Alcock and Brown: the first two names in Transatlantic Flight

 In Edwardian Britain at the turn of the last century, everybody was, like, super into balloon flying.

The upper class, typically, did the flying, but everybody else was welcome to attend the balloon race, meet, fairground attraction, fete, [that one time a riot], and observe the men ascending into the heavens. Despite it being the pursuit of the rich, the lower classes (if you pardon the pun) loved the sight of a man actually flying. The men flying could soak in the most gentle and settled land through the supernaturally weird perspective afforded by a balloon at 1000 ft. And since the balloon flight was well and truly random, nobody could say where the trip would end. It was an attraction where everybody got a picnic, and a first rate adventure could be had without leaving Buckinghamshire on a summer's day. It even received the ultimate mark of popularity in Victorian/Edwardian Britain: women were forbidden from some aspect of it. Women could go up chaperoned in a balloon, but were forbidden from soloing, because vaginas or something.

So this was all well and good - erm, not the sexist bit, everything else -  but by the 1900s, the balloon was no longer the only flying machine. Both France and Germany had begun extensive research into airships and airplanes, with pioneers often receiving state-backed support. In 1908, The Daily Mail to spur innovation in airplanes, offered 500 pounds to anyone who could fly across the British Channel in one, and at the start of 1909, doubled the prize. A balloon crossing of the channel had already happened a over a century previous in 1785. All an airplane had to do was 37 km [23 miles], but it still took about a year for the challenge to be surmounted. The man who did it was of course Frenchman Loius Blériot, who would claim the prize with his flight of 25th July 1909. His self-constructed monoplane had a 25 hp motor and took 37 minutes to cover the distance. This flight clearly demonstrated to  the far-sighted that these new types of flying were more than just continental eccentricity. Soon these new types of flying would have real applications, both military and commercial. The British Empire didn't get to where it was through complacency!

Unfortunately, the people who made decisions in Britannia...disagreed. And possibly harrumphed.  These men were, like, super into one type of the new aircraft: rigid airships. (My personal theory is that the deciders of the UK were fixated on rigid airships as the most important type of flying machine for cultural reasons.) Outside of those, they thought other aircraft types actually were continental eccentricity, and thought that to spend 2500 pounds on aircraft a waste of taxpayer money, at a time with both the French and German governments were spending about three quarters of a million pounds annually on aircraft research.

Still, they were not the only ones who did things in the Empire. The Daily Mail had done what they had set out to do (advance aircraft research and sell a shitload of newspapers) and so announced a new contest in 1910: a 10,000 pound purse for the man who could fly from London to Manchester. The distance between the two cities was 300 km [186 miles], around 8 times the distance of the cross channel contest. As this was the early 1900s, a nationalist aspect to the race soon grew, with  pilots Claude Graham-White and Louis Paulhan dueling for the honor of Britannia and France respectively. Both racers were allowed only two refueling stops, and had to make the distance in 24 hours. Paulhan was waiting for his airplane to reach him in London, so Graham-White was the first to fly. 

Flying from the a point in Wormwood Scrubs [sidebar: seriously, Wormwood Scrubs?] Graham-White's Farman biplane had no protection for the pilot from cold, and when his plane landed at Bletchley he had turned slightly blue, and his mechanics had to haul him out of the aircraft and plop Graham-White in front of a nice flaming hearth while refueling his aeroplane. Graham-White took off again, only to immediately have engine trouble and be forced down. Henri Farman himself was Graham's crew chief, and with the mechanics they set to the airplane immediately, while Graham-White retired to a hotel in Lichfield. The damage Graham-White took on landing was too great to be repaired in the time limit, so the pilot, airplane, and pit crew took the train back to London to try again.

Louis Paulhan. He has a seat but no seat belt.

