of which were used for reconnaissance. However, on 19 January 1915, in the first ever bombing raid on civilians, two Zeppelins dropped twenty-four fifty-kilogram high-explosive bombs and a number of incendiaries on towns along the Norfolk coast, killing four people, injuring sixteen and causing considerable damage to property. In the course of the war there were fifty-one such raids; 557 British civilians were killed in all, and 1,358 injured. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, all airships were transferred to the Allies as part of the war reparations package.
The British had started to experiment with rigid airships in 1908, but a series of disasters, beginning with the unfortunately appropriately-named Mayfly in September 1911, put an end to their development until towards the end of the war. After it resumed, success seemed as elusive as ever: a review in 1923 revealed that out of the 154 rigid airships that had been completed and flown by Germany, Britain the United States and France, 104 (68 per cent) had been lost, along with a total of 584 lives. One life had been lost for every sixty-five airship flying hours. However, one German commercial aircraft company had flown 138,975 miles without a single fatality, and airships had the edge over ‘heavier than air’ aeroplanes when it came to spaciousness, comfort, load-carrying and quietness.
On leap year’s day 1924, Lord Thomson, newly appointed Secretary of State for Air in the first Labour government, announced a three-year Government Research, Experiment and Development airships programme. The gauntlet was picked up by Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives when they came to power in November that year, and in 1926 the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Samuel Hoare, announced that not one but two airships, each capable of long-distance overseas voyages, were to be constructed, in the hope, as Hoare told the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, that ‘in a few years it will be possible to have a regular airship service between London and Bombay as it now is to have an aeroplane service between London and Paris’. At that time the sea voyage took seventeen days. While an airship could not fly fast as an aeroplane (then averaging around 120 mph) it would be able to sustain a regular 60 mph, and unlike a plane it could remain in the air throughout the day and night. One of the airships (the R101) would be built by the Air Ministry at the Royal Airship Works at Cardington, near Bedford, the other (the R100) by a private company, the Airship Guarantee Company Ltd, owned by the engineering firm of Vickers, at Howden in Yorkshire, where Barnes Wallis, later to develop the famous ‘bouncing bomb’ used by the ‘Dambusters’ in the Ruhr in May 1943, was chief designer.
This dual capitalist/state enterprise approach was intended to ensure ‘competition in design’, and would mean that the failure of one ship would not terminate the whole programme, but what it also did, according to the stress engineer for the R100, N.S. Norway, later to be better known as the writer Nevil Shute, was to ensure that the lessons learned in one experiment were not shared with the other: it was rivalry, not collaboration.
The airships were to be built to the same rough specifications, designed to carry a hundred passengers in comfort, plus ten tons of mail and cargo, and to be capable of flying non-stop for fifty-seven hours at an average speed of 63 mph. But while the R100 was intended as a commercial craft, built along largely conventional lines gleaned from the German Zeppelins, the R101 was to be absolutely cutting-edge, employing the latest technologies.
The plan had been that the R101 would make its first trip to India in the early spring of 1927, but delays, design problems, and costs escalated at Cardington. By the end of 1927 only part of the R101’s structure had been delivered, whereas the framework of the R100 was almost finished, despite the fact that at Howden, where Vickers controlled the purse strings, many more calculations were made on the drawing board before work was put in hand. The R100 made its first flight of 150 miles (which took five hours forty-seven minutes) on 16 December 1929, and seven months later, in the early hours of 29 July 1930, took off for Canada. Meanwhile, the R101 had made a couple of flights round Britain, in ‘very perfect flying conditions’, as its chief designer, Lieutenant-Colonel Richmond, put it, but had not been tested on an overseas route. And the Imperial Conference at which Lord Thomson planned to make his dramatic entrance was due to open on 1 October.
In the early hours of 2 August 1930 the R100 moored at Montreal, having been in the air for seventy-four hours. On 16 August it was back in England, where Thomson congratulated the crew on accomplishing ‘this first and successful step in the development of our new generation of British airships’. It never flew again.
Meanwhile, the other great hope of British aviation was being sliced in half in its hangar. The surgical intervention was being performed to lengthen the R101 from 732 feet to 777 feet by adding a further section so that an additional gas bag could be inserted, covered, in the days before plastic, with the stretched intestines of bullocks imported from the great Chicago meatpacking factories. This was being done to give the R101 more lift: as it was, it would only have been able to carry a load of thirty-five tons; the long journey to India required twenty-five tons of fuel, leaving only an impossible ten tons for passengers, crew, luggage and stores. Already everything that could be lightened had been, and what looked like solid oak pillars were in fact balsa wood covered with a paper veneer. But it had been decided that with only weeks to go before the epic flight, drastic action had to be taken.
By 25 September the operation had been completed and the two halves of the airship sewn together again, but bad weather prevented further tests, and it was not until the early hours of 1 October that the R101 was finally ‘walked out’ of its hangar, some two hundred men (including a number of the unemployed from nearby Bedford) pulling the vast dirigible out of its glove-tight housing with ropes and mooring it to the Eiffel-tower-like structure to which it was attached ready for flight. Already twenty men, the ‘gassing and mooring party’, had left for Karachi to prepare for the R101’s arrival in India. If Thomson was to meet his timetable, it was essential that the airship set off as soon as possible. It has been alleged that Thomson’s impatience overrode proper safety concerns for the R101, although the airship’s principal biographer strenuously disputes this. Indeed, on the day of its departure for the subcontinent, Thomson insisted to Wing Commander Colmore, Director of Airship Development at Cardington, ‘You must not allow your judgment to be swayed by my natural anxiety to get off quickly.’
There were other considerations: six weeks earlier, on August Bank Holiday, the twenty-six-year-old Amy Johnson, daughter of a fish-shop owner from Hull, had arrived at Croydon airport in pouring rain after a nineteen-day solo round trip to Australia, via India. She too had received a warm welcome from the Secretary of State for Air, who nevertheless must have reflected on the contrast between Miss Johnson’s pioneering achievement and the fact that although nearly £2.5 million had been spent on the airship development programme since 1924, and questions were being asked in Parliament about such expenditure at a time of intense economic depression, so far there did not seem a great deal to show for it.
Despite the fact that the R101 had never flown in bad weather, and had not flown for even an hour at full speed in any conditions, a Certificate of Airworthiness was issued, and on 4 October 1930, the last day of British Summer Time, the R101 was ready to take off on a ‘demonstration flight’ of 2,235 nautical miles to Ismalia in Egypt, and then on to Karachi.
At 6.15 that evening the ministerial Daimler drew up on the Cardington airfield and the Secretary of State for Air got out. Earlier that day biscuits had been decanted from tins into paper bags to save weight; Lord Thomson’s luggage, which included cabin trunks, suitcases, two cases of champagne, a dress sword weighing three pounds and a Persian carpet weighing 129 pounds to be laid for the state dinners planned for Ismalia and Karachi, amounted to 1,207 pounds. The total weight of the passengers and all their luggage was supposed to be 2,508 pounds.
The mighty silver airship, the largest in the world, with fifty-four people aboard including six passengers, slipped its moorings at 6.36 p.m. in poor weather and steered for London, where it cruised at no more than eight hundred feet above the city, its lights blazing. The practices and uniforms aboard the R101 were, as befitted the name airship, naval, but those not required for watch duty or other chores headed for the spacious dining room, where six tables had been laid with white linen and gleaming silverware presented in a gesture of civic pride by the town of Bedford. After a good dinner (for the grandees, or bread and cheese and pickles washed down with cocoa for the crew) most of the passengers retreated to the comfortable