After R.101’s crash, Harry Leech, the engine expert, received from King George V the Albert Medal for “at grave risk” rushing into the burning wreckage and “disentangling a companion from the network of red-hot girders.” For the rest of his life he worked on engines and as an engineer. Throughout the 1930s, he fine-tuned the engines used by Sir Malcolm Campbell to set land and water speed records. Leech beamed with delight when Campbell’s car roared across the Bonneville Salt Flats at 300 miles per hour and cheered when Campbell’s boat thundered across Lake Maggiore in the Alps at 127 miles per hour. In the 1940s, Leech maintained the engines for Campbell’s son, Donald, when he tried to set water speed records. In the 1950s, Leech worked at the engineering department of the University of Southampton and at South Hants Hospital, where he used his engineering skills to build a cesium unit to treat cancer. He died at age seventy-seven in November 1967.
Outliving Leech by a few years was the rear-engine car operator Arthur “Ginger” Bell, who died in December 1973, aged seventy-five. For years, Bell lived at No. 18 East Square in Shortstown, less than three miles from the giant sheds, although a reminder of his airship adventures was closer to home. From his house he could walk 300 feet or so and reach a street named, in his honor: Bell’s Close. A few streets over was Bink’s Court, named in honor of his colleague Joe Binks.
After R.101, Binks dabbled in airships again: he joined a small team that developed The Bournemouth, a tiny airship, a mere twenty-seven-feet long, built in 1951 with private funds. Its builders hoped to revive airships. Binks was the last of R.101’s survivors to die, in June 1974, aged eighty-two.
After Noel Atherstone’s death in the crash, his wife, Susanna, was paid £10 3s. for his wages for October 1st to 5th, less income tax of £5 15s. and 10 shillings and 6 pence of charges for personal telephone calls from Canada. He called home several times from Montreal while serving on R.100. The Air Ministry considered deducting the five pounds advance issued for pocket money in India—“presumably lost in R.101,” they wrote—and the twenty-pound advance to purchase a uniform and kit for the trip to India—“uniform lost in R.101,” they also noted—but in the end they waived these deductions. It would look unseemly to have one of R.101’s widows pay money to the Air Ministry. They awarded her a yearly pension of, as they spelled out precisely in a letter, “£191.12.6 (one hundred and ninety-one pounds twelve shillings and six pence),” specifying that it will be paid “while you remain unmarried and of good character.” Her children, Richard, aged nine and a half, and Anne, seven and a half, received a yearly allowance of £31 18s. until they reached age eighteen. Susanna Atherstone remarried four years after the crash, was widowed again in 1948, and lived until 1976, when she died at age eighty-one. She preserved Atherstone’s diaries, which are currently stored by his granddaughter in a bank vault in Southwold in Suffolk.
After the R.101 disaster, Britain’s commitment to airships weakened. In May of 1931, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald told the House of Commons that Britain should not “continue to build new ships,” but neither should the country conclude “that the experiments and our experience have been so discouraging that we will let the matter rest” and “scrap everything.” He proposed a “middle course”: maintain the Works as a “nucleus” for “scientific experimental interest in airship development,” although he reminded the House that “there will be no new construction, no placing of large ships on order at all.” He noted that Britain’s only existing airship, R.100, rested on trestles, its gas bags deflated, in one of the two giant sheds at the Works. The ship was, he said, “very much out of condition by lack of use.” Indeed, after its successful Atlantic crossing in July 1930, R.100 had not flown again, not even for a short flight. R.100 would become “a sort of experimental ship,” said the Prime Minister, and undertake no “long-distance spectacular flights.” He estimated the costs of this diminished airship program as £120,000 in the first year, £130,000 in the second, and £140,000 each year thereafter. This new, stripped-down program lasted only six months: in mid-November 1931, the government sold R.100 for scrap.
By early December, a salvage team had removed the ship’s tables, beds, decoration, staircase, and flooring, which were sold to yacht owners and to those, said the head of the salvage firm, with a “sentimental interest.” The ship’s cloth cover and gas bags were removed and scrapped; the engines detached and sold. And now, with R.100 a mere metal carcass, workers attacked it with hammers, hacksaws, hatchets, and axes. They lopped off the tail and fins, which fell into an untidy heap on the shed floor. The ship’s nose smashed to the ground with a grinding sound that echoed throughout the giant shed. With the nose off, they hacked the ship apart from front to back, cut the frame into small pieces by blowtorch, then piled the scrap in a heap, and steamrolled it flat.
