Imperial’s Africa Service Timetable.
BOAC was born from the growth and amalgamation of some of the pioneer commercial air services that took to the air as early as 1919, when a certain Winston S. Churchill was Britain’s first Air Minister. That was also the year that the world’s oldest airline, K.L.M. Royal Dutch Airlines, officially began its existence under royal charter, which was just months before ‘The Queensland and Northern Territories Aerial Services’, as Q.A.N.T.A.S. (Qantas), came into reality. Ironically, BOAC’s later transmutation into a branded ‘British Airways’ in 1974 revived a name of a British air service company from the early days of British civil aviation.
BOAC’s roots actually go back to the First World War and the emergence of private British airlines which would latterly be forced to amalgamate into what became the grandly titled ‘Imperial Airways (London)’, which in 1939 became BOAC. We can thank Imperial Airways and the British independent airlines for setting up the routes and infrastructure that BOAC inherited – initially via domestic regional, European and then intercontinental services. There was, in 1917, a British Civil Aerial Transport Committee, and an Air Vice-Marshal named Sir Sefton Brancker became the key figure in promoting British aviation. The BBC’s Lord Reith had been a somewhat unexpected figure of aviation – as a chairman of Imperial Airways and as first chairman of the new British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
On Hounslow Heath
Lord John Reith of BBC repute oversaw the amalgamation of Imperial Airways, and then the 1930s iteration of ‘British Airway’s into BOAC, a title which he claimed to have thought of as part of his belief in the British Empire and Commonwealth air arm that could earn a place in the nation’s psyche in the manner of another great national corporation – the BBC itself. Reith was seen as an inspirational leader at Imperial Airways and his departure caused much unrest. A report into Imperial Airways operations by Lord Cadman in 1938 revealed several management and operational conflicts and we might see it as the stepping stone to the formation of the new corporation. Imperial’s director and Reith’s lifelong friend, Woods Humphrey, became a scapegoat for confused policy and confused government and governance. John Reith stepped into the chairmanship of Imperial in June 1938. Change came quickly under Reith and with orders from government, amalgamation of Imperial and British Airways led to BOAC being first framed in 1939, but delayed in terms of real commercial start-up by the Second World War it was originally the British and Commonwealth Empire Air Corporation, but became less of a mouthful for 1946. Interestingly, Canada vetoed a Commonwealth and Dominion-wide airline idea as it would restrict the likes of Canada from founding their own international carrier. South Africa and Australia adopted similar positions.1
Alongside the institution that was BOAC, we must cite Heston and its nearby Hounslow Heath (not Croydon) – once a scene of medieval life and Dick Turpin highwayman-style hijacks – as the origin of British civil airport and airline beginnings. The heath was a desolate and dangerous place, yet had been important in British history for centuries. Ancient man had built a cursus and a stone circle in an alignment that is mirrored by today’s main, northerly runway. Julius Caesar built his first British camp on this alignment upon the heath. Curiously, a ‘ley line’ runs directly from the centre of London’s significant sites and out along the London-Bath road, through Heathrow’s main runway, Caesar’s camp, the old circle, and beyond to Windsor Castle and westwards to further places of power. Little did ancient man know that the alignment upon the heath would become the world’s busiest runway, teeming with metal monsters spewing thrust as they launched not just airliners across the world, but the airline of an empire. Today, Heathrow’s main east-west runway also follows the line of the Roman road and tracks that coaches and horses took into and out of London, a fitting synergy indeed.
And of Heathrow’s original ‘third’ runway that was aligned north-east-southwest into the prevailing wind? This has long been forgotten, even though it existed into the 1980s, only to be so short-sightedly sacrificed at the needs of buildings and money. Constructing Terminal Four, a new cargo centre and car parks so close to it – Heathrow’s own ideal, short and medium-haul airliner-tailored third runway – ensured that its closure was enforced. We can now see how short-sighted such idiocy was. At Gatwick the new 1980s North Terminal was similarly built upon the potentially easiest alignment of a second runway, and avoiding the hill that a faltering American-operated 747, packed with passengers, came within 16ft (radio altimeter height recorded) of hitting in the 1980s after an engine failure on takeoff – leaving burned grass in its wake.
Back in 1919, the heath at Hounslow became the take-off point for the first services of an ‘aerial liner’ to depart (Croydon aerodrome soon usurped it). Those who do not know why Heathrow is so named, need only to look back to the history of Hounslow Heath – the site of London Heathrow Airport and still known as ‘LHR’ on airline baggage tags and pilots documents. From Hounslow Heath, West London, British civil aviation was born, despite an understandable claim to fame from Croydon Airport in the 1920s.
So it was, on 25 August 1919, that a scheduled service from London Heathrow to Paris le Bourget was inaugurated as the first timetabled civil air service in Britain (a one-off flight had taken place six weeks earlier). The pilot was man named William Lawford, a man who had begun his aviation career in 1911. The first ad hoc civil ‘one off ’ service from London actually took place on 15 July at Hendon aerodrome just over one month earlier when a pilot named Jerry Shaw, of Air Transport & Travel Ltd, flew a chartered flight from Hendon to Heathrow, thence to Paris and back. Shaw would soon fly a charter for a Dutchman named Albert Plesman and his own nascent airline – KLM. Shaw did not know it, but Shaw was the Briton who played a key role in the creation of Plesman’s mighty KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. By late 1919, Hounslow Heath’s new airport was witnessing four cross-Channel services a day.
Forgotten today, there were several London airfields in 1919 – notably Heathrow, Cricklewood and Edgware. They were surrounded by green fields. The point of customs exit and entry into Great Britain was solely based at Heathrow in a tented village, soon to progress to wooden sheds and wooden boards in the mud. In March 1920, the new Croydon Airport became the customs airport for London and a leading hub of airline transport development, but Heathrow would once again have its day. In the intervening period, a cast of small British airlines would flourish, and some die, as the survivors of 1920s aviation were forced together by act of political will, and a grant of capitol, and an overseeing committee.
