Other early aerodromes, almost contemporary with Brooklands, were Hendon, in the northern suburbs of London, and Larkhill, on Salisbury Plain, a few miles from Amesbury. The Hendon aerodrome, like Brooklands, owed its first fame to the initiative of Mr. Holt Thomas. After the Brooklands adventure he kept in touch with M. Louis Paulhan, and in April 1910 persuaded him to make an attempt to win the £10,000 prize offered by the Daily Mail for a flight from London to Manchester. During the previous winter M. Paulhan had been flying with success in America, while his rival, Mr. Grahame-White, had been busy with his flying school at Pau, in the south of France. Mr. Grahame-White brought a Farman biplane to London, and obtained permission to use Wormwood Scrubbs for his starting-place. Mr. Holt Thomas, looking for a starting-place for Paulhan, heard of a field at Hendon which was being used by a firm of electrical engineers for experiments with a small monoplane, and got leave to start Paulhan thence. After Paulhan's success, Mr. Grahame-White and his business partner, the late Mr. Richard T. Gates, visited Hendon, and finding that the field was one of a number bordering the Midland Railway without any roads cutting across them, fixed on the place as the site of what was afterwards called the London aerodrome. Here the Grahame-White Aviation Company made it their business, from 1911 onwards, to familiarize Londoners with the spectacle of flying and with its practice. They built a number of sheds and let them to manufacturing firms. One of these was the Aircraft Manufacturing Company, formed in 1911 by Mr. Holt Thomas, who at that time was working the British rights for the French Farman Company. Another was the W. H. Ewen Aviation Company, which subsequently became the British Caudron Company. A third was the British Deperdussin Company; the wonderful little Deperdussin monoplane, in the 1912 Gordon Bennett Trials at Rheims, carried its pilot, M. Vedrines, at a speed of nearly two miles a minute for a flight of over an hour. Hendon, moreover, laid itself out to attract spectators. There were stands and enclosures, with prices of admission to suit all purses. Aeroplane racing was a regular feature of the meetings. As early as 1911 about a hundred and twenty members of the two Houses of Parliament paid a visit to the place by invitation and were some of them taken into the air. In July 1911 two great races, modelled on the Circuit de l'Est of 1910, made Hendon one of their stages. The earlier of these, somewhat magniloquently called the 'Circuit of Europe', was organized by a syndicate of newspapers. The appointed course was from Paris to Paris by way of Liège, Utrecht, Brussels, and London—a distance of about a thousand miles. The second, not many days later, organized by the Daily Mail newspaper, and called the 'Circuit of Britain', laid its course from Brooklands to Brooklands, by way of Edinburgh and Glasgow, Exeter and Brighton, with Hendon as the first stopping-place on the outward journey. Both competitions were won by Lieutenant Conneau of the French navy, who flew under the name of 'Beaumont'. Whether because only one Englishman (Mr. James Valentine) took part in the earlier competition, or because the second was better advertised and first awoke the public to the significance of aviation, it was to witness the second that enthusiastic crowds first flocked to Hendon. Mr. Holt Thomas, who helped to organize the 'Circuit of Europe', found a stolid indifference in the English public. As he drove to Hendon along the Edgware road he noticed that the people on their way to the aerodrome were mostly French. Indeed, he adds, at the aerodrome itself there were almost more police than public to witness what was a great event in the history of flight. For the 'Circuit of Britain', on the other hand, an enormous crowd gathered at Hendon. The fields on Hendon Hill were black with spectators. One farmer, remembering to make hay while the sun shone, erected a canvas screen all along the upper part of his field, and by charging threepence for admission to the other side reaped a good harvest. The competitors arrived on a Saturday afternoon, and left again for the north early on the Monday morning. Thousands of spectators spent Sunday night in the fields, gathering round bonfires or singing to keep themselves warm. In this competition the French monoplane pilots carried off the honours; Beaumont was first, and Vedrines second. The only competitor who completed the full course on a British-built machine was the stalwart and persevering Mr. Cody on his own biplane.