Four days later, Paulhan had assembled his airplane and took off from London at 5:20 PM. Graham-White was fast asleep, and was only told around six PM that it was on, but was airborne by 6:30 in pursuit. Reporters had commissioned racing drivers to keep them apace of the two aircraft, sending telegraph messages back to London. Darkness fell, and both pilots landed, Paulhan in Lichfield, and Graham-White in Northhampton, about 40 minutes behind. After a meal, Graham-White decided to do the unheard-of, fly at night, using local cars to light up the field with their headlights, and carefully waiting until the moon appeared from behind a cloud. Graham-White made a successful takeoff, and the reporters tore away in their automobiles, with Daily Mail reporter Harry Harper in the lead in a steam-powered racecar.

Graham-White in his Farnam.

The wind rose, and Graham-White was forced down ten kilometers from Lichfield. Now Louis Paulhan was awakened by the alarming news that Graham-White was stealing a march on him. Paulhan decided to chance the darkness, and despite the wind, also took off into the night, at one point being nearly bucked out of his aircraft by the winds. But by dawn he had made it to Manchester. Crowds had stayed up all night to see who would win the race, and now greeted Paulhan with cheers. 

In this crowd was a 16 year old engineer's apprentice named John Alcock. He had just discovered what he was, like, super into now: being a pilot.

Manchester, 1890.

  
Alcock and Bull Story

John Alcock was born in Manchester, the 5th, of November 1892, to working class parents: Alcock's dad was a coachman for a nobleman. Nicknamed 'Jack' to his friends (I'd say for his enthusiasm and energy but for all I know Alcock's friends beat me in making a dick joke)  Alcock was a stocky, cheerful lad, with red hair and the normal schoolboy obsession awesome machines, namely flying machines and cars that had started appearing in Manchester. He built balloons with his friends out of tissue paper and paste, using cotton wool and methylated spirit to create lifting gas. This interests in all things machine lead him to become (in short) a big nerd on the subject, and in 1908 he left school at 16 to apprentice as an engineer, his family having saved for years to afford the gigantic apprentice fee. (I might as well mention this now, 'engineer was a much broader term back then, applying to what we'd call a mechanic today to what we'd call a university educated engineer, and pretty much everything in between.) The Apprentice Alcock joined the Empress Engineering Company, and about a month after the works was commissioned to build an aeroplane by a local rich person who wanted one of these new 'toys.' As the Empress Company knew nothing about aircraft construction, the result looked very nice but did not fly. A month after this, Alcock, his father and his younger brother were among those in Manchester to stay up waiting to see who would win the London to Manchester aeroplane race.  

This new ambition proved to be the first of many lucky breaks in Alcock's career, as his previous avocation complemented the new direction perfectly: to be a pilot was still to be a mechanic on the ground about 90% of the time. The second stroke of good luck came when the apprentice changed employers to the firm of Norman Crossland, run by Mr. Norman Crossland. Crossland has started the local flying club in addition to being an engineer, and he was as mad for flying as Alcock, so Alcock now had a boss encouraging him. The next stroke of luck came when a flying Frenchman sent an aero engine to Empress Works to be repaired. As a specialized engine, nobody there really was familiar with it - but their former apprentice Alcock. Alcock was allowed to return to the works and oversaw the repair and overhaul of the engine, and personally returned the engine to Maurice Ducrocq, a French aviation pioneer and chief instructor at the first British flying school at the Brooklands aerodome. Mr. Ducrocq was so impressed that soon Alcock had a new job: being Ducrocq's personal mechanic.

This last lucky break put Alcock in Brooklands, and Brooklands was the center of the pre-war airplane world in the UK. Here everyone was a airplane nerd, and thus brothers in obsession, regardless of class or nationality. Some of these nerds included T.O.M. Sopwith, Freddie Raynham, Harry Hawker, and A.V. Roe. Engineering firms saw the potential of the new market,  with Bristol, Vickers, Martinsyde, and Rolls-Royce often visitors to the aerodrome. Alcock leared to fly in 1912, and the way you learned to fly was by hanging onto the airplane behind the pilot's seat, and keeping your hands on the pilot's control column. The saying was "no pilot is any good until they had broken wood", so aside from a few hours of ground instruction, this was everything to a pilot's education in 1912. Having eagerly absorbed all the flying talk around Brooklands and the Brooklands watering hole, the Blue Bird Cafe, Alcock proved brilliant as a pilot, making his first solo after two hours of instruction. Alcock stayed around Brooklands until the war broke out in 1914. He was a pilot, assembled aircraft for A.V. Roe, and participated in testing of aircraft and aircraft engines. Alcock was also was a competitive airplane racer, beating Mr. Sopwith and winning the first race he entered. Clearly Alcock belonged in this crowd.