A key player in this early ‘air’ arena would be Hillman Airways, which operated from Stapleford Aerodrome, close to Chigwell in London. From this unlikely base, Hillman flew services to Europe and to domestic British seaside towns. Flights to Liverpool and Blackpool were operated, and Hillman’s were soon using de Havilland DH84 and DH90 Dragon and Dragon Rapides as the company became well established up to 1935; after which Hillman, along with smaller British independents, Spartan and United, was absorbed into the amalgamation that was the new British Airways. This incarnation of a ‘British Airways’, was then absorbed into Imperial Airways only, as we know, to re-emerge as a trading name in 1974 when Imperial’s successor, BOAC, merged with BEA.
Before that occurred, a somewhat messy structure of British domestic independent airlines grew, operating a diverse fleet mix and ad hoc services. Yet 12,000 miles away the Australians, under ‘outback’ remote Queensland airline pioneers and backers W. Hudson Fysh, Paul. J. McGinniss, Fergus McMaster, and Arthur Baird, created and organised, Q.A.N.T.A.S. (latterly QANTAS and now, as the grammatically incorrect, but de facto ‘word’ of Qantas) and really got their act together to create on-demand flights from 16 November 1920. The obvious question was why couldn’t British civil aviation be so efficiently framed? Qantas early ad hoc ferry flights in the remote bush became proper scheduled services on 2 November 1922 with a service from Charleville to Longreach with mail, and then onwards to Cloncurry (577 miles) the next day with one passenger. In its first year of regular services, Qantas carried 208 passengers, but by 1930 Qantas had flown one million miles and thousands of passengers.2
The early 1920s success of Qantas inspired Sir Samuel Hoare, who took over at the new Air Ministry in London in 1922; Hoare was forward thinking and needed hard evidence to convince the set minds in London that ‘air’ was the next great opportunity. Qantas provided the perfect lever to persuade the dull minds of Civil Service thinking and maritime preference.
It says something about the arrogance and the torpor of some of the British and their ‘attitude’ that their claims to excellence and superiority should have been usurped by ‘upstart colonials’ who were more mentally agile, better in adversity, and less constrained by class and society and the shackles of only being able to think within perceived wisdoms. The free-thinking Aussies, who had set up Qantas at Longreach, showed the British how to do it. The Deutsche Lufthansa and its Junkers JU52s, was also carving out a strong network throughout Europe, operating a route network of extensive reach. Air Union of France would soon build European and colonial roots. Societé Anonyme Belgique National d’ Aerienne (SABENA) of Belgium would also begin its notable forays.
Although Imperial Airways, KLM, Lufthansa, Air France, SABENA, and Qantas, are often cited as the world’s oldest or founding airlines, we should not forget that the Russians proceeded apace with airliner design in the 1920s.
Of massive latent commercial significance, across the Atlantic, there lay a grand array of 1920s American airline companies who would begin to flourish as aviation took hold across that vast continent. In the heart of the United States, difficult flying conditions and the need to carve out new airways and routes also represented the beginning of a new age and a new industry. The transport of mail provided the subsidy and the impetus to airline growth, as it did in Europe.
Curtiss Condors, Ford Tri-motors, Lockheed Orions and Vegas, and assorted Northrops, Boeings, and a brief flirtation with Fokker high wing wooden-built monoplanes, that were not always resistant to American conditions, populated a fleet mix of expensive diversity. It would take the metal-built Boeing 247 and Douglas DC-2 to change everything for carriers. America also had a nascent flying boat based service, the New York Buenos Aires Airways (NYBRA), which was absorbed into Pan American Grace Airways.
The American airlines, and the airliner builders that served them, advanced their respective arts at a pace that made Imperial Airways look very peculiar indeed. The fact that by the mid-1930s, the American Lockheed Super 14 Electra would be the pride of British Airways super-fast European service from London Heston Aerodrome, and would be latterly used to fly Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin to Germany, proves the point that national pride is one thing, but the economics and ability of a superb machine soon outweigh any such patriotic preferences. The confused and perhaps complacent British aerial 1920s mindset, cast from a band of small start-up Edwardian era air carriers, had resulted in strategy as policy and national will for ‘air’ that was unfocused and spread too widely across too many themes and ideas. Leadership had been missing.
We ought not to forget that despite historical perceptions, long before American dominance, the British were beaten into powered flight, beaten across the Channel, and that the first proper powered take-off, flight and landing in Britain by a British pilot, was on 1 December 1908, when J.T. Moore Brabazon used a French aircraft in the form a Voisin machine, built by Eugene Gabriel Voisin at Issy les Moulineux Paris. Although Samuel Cody has claim of flight from a few weeks earlier.
The French were also expanding their airlines, and with competitors in mind, Lord Weir’s British Government committee recommended direct State assistance towards the building of British aerial transport services. But for pioneers like Air Transport and Travel Ltd, founded by Holt Thomas, it all came too late, and this airline was closed down and absorbed into Daimler Airways.
Airmail
Early services carried more mail than passengers, and even in 1950, delivering the State-operated Royal Mail by air, accounted for up to twenty per cent of payload on some BOAC services, especially to Africa and Asia. What of Plesman’s brilliant KLM, or the French Government supported Air Union of France, or Lufthansa? The British, as so often happened, took their time while their direct European competition raced ahead – in the case of KLM – literally.
British domestic aviation was surprisingly strong in the 1920s and 1930s with routes to remote Scottish islands, the Midlands and the North, providing a fast alternative to the railways. Services to Blackpool and East Anglia were commonplace, if weather-dependent. So concerned were the railways that they invested in small airlines or set up their own ‘air’ departments. As an example, the Great Western Railway (GWR) set up a GWR air service from Plymouth to Bristol and Cardiff, operating three days a week in the 1930s – with a call made to the windy top of Haldon Hill outside Exeter in case anyone wanted to access the local ports. Imperial operated the service for the GWR.