The man who makes a machine and the man who flies one are the heroes of the epic of flight. Next to them, all credit must be given to the public-spirited financiers and patrons who encouraged flight, especially to those of them who were not deceived, and knew that they are the servants, not the masters, of the conquerors of the air. As a promoter of flight Mr. Holt Thomas deserves more than a passing mention. He worked early and late for the progress of the art and for its recognition by the Government. He was fond of calling attention to comparative figures, pointing out, for instance, in April 1909, that the sum already spent by Germany on military aeronautics was about £400,000; by France about £47,000; and by Great Britain about £5,000. He befriended and rewarded distinguished aviators. In September 1910 he attended the military manœuvres in France, the first in which aeroplanes were used for reconnaissance, and there, among the experts of many nations, came across no other Englishman. He also attended the British manœuvres of the same year, where Captain Bertram Dickson made some reconnaissance flights. In 1911 he founded the Aircraft Manufacturing Company. He foresaw a great future for military aviation and constantly did battle with the argument, fashionable among some soldiers, that the British army, being a small army, required only a small air force. He held, from the first, that a national air force had many tasks to fulfil other than reconnaissance, and that it should be a separate organization, distinct from both army and navy. Men like Mr. Thomas, who, though they had no official standing, devoted study and effort to the problems of military aviation, were not a little serviceable to the country; they agitated the question, and kept it alive in the public mind. When the Royal Flying Corps at last was formed they might justly claim that they had helped it into existence.
The only other aerodrome which need here be mentioned is the Larkhill aerodrome, often called the Salisbury Plain aerodrome, or the Bristol Flying School. Eastchurch saw the beginnings of naval flying; Larkhill was the earliest centre of military flying. In 1909 Captain J. D. B. Fulton, of the Royal Field Artillery, was stationed at Bulford camp. M. Blériot's cross-Channel flight, in July of that year, excited his interest, and he set himself to build a monoplane of the Blériot type. This proved to be a slow business, so he bought from the Grahame-White firm a Blériot machine fitted with a twenty-eight horse-power Anzani engine, and began to experiment with it on the plain. Captain Fulton was a highly skilled mechanical engineer; some of his patents for improvements in field guns had been adopted by the War Office, and from the proceeds of these he was able to meet the costs of his experiments. His title to be called the founder of military aviation in Great Britain must be shared with others, especially with Captain Bertram Dickson, also of the Royal Field Artillery, who was the first British officer to fly. After seeing the flying at the Rheims meeting in August 1909, Captain Dickson procured a Henri Farman biplane, and learned, at Châlons, to fly it. He was a natural flyer, as Captain Fulton was a natural engineer. During 1910 he attended many aviation meetings in France; at Tours and elsewhere he held his own in competition with some of the most famous of French aviators. His ruling passion was not sport, but patriotism; he was chiefly concerned to put the aeroplane as a weapon into the hands of his country. In the summer of 1910 he made the acquaintance of Sir George White of Bristol, and joined the staff of the British and Colonial Aeroplane Company. At the army manœuvres of that autumn he appeared, a herald of the future, on a Bristol biplane, but found some difficulty in persuading the officers in command to make use of his services. The cavalry, in particular, were not friendly to the aeroplane, which, it was believed, would frighten the horses; and when a reconnaissance flight was arranged and had to be put off because the wind was high and gusty, aviation fell in esteem. Nevertheless, some of Captain Dickson's flights served to show how an aeroplane might help an army. It was natural enough that the cavalry should prefer to carry on the work of reconnaissance in the usual way. Men believe in the weapons they are skilled to handle. When the rapier was introduced into England in the sixteenth century, it found no friends among the masters of the broadsword; its vogue was gained among young gentlemen educated in France and Italy. To let an aeroplane attempt their work would have seemed to the cavalry like dropping the bone to catch at the shadow. But youth will be served, and in a very few years the shadow cast by Captain Dickson's aeroplane spread and multiplied and covered the field of battle. His own career came to an untimely end. A few weeks after the manœuvres he suffered a severe accident at the Milan aviation meeting, where he performed some of those admirable glides from a height, with the engine off, for which he had become famous. Just after one of these he had opened the throttle of his engine, and was rising again, when another aviator, called Thomas, who was rapidly planing down on an Antoinette, crashed into him from above. He lay between life and death for some weeks, and in his delirium talked incessantly of his work, and of the War Office, and of what he hoped to do for it. His health had been severely strained by the early work he had done in tropical countries, where he had been employed in exploration and the delimitation of boundaries; though he recovered from his accident and flew again, he grew steadily worse, and died in Scotland on the 28th of September 1913.
