participate. At last, in 1933, the canvas of air services in the subcontinent was stretched wider. Imperial joined Indian Trans-Continental Airways in a six-year partnership to provide services between Karachi and Singapore. Subsidised by both the British and the Indian Governments, the partnership was a compromise agreed by both parties. A hiatus was ended; Empire was served by another air link. The view in England was that Imperial had created goodwill and that India could take pride being actively involved in ‘a great imperial task’. Notably, there was agreement to hire Indians for all aviation positions if at all possible. Trans-Continental, with a 49 per cent share of the joint undertaking, was backed by rupee capital (as Hoare had advised in 1926) from the Indian Government and an indigenous air-transport company. The service made its first flight to Calcutta in July 1933. After a survey by C. A. Barnard, Imperial’s Traffic Superintendent, the first organised airmail service to Rangoon commenced in September. It traced a route whose preparation had been retarded by the Indian Government’s reluctance to sink funds into Burma province that might soon claim colonial status.17

Australasia Singapore (8,500 miles from London) appeared on Imperial destination boards and timetables from December 1933. Working the old analogy, Brancker had once said he could see no reason why Singapore could not be the Clapham Junction of the East. The time had now arrived to test his foresight. The editor of Airways saw no reason why Malayans, ‘associated in our minds with the giving of munificent gifts to the Empire’, should refuse to help both it and themselves.18 In December 1934 the first scheduled airmail service reached Australia from Singapore. It was more than three years since the first experimental Britain–Australia airmail flight. On 1 April 1931, coinciding with Imperial’s seventh birthday and the release of the official report into the R101 disaster, Geddes had reminded newspaper editors that two experimental airmail flights from London to India and Australia would begin that month. Asking the public to help test the service by mailing items, he implied that it was a way of honouring the service the Smith brothers had performed for the Empire eleven [ 153 ]

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years previously. The link, he said, was ‘the first rivet in the forging of this great Empire route’.19 By 1934 an impressive five-year-long airport construction project had already started at Singapore. Building the combined landplane and flying-boat facility involved moving 7.5m cubic yards of landfill from a quarry 5 miles away and dumping it over 262 acres of unhealthy, mosquito infested swamp. Approximately 1,200 labourers were on site at any one time. Straits Governor Sir Shenton Thomas opened the £1m project – ‘the Empire’s finest airport’ – in June 1937 in view of 20,000 spectators. A scale model was exhibited at the 1938 Glasgow Fair.20 A cross-hemisphere British air service was originally meant, in part, to show the Dutch that airmails in the Empire did not need to rely on foreigners. The first British rivet in 1931 was wretched, however. There was no flying boat to complete the last 500 miles, and the Australian pilot Charles Kingsford Smith, with C. W. A. Scott, flew to Timor from Sydney to retrieve British mails and British reputation after the City of Cairo crashed at Kupang in Timor with 15,000 letters aboard. Kingsford Smith’s rescue mission aboard his Southern Sun itself came to grief at Alor Star in the Malay States, but he flew on in a replacement aircraft. Later, Kingsford Smith helped to fly Christmas mails from Australia to London. His sole passenger, the Australian Director of Civil Aviation, survived the crash at Alor Star, but was severely injured when the KLM plane he next boarded crashed at Bangkok. Before it became routine, flying airmail was a derring-do task fit for heroes. It was fine propaganda for the infant Australian National Airways (ANA) in which Kingsford Smith had an interest. In the middle of December 1931 his plane touched down at Croydon. Three days of fog and bad weather over Europe had further delayed his arrival and the delivery of mailbags then swollen to 40,000 letters. It had taken twenty-seven days for the mail to reach London from Melbourne, one day slower than by sea. Britain’s Postmaster-General would have felt vindicated in his view that it would have been better to use KLM’s established airmail service at no cost.21 The news media feasted on the start of air mailing to Australia. There was an Empire-wide BBC broadcast from Croydon. Movietone shot newsreel film of the ceremonial departure and sent it to Australia on the inaugural flight. Paramount News chartered an Imperial aircraft to film the departure of Hengist. Likewise, the completion of the round-trip airmail service also drew media attention. There was less celebration in Imperial. The embarrassment had less to do with the sequence of accidents to an ‘experimental’ flight than with the report that Kingsford Smith wanted to fly British mails back to Australia in time for Christmas. Mr Handover, Imperial’s Traffic Manager, asked [ 154 ]

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the Post Office if it could bar the interloper from transporting mail consigned for places other than Australia. Referring to ANA, he said that he would ‘much dislike’ the prospect of Australians flying the Indian mail. In the Air Ministry a more generous spirit prevailed: ANA had after all helped out in a crisis, the outbound mail would earn revenue for one of the Empire’s small financially struggling airlines, and would keep alive the interest in England-Australia airmail.22 The opening of scheduled mail and passenger services by air to and from Australia in the mid-1930s was a familiar tale of intricate bargaining, compromise and intrigue. The Australians were suspicious of Britain’s overseas air routes that resembled octopus tentacles. Rival overtures by the Dutch were checked carefully to ensure that the dominion’s interests were not compromised through the backdoor. In the end, Qantas Empire Airways, owned jointly by Imperial and the Australian carrier Qantas, took responsibility for Empire services between Brisbane and Singapore (one third of the total route length). Critics of Australia’s favourite aeronautical son, Kingsford Smith, squeezed him and ANA out of the picture by playing up his personal flaws more than his aviation ambitions and success. From Sydney, the Imperial representative, a well-connected Australian and a fervent imperialist (who was awarded a CBE in 1939), wrote to Woods Humphery denigrating and undermining Kingsford Smith. His sources included a dossier compiled by the editor of Australia’s leading aviation magazine that depended heavily on advertising revenue from British aircraft manufacturers. The hero-pilot whom C. G. Grey regarded as a self-seeking daredevil came to be seen in Imperial as a reckless soldier of fortune. Kingsford Smith’s near fatal experimental trans-Tasman airmail flight, and his wish to operate a commercial airmail service using American rather than British aircraft, meant that he was also shut out of the air route extension from Australia to New Zealand. In the end, he could not use the funds that an ‘unpatriotic’ London investment company (whose Board included Lord Sempill) offered as part of its plan to compete with Imperial.23 One peculiar aspect of the negotiations surrounding the Australian air service had to do with race. The matter was resolved quietly and quickly out of the public eye within three months of being raised, but not before it caused moral and political consternation. The BullockBhore agreement, whereby Indian and British pilots would fly alternate services for Trans-Continental Airways, was received icily in official circles in Australia. In November 1932 the Australian High Commissioner, Bruce, told the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs in London that the Australian Government would object if Indian pilots [ 155 ]

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were to fly on any part of the Karachi–Singapore air route. Moreover, he warned that Australians would boycott any such services, in which case their Government’s annual £30,000 air service subsidy would be unjustifiable. Suddenly, from a quite unexpected quarter, another rumpus threatened the integrity of the imperial airway. Imaginations reeled at the thought of every British dominion and colony adopting its own policy on using or refusing pilots of some ethnic group. A letter drafted for sending from the India Office after the event contained the sentence ‘I shudder to think what a black pilot agitation might have been like’. In the Air Ministry it fell to Hoare and Bullock to smooth out Bruce’s ‘ridiculous’ attitude, one that would undermine Bullock’s hard-won deal with Bhore. Consulting dominion office representatives was a revelation to Bullock – he found them ‘meddlesome and misinformed’. Whoever’s memory was playing tricks, Bullock traced India’s (now ‘reasonable’) wishes to operate their own services back to rankling from a tactless remark attributed by Bhore to Woods Humphery (not Chetwynd) while in India in 1927. Bullock’s preference was to keep on side with India. Informing Willingdon clarified the Indian position: the Viceroy let it be known plainly that he regarded the Australian prejudices ‘regrettable’, their attitude ‘preposterous’. Naively, he added that he found it ‘inconceivable that members of the Empire should treat fellow citizens in this way’. Yet, just as the Indians were adamant, so the Australians claimed right on their side. They invoked a 1901 law (related to overseas mail shipping) that was designed to keep Australia’s maritime reserve in the hands of only the most loyal [white] Empire subjects. It mattered little that the law was more frequently breached than honoured. After a series of high-level exchanges, principled objections were doused. On the basis of alternating flight schedules, there would in any event be a fortnightly Karachi–Singapore service flown by British pilots. Practically, too, before Indian pilots became competent (as Bullock explained sotto voce to Hoare, Hoare to Bruce, and Bruce to Prime Minister Lyons), there would also most likely be weekly ‘all-white’ flights.24 The first years of the England–Australia air service were marked by a chronic aircraft shortage. Public frustration about the delays was aggravated by memory of the superior speeds attained by the non-British civilian aircraft in the MacRobertson air race in October 1934. The new, faster, more capacious Imperial flying boats that entered service in 1938 were meant to improve performance. By then, New Zealand was linked into the imperial air network. Meanwhile, a regular weekly service from Penang to Hong Kong began in March 1936, nearly two years after negotiations started. In the imperial manner, an escort of [ 156 ]

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nine planes from a British aircraft carrier magnified the arrival of one passenger and sixteen mailbags on the first civilian biplane. Thereafter, the arrival of the silver-winged aircraft ‘plentifully decorated with Union Jacks’ never failed to attract the eyes of ‘even the most hardened old China hand’. The only British overseas possession accessible from London on a through-train ticket was now also linked by air. Airmail on schedule from Britain could reach the colony in ten days; mail ships took approximately thirty days.25 The Imperial service to Hong Kong began only after the customary arguing, negotiating and posturing. The British wanted substantially the same concessions from Siam as the French had received for their bi-weekly Paris–Saigon airmail service. But whereas the French had flown across Burma since 1931 on the basis of temporary permits, Britain wanted a more permanent concession. In return, Bangkok requested reciprocal rights for the Siamese airline, beneficial imperial airmail tariffs (Dutch air post rates were lower than the British), preferential airfares for Siamese Government officials, and training for Siamese pilots in Britain. Difficulties arose concerning the sector between Hanoi and Hong Kong for which the Chinese would have to award overflying rights, and/or where France would have to permit aircraft to land at its treaty port. A coup d’état and change of government in Siam in 1932 interrupted negotiations and added a layer of nationalism to Siamese aviation prospects. Funding was curtailed simultaneously. British representatives were frustrated by what they regarded as the obstinacy and Prussian rigidity of the German-educated Siamese Controller of Civil Aviation. But it was not just Siam’s national self-esteem which was at stake; an American official in Bangkok who had his finger on Siam’s commercial pulse recognised that Imperial wanted a free hand in as much of the Orient as possible. Woods Humphery certainly did not wish to risk any substantial corporate presence on foreign soil. Tri-partite negotiations between Britain, Siam and Hong Kong stumbled on. The cash-strapped Hong Kong aviation company was anxious about the durability of agreements signed with China. The Siamese Government was keen on a Rangoon–Hanoi–Hong Kong air link but was reluctant to give Imperial a majority stake in any arrangement. It was influenced by nationalistic objections to the British airline’s majority shareholding in Indian Trans-Continental Airways. For its part, Imperial wanted majority control of a joint organisation in order to avoid political complications that might disrupt services at a later date. In the wings during negotiations, the British Government stuck firmly to its ‘fundamental principle’ that British mails should be carried in British aircraft. [ 157 ]

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In order to show the upper hand, at the end of 1935 Imperial began a series of experimental flights between Penang and Hong Kong. They were routed via Saigon and skirted Siam. The regular ‘off-shore’ weekly flights started in March 1936. The Foreign Office wanted to demonstrate that Siam’s goodwill and territory were dispensable and that Bangkok could not blackmail London. The strategy worked, but it was not until December 1937 that the detailed politics of regional aviation were settled and Imperial could start flying across Siam from Bangkok to Hong Kong. In theory the Siamese carrier had reciprocal rights, but shortage of funds and aircraft (and limited airmail market share) meant that in practice it was excluded from cross-border air services.26

Notes   1 H. Burchall, ‘Air transport from Europe to the East’, Asiatic Review, 32 (1936), 643–50. On British-Dutch air rivalry see Dierikx, ‘Struggle for prominence’.   2 NA, AIR 2/1477: Dodd to Marquess of Reading, 21 September 1931; AIR 2/1478: J. Simon to Secretary of State, 19 March 1932; Baxter to Under-Secretary of State, 16 March 1932; AIR 5/1216.   3 Courtenay, Airman Friday, p. 183; O. Tweedy, Cairo to Persia and Back (London, 1933), p. 178; V. Sackville-West, Passenger to Teheran (Heathfield, 1926), pp. 80, 128.   4 Courtenay, Airman Friday, p. 183; Aeroplane (7 May 1930).   5 Aeroplane (27 January 1932), p. 146; NA, British Residency Diary (Persia), October 1928, p. 175; C. G. Grey, The Civil Air War (Leicester, 1945), p. 201.   6 Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire, p. 84.   7 Aeroplane (28 September 1932), p. 615; (8 February 1933), p. 206.   8 NA, AIR 2/1476: Biscoe to British Legation, Tehran, 21 August 1930; AIR 2/1478: Notes of discussion at Air Ministry, 27 January 1932; DCA to Secretary of State, 3 February 1932; AIR 5/1217: Biscoe to Foreign Secretary, Simla, 21 June 1932.   9 H. L. Smith, Airways Abroad: the Story of American World Air Routes (Washington DC, 1991), p. 99. 10 NA, AIR 2/1477: Cabinet Paper C. P. 183 (31), 23 July 1931; AIR 5/1216: Notes of meeting re Arabian Coast Route, 21 March 1932; AIR 5/1217: Paper M.E.(M) 15, May 1931; BPMA, PO 33/5551: Committee of Imperial Defence Meeting, minutes and enclosure, 9 June 1932; F. Al-Sayegh, ‘Imperial Air Communications and British Policy Changes in the Trucial States, 1929–1952’ (PhD thesis, University of Essex, 1989). 11 NA, AIR 2/1302: Geddes to Amulree, 24 October 1930; NA, DO 35/214/1 (8345/9). 12 BPMA, PO 33/4739 (8): Proposals for Extension of Dutch Air Line, meeting notes, Air Ministry, 18 March 1932; PO 33/4739 (11). 13 NA, FO 371/13641 (C2777/2777/18). 14 M. d. P. Webb, ‘Links in the Imperial chain’, Asiatic Review, 29 (1933), 693–7; BPMA, PO 33/4739 (16): Hoare to Indian Department of Industry and Labour, 14 January 1933. 15 Aeroplane (14 December 1927), p. 798; (2 September 1931), p. 562; Higham, Britain’s Imperial Air Routes, p. 169. 16 T. N. Stack, ‘By mailplane to India’, Air and Airways, 9 (1932), 189–90. 17 Spectator (27 February 1932); J. A. Shillidy, ‘Civil aviation in India’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 83 (1935), 478–92; C. A. Barnard, ‘The airway to Australia’, Air and Airways (1933), 5–6.

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eastern crescent 18 Cited in T. S. Sprigg, ‘Aviation and Malaya’, British Malaya (May 1929), 23–6. 19 Higham, Britain’s Imperial Air Routes; The Times (2 April 1931), p. 11. 20 M. M. Tun, ‘Some Asiatic displays at the Glasgow exhibition’, Asiatic Review, 34 (1938), 806–16; Journal of the Institution of Civil Engineers, 12 (1939), 90, 97. 21 The Times (23 April; 17 December 1931); M. Hooper, Kangaroo Route (Sydney, 1985); Lloyds List (27 November 1931); BPMA, PO 33/4739 (8). 22 BPMA, PO 33/3597; 33/4739 (33). 23 Mackersey, Smithy, pp. 268–9, 307, 15, 39; Aeroplane (21 June 1939), p. 803. 24 BL, OIOC, L, PO/1/41 (xiv): Bullock to Hoare, 10 January 1933; Bruce to Lyons, 12 January 1933; Willingdon to Hoare, 22 January 1933. 25 Higham, Britain’s Imperial Air Routes; Aeroplane (15 January 1936); R. Brenard, Asia in Britain’s world air system’, Asiatic Review 35 (1939), p. 361; J. Morris, Hong Kong (London, 1988). 26 NA, DO 35/214/1 (8345/126); BPMA, PO 33/4793 (3): Foreign Office to Director General, Post Office, 1 January 1935; PO 33/4793 (5); E. M. Young, Aerial Nationalism: A History of Aviation in Thailand (Washington DC, 1995).

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The stirring tale of determined, organised struggle against nature so as to pioneer an African airway was brought to public attention again in January 1931. The epic tale of building and maintaining the first African airway in the 1920s was resurrected in The Times. Woods Humphery lectured two hundred people on the subject at a meeting of the dominions and colonies section of the Royal Society of Arts. The published version of his lecture referred to the fuel stations which were isolated for three months of the year during the rainy season, and to the way in which three weeks neglect could obliterate distinguishing marks on landing grounds and make them dangerous; during the rainy season constant attention was needed to level out elephant tracks. At Jinja, landing places were hacked out of forest. Thirty African labourers were left to trim weeds and bush. More than four hundred Africans worked for a month preparing ground for Tabora airstrip. At Abercorn, a missionary undertook to supervise the maintenance of the landing ground. In Northern Rhodesia, Maj. Court Treatt’s ground-based survey party had to contend with grass sixteen feet high. The landing ground at Ndola was cut out of forest. Sixty-three anthills towering between twenty and thirty feet were removed. Each one was about forty feet in diameter. Seven hundred Africans spent almost five months manually clearing and levelling 25,000 tons of ant heap sand. At another site, 90,000 trees were felled and removed. Elsewhere, workers carted away a thousand wagonloads of stone and rock. Chief Khama turned his Serowe racecourse into an aerodrome.1 The first successful 1920 trans-Africa flight was never envisaged as the launch of regular air service. Flying did indeed stall until 1925 when the RAF started regular yearly formation (training) flights across selected African route sectors. The purpose, Hoare told the House of Commons, was to show the flag, flaunt British technology, and study air routes with a view to future commercial services. With France [ 160 ]

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and Belgium already active in the field, a process not unlike a second scramble for Africa was underway. The internal Congolese Ligne du Roi Albert, started by the Belgians in 1925, presented itself as a hub for trans-Africa services. It was one that threatened to compete with an all-British air route. Air traffic between Europe and Africa might also be deflected onto a more direct westerly route using established Belgian and French services. On the North–South route it had established in 1919 the RAF used airstrips that had been handed over to local administrations. The East– West formation flight from Khartoum to Kano was more in the way of pioneering and, apparently, the arrival of aircraft in Nigeria ‘caused great excitement and a marked increase in British prestige’. In the same year, 1925, private enterprise muscled in on imperial aviation. According to The Times this was ‘the British way’. Capt. T. A. Gladstone arrived in Kenya on his own initiative to promote the establishment of an experimental 1,400-mile air service south from the railhead at Khartoum to Kisumu. Proving flights funded by a subsidiary of the Leeds-based Blackburn Aeroplane and Motor Company eventually bore fruit. Late in 1926 the governments of the Sudan, Kenya and Uganda awarded financial assistance for twelve experimental flights over a year in each direction between Khartoum and Kisumu.2 A purpose-built seaplane built jointly by five prominent British manufacturers was launched on the Thames at Rochester with great pomp. In a special ‘Khartoum–Kisumu’ supplement (several copies of which Gladstone took with him aboard his aeroplane’s delivery flight), the London-based East Africa weekly reported speeches by several dignitaries. The governors of the Sudan and Uganda both alluded to the Nile valley as the historic source of profound human progress. Over lunch other speakers addressed a gathering of some forty people on more prosaic topics of faster and more comfortable travel. The prospects for flying gold from the Belgian Congo and diamonds from Tanganyika were raised. The idea was planted that soon every (settler) farm in Kenya would have a little plane that would be used for carrying schoolchildren and laundry, and for shooting wild animals. The effect that aeroplanes would have on ‘the East African savage’ was said to be minimal as ‘he’ dispelled all technical innovation as an act of God. One speaker highlighted the commercial benefits of the new air service, especially for East African cotton growers whose samples could reach Lancashire two weeks before the ‘menacing’ competition from Bombay. Editorial comment in East Africa judged that air service would put ‘the outer Marches of Empire’ on the map, thereby enhancing tourism and commerce, and increasing the flow of settlers and capital. Contact between the East African dependencies was also forecast to improve. [ 161 ]

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Having himself flown in East Africa and attended the governors’ conference at which plans for regional aviation were approved, Sir Alan Cobham soon joined forces with Blackburn. By mid-1927, after completing only five of the twenty-four flights, Gladstone had crashed twice and had resorted to an RAF plane. Alert to the necessity of pushing ahead with an air link, the Colonial Office agreed to help support Gladstone financially without referring to the Air Ministry. In 1928, the Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and the two Rhodesias guaranteed a further joint aviation subsidy, but it was inadequate. Being committed to supporting Imperial Airways, the British Government declined to assist. In 1929 the Air Ministry persuaded Cobham and Blackburn to submerge their interests in the designated Empire airline to form Imperial Airways (Africa) Limited. Cobham was not ‘given Africa to develop for aviation under the Union Jack’ as Sir Harry Brittain recommended when toasting ‘Imperial Aviation’ at a Savoy banquet for the pilot in 1928. Pocketing £30,000, share options, a deferred half share of profits in the fledgling airline, and seats on its management board, Cobham, Gladstone and Blackburn sold out in 1930. Imperial was left holding the Cairo–Mwanza trunk route for which the small Wilson Airways operated a feeder service. In East Africa, as elsewhere, the airline was never to face any competing airship service along a route from the Red Sea to Mombasa and Durban such as Sir Halford Mackinder predicted.3 In the early years of African aviation, competition of a different kind did, however, emerge in west central Africa. In March 1927 the British Air Attaché in Paris notified the Air Ministry that the Belgians were considering three alternative ways of linking the Congo to Brussels. The options were to elongate France’s air route along the West African coast, to start a new trans-Saharan service, or to link to a future British air route along the Nile. Belgian preferences for dealing with Britain rather than France were made evident on several occasions. Late in 1928 the Belgians surveyed a feeder service route to and from the eastern Congo, but tardy British aeronautical development along the Nile– Great Lakes axis failed to exploit differences that emerged between the two European colonial powers. And, fortunately for British imperial interests, the possibility of the Belgians striking first with a trunk air route service between central and southern Africa was superseded by a joint Franco-Belgian project for a diagonal air route from French West Africa via the Congo to Beira and Madagascar. Financial and organisational difficulties delayed the opening until 1932.4 Assuming that the British public was more fascinated by wilderness conquest ten years earlier than by dilatory development and by administrative measures and manoeuvres in the interim, Woods [ 162 ]

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Humphery’s 1931 RSA lecture brushed aside details of his airline’s managerial arrangements in Africa. The deals with colonial and provincial governors, municipalities and other air transport operators were not mentioned. The awkward matter of being obliged to secure a (twenty-year) permit to fly over and land in Egypt from 1931 was not mentioned. Keeping silent about such things preserved an illusion. On the route that Brancker had told the Africa Society was ‘by far the most romantic in the Empire’, the fiction was that there were no difficulties south of Egypt. This country was the only non-British ­sovereign state that the trans-Africa air route straddled, and Britain took a decade to square its strategic interests there with national sensitivities.5 Among the matters Woods Humphery glossed over was the announcement in the second half of 1930 of £88,000 worth of Colonial Development Fund grants to Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and Northern Rhodesia for airfield and wireless facilities. The funding was no unilateral decision: approval followed a meeting with the Deputy-Director of Civil Aviation (Mr F. G. L. Bertram, who had been secretary to the 1919 Weir Committee) and the Air Ministry’s veteran African airway surveyor, Tymms. Woods Humphery also failed to report modest public disenchantment in Africa about air developments, especially the Imperial monopoly. After 1930, unchallenged dominion on the northeast African trunk air route was not to the liking of local interests. Air service suffered.6 In April 1931 the Nairobi Chamber of Commerce protested about the delayed start of air service, the inconvenience to the public, and the loss of public money. In January 1932 the Ugandan Chamber of Commerce complained about the air route bypassing Kampala. Both chambers asked their governments to suspend subsidy payments pending the establishment of a proper service. In Kenya, speakers turned the message of the airline’s latest ‘propaganda pamphlet’ back on Imperial: like the trumpeting elephant on the front cover, they too asked ‘where’s my mail’?7 Africa airmail service delays due to misdirection and over-carrying occurred at the rate of two a month from March 1931 to March 1932, and cost at least two Imperial employees their jobs. Embarrassingly, one of the mislaid mail items was the message sent by the Secretary of State for Colonies to the Ugandan Governor on the first flight to Port Bell. On investigation, the Imperial Traffic Manager reported that ‘the Egyptian stations got into rather a spin’ when handling their first flight. When the Secretary of State commended the new airway (which, he conceded, was not of steel, but was instead as light as the fabric of Rhodes’s vision), he did not imagine that the arrangements would [ 163 ]

