Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (43 page)

O
N October 4, 1930, when the imperial Prime Ministers were about to assemble in London to conclude the Statute of Westminster, when Gandhi was about to celebrate his sixty-first birthday in prison at Poona, when the chiefs of the Al ’Alawi were still squabbling in the Hadramaut and Feisal I still ruled in Baghdad, there took off from its mooring mast at Cardington in Bedfordshire the airship R101, the largest and most expensive flying machine ever built in Britain. This was an imperial occasion too. Ever since the end of the Great War the imperialists had been planning to link the greater components of the Empire by the thrilling new medium of the air. It could revolutionize the very nature of the Empire, they thought, as had the advent of the steamships in the previous century. The idea that the King-Emperor might be in London one week, Canberra, Bombay or Vancouver the next, offered altogether new imperial prospects, and visionaries of the Rhodes kind already foresaw an All-Red Route of the Skies binding everything into a new cohesion.

Fortunately there was to hand an invention awesome enough to match the grandeur of the conception. Few people thought the aeroplane could ever master the prodigious distances of the Empire, but the airship, the rigid dirigible, certainly could. The Germans had done marvellous things with their Zeppelins during the war, sending one as far as Khartoum in an attempt to supply the German forces in East Africa, while the British R34, modelled on the German pattern, had become in 1919 the first aircraft of any kind to make a double crossing of the Atlantic. The airship was the Liner of the Future! It could be at once the means and the symbol of the imperial revival. In 1924 Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Government officially adopted an Imperial Airship Scheme, meant to provide a regular
passenger and mail service along the principal routes of the Empire—to India, to Australia, to Canada, to South Africa. One day, the enthusiasts prophesied, flotillas of great dirigibles would be serenely sailing through all the imperial skies, saluting each other as they passed over Suez, or magnificently perceived in the dawn of mid-Atlantic.

The R101, which was built by the Government itself, was to inaugurate the service with a return flight to Karachi, in India, via Egypt. Its construction had been one of the great national efforts of the post-war years. The airship sheds at Cardington, the Royal Airship Works, were the biggest buildings in the British Empire, and the design team, it was said, had ‘lived and worked like a religious community intent upon their single purpose’. So proud of the project was Brigadier-General C. B. Thomson, the Secretary of State for Air, that when he was elevated to the peerage in 1924 he took the name of the airship works for his title, and became Lord Thomson of Cardington. The airship took six years to build, and was full of new all-British ideas—diesel engines instead of the usual petrol, steel framework instead of aluminium, new kinds of valves, harnesses for the gasbags, fabric dope. She was propelled by five engines and was designed to carry 100 passengers at speeds up to 70 miles an hour.

‘She’, because everything about her was consciously shiplike, as though the Empire Airships were in direct line of succession to the British India liners, or P and O. Passengers bunked two to a cabin, with portholes to heighten the nautical effect, and the crew wore neo-naval uniforms (though most of them were in the
RAF
). There was a promenade deck with deck-chairs. The passengers’ lounge, embellished with gilded pillars and potted palms in the Cunard style, was pictured in artists’ impressions at the height of a tea dance, with young blood and flappers waltzing among the wicker chairs, and distinguished seniors watching benignly from the sofa. The wireless transmitters were as powerful as any ocean liner’s, with a range of over 200 miles, and a radio-telephone that could carry conversations up to 100 miles. The R101 was, so the publicity men said, one of the supreme examples of British inventiveness, in the line of the great Victorian constructions.

On the ground the arrangements for the Airship Scheme were just as elaborate. Immensely expensive mooring masts were erected at Ismailia, half-way to India, and Karachi, where another gigantic hangar was also built, and across the Empire other sites were prepared. Work started on a base at Montreal, terminals were surveyed at Durban and Perth, in Ceylon and on the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic. Weather stations at Malta, Ismailia, Baghdad and Aden collaborated to begin a meteorological service more thorough than anything conceived before.

