Marked for Death (6 page)

All things considered, then, it is a pity that Pemberton Billing and Charles Grey should have mounted so many
ad hominem
attacks on the wretched Mervyn O’Gorman when they would have done better to concentrate on the continuing failure of the military and the government to organise a properly unified air service. In fact, in April 1916 the far-sighted PB published an outline of his own for what he called an Imperial Air Service (a memorandum of which he sent to the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith) that in many respects bore a considerable resemblance to the plan that was adopted for the Royal Air Force when it was finally created by amalgamating the RFC and RNAS two years later.

These days Noel Pemberton Billing’s reputation has to some extent been made hostage to the more lurid episodes in his wartime career as an MP. He once had to be carried bodily out of the House of Commons on the Speaker’s orders, and he had
a bout of fisticuffs with a fellow MP, Lieutenant-Colonel Archer-Shee, that
Punch
gleefully described. ‘Palace Yard was the scene of the combat, which ended in Archer downing Pemberton and Billing sitting on Shee. Then the police arrived and swept up the hyphens.’
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Most notorious of all was PB’s claim that an unnamed German prince had a ‘black book’ containing the names of 47,000 British homosexuals of both sexes (reaching, as always, to ‘the very top of society’ – not to mention government, since veiled gossip hinted that Asquith’s wife Margot was a lesbian). PB’s allegations in print resulted in a libel suit at the Old Bailey in which he defended himself and against all odds won. This earned him considerable popular acclaim. As the war dragged on in an apparently endless stalemate an increasingly fractious public was casting about for scapegoats, and it was easy for such papers as Horatio Bottomley’s jingoistic rag
John Bull
to whip up paranoia about Germans blackmailing ‘sodomites’ into spying for them. (Barely forty years later a similar moral panic would surface in the Cold War, although this time it was Soviet Russia that was ‘turning’ homosexuals to spy for it.)

As a result of such escapades, PB is generally written off as a publicity-seeking crackpot. It is a vanishingly rare MP who shuns the limelight and PB undoubtedly courted it better than most, zealously and effectively. However, though often foolish, he was not stupid. In 1916 in the wake of the early Zeppelin bombings he published a book called
The Air War: How to Wage It
in which there was a section entitled ‘The Protection of England. A Dream that MUST Come True’. This included a vision of how the country might be defended against aerial attack and invasion. He foresaw an operations room with one wall entirely covered by a map of Britain on glass divided into squares, with a smaller replica on a large table. The country was divided into sectors, all of which were linked to the room by telegraph and telephone. A reported sighting of enemy aircraft from any of them instantly lit up that sector on the wall and table maps. In addition to spotters on the ground was a network of 500
listening posts: wooden towers with large cones attached to microphones for detecting the sound of aero engines (a technique that was already in use by both Britain and Germany). In a way this was an almost uncanny foreshadowing of the Chain Home defence system eventually built in the 1930s with PB’s acoustic ‘ears’ replaced by the new technology of radar. His visualised ‘ops room’ was also remarkably similar to that of the future Bentley Priory, the headquarters of RAF Fighter Command from where Britain’s Second World War air defences would be directed.

Whatever else, PB did act as both lightning rod and stimulus for growing public dissatisfaction with the war’s conduct as well as impatience with politicians’ inability to break the apparent stalemate that was costing the country, and the rest of Europe, a fortune in blood and treasure (as he frequently put it). Indeed, by 1916 the war was costing Britain £5 million a day – something like £215 million at today’s values. He was unquestionably right to keep on pointing out the absurdity and inefficiency of having the Army and Navy run competing air services, and for this reason it is perhaps not far-fetched to argue that he played a small but vociferous part in ensuring the RAF was finally created when it was, on 1st April 1918, rather than after the war was over. It is true that both the French and German armies, faced with much the same problem, also managed to create independent air forces before the war’s end. Doubtless they had Pemberton Billings of their own: civilian public figures desperately trying to instil a little reason into the military and political maladministration of an insane war.

At any rate the inflammatory rhetoric in Westminster and the press had its effect. Together with the military impasse in France and the failure of the British authorities at home to make provision to counter the German air raids, it helped unseat Asquith as Prime Minister and install Lloyd George in December 1916. The new coalition government at once put the Ministry of Munitions in charge of the aircraft industry and made the new
Air Board responsible for allocating resources. From 1917 onwards British aircraft improved markedly in both quality and quantity – and this despite 281,600 working days being lost that year to strikes. The number of different types of aircraft was cut from fifty-three to thirty, a process of rationalisation that continued until the war’s end. (It was much needed. In four years of war the Sopwith Aviation Co. alone produced some thirty different types.) By the time of the Armistice the British aircraft industry had 347,112 employees and in that final year of war it produced over 30,000 aircraft. In a little over four years and after a very poor beginning it had become the world’s biggest aircraft industry.
18
,
19

*

The sheer proliferation of early aircraft shapes and types that Britain flew in the first air war is examined in the following chapter. This variety can be construed as partly the result of administrative disorganisation. But even more, it was a product of the still experimental nature of flying itself, when ‘suck it and see’ designs and piloting techniques were often improvised with more optimism than understanding of aerodynamics. Merely getting airborne could be hazardous enough; staying there was by no means guaranteed. Powered flight using wings rather than gasbags to stay aloft took place in a realm that was new to
Homo sapiens
, who was obliged to deduce its laws from scratch the hard way.

1*
For an explanation of this classification system see the Note on p.319

2*
In the following year, 1917, nearly 800 pilots would be killed in the UK in training accidents alone.