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become a nightmare. The imagined progress and enhanced prosperity and happiness in Uganda clearly would not be ­instantaneous.8 The delayed start of Imperial passenger service might have been the reason the cotton millionaire Maj. Jack Coats hired T. Campbell Black to fly him privately from Nairobi to London in January 1931. When it did start, passenger service was less than smooth. It could also be embarrassing. In July 1931, for example, northbound passengers waited three days for a relief plane from Juba where their Imperial aircraft was damaged during landing. The relief aircraft sent from Cairo broke down at Malakal. One of the inconvenienced passengers telegraphed Nairobi and hired a Wilson Airways light plane to get him to Khartoum quickly. Imperial declined Wilson’s offer to fly a bigger aircraft and take the other seven stranded passengers as well. Little bird did not rescue big bird, but it did carry away a big beast, Maj. E. S. Grogan. He, at least, was an exception to Winifred Spooner’s view that unhurried settlers in Africa had no reason to value the speed of air travel.9 When time was priced low, flying was about novelty, ease, comfort and status. The start of Imperial service south from East Africa was also delayed; Imperial had itself been over-eager or had been pressed to start services prematurely. Hoare was not to blame: in 1929 he rejected the airline’s proposed start-up programme as politically impracticable. Clients in southern Africa were unlikely to have pressed harder than their northern neighbours for air service: flying to the Cape was only six days quicker than sailing from Southampton, whereas in central Africa airmail could save as many as twenty-four days. Whatever caused delay, the writer of one letter published in the South African paper Aviation in Africa in June 1931 recommended inviting the Americans to run the African airway.10 More than two years had passed since the Union Government initially agreed to co-operate with Empire air schemes. It had agreed to pay costs of an airship mooring mast in Durban and, after airshipping was abandoned, it continued its support for a service by Imperial. The first trans-Africa flights had been expected to start early in 1930. By April 1931 air service reached only as far as the Sudan. The ‘jubilation’ in Khartoum that a copy of The Times could be read within four days of printing in London would not be shared further south on a regular basis for many months.11 By August 1931 Imperial had made eight announcements delaying the opening of the through service. In South Africa, irritation mounted about the powerlessness of the Government, the largest continental funder of the African airway. Would it not be better to follow the example of India and Australia and develop domestic or regional aviation independent of the ‘whims [ 164 ]

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and fancies’ of a British airline? Would that not help preserve ‘national character’ in aviation? An editorial in Aviation in Africa railed against metropolitan intervention that undermined and deflected Government subsidies for local aviation. Imperial was accused of wanting to smother competition and keep dormant other civil flying until the moment when, as big brother, it could exploit air routes for the benefit of shareholders. Predatory action was anticipated from Britain’s imperial carrier within South Africa, and the South African Government’s neglect of the local airline, Union Airways, was attributed to connivance or fear of takeover.12 Undermining financial interests or national character was only one concern. The effect on the Union’s national security was another. A senior military officer in South Africa and Maj. A. Miller (OBE), the proprietor of Union Airways, were both anxious. Whereas they thought that the character and personality of white South Africans would deal adequately with the ‘menace’ of the ‘huge native majority’ in the Union, it might be necessary at some future date to show, or use, aerial force.13 Abdicating air capacity in favour of some mythical imperial interest was not acting in the perceived national interest. Even regional African security was of more concern to Pretoria than imperial security, and South Africans still considered railways their chief territorial weapon. Any innovation that threatened to undermine the precarious traffic revenues of the South African Railways was resisted.14

Commercial service The first despatch of mails down the contested African airway was in December 1931 aboard an aircraft delivery flight. Film footage showing the loading of the aircraft at Croydon was loaded on the flight. Three mailbags consigned to Nairobi and five to Johannesburg were carried on what was effectively an experimental service. Almost half the items were commemorative philatelic covers. None bore messages in the Afrikaans language that the South African Post Office had requested. Conveniently for the British authorities, international postal conventions only recognised French and English.15 Regular weekly air service between London and South Africa started in January 1932, nine months later than initially intended. The first of what eventually added up to 1,600 scheduled Imperial inter-war flights on the African trunk route was not an event which brought out flags and bunting on English streets. Only the airline, the aviation authorities and the press marked the start of the service scheduled to take ten days. At Croydon, Air Vice-Marshall Sir Vyell Vyvyan (the British [ 165 ]

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Government’s nominee director on the Imperial Board) and his wife, and Bertram, departed on the inaugural flight on the Royal Mail plane Helena. Some 20,000 letters and 150 parcels accompanied them. It was twelve years since the first flight along the 5,200-mile stretch between the most northerly and southerly tips of British Africa. Only days later, on 1 February, the first telephone connection opened between London and Cape Town. Technological progress was becoming commonplace, and the launch of the air route occurred ‘with true British phlegm ... in a casual and almost secretive manner’. There was certainly no great public celebration of the materialisation of Cecil Rhodes’s grandiose vision of an ‘all-red’ trans-Africa transport route. In the end, practical aviation had achieved more than speeches, pamphleteering and Albert Hall rallies, but the applause was muted. The ‘twin citadels of British power and presence in Africa’ may have been joined, but the triumphalism was curiously restrained for an event that the South African High Commissioner in London, Charles te Water, construed as lighting and civilising Darkest Africa.16 Sir Harry Brittain imagined Afrikaners enjoying the sight of British aircraft in South African skies. Northbound aircraft revived the Voortrekker spirit each Sunday, he wrote.17 He neglected to convey the detestation of British power which originally prompted trekking, and which may indeed have been stoked by this latest British assertion. The formalities at Croydon featured a celebratory lunch hosted by Imperial for one hundred and twenty guests. The theme might have been ‘roots’. Each person received a folder on which was printed Ecclesiasticus’ rousing praise of famous men, and a nineteenth-century history of civilisation in England that valued communications as a way of overcoming prejudice and hostility. A reprinted 1843 Punch cartoon aptly recalled the long-standing dream of flying to Africa. Probably drawn by W. M. Thackeray, it poked fun at a parliamentary proposal for an aerial transport company. A ‘carriage’ is shown landing at the Egyptian pyramids; a ladies’ waiting room is evident. Tethered balloons destined for the ‘Mountains of the Moon’, ‘Cape’ and ‘Zehara’ anticipated passengers making an onward journey. The gastronomic celebration at Croydon had a decidedly imperial flavour. It included soup made from Ascension Island turtles, and sole, crayfish, citrus salad, wine, brandy and liqueur from the Cape. There was also fruit ice made to an Afrikaans recipe, Kenyan coffee, South African lemon and orange squash, Empire cheese, and cigarettes from Rhodesia and Egypt. The main dish was roast pheasant, not springbok cutlet and crocodile meat as one journalist fantasised. Toasts were drunk to the King and to Empire communications.18 Maj. Court Treatt (who had led the RAF’s work opening the 2,000-mile Abercorn–Cape [ 166 ]

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Town section of the trans-Africa air route in the early 1920s) was not at Croydon to give a toast, although his presence would have been appropriate. The epic motorcar journey he led along the spine of British Africa from the Cape to Cairo between September 1924 and January 1926 was just as much a test of British backbone.19 On hand to toast Imperial’s African air route was Maj. E. S. Grogan. Graciously, he did not speak about his experience at Juba six months previously. At the turn of the century he had become a celebrity on account of being the first person to traverse the length of Africa. Seeking to survey a possible transcontinental transport route (and to prove himself a man worth marrying), the charming, thrusting buccaneer had travelled from Cape Town to Bulawayo by train, coach and wagon in 1896. Between 1898 and 1900 he trekked on foot and by boat and train from Beira to Cairo. Grogan’s toast quoted from a letter that Cecil Rhodes had sent him concerning a trans-Africa railway. Thirty years previously Grogan had defended this scheme as Britain’s moral and developmental obligation; there was no reason why he should have thought differently of the airway.20 In writing, however, he reflected more narrowly on the regional and sectional benefits of an air service. C. G. Grey cited his letter approvingly in the East African Standard. Before the advent of the aeroplane, Grogan wrote, it had been geographically impossible to have ‘any easy contact between the thinking people of Nairobi and the thinking people of Rhodesia’. Earlier, in his February 1920 article in the London Times, Grogan noted that flight was the newest dimension of a European presence that could ‘leaven the inert dough of Africa’s peoples’. The continent’s ‘primitive people’, he wrote, just needed ‘the stimulus and organising capacity of the European’ to become important contributors to the world economy.21 Imperialist mentality and discourse was tenacious. In January 1932 postprandial torpor was probably enough to obliterate lofty sentiments about the importance of the first airmail flight. Broadcasting on the BBC, te Water excelled himself. He was anxious that the historic event would pass unnoticed in an age in which the miraculous had become commonplace. When a great corporation threw its lattice of airways over the world’s oldest continent, he thought it important to mark the occasion. The need was all the more in the gloomy days of war debts, sterile reparations and tumbling revenues. South Africa’s High Commissioner wondered, rather vaguely, what other enterprise of the day could stimulate conjecture more, or spur more vigorous thought. Referring to the ‘vast store of wealth of this richest continent of the earth’, te Water claimed that ‘within our times there will be presented a series of dazzling opportunities to the men of enterprise’.22 Smart money attuned to te Water’s plundering vision [ 167 ]

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would already have acted on Woods Humphery’s illustration of the comparative time savings which towns along the air route would enjoy vis-à-vis existing surface transport. Conveniently, the air route also zigzagged between prime agricultural and mining zones in order to tap consumer and producer markets. Mishaps disrupted the inaugural commercial mail flights across Africa in both directions. One aircraft became bogged down on a sodden landing field and was repaired with parts from the wrecked City of Cairo that were shipped from Timor to Durban. Another aeroplane disappeared for thirty-six hours before being found during an air search. Tinned food was dropped, a rescue party was despatched overland, and a team of African porters shouldered mails for three days to Broken Hill. The delivery to points en route to Mwanza on the southern shore of Lake Victoria began after delays due to late delivery of new aircraft, interruptions to the telegraph, and collapse of a flying boat slipway in Kisumu. Delays also arose when aircraft spare parts shipped to Kenya by boat were damaged in transit. The accidents effectively reduced the fleet on the Nairobi–Cape Town sector from five to two aircraft. At Broken Hill, the City of Baghdad (to which Bertram and the Vyvyans had transferred) was turned around to carry the delayed mails north, while the southbound load was carried ahead on a privately owned aeroplane hired by Imperial. The three passengers proceeded to Cape Town ignominiously by rail.23 Beforehand, the three VIPs had an unexpected taste of expatriate life. City of Baghdad’s captain decided to make an unscheduled landing when confronting foul weather over Northern Rhodesia. Quite by chance he spotted some level lakeside ground. It happened that this was where the scion of an upper-class English family, Col Stewart Gore-Brown, had built his dream house. Landing at Shiwa Ngandu was astonishingly fortunate. Lady Vyvyan, resplendent in mink stole, tweed suit, floppy hat and string of pearls, admitted she was relieved to have avoided ‘cannibals’. All the visitors would have been amazed as they were driven through the arched, clock tower gateway up a tree-lined avenue toward the stately, incongruous red brick mansion. A Union Jack flag fluttered reassuringly from the first-floor terrace. Lady Vyvyan thought it a miracle to have landed ‘in the middle of the jungle with people of one’s own kind’ – people from Surrey, indeed. It might just have crossed her mind that she had escaped the cooking chore that her gender would have prescribed in other circumstances. Her aristocratic roots surely left her ill-prepared to muck in and use Imperial’s emergency equipment and rations: saucepan and Primus stove, bottles of Bovril, tins of preserved meat, biscuits and condensed milk, tea, sugar and drinking water. Instead, the drop-in visitors from [ 168 ]

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Figure 8  African spectators, and two uniformed Imperial employees, watch refuelling of City of Karachi at Moshi airfield, Tanganyika, 8 September 1932.

London enjoyed a civilised dinner of guinea fowl, champagne and fig pudding. The overnight experience surpassed anything that Imperial would ever give its passengers. Gore-Brown, heir to the Brooklands estate (with its aerodrome), must have revelled in the irony of the emergency landing: an aeroplane had arrived despite his having failed to persuade air-route surveyors to select Shiwa Ngandu as a stop. Bertram (disqualified from hard labour by race, status and dress – dark suit and bowler hat) reported how his host selflessly ordered ‘an army of blacks’ to cut down two treasured ornamental trees and to remove huge ant heaps and fill gullies with the spoil to make a runway. Work continued until dark. It restarted at dawn. Gore-Brown’s own diary entry tells of one hundred farm labourers corralled to hack an 800-foot-long and 70-foot-wide path through the bush.24 Impromptu levelling formed the basis of what, in 1933, became an official government-financed emergency landing strip. Gore-Brown was thrilled to design and direct the building of his own airport. He wrote of one hundred and thirty labourers ‘hoeing and singing and carrying buckets of earth ceaselessly day after day’. There were few other tasks, his biographer remarked, in which large gangs of African labourers could be so gainfully employed with so little White ­supervision.25 [ 169 ]

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The take-off in City of Baghdad must have been easier than those aboard would have contemplated when last they were airborne. Fortunately too, the gentlemanly farmer Brown had replenished his petrol stocks. After refilling the aircraft tanks he faced a two-day, 100-mile repeat road journey for restocking. The squire was spared one trip to the post office however: on his return trip north, Bertram tossed out newspapers and letters when flying over Shiwa Ngandu. This was the closest that air mail delivery came to the weekly parachute drops at isolated spots in Africa that Imperial contemplated in 1931.26 As the new trans-Africa service established itself, aircraft spares were unloaded at successive stops. Newly appointed station managers and ground engineers disembarked to start their assignments. Letters of introduction to governors and agents were offloaded. Addressing the South African Governor General, Geddes wrote confidently that everyone who wished for the rehabilitation of the British Commonwealth would support the ‘great Imperial Air Route’. He added that the new venture would surely be another means of uniting the Empire’s people.27 Similarly, Woods Humphery wrote on Imperial Airways stationery and referred to imperial stresses and opportunities. Addressing commercial houses in British Africa he pointed out that ‘buying British’ involved more than just patriotically purchasing Empire commodities. Using Imperial for personal travel, and for parcel and freight shipments, would also support the value of sterling and enhance ‘the well being of all’. When eventually the first airmail from Africa landed at Croydon it comprised more than 50,000 items. Approximately a quarter of those originated in central Africa and the Sudan. Ensuring some longevity for the event, many items were sent in ‘First Flight’ envelopes addressed as souvenirs to stamp  ­collectors.28

Complaints and challenge In its early days the erratic trans-Africa service drew disparaging comments. Not everyone carped. Grogan was one who was disinclined to knock an ambitious project that aimed to serve Empire. His attitude was not simply that of a romantic, one-time adventurer. He also spoke with the authority he had acquired as an established entrepreneur and the founding father of colonial Kenya. Grogan was no lackey of London ‘bumbledom’, yet knowing about the difficulties of bringing colonial projects to fruition he defended Imperial. The airline was making a fine effort, he thought. Its 90 per cent operating efficiency needed to be put in context: ‘do you know anything in Kenya that is 50% efficient?’ he countered. Grogan’s query had a wider currency. [ 170 ]

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He would have known the sort of frustration of investing in landing facilities at Broken Hill, for example, and then being expected to divert operations to Lusaka.29 Much-needed investment to improve the African airway was signalled early in 1931. The announcement that a railway trust fund (established by the South African mining magnate Sir Alfred Beit) would spend £50,000 on aviation in the Rhodesias was also a sign of shifting priorities in African transportation. After a field study in the territories by an Air Ministry representative sent from London (he travelled by Imperial to Bulawayo), the Beit Railway trustees announced a rather reduced investment. Toward the end of 1932 the Ministry approved an £11,000 programme for upgrading regular and emergency air facilities at landing sites spaced at approximately fifty-mile intervals between Tanganyika and the Transvaal. Long before the practice of public inquiries into land deals and use, the incidental consequences were not always publicised. At Lusaka the land purchased for an airfield separated the best area of the new capital from African slums, thereby facilitating segregationist urban development. The identity of the buyer of the private land at Lusaka, and its intended use as an airfield, was kept secret to avoid inflating the asking price. Away from such key sites, other work would be done at isolated, little known and largely unmapped spots whose names were redolent of mysterious Africa. Landing grounds would be extended, drainage improved, and concrete aprons laid so that aircraft could work in the wet season. It was also intended to realign several runways to facilitate take-off in prevailing winds, and to install or upgrade telephone links and navigational and meteorological instrumentation. Road strips were to be laid out as emergency-landing grounds for pilots forced down by engine trouble, heavy rain or thunderstorms.30 The work was supplemented by additional Colonial Development Fund grants for aviation ground facilities in East Africa. By 1933 these awards totalled £105,000. Although only a third of the money would return to the United Kingdom as payment for equipment purchases, the Fund advisory board claimed credit for creating a demand for new British aircraft, and indeed, for making the Cape-to-Cairo airway possible at all.31 Britain welcomed outright private-sector grants for aviation in southern Africa more than initiatives that competed with imperial business. Following earlier predatory behaviour by Imperial in East Africa, Geddes told shareholders at the ninth annual general meeting in 1933 that their airline had taken a substantial interest in the CobhamBlackburn company which had been set up in Southern Rhodesia as a feeder airline. Imperial would in future act as operating manager and technical adviser for its new subsidiary, Rhodesia and Nyasaland [ 171 ]

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Airways (RANA), in which Rhodesia Railways and the Beit trust also held equity.32 A chill would have been felt at Wilson Airways in Kenya. There, the small white settler society affectionately regarded the home-grown air transport company (founded, owned and managed since 1929 by Mrs F. K. Wilson, OBE), as the embodiment of their sense of independence: it was a proud manifestation of ‘a familiar chafing at the restraints of imperial domination’.33 Geddes sneered at the little enterprise. His airline and the Air Ministry were always willing to sacrifice the colonial upstart to political and commercial considerations pertaining to the trans-Africa airway at large. Officially, Imperial’s policy was to ‘assuage local nationalist obstruction by soft words and rigid non-interference with local and feeder air services’, but Geddes did once admit to Tanganyika’s Governor that he had a private feud with Wilson Airways for poaching an Imperial employee.34 Sacrificial action mainly involved pandering to growing pressures from South Africa, the wealthiest and most populous of the British African communities. South African chafing was intense and well managed. At first it took advantage of the erratic service offered by Imperial during its first year of operating the London–Cape Town service in 1932; hiccups were all but intrinsic to a design involving thirty-three stages and six aircraft changes. Next, the South Africans took advantage of Imperial’s proposed route reorganisation for a flying-boat service. Appeasement focused on Oswald Pirow, South Africa’s ambitious, air-minded Germanophile Cabinet minister who used air transport to challenge British paramountcy in the subcontinent. He began in 1934 by fashioning a state airline as a tool of South African expansionist policy. His dream was an air Empire that united ‘white’ Africa. The editor of Air and Airways saw only vindictive competition by the South African Railways administration, an organisation he understood to be unpopular, short-sighted and uneconomical. He predicted that the Railways might soon amass an imposing network of air routes, and thereby provide a novel form of employment for unlimited numbers of poor (but supposedly air-minded) white labourers whose interests it protected. London’s stalwart Times foresaw an even more ghastly danger of Union Airways being reconstituted under the wing of Junkers, three of whose aircraft had been purchased by the South Africans. The Junkers press officer would hail a future delivery flight down the Imperial route as international co-operation. In a leader article, editors at The Times thundered that no other dominion or colonial government had even contemplated the award of an airmail contract to a company controlled by ‘foreign’ capital. They had forgotten India’s serious [ 172 ]

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consideration of doing precisely that. In South Africa, Maj. CochranPatrick once tendered against Junkers for the South African domestic airmail contract.35 Pirow steadily and skilfully manipulated South African Airways into an increasingly powerful position as the prime regional airline. He struck a series of deals which, among others, shut out Imperial from the important Johannesburg–Cape Town air route, and threatened to monopolise air routes in West, East and Central Africa. If he did not actually want to erase them from the airline map, Pirow certainly reduced Wilson Airways and RANA to bit-part players. His nationalistic and imperialistic antics embarrassed loyal British expatriates in South Africa.36 He himself recollected Parliament in Cape Town being asked to investigate his allegedly treasonous conduct, and remembered ‘every jingo in the country getting up on his hind legs, nearly hysterical with indignation’.37 In Britain, South Africa’s stance was regarded as obstinate, opportunist and shameful. Woods Humphery was exasperated. The Dominion Office intervened, offering Pretoria several inducements to be more co-operative. The incentives included management of the southern African air route by a protégé of the South African Prime Minister, the offer to South African capital of a lucrative role in the financial arrangements, and a hint of large British subsidies. Officials in the Air Ministry, Post Office, Colonial Office, Foreign Office and Treasury ground their teeth and resorted to sending Sir Christopher Bullock (Permanent Secretary to the Air Ministry) to confront Pirow personally in Lusaka.38 The principal historian of British African aviation contends that Imperial probably would not have made such quick progress in the continent without the competitive spur which Pirow provided.39 In Africa, as in the Middle East and India, making an air Empire was not just a metropolitan prerogative; other interests understood the leverage of aviation. It was difficult to patronise colonial interests but it was still easy to patronise people living in Britain far from the scene of struggle. Imperial shareholders were told in 1938 of the ‘excellent relationship’ with four colonial-based airlines: the names of the Indian and South African carriers were notable omissions from the list of four companies said to ‘reconcile the interests of their respective territories with Empire interests as a whole’.40 The power struggle was concealed from public view. Only a more triumphal history was told. In time, the legacy of British involvement in African skies was presented entirely favourably, and with sympathy to inter-colonial African rather than British interests. The myth of the harmonious imperial family was not so much perpetuated as refined: [ 173 ]

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flight would correct familial dysfunction. According to a propagandist booklet published in 1939 by the Empire Marketing Board, aviation meant more in Africa than anywhere else. It had predated railways in many colonies, and shortened inter-colonial travel times. Using the future rather than the past tense, the writer elaborated that flight promised to be the principal agent breaking down strong mutual indifference between colonies that looked to London and had little occasion to know or care about each other.41 Addressing a congress in Rome in 1938, however, Sir John Maffey, then one of Imperial’s directors, foresaw reciprocity between European airlines operating in Africa rather than co-operation between colony-based airlines. In an otherwise bland recitation he reclaimed imperial beneficence and capability: it was only because so many African territories derived their authority from distant European capitals that there was a network of airways in Africa at all, he said.42

Notes   1 The Times (12 January 1931); Aeroplane (4 February 1931); G. E. Woods Humphery, ‘Air communications in Africa’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 79 (1931), 271–93. For more on the air route see R. L. McCormack, ‘Imperial mission: the air route to Cape Town, 1918–32’, Journal of Contemporary History, 9 (1974), 77–97.   2 R. L. McCormack, ‘Airlines and empires: Great Britain and the scramble for Africa, 1919–1932’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 10 (1976), 87–105; McCormack, ‘Imperial mission’; H. Burchall, ‘Air services in Africa’, Journal of the African Society, 32 (1933), 58; Baker, ‘Nyasaland at the aviation cross roads’; The Times (16 August 1926).   3 East Africa (9 December 1926), pp. 349–63; NA, AIR 2/322 (S26310), AVIA 2/422; Flight (21 June 1928), p. 463.   4 NA, AIR 2/322 (S26310).   5 Johnston, To Organise the Air; The Times (28 June 1928), p. 9; McCormack, ‘Imperial mission’; NA, AIR 2/780.   6 Colonial Development Advisory Committee, Annual Report (1931) (Cmd 3876); NA, AVIA 2/487; Aviation in Africa (June 1931), p. 11.   7 NA, CO 822/40/6.   8 BPMA, PO 33/3666: Report by Bertram on his January–March flight (24 March 1932), and interim reports to Shelmerdine; CO 822/33/8: Handover to Air Minister, 27 March 1931; Passfield to Gowers, March 1931.   9 East Africa, 5 June 1930, p. 1230; 15 January 1931, p. 582; 12 July 1931, pp. 1287, 1294. 10 Aviation in Africa (June 1931). 11 J. S. R. Duncan, The Sudan: a Record of Achievement (Edinburgh, 1952), p. 180. 12 McCormack, ‘Imperialism, air transport and colonial development’, p. 382; Aviation in Africa (May, August 1931). 13 Aviation in Africa (July 1931), p. 5; (August 1931). 14 R. F. Holland, Britain and the Commonwealth Alliance, 1918–1939 (London, 1981), p. 36. 15 BPMA, PO 33/3666: D. Handover to J. F. Greenwood, 12 February 1931; Greenwood to Handover, 16 February 1931. 16 McCormack, ‘Imperial mission’, p. 77; W. J. Makin, Swinging the Equator (London, 1935), pp. 279, 173; Imperial Airways Staff News (5 February 1932).

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african arc 17 H. E. Brittain, Wings of Speed (London, 1934), p. 99. 18 Details of the Croydon ceremony in RAFM, AC 76/49. 19 Court Treatt, Cape to Cairo; J. B. Wolf, ‘Imperial integration on wheels: the car, the British and the Cape-to-Cairo route’, in R. Giddings (ed.), Literature and Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 112–27. 20 L. Farrant, The Legendary Grogan (London, 1981); E. Paice, Lost Lion of Empire: the Life of Cape-to-Cairo Grogan (London, 2001); E. Huxley, Out in the Midday Sun (London, 1985). 21 Aeroplane (30 March 1932), p. 573; The Times (9 February 1920), p. 16. 22 Jones, The Time Shrinkers; Penrose, British Aviation: Ominous Skies; The Times (21 January 1932), pp. 12–13; C. T. te Water, ‘Airways over Africa’, Listener (27 January 1932), pp. 123, 5; Aeroplane (27 January 1932), p. 138. 23 H. Klein, Winged Courier (Cape Town, 1955); H. Yea, ‘Air mail to the Cape’, Unpublished paper (n.d.); The Times (9 May 1931); BPMA, PO 33/3666. 24 C. Lamb, The Africa House (London, 1999), pp. 166–71, 76–81; Who Was Who, 1897–1996. 25 R. I. Rotberg, Black Heart: Gore-Brown and the Politics of Multiracial Zambia (Berkeley, CA, 1977), p. 148. 26 NA, AVIA 2/522. 27 Speedbird Magazine (March 1976); South African Archives (Pretoria) (SAA), GG 1879 (59/836). 28 Air Annual of the British Empire, 3 (1931/32), pp. 11–12. 29 Paice, Lost Lion of Empire. 30 NA, AVIA 2/579; CO 822/40/12: D. M. Kennedy to Cunliffe Lister, 25 October 1932; The Times (26 August 1932); South African Motorist (October 1932). 31 Colonial Development Advisory Committee, Annual Report (1933), Cmd 4316. 32 The Times (31 October 1933). 33 McCormack, ‘Imperialism, air transport and colonial development’, p. 385. 34 Air and Airways (March 1934); NA, CO 822/48/1. 35 R. L. McCormack, ‘Man with a mission: Oswald Pirow and South African Airways, 1933–1939’, Journal of African History, 20 (1979), 543–57; The Times (24 June 1932), p. 13; (27 September 1933); Aviation in Africa (October 1931); Shell Aviation News (February 1935), p. 11. 36 McCormack, ‘Man with a mission’, p. 548. 37 Holland, Britain, p. 36. 38 BPMA, PO 33/5367 (4): Notes of meeting on Empire Air Mail Scheme, Air Ministry, 4 April 1935; NA, T 161/917. 39 McCormack, ‘Man with a mission’. 40 The Times (14 November 1938), p. 10. 41 The Story of the British Colonial Empire (London, 1939), p. 150. 42 J. Maffey, ‘Air Transport over Africa’. Proceedings, Contegno di Scienze Morali e Storiche (Reale Accademia D’Italia), 4–11 October 1938, pp. 1393–1409.

