Von Richthofen dead at Bertangles airfield. The British subsequently buried him with full military honors.
Love and War
On April 30, 1918, Elliott Springs wrote his stepmother from his residence in Berkeley Square. “I suppose you saw in the papers that von Richthofen, the famous German pilot, has been killed. Everyone says it’s too bad he couldn’t have been taken prisoner.”
Death was never far away from Springs’s daily life. Either he was reading about it, or witnessing it. In the first week of May he saw Clarence Fry, another of the Oxford cadets, killed, and a few days later another of that small band, Chester Pudrith, former captain of the Dartmouth football team, met a similar fate.
Springs and Callahan also had crashes, but they walked clear without serious injury. Grider had little sympathy. “The only reason you fools are alive is that hell is already packed with aviators,” he told them. Of the Musketeers Grider was the inferior pilot of the three, but what he lacked in flair, he made up for in prudence. Four years older than Springs, and two years the senior of Callahan, he had shed his youthful impetuosity while his two friends still wore their immaturity like medals of honor. “I have a rather good record about busting [aircraft],” Grider wrote his family. “I have not strained a wire except that one wing tip.”
Though in his diary Grider pondered his own mortality, in his letters home he wrote only words of cheerful assurance. “My boss [Billy Bishop] led a flight over the lines for five months and never lost a man,” boasted Grider in a letter to his friend, Emma Cox. “He is going to lead me so I feel pretty safe. Besides, I want to come home and live at San Souci [his plantation] with sister and keep Grider exclusively as a road house for my friends.”
Von Richthofen dead at Bertangles airfield. The British subsequently buried him with full military honors.
Grider longed to tell his friends and family “about our squadron” but he knew such details would never pass the censor. Bishop, Benbow, and Horn must all remain secret, so too the squadron number, but Grider reassured his correspondents that the outfit was “the best and the three Musketeers are in it. I hope to God we will be out before long.”
At the beginning of May, 85 Squadron was still at Hounslow, constantly training, but their mood brightened when they finally took delivery of their brand new S.E.5s. “I have been a child with a new toy ever since,” Springs told his father on May 12. “I’ve been cleaning and oiling my machine guns, tuning up the motor, and testing the rigging continually.”
Springs wanted to prove a point to his father, to show that he was now his match as a man, and was no longer a child to be patronized. “You ought to see the gadgets,” he bragged of his aircraft’s cockpit. “Compass, air speed indicator, radiator thermometer, oil pressure gauge, two gas pressure gauges, tachometer, compensator, two gun trigger controls, synchronized gear reservoir handle, hand pump, two switches, pressure control, wheel altimeter, gas pipe shut-off cocks, shutter control, thermometer, two cocking handles for the guns, booster magneto, spare ammunition drums, map case, throttle, joystick and rudder bar. How’s that for something to keep your eye on?”
The description was designed to confound. There was no explanation as to what items such as a booster magneto might be. Springs must have chuckled as he imagined his father scratching his head in puzzlement. It was his way of telling him to stick to his nineteenth century cotton mills while he mastered the very latest in twentieth century technology. Springs customized his cockpit after the first couple of test flights, adding a cupboard and shelf for spare goggles, machine gun tools, cigarettes, chewing gum.16
“You know, when you’re in the air for two or three hours at a time you get awfully bored.” However, of course his father didn’t know; the only thing he’d ever piloted was an automobile.
Larry Callahan wasn’t quite so delighted with his machine on account of an engine he believed faulty. Together with his mechanics he looked it over. But at least he had an aircraft. Grider’s S.E.5 had been smashed during its delivery when its ferry pilot ran into some telegraph wires attempting to land.
However, by now Grider had things on his mind other than flying. He was in love. In the six months since arriving in England, all three Musketeers had participated in what they called “horizontal refreshments” with some of the scores of young women who found pilots—particularly North American ones—as dashing as dashing could be. Springs’s diary was littered with the names of women he’d seduced, while, on April 12, he described how Grider and Alex Matthews “fight over Sheila.”
Larry Callahan (left) and his other two Musketeers worshipped Canadian ace Billy Bishop (center), seen here with 85 Squadron.
Then Grider met Billie Carleton. The exact date his eyes first fell on her isn’t known. It was probably a meeting made possible through their acquaintance with Lord Athlumney. Perhaps the pair met at one of his parties. But wherever they met, it was love at first sight for Grider.
