British behemoth brought down by one man’s vanity
A mighty symbol of Imperial power – three times as long as a 747 – it was seen as the future of travel. Then a glory seeking politician got involved. The result? Scores of deaths and national humiliation
The familiar strains of elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance filled the opulent passenger lounge of R.101, the biggest airship in the world, as the twinkling lights of the British coastline gave way to the blackness of the Channel below her.
That October evening in 1930 coincided with the Last Night Of The Proms, and the BBC’s radio broadcast could hardly have provided a more fittingly patriotic soundtrack for the start of R.101’s doomed maiden flight to the Indian city of Karachi, today part of Pakistan.
The pride of the British aviation industry, she was three times the length of a modern jumbo jet and held aloft by 15 hydrogenfilled bags, the largest of which would fill the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. even the smallest, a tenth of that size, could lift a ton.
These were arranged nose to tail inside a vast skeleton made up of 25 miles of girders and connecting pipework and protected by a cloth cover which, if stretched out on the ground, would cover five and a half acres.
Whenever this sky-whale embarked on test flights, her cigar-shaped form floating above the ground like a giant cloud, children waved their handkerchiefs in greeting, tugboats tooted horns and train-drivers blew the whistles of their locomotives.
She even won royal approval, circling three times around the estate at Sandringham one morning, watched by George V and Queen Mary, together with their granddaughter — the future elizabeth II. While the King was said to have acknowledged her presence with a tip of his hat, three-year-old Princess elizabeth waved furiously, her eyes bright with excitement.
All in all, R.101 seemed a symbol of hope that post-war Britain could again become the Land Of hope And Glory celebrated by those at the Proms. But no matter how stirring the music on that fateful night, it could not mask the howling winds which were causing concern among her crew.
AMONG them was jovial engineer harry Leech who, only hours previously, had said an emotional goodbye to his family when they came to watch R.101’s departure from the Royal Airship Works near the village of Cardington in Bedfordshire.
She had been built in a hangar so immense that Westminster Abbey could be tucked into a corner of it, with room for a football pitch alongside. To ‘walk the ship’ out took 400 men holding ropes attached all along the 732ft of her length.
The spectacle attracted crowds of many thousands, surpassing those at both the Derby and the Grand National that year.
Before boarding, harry Leech had consoled his crying seven-year-old daughter, who was convinced her father would not return.
Then, as he walked towards the airship, his wife had raced after him and handed him a sprig of white heather for ‘good luck’ — but that was in desperately short supply in the hours to come.
Also boarding R.101 that evening was Lord Thomson, Air Minister in the Labour government of the day and the man whose greedy political ambition was directly to blame for the tragedy about to befall her.
At a time when red shading which denoted British empire territories covered a quarter of the world map, the distance between its dominions was described by one official of the day as an ‘enemy of imperial solidarity’.
Only advances in air flight could ‘knit together its scattered peoples’. It was claimed R.101 would make the journey from Britain to India in five days, ten days faster than by sea or aeroplane, the latter making frequent stops to refuel.
If all went well, Thomson expected R.101 to be the first of a fleet of airships to dominate the skies as British ships, a century earlier, had ruled the seas. This would propel him to the top ranks of government, perhaps as Viceroy of India, or even Prime Minister.
This aspiration was reflected in the airship’s grandeur and scale. In addition to 42 officers and crew members aboard, each flight could take up to 52 passengers, all of whom could be accommodated at one sitting in the dining room, which boasted meals ‘as wellcooked as in any West end hotel’.
After their meal, they could retire to a lounge the size of a tennis court which spanned the width of the airship. It had gilded pillars, potted palms, and a polished wooden floor which gleamed in the sunlight spilling through windows to both port and starboard.
here, Thomson imagined, passengers could foxtrot through the night as they passed ‘tranquilly over archipelagos in the southern seas’.
To ensure the first flight had a big impact, he became intent on an attention-grabbing stunt.
The leaders of Commonwealth countries met every few years in London for a 45-day Imperial Conference. October 1, 1930, had been set for the next gathering.
With a flair for the dramatic, and to show the speed of airships, Thomson proposed to attend the start of the conference and then travel from Britain to India and return before the end. he would then present his plans for an empire criss-crossed by airships.
BuT the R.101 was simply not ready for such a trip. earlier that year it had been hoped that she would stun audiences at the RAF Display — the annual showcase of Britain’s aviation progress.
But, just days before the event, strong winds ripped a 140ft-long tear in the cloth cover that enveloped the frame and protected the fragile gas balloons within from the weather.
The ship was fitted with a new cover which, it was hoped, would not suffer the same fate — but there was no time to test it properly before the flight to India.
None of this concerned Lord Thomson who, despite his own lack of aeronautical knowledge, often quoted a German expert who described that country’s Zeppelin airships as ‘the safest conveyance on land, sea or in the air that human ingenuity has yet devised’.
Refusing to deviate from a departure date of October 4, Thomson worried any delay would cause a withdrawal of funding for projects at the Royal Airship Works.
It did not help that Major George Scott, Britain’s most prominent airship captain and the official responsible for scheduling all flights from Cardington, was far from a voice of reason.