Despite such fascinating moments, several of the British independent airlines would be absorbed into the new national carrier of Imperial Airways, including the lead players of Sir Frederick Handley Page’s own Handley Page Transport Limited with its three HP W8B machines (Handley Page Transport carried over 3,000 passengers in 1922); the Instone Air Line Limited (former coal exporters and shipping line operators) and its single converted, Vickers Vimy Commercial, and four de Havilland DH 34’s. Daimler Airways brought three de Havilland DH 34’s to the mix and the British Marine Air Navigation Company added two Supermarine Sea Eagle amphibian flying boats. These airlines built British domestic route networks and services to Paris and other European cities. Services to Scotland and the Channel Islands were also started, only to be somewhat neglected by the later amalgamation of airlines that became the great instrument that was Imperial Airways.
Imperial was to inherit 1,760 miles of cross-Channel European routes, the operations were based not at Heathrow, but at Croydon Airport, which had opened on 25 March 1920. The first scheduled overseas service of Imperial did not start until 26 April 1924, when a daily London-Paris service was opened with a DH 34. The British independents that had been formed into Imperial had made a big success of developing European routes, but Imperial (with government edict) seemed to want to focus on overseas long-haul mail and elite passenger services, perhaps at the expense of previous European and domestic achievements by the small band of British airlines that now lay within Imperial’s umbrella. Dutch, French and German airlines would soon punish Imperial’s complacency in Europe.
However, in 1925, out in central and east Africa, Sir Alan Cobham was undertaking ‘The Empire Air League Imperial Airways Survey’, with the specific remit to assess the issue of aerial mail and transport services. The idea of landplanes across the bush, and for flying boats taking off and alighting upon African lakes, came from this survey. The first contract for such services went to The North Sea Aerial and General Transport Company Ltd, who received the rights from the Colonial Office to operate from Khartoum to Kisumu on Lake Victoria. Sir Samuel Hoare undertook an African inspection tour and soon considered that Cobham’s own airline interests, in the form of the Cobham-Blackburn Airline, might operate local east African services for Imperial, but Imperial soon acquired the small concern and launched its own African affair that linked Cairo to Cape Town. So began Imperial in Africa.3
An Imperial Air
From 1924, Imperial Air Transport that was officially formed as Imperial Airways gained its first chairman, the business tycoon Sir Eric Campbell Geddes. Geddes was formerly General Manager of the North Eastern Railway and also ex-Inspector General of Military Transport in France in the First World War. He ran Dunlop, and fellow Dunlop luminaries Sir Hardiman Lever and the expert accountant Lt Col Sir George Beharrell, DSO, (another ex-railway expert) were streamed into running Imperial. In fact Dunlop supplied offices, solicitors, and other resources to Imperial. Given that the government had little interest in ‘air’ matters, we can be grateful that a force as large as Geddes was present to push all the right buttons. He had railway and Ministerial experience as Minister of Transport in 1917–1918 and transferred his skills well. The same could be said of Sir Sefton Brancker as Director of Civil Aviation. It should be recalled that at this time the Air Minister did not sit in Cabinet. Britain was not then truly ‘air-minded’, and it appears that the strategic aerial lessons of the First World War had not penetrated the minds of government and civil servants in their ivory towers in London.
A Colonel Frank Searl, who had expertly run the London bus service and achieved high utilisation of equipment, then to run B.S.A. Daimler Airways, was appointed Imperial’s first Managing Director. But even with such expertise, Imperial constituted a diverse and expensive fleet of British aircraft procured from a range of sources. Merger with British Airways in 1935 would only confuse the mix further. Lower training, operating and maintenance costs from standardised fleet procurement did not enter the mindset – but using British equipment did.
The first new airline type commissioned for Imperial Airways was the Handley Page W8F, which was ordered on the 3 November 1924. In the first year of operation, Imperial flew 853,042 miles, carried 11,395 passengers and 212,380 letters, a quite astounding figure given the old aircraft types, their maintenance issues, and the mix-and-match nature of the inherited operations.
Any observer who resents the description of Imperial’s early days as being within a torpor, needs to recall that the British did, in 1932, only have thirty-one registered airline transport pilots and the same number of actual in-service airliners. By comparison, the ‘foreigners’ on the European continent saw 135 French airline transport pilots flying 269 aircraft, the Germans had 160 airline pilots flying a 177-strong fleet on a route network whose total mileage exceeded the British and French airlines network mileage combined. The unanswered question was why?
In latter years, the great corporate-political torpor continued, much to the frustration of the aviation experts who operationally managed and staffed BOAC, many of who had started their careers at Imperial Airways and its antecedents.
Luckily, back in 1920s Britain, a few key players had realised that action to promote a British airline industry was needed, not least in the face of subsidised Dutch, French, and German rival carriers. With support from Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, the independent British civil air services were amalgamated, regulated, and then State-financed into a more cohesive British airline service. So it was that Sir Samuel Hoare, as Air Minister in 1922, drove the process through. It was not easy; the mindset of government and nation was maritime – not of the air. His Majesty’s Treasury was not really interested and it would take Sir Herbert Hambling of Barclays Bank (Deputy Chairman) to drive the process – it is said with direct encouragement from then Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law. Law was soon out of office, so it was Stanley Baldwin who was the man to approve the State, tax-payer funded subsidy of one million pounds over a ten year period for the new ‘air’ line. The Hambling Committee had framed and driven the process and it would lead to an entity named ‘Imperial Airways’. The name was suggested by George Woods Humphrey and replaced the original suggestion of ‘British Aircraft Transportation Service’, which was seen to be vulnerable to the pejorative acronym of ‘BATS’.4
Imperial’s dominant position led to airliners being created for Imperial and its route demands. So was born the British practice of designing airliners to the peculiar needs of the dominant, State controlled, national carrier – a characteristic that would touch the VC10 itself decades later. Back in the 1920s, the two key airliners that emerged from the process were tri-motors of 1926, the Armstrong Whitworth Argosy, of which seven were constructed (their engines proved troublesome), and the de Havilland DH 66 Hercules. The emergent Qantas would take four DH 66s and Imperial operated seven. The DH 66 was the first airliner to be designed with excess power and a durable, reinforced, steel (not wood) airframe. A cockpit canopy to convert the open-cockpit was later designed and retro-fitted to the Imperial machines. The Handley Page HP 42 and Short Brothers flying boats were to follow. Elsewhere in the world, airliner design was much further ahead, and Imperial was, despite British impressions, not alone in conquering the skies.