The Daily Mail continue to issue airplane challenges with money for the victor, and flyers out of Brooklands and elsewhere competed to achieve them. Then, on April Fool's Day 1913, two new prizes were issued: first, a 5000 pound prize for flying around England and Scotland, and second, a 10,000 pound prize for a nonstop flight across the Atlantic. It was open to "aeroplanes, waterplanes, and airships." The contest assumed that thanks to prevailing winds, the flight would be made from Newfoundland to the UK - which at the time included Ireland. Open to all nationalities, this prize attracted a lot of attention from both European and one American pilot, Glenn Curtiss. Curtiss had with his British partner, John Cyril Porte, perfected the America flying boat. While war put a pin in the the duo's ambitions, this isn't the last time we'll hear of this aircraft. The declaration of war in the early fall of 1914 caused the Daily Mail to officially resend the prize.

'Jack' Alcock, Royal Naval Air Service.

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There was no way a man like John Alcock was not going to sign up, so he enlisted in the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS.) As one of Britain's few expert pilots, he found himself an instructor at the RNAS flying school. He did this for two years, and was by all accounts an excellent teacher, but being a teacher in a flying school meant he rarely got to fly; most of his time was spent repairing aircraft his students had just broken. If not possessing the manic energy of Theodore Roosevelt, Alcock was a man who was happiest when all his considerable energies had an outlet. He was also a man who in peacetime had been a competitive airplane racer, so not being in the middle of the action rather went against his grain.

In December 1915 he received a commission as a Sub-Flight Lieutenant and became head of the Aerobatics school. For Alcock, the lots of flying was good; not actually in combat, not so much. After another year in December 1916, he was promoted to Flight Lieutenant and posted to the Rumanian front. By the time Alcock was in the eastern Mediterranean, that front had collapsed, and he found himself assigned to the No. 2 wing, RNAS, at Mudros on the island of Lemnos in the Aegean Sea.

Once again Alcock's luck was with him, as Mudros did all the flying,  and it's random assortment of aircraft, the leftovers of campaigns across the Mediterranean required ambidextrous piloting. Pilots didn't specialize in combat roles, so over the next ten months Alcock got to fly fighter patrols, recon flights, bombing missions (where Alcock was identified as a good long-distance flyer) ground harassment, and antisubmarine patrol. The book I'm getting this from he also mentioned Alcock "made the most of the local tavernas and found many friends among the descendants of Queen Hypsipyle." Though why the Greek women would be interested in a man named Alcock I haven't the foggiest

An RNAS O/400 in 1918, painted dark navy blue.

On the 8th of June 1917, a new aircraft appeared at Mudros: a Handley-Page O/100 bomber. The O/100 was one of the new breed of specialized bomber aircraft . The fighters of the era look delicate and well proportioned, while the O/100 took those looks and applied them to a Newcastle boxcar mated with a set of 30 m [100 ft] rectangular biplane wings and a box shaped biplane tail. The engines were suspended between the wings, Rolls-Royce Eagle mk. 8 V-12 engines, making 300 hp from 20.3 liters. Three flight crew were defended by three dedicated gunners in three positions, offensively could carry up to 2,000 lb (907 kg) of bombs. The O/100 had a range of approximately 650 km [400 miles], or an eight hour endurance. It's top speed was around 150 km/h [100 mph]. This particular aircraft, #3124, was one of the few that went to the RNAS instead of the RFC, and the Royal Navy had been dreaming up missions for it for at least a year. As Handley-Page refused to build the biplane floats as the RN first requested, even ferrying the aircraft to Greece was an adventure. On this flight it carried seven crewmen and six (imperial) tons of supplies, including the crew's luggage, bedding [they would be camping], tools, a disassembled spare engine, spare wheels, and two replacement propellers lashed to the side of the airplane. This burden often restricted the O/100 to altitudes of hundreds of feet when flying over elevations.It's a sidebar, but it gives you a good idea of what long-distance airplane flying looked like in Alcock's time:

Day One
Manston, UK to Villacoublay, France. Manston is east of London, just north of Dover. Villacoublay is a suburb of Paris near Versailles.

