Lectures

5th October 2022: Flying Past - The History of Aviation in Kent

Our programme opened on 5th October with a talk by Guy Bartlett entitled “Flying Past – A Century of Aviation in Kent”. Aviation started in Kent over 100 years ago with hot air balloon flights. There is also a record of the first gliders being flown by aviator Percy Pilcher in the Eynsford area. The Short Brothers, Horace, Eustace, and Oswald are names associated with the Kent aviation industry, and for kick-starting the industry across the UK. Eustace purchased a secondhand gas balloon for £30 in which he took his brothers for flights. Realising the business potential he started manufacturing balloons and sold pleasure flights from St Ann’s Pleasure Gardens, Hove, Sussex. By 1905 Eustace and Oswald had moved their balloon manufacturing to a workshop conveniently located next to the coal gas works in Battersea, London. The site of the workshop can still be seen today from the train on the approach to Victoria Station. Meanwhile the Aero Club was founded in 1901 by enthusiastic aviators Frank Hedges Butler and Charles Rolls, a founder of Rolls Royce. The Aero Club flying site was at Shellbeach near Leysdown on the Isle of Sheppey, and the club house was at nearby Mussell Manor. Eustace and Oswald Short were official suppliers of balloons to the Aero Club. Realising that the future lay in “heavier-than-air-machines”, Eustace and Oswald moved the workshop from Battersea to the rural location of Shellbeach next to the Aero Club. The Kent business was started with £600 of capital. By 1909 they had built a factory and were employing a staff of 80. Eustace and Oswald persuaded their engineering brother Horace (famous for speaking from the top of the Eiffel Tower through the gouraphone loud-speaker system he had invented) to join the business, and the Short Brothers company was formed. In France the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur had successfully started building the planes, of which the Wright Flyer biplane was one of their first. In 1909 the Short Brothers won orders to build planes for the Wrights under licence. The first order worth £1200 (£148,000 in today’s money) was to build six planes according to the Wrights’ designs. Another customer of the Short Brothers was Aero Club member John Moore-Brabazon who in 1908 was the first Englishman to officially fly a plane. In 1909 John successfully took the Short biplane No. 2 on a 1-mile flight, and for this he won a prize of £1000 (£105,000) from the Daily Mail. He is also famous for his joke of trying to prove that “pigs could fly”, when he put a small pig in a basket tied to a wing of his plane. In 1910, John became the first person in the UK to obtain a pilot’s licence, but 4 years later he gave up flying after his friend Charles Rolls died in a flying accident. In 1910, after a visit by George V the Aero Club was renamed the Royal Aero Club. Another Aero Club member was Frank Maclean who had a passion for seaplanes. He owned a total of 16 planes and is famous for flying under Tower Bridge. He was also behind the foundation of the training school for naval aviators at Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey. In 1912, seeing the opportunity of expansion into military aircraft, including seaplanes, the Short Brothers bought a site for a factory on the banks of the River Medway at Rochester. Horace died in 1917, Eustace in 1932, and Oswald in 1969, with no memorial to their pioneering contribution to the aviation industry. However, in 2013 a memorial to the three brothers was unveiled outside the Aero Club site at Mussell Manor. Other aviators memorialised in Kent include Amy Johnson, who was the first woman to fly solo from the UK to Australia. During the Second World War Amy served in the Air Transport Auxillary. On 1st January 1941 while on a mission to fly a plane from Blackpool to Oxford, she became way off course, and ended up parachuting into the sea off Herne Bay, where she lost her life. Manston airfield with its large runway, has also been important for aviation in Kent. During the Cold War Vulcan bombers were stationed there. Manston also became potential emergency landing place for the Space Shuttle. From the 1980s onwards Concorde was often seen at Manston because it was chartered by Goodwood Travel of Canterbury who sold flights over the Bay of Biscay, allowing people the opportunity to fly on Concorde if they could not afford the flight to New York.

Margaret Bray