In 1924, Imperial became the main airline and employer of British civil pilots. The first sixteen pilots were gathered together, and soon others of experience would come to the airline. These men truly were the pioneers of British airline building and without them Imperial, BOAC, and the subsequent story would never have happened. Some of them started flying biplanes for Imperial and ended their careers flying VC10s for BOAC – surely something remarkable in terms of experience and achievement.
Imperial Heroes
Imperial and BOAC pilot O.P. Jones would achieve great fame – eventually commanding BOAC four-engined flying boats and VC10 airliners, and flying Prime Ministers and VIPs. Many of his Imperial colleagues would finish their careers as BOAC, Comet, Britannia, 707, and VC10 pilots. Dudley Travers, a former cavalryman of the First World War, went into the Royal Flying Corps and then to Imperial Airways, arriving with a DFC and Croix de Guerre no less. Millions of flying miles later, he was a legend as a flying boat commander, he would also become an Imperial ‘Master of the Air’ – one of only five men so ennobled – in doing so he would make the East Africa flying boat route his own before retiring from BOAC in the 1960s.
Jack Kelly Rogers was another of Imperial’s illustrious adventurer pilots and commanded the BOAC Boeing flying boat that brought Winston Churchill across the Atlantic in wartime. It was Kelly Rogers who attended Imperial’s crashed flying boat, Corsair, on the Dungu River in Africa in 1939–1940, where he further cemented his reputation as man of action and certainty.
Men like Jones, Kelly Rogers, Travers, Wilcockson and others, epitomised the great era of aeronautical advancement. Without them and their travails, BOAC and its VC10 would never have happened. We might also recall that without the behind the scenes diplomacy of HRH Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Africa and the Commonwealth would have imploded long before BOAC and its VC10s dominated those tropical skies. Africa, always the cauldron of politics and good and bad deeds, framed Imperial, its successor BOAC, the Comet, and lastly, the VC10.
From single-engined prop-jobs made of wire, canvas and wood, to sleek-hulled ‘Empire’ flying boats and then to giant, T-tailed Rolls-Royce powered VC10s straddling the globe, it all seems an incredible achievement, yet one seemingly ‘lost’ to history beyond the enclave of the aviation enthusiast. We should briefly add the names and deeds of some of the other men who made all this happen. Lead names of the Imperial years included: Rhinhold F. Caspareuthus, Gordon P. Olley, Athelstan S.M. Rendall, Gordon Store, Rex Oxley Taylor, Arthur S. Wilcockson, C.F. Wolley Dod, and Alan B.H. Youell.
Captain C. Nigel Pelly was another example of the derring-do at Imperial and BOAC. He had worked for Hillman Airways and then Imperial, before becoming a BOAC man. Perry piloted Lockheed Electras, Canadair Argonauts and Britannias. Of note, Pelly flew Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to meet Adolf Hitler in 1938 for peace talks. Pelly was one of the wartime BOAC Mosquito pilots operating the clandestine, unarmed Mosquito service to Sweden from Leuchars in Scotland. This was the ‘ball-bearing’ airline that collected vital Swedish ball-bearings for British industry and which also carried VIPs, returning airmen and spies, in and out of Sweden in the bomb bay of the BOAC Mosquitos. Their aircraft only had one defence against marauding Luftwaffe night fighters – speed. Seven BOAC Mosquito pilots would die in this service, including Captain Gilbert Rae.5
Ronald Ballantine of Imperial Airways & BOAC: Commander of the Air
Ronald George Ballantine, who ended his career as a VC10 captain, was born at Plymouth on 2 August 1913, and as a young man learned to fly privately. By the time he was twenty-one he had obtained his commercial flying, navigation, and wireless licences, enabling him to join Imperial Airways. Ballantine flew as a second officer in the three-engined, open cockpit, Armstrong Whitworth Argosy on the Croydon-Brussels-Cologne route, then moved on to the Handle Page HP 42 biplane airliner.
Ballantine next flew on the Imperial Airways routes to Africa and Asia before being appointed to his first command. Transferring to Imperial’s eastern hubs, he was based in Hong Kong, flying the de Havilland DH 86. During this period he carried out an aerial survey of the route to Bangkok via Hanoi, across the unknown territories of Siam and Indo-China, and he established a 16-hour record for the Rangoon-Calcutta return journey. Although Ballantine had joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve (RAFVR) in 1939, he was retained to fly for BOAC. He flew in the evacuation of France before being posted to Egypt, where he flew in support of operations in the Western Desert. In one incident, when supplying fuel to the besieged garrison at Tobruk, Ballantine successfully landed his Lockheed Hudson after the two preceding aircraft had been destroyed by enemy fire, only for the undercarriage to collapse as his machine hit a shell hole and was wrecked. Ballantine spent the night in a trench and he managed to escape just before Tobruk fell.
