Introduction

Our views on the viability of the airship are conditioned by images of the wreckage of the R101 on the hillside at Beauvais on 5 October 1930, and the Hindenburg in flames at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937. However, in the first decade of the twentieth century, the airship was just as exciting and promising a piece of advanced technology as the frail and unreliable, shortranged, heavier-than-air craft. Airships offered stability, endurance, range, payload and reasonable speed when compared to contemporary surface transport. Airships appealed to the Royal Navy as they offered a means of extending the eyes of the fleet above the oceans.

A number of young and ambitious naval officers seized the opportunity to become involved with this new branch. Many served with distinction in the First World War and achieved high rank in the Royal Navy or the Royal Air Force. One of these pioneers was recognised by his contemporaries as having an inventive mind, allied to a powerful and thrusting personality. According to the airship historian, the late Ces Mowthorpe, he was, ‘a brilliant and famous (in his time) airshipman.’ Owing to his untimely death at the age of only thirty-three, in 1916, he is all but forgotten. His name was Neville Usborne and this is his story, set within the context of the technological and strategic developments of his time in the British Isles and Europe, and also of the technical and social climate in which he grew up. In the course of this study, I hope to draw together and shed light on several important subject areas in which he was intimately involved:

(a)	How the RN had to adapt to and embrace new technology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, within a service ethos and training environment that still harked back to Nelson’s times.
(b)	How and why a bright, ambitious, technically minded young officer of the late-Victorian/Edwardian period could come to choose lighter-than-air aviation as a promising and fulfilling career path.
(c)	The general loss of confidence in Edwardian Britain as it faced the possibility that this new technology (which as well as aviation, included submarines, radio-telegraphy, torpedoes, Dreadnought Class battleships, optical fire control and the introduction of oil fuel to replace coal) would erode the comfortable and complacent feeling of security from continental disturbances which had existed since the time of George IV.
(d)	The very real and important debate in the early twentieth century between the comparative merits of lighter-than-air (balloons and airships) and heavier-than-air aviation (aeroplanes). How the role and organisation of a military air service was defined from the Royal Engineers Balloon School, to the RE Air Battalion, the RN Airships Branch, the RFC, and eventually the RAF.
(e)	The political, public, press and military perceptions of the above.
(f)	The differing strands of lighter-than-air flight – rigid airships as favoured in Germany, semi-rigid as the French preferred, non-rigid, which came to be the British speciality, balloons, kites and kite balloons. Which would prove to be of the greatest utility in the war, the advent of which was greatly feared in the first decade or so of the twentieth century?
(g)	The particular involvement of Neville Usborne in the construction of the first British rigid airship, pre-war pioneering with small non-rigid airships – which would directly result in the design and construction of the two most successful and widely used classes of non-rigid airship – and the ultimately unsuccessful effort to develop a hybrid aircraft as a means of anti-Zeppelin countermeasures.
(h)	Putting Usborne’s story, and all of the above, within the overall framework and context of an examination of the military experience of lighter-than-air flight in Britain between 1878 and 1930, with attention also being paid to parallel developments in Europe and the USA during this period. Annexes sketch out the place of all of this within the history of lighter-than-air aviation from 1783, through the search for motive power and dirigibility in the nineteenth century, and also show briefly how airships found a niche in the Second World War and the Cold War.

The several classes of non-rigid airships operated by the Royal Naval Air Service during the First World War may, with some justification, be regarded as some of the most successful types of dirigible ever built. This did not come about by accident, and was based on over thirty years’ experience accumulated by the British Army and the Royal Navy, and which progress Neville Usborne, among several others described in the text, played a significant role. No previous work has put all this together and no account has ever been given of the life story of this Anglo-Irish airman.

My very grateful thanks are due to the following for their very valuable help: Sara Bevan, Anne Boddaert, Den Burchmore, Nigel Caley, Michael Clarke, Ernie Cromie, Allen Crosbie, Peter Devitt, Richard Forrest, Sam Gresham, Dr Jane Harrold, Commander David Hobbs, Sue Kilbracken, Christopher Kilbracken, Diana King, Stuart Leslie, Tom McCarthy, Sara Mackeown, Phil Maguire, George Malcolmson, John Montgomery, Philip Moody, Betty Moss, Ces Mowthorpe, Tim Pierce, Dr Ian Speller, Nick Stroud, Julian Usborne, Doreen Warner, Beverley Williams, Christine Woodward and Sam Wynn. BRNC Dartmouth, Crawford Art Gallery, Imperial War Museum, History Department NUI Maynooth, National Aerospace Library, National Library of New Zealand, National Physical Laboratory, Port of Cork, RAeS, Royal Aero Club, RAF Cranwell, RAF Museum, Royal Engineers Museum, RN Submarine Museum, RUSI.

Finally, sincere thanks to my editor Ken Patterson and to all the staff at Pen and Sword, especially Charles Hewitt, Lori Jones, Laura Hirst, Laura Lawton and Matthew Blurton.

Except where stated, photographs are from the author’s collection.