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PART I V

Shoring up

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Chapte r t welve

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Arguing about Imperial Airways

Postponed, slow and erratic Empire service tainted Imperial Airways. Criticisms of the carrier bounced off the Geddes carapace. Nevertheless, he would have been heartened by the stout support that the Air Ministry gave his company in the early days. An internal memorandum prepared for Secretary of State Thomson when he resumed office briefly in 1929 repulsed criticisms about the monopoly and subsidy in particular. It may have been enough to remark that the airline’s most prominent competitor (the Dutch carrier, KLM) was also a subsidised monopoly, but the note went on to impugn the critics themselves; Empire aviation was no cosy club of mutual admirers. Cobham and Handley Page were both savaged for their ‘campaign of misrepresentation’ about Imperial. As far as the Air Ministry was concerned, the Empire’s flying white knight had blackened himself by assiduously spreading prejudicial reports among Members of Parliament on both sides of the House when his company was vying with Imperial in Africa. The airline had maintained a dignified silence in the face of his mud-slinging and libellous attacks. Then, adding injury to insult, when negotiating the Cobham-Blackburn concession, the Imperial Board had to deal with Cobham’s desire to be executive director responsible for ‘propaganda’ and air-route inspection. Behaving little better than Cobham, Handley Page was said to have wielded a vicious knife in his fervent campaign to get elected onto Imperial’s management Board. His clever wit and phraseology was said to carry quite undeserved conviction.1 In 1928, at Imperial’s fourth annual general meeting, Geddes boasted gruffly that the airline had long turned a deaf ear to croakers and sceptics. His defence was meant to rebuff accusations that Londonbased civil imperial air transport was doing less than private pilots and less than the small air transport companies in the colonies and dominions. Geddes argued that individual pioneers in air development did [ 178 ]

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not necessarily possess the qualities needed to develop civil aviation. He added that a small organisation – even one with boundless enthusiasm and vision – was less capable of developing a new air service than one with experienced backing. After a lifetime in transport, he warned, he had never encountered an enterprise as full of pitfalls as that which air transport posed for inexperienced people. Geddes may also have recalled reading nine years earlier the warning by Sykes that British aviation should guard against flash-in-the-pan exploitation by ignorant or unscrupulous people.2 Writing prominently and lengthily on the leader page of The Times, Woods Humphery offered his own defence of Imperial in 1930. In an article published on successive days under the heading ‘Flight and the Nations’, he argued that civil flying had a national importance beyond the average commercial adventure. He added that despite its profile Imperial had never aimed to develop ‘a spectacular side’ by exploiting the bravery of pilots and crew. He would have been appalled by the claim made in 1919 that in peace as well as in war the quality of British pilots lay in their desire to fly zestfully as if riding a horse to hounds, or in a steeplechase, or sailing a yacht in a freshening wind. Woods Humphery scorned expeditions and publicity flights undertaken by people who wanted to get a foot in the market place. Ill-considered and mismanaged air-transport enterprises were guaranteed to lose money, he said. Imperial’s policy, by contrast, was to build Empire routes on unshakeable foundations using principles that would match British sea traditions.3 Woods Humphery was not thinking of rum, sodomy and lash. Rather, he was invoking the golden template of maritime Empire after scraping away the tarnish left by the chancers and privateers who sailed the oceans. In the 1920s and 1930s the buccaneering, highly publicised lightaircraft flights undertaken by intrepid pilots such as Batten, Cobham, Hinkler, Johnson, Mollison and Scott were a thorn in the side of the Empire airline. Woods Humphery’s position was that dashing feats were incomparable with sober and publicly accountable commercial service. It was tempting, of course, to portray any and all long-distance private flights as reckless and self-seeking. Among those tarred in this way was Kingsford Smith whom some suspected of even staging a crash in the remote Australian outback in 1929 as a publicity stunt while en route to London on an ill-prepared venture. His luck finally ran out in November 1935. The death of the penniless and sick 38-year-old Australian idol (and the sacrifice of his co-pilot) during an addictiondriven England–Australia flight would have bolstered suspicions. Another flyer whose adventures raised eyebrows was Lt-Cdr G. Kidston. In May 1931 he wrote an open letter to Woods Humphery [ 179 ]

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denying that his six-and-a-half-day flight from Britain to the Cape had been a stunt incompatible with commercial flying. Whereas it was understandable that the managing director of a parastatal organisation would be quizzical about an arduous flight made without the resources of a large company, Kidston puzzled at criticism about breaching safety: he had in fact carried extra fuel, a second pilot, an engineer and a radio-operator. The head of the information department at the Society of British Aircraft Constructors agreed that he had indeed behaved responsibly.4 It was a cruel twist of fate that Kidston’s letter was printed in The Times on the very same day it printed his obituary. His charmed life as a wealthy adventurer (and prospective financier of South Africa’s civil airline) came to an abrupt end in an air smash in the Union. The tragedy did not prove Woods Humphery right; Kidston had shown what was achievable on long-distance Empire air routes. Yet his death set off a shiver. The cause of private flying, and Kidston’s argument for separating mails and passengers, was undermined further by the vivid accounts of a legendary Frenchman’s experiences flying mail in the 1920s. The work of the gifted writer-pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry appeared in English translation for the first time in 1931. Southern Mail and Night Flight recall his work for Aéropostale in Morocco and Patagonia. The tales were rich in moral fable and made a virtue of ruthless discipline, but they could also be read to vindicate Woods Humphery’s despair about risky individualism in the sky. André Gide’s preface to Night Flight let slip Saint-Exupéry’s view that flying was about vulgar thrills, and that airmen’s vaunted courage actually comprised some ‘not very pretty feelings’: pioneer pilots were inclined to rage, vanity, stubbornness and tomfoolery.5 Woods Humphery did not rebut criticism of Imperial just by impug­­ ning solo flying in the Empire. But his defence of airline subsidy was consistent with his view that he and his team were on an altogether superior mission. In this regard, Woods Humphery despised the mischievous connotations of subsidy and preferred to think of ‘national payment for national services rendered’.6 His view was that whereas it made little sense to subsidise civil air transport if it benefited mainly Americans and sensation-seekers on flights to Europe, the argument was different if it applied to flights connecting Britain to the Empire. Indeed, earlier in the same year, 1930, Burney told the Study Circle on Imperial Economic Co-Operation that it would be reasonable for the British Government to spend £12m (a tenth of annual defence expenditure) to foster and build imperial air communications. The sum would still be little more than half the indirect subsidies received by American airlines.7 [ 180 ]

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Whatever terminological trickery was applied, the hoary argument about subsidies never died. Opinions could and did shift, however. In view of the dominant presence of European carriers and the high subsidies paid by European governments to their flagged airlines, even Churchill changed his view that civil flying should be self-financing. And, in 1935, no less a figure than L. S. Amery, ex-Colonial and Dominions Secretary, warned against letting British aviation suffer from either laissez faire or from the payment of subsidies too small to sustain it. The phrases ‘almost unthinkable’, and ‘height of folly and shortsightedness’, leap from the pages of his book. In a text mostly protesting the damaging effect of concerted foreign competition on British merchant shipping (‘the indispensable foundation of our whole system of interImperial transport and communication’), he anticipated parallels with aviation. He urged immediate state assistance for the development of a network of imperial air services that would at least equal the capacity and speed of those the United States or any other nation could afford to develop. Aviation, he wrote, was an ‘immensely potent economic and political link of Empire’.8

Industry Tasteless, unpatriotic, or economically irrational, discounting the value of Imperial Airways to Britain and the Empire by the size of financial subsidy was not the only option open to critics. Others pointed a finger at Imperial’s small fleet. Far from being a sign of weakness, Woods Humphery argued deftly that a trim fleet was a sign of strength: his airline could operate a smaller fleet than other countries owing to the excellence of British commercial aircraft and engines, coupled with economical management. Excellent or otherwise, the small number of aeroplanes ordered by the Empire airline did little to stimulate the peacetime aeronautical manufacturing industry in Britain. Capt. W. W. Benn’s prediction in 1923 that revitalised production would ‘secure for the British Empire the hegemony of the flying world’ was never tested. For a long time thereafter, manufacturers and commentators squealed about the sector’s depressed state and the absence of incentive and money to make any progress. In 1927, after representing Britain at a meeting of the International Aeronautical Federation in Zurich, Col M. O’Gorman (a consulting engineer and one-time head of the Army Aircraft Factory) reflected ruefully that not one of the ninety-seven aviation records over whose award he had presided had been British. Whereas the country had many daring pilots, he said, Britons had to make do with stodgy technology. In his Spectator article, O’Gorman deduced that there was [ 181 ]

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no appreciation in England of what the air meant either as a threat or as an opportunity. Even the landlocked Swiss, he noted, were building flying boats and would soon show their wings over water where once Britain was supreme. He wondered, in passing, how many people had donated even half a guinea to the Air League. Also in 1927, a disillusioned Capt. Sayers confirmed the moribund state of British aircraft manufacture. Having worked in the industry for fifteen years, he told a meeting of the Royal Aeronautical Society that British aeronautics had ‘plenty of body to be kicked, not much soul worth saving, and an almost total absence of imagination’.9 Such imagination as existed in British aeronautics was involved in building aircraft like the specially commissioned, sleek two-seater Comet racer that won the 1934 MacRobertson race. Civil aviation, by contrast, was pickled in false imaginings about the quality of and demand for British manufacture. Constructors and commentators were deluded by their own self-congratulatory propaganda. A self-satisfied remark was made as late as 1932 that the Empire was the best ‘home market’ for British aircraft. The United States, Soviet Russia and Latin America may eventually match the British Empire as aviation users, it was said, but they could not expect to surpass it. Misleading statistics preserved the chimera. In 1928, 1929 and 1930 British aircraft exports did indeed head the international league table, surpassing those from Europe and the United States. But it was the quirks of Britain’s small geographical size and small domestic market rather than its great aircraft industry that gave the lead. Volumes of civil aircraft production were far larger in the United States, but the product sold into a vast national market. Britain’s export rating counted sales only into the Empire. Flying boats lacked export potential in Germany, France, Italy and the United States where landplanes predominated.10 Despite its position at the top of the export table, Britain’s aircraft industry was hamstrung by a small order book. Although the monopoly Imperial was established partly to aid the post-war industry, its orders for aircraft were small in volume and narrowly directed at three firms. In a tight market manufacturers were not blindly loyal to the flag airline. Vickers, for one, costed and tendered for a four-plane West African air service between Dakar and Lobito, an operation proposed by a British shipping line in 1929. Until 1934 Imperial never ordered more than eight aircraft at a time. Then, in 1935, it wrote into a proposed contract with Handley Page that it sell exclusively to Imperial for four years. Airliners were built slowly, by hand, and flown long beyond their amortisation period. Alternative sales markets were crimped by airframe design that suited British imperial service rather than other potential clients. Service considerations trumped even the airworthi[ 182 ]

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ness of British aircraft, something that Brancker so admired. Ironically, nine months before he was killed in the R101 nosedive, he told a lunch gathering at the Aldwych Club that a British certificate for airworthiness was the best thing in the world for selling aircraft. It was the equivalent of ‘A1 at Lloyds’ in the shipping world, he said.11 Industry sources claimed that imperial sentiment and kinship (and presumably also hard-sell incentives) played no role in the purchase of British aircraft in the colonies and dominions. The Dominions Office certainly trod gingerly around the proposal to invite dominion heads on ill-disguised annual shopping trips to Britain; the cautionary note from the Department of Overseas Trade exuded exemplary English reserve. There were Empire strings to pull, but the puppeteers preferred to let technical considerations (low capital and operating costs, and durability) speak for themselves. Whether or not imperial trade preferences applied to aircraft, British exporters shared with all manufacturers the problem of selling airliners whose landed price would be inflated by the cost of packing, shipping, unpacking and reconstructing partly dismantled aircraft, often using mechanics sent specially from Britain. Labour and freight costs could amount to a fifth of the value of the aircraft. With help from the Imperial Shipping Committee, the Society of British Aircraft Constructors was able to lighten the burden. For example, the weight-rate charged on aircraft shipments to Canada was reduced by 17 per cent, or a little more in the case of aircraft crated without engines.12 An industry analyst has described Imperial as ‘one of the most conservative and narrow-minded of airline customers’. The inter-war period was ‘truly miserable’ for the British civil aircraft industry’.13 Imperial’s requirements may not have bolstered suppliers, but the airline and the manufacturers were not often at each other’s throats. Woods Humphery was harried less for weak links with industry than for organisational performance. Even so, his defence of Imperial’s insistence on monopoly (euphemistically called ‘unified’) operations on trunk routes did not have to address the objection made in 1936 that exclusionary practice flouted the venerable tradition of freedom of the seas that had made Britain pre-eminent in the past.14 Ends, not means, interested Woods Humphery. His target was a firmly based and enduring air service. Capt. A. G. Lamplugh of the Royal Aero Club approved. He reckoned that even though Imperial service was slow, it was unquestionably sound and had achieved more for Britain than any European airlines had done for their host countries, excepting perhaps KLM. In due course, he wrote, Britain’s Empire airline would create a national prestige and reputation for air transport comparable to that first gained at sea.15 [ 183 ]

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Economics Lord Amulree defended the policy of slow-but-sure in 1931, shortly after the embarrassing hiccup of the first airmail service to Australia. At a dinner arranged by the Air League he heard Capt. F. E. Guest blame the British Government for the miserable pittance of £500,000 annual state assistance that left flying clubs and Imperial starved. Amulree, an invited guest, brushed aside the charges saying that Imperial was following an approach which was in keeping with British character and which was preferable to building a rococo superstructure on shaky foundations. Such, he suggested, was the window dressing that had unhinged the French Aéropostale service to South America without attracting substantial and enduring custom. It was a rather cheap and misdirected broadside against a spectacularly successful enterprise brought to its knees at the end of August 1933 by a scandalous cocktail of politics, petty jealousy and allegations of financial impropriety. In 1930 the French airline had operated the longest single air route in the world using Europe’s largest commercial fleet, and it had brought the world’s second largest colonial power within a whisker of controlling North Atlantic airspace.16 Geddes illuminated the economics of Imperial services in his presentation to the Marshall Society at Cambridge in February 1931. In his paper on ‘The Commercial Future Prospects of Aviation’, and in the version that Imperial printed for wider circulation, Geddes claimed commercial progress and sagacity. First, he noted that the airline used its subsidy comparatively efficiently. For every ton-mile flown, the British taxpayer paid 7s 2d. In the United States the corresponding tax penalty was 8s 1d. The German figure was on a par, whereas the French figure was double. Geddes approved subsidies, arguing that they had enabled aviation to achieve in ten years what might otherwise have taken risk-averse constructors and entrepreneurs a century. State financial support was a way of buying the future. Second, Geddes noted that his airline had lowered its insurance bill from 11 per cent to 5 per cent of budget between 1924 and 1930; a proven record of safety reflected technological progress and good management. The same mix was expected to reduce the heavy burden of obsolescence that accounted for 12 per cent of the cost of operating one air mile in 1929/30. Thereafter the proportion should decline further. Progress in aircraft design and construction would lower the initial costs of aircraft. Design simplification would mean less time spent idle during maintenance and overhaul. Finally, a slower rate of design progress would enable obsolescence to be spread over ten or fifteen years rather than four or five years. [ 184 ]

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The state of aeronautical technology enabled Geddes to argue that Imperial could not be held responsible for everything that happened in Empire aviation. Not all the ways of improving commercial performance were in the airline’s own hands. In addition to engineering design features that restricted the commercial life of aircraft and necessitated lengthy time on the ground for maintenance, limited engine design limited the payload that engines could lift. On British aircraft too, aerodynamic design deliberately sacrificed higher cruising speeds in favour of lower stalling speeds as a concession to safe and regular flying. Geddes had over-simplified the quest for raw speed in telling the Imperial Press Conference at the Carlton Hotel in 1930 that rapid air transport was the most important consideration to those who loved the Empire and wished its strengths to develop. Technical limitations applied to all Imperial services, but the restrictive laws, rules and regulations facing the airline were not universal. Geddes skated over the question of domain, but there was a European bias to his list of matters which Imperial was powerless to alter. Some countries closed their frontiers after dark; some enforced 100-milelong detours so that certain towns might have an air service; some confined services to once or twice weekly. Insecurity of route tenure was another point of contention, as was the call in some countries for arterial routes to be served by several carriers.17 It was not just aeronautical technology and foreign practices that were out of Geddes’s hands. Meteorological services were another external influence. Their availability and effectiveness had an impact on his airline’s safety, predictability and economy. Yet Empire-wide weather recording and prediction was in its infancy. The directors of Empire meteorological services conferred in August 1935 in London for the first time in six years. Also in attendance were representatives of government departments in Empire areas without weather stations. The first agenda item was the requirements of imperial air services.18

Airmail When deflecting criticism away from the Empire airline, it was common to point to the unhelpful policies and practices of its main client, the British postal service. Despite public use of the airmail, the Post Office attracted vigorous criticism. Hoare did not mince his words when he spoke to students at Bonar Law College in Ashridge, Buckinghamshire, in September 1930. In a speech pleading for aviation to be brought out of the shadows and regarded as a normal means of supplementing imperial communications, he declared the Post Office ‘the blackest reactionary’ in all aviation matters. He grumbled that [ 185 ]

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pillar-boxes exclusively for airmail were still regarded as curiosities even in the capital of the Empire. Yet it was harsh blaming the Post Office while overlooking public habit. Being one of the few ‘great countries of the world’ without an airmail stamp, and being beaten to it by the dominions, was another matter. The neat little devices were several years old in South Africa. They had been introduced in Australia in May 1930 and in India in November the same year.19 Within days of Hoare’s denunciation, the Imperial supremo described the airmail as the ‘unwanted stepchild’ of the Post Office. Addressing shareholders at the airline’s 1930 annual general meeting, Geddes observed that the airmail pricing structure ran counter to the general belief that the public was entitled to the fastest possible transport of mails by whatever means. Instead, the Post Office adhered rigidly to an airmail surcharge of 5d and to the practice of separate accounting whereby only users of airmail service actually paid for the privilege. The cost of airmail was not deemed to be a charge that should be spread across all mail services. If that appeared fair, it was surely inequitable

Figure 9  Dignitaries and guests watch Lord Londonderry (Air Minister) and Sir Kingsley Wood (Postmaster General) inaugurate the England–Australia airmail at a Croydon ceremony, 8 December 1934.

[ 186 ]

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that surface mail all the way to India was effectively rated the same as airmail items on the first stage of their journey overland to Croydon. Geddes would also denounce the Post Office for profiteering from the difference between the gold-denominated revenues it received from overseas and the sterling disbursements it made to his airline. No balancing ex gratia payments were made; the excuse was that the Air Ministry, not the Post Office, fixed Imperial’s subsidy. The Post Office was stung by the criticism, feeling it was offside for a state-subsidised organisation to squabble openly with a department of state.20 Geddes was not alone in his criticism of the Post Office. One of several resolutions that the London Chamber submitted to the 1930 meeting of the Empire Chambers of Commerce was about restructuring postal charges. Two interests were being championed. On the one hand, traders would benefit from cheaper and quicker Empire contacts which extended the geographical range and the competitiveness of commerce. On the other hand, a better-used airmail service would enable Imperial to expand its services and would boost demand for products of the British aircraft industry. The start of experimental airmail services to Africa and Australia in 1931, and their regularisation in the following year, set some criticism to rest, at least once teething troubles had passed. Slow flying speed remained one point of contention. It could be settled by using higherpowered aircraft that coped better against headwinds. The infrequency of flights was a second bone of contention. Postings that missed the weekly airmail departure on a week-long journey would reach most destinations quicker if they were sent by the next available surface mail rather than wait seven days for the next airmail. The London Chamber of Commerce took up its concern about the airmail with the Postmaster-General and Lord Londonderry, the Secretary of State for Air. Lord Sempill, who succeeded Harry Brittain as chairman of the Chamber’s aviation section, led the March 1932 deputation. It noted that taking into account time spent on the ground, the average air speed between England and India was 28mph. One way to make service faster was to fly freight at night. Parcels did not need sleep, and it seemed unnecessary to keep Empire airmails stationary for sixteen hours out of every twenty-four simply to suit passengers’ liking for a night’s rest on the ground. Imperial was reluctant to separate passengers and mails, and defended itself against comparisons with American domestic airmailonly services. Woods Humphery explained the high cost of that service which was flown by small-engined aircraft which attracted high insurance premiums, tracked expensive beacon-lit routes, and flew a tenth as many miles as did combined mail and passenger services. [ 187 ]

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Anyway, American inter-continental flights to Mexico, Panama and South America were the proper comparison, and these were practically identical to Imperial’s. The first volley had been fired in a longrunning battle over priority for parcels or passengers. C. G. Grey wondered whether imperial routes were organised and financed to provide luxury travel for the few, or whether they were intended for rapid communication in the Empire. By what logic, he asked, should Imperial be allowed to set schedules to suit about a dozen passengers at the expense of thousands of mail users?21 The London Chamber of Commerce kept a vigilant eye on the growing Empire airmail and continued to lobby the Government. At the July 1933 London meeting of the Federation of Chambers of Commerce of the British Empire attended by almost three hundred delegates, Sempill submitted a report which emphasised the need for a round-the-clock mail-only air link with Australia, and a feeder service to Hong Kong and Shanghai. In September another deputation to Lord Londonderry reiterated that airmail would better justify connotations of swift service if aircraft with higher cruising speeds were used, or if flights were made at night. Another recommendation was to levy a flat rate on airmail. The deputation also hinted at the desirability of redesigning Post Office accounting such that airmail subsidies could be taken from its annual profit rather than from the smaller purse of the Air Council.22 At its twenty-fourth annual meeting in 1934 the Empire Press Union noted its satisfaction with airmail facilities offered to the overseas press. Others continued to be critical. C. G. Grey argued that a truly imperialist government would spend more money on airmails. Maj. Oliver Stewart tried to twinge consciences by remarking that the Empire was crying out for fast mail services more vociferously than even babies wailed. It was also his view that the small proportion of total overseas mail that the public sent by air was a result of the confusing, expensive and slow services. Cynically, he remarked that if people wanted to write by airmail they would have to do so by four o’clock in the morning. Then, having failed to decode the Royal Mail’s information leaflets which ‘resembled an income tax form embellished with a map’, people would go to a post office to ascertain cost and timing. Meanwhile, the day’s collection of airmail items would have finished.23 Disappointing use of the airmail service may have been one reason that Imperial issued a 6d promotional booklet, which, among others, guided novice users through the labyrinth of airmail arrangements. Published in the early 1930s, one chapter in All Ways by Airways urged the value of written greetings over cables. The compiler explained: when congratulating Cynthia in Karachi on her newborn, there is [ 188 ]

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far more cachet to be had sending an airmail letter from Sussex to her bungalow by the Khitmagar within seven days. The booklet also stressed the value of air parcel post for commercial samples, delicate glass instruments and wireless valves. ‘Cousin Bob’ in Kenya could even be sent such quintessentially English perishables as ripe Stilton cheese and Exmoor whortleberries. Using the opposite and dismissive device of vague naming, a cartoon showed an Imperial captain delivering an income tax demand note to citizens of ‘Bula Bula’ somewhere in Africa; air parcel post could collect as well as distribute bounty.24 In June 1934 the London Chamber of Commerce teamed up with the Association of British Chambers of Commerce and the Federation of British Industry to form a heavyweight deputation to the PostmasterGeneral. Having him deliver on a decade of rhetoric about the Empire airmail was the goal; it was time to stash the trumpets and do trade. The outcome was the formation of an airmail panel as part of the Post Office Advisory Council, and appointment of an Airmail Adviser to the Post Office in July. When retiring from that position in 1936, G / Capt. Primrose gave an account of his work. He noted loyally that within the Post Office there was continuous, extensive investigation, and frank and fearless criticism. He conceded room for improvement to airmail service but defended Imperial against unfair and unhelpful comparisons with other airlines.25