It was Lord Thomson who conceived a fitting moment for the launching of the project. The Imperial Conference of October 1930 was to be a particularly important one: it would be attended by all the Dominion Prime Ministers, plus representatives of India, and upon its talks, as we have seen, the future shape of the British Empire would depend. How grand, thought Lord Thomson (who had been tipped as a possible Viceroy of India), if the biggest airship on earth could make its maiden voyage along the most imperial of all the imperial routes, to bring the Secretary of State for Air himself direct from the Empire’s frontiers to the conference chamber in Westminster! So it was arranged. Lord Thomson would fly with the R101 to Karachi and back, his return to coincide with the start of the conference. On the way the airship would land beside the Suez Canal, the lifeline of Empire, for a celebratory banquet at Ismailia—just as, over so many generations, British warships had flown the flag and offered hospitality in the imperial ports of call.

Everything was hastened to this end, and by October 4 the airship was ready for the flight. The publicity was terrific. The Prince of Wales himself drove up to Cardington to inspect progress, and the papers were full of the excitement of the project. ‘As I set out on this journey,’ said Lord Thomson at a farewell ceremony, ‘I am reminded of the great hopes that have been pinned on this magnificent ship of the air as a link with the furthest corners of that everlasting entity, the British Empire…. This is the Empire link of the future, and I set out now to prove that the air and the far corners of the earth are ours to command.’

It was a grey cold night, but at Cardington the vast silver shape of the R101 was ablaze with light. Searchlights played upon it, and
there were rows of bright lights from the passenger quarters and the control cabins, and green and red navigation lights on the fins. The headlights of hundreds of cars, too, illuminated the scene, so that from a distance the great hulks of the airship sheds, the resplendent silver of the airship at its tower, the crowds milling about the field, the stream of lights pouring out along the country roads from Bedford, gave it an other-wordly air, of fantasy or nightmare.
1

Fifty-four men boarded the R101 that evening—12 passengers, all officials except Lord Thomson’s valet, 42 crew, from Flight-Lieutenant Irwin the captain to J. Megginson the nineteen-year-old cabin boy. By 6.30 they were all aboard, and by 6.45 the airship’s engines, spluttering one by one into life, were thundering at the mooring mast. Slowly the ship backed away, as the crowd sang ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ below, and the cars around the airfield flashed their lights in farewell. Rain began to fall, and a gusty wind blew across c as the R101, making a last slow circuit of the Royal Airship Works, flew heavily away to the south.

By 9 o’clock the R101 was crossing the coast near Hastings, and Irwin was preparing his route down the line of the Rhone to the Mediterranean. The passengers, after a cold meal, soon went to bed, and the radio operator sent a reassuring message home. ‘After an excellent supper’, it said, ‘our distinguished passengers smoked a final cigar, and having sighted the French coast, have gone to bed after the excitement of their leave-taking. The crew have settled down to a watch-keeping routine.’

The watch-keeping was not all routine, though. The weather worsened, strong winds blew up, the great airship rolled and pitched, and was sometimes blown sideways. From time to time the crew inspected the gasbags, clambering around the ropewalks that crisscrossed the interior of the airship’s envelope: everything in there creaked, groaned and hissed as they worked, the gasbags themselves creepily squelched themselves into new shapes, as the pressure shifted inside them, and the metal chains that supported them clanked and chafed in the darkness. The night outside was very
black. Only occassionally did a dim light show from the ground below, through the drifting cloud and the rain.

Soon after 2 in the morning the radio operator exchanged messages with the airport at Le Bourget, and confirmed that the R101 was approaching Beauvais, a market city some eighty miles north of Paris. She was flying very slowly now, shaken all over by the wind. Soon afterwards an engineer in one of the nacelles, slung beneath the body of the airship, looked through his window in the darkness and saw an astonishing thing. Protruding grotesquely out of the rainy mist, only a few yards from the airship, was the humped roof of a building, a massive grey object stuck about with pinnacles and queer gargoyles, very old, very stark. For a few seconds he saw it there, as the airship laboured by, and then it was lost again in the rain and the dark. It was the roof of Beauvais Cathedral.