Ballantine flew regularly on the London-Cairo route, staging through Lisbon, Lagos and Khartoum. Among his passengers during this period were General de Gaulle and General Patton, it was also where he first met Ernest K. Gann. After he had been seconded as Chief Pilot to the newly formed Hong Kong Airways, Ballantine returned with his wife Cherry to England in 1949 to fly BOAC’s new Rolls-Royce Merlin-powered Canadair Argonaut airliners.
On 6 February 1952, he flew the new Queen Elizabeth home from Africa following the death of her father, King George VI. Ballantine soon converted to the Bristol Britannia, before transferring to the Comet IV fleet under the command of Tom Stoney. In 1963 he converted to the Vickers VC10 – going on to be a senior fleet captain. When he retired in 1966, he had amassed 21,400 hours flying time during a career in which he had flown an estimated five million miles. Ballantine then went to Singapore as Director of Flight Operations for the Comet-equipped company Malaysia-Singapore Airlines, which subsequently became Singapore Airlines.
Ronald Ballantine retired to his home in the ‘Berkshire BOAC belt’, an hour’s drive from Heathrow. There, this tall gentleman and true commander of the air, retired to his garden and his earlier passion for art and colour. Ballantine was friends with the author Ernest K. Gann and featured in one of Gann’s books. Ronald Ballantine was a pioneer aviator typical of his breed, encapsulating all that was best of his era and his genre.
As a child, the author visited a Lagos-bound BOAC VC10 flight deck and met Captain Ballantine. Nearly three decades later the author bumped into an upright, tall gentlemen at a village flower and jumble sale and got talking about BOAC with the stranger, who turned out to be the man he had last met when he was a boy taken to see a VC10 commander in a cockpit high over the Sahara desert – it was Ballantine.
Beyond the posh people in the cabin and their social issues, men like Ronald Ballantine were the founding core of British civil airline operations, they were Imperial and BOAC.
C Class Celebrity
The brave Australians would beat the Americans and the British across the world’s greatest oceanic aerial challenge. On 31 May 1928, Charles Kingsford-Smith and his crew of Ulm, Lyon, and Warner, flew from Oakland California to Brisbane, arriving in Australia on 9 June. They did it using one of Dutchman Anthony H.G. Fokker’s own F. VII tri-motors, the Southern Cross. It would be another three years before Charles Lindbergh would attempt the Pacific (by a northern route).
Charles Kingsford-Smith (‘Smithy’) and Charles Ulm then rubbed British noses in it by ‘rescuing’ an Imperial Airways attempt to run a mail flight through to Australia in April-May 1931. The Imperial machine, the Hercules Class City of Cairo, crashed at Koepang during an emergency landing due to headwinds. The Imperial pilots, R. Mollard and H.W.C. Alger, managed to save the mail and pass it on to an Imperial-chartered Kingsford-Smith crew who had crossed the Timor Sea from Darwin in the famous Southern Cross. The mail was saved and delivered onwards to Brisbane. Imperial’s Mollard, who had hitched a lift with Kingsford-Smith, was told to purchase an aircraft in Australia for the return Australia-Great Britain mail attempt. He did so, but the return mail was actually flown all the way back up the line to Imperial’s main station at Akyab in Burma by Kingsford-Smith under charter to Imperial Airways. Unsurprisingly, the flight from there to Croydon was performed by an Imperial machine and crew.
In May 1934, the official British Royal Mail charter and pennant was handed to Imperial Airways by the Postmaster General, Sir Kingsley Wood, at the consent of the King (George V). Carriage of mail at an agreed tariff, and by 1937 on an un-surcharged ‘Air Mail’ basis, would now underpin Imperial. So was born, under the management of Imperial’s Company Secretary (not a stenographic title) S.A. Dismore, the ‘Empire Air Mail Scheme’ to transport mail across the British colonies at a cheap and fixed rate. George Woods Humphrey, who had entered the 1920s airline business with Frederick Handley Page and then Daimler Airways, was by now a significant figure for Imperial as General Manager.
However, it took from 1933 to 1937 for the government to enact the mail legislation, it being approved by the House of Commons on 20 December 1934, but did not achieve in-service reality for another three years. Yet there was a significant unintended outcome – aircraft with more cargo (as mail) capacity were required and they would be heavier and, as the runways to serve such machines did not exist in Africa or Asia, there was only one answer – flying boats. So at Imperial’s needs, were born the range of small to medium size 1920s and 1930s flying boats that built Imperial’s wider network. Within ten years, giant C Class flying boats would, in every sense, imperially dominate the airways.
Imperial Airways, locked into a British psyche of lumbering biplanes and early flying boats delivering a slow but reliable service, came late to the game, and ultimately responded to American alloy-bodied, monocoque, monoplane airliner developments with two 1930s monoplane airliners.
The first was the Armstrong Whitworth AW15 Atalanta of 1932. It was built of a combined wood and alloy tube construction, and was Imperial’s first ‘hot and high’ airliner-to-order, in that it had a large high-lift wing (with lower wing-loading), and four powerful Armstrong-Siddeley ‘Serval’ engines rated at 340bhp each – derived from the wonderfully named ‘Double Mongoose’ engine. The cantileverwing was high-mounted to allow ground clearance and keep the engines away from rough ground and runway debris. Despite a large and cavernous fuselage, only ten passengers could be accommodated – the rest of the space was for the lucrative empire mail and for cargo as they were vital consignments on the Eastern routes where the Atalanta was deployed in Africa and India. Here was Imperial’s tropical airliner for difficult runways. Eight were built and set a formula that persisted up to BOAC’s VC10 requirements.
Imperial’s next machine, a large tropical route landplane, was the belated, 1938 AW27 Ensign, which was a descendant of the Atalanta, but it was underpowered, required modification to American powerplants, and was made in small numbers prior to wartime use. But, prior to that event, a greater success came in the form of the elegant de Havilland DH 91 Albatross – alas built of wood, and yet highly aerodynamically efficient, but taking over five years to come to fruition in 1937, by which time any market other than a British one, had long since been secured by the DC-3.