Under-performance In a series of articles under the common title ‘An Empire Air Programme’, Maj. Oliver Stewart launched a ferocious verbal assault on British aviation in April and May 1934. His caustic criticism was published in the staunchly pro-British Saturday Review. On the economic front he accused the Air Ministry and Imperial of using ‘unctuous arithmetic’ and selectively fashioning international comparisons of route miles, passenger loads and per-mile costs. The Government also stood accused of being hypnotised by Churchill’s loudly applauded and ‘damnably dangerous’ aeronautical cliché that aviation must fly by itself. Turning to technical matters, Stewart criticised the authorities for being content with sluggish aircraft. He wrote bitingly about wandering and rambling around the world in aircraft better suited to carrying tinned pineapples than express mail and business travellers. Stewart kept his most acid criticism for the political aspects of Britain’s aviation programme. Its waste of the strategic potential afforded by ‘a modern instrument of Empire’ was key. He could not decide whether the Government was behaving like a shopkeeper who [ 189 ]

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stashed the newest and best commodities at the back of the store, or like a coffee-stall proprietor put in charge of the Savoy Hotel. Either way it was ‘pathetic and humiliating’; Stewart hated seeing the squandering of aviation that might have exceeded the achievements of past Empire builders in scope and romantic appeal. Snarling, he condemned the petty outlook of the authorities as a devastating indictment of statesmanship blinded or frightened by greatness.26 Stewart was not alone in his outrage and disappointment. Back from a liberating lecture tour in the United States of America, the leader of Britain’s successful 1933 first-over-Everest flight told a Royal Aeronautical Society meeting in April 1934 that it was time to clean out the ignorance and conservatism which controlled British aviation. The cancer was ‘a danger to the British Empire’. Airmen, not chairmen, were due their say. It was an old gripe. Ten years previously, a dejected airman who had been dismissed by the aeronautical establishment in 1916 scorned the power of administrators over scientists.27 The retarded attitude of officials to aviation had also rankled with Sir Alan Cobham. Whereas he had moved on from his criticism about Imperial’s take-over of his Central African enterprise, and felt able to second Sir Harry Brittain’s vote of appreciation and thanks to Geddes at Imperial’s 1935 annual general meeting, the ‘chronic stupidity’ of politicians, officials and civil servants left a lasting grudge. Cobham berated the Government-backed R101 project as ‘a monumental exercise in bungling and incompetence’. Sir Samuel Hoare, he recalled, was rather exceptional. Most ministers, politicians and civil servants were middle-aged or older, and set in their ways. If they did not actually regard civil aviation as a joke, some of them came close to doing so. Years later, in a 1963 BBC radio interview, Cobham spoke about the difficulty of making influential public figures interested in civil aviation in the 1920s. The task, he said, was ‘like talking to wooden blocks’. He recollected how at the Carlton luncheon given in his honour in 1926, Lord Birkenhead had brushed aside the desirability of communicating with India inside a week saying ‘when I send a despatch to India, thank God I can’t get a reply in two months’.28 Stewart brandished his pen again in November 1934 after the lessons of the MacRobertson air race had sunk in. ‘Were it not for one heavensent Comet’, he wrote, ‘one might weep with rage and mortification at the backwardness of British aviation.’ Moore-Brabazon shared Stewart’s despair and denounced the ‘deplorable technical performance’ of British civil aviation.29 Stewart blasted the Government’s narrow commercial concerns. Aviation, he insisted, must either be treated on the grandest scale or not at all. The British Empire should be aeronautically more advanced than any other territory, he wrote, because it stood to gain [ 190 ]

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most. Prime Minister Baldwin and Air Minister Londonderry got a particular lashing. The more they tried to reassure the public, Stewart frothed, the more they displayed ‘somnolence, complacency, technical misunderstanding, and a lamentable lack of the progressive spirit’. Apologetic and defensive, the duo was never bold and inspiring. It was as if aviation was something obscene, to be tolerated as a necessity, and not encouraged. The Air Ministry, Stewart concluded, was afflicted by an inferiority complex; the Londonderry air was filled with deathly chloroform.30 Such vitriol was bound to draw reply. Geddes anticipated that he might be put on the defensive by shareholders during Imperial’s tenth annual general meeting in November 1934 after the air race to Melbourne. In a specially prepared addendum to his report he stressed that a once-off race was quite different to a commercial service whose passengers liked comfort, would not risk flying over an unlit route at night, and had to go through slow passport and customs checks. On a financial note, Geddes added that his airline had to set its tariffs mindful of the need to build up a fund it could tap in future to replace obsolescent aircraft. Yet again he claimed that brute aircraft speed was less important than overall journey speed attained at reasonable cost. In the avian equivalent of the hare and tortoise fable, Imperial went its ‘steady, plodding, non-spectacular course’. For Geddes, that was ‘soundest and best in the end’. In the Spectator a calming editorial pointed out the need to balance speed and cost, while still urging more rapid development in British commercial aviation. Stewart and his ilk were dismissed as hysterics. He retorted that statements from Air Ministry apologists were inaccurate and were only excuses for Britain’s backwardness. Burchall was among those who urged cautious and orderly development in Empire aviation. Taxpayers, he remarked, were unlikely to want to pay the colossal price of an imperial network of aerodromes and radio and lighting installations to overcome ‘the murderous combination’ of fast planes and poor ground facilities. When the money was available, he wrote, Britain would not lag behind. As to aircraft design, it had become a matter of mathematics not miracles. Like Burchall, Sempill decried ‘ill-informed’ attacks on British air policy. He conceded that engineers could design aircraft that could average speeds twice as fast as the 100mph achieved by Imperial’s aircraft, but matters of safety and reliability were uppermost. Comfort was also crucial, passengers being reckoned to tolerate no more than eight hours in the air without a long break.31 Favouring a moderate reaction to the outcome of the MacRobertson race, Adm. (now, Sir) Murray Sueter wrote a vigorous denunciation [ 191 ]

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of the disparaging remarks about British Empire aviation. He spoke with the interests, and from the vantage point, of someone with longstanding links with British aviation: he was the inspecting captain of airships as from 1909, he represented the Admiralty at the 1910 international air navigation conference, and he had chaired a parliamentary air committee. Sueter hit out at Britain’s extreme national modesty, at destructive criticism, at vicious self-deprecation and irresponsible journalism. He urged industrialists to become more air-minded and to fly their trade representatives overseas. Comparing Imperial’s service with American domestic air services, he stressed the obstacles of multiple languages, currencies, and customs and immigration laws that the British airline faced. At the time, it operated in twenty-five countries on five continents, dealt in twenty-five currencies, and kept ledger accounts in fifteen of those. Sueter added that the airline had to operate over ‘backward’ countries, and needed to compensate travellers with appropriate comfort. In his view, commentators and critics should make the necessary allowances. Britain’s prestige in the air, he concluded, depended on public opinion and checking an insane national instinct for self-immolation.32 As he might have been expected to, the Secretary of State for Air sided with Sueter. In a foreword to the printed souvenir for Empire Air Day in 1935 he berated the press for its ‘merry game of depreciation’ that undervalued British aviation achievements, gave more publicity to competitors and followed ‘instinctive national modesty’. Even MacRobertson allied himself with these views. Writing to the Manchester Guardian he stated that he had organised the international centenary air race to encourage British civil aviation and, in the same spirit, was reacting to ‘captious and uninformed criticism’ of the country’s civil aviation policy during a visit to Britain. His judgement was that both the British Government and Imperial were pursuing the correct and sensible policy by giving priority to regularity, comfort and safety, rather than just speed. He spoke warmly about the ‘real ascendancy of British machines, British organisation, and British policy’.33 In the aftermath of the MacRobertson race Woods Humphery said proudly that civil air service improvements were in the offing anyway. He also implied that his airline worked to a plan and would not be embarrassed into making knee-jerk policy. At the Royal African Society’s November dinner in 1934 Woods Humphery doggedly set out the case that speed must be balanced against costs. For the first time he made the face-saving argument that Imperial regarded it as part of its duty to spend money extending the geographical scope of its services rather than confining them to a select few who could afford to buy greater speed. Anyway, it was becoming a more widely accepted view [ 192 ]

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that journey times set in harum-scarum flying ventures should not be the standard for commercial services. The BBC conceded the point when indexing its 1936 broadcasts. That year’s air race from England to South Africa was categorised as sport.34

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Notes   1 NA, AIR 19/137; BA, Imperial Airways Board Minutes, April 1930.   2 The Times (8 September 1928); (8 January 1919), p. 4.   3 The Times (20 August 1930), p. 11; (21 August 1930), p. 12; Grahame-White, ‘Commercial and pleasure flying’.   4 Aviation in Africa (February 1932); The Times (6 May 1931); Jones, The Time Shrinkers.   5 Schiff, Saint-Exupéry; André Gide, ‘Preface’, in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Southern Mail/Night Flight (Harmondsworth, 1976 [1931]), pp. 105–8.   6 The Times (20 August 1930), p. 11.   7 London School of Economics (LSE), Malinowski 1556, Note on Study Circle Seventh Meeting, 13 January 1930, pp. 8–9.   8 Grieves, Sir Eric Geddes, p. 171; L. S. Amery, The Forward View (London, 1935), p. 382.   9 Benn, ‘Air policy’, p. 363; Spectator (10 September 1927), p. 382; Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 31 (1927), 1019. For a more positive view of the interwar British aeronautical industry see Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane. 10 P. King, Knights of the Air (London, 1989); Air Annual of the British Empire, 3 (1931/32), 36; Fearon, ‘The growth of aviation’. 11 CU, Vickers 749; Fearon, ‘Aircraft manufacturing’; The Times (29 January 1930). 12 NA, DO 35/214/1; Higham, Britain’s Imperial Air Routes; Higham, ‘The British government’; Imperial Conference, Appendices (1930) (Cmd 3718), p. 163; Air Annual of the British Empire, 3 (1931/32). 13 Hayward, The British Aircraft Industry, p. 19. 14 Spectator (15, 22 May 1936). 15 The Times (23 August 1930), p. 6. 16 The Times (23 April 1931); Schiff, Saint-Exupéry. 17 NA, AVIA 2/422; The Times (21 August 1930); (6 February 1931), p. 16. 18 NA, DO 35/245/3; The Times (22 August 1935). 19 Scotsman (19 September 1930); The Times (19 September 1930), p. 6; Empire Review, 51 (1930), 133–7. 20 The Times (30 September 1930), p. 19; BPMA, PO 33/5518 (1). 21 The Times (10 March, 8 April 1931); (9, 10 March 1932); Aeroplane (13 July 1932). 22 BPMA, PO 33/3223; The Times (30 September 1933), p. 7; (6 July 1933), p. 9. 23 The Times (30 May 1934), p. 11; Aeroplane (24 January 1934), p. 131; Saturday Review (19 May 1934), pp. 571–2 (26 May 1934), pp. 602–3. 24 Booklet at www.imperial-airways.com accessed May 2007. 25 BPMA, PO 33/3223; Sphere (5 January 1935), p. 8; The Times (8 April 1936). 26 Saturday Review (28 April 1934), pp. 475–6; (5 May 1934), pp. 507–8; (19 May 1934), pp. 571–2. 27 Fellowes, ‘The Houston-Everest flight’, p. 701; Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 28 (1924), pp. 185–8. 28 The Times (1 November 1935); Cobham, A Time to Fly, pp. 146,9; BL, NSA BBC28282. 29 Saturday Review (20 October 1934), p. 427; The Times (6 November 1934), p. 10. 30 Saturday Review (24 November 1934), p. 427; (1 December 1934), p. 463; (15 December 1934), p. 521. 31 Spectator (26 October 1934), p. 608; (2 November 1934), p. 673; Field (3 November 1934), p. 1046.

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32 Aeroplane (9 January 1935); Manchester Guardian (19 February 1935). 33 Marquess of Londonderry, ‘Foreword’, in Taylor, Souvenir; Manchester Guardian (21 August 1935), p. 16. 34 NA, DO 35/322/6; Journal of the Royal African Society, 34 (1934), p. 85; The Times (6, 13 November 1934); BBC Annual, 1937.

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Everyday operations and performance were not the only preoccupations of the Imperial Airways management in the first years of the 1930s. Airline prospects could not be set aside even though Imperial had secured some breathing space by renegotiating the terms of its founding subsidy three times, in 1926, 1927 and 1929. The state subsidy promised for imperial operations had been extended progressively from 1934 until 1939,1 but the airline management could not luxuriate in a certain future. Geddes (and his son) and Woods Humphery had these matters in mind when they flew to South Africa in 1933. Their journey had been postponed several months on the advice of the South African High Commissioner who, after months of erratic air service, warned against inflaming ‘local prejudices not yet wholly dormant against Imperial Airways’. The public relations visit (by sea) to South Africa by Imperial Board member Col Barrett-Lennard, in 1930, had long since been overshadowed.2 The best pickings from the executive retreat were incorporated in the memorandum that the Imperial Board submitted to the British Government in March 1933. The Future of Civil Air Communications in the Empire reviewed nine years of progress. Imperial still had six years of its contract to run but its Board knew the long lead-time needed for major developments. The 1933 memorandum proposed making Imperial a bulk mail carrier. With the precedent of subsidised ocean mail contracts that the Government could hardly ignore, the Board eyed predictable volumes of cargo, steady revenue and state support. A halo was draped over boring business: Imperial wanted to ‘lean more and more to our national heritage, the Sea’. The tradition of freedom of the seas was not referred to. Instead the Board noted its wish to secure Imperial’s tenure along trunk routes. Protectionism was self-evident, but the heart-warming concern for the future of feeder services had to be spelled out; they would not grow until the long-term [ 195 ]

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future of trunk services was certain. The Imperial memorandum went before the Cabinet accompanied by a supportive note from the Secretary of State for Air. The airline, he noted, deserved great credit even though it had fallen short of expectations: it was destined to become an increasingly important stimulus to inter-imperial trade and was a way of maintaining and promoting close and continuous political contact in the Empire.3

Intentions The most striking change in Empire aviation in the mid-1930s was not flagged by a more dense or extended route map or just by the imprimatur of flying the Royal Air Mail pennant on Imperial’s aircraft. Even the simplification of the distance-linked tariff for Empire airmails in 1934 was only a precursor to a more fundamental development, namely, the design and implementation of a strategy for boosting the volume and speed of airmail. The so-called Empire Air Mail Scheme (EAMS) (hatched in detail in 1933 by Imperial’s Assistant-General Manager, S. A. Dismore) affected imperial aviation in several ways. It curtailed the independence of the airline and it increased the complexity of negotiating, designing, operating and funding its own and other Empire air services. Meetings and paperwork proliferated. It was a programme that brought the Post Office and Imperial into a closer working relationship in which the priorities and procedures of the airline were tuned to the interests of yet another Government department. The scheme reformulated the century-long tight co-operative imperial venture between the Post Office and British shipping.4 As ever, the newest artery of a postally connected Empire was devised centrally in the imperial core, London. The periphery was expected to fall in with the new proposals. So too was the man at the centre of Empire finances, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain. Twice in October 1934, Secretary of State Londonderry implored him to endorse the EAMS. In the first case he urged haste because he knew that the South Africans had been made an alternate offer of a five-day air service to the Cape down the West African coast, at negligible cost. Three weeks on he took up his pen again in the context of what he called the ‘centrifugal tendency’ in the dominions. Cleverly, Londonderry gave the EAMS political gravitas while also appealing to the Chancellor’s ego. At issue was Chamberlain’s insistence that the dominions contribute at least £200,000 to the scheme. Londonderry argued that the project was worth supporting even if Britain had to absorb more than that amount. Future calls on the Exchequer, he noted, would be less than the current air subsidies when [ 196 ]

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taken over a fifteen-year period. These, anyway, were a third the size of French subsidies and half those given to civil aviation in Germany and Italy. Londonderry sided with the feeling of organised commerce in the Empire that it was exceedingly short-sighted to starve civil aviation and airmails. The EAMS would put Britain ahead of the rest of the world at relatively little cost. Questions of national prestige were at stake. Would Chamberlain block ‘the most far-reaching air and postal development of a generation’? Would he prevent one of the Government’s ‘chief constructive achievements’? Would he not like to underwrite ‘an epoch-making step in air and postal development – a project of outstanding Imperial importance whether regarded from the political, the strategic or the commercial aspects’?5 The outline of the EAMS was complete toward the end of 1934. In October telegrams were sent to the dominions informing them about the plan. Transmission was top secret, as Imperial feared annoying France with whom arrangements for overflying were still delicately poised. In outline the EAMS involved applying a flat-rate charge to all first-class overseas mail as from some unspecified future date. Thereafter, ‘All-Up’ mail would automatically go by air without surcharge. The Secretary of State for Air, the Postmaster-General and Imperial agreed to apply the new tariff for fifteen years. During that contract period the airline expected to repay the £2m raised. It would receive a state subsidy and a fixed annual mail payment. The EAMS provided for raising fixed sums from colonial and dominion governments, and proposed that they exempt Imperial from fuel taxes and landing fees. Teams of contract lawyers working for the Post Office, the Treasury and Imperial pored over draft agreements. Agents did likewise in the outlying Empire. During negotiations, the Treasury, the Board of Trade, and the Colonial, India and Dominion offices agreed that the volume, regularity and rapidity of Empire shipping could not be allowed to suffer. Lifelines and skills had to be maintained. Subsidy payments to Britain’s mail shipping lines would remain even though they would not be used to transport first-class mail.6 A new airmail tariff was one element of the EAMS. Another was more rapid service. Imperial had been pestered for faster daylight service, or night flying, but in the end cargo capacity was increased directly by putting faster and larger aircraft into service. Quicker services effectively increased flight frequencies. Thrust by engines that could propel aeroplanes toward a top speed of 200mph, the proposed new Empire flying schedule was two days to India, four to the Cape and to Singapore, and seven days to Australia. The intention was to operate foura-week services to India, three to Singapore and East Africa, and two each to South Africa and Australia.7 [ 197 ]

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Faster schedules and increased mail loads called for new aircraft. The new generation of Empire airliners would be flying boats. The novelty was less the idea than its acceptance: Sykes had spoken about Empire flying boats in his address to the London Chamber of Commerce in January 1919.8 Fifteen years on, concrete plans were formulated for a modern and singular design and operation across the entire length of Empire route to Africa or Australia, rather than just on sectors. At first, the geography of Empire airways east, west and south of Cairo took shape around the dominant technology of landplanes. Flying boats had been used for imperial flying, some by pioneers such as Cobham and Sassoon, and some by Imperial on route sectors such as the Mediterranean and the Nile. They were used in association with landplanes, but the attendant requirements for transhipments, spare parts inventories and aircraft servicing and crewing were not ideal. A new generation of long-range, fast flying boats would make through-service possible. A uniform fleet of aircraft was considered more cost-effective than a technically diverse fleet. First, interchangeable aircraft and crew offered operational flexibility. Second, there would be additional cost savings if the entire fleet could be maintained and repaired at one central site in Britain that was close to the sources of materials and relatively inexpensive skilled labour. In Australia, by contrast, shipping and wharfage was calculated to push the cost of aircraft repairs to a level 25 per cent higher than in Britain. Wage rates in Sydney were reckoned to be three times higher than in Britain, and rates in Darwin were 50 per cent higher than in Sydney.9 In the face of demand for increasingly large civilian aircraft which would operate with higher payloads at lower cost per seat mile and per ton mile, flying boats of a new ‘Empire’ design promised considerable savings for passengers and airline operator. In his 1932 annual report Geddes noted that every extra 1 lb payload added £1 revenue per annum. Constructing landplanes with undercarriages strong enough to bear additional weight was expensive, and the increased dead weight of aircraft diminished their payload. There was no comparable limit to the size of flying boat that could be supported by water displacement. Moreover, every increase in the size and weight of flying boats made them more seaworthy not less. As they also turned into the wind automatically at their moorings, there was no need for large hangars. Wind direction troubled flying boats less in another respect: a winding river offered more possibilities for taking off and landing into the wind than a fixed-direction landing strip. Additional financial savings would accrue from using flying boats rather than landplanes because it would not be necessary to strengthen aprons and landing strips so they could bear the weight of increasingly [ 198 ]

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heavy airframes. At Malakal, for instance, even though the airstrip was lengthened (an African village being removed in the process) the area’s cotton soil made the landing strip a quagmire in the rainy season. It was once reported that there were no materials or skilled labourers for hardening the ground, and that the cost of the necessary imports was excessive relative to the prevailing density of traffic. When eventually brick crust was used as pavement, it was not suited to new generation airliners: one of two Junkers aircraft which landed at Malakal in September 1937 on a delivery flight to South Africa damaged the surface, sank into the mud and had to be hauled out by a tractor. A final consideration was the high cost of aircraft fuel at inland aerodromes compared with the seaboard price that was half as high at many points on the Empire routes. Aircraft engines were less thirsty at sea level too.10 Safety constituted another persuasive case for using flying boats on Empire routes. From the perspective of passengers, aircraft which could float offered greater safety in the event of an enforced water landing, or in the event of pilots being instructed to fly offshore so as to avoid transgressing the airspace of hostile nations. Seeking to give the ultimate reassurance, Sassoon once boasted in the pages of the Empire Review that Britain’s exceptional sea-going flying boats could face weather that would have brought dire peril to the frail little ships in which the nation’s forefathers had faced unknown and uncharted seas.11 Possessing the bravery of audacious British tars of yesteryear was no longer a precondition for overseas travel. Simple logic – and the template of seaborne imperialism – suggested that an Empire which straddled so much ocean and boasted many fine sea bases would be served well by aircraft that could take off from and touch down on seas, lakes or rivers. But if the idea were to be implemented seriously much more was needed than the gesture of imperial naming. In 1927, when two first-generation ‘Calcutta’-type flying boats were being built in Short’s factory at Rochester, Lord Sempill, then chairman of the Royal Aeronautical Society, wrote in The Times about the oddity that a historically great imperial maritime power did not have a single modern commercial flying boat in operation. Not even an old type of flying boat flew any civil air route. An occasional flying boat visit to the Channel Isles and Deauville was of no imperial importance whatever.12 Stitching commercial flying boat services into the Empire aviation tapestry might have been done in joint ventures with British shipping companies. The speaker at a Royal Aeronautical Society meeting in 1928 suggested a ‘high-speed auxiliary to the main fleet’ which could be used to connect oceanic services to inland lakes, coastal and [ 199 ]

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up-river ports, and outlying islands.13 This proposal fell flat but did not stump initiatives. One originated with Sir Samuel Instone who made his fortune in coal and shipping before establishing one of the four British airlines out of which Imperial was formed in 1924. Having argued in 1927 that the sea was ‘England’s natural aerodrome’, six years later Instone returned to the idea of flying boats. In the middle of his thirteen-year stint as a board member of Imperial, he did not resurrect the idea of maritime partnership. At a Rotary Club luncheon he spoke instead about the attractiveness of an airmail service by flying boat to Australia. In November 1934, at Imperial’s tenth annual general meeting, Geddes announced plans for just such a service.14

Preparations A flying boat service had intrinsic advantages for Imperial and it boosted the British aviation industry. One particular firm’s order book benefited. Twenty-eight second-generation ‘Empire-class’ flying boats were built at Short’s yards in Rochester. Each was designed to carry 2.75 tons of mail, and twenty-four passengers by day or sixteen by night with sleeping accommodation. In a display that would have delighted the Air League and other aviation propagandists, construction progress was shown in a generous double-page spread of photographs in The Times. The British Powerboat Company of Hythe (designers and builders of the famous Miss England and Miss Britain racing boats) got orders for a fleet of sixty motor launches to service the flying boats at bases around the Empire. The contract represented welcome – if not surprising – new business for a company which had built marine aircraft for two decades, and whose chairman H. Scott-Paine was an Imperial director throughout its existence. The launches were floating platforms for handling fuel, freight and passengers. Prior to aircraft taxiing, taking off and landing, the launches were used to clear away flotsam, to patrol traffic and to ruffle glassy water. They were also used to carry searchlights, set out flare path lighting for night manoeuvres and provide radio assistance to aircraft on final approach.15 The question of who would be allowed to supervise and operate the launches at thirty-two overseas stations became a ticklish issue. Over a two-year period in the second half of the 1930s, the Air Ministry corresponded with Imperial and the Treasury about the costs of hiring British coxswains versus local men (expatriate, other European, or native). In question was the risk of hiring crew who might not be trained (some felt they might be untrainable) to handle fast craft in difficult water, and to do so under pressure during emergencies. Expecting [ 200 ]

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compliance with the Ministry’s English-language written regulations was problematic. Operating the launches was only one problem. Their all-wood hulls were not ideally suited to tropical conditions. Design and nature could even conspire to sink launches, as happened during a storm at Kisumu in May 1938.16 The time taken to design, construct and test new aircraft delayed the start of services for three years after announcement of the flying boat programme in 1934. The breathing space was actually useful because it spared blushes that would have arisen otherwise in connection with reorganising Empire flying. The impact of the new Empire flying boat service was not given an enthusiastic and unconditional welcome everywhere; the new geographies of flight in particular raised concerns. Local workforce and service providers at landplane bases would not have been pleased by unilateral and uncompensated diversion of regular Empire flights (from, for instance, Croydon to Southampton, Heliopolis to Alexandria, and Johannesburg to Durban), but commercial and municipal objections were not the most prominent. More serious difficulties arose in connection with, for example, obtaining landing rights on water. In Palestine, religious objections to the violation of Lake Galilee forced Imperial to divert to the Dead Sea. One coincidental association between prayer for rain and the arrival of an Imperial flying boat in the midst of a rainstorm17 was not miracle enough. In 1937 it was agreed that Galilee was only to be used in emergencies. In Iraq, where there were unacceptable shoals on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, Lake Habbaniyah (80 miles from Baghdad) was selected as a new base, but for several anxious months the Iraqi Government withheld permission to use it. A repeat of the tortuous Persian Gulf episode seemed possible. On the eve of Imperial’s planned trial of the flying boat service, the British Embassy informed the Iraqi Prime Minister that the aeroplane was waiting in Alexandria ‘and like all women, is becoming impatient’. Later the Prime Minister would hear that Iraq’s obstructiveness was stupid, short-sighted and unfriendly, and that it ‘contained the elements of a first-class quarrel with His Majesty’s Government’. Fevered interventions finally secured permission for one experimental flight eastward. Imperial gambled that its flying boat would be permitted to return. Iraq had several objections to the use of Lake Habbaniyah. A material one had to do with paying to build and staff another customs post. Principled objections from Iraqi politicians included indignation at not having been consulted. They were also annoyed by the way Britain was benefiting disproportionately from a treaty and they wished to maintain some bargaining muscle. Did Britain expect undiluted [ 201 ]