In 1919, Scott had been called a national hero after flying airship R.34, a third of the size of R.101, from Scotland to New York. Battling failing engines and thunderstorms along the way, he was acclaimed for his ‘press-onregardless attitude’, but his judgment was often impaired by drink.
his colleagues at Cardington knew that inviting him to dinner could be an expensive business. Knocking back two whisky and sodas beforehand, then three cocktails and a stiff whisky during the meal, he would inevitably round it off with a postprandial liqueur. ‘his visits cost us a small fortune,’ complained one of the Works’ wives.
Scott’s status as a powerful force in aviation depended on work at Cardington continuing. he was not about to risk Lord Thomson’s wrath, so the decision to depart for India without a proper test flight went unchallenged.
Getting the airship ready in time involved the crew working around the clock, some of them getting almost no sleep in the four days before departure.
As a result, when R.101 finally departed from Cardington at 6.36pm on the appointed day, it
was with a bone-tired crew who had been unable to satisfy themselves that she was airworthy. And all this unfolded in bruising winds and pelting rain, a more sustained assault than on any other airship in the history of aviation.
On that flight, as well as a crew of 42 there were 12 passengers — Lord Thomson, Major Scott and other dignitaries.
By midnight most had retired to bed, as had the off-duty crew, but Harry Leech stayed up beyond the end of his watch.
As foreman of the engineers, he wanted to keep an eye on R.101’s five engines, each housed in its own small cabin, attached to the outside of the ship and accessed via a hair-raising climb down a short open-air ladder.
As he went about his work, he was aware of the ship pitching and rolling in the gale-force winds. He’d never felt so much motion, even during World War I, when two of the submarine-chasing blimps he’d worked on crashed — one when it hit a building soon after taking off.
Satisfying himself that all was well with the engines, he made his way along the walkway, the main thoroughfare from bow to stern, to the fire-proofed saloon which served as a smoking room. No matches were allowed on the ship but here there were electric lighters, built into the furniture to reduce the risk of anyone removing them to parts of the vessel where a stray spark might ignite the highly flammable gas bags above.
After a well-earned cigarette, his first since leaving the Works, he began dozing. It was a few minutes to two in the morning and by then the ship was nearing Beauvais, just north of Paris.
This area was known for turbulence and winds so strong that they once destroyed part of the town’s 13th-century cathedral.
To avoid this, R.101’s flight plan charted a course ten miles to the west of Beauvais, but her sleepdeprived officers ended up making a fatal error and headed straight for it instead.
In the fierce winds they encountered, the ship’s cloth cover, battered by seven hours of flight, ripped open along the top and rain pierced the paper-thin gas bags within. Made from delicate sections of ox intestine that were glued together, the material — punctured by the rain, hail and wind — split open at the seams.
As the hydrogen escaped, R.101 crashed into the ground nose-first. Within seconds the gas-bags had ignited, and crew and passengers screamed as the hydrogen-fuelled fire ravaged the ship.
In the smoking room, Harry Leech was initially protected by the asbestos lining of the walls. But the door was blasted open and he was thrown against the floor, choked by acrid smoke as the deck above collapsed through the ceiling, a girder trapping him in a space only 3ft high.
Somehow he managed to lift it and free himself, then grabbed the leg of a bench attached to the heavy fabric of the ship’s inner wall and ripped it away, tearing an opening through which he managed to escape.
He was now outside the ship but his path to safety was blocked by her windows of cellulose acetate, which had fallen from their frames and lay blazing on the ground, creating a maze-like inferno.
Propelled by fear he ran through it, braving intense heat until he found the relief of cool, wet grass.
As he did so, he heard two voices shouting out. ‘Hello, hello! Anybody there?’ It was his fellow engineers Joe Binks and Arthur Bell, who had been in one of the exterior engine cabins when the ship crashed.
With flames engulfing them and unable to escape, they had shaken hands and were waiting, sombre and silent for their deaths, when, by some miracle, a half-ton of water came thudding down on the roof.
It had come from the ballast system — a network of pipes which sent water to different parts of the ship to provide weight, and control its position in the air.
As the water rushed in, the flood smashed them against the wall, but doused the flames and saved their lives.
Together the three men gazed at the scene in shock. All around them the ground was littered with everyday articles: suitcases, furlined boots, shaving brushes, a tin of cigarettes, a ticking watch, and, untouched by the flames, the latest issue of Wireless World.
FROM this debris, a crew member rose, but then fell back into the flames. This snapped them out of their stupor. Lurching towards the burning wreckage, they smashed the window of an engine car to free survivors. But all they found was the body of a workmate, still clutching a wrench in his hand.
As the inferno drove them back, the three men circled the blazing ship to search still more. Rushing back into the glowing girders, he managed to free Arthur Disley, the radio operator, who was unconscious at the edge of the ship.
They also found two more of their engineer colleagues, and two riggers, both severely burned, but as they continued to call for survivors there were no more replies.
The only sound was the hiss of rain, evaporating as it struck the smouldering remains of R.101.
There were only six survivors in all. A week after the crash, all 48 of the dead were buried in a communal grave in a cemetery only half a mile from where R101 had set off.
Among them were the unidentified remains of Lord Thomson and Major Scott, the two men who had been so desperate to make Britain’s airship industry a success, but who succeeded in achieving the very opposite.
After the disaster, Britain never again built or flew an airship. But there was one final dark twist to the story of R.101.
In the days after the crash, her compacted 80-ton framework was returned to Britain by a company which melted it down for scrap.
They sold it to the Zeppelin company of Germany, who used it to create the Zeppelin LZ 129… better known as the Hindenburg.