Despite such moments, Imperial remained trapped into a peculiar torpor. The French also remained in a dinosaur biplane nationalistic mindset. Yet Britain’s massive Short’s built C Class flying boats, introduced in 1936, were a great success and created a stately golden era for Imperial and the British. The C Class engendered unheard of affection for an airliner and they were loved by crews and passengers alike. In Africa, the C Class (and the three G Class) became beloved legends, even in the remote bush areas, and upon their withdrawal in 1946 many tears were shed. The VC10 would be the next airliner to achieve such endearment and status in Africa – and beyond.
Imperial’s 1930s fleet equipment mix was an expensive melange of landplanes and flying boats that ranged from giant flying boats to variously named, or classed, Scyllas, Ensigns, Hannibals, Heracles, Atalantas, Frobishers, and to Boulton and Paul P71As named Britomart and Boadicea, a fleet of twelve-seat DH 86 machines tagged the Diana Class, and two Avro 652 six-seaters. It looked like a free-for-all and would only be exceeded in the bizarre by the post-war British use of Junkers JU 52 airliners!
Over at KLM and Qantas, much more rational and cost-effective fleets were being built.
First Class Travellers
Imperial’s landplane passenger services were slow and stylish. The arrival of the big flying boats only speeded things up a touch. Existing standards of railway inspired Pullman-style luxury were retained (Imperial’s early directors were of course, ex-railway managers).
The new Shorts Company built C Class flying boats with deep fuselages carrying not just people, but mail, tonnes of mail, and with grand cabins, became true icons of a grand era. These machines could fly from rivers, lakes and sea ports where a one or two mile take-off run presented fewer problems than a landplanes bush take-off. It was from these circumstances that Imperial procured its giant flying boats and wrote a new chapter in the history of aviation. So were born the Imperial Airways Short S23 C Class Empire flying boats at a 1935 cost of £50,000 each, and their Poole, and then Southampton bases – latterly with the S26 flying boat, which was a larger and longer range version that itself led to the two even larger S33 examples that went straight into BOAC wartime service in 1940. Through the C Class Imperial, of which it ordered twenty-eight, and of which the first example, Canopus, flew on 3 July 1936 and entered service in October 1936, created the world’s largest carrier of mail and freight. So too did Imperial offer the world’s most luxurious airline travel in the world. At one stage, the giant flying boats only had room for six passengers instead of sixteen, so great was the weight of the mail – which took precedence. So a new era, and a new industry, was also born upon Imperial’s C Class wings.
By 1938, Imperial was operating five services a week from England to India, of which three continued to Australia (a ten-day total journey), and had eighteen Africa services a week operating through the hubs at Alexandria, Cairo and Khartoum. Imperial, self-appointed preacher of its own rectitude, called itself; ‘The greatest air service in the world’, which was probably true in one context, but it was definitely not the fastest.
Be it on a landplane or a seaplane, luncheon was eaten from tables laid with linen and napkins; wine coolers abounded, as did single malt whisky. The menus include the serving of ‘Cornish’ chicken in the skies over the middle of rancid African jungles. Roast woodcock was served, as was gingered melon and ‘Toast Imperial’. Château-bottled fine wines were dispensed by an all-male waiting staff of deferential stewards. The first stewards were used by Imperial in 1927 on the Armstrong Whitworth Argosy services to Paris. Early cabin services were picnic offerings, but by the advent of the HP 42/43, and then the C Class, a true First Class offering was created. The horrendous thought of females as servants in the air had not at that time been even considered in the days of the Raj. The realities of a female Concorde pilot, or female cabin service directors, were it seems, not just decades away, but things from another world, one far too dreadful to contemplate old boy …
Change was slow to dawn upon the rarefied airs of Imperial’s impeccable progress. It was all an anachronism, even in its own day, but it worked, and Englishmen were proud of their airline; but was Imperial actually an extension of national psyche and pride as they looked down upon those less superior than themselves? Thus did Imperial meet the expectations of its passengers as the, ‘Englishmen of their Empire’. Such realities framed the British, Imperial and its attitudes: Imperial flew the flag for King, country, and the elite of society. Workers, tradespeople, shopkeepers, and administrators – the white under-class of the Empire did not fly Imperial – instead they travelled out to their colonial postings by sea, on some very old ships. The class system pervaded everything.
An extreme view? Not at all, for it was reality. Poor people, and even middleclass people, simply did not travel by air at this time, unless of course they were servants of the airline itself.
Flying the Furrow
Whatever its failings, Imperial had talented and brilliant pilots, station managers and staff, who could think laterally, improvise and solve problems if forced down in the bush. A few Imperial pilots may have been arrogant or egotistical, but most were cleverer than that. Imperial created the world’s first true multi-armed intercontinental network, and it threw money at establishing aerial routes to serve the British Empire. It was Imperial who built runways, airports, hotels and enroute facilities in the most hostile of environments in Africa and Asia. There was even an Imperial-built hotel for night-stopping flying boat passengers constructed beside Lake Naivasha. At Khartoum, Juba, Mwanza, Victoria Falls, Bulawayo, Kano, Lagos, and across Africa, Imperial spent millions of pounds carving new airports and facilities from barren ground. At Juba, in the southern Sudan, the Imperial passenger could turn ninety degrees and head west across the seething forests and stunning landscapes of central Africa to track towards Lagos (latterly, from there one could depart for Belem in Brazil by Boeing Clipper), before trotting along the so-called ‘Gold Coast’ to Bathurst.