Along with Captain Fulton and Captain Dickson a third army aviator must be mentioned—Lieutenant Lancelot Gibbs, who also learned to fly at Châlons, and was present, on a Farman biplane, at the manœuvres of 1910. At the Wolverhampton meeting, earlier in the same year, he had had a slight accident which injured his spine, so that before very long he had to give up flying. He had flown at many early meetings, and had distinguished himself in duration flights. The dangers encountered by these pioneers may be illustrated from the experiences of Lieutenant Gibbs in Spain. He had arranged to give an exhibition of flying at Durango, near Bilbao, in April 1910. The delivery of his machine, which was sent from Paris by the Spanish railways, was delayed, and many hours of work had to be spent on it before it could fly, so that the thirty thousand people who had assembled were kept waiting for more than an hour. They grew impatient, and when the machine was wheeled out of its shed, so that they might see the work of preparing it, they crowded round it and handled it roughly. It had to be taken back into the shed again. Thereupon they began to throw stones, which disabled the mechanic and broke the shed. One of them advanced to Lieutenant Gibbs with a drawn knife and said that flying was an impossibility, there was no such thing as aviation, and therefore they were going to knife him. The crowd shouted 'Down with science, long live religion!' Lieutenant Gibbs saved himself by his courage and calm, and was taken away by an escort, under a heavy shower of stones, to the judge's house. Within half an hour the shed, with all it contained, was burned to the ground.
These three soldiers, Captain Fulton, Captain Dickson, and Lieutenant Gibbs, have earned their place in history as the first British military aviators. Of the three Captain Fulton had most to do with Salisbury Plain and the beginnings of the air force. Some civilians were also at work. During the manœuvres of 1910 Mr. Robert Loraine, in a Bristol machine fitted with transmitting apparatus, succeeded in sending wireless messages, from a distance of a quarter of a mile, to a temporary receiving station rigged up at Larkhill. The earliest permanent establishment at Larkhill seems to have been an aeroplane shed tenanted by Mr. H. Barber, who subsequently held a commission in the Air Force. Mr. Barber was a man of independent means, and being convinced that flying would play a great part in war, he spent his time in devising aeroplanes for naval and military purposes. He founded a firm of his own, called 'The Aeronautical Syndicate', and produced a type of monoplane with elevator in front, which, in its later development, was named the 'Valkyrie'. He taught a good many people to fly, but none of them, except himself, became expert pilots. The 'Valkyrie' was the last survivor of the earliest type of flying machine, often called the 'Canard' type, because the elevator is extended in front like the head of a duck in flight, and serves to balance the machine. When this type of machine was at last superseded by the more shapely modern design, Mr. Barber's syndicate died a natural death. At the outbreak of war he joined the Royal Flying Corps, and became one of its leading technical instructors, with the rank of captain.
The second shed erected at Larkhill was built by the War Office and was intended for the use of the Hon. C. S. Rolls, so that he might give instruction to army pilots. The death of Mr. Rolls at the Bournemouth meeting in July 19th (one of the heaviest losses that aviation has suffered in this country) put an end to that scheme, and the shed was assigned, later on, to Captain Fulton. The third shed was erected by Mr. G. B. Cockburn, who on his return from France applied to the War Office for leave to carry on at Larkhill. Mr. Cockburn was the first, he says, actually to fly over Salisbury Plain. He worked hand in hand with Captain Fulton, to whom he lent his Farman machine (the first machine built by Henri Farman after he left the Voisin firm) in order that Captain Fulton might pass the tests for the pilot's certificate in November 1910. The two together did much good work at Larkhill, and were successful in gaining a certain measure of recognition for the aeroplane among the army units on the plain.
From these beginnings Larkhill rapidly developed. Towards the end of 1910 the Bristol Company, having come to an agreement with the War Office, established themselves at Larkhill in a solidly built row of sheds. The Government were not as yet prepared to undertake any large expenditure upon aeroplanes; their attitude was tentative; they had been advised by the Committee of Imperial Defence that the experiments with aeroplanes, hitherto carried out at the balloon school, should be discontinued, but that advantage should be taken of private enterprise in this branch of aeronautics. Accordingly, the Bristol Company opened at Larkhill the Bristol School of Aviation, which remained in existence until the outbreak of the war. The chief instructor was M. Henry Jullerot, one of the best pilots in France; he was assisted by Mr. Gordon England, who had shown so much skill in handling the gliders of Mr. Weiss, and by Mr. Harry Busteed, the first notable Australian pilot. Salisbury Plain is perhaps the best stretch of country in England for the training of aviators; the school grew and prospered; the Bristol machine proved to be excellently well fitted for the purposes of instruction, and the pupils, being relieved from the dangers that attend a forced landing in populous country, distinguished themselves by their bold flying. There were many camps of soldiers in the neighbourhood, so that the work done at Larkhill did much to convert the army to a belief in aviation. The tokens of the conversion were soon visible. On the 28th of February 1911 an Army Order was issued, creating the Air Battalion of the Royal Engineers. It ran as follows: 'With a view to meeting Army requirements consequent on recent developments in aerial science it has been decided to organize an Air Battalion, to which will be entrusted the duty of creating a body of expert airmen.... The training and instruction of men in handling kites, balloons and aeroplanes, and other forms of aircraft, will also devolve upon this battalion. The establishment of this battalion will be organized into (i) headquarters and (ii) two companies.... The officers will be selected from any regular arm or branch of the Service on the active list.... A selected candidate will, on joining the Air Battalion, go through a six months' probationary course.... An officer who satisfactorily completes the probationary period will be appointed to the Air Battalion for a period of four years.... The Warrant officers, non-commissioned officers, and men will be selected from the Corps of Royal Engineers. The existing Balloon School will be superseded by the Air Battalion, and the new organization will be regarded as taking effect from April 1st, 1911.'
