WHY DRIVE WHEN YOU CAN FLY?

This month marks the 110th anniversary of Charles Stewart Rolls — yes, he of Rolls-Royce fame — making the firstever non-stop return crossing of the English Channel by aeroplane.

Rolls took off from Swingate Aerodrome near Dover at 6.30pm on June 2, 1910. According to a report in the Daily

Telegraph, his biplane reached an altitude of 900ft (275m) and a speed of “quite 40 miles an hour” along the coast of France.

Over Sangatte (where the present-day Channel Tunnel emerges) he threw out three weighted envelopes, each containing the message: “Greetings to the Auto Club of France . . . Dropped from a Wright aeroplane crossing from England to France. C. S. Rolls, June 1910. P.S. Vive l’Entente.”

Rolls was safely back in Dover at 8pm, not touching the ground once in his 95-minute journey.

Not impressed? Remember this was just seven years after the Wright brothers made the first powered flight. Rolls’s craft was flimsy, made from wood and fabric braced with spars and wires, with a wingspan of just 12m; it weighed only 457kg including the engine.

Rolls decided to attempt the return trip only when he was actually over Sangatte and reassured himself everything was working well.

So for a short time, the co-founder of the company that made the World’s Best Car was also the World’s Best Aviator.

Rolls was killed in a Wright flyer just a month after his cross-Channel feat. On July 12, 1910, during a competition at Bournemouth, the tail-piece broke off and the aircraft plunged to the ground from a height of 30m, crashing close to a crowded grandstand. He was a few weeks short of his 33rd birthday.