If Springs wrote home with boyish excitement about his aircraft, Grider’s adolescent boasting was induced by the twenty-two-year-old Carleton. To his friend Emma Cox he wrote:
Three of us—the Three Musketeers—are stationed in London, almost, and have been living in a house in Berkley square. Tell papa that none of us are the Tomlinsons by any means though the devil wouldn’t hesitate a minute to take us into hell. Emma, at last I am having a real romance. I wish you could see the girl. The only trouble with is her salary. She gets £5,000 a year and has a very nice private income besides. She is one of the most sought after women in London and almost every evening I strut into the Carlton or the Ritz [two of London’s most exclusive hotels] with this wonderful vision on my arm. All the women hate her and copy her clothes. Her name is Billie Carleton and she is on the stage playing “Fair and Warmer.” Some girl. Emma, I do wish you could attend some of our parties. Honey, the youth and beauty of London are there, also the talent.…[W]e are going with the fastest, keenest crowd in London and I have gotten away with the handsomest, most charming and sought after girl in the drove. Some class!17
But there was more to Billie Carleton than met the eye. Yes, she was beautiful, and yes, she was undoubtedly talented, an accomplished pianist, dancer, singer, and actress. Her first break had come in 1914 when the impresario C. B. Cochran promoted her from the chorus line to star in Watch Your Step at London’s Empire Theatre. “Despite her inexperience and her tiny voice, she pleased the audiences,” recalled Cochran. “A more beautiful creature has never fluttered upon a stage. She seemed scarcely human, so fragile was she.”
But Carleton had inherited something other than musical talent from her parents—an addictive personality. Alcohol had been her father’s weakness; hers was drugs. Early on during the run of Watch Your Step, word reached Cochran that Carleton was being “influenced by some undesirable people and was going to opium parties.”
He sacked her from the role and her career teetered on the brink. If there hadn’t been a war on Carleton might have slipped back into obscurity. But London in 1915 was a louche, decadent city, with more than 150 night clubs opening during the war years, and notoriety was to be celebrated, not stigmatized as it had in the pre-war years. A mysterious man called John Marsh, twenty years Carleton’s senior, and said to be “the backbone of half a dozen big money-lending concerns,” became her patron. He installed Carleton in a flat in Savoy Court Mansions, and it was he who provided the annual income of £5,000 that so impressed Grider. The money was managed by Frederick Stuart, a Knightsbridge physician, while another man she met through Marsh was Reggie de Veulle, a dress designer whose creations she modeled. Such generosity enabled Carleton to be seen in the best dresses in the best clubs with the best people. She was also able to feed her drug habit.
“You ought to see the gadgets!” Elliot Springs wrote his father after taking delivery of his first S.E.5a and peering inside the cockpit.
Carleton was far from alone in her addiction. In April 1916, “information reached the police and the authorities that a new and most pernicious habit had sprung up in the selling of cocaine in small quantities.” Most of the users were soldiers on leave from the front, doubtless seeking an escape from the horrors they’d seen in the trenches. In May 1916, a law was passed by the British government “prohibiting the traffic” of cocaine but it did little to disrupt the flow of drugs into London. In November 1917, “information was received by Scotland Yard that de Veulle was trafficking in cocaine with Billie Carleton.”18
Carleton’s stage career was booming once more at this point. Cochran had given Carleton a second chance and cast her in Hoop-La at the St. Martin’s Theatre in November 1916, and the following year, she starred in Some (More Samples!), prompting society magazine Tatler to predict “a very brilliant future for Miss Carleton in musical comedy.”
John Grider fell head over heels in love with Billie Carleton, a stage beauty with an addictive personality. From “The Freedom of the Seas,” Play Pictorial, July 1918
However, as Carleton’s fame grew, so did her addiction. One of the handsome young men in “her set” was Lionel Belcher, a film actor who had played the romantic lead in the 1917 movie Another Girl’s Shoes. As impressionable as Carleton, but without her private income, his drug habit soon landed him in heavy debt. He therefore became a dealer to keep his creditors at bay. One evening he was at a party laden with cocaine when “the door opened and there entered, also in pajamas, the girl who was the idol of London.”19 Belcher recalled that: “I have rarely, if ever, seen a more beautiful woman than Billie Carleton. In addition to her wonderfully expressive eyes, which could melt appealingly or sparkle with vivacity and laughter, which were still at twenty-two those of a child of fifteen, her coloring was perfect.…[S]he was a woman to whom no man in the world could refuse anything.”