The formation of the Air Battalion was a great step in advance. Up to this time flying had been a hobby or fancy of individual men; it was now organized and provided for as a part of the duty of the army. The battalion was duly formed under the command of Sir Alexander Bannerman, with Captain P. W. L. Broke-Smith, of the Royal Engineers, as adjutant. Airships were assigned to No. 1 Company and aeroplanes to No. 2 Company. This latter company, commanded by Captain Fulton, went into camp at Larkhill about the end of April. When Mr. Cockburn, after completing the course of instruction that he gave at Eastchurch, returned to Larkhill, he found the battalion in process of formation. Its history, and its development, a year later, into the Royal Flying Corps, must be narrated in the next chapter, and the steps traced by which a small balloon factory at Chatham, started in the year 1882, was transformed into the Air Force of to-day. A few words may here be added concerning Captain Fulton and Mr. Cockburn, who bore so large a part in the creation of an air force. While he held his command in the Air Battalion, Captain Fulton did all he could to get it recognized as a separate branch of the army, distinct from the Royal Engineers. When the Royal Flying Corps was formed he was appointed to the Central Flying School as instructor, and was put in charge of the workshops there. Thence he passed to the aeronautical inspection department, which was placed entirely under his control and became, what it has remained, one of the foundations of the strength and efficiency of the air force. He could not be spared from this work for combatant service, so he saw little of the war at the front; but more flying officers than ever heard his name owe him a debt of gratitude for his faithful work in providing for their safety. He died of an affection of the throat in November 1915. Mr. Cockburn, who was continuously at work on Salisbury Plain for a period of something like four years, continued, as a civilian, to give his help, first in the aeronautical inspection department, and, later on, in the investigation of aeroplane accidents.
The account which has now been given of the early years of flying in England may serve to show what a wealth of private enterprise lay ready to the hand of the Government when the building of the air force began. The Royal Air Force, like the tree of the Gospel parable, grew from a small seed, but it was nourished in a rich soil. The great experiment of flying attracted a multitude of adventurous minds, and prepared recruits for the nation long before the nation asked for them. This early predominance of private enterprise, it is worth remarking, told in favour of military rather than naval flying, and, when the Flying Corps was formed, started the Military Wing at an advantage. Little has been said as yet, because in truth there is little to say, of pioneer work in the air done by sailors. Yet no one would dare to assert that the average sailor is less resourceful, less inventive, less open to new ideas, than the average soldier. No doubt there were many senior officers in the navy, as there were many in the army, who in the early days regarded aviation with professional impatience and scorn. Further, the higher command of the navy were not quick, when aircraft became practically efficient, to divine or devise a use for them. The difficulty of employing them over the sea was formidable, and none of their uses was quite so obvious as their use (questioned by more than one distinguished army general) for reconnaissance in a land campaign. But the real difference which told in favour of military aviation lay in the nature of the services. A sailor is attached to his ship, and flying is an art which of necessity must be practised and developed, in its beginnings, over wide level tracts of land. The value of the airship for distant reconnaissance at sea is now fully recognized, but airship building is not a possible hobby for a young naval officer. Those naval officers who believed in the future of the new weapon were reduced to attempting to influence the Government, so that it might undertake the necessary work. While the army officer could attend aviation meetings and demonstrate his opinions in practice, his less fortunate brother in the navy had no resource but to engage in a melancholy course of politics, with small prospects of public result, and smaller prospects of private advancement.
The consequence of all this is that the history of the work done by the navy with aeroplanes and airships is essentially a history of official decisions and official acts. Great credit must be given to individual navy men for their insight and persistence in advocating the claims of the air, but the history of the work done can be fully narrated, without further preamble, in an account of the origin and growth of the national air force.