Howden, Yorkshire, UK
(Fox Photos / Hulton Archive)
The R100 was a response to the British Empire’s requirement to manage its many and varied – and distant – colonial outposts. The ship’s designer, Barnes Wallis, would go on to create the celebrated ‘bouncing bomb’ during the Second World War.
Commissioned in 1921, work commenced in 1925 at the No. 2 Double Rigid Shed, Royal Naval Air Service Air Station in Howden, Yorkshire. The shed, the largest in the world when it was built, had its doors heightened by another 10 feet to 140 feet in order to accommodate the R100. Rusting corrugated iron sheets made up the back wall. The workman was likely applying aluminium aircraft dope, a form of plasticized lacquer, onto the linen fabric envelope of the ship to make it weatherproof.
Four years later, the craft was launched, with space for 137 people – 37 crew and 100 paying passengers. Propulsion came from six petrol engines, and levitation by 5 million cubic feet of hydrogen.
The R100’s first significant voyage, on July 29, 1930, was to Canada – a journey of some seventy-eight hours. But three short months later, its sister ship, the R101 was brought down by bad weather in France. Of the fifty-four people on board, only six survived. With that, the R100’s flights were curtailed and the ship was crushed by a steamroller and sold for scrap.
‘On Thursday, November 28, representatives of the press were invited to view R100 in her shed at Howden. It was a miserable, wet day, and everyone was glad when they got inside the huge shed, though as a matter of fact the rain was pouring freely through one section of the roof. Inside the shed it is impossible to get a complete view of the silver monster which fills it.’
Flight International magazine, December 6, 1929