Day Two
Villacoublay to Lyon, France. Here, there was a weather delay. The next leg had them flying over the Rhone valley, who's elevation meant the overloaded O/100 had to wait until conditions were ideal.

Day Three
Next day, the O/100 managed - barely - to fly across the Rhone valley to Frejus - a coastal town near Cannes, where they discovered the landing field was dangerously short, and just managed a non-eventful landing.

Day Four
The shitty thing about landing in an inadequate field is you have to use it again the next day, to take off. This the crew of the O/100 did, and flew the coast of the French Riveria to Pisa in Italy.

Day Five
Flying the Riveria sounds glamorous, but the flight to Rome took place in constant rain. Fortunately the ocean remained at sea level, so the sky gypsies flopped into Rome with few problems.

Day Six
When the British Admirals dreamed up this operation, I'm sure they would have used the phrase "strictest secrecy", but unfortunately nobody told the Italians. The O/100 arrived in Naples with their arrival announced in newspapers and with a large crowd there too greet them.

Day Seven-Eight
A two day lull waiting for the weather to clear.

Day Nine
The overloaded O/100 was able to fly to the 'heel' of Italy, landing at Tarantino.

Day Ten
Now things got difficult. The O/100 few across the Adriatic Sea and attempted to cross Albania's mountains to reach the east coast of Greece. But, the mountains were higher than British charts had told the flyers, and the O/100 had to return to Tarantino.

Day 11
It was decided it would actually be Okay to offload the spare parts, spare wheels, and the spare propellors and send them by sea. This allowed the O/100 to get over the Albanian mountians and reach Ampelakia, a town in Eastern Greece.

Day 12
Finally, the 0/100 reached the island of Lemnos. The total trip had been 3146 km [1955 miles]  in 31.5 hours of flying time.

(Shoulda had an airship.)

The mission of the RNAS O/100 was to attack Constantinople, and two German warships docked there, the cruiser Goben and the battle cruiser Breslau. The mission, attempted at night with diversionary attacks on Gallipoli and Smyrna, achieved total surprise: the Ottomans had never guessed an air attack on their capital was possible, and the city was lit up as in peacetime. It seems the German warships escaped damage (though a U-boat next to Goben was not so lucky) and the O/100 had time first to attack a steamer the Germans were using as a H.Q. and then to attack the Ottoman's Ministry of War building. On their return to Lemnos, the commander, Flight Lt. Savoy, was recalled to Britian to recieve a DFC. The O/100 was now Alcock's to command.

With the two other Flight lieutenants, Aird, and Wise, Alcock flew a series of night bombing missions against the Ottomans. After their initial shock, the Ottomans began placing AA guns around likely targets, and got their German allies to station fighter aircraft nearby. Alcock's O/100 was restricted to low altitude when bombing, so in addition to defenses, the O/100 also had to do rather sphincter-clenching things like navigate hills in bad visibility and low altitude. Still, Alcock's bomber flew many night missions, with the Maintenance crews working all day to keep the O/100 ready. In his spare time, Alcock started a new project. Using spare parts kicking around the airfield, Alcock started improvising his own fighter design. The fuselage was mostly castoffs from other models of Sopwith, with a biplane's wings, but set low enough that the pilot actually looked out over the upper wing. It used a spare German bomber engine as a power plant.