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co-operation from people whose minds it had filled with fanciful ideas of nationalism and the revival of mythical glories? The Iraqi Chief of Staff was suspicious that the civilian air base was just another military project in disguise. There was fear of creating a precedent for landings by flying boats from other countries. Another objection arose from the British wish to raise the lake level by damming. The Iraqis suspected this was a way of reviving an irrigation and anti-flood scheme that their Government had already vetoed. One British person who was close to the kerfuffle rejected this conspiratorial idea out of hand. It was, he wrote, a ‘fantastic skittle’, which merely hid ‘the Oriental’s primitive impulse to drive a bargain’. The coincidental murder of the two prime Iraqi obstructionists eventually allowed the Iraqi premier to approve use of Habbaniyah without risking the fall of his Government. The £9,000 spent on the Imperial station had not been wasted, as there would be work for three expatriate staff, a cook, two porters, three fitters and six ‘coolies’. With its entire project under threat, the airline wriggled to the last trying to squeeze additional concessions. Imperial objected to paying the £50 annual property tax, claiming that its site was within the area allocated without charge to the RAF, but the airline was advised against injudicious complaints that could backfire politically. Besides, Imperial needed Iraq more than Iraq needed it. The upbraiding did not prevent Imperial withholding payment of £500 import duty on its motor launch. Even if lawyers might find that articles imported for use on Air Ministry property were not tax free if they were used for non-military purposes, Imperial clung to the hope that Iraq would sign up to the EAMS, in which case tax concessions would apply.18 Serious as these matters were, the objections which South Africa, India and Australia had to London’s redesign of imperial air services were of a different order. Disputes reached levels that could not be dealt with by letter, telegramme or dinners at which Britain’s overseas political representatives politely browbeat disaffected local politicians. In mid-1935, by which time the entire EAMS seemed threatened, Sir Christopher Bullock (Permanent Secretary to the Air Ministry) and aides were dispatched by air to negotiate terms for colonial and dominion financial support for the EAMS and for Imperial’s proposed new routeing. East Africa In East Africa serious political challenges to the EAMS arose over the proposed realignment of the Empire air trunk route away from the continental interior. South of Kisumu on the northeastern shore of Lake Victoria, the flying boat route swung several hundred miles east [ 202 ]

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from the previous corridor. Despite their natural suitability the Rift Valley lakes were too isolated from other water bodies to be used as intermediate stopping places.19 Nairobi was bypassed despite strong objections from the Kenyan Government. In measured diplomatic language, the Governor told the Colonial Secretary that it would be politically and imperially unfortunate if the EAMS did not call at the capital of a major British settlement.20 Airfields in landlocked Tanganyika and the Rhodesias, and on the South African veld, lost direct Empire service. Geographically, the imperial beneficiaries were the Kenyan seaport of Mombasa and the Tanganyikan capital Dar-esSalaam. In the latter territory senior civil servants would have been among those to welcome a more direct air link with London; in 1936 the Chief Railway Engineer had to travel overland to Dodoma to access the Imperial landplane service to get home on leave with his wife.21 Further south, Portuguese East Africa benefited from air connections through Beira and Lourenço Marques. Inter-imperialism was not part of any script with which British Africa was familiar. In discussions with other colonial governments in southern Africa about the EAMS, Bullock offered to ‘compensate’ Nairobi for losing its trunk status by funding some connecting services. Sensing that route diversion might become ‘a first-class issue in local politics’, Bullock agreed to operate an extra flight each week between Kisumu (or Nairobi) and Lusaka. He offered carrots, but also brandished a stick. When pushed, he could always retaliate that Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika were fortunate to have any trunk service at all: Imperial could leave East Africa altogether and fly to the Cape via the shorter West African route. This was a ruse. Bullock admitted in a secret report that it was ‘strategically essential’ to keep open the historic easterly air route.22 Commercially fixated proponents of the Atlantic coastal route never held the upper hand despite claiming that its all-water stops would minimise infrastructure development delay and expenses, not least because African labour on the West African line was considered stronger, more intelligent and better disciplined.23 Bullock found that the poor East African territories had good reason to fret about the costs of the reorganisation required to run the EAMS. He agreed there was an ‘overwhelming’ case for the Colonial Development Fund to pay for ground organisation that would cost £37,700 in Kenya, £38,500 in Tanganyika and £11,000 in Uganda. After the Fund refused payment, the British Government decided to meet two-thirds of the capital cost and devolve the balance onto the three territories in the form of an interest-free proportional loan repayable over five years. Kenya refused. Tanganyika was not keen. Only Uganda accepted. In the Sudan (where the Governor General made it clear that the [ 203 ]

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service would not benefit the territory’s Africans), meeting the £80,000 capital cost carried the risk of ending or reducing Egypt’s annual gift of nine times that sum. The solution was to bring Egypt into the EAMS. In addition, as Sudan did not qualify for assistance from the Colonial Development Fund, Bullock undertook to recommend that the imperial exchequer meet half the capital costs. His proposal was that half the recurrent expenditure would be defrayed on grounds that the RAF would use the improved meteorological services in the ­territory. Negotiations about the apportionment of expenditure continued long after the start of flying boat operations. Agreements in principle did not always cover practical requirements. Who, for example, would pay for Sudd clearance? Who would fund a preliminary experiment? Who would pay for the delivery of the necessary technical equipment? Invoices for the use of Imperial’s launch, for the upriver journey of a mechanical dredger, and for removal of a small island, went to and fro. At the end of 1938 the Sudan Government agreed to pay a third of the cost of operating and maintaining marine equipment, and two-thirds of the cost of public works and meteorological services, subject to a maximum of £20,000. Precisely which of the Nile River and associated improvements the Sudan administration, Imperial or the Air Ministry should pay for was disputed for months. The latter wished to confine itself to expenditure related to navigational matters. The other two parties disputed expenditure on approach roads, buildings, jetties, landing stages, steps, launches and dredging. After Imperial’s Near East manager visited the Sudan in November 1936 to assess the readiness of flying boat facilities, the territory’s Governor-General complained about the rush of instructions after a long period of unsatisfactory co-operation. The Foreign Office scolded Imperial for its ‘cavalier treatment’ of the Sudan authorities.24 Bullock’s African tour in mid-1935 settled some crucial matters relating to the EAMS, but unforeseen problems bedevilled the project to the last moment. In February 1937 Imperial protested that at Cairo, Juba, Mozambique and Durban it was unable to lay its hands on materials and spares held in bond pending payment of import duty that it understood had been waived.25 Simultaneously, a matter of five weeks before services to Africa were scheduled to begin, Imperial had second thoughts about the adequacy and safety of its Nile landing site at Juba. After years of planning it suddenly emerged that the river there was too shallow. Thought was given to dredging and to raising the level artificially by constructing weirs. In the end, the Imperial manager in Central Africa J. W. S. Brancker Jr recommended using an upriver site at Laropi where there was deeper water and a disused rail [ 204 ]

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jetty. He obtained assurances that aircraft moorings would not interfere with river steamers. Relocation may have been swift had it not been for the administrative inconvenience that Juba was in the Sudan and Laropi was in Uganda. ‘Blasted British boundaries’, one can almost hear Woods Humphery spluttering. Neither the Ugandan nor the Sudanese authorities were pleased by the last-minute change of plans. Sudan complained that whereas it had sunk funds into the EAMS it was now being denied some of the benefits. The Sudanese authorities wished Laropi to be made a mail stop at least, and wanted Britain to fund a compensatory riverboat mail service down river to Juba. Uganda’s initial response was to draw London’s attention to the utter isolation of Laropi, and to the hippopotami that frequented the pools there. The Air Ministry’s answer was that once a few of the animals had been shot the rest would migrate away. Adding further objections, the Ugandan Government noted that the proposed landing site was subject to violent squalls. London was unmoved. The Ugandans opened up a new line of resistance. Why should they sink new money into staff housing, and wireless and telecommunication facilities if Imperial was going to make a habit of changing its mind about landing places? Moreover, the agreed Ugandan contribution to the EAMS had been a subsidy and flying boat facility (costing £11,000) at Port Bell only. The colonial budget simply did not have reserves to satisfy shifting aviation whims. Under relentless pressure from London, the Ugandans next agreed in principle to develop Laropi provided it was used only as a refuelling stop (where facilities would be minimal). This wish cut across Sudan’s. The correspondence file fattened. Time shortened. In June 1937 Government House in Uganda appealed to the Colonial Secretary’s democratic instincts: the taxpayers who would have to bear the added financial burden were Africans to whom the EAMS offered only ‘very nebulous direct benefit’. They were said to be unaware of and indifferent to any indirect advantages. London was warned that it might be stoking up future hostility from ‘ordinary’ Ugandans. Next, the frustrated colonial government played its health card: in a region notoriously subject to sleeping sickness and yellow fever, shelter would have to be constructed to a very high standard. Grass huts would not suffice, at least not if expatriates were going to be stationed at Laropi. Imperial obligingly declared that it would only employ Africans, but the Shell fuel company wanted a white supervisor. A classic plan for racially segregated settlement emerged. Africans working for Shell and Imperial would share barracks at Laropi, and the airline’s white coxswain, white radio operator and white traffic assistant would reside 16 miles away at Moyo. The arrangement required somebody to pay [ 205 ]

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for a new connecting road as well as river bridges and a telephone line. The Ugandan Government was adamant that it would not sanction civil flights until substantial accommodation had been built for station staff. In addition there would need to be an anti-malarial programme, including spraying. Native huts would have to be removed. Medical stores would have to be provided – the nearest white doctor was 50 miles away. The brute force of economics was beginning to tell. A higher-than-normal complement of staff was needed to cover for unexpected illness. Bringing Laropi into service would cost in the vicinity of £30,000 in capital expenditure, and £2,500 in recurrent annual expenditure. Who would pay? It was settled that the funds would come from the Air Votes; the agreement of the Treasury in London was secured on the basis of ‘unforeseen operational considerations’. The saga of Laropi limped on. Rather late, the Air Ministry sent its own representative in Nairobi to inspect the place. He was stunned to see that the local topography was unsuited to safe aircraft approach and take-off. He declared that money would be better invested in improving Juba, if necessary by blasting away the Nile bedrock to create a deeper landing surface. On that very matter it emerged that there had been some misunderstanding about the minimum water depth which was safe for landing Empire-class flying boats: the margin was six feet, not eight. The knockout blow was the estimate about the money and time needed to clear river vegetation and bush at Laropi. On the basis of experience at Kisumu where a gang of one hundred men (half of them convicts) had been used to remove weed, the Air Ministry calculated that the task would occupy one thousand men for a year. A smaller budget item was ‘clearing and compensation of people within half-a-mile of mooring buoys’. Relocated African labour would have to be conscripted and transported expensively from elsewhere. The Empire airline could not after all sweep away everything that it came up against: Ugandan protests may have been irritating, but aquatic biomass proved intractable. In February 1938 Imperial notified the relevant parties that it had given up on Laropi and was reconsidering flying boat landings five miles upriver from Juba. No embarrassing public retreat was needed because the whole saga had been kept private. But a new round of negotiations and expenditure had to begin, urgently, to get the new site ready. Tree felling made the approaches safer. Riverbank improvements were needed for mooring, for handling passengers during refuelling and for storing marine equipment. There was no housing for marine crew in the derelict town, once the riverhead for Nile steamers. They, and [ 206 ]

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longer-stay passengers and flying crew, were ferried to Juba, or travelled by road. Both options were problematic. The five-mile-long road was in disrepair and in the rainy season was impassable without bridging. Fixing the overland route would cost £5,000. Submerged rocks and sandbanks in the Nile presented a danger. For a time, Imperial resorted to sedan chair transport part of the way between Rejaf and Juba.26 Porters continued to carry Empire. South Africa In South Africa the diversion of the Empire route necessitated shifting the Imperial terminus (including workshops) from the vicinity of Johannesburg to the coastal city of Durban. Some consideration was given to selecting Lourenço Marques instead, but British officials thought that whereas the Portuguese would tolerate a stopover they would not accept a terminus: a considerable infrastructure would indicate a permanent foreign presence. The same logic did not apply away from the capital of Portuguese East Africa. In the coastal town of Mozambique, Imperial was partly responsible for building a new hotel to ensure there would be sufficient accommodation if two flying boats landed simultaneously. Sir Donald Banks (from the British Post Office) gave another reason for choosing Durban. The African terminus of the Empire trunk route should be in British territory, he said, ‘if for no other reason than that of sentiment’.27 South Africa’s nationalistic air minister Pirow used the proposed flying boat service to express displeasure with Imperial generally. Whereas he was presumably pleased to see the British airline leave his country’s commercial capital, being asked to subsidise the offshore EAMS irked him. He argued that his Government’s existing five-year subsidy to Imperial had been politically damaging to senior South African Cabinet ministers. Gen. Smuts, then South Africa’s DeputyPrime Minister and Minister of Justice, may have been the exception – he certainly approved the EAMS. Told about it in November 1934 he remarked enthusiastically that ‘the British Empire must be first in the air as she is on the sea’. His stance was one that a former President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science might have been expected to take, not least one who used Imperial for his Saturday-to-Monday visits to England.28 Pirow’s initial bargaining position was that the Union would only agree to a new cycle of subsidies for Imperial after the existing contract expired in 1937 if the money was paid from the defence budget and used to purchase a fleet of 200mph aircraft. He wanted to use these for pilot training, and to have the right to requisition the fast aircraft for military use. Having publicised the likely friction with Imperial during [ 207 ]

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the glittering opening session of the 1935 imperial Press Conference in Cape Town, Pirow then backed down. He was tempted by an offer, among others, for South Africa’s flag-carrying airline (Union Airways) to operate a commercial service from Johannesburg to Lusaka (capital of Northern Rhodesia from 1935) on a westerly route through Southern Rhodesia. The quid pro quo was that Rhodesia and Nyasaland Airways (RANA) would have a reciprocal right on an easterly route. In the course of negotiating these concessions, the Governor of Southern Rhodesia sent a memorandum to the Dominion’s Office in which he revealed the feeling in Rhodesia and South Africa that Imperial was ‘inclined to ride roughshod over everybody’. In Northern Rhodesia there would have been some gratitude for a Colonial Development Fund award of £15,000 for wireless facilities that put their new capital on the air map. Coinciding with the Laropi affair, and dragging on after it, the South African thorn continued to prick. Pirow’s latest wheeze was to waive the £100,000 bill for flying boat facilities at Durban if he could use restrooms, workshops and offices at Imperial’s inland aerodromes. Imperial felt cornered. RANA understood that it had been promised their use. Wilson Airways was annoyed by the prospect of increased competition after just having ordered new aircraft and hired new pilots. In May 1937, at yet another London meeting attended by representatives of the Air Ministry, the colonial and the dominions offices, the Treasury and Imperial, one frustrated British official suggested just having done with it and giving Pirow all the air traffic and aviation facilities south of Kisumu. Time saving as this may have been, a timely reminder about the resultant ‘disastrous loss of civil aviation prestige’ quashed the idea. There followed a meeting with Pirow in Mombasa. Little can have been accomplished to Britain’s advantage. A year on the likelihood remained that all Imperial airmail services to Africa would terminate at Kisumu. As things stood then, one of the weekly flights stopped there and two went on to Durban. The South Africa section of the London Chamber of Commerce urged Imperial to operate an additional weekly through service, but the carrier reported capacity adequate for the existing traffic. Imperial would only offer an additional flight if it received £78,000 to buy another flying boat and subsidise its operation. When meeting Pirow in London in October 1938 British officials worried that he would ask to operate an air service right through to London. Facing this prospect, and with the possibility of competition from France and Italy (which might exercise reciprocal rights with Pirow’s trans-Europe landplane service), Britain gladly accepted the South Africans as partners on just the Kisumu–Johannesburg trunk [ 208 ]

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route. A prior right to local traffic was negotiated for the local operators, RANA and Wilson. A new company (Central African Airways) was formed to handle the trunk-route traffic in the proportions 60 (Imperial), 20 (RANA), 20 (Wilson). In February 1939 a retired Air Ministry permanent secretary flew from London on a trip through central, eastern and southern Africa to finalise the new ­arrangements. Britain’s renewed interest in a landplane service was partly to prevent South African monopoly of the overland route: its faster Junkers aircraft would scoop all the traffic. Furthermore, Imperial’s flying boat service was never set to tap into passenger or freight markets beyond Durban. The small Indian Ocean island colony of Mauritius offered too little, and Cape Town was off limits – in November 1938 Pirow declared that it would be an ‘unfriendly gesture’ if Imperial reappeared in the mother city of the Union. Finally, there were second thoughts in Britain about using flying boats on the African routes as they were costing the Treasury dearly. Abandoning them at once might have saved money, but at the risk of offending the Portuguese and losing a valuable bargaining counter in dealings with Pirow.29 India The reception given the EAMS and the attendant flying boat technology did not only run into trouble in tropical Africa. By 1936 the Indian Government was having serious doubts about participating. Some public opinion was that a British company had again scooped the prime routes to the exclusion of Indian capital and enterprise; once more the development of Empire air services by a public corporation meant that political considerations overshadowed commercial considerations. There were also worries about the affordability and strategic value of flying boats. Who would meet the cost of establishing new infrastructure? Even if seaplane bases might one day have defensive merit, many Indians thought it unlikely that Indians would be trained to fly civil seaplanes. Indeed, would flying boats promote civil aviation in the subcontinent? The question became more pertinent late in 1936 when Imperial cut back on the lavish route proposals made after a survey conducted by Tymms and Brackley.30 Once services began, localised agitation arose in India against Imperial’s use of the lake at Gwalior, but it was overcome by the Maharajah. In consideration of local sensibilities, flying boat commanders were instructed not to fly over the Raj Samand palace and temple. The lake there was itself looked upon as sacred. Other local protest emerged after Imperial switched flights from Gwadar to Jiwani in 1938. Fishermen who had long sheltered their boats where Imperial flying boats started anchoring requested either compensation for inconvenience and risk, [ 209 ]

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or the dredging of an alternate anchorage. If the example of Calcutta was typical, imperial presumptions rather than local negotiations attended the provision and funding of infrastructure improvements at flying boat bases in India. Indeed, Tymms wrote huffily to the Air Ministry that Imperial ‘always proceed on the basis of getting someone else to pay their operating costs’.31 On the national scale Indian resentment simmered even after inclusion of the subcontinent in the EAMS when some changes were made to the joint operations of Indian Trans-Continental Airways and Imperial. (They co-operated on the London–Calcutta sector in place of the Karachi–Singapore sector.) In a carefully phrased report sent to the Secretary of State for India in 1939, the Indian Government observed that shared civil air enterprise had not worked to the advantage of Indian national sentiment or interests. People complained about Imperial service having limited capacity and not being punctual. There was criticism about the delayed delivery of airliners that were meant to be the visible symbol of India’s EAMS participation. Critics rounded on Trans-Continental as a front behind which Imperial controlled the main Indian air route. It had certainly been disappointingly slow employing Indian pilots and first officers on the Indian trunk air route.32 Australia East of India it was not until November 1936 that Australia gave in and supported the EAMS. Over a two-year period it came before the Australian Cabinet twenty-nine times. Closely related matters were given attention on a further twenty-eight occasions. Even the strategic decision to fly a British delegation to Sydney in February 1935 to discuss difficulties did not overturn antipodean objections to a proposal which had taken eighteen months to hatch in London, and about which no imperial government had been consulted. Among several Australian objections was that the EAMS would double its annual civil aviation budget. Besides, the proposed shift from landplanes would necessitate expenditure on equipping a longer and slower air route around the Australian coast. The switch meant deceleration in local air service (because of the lengthened route), freight congestion, and loss of trunk service to inland towns in the Australian outback. The vulnerability of coastal air routes in times of war was another concern. Domestic aviation work was also set to shrink by virtue of Imperial’s decision to perform all major flying boat repairs and servicing in Britain. In Australian eyes the unilaterally imposed scheme subverted local interests to those of aeronautics and London shareholders. However sincere the Director-General of [ 210 ]

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the British Post Office may have been in his ‘earnest desire to see the Australian flag arriving and departing from Croydon’, it was easier for Australians to scent a return to ‘the arbitrary methods of early Colonial Office days’.33 Once again when dominion approval was sought for an Empirewide air plan, tensions ruffled the smooth facade of imperial unity. In Britain, Australian self-interest was seen as putting at risk the ‘improved cohesion of the Empire’, something to which Woods Humphery referred glowingly in 1936 in the first of a sequence of two daily Times leader-page articles entitled ‘Dominion of the Air’. Britain’s Prime Minister intervened personally with a heartfelt unity call to his Australian counterpart. He, in turn, objected to the peremptory tone of London’s telegrams. The Dominion Office – its enthusiastic Under-Secretary not least – weighed into negotiating Australia’s EAMS participation. The view of his war-alert British Government was that commercial air service development, and the consequent establishment of an aircraft industry, were vital for defence and for providing an industrial base for RAF expansion, if necessary. Downing Street also played the American card, expressing anxiety about competition from that power’s overseas airline. In the end, rather than breaking off negotiations with Britain, the Australians succumbed to economic pressure and Empire sentiment. Managing to extract some concessions while in London, two Australian Cabinet ministers nevertheless fell victim to its ‘heady atmosphere’. Despite having different ideas about the meaning and purpose of Empire, Australia despatched its first EAMS service from Sydney in August 1938. In customary style the Acting-Governor General handed over a special mailbag containing messages of goodwill to the King, his Prime Minister and his Postmaster-General.34

Operations In 1937 in the Northern Hemisphere summer, the unsurcharged mail service by flying boat was started along the established Empire routes east of Britain. Canopus, the first of the iconic Empire flying boats, had already been inducted at a private ceremony attended by dignitaries at Gillingham naval pier in October the previous year, so the Southampton launch event was to publicise the technology and celebrate the service. The filmed proceedings, and the BBC radio broadcast, were preceded by an astonishing fuss over the guest list and the waterside arrangements. In the end the Government hospitality fund paid for the Post Office to host some two hundred people at an elaborate function. Niggling protocol was sorted out in respect of train coach accommoda[ 211 ]

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tion, table seating, the lettering on a ceremonial red silk mailbag and the placement of an ivory handled date stamp in a mahogany box.35 The launch of each new flying boat successively expanded operations. For several months only the African route was served. The service from Hythe (on Southampton Water) commenced at the end of June shortly after the one-thousandth regular airmail despatch from the United Kingdom along the Empire routes. Commemorating that marker, Woods Humphery reflected proudly that British airliners manned by British crews had served three monarchs in improving understanding between the dominions and colonies and the ‘Mother Country’. Less notably, Imperial had just been relieved of its European operations. The start of the flying boat service coincided with other anniversaries. It was 110 years since Britain’s Commissioner of Revenue had remarked that rapid postal communications were vital for imperial success. It was sixteen years since G. Holt Thomas first suggested that all overseas first-class mail should be forwarded by air. Fourteen years had passed since the Director of Postal Services told the

Figure 10  At Southampton docks, an Imperial flying boat passes a Union Castle liner before its maiden voyage, 6 April 1938. The Capetown Castle would sail 591 passengers to Cape Town in 13 days, 8 days longer than the 17–passenger Empire Class Circe air service to Durban.

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International Air Congress meeting in London that airships would be the principal imperial airmail carriers. Speaking at the launch of the seven-day flight to Durban the Imperial chairman tactfully ignored these anniversaries. Instead, Geddes looked forward and suggested that the event was one which future generations might regard as crucial to the consolidation and development of the Empire.36 Four week-long Imperial flying boat survey flights, demonstrations and trials along the Alexandria–Karachi–Singapore route in the last four months of 1937 identified problems at marine air bases and indicated work that needed doing before commercial services started. The inaugural mail flights by Empire flying boat began to India, Malaya and the Straits Settlements (Singapore, Malacca, Penang) in February 1938 and to Australia in July. Later in the year the first overseas Christmas mails were sent on by flying boat under the new no-surcharge scheme. The July send-off at Southampton was filled with pomp once more. Among the several hundred guests were civic notables and journalists. The guests included Croydon’s chief aerodrome officer and Imperial’s engine shop superintendent and engine shop foreman. Among the senior public figures present was the Secretary of State for Air, the Postmaster-General, the Imperial chairman, Shelmerdine (DirectorGeneral of Civil Aviation), the Australian Deputy-Prime Minister, and the country’s High Commissioner. Letters sent to high-ranking officials overseas from the King, the Dominions Secretary and the Postmaster-General were franked with a commemorative stamp and put in bags of scarlet silk away from sixty-eight mail sacks.37 Old-fashioned British ceremony and distinction had not yet been nudged into obscurity. From Australia, however, Britain’s most senior representative reported the landside carelessness that made an ‘abominable mess’ of the flying boat’s arrival.38 Lord Londonderry complained about the brief coverage on the BBC’s 10 o’clock evening national news, and about the slight half-column notice on an inside page of The Times. Quietly, unheralded, and characteristically British, there came into operation what the Marquess regarded as ‘a scheme of infinite hope for the future of the Empire and civilization generally’.39 Few people outside aviation would have seen the souvenir booklet whose cover boasted about the inauguration of an imperial airmail programme not just to Australia but also to remote south Pacific islands. Several of these had names redolent of earlier British contact: Banks, Cook, Fanning, Solomon, Gilbert, Ellice, Nauru, New Guinea, New Hebrides, New Zealand, Norfolk, Papua, Samoa, Tasmania and Tonga. This destination list was impeccably imperial, yet it tested the boundaries of belief. Air links were still only aims and possibilities. The geography of South Pacific aviation would be shaped by practicali[ 213 ]

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ties and will. Yet another Latin slogan was devised to wrap Imperial’s mission with noble gravitas: Imperii Viae Volito (the Empire flying route/Empire air way) is the inscription on the souvenir booklet.40 The start of the EAMS was meant to propel British Empire air transport to new heights. Anglo-American aviation writers were certainly enthusiastic. The lukewarm reaction in the colonies and dominions was not newsworthy in London. Nuanced interpretations were not journalists’ stock-in-trade; it was easier simply to be mesmerised by technology. Just as the American Aviation Mission of 1919 applauded post-war British air initiatives, so in 1938 the American journal Aviation assessed the new enterprise generously. The editors noted that whereas Imperial had never before led anyone to anticipate rampaging progress, the airline was now embarking on a project that would have a ‘tremendously beneficial effect upon Empire ties and loyalties’. It would also give Britain a position in air transport ‘equalling her leadership in ocean commerce’.41 Citing the acclaim eagerly, Burchall added his own view that Britain and the Empire could be proud of taking to the people of the world the benefits of aviation in the interest of peace.42 True, the airmail was not warlike, but preserving a shakylooking world peace was not the purpose of air commerce either.

