Marked for Death by James Hamilton-Paterson Read Free Book Online

aircraft, with the honourable exception of a few Curtiss HS-2L flying boats that performed long-range escort duties for cargo ships running the gauntlet of German submarines.
    British aviation owes a very large debt to Samuel Cody who, as mentioned in the previous chapter, was the first to achievepowered flight in Britain. Calling himself Colonel Cody, he was a barely literate Texan showman with a twelve-inch moustache. At the turn of the twentieth century he was touring British music halls giving ‘Wild West’ exhibitions of trick shooting and riding. But what really fascinated him was flying, and he devised a series of man-lifting box kites for military observation. These duly caught the eye of both the British Army and the Royal Navy and by 1906 Cody found himself at the Army’s Balloon Section at Farnborough. His problem was money, since at the time the military were still only interested in balloons and could see no future in the powered aircraft he wanted to build. In the teeth of opposition, by one means or another (and mainly by sheer force of ebullient charm) he managed to put together something he called the ‘British Army Aeroplane No. 1’, and on 16th October 1908 he flew it. Like most of the pioneers he had taught himself to fly and had no formal education in aircraft design. Carpers accused him of having cribbed his machine from his fellow American, Glenn Curtiss, but by now there were aeronautical inventors in most European countries, travelling around to displays, swapping information, accusing one other of plagiarism and promoting their own designs while learning from each other. Nevertheless, at Farnborough Cody was often ridiculed as ‘the Texan showman’ and ‘the cowpuncher’ for being no scientist and generally self-taught.
    In 1913 the Daily Mail offered a prize of £5,000 for the first person to fly a ‘waterplane’ around Britain, including a flight across the Irish Sea to Dublin. Cody, by then aged fifty-three, built a new aircraft of his own to meet this challenge. It was his sixth design: a biplane so large it was mocked at Farnborough as ‘Cody’s Cathedral’. The young Geoffrey de Havilland, who as well as being a pilot had formally studied aircraft design, infuriated Cody by sauntering over to his immense machine, plucking its flying wires like harp strings and telling the old showman that he really needed to double them for added strength. Cody assured this whippersnapper that it was as strong as a house. On7th August, the day Cody was due to fly his ‘Cathedral’ down to Calshot to have its floats fitted for the competition, he decided to give two friends the flights he had long promised them. On the second of these he took up W. H. B. Evans, the captain of the Hampshire cricket team.
    Two of Cody’s three sons, Leon and Frank, were among those watching as Cody circled the clubhouse of Bramshot golf course and turned back towards Laffan’s Plain. They saw the plane stagger and the wings fold upwards. Cody, easily identified by his white coat and cap, followed by his passenger, were catapulted from their seats at a height of between 300 and 500 feet. Their bodies, followed by the wreckage of the plane, fell into a clump of oak trees 50 yards apart. Cody’s publicly expressed wish that, when it came, death would be ‘sharp and sudden, from my own aeroplane, like poor Rolls’, had been granted. 22
    ‘Poor Rolls’ was the Hon. Charles Stuart Rolls, who had gone into partnership with Henry Royce in December 1904. On 12th July 1910 Rolls was piloting a Wright ‘Flyer’ at Bournemouth when its tail broke off and he was killed, the first person in England to die while flying a powered aircraft. As for Cody, the Daily Mail gave him an epitaph on 11th August in the form of a bitter poem by a certain J. Poulson.
    Crank of the crankiest, ridiculed, sneered at,
    Son of a boisterous, picturesque race.
    Butt for the ignorant, shoulder-shrugged, jeered at,
    Flint-hard of purpose,