Mail van brought news of Arctic disaster
ON the front page of Bugle 1462, September 2, we featured a delivery van for our stablemate the Birmingham Mail toiling its way up Waterfall Lane in Old Hill.
That photograph dated from 1949 and we have now uncovered another picture of earlier vintage.
This picture shows a brand new Ford van that had been supplied by Hanger Motor Company of Broad Street. Readers may remember that firm as they were still in business in the 1960s.
There is no date for this photograph but we can work out that it must have been taken in May 1928. The clue is the headline in the frame on the side of the van – Lost Polar Airship’s Messages.
This is a reference to the disaster that befell the airship Italia and the rescue mission that gripped the world.
The 106m long airship was designed and built by Umberto Postile and in May 1928 it embarked on a series of exploratory flights over the Arctic.
Cross
Shortly after midnight, on May 24 the Italia reached the North Pole and dropped to the ice an Italian flag and a wooden cross given to the expedition by the Pope.
Making its return to Svalbard, the airship struggled against a strong headwind and, some 75 miles short of their base, crashed into the ice. The control cabin was smashed and torn away from the main body of the airship.
Of the 16 men aboard, one was killed outright, nine were in the smashed gondola while six men were trapped aboard the now free-floating gasbag. It was carried away on the wind and was never found.
Some of the nine survivors were injured but they managed to rig up a radio
and send an SOS while they scraped together what rations they could, augmented with a polar bear they shot. None of the men had proper Arctic clothing and some were not even fully dressed at the time of the crash. They lashed up a tent and dyed parts of it red to make it
more visible against the ice.
Several countries contributed to the rescue effort, sending ships, aeroplanes and dog-teams to the area. But there was further tragedy on June 18 when the flying boat carrying the polar explorer Roald Amundsen, who
had led the first expedition to reach the South Pole, and five other would-be rescuers disappeared from the skies over the Barents Sea and their bodies were never found.
The Italia’s crew were spotted by aircraft a few days later and supplies were dropped to them but it was mid-july before all the surviving crewmen could be rescued from the ice.
As recently as 2018 there was an attempt to trace the wreckage of the Italia, in particular the lost airship envelope in which six men perished.