Notes   1 Lyth, ‘The Empire’s airway’.   2 NA, CO 822/40/6: High Commissioner to Secretary of State (Dominions), November 1932. Barrett-Lennard’s visit coincided with the suggestion to eliminate Union Airways competition by offering Maj. Miller ‘a high sounding job with little influence’ at Imperial (CO 822/23/8, p. 149).   3 Memorandum in NA, AVIA 2/636.   4 H. Robinson, Carrying British Mails Overseas (London, 1964).   5 BL, OIOC L, PO/1/41 (viii): Londonderry to Chamberlain, 5 and 26 October 1934.   6 BPMA, PO 33/5396 (11).   7 Economist (29 December 1934), pp. 1246–7.   8 Flight (16 January 1919), pp. 84–85.   9 BPMA, PO 33/5396 (3). 10 NA, DR 9/32; H. Burchall, ‘Empire flying boat routes’, Brassey’s Naval Annual (1937), 180–9; H. Burchall, ‘The projected flying-boat service to Australia’, Asiatic Review, 33 (1937), 627–34; The Times (11 November 1936), p. 23; SAD 767/7/22– 23. 11 Sassoon, ‘Aviation to-day and to-morrow’, p. 175. 12 The Times (18 August 1927), p. 11. 13 J. D. Rennie, ‘The problem of the long-range flying boat’, Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 32 (1928), p. 282. 14 Airways (February 1927); The Times (6 November 1934), p. 14. 15 The Times (29 May, 5 November 1936); Imperial Airways Gazette (December 1936); Who Was Who, 1897–1996. 16 NA, AVIA 2/1013 and 1314. 17 H. Bolitho, Beside Galilee (London, 1933). 18 NA, FO 20802 (E4729/922/93): Memoranda by J. G. Ward, 9 and 12 August 1937; correspondence in CO 323/1446/43 and 45; FO 624/9.

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reconfiguring empire aviation 19 M. D. Howes, ‘Some details of the first twenty-five years of flying in Tanganyika, 1914–1939’, Tanganyika Notes and Records, 50 (1958). 20 NA, AVIA 2/1929: J. Byre to Cunliffe Lister, 14 January 1935. 21 S. Hoyle, Gillman of Tanganyika, 1882–1946 (Aldershot, 1987). 22 H. E. Turner, The Fifth Imperial Press Conference (London, 1935); Colonial Development Advisory Committee, Annual Report (1937), Cmd 5537; BPMA, PO 33/5367 (2): Report by Sir Christopher Bullock on the Results of his Mission to Africa; PO 33/5367 (11). 23 Flight (5 September 1930), p. 1002. 24 BPMA, PO 33/5367 (2); NA, AVIA 2/1246, 1271, 1929 and 1989. 25 NA, AVIA 2/1989. 26 NA, AVIA 2/1106, 1278 and 1314. 27 SAL, MSB 750.1(5); BPMA, PO 33/5367 (4): High Commissioner’s Memorandum, 29 January 1935. 28 NA, DO 35/214/1 (8345/84); Journal of the Royal African Society, 34 (1934), p. 77. 29 NA, T 161/917; AVIA 2/1254 and 2369. 30 BPMA, PO 33/5525 (7) (14); NA, AVIA 2/1070. 31 NA, AVIA 2/2010 and 2039; AVIA 2/1249: Tymms to Galpin, 1 July 1938. 32 BPMA, PO 33/5525 (35): Report No 1, India Department of Communications, 18 August 1939. 33 BPMA, PO 33/5545 (3) (5) (10); Sphere (5 January 1935), p. 8; The Times (1, 26 February; 1 March 1935); Edmonds, ‘Australia, Britain and the Empire Air Mail scheme’. 34 The Times (18 May 1936), p. 15; Edmonds, ‘Australia, Britain and the Empire Air Mail scheme’; J. Garner, The Commonwealth Office, 1925–1968 (London, 1978). 35 SML, Mayo 5/10; BPMA, PO 33/5330. 36 The Times (28 June 1923), p. 7; H. Burchall, ‘Imperial air routes’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institute (1938), 247–61; SAA, GG 1879 (59/836); Imperial Airways Gazette (August 1937). 37 NA, AVIA 2/2010; Listener (20 October 1938), pp. 825–7; Imperial Airways Gazette (August 1938). 38 NA, FO 371/2242: Acting-High Commissioner to Secretary of State (Dominion Affairs), 11 July 1938. 39 Aeroplane (27 July 1938), p. 103. 40 SML, Mayo 5/18; Post Office Magazine (September 1938). 41 Cited by Fearon, ‘The growth of aviation’. 42 Burchall, ‘Imperial air routes’, pp. 258–60.

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Neither the glamorous new flying boats nor the promised faster Empire air service satisfied the critics of Imperial Airways. Pressure mounted for change to the design and practice of aviation in the Empire. Geddes’s death at age sixty-two in June 1937 made the edifice more ­vulnerable than it had been for more than a decade. A leader of stature and influence was mourned. His system would not survive him for long. The London Times published a glowing tribute to Geddes from Sir Ralph Wedgwood. The Imperial chairman had been by far the greatest ­organiser it had ever been his privilege to meet. His methods, he said, ‘were Napoleonic but effective’. This was high praise from someone who had been General Manager of the London and North Eastern Railway since 1923.1 In his own mouthpiece, C. G. Grey volunteered that Geddes had been a great man in his own way, and in a time when there were so many paltry men. ‘The Empire is poorer by his death’, he wrote. Later, however, Grey would attribute Imperial’s troubles in the late 1930s to the Geddes system, if not to the long shadow cast by the man. He built and drove a system of almost inhuman mechanical efficiency, but he was ‘a machine to be feared rather than a human being to be loved and followed’. The result, Grey wrote, was an ‘atmosphere of pomposity, not to say pretentiousness or grandiosity’ which had stuck in the gizzards of everybody who had anything to do with the airline. Grey exempted the crew. Forgetting the pilots’ strike in 1924, his rebuke strayed into muddled sycophancy about temperamental aircrews that needed an intimate personal touch from a dictator like a führer.2

Parliamentary criticism By the time Grey penned that indelicate remark, scathing criticism in Westminster had battered Imperial. The honeymoon decade, 1924–34, was over. During the Air Estimates readings in the Commons in [ 216 ]

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October and November 1937, a West Country Conservative Parliamentarian, Robert Perkins, donned the executioner’s hood. Britain’s grand old man of flight, Moore-Brabazon, judged the performance ‘a terrific onslaught’, and dubbed it ‘the first aviation Philippic’. It was a ‘masterpiece’ according to one Labour Member of Parliament. A pilot, and founder and vice-chairman of the British Air Line Pilots Association, Perkins confined most of his remarks to nuts-and-bolts operating issues. He began with the deteriorating industrial relations in Imperial and the management’s dislike of collective bargaining in particular (rumours of unionisation among air stewards was met with threats of postings to remote parts of Africa). Pilots wrestled with an eight-fold intensification of Imperial services after the intro­ duction of the EAMS. They were obliged to fly outmoded aircraft and work long and unsociable hours, yet they were denied a voice. In the meantime, airline subsidies were increased, shareholders reaped enlarged dividends, and directors’ salaries doubled. It was a slap in the face for the pilots of Britain’s Heath Robinson flying contraptions on the Imperii Viae Volito where national prestige was deflated in front of German, American and Dutch airliners. Smarter competitors were filling markets for aircraft in Canada, Australia and South Africa. Perkins also objected to anti-competitive practices in Imperial. These included refusing Imperial Airways Gazette advertising space to British Airways (which took over Imperial’s European services) while giving space to Lufthansa and denying ticketing to travel agents.3 Cobham publicly condemned Perkins’s criticism as a mixture of halftruths and special pleading that would serve only to undermine the prestige of Imperial and British aviation generally. Possibly for that exact reason, an investigating committee into civil aviation was appointed at the end of November 1937. Lord Cadman, Chairman of the AngloIranian Oil Company (named ‘Anglo-Persian’ until 1936), was appointed head. His committee’s work proved decisive for Imperial even though barely a quarter of its thirty-page report concerned the airline directly. The airline was criticised for its attitudes to internal staff matters, for failing to co-operate fully with the Air Ministry, and for being intolerant of suggestions and unyielding in negotiations. The dividends paid to shareholders attracted adverse comment even though for ten years the Ministry had accepted that the airline’s mandate was to operate on commercial lines with a subsidy. The Cadman report savaged Woods Humphery. He was accused of elevating profit and loss above that of wider Empire purpose, including creating a market for British aircraft manufacturers and training flight crews for imperial defence. The Imperial Board was ‘profoundly disappointed’ that the airline’s submission to the Cadman committee seemed impotent. The ­Secretary [ 217 ]

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of State for Air agreed that the absence of any mention of the Empire services was strange. In an unusual step, in a preface to the printed report of the Cadman committee, the Government went some way to setting matters right by giving fuller recognition to Imperial’s Empire programme. Cadman’s conclusions and accusations surprised Woods Humphery, the stalwart servant of Imperial if not Empire. He was also aggrieved about the procedures that the Cadman committee followed. He was promised a second interview in order to deal with the charges made against him, but the opportunity never materialised. The victim would have had a point if he had pleaded scapegoat. With Geddes gone, it was a perverse tribute to the Managing Director that he should be targeted. Almost certainly, Woods Humphery would have been one of those who thought that Cadman’s recommendations had more to do with the politico-strategic context of 1938 than with the record of his airline.4 Even before the Cadman committee reported, the Government was hunting for a successor to Geddes. One pretender to the throne had already been sidelined. Sir Christopher Bullock was dismissed in 1936 after the national scandal of a parliamentary inquiry (appointed by the Prime Minister) into impropriety involving Bullock’s wish to leave the Air Ministry, be appointed to the Imperial Board, and then succeed Geddes. Civil-service corruption was ruled out, but Bullock’s informal conversations with Geddes about a possible high honour due him, Geddes, for service to Empire, appeared more than coin­cidental and were rated lacking in judgement.5 Sir George Beharrell, who replaced Geddes as chairman at Dunlop, was Acting-Chairman of Imperial and would have been another contender. But the Government wanted someone full-time to clean up what it had come to regard as a corporate mess. In September 1937, Sir John (later Lord) Reith, then Director-General of the BBC, learned that he was the top candidate for executive chairman of the airline. His leadership experience and public persona marked him as someone who could transform Britain’s Empire airline.6 Certainly his successor at the BBC knew ability when he saw it. Bidding farewell to Reith he observed that he possessed ‘one of the finest and most forceful intellects in British administration’.7 No attention was given to the possibility of ending nation-based air services. One alternative was to place world air transport under the mantle of some supra-national organisation such as the League of Nations. In 1926 Lord Attlee suggested that the League might form a Société Internationale des Wagons-Lits de l’Air. Seven years on, the New Commonwealth society reported enthusiastically on a French non-party proposal for an international air transport union that would [ 218 ]

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rationalise wasteful civil airline and aeronautical manufacturing competition and subsidy, and deter the build-up of national military reserve air capacity. Neither nationalists nor imperialists approved. They argued, for example, that obstacles within the relatively homogeneous British Empire would be minor compared to insuperable political differences between Empire countries and other nations.8 C. D. Burney dismissed extra-Empire co-operation as a conflation of the bogeys of Bolshevism, pacifism, atheism and materialism. The Air League of the British Empire would have none of it. In the House of Commons, J. T. C. Moore-Brabazon waved away internationalisation as just the kind of contrivance that would appeal to ‘defeatist half-wits from the Foreign Office’.9 Little consideration seems to have been given to a compromise British-only arrangement modelled on Sir Halford Mackinder’s Imperial Shipping Committee. Dating from 1918 this inter-imperial advisory body reported to the British and dominion prime ministers and not to the British parliament or any Government department. In 1930 its membership was in fact expanded to include a civil aviation representative, but Shelmerdine, the incumbent, was expected only to advise how shipping initiatives might work out in the context of airline competition for traffic. The editor of Round Table, H. V. Hodson, favoured a less passive role for an all-air body which was more than a semi-technical committee. He recommended a permanent subcommittee of a new Commonwealth communications conference. This might have included the existing inter-Imperial cable and wireless advisory group. Two well-travelled commentators offered the alternative of a British transport administration overseeing all forms of transport at home and abroad. Presented to the Institute of Transport in London in February 1932, their proposal oozed imperialism. The Empire and the rest of the world, they wrote, looked to the mother country ‘for a real and courageous lead to save perhaps civilization itself’.10

Reith restructures An engineer by training, Reith was described in a contemporary newsmagazine as a starch, six-foot-six, ascetic Aberdonian. For a second time a Scot would head Empire civil aviation. For a second time a non-military man controlled the rudder. Reith’s presence and uncompromising managerial style served him well during fifteen years at Broadcasting House. His achievement of restructuring the BBC into a public corporation was greatly admired and was considered just the tonic needed to revive Imperial and merge it with British Airways, [ 219 ]

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which flew the flag for Britain on European routes from February 1936. Whether Reith would make Imperial better loved and more responsive was a moot point. The American Time magazine wondered if the puritanical man would infect the airline with his condescending attitude that public organisations existed to prescribe what the British public ought to have, not provide what it wanted. It speculated that Reith would recreate the top-to-bottom, rigid quarterdeck punctilio he commanded at the BBC. More conservative and snobbish even than Reith, C. G. Grey sniffed because he feared that Reith might take unsuitable staff with him. Evidently he did not expect job mobility among the radio announcers who were required to wear dinner jackets when on air: Grey declared that young people ‘of indeterminate sex with wavy hair, arty shirting, flapping trousers and elegant suede footwear’ should not staff Empire aviation enterprise. With customary rudeness he added that Reith would find his new assignment ‘more of a man’s job than turning out bilge and bathos from the BBC’.11 In the Empire stakes Grey rated aviation higher than broadcasting. Machines trumped words, action won over sentiment. Should there be any doubt, gendered associations would be conclusive. Like Geddes before him, Reith was an unwilling appointee. He took the reins of Imperial in the second half of 1938, aged forty-eight. He took the job because the Prime Minister asked him and not because he wanted to. He was desolated at having to leave his BBC. It might have helped that the head of the Air Ministry encouraged him to think of his new post as ‘sitting at the centre of a vast aerial communication system’, almost as if he ‘were chairman of all the English shipping companies’.12 Recollections of Britain’s maritime grandeur seldom failed to twitch an imperial nerve even in a dour Scotsman anaesthetised by his dismay at leaving the ‘Beeb’. A Punch cartoon depicted Reith’s move as the transit of Mercury: the messenger of unspecified gods was merely switching from airwaves to airways.13 The dreamer, imperial zealot and patriot could once more contemplate cultivating a corporation for national service. It was a chance for the conformist and devotee of hierarchical values to consolidate his place in the Establishment. The tormented and eccentric outcast could rescue himself. Fourteen years previously Reith had been entranced by the prospect of the BBC ‘girdling the earth’ with radio waves whose invisibility he thought added strength; now the self-dramatist had to unleash the latent strength in the ostentatiously visible aerial bonds of Empire.14 He began by axing Geddes’s Empire. Reith’s first moments at Imperial were signal. He would not have felt he was sitting at the centre of anything very much at all. In his [ 220 ]

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memoirs he recalled leaving behind the architectural magnificence of the BBC’s home at Bush House, Aldwych, and going to work in a shabby office in an old furniture depository behind Victoria railway terminus. According to one contemporary, the street was sordid, lined with cheap hotels and frequented by prostitutes. The building assuredly did not project an imperial air. Reith only discovered it was Imperial’s headquarters because of a sign outside. Burrowing past an ill-informed clerk, up a dark and narrow staircase, along a dingy passage between wooden partitions, he eventually found a door marked ‘Managing Director’ – the sign was not copperplate. His first task captured the atmosphere of the warren perfectly. In a much-repeated anecdote he had to approve the spending of £238 on toilets at Croydon. Reith’s preferred level of working was somewhat higher. Indeed, before the end of his first week he let it be known that he intended to amalgamate Imperial and British Airways into a public corporation.15 Empire aviation was to be nationalised. The toilet incident indicates that expenses were a central pre­occupation at Imperial. A keen eye was kept on profit as well as shareholder rewards. Reith was exasperated by this managerial ­obsession with dividends. In his autobiography he sneered at the rule that shareholders got first consideration. The result was that the airline had not been driven by a sense of its wider importance to Britain and the Empire. He could not discern any passionate commitment to weaving an airline network that was conspicuously and proudly British. As Cadman found, the organisation seemed too commercially inclined. It emitted no sense of a mission that ‘through the seven skies, as once upon the seven seas, British airlines, crews and craft might ply supreme’. Imperial’s disillusioned new boss wrote that he was determined to follow the practice of pleasing shareholders, but that he would do it differently, buying them off. Reith’s views on dividends may have been too harsh. An editorial in Flight magazine made the telling point that reputed financial strength was not to be despised: dividend payments converted many investors who had previously considered air transport a fad.16 Away from the bigger picture, Reith was astonished by the cosy arrangement whereby Geddes had continued to serve as Dunlop’s chairman for the duration of his thirteen-year tenure as Imperial chairman. In 1931/32 he also worked as business consultant to the troubled Lancashire Cotton Corporation. Dunlop’s influence was pervasive. Imperial’s management board (on which two other Dunlop directors sat) met in the Dunlop office, and employed the same solicitors, auditors and architects. The incestuous relationship between the companies was also evident in other spheres. Dunlop supplied aircraft [ 221 ]

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tyres, braking systems and de-icing equipment. Dunlop experience was provided free in some cases. For example, its estate managers advised Imperial ground personnel in Central Africa on protection against malaria.17 Reith was in for more surprises at the level of day-to-day management. As if managing a small family shop, Woods Humphery handled an inordinate amount of detail himself. Reith admired his work and the devotion of his staff. But while paying tribute to Woods Humphery’s creation and operation, he was shocked by the personal indispensability that Woods Humphery had woven around himself. Beyond the top-heavy, centralised structure, the Empire airline had no clear administrative system or any recognisable chain of command. The two general managers, Col Burchall (administration), and Maj. Mayo (technical), held authority and responsibility that seemed to Reith to stop at their office doors. Two other officials (one was probably Maj. Brackley) seemed not to owe allegiance to anyone. Reith’s comment that there was no single experienced and authoritative senior aeronautical adviser tells of his disregard for Mayo, a man who matched Reith’s age but was an intellectually gifted, cautious, introverted Cambridge engineering graduate. The new broom found almost as many opinions on technical matters as there were senior staff; a matter as basic as whether to use landplanes or flying boats was unsettled. Reith judged that much of the damage done by Cadman was self-inflicted and could have been avoided by prudent management. Better public relations would have helped, as even Woods Humphery conceded. His explanation was that the Imperial Board would never have agreed to hire a professional because their first duty was to shareholders. Under Reith there emerged a post designated ‘foreign public relations officer’ which, in 1939, was filled by a contemporary (E. W. P. Newman, Christ Church) who had experience as a press correspondent and adviser.18 If the Imperial administrative system was homespun, opaque and muddled, the office system was arcane. The airline’s image as a progressive organisation owed more to the exulted place of aviation in the transport sector than to either its aircraft or its internal workings. An ex-flunky at Imperial recalled that there was a Dickensian flavour to the office: ‘clerks did sit on tall stools to pore over ledgers. They did tuck their pens behind their ears ... And discipline was strict. If two shillings were unaccounted for there was an inquest’.19 The nerve-centre of Britain’s inter-war Empire airline was a coterie of powerful men who operated a close-knit, fusty organisation according to their own time-warped and idiosyncratic practices. There could be little room for new ideas and emphases, let alone clashing imperious [ 222 ]

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persona. Reith gestured to Woods Humphery that he would retain him as Managing Director, but he cannot have been surprised when Woods Humphery told him at a lunch in October 1937 that he would not allow a full-time chairman to meddle with his Empire. Reith dreaded the inevitable. Woods Humphery was a long-standing friend. As young men they had sat at adjacent desks in the drawing office of the North British Locomotive Company in Glasgow. Woods Humphery had worshipped in the church where Reith’s father was minister. Reith senior officiated at Woods Humphery’s wedding, and John Reith was best man. How and when the men finally parted is not recorded. In his memoirs Reith wrote that Woods Humphery initially accepted some of his reservations and criticisms, but, in time, he accused his old friend of ‘smashing up his organisation’. Reith retorted sarcastically that he had been unable to find any organisation.20 He showed a more generous side when he told shareholders in November 1938 that all Imperial staff, Woods Humphery especially, had overcome obstacles magnificently and merited greater recognition. Failing to distinguish between man and airline, he added that achievements had not received the commendation they merited, and that faults had been magnified to the point that there seemed little else to tell. Exaggerated or not, failure to participate effectively in advanced civil aviation haunted British leaders. In light of Reith’s diagnosis, Shelmerdine’s remark earlier in 1938 took on ominous tones: without the civilising effect of good global (air) communications, he wrote, we will ‘lapse into barbarity’.21 Reaction to the treatment of Woods Humphery disclosed remarkable Imperial solidarity and loyalty. A telegram was drafted which called on every engineer on the Empire routes to observe a 24-hour strike. In the end the call for a stay away was never sent. The airline and the Empire were spared the embarrassment of industrial action by a staff of 3,600 working at 111 stations and responsible for 77 aircraft.22 A strike was averted, but verbal protest gathered momentum. In part, angry outbursts were fuelled by strong imperial sentiment. It was as if Woods Humphery had become the embodiment of Britain’s air Empire. From his lofty position as founding editor of the Empire’s premier aviation magazine, C. G. Grey lashed out at the ‘Reds, Wets and Exhibitionists’ in Parliament. He devoted three pages of one edition to the ‘Imperial Mutiny’ and Woods Humphery’s legacy, namely a British air transport and postal service that he deemed ‘second to none’. The Aeroplane also carried the text of telegrams containing good wishes sent by six of the airline’s overseas divisions. More than one hundred staff paid tribute to Woods Humphery at the [ 223 ]

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dinner they gave in his honour in mid-1938. Speakers tapped into a deep seam of imperial emotion. A mood of spurned patriotism and unappreciated selflessness hung about the room. General Manager Burchall ended his speech saying that Woods Humphery’s absence would be a loss to the organisation, the nation and the Empire. Concurring, Mayo added angrily that the statements made in the House of Commons ‘were a disgrace to the British Empire’.23

Flagship failure Mayo had one more card to play. He did so after a report filed by the Air Ministry. In December 1938 the Directorate of Operational Services and Intelligence in the Air Ministry despatched an employee on a 95-day inspection tour of Imperial’s Singapore–Alexandria flying boat service. Among others, Lt-Cdr Tillard identified conditions that compromised the safety and efficiency of work at marine air bases. His technical reports captured behind-the-scenes elements about which passengers were mostly unaware. He sensed, for example, that operations relied on a bare minimum of crews and launches, not enough for any emergency. Poor promotional prospects for coxswains deterred job applications and contract renewal. Noisy engines made it hard for flying-deck crew and launch crew to exchange instructions. Canopies on passenger launches obstructed navigation and raised the chances of collision with flying boats. In some instances equipment essential to safe navigation and anchorage had been removed from flying boats to increase payload weight. A flying boat commander once had to borrow a map because no supplies were available. In places, skills were in question. At Alexandria the length and direction of one flare path was set by an ‘utterly incompetent’ engineer. Tillard reported that flying boat operations had a precarious as well as a hazardous side. Landside conditions could be tenuous: a landowner summarily terminated Imperial’s land lease at Alexandria (but was later served with an expropriation notice by the Egyptian Government). Operations at marine bases were less than optimal on account of where and how crews lived. Segregation by race and occupation was not identified as having any intrinsic operational consequence, but the distance which some meteorological and launch crews had to travel was noted. At Jiwani the Indian employees were housed in tents a quarter of a mile off base. Karachi launch-crews paddled canoes two miles across the harbour to get to work. Recommending building quarters on site, Tillard’s olfactory advice was to erect them downwind. Sensitive to scenes that Imperial passengers would most certainly notice, Tillard reported that a launch man and his family lived directly [ 224 ]

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Figure 11 London-centric, modernist 1938 Imperial Airways advertisement showing the best times to Empire destinations.