On May 11, Carleton sent the Three Musketeers tickets for the opening night of Fair and Warmer at the Prince of Wales theatre. The farce had come to London from Broadway, and Springs told his father that “the English audience always laughed at the wrong time and their idea of American slang was simply weird.”
Nonetheless it was worth going just to see Carleton. Springs was as in thrall to her beauty as Lionel Belcher had been. “Oh, la la, what a knockout!” he wrote of her following the first night party. “Billie and ‘Mac’ Grider got on like Antony and Cleopatra. How that woman can dance!…She is about twenty-three and has been on the stage since she was eighteen. She sure is witty. She kept us laughing all evening.”
After the party Grider escorted Carleton back to her flat in the Savoy Court Mansions where she “slipped into a negligee and looked like a million dollars.” Fortunately for Grider, he was well versed in “horizontal refreshment,” for Carleton was as racy as her image suggested. She frequented opium parties at the flat of de Veulle in Dover Street where, once dinner was finished, the male guests “divested themselves of their clothing and got into pyjamas, and the women into chiffon nightdresses.” There then occurred “disgusting orgies” during which Miss Carleton “arrived later at the flat from the theatre, and she, after disrobing, took her place in this circle of degenerates.”20
How much Grider knew of Carleton’s private life is unclear. Given her propensity for cocaine, an open secret in London, it seems unlikely he was oblivious to her addiction. He probably ignored it, his eyes blinded by love.
Grider spent every spare minute in Carleton’s company, and then one day he announced to Springs and Callahan that they were going to get married. “Larry and myself were rather worried about it,” Springs wrote his stepmother. “Not that we weren’t both in love with the lady ourselves but we still don’t care to have the Three Musketeers mixed up in matrimony.” Grider even applied for a marriage license but Carleton “had the good sense to refuse at the last moment.” The truth was that Carleton wasn’t in love with Grider; he was just something different, a welcome change from the foppish actors and listless artists that comprised her usual crowd of hangers-on. To her, Grider was “her cave man,” and on their last night together she teased him about it during a party at the Musketeers’ flat in Berkeley Square. It was another wild night. One of Carleton’s girlfriends smashed an empty port bottle over Springs’s head and “he was out for some time.”
The next morning, May 22, the Three Musketeers left their Berkeley Square home for the final time. Billie Carleton and some of her theatrical friends accompanied them to Hounslow. They arrived to find quite a crowd had gathered. “I don’t think there ever was a squadron that got the send off we did,” wrote Springs. “Two princesses, a couple of generals, several colonels and majors and the ’drome was simply covered with pink parasols.”
The boys of 85 Squadron at London Colony in spring 1918. From left to right: Elliot Springs, Spencer Horn, John McGavock Grider, unknown, and Malcolm McGregor.
If there were two members of the royal family present, Springs only mentioned one by name: Princess Marie Louise, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and a first cousin of German Kaiser Wilhelm II. Grider also singled out Her Royal Highness when he wrote his sister of the day. “You should have seen our departure from England. There was the princess Marie Louise, who is a peach of an old lady. She is also the sister of King George and the godmother of the 85th squadron. I had tea with her that afternoon and enjoyed talking to her very much.”
Springs garlanded Mrs. Bishop with orchids and marveled at her “stiff upper lip.” She in turn begged the eighteen other pilots of 85 Squadron to “stick to the major and not let a Hun get on his tail.”
The pilots said their last farewells. Grider and Carleton embraced, and she slipped into his hands a doll she’d had specially made for her lover. It wore a miniature replica of one of her evening gowns, the one Grider most admired, and its hair had been delicately clipped from Carleton’s own head. Grider loved it. He called the doll “Billie 2” and installed it in the rear of his fuselage as his mascot.
The pilots climbed into their S.E.5s and took off in their well-rehearsed formation, Bishop “out front in the center and the three flights arranged in a V on each side and in back of him.”
The weather over the Channel was perfect as the squadron left England and headed to France and to war. Springs appeared unconcerned by what lay ahead. Halfway across the sea, at a height of 8,000 feet, he motioned to Grider to come in close. “I flew up to his wing tip,” recalled Grider, “and he took out his flask and drank my health.”