In the deserts of what was then Arabia and the Sudd of East Africa remote yet complete airports, with full facilities and passenger bedrooms, were built. At Sharjah, Imperial created a new aerodrome in the desert, and that outstation became today’s international airport. At Wadi Halfa, Malakal, Kisumu, remote outposts of Imperial were created to serve the original five-day service to Durban, and the aerial branch line via Victoria Falls and Bulawayo to alight upon the Val at Johannesburg. Imperial ‘rest-houses’ were built in Tanganyika and at Lumbo at Mozambique’s main port. Traverses of the Upper Nile, and detours to zoom the C-Class over Murchison Falls were the very stuff of Imperial legend in Africa.6
Perhaps the most spectacular undertaking in terms of engineering and resolve was the ploughing of a furrow across the deserts of what was then called ‘Persia’ to cross Iraq and link British interest in Egypt and Palestine to Baghdad. At first, building a railway line was considered, but this was dismissed as too expensive. After the RAF had carried out ground and aerial surveys across the region of British mandated territories from June 1921, the idea of actually ploughing a marker track across the desert was conceived. By late 1923, low-flying pilots could follow the furrow, which even had marker ‘arrows’ ploughed to assist direction finding, and emergency landing strips and fuel stores. After Director of Civil Aviation Sefton Brancker’s 1924–1925 aerial survey expedition to ‘prove’ the route from Europe to India (Brancker was assisted and piloted by Alan Cobham), the route was commercialised in 1925. This was largely due to the combined efforts of two ‘air’ enthusiasts, the new Air Minister (the Leftist Labourite Lord Thomson) and the urgings of Sir Samuel Hoare (a Conservative in that year’s new government), Imperial’s machines would make use of the furrow on the new airmail run to India and for years to come as its low flying passenger craft traversed the desert to the east. In 1926, following Imperial’s own route and out station building, carried out by Charles Wolley-Dod, the new government-subsidised route was opened to Baghdad, by 1931, Delhi was reached.
Soon, equipped with radios, Imperial’s new airliners, themselves ploughing along at under 2,000ft, could at least deviate from the furrow’s track, but it remained an excellent emergency resource. VC10s would later fly high over this route, the furrow unseen 30,000ft below. But they would still be traversing Africa, and emblazoned with the Union Jack and a Speedbird logo handed down across the decades of imperialism.
From these wonderful route-building days came BOAC’s inherited network, its requirement for ‘hot and high’ capable airliners and today’s mass travel that means a person can leave the bush or outback in the morning, go to an airport and arrive on the other side of the world as quickly as twelve hours later.
The key early routes laid down by the ‘chosen instrument’ of Imperial Airways and handed to BOAC followed distinct courses. The UK-Africa journey of nearly 8,000 miles took ten and half days and several night-stops en route. By the time the C-Class had got it all sorted, it was a five and half day run. Cairo was a major Imperial crossroads and the port of Alexandria provided a similar base for flying boat services. From Egypt the route turned south to East Africa and South Africa, or south-west via Khartoum to skirt the Sahara to alight at Kano, then Lagos, Nigeria, and onwards to Accra and Takoradi. In this region West African Airways (WAA), as an Imperial Airways local arm, replaced the Liverpool-based Elder-Dempster shipping line as the colonial transport arm. From there local services were extended along the west coast. Central African Airways (CAA) linked up with the routes of that part of Africa.
Alternatively, the turn of the route was to the east at Cairo and onwards to the Gulf, then to India, and soon, on to Singapore and Australia. This first stage of Imperial’s core service to the Orient was the strategic Egypt-India route surveyed by Sir Alan Cobham in 1925. The first through-service from England to India was opened in 1934, and India was brought within one week’s travel from England. Australia lay beyond. The Imperial route from Cairo led to Karachi, Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore, and in later years across Java, the treacherous Timor Sea, and then to Brisbane (1934), and soon onward to Rose Bay Sydney in 1936 (where local flying boats still operate and the old maintenance ramp is still visible) – in thirteen days covering just under 13,000 miles. Onward services by flying boats of Tasman Empire Airways Services to New Zealand soon followed.
For Imperial, from Singapore to Brisbane and Sydney – in association with Qantas as ‘Qantas Empire Airways’ – the record was impressive, but the flight times and overall journey times were not, especially in comparison to those of KLM, which provided Imperial with its main competition on the route to India and beyond, and soon surpassed Imperial’s European ambitions in route network terms.
In the 1980s, BOAC’s successor, British Airways, would employ a pilot who, upon his retirement, was the last British man with a valid large four-engined flying boat licence and experience that went back to wartime days. His name was Ken Emmott and it was Emmott who flew the Hulton-owned Short Sunderland flying boat Islander away from England in the 1990s, thus finally severing the last link with the age of Imperial Airways.7
Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij NV – KLM’s Dutch Brilliance with British Links
Founded on 7 October 1919, with a royal charter to assist it, KLM was, by 1920, running proper ‘airline’ standard services from Amsterdam to London, Hamburg and Copenhagen. The early KLM services featured British pilots. In fact KLM’s early days were an Anglo-Dutch amalgam of aircraft and crews from Croydon Aerodrome, with the first scheduled flight being a DH 16 G-EALU from Croydon on 17 May 1920. KLM’s early flights were performed by DH 9 and DH 16 aircraft owned by Aircraft Transport and Travel (AT&T). The wonderfully named Captain Spry-Leverton ran KLM’s London office from 1921 to 1953. In 1939, Winston Churchill and his family flew to the Netherlands on KLM.