[ 225 ]

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in front of the Imperial base building at Allahabad. He suspected that their matting hut was a last refuge after Imperial staff encroached on their previous quarters. Its foreshore location appeared to him to be ‘a bad advertisement’. The base itself was sited only a few yards from a tuberculosis sanatorium, raising the possibility of contamination by fly swarms. In writing reminiscent of contemporary slum-clearance discourse, Tillard noted Calcutta launch crews living among their poultry under corrugated iron, matting and packing cases right on the pontoon. The ‘temporary’ conditions were not only shockingly dirty and ‘undesirable for human habitation’, he wrote, but they gave air travellers an ‘unfavourable impression’.24 The Air Ministry’s findings did not glow. Yet nothing summarised the gulf between flying boat dreams and flying boat realities better than the internal assessment commissioned by Imperial in 1939. Its writer was no embittered crank. Summoning up more than two decades of experience (which included being sent by the Royal Aero Club to Ireland to inspect Alcock and Brown’s Vimy and certify their eligibility for the trans-Atlantic title), Maj. Mayo compiled his candid report with scrupulous care. It showed that the highly publicised flying boat service fell woefully short of expectations. Written in measured tones, eighty pages of exhaustive detail convey the weight of his ­criticisms.25 Mayo found fault chiefly with the slowness, regularity and safety of the flying boat service. By 1939 the flying schedules were showing journey speeds of 40mph rather than the promised 100mph. He blamed the absence and unreliability of 24-hour direction-finding radio, which, in turn, prevented night flying. Coupled with daylight service, the poor facilities at all flying boat bases (including Hythe) worsened flight regularity by slowing aircraft turnaround and maintenance. Irregularity was, in Mayo’s view, far below the standards associated with the name of Imperial: ‘the service charts, which used to show an occasional dash of colour indicating a delay, are now like rainbows’. Records for January–September 1938 show that 120 (three-quarters) of 158 flights on the Africa route arrived within three hours of schedule; 29 arrived within twenty-four, 9 later. Data for the Australia route show this record of punctuality: 141 flights, 103 no more than three hours late, 16 within twenty-four hours, 22 more than a day late.26 Mayo claimed that Imperial’s Dutch competitor managed considerably superior performance. Service delays continued into 1939. A question in the South African parliament queried the annual payment of £98,000 to Imperial for a service that was irregular, unpunctual and slower than KLM’s to the Far East. The responsible minister resorted to the old tactic of putting [ 226 ]

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passenger safety ahead of speed. At mid-year an Afrikaans-language daily in South Africa reported bitter complaints by the Federation of Empire Chambers of Commerce. An editorial advised cancelling the Imperial monopoly in favour of the Dutch, French, Germans or Belgians – anybody, really. In Singapore the Straits Times reported that Malayan business houses were prepared to pay air mail rates to send valuable bearer bond coupons, share certificates and bank drafts by sea, but were obliged to use the slower, less reliable EAMS. A leader article entitled ‘All-Up Falls Down’ told of advertisements that urged travellers who wanted to be on time to fly KLM.27 Mayo found that severe weather on some route sectors retarded flying boat schedules. Adverse conditions over France and Crete especially created a bottleneck. Specification of a flying range of 500 miles for the Empire flying boats was based on the calculation that they would always be able to land in those territories whereas, in fact, foul Mediterranean weather often prevented flying. There were design flaws on other route sectors where operating practice showed up inefficiency. Imperial scheduled too many minor stopping places, many of which offered inadequate alighting areas and facilities. Pilots anxious to avoid lengthy taxiing and refuelling (tasks that accounted for about 20 per cent of the flying day) began to avoid these intermediate halts. They did so at some risk because of the flying boats’ limited fuel range. Smooth operating along the Empire routes was made more difficult because of certain engineering features of flying boats. One was the poor reliability of aircraft engines that needed overhauling after two hundred hours of flying time. An aerodynamic design which necessitated a fast take-off speed was partly responsible: in the rarefied air and heat at high-altitude tropical African landing sites, the long take-off run of flying boats put unexpected strain on engines when they were operating at maximum power. The insufficiency of spare engines along the route made replacement difficult and necessitated temporarily withdrawing aircraft from service, thereby putting additional strain on serviceable units. Maintenance was difficult enough under high wings on placid water at well-equipped stations. It was difficult and dangerous on rough water at out-stations where there were not even stable jetties from which to work. Mayo did not himself say so, but it seems that the water with which God was said to have blessed the British Empire was not necessarily a better surface than the God-given soil. The disappointing safety record of the Empire flying boats was another aspect of service that Mayo reviewed. There were twelve major accidents in the thirty-two months after the introduction of the flying boats in October 1936. Each crash – each decommissioned aircraft – [ 227 ]

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stretched remaining capacity a little closer to breaking point. At the time the accident record may not have seemed inordinately bad in relation to the amount of flying done, but the statistics did not measure a considerable number of less serious incidents which might easily have resulted in partial or total loss of aircraft. The deaths of seven passengers and twelve crew (not to mention four cases of serious injury and an unknown number of trauma cases) shook public ­confidence. The record, said Mayo, had ‘done little to inspire the con­fidence of the British travelling public or to enhance the prestige of British aviation’. The loss of life may have been thought relatively small, but as Mayo noted, this was only because so few passengers actually used the Empire flying boats. Imperial’s contractual commitments to the Post Office generated payloads that squeezed out less lucrative passenger traffic. Taking aboard a flight clerk to cope with the paperwork associated with mail transfer was one lost fare. The provision of elaborate and luxurious passenger accommodation (which exceeded minimally acceptable standards of spaciousness, heating, ventilation and noise insulation) added weight that curtailed payload, and took up space that might have been used for carrying mail. The provision of sleeping berths was redundant because there was no night flying. Those lucky enough to travel in the flying boats appreciated the comfort, but it was wasted when aircraft were filled to capacity with airmail. This was chiefly on flights outbound from Britain. Mayo noted that the goodwill derived from the promise of comfort was probably offset by the dissatisfaction caused by being unable to obtain bookings. A reduced on-board buffet obliged crew and passengers to dine on the ground and diminished the much-advertised pleasures of flying ‘Imperially’. An even more extreme step toward devoting load capacity to mails involved limiting passengers. In July 1937, Imperial restricted through-tickets to Durban to four on one weekly flight and three on another. This measure seems to have been flexible when it came to flying Imperial staff. In mid-1938 a flying boat bound for South Africa left Southampton with just five passengers (they included a Tanganyikan farmer’s wife, a widow on her way to Tanganyika, an Imperial ground engineer en route to Lagos, and a Swedish airline employee). Only one of these passengers was to fly the whole way to Durban. Whether a quota of seats was set aside for people flying only short sectors is unknown, but protests from Tanganyika about the difficulty of buying tickets suggest not. Sir Patrick Balfour, then a travel-weary 35-year-old solo back-packer, did not record whether his title and pedigree (‘Third Baron of Kinross’) helped secure him a seat on Imperial’s Kisumu–Juba leg in 1939.28 [ 228 ]

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Maximising flying boat payload was always problematic. The initial intention of the designers to meet public expectations of accommodation equivalent to a London club compromised payload in the same way as later efforts to improve flying boat safety. The installation of oxygen apparatus, rafts, doors and upgraded flight-deck instrumentation added to flying boat dead weight, as did hull strengthening. The light construction of flying boat planing bottoms (which were under perpetual stress and were easily damaged) caused five crashes and reduced buoyancy after impact. Sea-salvage was expensive and dangerous; repair was difficult and costly, especially because it required hauling aircraft out of the water, a task for which few flying boat bases were equipped. Even the comparatively simple task of (dis) embarking passengers and (off)loading mails was challenge enough in most places. The superior safety claimed for flying boats before their inception looked poor against the safety record of their predecessors. Mayo might have argued for reverting to landplanes on those grounds alone, but he could also query the alleged savings in fuel projected from the use of river, lake and marine air bases. In practice, suppliers found that the cost of refuelling on water outweighed the saving on fuel transport to airports inland from coastal dumps. It was a delicate task piping fuel carefully between two bobbing objects on a choppy surface so as to avoid fire and to prevent water contaminating any fuel. Mayo’s withering indictment of the Empire flying boat project was not released or leaked into the public domain. By the time he had finished writing it in September 1939 the Second World War had started and there were other imperial distractions. Imperial, in the last throes of merging with British Airways, had moved onto a war footing. Flights continued for a time, but they were made in the interest of the nation not shareholders; out of twenty-one passengers recorded flying to Karachi in November 1939, seventeen were the wives and children of army officers serving in India.29 Mayo’s criticisms and recommendations would have been taken into account when civil aviation resumed after the War, but intervening technical progress presented new opportunities and solutions. Even so, as Mayo concluded, if those clashed with British maritime sentiment there would always be one major hurdle in the way of scrapping flying boats. Mayo’s report had no immediate effect on commercial Empire air services, and it is largely as a historic document that it has any significance. His study shows that claims made about the flying boats on Empire service were untested. Instead, a blend of assumptions and hopes underpinned the making of the new imperial links. With uncertain foundations, Imperial and several Government agencies (Post [ 229 ]

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Office, Treasury, and the Colonial, Dominion and Foreign offices) spent years in complex negotiations about a new imperial air service. Delicate dealings with home governments elsewhere in the Empire proceeded on flimsy grounds. Expecting a boom in flying boat service, the Shell company went so far as to commission a new shallowdraught ship to deliver aircraft fuel in bulk at river-mouth landing sites between Beira and Mombasa.30 Imperial’s gigantic technological and organisational experiment was never presented in experimental try-it-and-see terms.

Coda Into the twilight of Imperial Airways and Empire aviation the Aeroplane continued to hang out soiled imperial laundry. In mid-1938 C.G. Grey published a copy of the letter that Imperial’s AssistantGeneral Manager S. A. Dismore wrote to Prime Minister Chamberlain. Bluntly, Dismore claimed that Woods Humphery, once decorated as a Commander of the British Empire, had been dishonoured. It may have been as close as he dared go to actually telling Chamberlain to nominate Woods Humphery as a Knight of the British Empire. The architect of ‘an organisation unparalleled in the history of the British Empire’ – one of which it could be proud – had been snubbed. Dismore added that Imperial’s ‘true history’ would make stirring reading for people who believed that enterprise, courage and devotion to duty were fading qualities in British people. It was not Woods Humphery but his enemies who epitomised behaviour unbecoming to the nation and Empire. In Grey’s opinion, Dismore’s letter glowed with ‘the Imperial spirit that would rather suffer itself than allow others to suffer unjustly’.31 Pushed out by pilots, passions and politics, the 45-year-old Woods Humphery departed Imperial, London and Britain. His talents were not lost to the Empire. At first he took a senior post in the air-services department of Canadian Pacific Railways, which had ambitions of its own overseas airline. Then, after the outbreak of war (and apparently drawing a salary from the Air Ministry), he headed a trans-Atlantic airborne ferry of American warplanes. Based for a time in the aptly named British Empire building on Fifth Avenue in New York, he saw to it that some twenty thousand aircraft augmented the Allies’ military capabilities in the air. In peacetime he returned to his marine engineering roots and joined a motorboat building enterprise in the United States.32 The ferrying of fighters and bombers eastward across the Atlantic began in November 1940. Burchall and Dismore both worked as admin[ 230 ]

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istrators in the organisation that started with a nucleus of ex-Imperial pilots. Among them was D. C. T. (later Air Vice-Marshal) Bennett who flew as an Imperial pilot from 1936. His memoirs, published in 1958, deride the merger of Imperial with Britain’s European airline as the outcome of ‘political nonsense’. Part of his irritation arose from the ill disposition of British Airways officials to Imperial and their ‘unpatriotic’ purchase of Dutch, German and American aircraft. Bennett paid warm tribute to Woods Humphery, Brackley and Mayo. He considered Brackley the person most directly responsible for opening the Empire air routes. His ‘merry men ... seared their way through the deserts of the world, and had brought civilisation and good communications to all sorts of outposts of the Empire’. But neither Brackley nor Mayo had striking personalities. Mayo was shy, kind and soft-spoken. The mild-mannered scientist’s posture drooped even more than usual when confronted by the pressure of aggressive business interests. In the end, dedication and professionalism did not count for anything. Nor indeed did the quintessentially English gentleman. Even winning records for Britain had lost its sheen. Bennett himself knew how it felt to be slighted: his long-distance seaplane record to the Cape in 1938 went unheralded by the public, the press, Imperial and the aeronautical industry. But he was speaking of the others when he wrote that it was deplorable and typical that the country of their birth failed to honour them.33 The convulsions in Imperial did not choke Empire air services. Nor did they end practical steps to give the organisation a higher profile on the streets of the imperial capital. In 1936 Dunlop’s architect had been engaged to design a new headquarters building for the airline. His brief was to design a structure to fit the only vacant land alongside a platform of the Southern Railway Company (an Imperial shareholder) at Victoria terminus. The site gave direct rail access to Langstone Harbour (Portsmouth), the initial site of the Empire flying boat base. When Imperial’s new building opened in June 1939, Reith scoffed that it was little better than its predecessor. In his view it resembled a depot and was only incidentally the headquarters of an imperial organisation, let alone the ‘great’ one that he had taken to talking about after the airline had ceased to be Woods Humphery’s fiefdom.34 A more charitable architectural interpretation was that the art deco building’s twelve-storey tower centred between symmetrical, curved wings provided ‘a point of interest’ at the end of Buckingham Palace Road. It was among London’s ‘prominent projections’. The building ‘combined utility and convenience with occasional outbreaks of magnificence’. In the concave driveway at the front of the stone-facade building, an exuberant sculpture entitled ‘Speed Wings of the World’ drew the gaze [ 231 ]

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skyward. Two helmeted and winged male figures, one at each side of a globe, leaned forward and, in their outstretched hands, jointly clasped a look-alike Speedbird arrow, Imperial’s geometric logo since 1932. In the lofty main hall of Imperial Airways House, Empire finishes included pillars of fluted Burmese teak, and wall panels and decorative strips cut from Canadian birch, African zebrano and Australian walnut. The exotic forest veneer matched soft furnishings selected from an in situ display that had resembled ‘an imperial bazaar’. Passers-through who were distracted by the anxiety and excitement of air travel could barely have savoured the effects. Fewer still would even have glimpsed the English walnut panelling and the glamorous light fittings that graced the directors’ luncheon eyrie on the eighth floor of the tower. From there, the view was in three directions over London. If not Reith, then certainly the aeronautical correspondent of The Times was enthusiastic. The building, he gasped, was ‘almost symbolic of the company’s heritage of the Empire, if not the earth’. Unlike in the old warren, the atmosphere in the new Imperial building was bustling and modern. The description of the booking office as a cross between a stock exchange and a casino was unfortunate. Clerks clustered around central tables containing a telephone and a row of coloured lights and switches. Revolving bookshelves housed reference documents. Concealed scales weighed passengers almost without their knowing. Fourteen telephone operators reportedly took nearly four thousand calls on their first day at work.35 In its new home, the transformation of Imperial continued smartly. The nationalisation of the airline had been announced formally in November 1938 and stockholder sales coincided with the relocation in June 1939. All the while Reith was refocusing management policy from profitability to national prestige, accentuating the airline’s public service mission. Paradoxically, he discarded its eponymous imperial connotations. Reith decided that the name of the new airline would be ‘British Overseas Airways Corporation’. Selling itself reassuringly, the airline indicated reverence for tradition and the aim of giving ‘still greater strength to the bonds that link Britain to her Empire and to friendly nations overseas’.36 A peeved C. G. Grey sounded the last post. In one of the last of the approximately 1,400 consecutive issues of Aeroplane that he edited (employer or reader tolerance of his Nazi sympathies finally ending), he grumbled that the new airline’s name should have been ‘British Empire Airways’. At the twenty-five thousand addresses to which the magazine was mailed, readers were presented with Grey’s lacerating assessment that the eclipse of the word ‘Imperial’ was symptomatic of British enfeeblement. It was, he said, yet another reflection of the [ 232 ]

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spineless attitude of timid politicians who were afraid to govern an Empire of hundreds of millions of people.37

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Notes   1 The Times (25 June 1937), p. 18.   2 Aeroplane (30 June 1937), p. 789; (16 March 1938), p. 336.   3 Hansard (Commons) (17 November 1937), cols 434, 465; Higham, ‘The British government’.   4 The Times (4 November 1937), p. 10; Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Civil Aviation (1938) (Cmd 5685), pp. ii; 14–16; NA, CAB 27/643; RAFM, AC 76/49; Grieves, Sir Eric Geddes, p. 151; Reith, Into the Wind, p. 307.   5 Report of the Board of Inquiry … (1936) (Cmd 5254); Minute by the Prime Minister (1936) (Cmd 5255).   6 C. Stuart (ed.), The Reith Diaries (London, 1975); A. Boyle, Only the Wind Will Listen: Reith of the BBC (London, 1972).   7 Reith, Into the Wind, p. 317.   8 LSE, Brittain 8; New Commonwealth, Aviation for World Service, Pamphlet No, 4 (1933); J. A. Chamier, ‘The internationalisation of civil aviation: the case against’, New Statesman and Nation (1933), 473–4; Aeroplane (22 March 1933), p. 486; J. Griffin (ed.), World Airways: Why Not? (London, 1934).   9 Burney, The World, the Air and the Future; Hansard (Commons) (14 March 1933), col. 1849. 10 H. V. Hodson, ‘Economics of the Empire’, in A. Willert, et al. (eds), The Empire in the World (Oxford, 1937), p. 227; LSE, Rees Jeffreys Collection, RJ 20/6: A.T. Hacking and W. Rees Jeffreys, A Transport Policy for the British Empire (London, 1932), p. 4. 11 Time (27 June 1938); Aeroplane (22 June 1938), pp. 764–5. 12 Stuart (ed.), The Reith Diaries. I. McIntyre, The Expense of Glory: A Life of John Reith (London, 1993), pp. 239, 247. 13 Punch (22 June 1938). 14 Boyle, Only the Wind Will Listen; J. M. MacKenzie, ‘In touch with the infinite: the BBC and the Empire, 1923–53’, in J. M. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, 1986), pp. 165–91. 15 Makin, Swinging the Equator; McIntyre, The Expense of Glory. 16 Reith, Into the Wind, p. 328; Flight (23 June 1938). 17 Grieves, Sir Eric Geddes, p. 152. On entomological testing for malaria on Imperial aircraft in Khartoum see F. P. Mackie and H. S. Crabtree, ‘The destruction of mosquitoes in aircraft’, Lancet, 20 (1938), 447–50; F. G. S. Whitfield, ‘Air transport, insects and disease’, Bulletin of Entomological Research, 30 (1939), 365–442. 18 Reith, Into the Wind, pp. 294–5, 328–9, 337; Who Was Who, 1897–1996. 19 D. Cluett, et al. (eds), Croydon Airport: the Great Days, 1928–1939 (Sutton, 1980), pp. 33, 37; Jackson, Imperial Airways. 20 Stuart (ed.), The Reith Diaries, pp. 175, 233; Reith, Into the Wind, p. 329. 21 The Times (15 November 1938), p. 22; Listener (18 April 1938), p. 783. 22 Pudney, The Seven Skies. 23 Aeroplane (29 June 1938), p. 800. 24 NA, AVIA 2/1404 and 1547. 25 B. J. Hurren, Fellowship of the Air (London, 1951); SML, Mayo 2/5. 26 BPMA, PO 33/5558. 27 Hansard (House of Assembly, South Africa), February 1939, col. 307; NA, AVIA 2/1581. 28 Flying (17 September 1938); BPMA, PO 33/5551; P. Balfour, Lords of the Equator (London, 1939). 29 Airways Newsletter, No. 3, January 1940. 30 The Engineer (12 May 1939), p. 604.

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shoring up 31 Aeroplane (29 June 1938), pp. 799–800. 32 Higham, Britain’s Imperial Air Routes, p. 291; Grey, The Civil Air War, p. 42; Bamford, Croissants at Croydon; J. Davis, ‘ATFERO: the Atlantic Ferry Organisation’, Journal of Contemporary History, 20 (1985), 71–97; The Times (26 January 1963), p. 10. 33 D. C. T. Bennett, Pathfinder: A War Autobiography (London, 1958), pp. 59, 85. 34 Reith, Into the Wind, p. 338. 35 Grieves, Sir Eric Geddes, p. 152; The Times (4 May 1919), p. 11; (3 June 1939), p. 9; Aeroplane (14 June 1939), p. 766; Architects’ Journal (23 March 1939), pp. 476, 480; (29 June 1939), pp. 1124–8. 36 Grieves, Sir Eric Geddes; Aeronautics (May 1940); Aeroplane (21 June 1939), p. 777. 37 T. James, ‘Charles Grey and his pungent pen’, Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 73 (1969), 839–52. For more on Grey see W. Boddy, ‘C.G.G.’ Blackwood’s Magazine (January 1974), 64–76.

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An enormous number of words about Empire aviation were spoken and written between 1919 and 1939. They distilled the state of affairs but also spawned a new mercantile imperial imagination. Both in Britain and beyond, the matter of civilian flying to, from, between and in Britain’s overseas territorial possessions was the subject of reports, speeches, lectures, debates, editorial and letters in newspapers and magazines. Books and films also conveyed the bare history of air Empire, its technologies, organisation, key ‘commercial’ operator and spheres of operation. Nostalgia, fear, hope and hyperbole were more apparent than detached examination. Nobody coined the words ‘airmpire’, ‘airtopia’ or ‘impaerial’ to denote the dream, but many enthusiastic proponents and publicists might have. It would be a mistake to repeat the exaggerations of the past and suggest that aviation forged a brand of imperialism as distinctive of the twentieth century as was flight itself. Arguably, aviation did not make the British Empire very much less landed or maritime. Empire remained for ever ‘overseas’. As even aircraft require toeholds on land, the novelty of imperialism in the air age was that it was partly airborne and acquired a new dimension and style, not that a new and different configuration of Empire emerged. In inter-war Britain, the pursuit of long-distance civil aviation was about the wish to maintain national standing and imperial interests in the face of competitive international industrial progress. Proponents stressed that the technology was a way of perpetuating British pre-eminence (and so, some claimed, ensuring civilisation itself). Aviation did not create a new Empire or generate a new imperialism. It adapted to existing Empire, reincarnating it, prolonging it, propping it up and willing it to succeed. Flight provided a different stage for imperial sensibilities and theatrics; some people could engage with it as voyager, many more as voyeur. For others, air Empire became a [ 235 ]

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target of anti-imperial protest. Indeed, the technical failures, logistical difficulties and geopolitical tensions and opportunities associated with notional ‘freedom of the air’ gave expression to the new nationalisms of Empire. Empire air passenger and freight transport was a novel, complex service, the economics and logistics of which had to be worked out largely experimentally. The sheer establishment, equipping and operation of Empire air routes and the Empire airline were no simple matters and were beset by controversy, delays and funding difficulties. Providing air service entailed challenges, struggles and oversights. Targets went unmet, compromises were made, and there were disappointments. Flight was no new magic carpet. The gap between the rhetoric and reality of Empire aviation was a marked one. Anticipation and intention exceeded actuality and implementation: what was hoped for and promised from aviation was less than what it actually achieved on the imperial stage. Solid, sustained and to-schedule air service was not the hallmark of Britain’s incipient air Empire. The trumpeted speed advantage of airfreight consignment and personal travel turned out to be something of a red herring. And, whereas aircraft supplemented inter-war shipping, they never replaced ships as the prime vehicle of Empire circulation either in terms of passenger numbers or freight volumes. In the 1920s and 1930s defying gravity became more than a prank, but maritime Empire was never automatically, effortlessly, or completely succeeded by air Empire. Maritime services in the Empire scarcely registered a new challenger. After a succession of promising private flights from Britain into the Empire, a sparse British imperial landplane network was achieved only gradually. At territorial outposts in the Colonies and Dominions, expatriate administrators and surveyors used local labourers to construct landing grounds, and then to staff the refuelling and rest stops. Under indirect rule, local chiefs could be used to arrange working parties and were rewarded for doing so. Indecision in London about technologies appropriate for different route sectors stalled progress. Interventions, designs and procedures formulated in the capital did not always take overseas conditions into account. Aviation and airline officials made placatory tours by air to meet and plead with disaffected foreign parties. Less-than-robust technology and operations handicapped service and damaged the image and practice of imperial aviation. There was nothing resembling a comprehensive arterial Empire air network in the 1920s, despite previous official surveys, expeditions, and private pioneering flights to and from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, India and Australia. For many years European obstructionism confined [ 236 ]