The engineer scarcely had time to tell his companion when the airship gave an abrupt lurch, dropped, recovered, dropped again, and with a colossal judder was suddenly still. There was a pause: then suddenly a tremendous breaking roar, like the lighting of a million bonfires, a frenzied ringing of bells, a clatter of feet along the companionways, and the shout of an officer somewhere—‘We’re down, lads! We’re down!’ In a moment the R101 was a mass of flames. She had covered some 300 miles of the 3,652-mile route to India.

The R101 had hit a low hill on the southern outskirts of Beauvais, and was destroyed in a matter of minutes. All but eight of her complement died at once: two more died of burns. Lord Thomson, Flight-Lieutenant Irwin, Sir Sefton Brancker the Director of Civil Aviation, the representatives of the Indian and Australian Governments, all died, and were soon forgotten. So absolute was the catastrophe that the Empire Airship Scheme was abandoned at once, and the Empire never did see the grand spectacle of the dirigibles dipping their ensigns in the empyrean. It was an immense blow to British pride. Worse still, it was a revelation of British failure in that most basic of imperial elements, technique.
1

The story of the R101 was seen by the contemporary public as a heroic tragedy. ‘Another band of pioneers have sacrificed their lives on the long track of the Empire’s advance’, wrote Sir Samuel Hoare in
The
Times
, and the Imperial Conference, by now in session in London, passed in sad silence a resolution of condolence. Behind the tragedy, though, there lay a record of ineptitude. The building of the R101 had looked an imperial enterprise in the great tradition; in fact it possessed little of the daring confidence and commonsense that had characterized British technology in the nineteenth century. Compromise, makeshift, amateurism, plagued the work from the start, and the designers were hamstrung by political interference. The airships’ engines were too heavy and too weak, the new valves were found to be more ingenious than practical, the new dope set up a chemical reaction, so that the whole envelope had to be scrapped. Even the galley with its Electric Stove proved inadequate—a party of
MPS
lunched on board the airship at Cardington once, but the meal they ate was surreptitiously prepared by
RAF
cooks on the ground. When it was found that the gasbags were chafing against the steel girders of the ship, wads of padding were simply tied around the metalwork. Far more drastically, when they discovered that the airship’s payload would be no more than 35 tons, instead of the 77 tons predicted, they simply cut the entire airship in half, inserted an extra gasbag, and joined it together again.

It was only two days after the completion of this major surgery that the R101 set off on her maiden voyage. She had made only eight flights, all in good weather, and she had flown only once since the insertion of the new gasbag, which had increased her length by a
quarter. Her engines had never been tested at high speeds—it was suggested that the test flight might be the maiden voyage itself. But all the time, as these slipshod preparations continued, as one fault after another was hastily mended, as the confidence of the crew gradually waned, and it became clear to the Cardington team that they were being rushed into a haphazard venture for political reasons—all the time the inexorable light of publicity shone upon the airship. There was not a child in the kingdom who did not know the R Hundred-and-One would soon be sailing, and scarcely an adult who did not think of the project as a great technical triumph. ‘They’re rushing us,’ Irwin told visitors to Cardington in the week before the flight. ‘We’re not ready, we’re just not ready….’

This then was the truth behind the great enterprise. The Royal Commission of Inquiry did its best to minimize the meaning of the disaster, but the crash of the R101 was an indicator of the British condition. Technique had been the truest foundation of British power, and often the actual cause of Empire: Britain had truly been the workshop of the world, and the British Empire had eagerly seized upon each new product of technology—even the distant and inessential colony of Mauritius had got its first electric street lights in 1893, its first cinema in 1897, its first X-ray machine in 1898, its first motor car in 1903, its first telephone in 1912.

Since the Great War, though, the nation seemed to have lost its touch. The world was moving out of the age of steam, and the British, who had been masters of the greased piston and the mighty boiler, did not adapt so easily to the age of the automobile and the aircraft. They were not made for it. Unlike Americans or Arabs, Englishmen did not respond as it were by instinct to the new machineries. Their genius for improvisation did not run to the gob of chewing-gum, or the string of twisted fencing-wire, by which other peoples mended the broken carburettor or fixed the dead transmitter.