Within four years KLM was sending monoplane Fokker F VIIs on flights to Batavia in the Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta, Indonesia) – 9,522 statute miles and a fifty-five day route proving journey time. By 1929, KLM had created a weekly scheduled service of seven days duration to Batavia. Just a handful of years later, this KLM service would take five days as an express service using the latest Douglas equipment. KLM operated the world’s first intercontinental long-haul flight in June 1927 as a charter for the American businessman, Van Lear Black. ‘The KLM’, as it was known, would race eastwards in Fokkers and Douglas machines to establish the world’s first true, scheduled, long-haul service. Within five more years, KLM’s European route network served twelve major European cities and would soon despatch the Douglas DC-2 and DC-3 to the Far East with utter reliability on a several-times-a week, scheduled basis. By October 1937, KLM was running a thrice weekly DC-3 departure from Amsterdam to Batavia with regularity and safety as a vital link to its Dutch colony in Asia, and also offering connections to Asia and Australia. Soon, KLM would not even need the State subsidy with which its early operations were underwritten – even by 1938 KLM’s Netherland’s Government funding was just 4.5 per cent of expenditure.
KLM’s founder, Albert Plesman, was a genius, an entrepreneur visionary, a driving force of a character who seized opportunities and, despite his long standing customer relationship with Anthony H.G. Fokker, thought nothing of racing to Los Angeles to secure early delivery of the new DC-2 – which would lead to the KLM DC-3 division. From such beginnings, from such energy, grew the legend of KLM. Imperial Airways managed to get its achingly slow, long haul landplaneseaplane-train-boat route to Karachi (and then Delhi) in the early 1930s, whereas KLM, by using dedicated, high-speed DC-2s (and then its DC-3s), carried on to Calcutta, Rangoon, Bangkok, Palembang and then to Batavia, Surabaya and Denpasar, just a short but risky over-ocean hop from Australia, and all without the need for constant changes, train and boat connections. KLM’s DC-2s and then DC-3s flew at 10,000–12,000ft cruising altitudes, where cooler airs made life in the cabin bearable, Imperial’s biplane winged dinosaurs flew at 500ft to 2,000ft in the stinking airs of the tropics and life in the cabin was difficult, and made even more so by the dress code for the colonial men of status – ties, suits and hats.
Indeed, KLM was Imperial’s true competition, and as late as March 1938, when Britain’s Lord Gowrie, as Governor-General of Australia, flew home to London, he travelled by KLM on a tour of the then Dutch East Indies and then rode the KLM express DC-3 service from Batavia to Amsterdam, then connecting for London – eschewing Imperial’s flying boats.
Imperial had countered the KLM express service with a sedate but stylish flying boat service to Singapore as part of an eleven day flight from London to Brisbane and Rose Bay Sydney via Darwin. But en route, KLM and its KNILM East Indies subsidiary, worked with Imperial in a rare act of international airline friendship.8
Imperial’s Africa Service Timetable.
Plesman’s airline in 1938 could get you 12,500 miles in sixty-three hours in safety and comfort; this speaks volumes for the man and his company. By 27 June 1938, KLM was flying Lockheed Super Electras to Batavia, and then on the Qantas route to Cloncurry, Longreach, Brisbane and Sydney; total flight time from Croydon to Sydney via Amsterdam was six days.
KLM almost won the 1934 MacRobertson air race from London, England to Melbourne, Australia. Instead, a tiny, single-seat British de Havilland ‘Comet’ racer triumphed. But behind this headline, second place was taken by a proper big airliner – a KLM DC-2 no less. The DC-2, Uiver (Stork), astonished the world with its second place, and a first place by handicap class amid a flight time of seventy-one hours twenty-eight minutes at the hands of Captain K.D. Parmentier. So an airliner had competed against a racing machine and proved a massive point about American design and Dutch operational expertise – British was no longer best by default. In 1946, KLM would become the first airline in the world to operate a post-war flight from Europe to New York with a DC-4, operating a twiceweekly service via Glasgow, on the Atlantic, northerly route. In 1954, KLM then became the first airline in the world to operate the L-1049C Super Constellation – beating BOAC again. KLM and the Dutch had been underestimated. KLM never looked back and as it now approaches its 100th birthday, it remains the elder statesman of the air – alongside Qantas.
Imperial’s Dutch rival – ‘the KLM’ – was simply brilliant at what it did.
‘Speedbird’ – Defining a Brand
Imperial’s machines had been labelled with the ‘Speedbird’ legend, which had been created in 1932 by the designer Theyre Lee-Elliot as a corporate logo for Imperial Airways. This ‘winged’ illustrative device, with its upwards tilted ‘nose’ or ‘beak’, was an emotive, yet strong piece if imagery that not only captured the era, but endured across the following four decades as a corporate logo. Created at the height of the Art Deco years and the great era of poster art, typeface and logo design developments, the ‘Speedbird’ design represented an evocation of flight in a blend of bird-like design and industrial strength, yet of minimalist style. Lee-Elliot’s design may have been influenced by the earlier, pre-1920s avant-garde works of Edward McKnight Kauffer.
C Class alights.
The Speedbird emblem was plastered all over Imperial’s marketing and upon the noses of its aircraft. BOAC adopted not just the emblem, but a ‘Speedbird’ call-sign for its flights and even today, British Airways pilots use ‘Speedbird’ as their identifier. The emblem itself was slightly altered for the 1960s, with a larger ‘wing’ and sharper nose or ‘beak’. BOAC’s famous blue and gold livery made the most of Imperial’s logo. Lee-Elliot’s emblem lasted into the 1980s as part of the British Airways livery, but was then superseded by a stylised derivation of a ‘Speedwing’ that had a tenuous visual link to the original emblem and its design.9
With the arrival of Shorts C Class flying boats and Speedbird-branded DH Albatross machines as the Frobisher Class, Imperial’s late-1930s routes and service offering was extensive, reliable and frequent, and had become a true servant of the Empire and the men and women of it.
Whatever its British attitudes and wings of elegant Empire aura, Imperial Airways was a major airline and a major national instrument. The Imperial C Class flying boat operations were the best and most successful in the history of the flying boat – even if there were thirty-three stops en route from England to Australia in 1938! From its behaviours and beliefs came BOAC – then cast into a fast changing world. Much that was good and bad, was passed down from Imperial to BOAC.