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most of the key Empire airway across Europe to overland rail service. Geopolitics and proprietal sensitivities in the Middle East, India and Africa also threatened, delayed and diverted air-route development. Seeking to be first in the air, and to establish a dominant presence in the consciousness of settler communities and merchants, Britain was taunted by other colonial powers and by small states. British derision ensued, but imperial slights, impotence and humiliation were heartfelt. Squabbles arising from obstinate nationalism were evident even in the ostensibly happy imperial family. Concerns over money (infrastructure cost) and mainline service monopoly (revenue sharing and local airline capacitation) lay at the root of most dissension. Britain, however great, did not find it easy to secure initial advantage or enduring control of overseas imperial air routes. Nobody anticipated that they could be the perforations along which the Empire might tear. The first scheduled, commercial passenger flights by Imperial Airways were made in the 1930s after the calamity of the R101 crash that terminated imperial airshipping dreams. Airplane journeys were unpredictable but became less erratic, even if they never quite attained their touted reliability, frequency and speed. The limited service parodied the grand style of inaugural Empire aviation send-offs and receptions. Imperfect aeronautical machinery and equipment, and inadequate support infrastructure and personnel were partly to blame for disappointment. So too was grandiose, fanciful propaganda. Journey times, and sometimes the rate of air travel, insulted even contemporary notions of speed. Imperial Airways was often called on to explain and defend its poor performance and subsidy. British critics pinned the blame on unimaginative and over-cautious management, on excessive Treasury thrift, and on an attitude that regarded the carrier as primarily a utilitarian conveyance. The new tool of Empire was more than just a technology of movement. The designated imperial airline was also a share-stock business part subsidised for ideological purposes. Dividends and safety were both material concerns. But in a new imperial race, it was important to be first or, at least, not to be last. Aviation was a new imperial handmaiden and flag bearer. It was bound into notions of British national honour, duty, burden, paternalism and defence. In a foreign policy vacuum, and in the context of reluctant imperialism, Imperial became a de facto agent of Empire. Creating and operating in newly constituted geopolitical spaces, the airline was nevertheless constrained by and sought co-operation with established and vested (but increasingly hesitant) agencies of the imperial state. Only small numbers of people and small quantities of cargo circulated by air through imperial skies in the 1930s. But Imperial Airways [ 237 ]

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did more than convey passengers and commodities; it facilitated and advanced British imperialism in a new technological setting. Aviation revived, validated and prolonged conventional notions of Empire. The new technology changed elements of colonial supervision, service and interaction; it altered the experience and sense of being an expatriate and an Empire citizen. The airline flew the British flag, reflected the nation to its own citizens, gave Britain a new presence abroad, and revealed more of Empire to the naked eye. Once the technology was available, an Empire airline was justified for lubricating trade, and facilitating control and sociability across dispersed, non-contiguous territory. There was even reason to think that the airline itself legitimised modern imperialism. For, whereas several countries in the British Empire were able to support domestic aviation, few could afford to purchase, maintain and manage the aviation equipment and infrastructure required to operate hemispherical air routes, bases and services. That was a matter for a super-power or some supra-national organisation. The layered tasks of Empire aviation, and its more-or-less incidental spin-offs, escaped most public criticism. Instead, hostility focused on the more palpable facets of air service. Consistently, and from different quarters, Imperial was berated for being slow into the air and slow in the air. The airline’s lacklustre services were said to reflect poorly on Britain. Critics also rounded on the carrier’s stodgy management, its monopolistic privileges and subsidy, its failure to stimulate the British aircraft industry, and its tendency to put the interests of shareholders above those of country and Empire. Rebuttals were complemented by an innovative scheme launched in 1934 to boost lucrative airmail traffic especially. An integral element of the scheme was a faster Empire-wide service using new flying boat technology. A useful by-product would be recovery of comforting affinities with seaborne Empire. Hopes exceeded reality again. Imperial tensions resurfaced. A damning public inquiry was followed by changes to senior airline personnel, headquarter modernisation, and, in 1938, by airline nationalisation. Even when criticisms and responses were about a company and its management, they were rooted in and projected imperial views and attitudes. Hope, sentiment, paternalism and dogmatism sustained London’s version of air Empire over two decades. Fearful, ambitious and habitual imperial inclinations were part of the mix. The voices that championed the enterprise were old school: resembling some of the aircraft flown, British critics were mostly even older school. Careful and cool independent reason was not always apparent. Testing air-service sustainability against performance came late, and only when the [ 238 ]

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imperial ‘mission’ itself was in recess. Until then, the emotional and extravagant production of air Empire that was created and driven by a relatively small number and network of titled Establishment figures refracted and helped constitute late British imperialism. The overall novelty was less than might have been anticipated from radically new transport technology. Empire aviation nevertheless left a mark in Britain and beyond. The pace and extent of some imperial trade, circulation, contact and awareness improved, as senior figures in politics, defence, industry and commerce predicted, and as many discovered first-hand. Journalists on assignment, and diary-writing independent travellers, told the same story: at its best the new mobility offered superior direct service and comfort. Flying was welcome, not least, for getting to and from places remote from railways and shipping lines. It helped to buckle together much of the backbone of the world’s most extensive Empire in ways that were also meant to enhance the sense of belonging and reduce feelings of isolation. But the delights and dividends of being attached to Britain were alloyed by foreign and colonial political interference and diminished independence. Britain, home to the new technology, was not unaffected. Empire aviation recoiled on the self-sufficiency and serenity of inter-war Britain itself. The very mobility that was shrinking the Empire physically was also a new focal point for countercolonial sentiment that shrivelled the imperial spirit. It is tempting to reduce British imperial aviation to a tale of just the eponymous airline, Imperial Airways. Yet overlaps with other aviation codes – military, sporting and leisure – were not without consequence. Organised civil aviation may claim the limelight, but the roles of exploratory military aviation, and of airships and light aircraft in Empire aviation, were not inconsiderable. The symbolism of the decade-long Empire airshipping project of the 1920s resonated beyond the number of completed flights. In addition, a handful of virtuoso, path-breaking Empire flights by private pilots chasing fame and fulfilment had monumental impact. The institutional aspects and even the materiality of Empire flight might have been relatively unimportant. Indeed, in relation to the imperial airline alone, it can be argued that its most obvious elements – aircraft, routes and services – were not overwhelmingly significant. Civilian aviation re-staged and re-choreographed the drama of Empire, but these practical aspects probably counted for less than the imperial propaganda sought from aviation even before air services started. The physical work done by aircraft was overshadowed by the symbolic charge ascribed to flights even before they started, and by the weight attributed to them in retrospect. [ 239 ]

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As transporter, aviation served Empire in a utilitarian sense. Aviation also served imperialism by satisfying the idea and the spectacle of Empire. Flight possessed a valency that exceeded its obvious function: it also contained expressions of modernity and superiority. It flaunted Britain, putting its noisy birds on display overhead in even its remotest parts. In some secluded places British ground crews, aircraft and airfield facilities were the Empire. Wherever Imperial had a presence (especially where the sleeker aircraft of rival European carriers were absent) so too were there symbols of British industrial strength and progressiveness. Continuity with the past emerges as a strong theme in regard to the new imperial instrument. It is transparent in the way Empire aviation was resolutely squared with lingering maritime sensibilities. Air Empire was Britannia aloft. National heritage and destiny were to have been recovered. Seaborne imperialism was inflected. Nautical language was reclaimed. Heroic pioneering coupled with new technique held the promise of laying new foundations for twentieth century Empire. Aviation texts and images transmitted the renewed imperial spirit round British earth. They conveyed impressions of Empire back to Britain. Words and pictures ingrained standard, fossilised imperial stereotypes. Campaigners who adopted the task of making Britons ‘airminded’ devised slogans that idealised and moulded a fictional bauble of Empire and aviation. Aviation helped script modern Empire. The continuities extended to blaming others for undermining projects envisioned in London. The name of the imperial airline gave Empire a fresh presence in parliament, clubs, businesses, cinemas and households. British imperial aviation helped to revive imperial ambition and pretensions in Britain in the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century. The new technology did not reconstruct imperial practice or dilute overlord experiences overseas. The discourse was seldom far from that of nineteenth-century exploration. Aviation planning utterances and rhetoric displayed enduring imperial desires and attitudes; the practicalities of arranging and using air service to and in the colonies revealed actions tainted by insensitivity. Denigration of others, as well as racist attitudes, behaviour and language, embodied the haughty attitude that industrial ‘civilisation’ distanced Britons from ‘primitive’ people. The innate superiority of people who could fly (in) machines seemed self-evident to many British commentators. Whether or not overseas aviation epitomised late British imperialism better than any other instance, Britain’s air Empire certainly did resonate with contemporary class, gender and racial divisions and attitudes. There were women among the solo pilots who first dashed [ 240 ]

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across the face of Empire, but organised civil aviation involved almost entirely upper- or middle-class white men as organisers, providers and users. Indeed, the new aviation order was socially conservative. Aircraft were subservient technology that widened the gap between industrial and pre-industrial, ruler and ruled. Aviation did not fundamentally alter imperial social conventions. Whether it reconfigured the geography of Empire is also a moot point. Some imperial distances effectively shrank because organised ‘commercial’ aviation did speed up administrative, commercial and social exchanges on key route sectors. But flight did not quicken all inter-imperial communication. A few privileged places and people benefited: direct beneficiaries included 50,000 Imperial Airways passengers (many of them repeats) on Empire trunk routes, and commercial enterprises and households within reach of a slender airway network that was accessible only at intervals in time and space. And whereas aviation deposited the trappings of Empire into previously inaccessible inland spaces, not all colonies were connected by air. Those that were may have been served relatively fast, but the advantage was undercut by low-capacity, infrequent flights. Aviation did not stretch the shape and reach of the British Empire. In cases where seaports lost their imperial gateway role to inland airports, Imperial’s landplanes did turn Empire ‘inside out’. In the brief ‘Empire’ flying boat era, however, some harbours acquired imperial significance. Generally, territory already part of Empire remained so, and not all imperial spaces were better connected to London. Imperialism that travelled overhead did not end imperialism travelling overseas and overland. Imperial air routes were the new drawstrings for hitching the imperial outskirts more tightly into the imperial bosom, but vast swathes of the fabric of Empire drooped between the gathers. The Union Jack did flutter over territory the British had not yet acquired or mandated, but only on the tail planes and from the cockpits of visiting British aircraft. Aviation did sculpt a new imperial geography within Britain. Unlike Britain’s maritime Empire that had several home anchors, the new air Empire was centred in London. Bristol, Liverpool and Clydeside only ever had a maritime imperial profile. For most of the interwar period, the new engine of Empire was effectively landed in the imperial capital. It would be run from there for twenty years. Imperial Airways, a quaint and highly centralised parastatal organisation, managed its African, Middle East, Indian and Far East operations from London headquarters. Speeches and contacts were made at imperial conferences and air conferences in the capital, in Parliament, and in city-based aeronautical clubs and societies. London was where plans [ 241 ]

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were hatched, budgets drafted, legislation passed, inquiries held. Gala meals in smart West End hotels anticipated and celebrated imperial air achievements. Street parades and public exhibitions displayed aircraft and their heroic pilots. Stunned Londoners lined roads on one occasion of mass grieving. Even from 1937 when the signature ‘Empire’ flying boats came into service and skated on Southampton Water rather than the River Thames, London maintained its imperial aviation profile. It was in London too, that the key public agencies of air Empire (the Air Ministry, the Colonial and Dominion offices, the Post Office) exercised their respective powers. Among others they were called on to resolve disputes over air routes, aerodromes and financial subsidies. Empire aviation was nothing if not a mass of complex overlapping interests. The Foreign Office, and its overseas representatives, pushed and protected the British airline and British aeronautical manufacturing industry in non-Empire countries. It also used aviation to promote other British causes. Aviation was a new tool in international politics: the award or withholding of air-route concessions was tied to the negotiation of reciprocal deals in aviation or in other spheres. Harmonies in the new imperial project were ruffled when diplomatically motivated (in)action at the Foreign Office frustrated aviation interests. Because of its imperfect execution, much of the significance of organised Empire civil aviation lies beyond the relatively well-trawled registers of aircraft fleets and visible air service maps. By the criterion of Empire building, the airways project disappointed. But for precisely that reason, aviation is a window onto late imperial desire, delusion and dismay. And tone. What happened in Empire civil aviation tells about the problematic implementation of imperialism. And despite ‘failure’, the notion and practice of air Empire illuminates the persistence, popularity and potency of imperialism in inter-war Britain and in some strata of overseas Empire. This book has tackled these themes in relation to the formulation and contestation of air Empire in London and along imperial air routes. Other work will scrutinise the conduct and experience of airborne Empire within this framework. After all, imperialism was also expressed in and touched by flight itself – by private flying, by airliner journeys, by air and ground crews, by passengers, assistants and spectators, and by the associated travelogues, airfreighting, corporate advertising and iconography. Britain’s designated imperial flagship civil airline was conceived during the world’s first air war, and was part-seeded by anxiety about a second. Military requisition killed the carrier when war resumed in 1939. The last phase of British imperialism ended simultaneously, and not entirely coincidentally. Hopes of lasting British global supremacy [ 242 ]

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and influence were damaged badly by six years of combat, but they did not end. In a remarkable echo of dreams about Empire aviation a quarter of a century previously, ambitions for British commercial air service linking British overseas interests (the Commonwealth) resurfaced at the end of the Second World War. The revivalist rhetoric rang more hollow in a radically changed world order. Yet the image of Empire aviation survived and is now embedded in British imperial heritage. In some respects, this reincarnation and (selective) re-rendering is as telling as the memorialised object. As another study will show, British imperial civil aviation was a talisman that outlasted Empire itself and became an enduring icon of a romanticised imperial past.

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INDEX

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Note: page numbers in italics refer to illustrations Aerial sovereignty 14, 141, 146 Aircraft delivery flights 103–5, 165 fatally damaged 39, 41 inaugural flights 117, 132, 154, 166, 168, 213 orders 143, 181–3 shortages 156 see also Airships and Flying boats Aircraft industry 21–2, 33, 181–3 Airfields see Landing grounds Airlines British 23, 26 Imperial see Imperial Airways Colonial ANA 154–5 Blackburn 92, 95, 123, 161, 171 Indian Trans-Continental Airways 153, 155, 210 Qantas Empire Airways 155 RANA 172–3, 208–9 Union Airways 164–5, 172, 208 Wilson Airways 162, 164, 171–3, 208–9 European Aeropostale 180, 184 Junkers 20, 86, 114–15, 146, 151, 172–3, 199, 209 KLM 142, 151–2, 154, 178, 183, 226–7 Airmail 58, 60, 67–8, 120, 153–4, 165, 170, 185–9 see also Empire Air Mail Scheme Airports Croydon 54, 83, 86, 100, 102–3, 117, 165–7, 211, 221 Hythe 212, 226 Singapore 154

Airshipping 35, 45, 54–9, 66–7, 70, 130–8 bases 67, 82, 136–7 Canada and 130–1 colonial and dominion share 56 costs 55, 67, 136–7, 144n.29 decommissioning 137 India and 82, 132, 136–7 maritime resonances 57, 129, 137–8 range 99, 129 routes 67, 69, 71–2 subsidy 56, 67 Airships passengers 130–1 R33 76, 100 R34 29 R38 58 R100 72, 130–2, 137 R101 72, 132, 133, 134–6 crash 134 Zeppelin 56, 70, 132 Air races MacRobertson 126, 182 Air routes Africa 36–45, 121–4, 202–9 Australia 31–3, 210–11 Cairo–Karachi 26, 39, 45n.2 Cape–Cairo 26, 39, 44, 51, 124 Europe 13, 141–2 India 13, 113, 118–21, 142, 209–10 Middle East 112–18 Palestine 201 Persia 145–50 Air services Africa 160–74, 202–9 Australasia 153–8, 210–11, 213 Belgian 92, 123, 161 Dutch 115, 142, 145, 147–8, 151

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Far East 157–8 French 79, 115, 123, 147–8, 151, 162 German 77–9 India 150–3, 209–10 Middle East 145–50 Portuguese 123 Airway pioneering Belgian 92, 94 Dutch 83 French 27 German 56 Italian 83 Swiss 92 Airway pioneers 126, 179 Alcock, J. R. and Brown, J. W. 28, 32 Brackley, H. G. 39, 231 Cobham, A. J. (1894–1961) African flights 84–6, 91–5 Australian flight 87, 88 India flight 82–3 Kingsford-Smith, C. 126, 154, 179 Smith, R. M. and Smith, K. 31–4, 43, 67 Tymms, F. 39, 124 van Ryneveld, A. P. and Brand, C. J. Q. 42–5 Airway surveys Africa 27, 36, 50–1, 92, 124, 160, 166–7 Australasia 32 Middle East 97–103 Tymms, F. 124, 163, 209–10 Airways distances 23, 33, 38, 42, 77–9, 87–8, 127, 153 envisaged 3, 13, 26, 30 flying times 13, 38, 42, 57, 197 Aviation and aerial survey 19, 61, 101, 130 and airmindedness 12, 126 backwardness of 78, 120, 143, 190–1 and civilization 19, 90, 93, 100, 140, 223, 231

and colonial administration 42, 49, 95, 240 and colonial attitudes 41, 57,  85, 107–8, 152, 167, 172–3, 207–10 and colonial chafing 100, 105, 107–8, 118–20, 138, 151–2, 165, 172–3, 195, 207, 209–11 and commerce 19, 45, 67, 161 and conquest 28, 38, 134 and defence 13, 20, 22, 30, 53, 61, 67, 76, 107, 128, 211 and destiny 15, 18, 89 and discovery 19, 40–2 and duty 113, 237 and economic development 55, 89, 100 Empire links and 14, 18–19, 22, 30, 33, 34, 69, 76, 161, 181 and Empire preservation 26, 53–4, 68–9, 84, 129 and Empire suitedness 13, 30, 49, 52–3, 200 and Empire unity 19, 49, 52, 85, 99, 100, 123, 127–8, 170 England’s disadvantages for 19, 52 English aptitude for 13, 18, 29, 52, 127, 129 and entitlement 23, 145 hegemony 26, 181 and heritage 15, 195 imperial geographies of 33–4, 44, 49, 57, 77, 95, 101–2, 241 internationalisation of 218–19 and loyalty 139, 214 maritime roots of 10, 18, 20–1, 28, 34, 47, 49, 52, 71, 84, 90–1, 179, 183, 200, 207–21, 236, 240 and mobility 42, 70, 97 and national prestige 11, 14, 22, 52, 69, 84, 113, 128, 130, 151, 161, 183, 197, 208 and nationalism 120–1, 172–3, 207, 236 and overseas settlement 55, 69, 84, 100, 130

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patriotism and 31, 84, 170, 214 propaganda and 18, 42, 56, 62, 73, 82–3, 86, 92, 96, 105–8, 113, 116, 163, 174, 178 racism and 121, 155–6 resource conservation and 100–1 resource exploitation and 40, 42, 45, 62, 67, 89, 167 and romance 14, 28, 31, 85, 87–8, 94, 113, 117, 189, 213 and self-sufficiency 71, 239 and supremacy 15, 22, 40, 42, 90, 129, 133 and technology 55, 57, 59, 135, 142–3, 181, 192 women and 93–4, 102–3, 106, 124, 240–1 and world peace 12, 18–20, 69, 77, 99, 140, 214 Aviation administration Air Ministry 15, 17–18, 60, 67, 92, 101–2, 115, 124, 127, 142, 151, 155, 162, 171–2, 191, 206, 224 Department of Civil Aviation 53, 60 Aviation administrators Brancker, J. W. S. (1877–1930) 19, 35, 66, 68, 72–3, 76, 79, 82–3, 91, 108, 147 Bullock, C. 173, 202, 218 Groves, P.R.C. 61, 78, 126 Hoare, S. (1880–1959) 67–8, 72–3, 85, 99, 103, 104, 105, 115–16, 127–8, 164 Londonderry (Marquess of) 151, 187–8, 191, 196–7 Reith, J. (1889–1971) 218–23 Sassoon, P. 72–3, 84, 103 Seely, J. E. B. (1868–1947) 17, 30 Sempill (Lord) 78, 155, 187–8, 191 Shelmerdine, F. 119, 136–7, 219, 223 Sykes, F. (1877–1954) 17–18, 34, 39, 47, 52–3, 61–2, 198 Thomson, C. B. (1875–1930) 71–2, 89, 100, 132–4

Tymms, F. 40, 87, 137 Aviation critics Cadman (Lord) 217, 221 Cobham, A. 190 Grey, C. G. 19, 132, 142, 147, 188, 220, 223, 232–3 Holt Thomas, G. 51, 58, 113, 212 Kenworthy, J. M. 126–7 Perkins, H. 217 Stewart, O. 189–91 Aviation enthusiasts Amery, L. S. 100, 181 Brittain, H. 162 Bruce, S. M. 90 Burney, C. D. 66–7, 180 Cobham, A. 32–3, 125n.24 Montagu (Lord) 10, 12, 14, 22–3, 105 Northcliffe (Lord) 11, 12, 28–9, 43–4 Smuts, J. 39, 43–4, 69, 207 Wakefield, C. 32, 85, 89, 92 Wells, H. G. 15 Younghusband, F. 47–8 Aviation organisations Air League of the British Empire 10, 24, 61, 106, 184 Society of British Aircraft Constructors 23, 60, 82, 84, 106, 180, 183 Aviation talks Aeronautical Institution of Aeronautical Engineers 52, 86 Royal Aero Club 29, 61, 84, 86, 106 Royal Aeronautical Society 13–14, 52, 62, 78–9, 89, 91, 136, 182, 190, 199 Commercial Chambers of Commerce 18, 82, 92, 130, 152, 163, 187–9, 198, 227 Empire Press Union 130, 188 Study Circle on Imperial Economic Co-Operation 180

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General Africa Society 163 Australian and New Zealand Luncheon Club 18 BBC 85, 106, 154, 167, 190, 211, 213 Bonar Law College 185 British Empire League 84, 128 British Women’s Patriotic League 22–3 Chelsea Conservative Association 76, 106 Conservative Women’s Reform Association 128 Constitutional Club 76 London County Council 23 London Press Club 96, 106 Old Colony Club 90 Over-Seas Club and Patriotic League 15, 19, 23 Oxford University Conservative Association 106 Rotary Club 200 Royal Albert Hall 90 Scientific British Association for the Advancement of Science 129, 207 Institute of Transport 62, 68, 70, 219 Marshall Society 184 Royal African Society 192 Royal Central Asian Society 114 Royal Colonial Institute 52, 54, 71 Royal Geographical Society 47–50, 62 Royal Meteorological Society 106 Royal Scottish Geographical Society 102, 127 Royal Society of Arts 22, 54, 160 Aviators see Airway pioneers Awards 29, 50 Britannia Trophy 86



Knighthoods 29, 44, 90, 106 Livingstone Medal 102

Churchill, W. 10, 17, 19, 27–8, 30–1, 61 Committees 12, 14, 19, 27, 30, 38, 55, 67–8, 71, 77, 115, 217–18 Companies 32, 85 Anglo-Persian Oil 82, 107, 217 Castrol 32, 92 de Havilland 43, 82–3, 85, 102–3 Dunlop 74–5, 218, 221–2, 231 Handley Page 31, 94, 118, 149, 182 Kodak 32 Rolls Royce 3, 40, 42, 83, 92 Shell 32–4, 92, 205, 230 Short 92, 199, 200 Vickers 22, 28, 32, 34, 39, 40, 42, 70, 182 Conferences Air 23, 27, 53, 60, 68, 87–9 Colonial 108, 135 Imperial 54, 69, 99–100 Imperial Press 77, 135, 140–1, 185, 208 Empire Air Mail Scheme 196–7, 202–5, 207–9, 211, 214 Empire Press Union 77, 188 Flights path breaking see Airway pioneers Flying boats 212 advantages 197–200 bases 201–7, 224–6 construction 200 crashes 227–8 economics 198, 202–8 inaugural services 211, 213 maritime resonances 198–200 operating difficulties 226–30 route reorganisation for 202–7 tours of inspection 213, 224–5 Freight see Airmail

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Historiography 4–5

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Geddes, E. (1875–1937) 61, 71, 73–5, 178, 184–7, 191, 193, 213, 216 Mayo, R. 222, 224, 226, 231 Woods-Humphery, G. W. (1893– 1963) 23, 75–6, 178–80, 195, 212, 217–18, 222–4, 230 Imperial disintegration 59, 70, 136, 147 Imperial governance Admiralty 13, 60, 67, 74, 129, 146 Board of Trade 13, 115, 197 Colonial Office 60, 124, 162, 197 Dominions Office 173, 183, 197, 208, 211 Foreign Office 115–16, 120, 141–2, 146, 148, 158, 204, 219, 230 India Office 60, 120, 156, 197 Post Office 60, 102, 120, 155, 185–9, 196–7, 207, 211 Treasury 30, 51, 103, 116, 150, 173, 196–7

General Post Office see Airmail Geopolitics see Air routes

Imperial Airways advertising 139, 225 airmail 185–9 see also Empire Air Mail Scheme and airships 136 colonial representatives 141 delays 163–4, 226 economics 184 see also subsidy Empire-only service 115–16 establishment 72 ethos 216, 220, 222–3 flight duration 157, 164, 197, 212 freight see Airmail headquarters 231–2 inaugural flights 154, 166, 186, 211 maritime tradition and 179, 195, 229 monopoly 116, 138–9, 141, 183 naming 72 nationalisation 221, 232 passengers 103, 117, 140, 149, 164, 168, 187–8, 191, 203, 224, 227–9 size 223 speed 181, 183, 185, 187, 191–2, 197, 226 strike 74, 223 subsidy 72, 75, 102, 116, 150, 152, 156, 162, 180–1, 184, 195, 197, 207–8, 226 support for 128, 183, 192, 196 under-performance 189–93, 226–9 workforce 205–6, 223–4, 226 Imperial Airways management 75 Brackley, H. G. 209, 231 Burchall, P. R. 61, 145, 191, 214, 222, 224

Kipling, R. 19, 29, 53, 62, 68, 78, 103 Landing grounds Colonial Development Fund and 163, 171, 203, 208 construction 32, 36–7, 48, 49–50, 95, 160, 169 securing 149, 150 London celebrates Empire aviation 28, 34, 84, 87–90, 106 Empire aviation headquarters, 138, 196, 231–2, 241–2 flight send-offs 85, 93–4, 103, 154, 165–7, 211–13 lectures see Aviation talks mourns Empire aviation 134–5 Royal Air Force 26–8, 31–3, 35–9, 43, 50, 80, 112–13, 135, 149, 160–1, 211

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