Flying at Lanark

Over eight days in August 1910 the Lanark International Aviation Meeting was held at the market town’s racecourse. Just a year after the world’s first air meeting in Rheims, the craze came to Scotland. A new station was built at the racecourse by the Caledonian Railway to receive the crowds disgorging from special excursion trains and there was a vast parking area too for the owners of early motor cars. Twenty-two pilots comprising seven nationalities entered a total of fourteen monoplanes and twelve biplanes, but various mishaps en route to the meeting resulted in the destruction of several planes so only nineteen entrants got to fly in the end and compete for the various cash prizes on offer. Anything could happen on the day. This and the novelty of it all pulled in 100,000 visitors, including 50,000 alone on Wednesday 10th August.

This was a huge captive audience and potential market for nimble postcard publishers. Generically titled postcards of the participants were on sale at the start, but while the meeting was still going Lanark-specific cards were produced by Millar & Lang (National Series), Brown of Lanark, Valentine’s of Dundee, and Wm Ritchie of Edinburgh. These are worth between £15 and £45. Used cards often have eyewitness accounts of the aviators’ feats and as primary historical sources these warrant a premium. Some of the thousands of cards sold were franked at Lanark’s post office in the town. Others were cancelled at the racecourse with the Lanark Grandstand mark designed for use on telegram forms at race meetings. There’s a superb example of this shown in the 1975 monograph on the Lanark meeting privately published by my late friend, Donald Malcolm. Alas, most examples of this scarce postmark are 50% strikes, clearly cancelled in a big hurry with not too much thought for us collectors 110 years later.