The Balloon Factory by Alexander Frater
This is a curiously enjoyable book. Its structure is very odd for it is basically two books bolted together across 100 years: the first is the high drama of the dawn of powered flight in Britain as young men, and some not so young, fall out of the skies; the second is tea time, as Alexander Frater completes a stately trundle, interrupted by his own flying lessons, around the locations, and nearby hotels, where these events took place, but so few remember that they did. The effect is remarkable, for it puts into historical context the story of flight, seven-eighths of the entry about which in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica is to do with birds. The whole history of powered flight is in the living memory of some people, only, under skies that are now full of planes, they have forgotten this is so.
The hero of this book, apart from Alexander Frater, patient and polite, asking his questions and eating his Chinese meals (in 1910 there were about as many Chinese restaurants in Britain as there were planes), is the American ‘Colonel’ Sam Cody, a rank he invented for himself, just as he invented his past. Everything about Cody screamed con-man.
He was not made for the skies, being 6’3” tall and weighing 16 stone, wore a sombrero and a red-lined cloak in Regent Street, and had shoulder-length hair, a waxed moustache and an Imperial beard. Nobody knows where he was born, or whether, as he said, he had even been a cowboy. He had come to Britain to deliver ponies to a dealer, then stayed on to turn showman, writing spectacular Western melodramas which lasted three hours and more, in which he played the villain, riding horses across the stages of English county towns and firing his guns.
Yet, when he was killed in 1913, the British Army gave him a full military funeral, burying him in its Aldershot cemetery, where, on his tombstone, reports Frater, the figure of Christ has two fingers missing, which in its way is apposite, Cody having held up two fingers to so many in the course of his last and most improbable venture. An elegy, reprinted in the Daily Mail, ends with these two lines:
Lay a white wreath where your ridicule riddled him. Honour him now, he’s successful — and dead.
Sam Cody, having turned engineer, was the first man to make an officially recognised power flight in his adoptive country. He, who had flown over so many careers, had settled finally in flying.
Frater writes vividly about its beginnings, when a glimpse of daylight between grass and the wheels of a plane constituted a flight. When Geoffrey de Havilland made his first flight in 1910 his mechanic, Frank Hearle, greeted him with the news, ‘You flew all right. You were several inches off the ground for about 20 yards. Well done.’ And then there were crashes, into trees and hedges, into the sea, and, in Cody’s case, once into a cow.
For these were men prepared to go up to 3,000 feet in machines of such rickety beauty you have to make a conscious effort to imagine that, in Cody’s case, on a tractor seat, they sat inside them. The wings on Cody’s various planes were covered in linen stiffened by tapioca, which he, having noticed how dry his mouth got, applied in the hope that this would stop the linen becoming waterlogged.
But then he had no engineering background, he had nothing except the wits on which he had always relied, and it was this loneliness that caught the popular imagination. The editor of the Aeroplane (for in the dawn there was a magazine, and even insurance companies offering £1,500 cover on planes for £15), wrote of Cody, ‘He is a self-made man, without friends or money to back him, yet he is as true a gentleman as ever lived’. He went on, ‘Everything he has said he would do he has done’. And it could be Bacon writing of Henry VII, ‘What he minded he encompassed’.
What Cody did in 1910 was fly 185 miles and 787 yards, and ten months later 261 miles and 810 yards. The yards were calculated as precisely as a javelin throw, and it is this that underlines the drama of those achievements and the nerve it took to accomplish them.
Listen for a moment to Tommy Sopwith, another early flier, talking in old age about what it had been like amongst the tapioca and the wire:
One minute you were going flat out across a field and there was all this vibration around you which got worse and worse until, suddenly, there was no vibration at all. At that point you knew you were flying, and you had just one worry then. How were you going to get the thing down?
But within a year of flying for 20 yards Geoffrey de Havilland was taking his wife up, and their new-born baby, the two of them sitting side by side in garden chairs. Garden chairs! It is such homely details that are so amazing.
When Cody’s effects went for sale at Sotheby’s in 1996 they included a piece of tree no bigger than a chopping block, which came with the catalogue entry, ‘Used as a picket for the aeroplanes belonging to Colonel Cody’. He had used it as he may once have used a hitching rail for his horses in a cowboy past that may, or may not, have been. But there are no doubts about the sequel.
In August 1913, with the ex-captain of Hampshire as passenger, Icarus fell out of the morning sun. But the bodies are buried, the wreckage and the horror tidied away, and Alexander Frater comes, drinking his Barossa Valley Shiraz, eating his fish pie, and watching others eat their steamed prawns, all details carefully recorded. I liked this book.