An undignified end for a ship that flew 20,000 miles without incident. Britain never again built or flew an airship.
For Britain as a world power, the impact of R.101’s failure had significant consequences. The human capital and the outlays expended on airships—over £2 million in 1930 currency—diverted energy and funds from Britain’s nascent aviation industry, the foremost in the world when they started R.101. By 1930, Britain lost the lead to the United States, where the Douglas Aircraft Company produced, in 1934, the DC-3, which revolutionized commercial aviation.
And for the politicians who desired to sustain the Empire, the failure of a dominant British aviation presence spelled disaster. With the loss of aviation superiority, Britain lost in the next round of imperialism. Germany, Britain’s aviation rival, built a strong commercial air presence throughout Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa. The German government, eager to dominate air routes, funneled money to Lufthansa, which became hugely profitable: it flew more miles and carried more passengers than all other European companies combined. Yet the British had in their grasp the innovation that could have ensured Britain remained a dominant world power.
While teams of government-funded workers built airships, Royal Air Force member Frank Whittle toiled in near obscurity to create a jet engine. Whittle repeatedly sought government funding of his revolutionary engine, but failed each time. In 1935 he let his patent on the engine lapse, rather than pay the five pound renewal fee. Although the British government eventually funded his efforts, their support came too late. The United States took the lead when Boeing developed, in the mid-1950s, the first commercially successful jetliner, the 707.
Remnants of Britain’s airship program still exist. Approach Bedford from the south on the A600 and the giant sheds can be seen in the Great Ouse River Valley. The sheds were used for a time by the Department of the Environment to test firefighting methods—they were so large that firefighters could build a house, set fire to it, and extinguish it with their test equipment. Over the years the sheds have housed lighter-than-air crafts, mostly meteorology balloons, or hot-air balloons used to train paratroops. More often they are used for theatrical spectacles or to shoot movies—Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Inception were filmed in shed No. 2.
If you search the grounds surrounding the sheds, you can discover the twelve-foot-square concrete bases of the mooring tower’s legs, although the tower was torn down during the Second World War, its scrap reclaimed for the war effort. The only trace of R.101, though, is its charred ensign displayed on the wall of St. Mary’s Church in Cardington. The ensign is framed in oak and below it is a bronze tablet that lists the forty-eight victims of R.101.
Perhaps the most elaborate memorial was to the quiet, unsung engineering genius Michael Rope. His wife, Doreen, funded the building of a small Catholic church near the family’s farm at Kesgrave, Ipswich. The church was finished in June 1931, less than a year after Rope’s death. At its dedication a foundation stone was laid on behalf of Rope’s eight-month-old son, Crispin, born shortly after the crash. A scale model of R.101, constructed from metal salvaged from the wreck, hangs from the chancel arch. The quiet Rope’s memorial grew beyond the church: his wife used insurance funds to create a foundation to support the disabled, to relieve poverty, and to promote the public understanding of science. Among the projects supported by Doreen Rope, who died in 2003, was a hospital for treating leprosy in Bolivia, and one in Uganda to help families destroyed by AIDS.
Hours after R.101’s crash, sections of the ship’s still smoldering metal framework were hacked to pieces by firefighters and gendarmes. They ripped into the wreckage with blow torches, chisels and metal saws, chasing away swarms of rats attracted by the plastic coating on the few scraps of cover that survived the fire. They found five bodies in the control car, and in the crew and passenger quarters they uncovered twenty more bodies. Within a day, the rescue effort stopped.
To cart away the remains of R.101, the British government hired Thomas W. Ward and Company, Shipbreakers of Sheffield—a firm famous for using an elephant to cart scrap. They promised to remove the wreckage “expeditiously and quietly” and to “prevent souvenir hunters getting any part of it.” The firm’s workers finished the demolition begun by the rescuers and soon the airship’s “novel” and “radical” framework was no more than tidy piles of metal. The compacted eighty-ton framework returned to Britain in two consignments; the first aboard the steamer Fraternity on December 19, 1930; the second aboard the New Pioneer on Christmas Day. R.101’s remains shared space in both ships with a cargo of processed food and meat. When the vessels arrived in Liverpool, the wreckage was transported to Sheffield, where the firm melted the scrap, and sold it to the Zeppelin Company.
They used it to create the zeppelin LZ 129, an airship better known as the Hindenburg.