It happened during the spring of 1914, at one of the famous Hendon Saturday afternoons. A very strong, gusty wind was blowing… The first machine to be brought out was an 80 h.p. Morane monoplane piloted by Philippe Marty, a Frenchman, who asked me whether I would like to accompany him as his passenger. With the enthusiasm of youth, I agreed to do so.

Marty taxied out to the far side of the aerodrome in order to take off into the wind; but the machine left the ground all too quickly, with the result that a strong gust lifted us up about forty feet in the air and then left us in a stalled attitude, with practically no forward speed. The machine staggered for an ominous moment and then stalled.

I have never forgotten the horrible sensations of the next few seconds, and I don’t suppose I ever shall. The left wing seemed to drop out of sight, and I saw the right wing sweep round the sky above us like a sort of windmill vane. Then the roar of the engine stopped.

I thanked heaven that Marty had switched off in time, for a second later the Morane’s nose hit the ground with a bang and a crash, just as she had settled into the position of a vertical nose-dive. As she cartwheeled over on to her back I ducked well down inside the fuselage, and there we were – upside down, unable to move an inch and fairly soaked with petrol from the burst tank.

Meanwhile the aerodrome staff had hastened to the scene of disaster. When the machine’s tail was lifted up we both fell
out of the fuselage, whereupon all our rescuers began to laugh. This only sent Marty off into spasms of mirth-provoking Anglo-French fury. All of which may have conveyed the impression that we were rather a heartless set of fellows, but although a pilot who was hurt in a crash came in for his due share of sympathy, it was the custom at Hendon to give him a dose of ridicule if he was fortunate enough to escape injury.
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This vignette of a typical flying accident a few months before the First World War is revealing on several counts, apart from acting as a reminder that even today, a century later, a stall on take-off still causes multiple fatalities each year around the world, especially in light aircraft like this. At the time it was a familiar occurrence and the writer, Louis Strange, was very lucky. Many such crashes caught fire and their trapped survivors, often still very much alive and all too audible, were burned to death in front of the horrified spectators and ground crews. Aviation spirit, together with the aircraft’s wooden construction covered in doped fabric, could produce a raging bonfire within seconds. Despite the rapid developments in aircraft design that the war was to expedite, flying remained a high-risk pastime for many years, as the aeronautical engineer and future popular novelist Nevil Shute was to discover when working for the de Havilland company in the 1920s.

The jocular phrase that one was going out to flirt with death was not entirely jocular in 1923. Humour was grim at times on Stag Lane Aerodrome. There was a crash wagon with fire extinguishers on it ready at all times when flying was in progress, as is usual, and this crash wagon was provided with a steel rod about eighteen feet long with a large, sharpened hook at one end. This was for the purpose of hooking the body of the pilot out of the burning wreckage when the flames were too fierce to permit any gentler method of rescue. It was the custom at Stag Lane when a pupil was to do a first solo to get out this hook, to show him that his friends had it ready…
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As it turned out, Louis Strange’s luck went on holding to a phenomenal extent (as will shortly become even more apparent). He was the pilot mentioned in the previous chapter who had flown the first F.E.2b out to France and he was to have a most distinguished war, emerging practically unscathed from his years as a combat pilot and flying instructor, neither of which profession was noted for longevity. His pilot that day at Hendon, Philippe Marty, was not so lucky. He was to die only a few weeks later from stalling his machine once again, this time at 200 feet.

The story shows vividly how very susceptible early aircraft could be to chance gusts of wind. This was because they were of the lightest possible construction, which in turn was the result of the aero engines of the day being generally weak. This further restricted what could be achieved by designers’ limited understanding of aerodynamics. Among the earliest pioneers the Wright brothers in America were the most consistently scientific and systematic in their approach to flight, and this undoubtedly formed the bedrock of their success. Not only did they build a primitive wind tunnel to test their wing shapes, they also designed the first true aero propeller. Various propellers had already been tried on dirigibles, but they were mostly based on ships’ screws and even on paddles. It was the Wright brothers who broke decisively with the nautical model and reasoned that a propeller blade was in effect a little narrow wing that needed to be given a twist to ensure it created more lift than drag along its entire length as it revolved. Since the engine was mounted horizontally this lift simply became thrust. The propellers they crafted out of wood for their ‘Flyer’ were a mere 4 or 5 per cent less efficient than are the best computer-designed propellers well over a century later. It was a stroke of engineering genius for two men calculating with paper and pencil in a bicycle workshop.

Besides adequate thrust, powered flight depended on the aircraft being controllable. The Wrights and the German pioneer of man-carrying kites, Otto Lilienthal, are between
them credited with having worked out the basic principles of aerodynamics and control. However, as the Wright brothers themselves acknowledged, credit for that actually belonged to an extraordinary Englishman, George Cayley, who was born in 1773. He was the first person known to have worked out that the four main forces acting on any aircraft as pairs of opposites are gravity and lift, thrust and drag. He also designed the first cambered wing for generating lift; this became the standard aircraft wing shape such as the Wrights tested in their wind tunnel and which has persisted to the present day. Cayley first constructed and flew a model glider as early as 1804, and in 1853 an employee of his bravely made the first manned glider flight in one of Cayley’s designs at Brompton Dale in Yorkshire, nearly half a century before Lilienthal’s experiments with what were essentially the first hang-gliders. Modern replicas of Cayley’s glider have since been flown successfully in Britain and America to prove that, primitive or not, it really had worked.