The aircraft Alcock almost completed. Sometimes called the Alcock Scout, or the Sopwith Mouse, Alcock's friends would complete and use it. Its low-drag approach gave it a 32 km/h [20 mph] speed advantage over other fighters at the aerodrome. The Mouse was written off in a bad landing in the spring of 1918.

 Speaking of Germans, The German Air Force retaliated against these night raids with several attacks on Lemnos: one time the O/100 returned at dawn, its crew dreaming of breakfast only to discover the Kitchen had taken a direct hit the night before. On September 30th, 1917, at dawn, Alcock was feeling low, sick with Pappataci fever, and was still in his pajamas. Three German float planes appeared over the aerodrome. Alcock immediately got airborne in a Sopwith Camel, and shot down two of the Germans, driving a third off. He then landed, still in his pajamas. This feat would earn Alcock the Distinguished Flying Cross - though this would in fact be his last day 'in business' at Lemnos. 

That same day, the O/100 was to attack Adrianople, [now Edirne, Turkey], a town near the Bulgarian border, where the main rail yard connecting Constantinople with Germany was. The O/100 flew into the dark again, but after it made landfall one of the O/100's wooden propellers shattered with no warning. The crew abandoned their mission and steered for home (or at least to the Royal navy destroyer between Lemnos and the Dardanelles), but it was not to be. The O/100 made it to the coast, but then other engine overheated and seized, and the O/100 flopped into the sea close to shore near the old Gallipoli battlefield. Signals with flares brought sporadic rifle fire from Turkish soldiers instead of the Royal Navy, and by dawn the  O/100 sank. The three men swam to shore. Without supplies and exhausted, they gave themselves up to the Turks.

Between the Cushions of the Ottoman Empire

So being captured, and stripped of all your clothes, and marched a few kilometers at bayonet point through slate-y gravel paths and arriving in front of the Ottoman Major with bloody puttees definitely sucks all by itself. But remember that Alcock was running a fever and suffering flu symptoms on top of that.

The squadron back at Lemnos knew only the the O/100 had crashed near Gallipoli. After a few anxious days, good news came from an unexpected quarter.

A few days later, a German fighter flew high over the aerodrome and dropped a single quarter-full sandbag. In the sandbag were two notes: one written in English and again in Turkish, and a very short note from Alcock and company: "We are prisoners-of-war. All in good health. (Signed) J. Alcock, H. Aird, S.J. Wise." The bilingual note was from the Germans, who proposed delivering any personal effects, tobacco, soap etc. the aerodrome wanted to send to the POWs, and gave a signal and a time for a drop-off over the German aerodrome. The next day, November 4th, 1917, a British Pilot in a Sopwith Camel fired off two red flares, and dropped the supplies at the German air base at Chanak. It turns out the German aerodrome was directly next to the Ottoman POW camp. As the captured RNAS men were fellow flyers, the Germans hosted the three RNAS flyers in their mess, and volunteered to send a message to Lemnos for them. The commander of the Ottoman garrison, General Ferik Pasha, made sure the British POWs got and kept their supplies. The German pilots also tried to get the Navy flyers transferred to a German POW camp, but the Ottomans were quite cross at the RNAS for bombing Constantinople, so that was a nonstarter. Before being shipped to Constantinople, the German and RNAS pilots even posed for a photo together.

The trip to Constantinople was taken in a tramp steamer, filled with soldiers, peasants, and livestock. Alcock still had Pappataci fever.

More fun waited for the Navy flyers in Constantinople. First, their was more picture taking, this time involuntary: the POWs paraded in front of the movie cameras as the villains who bombed the Ottoman capital. Then, the prisoners got to meet the Ottoman Minister of War, Djavid Bey. Bey gave them coffee and cigarettes (to be fair to the Turks, every time the Navy men met a new official, they got coffee and cigarettes) and told them that the Navy flyers would be well taken care of, and that because of unspecified indignities done to Turkish officers by the Entente, they would be staying in a Turkish prison rather than a POW camp. Alcock asked for insecticide and lice power, and Bey replied "Yup!" Alcock did not get insecticide or lice powder.

The Navy flyers spent a month in the lousy (in both senses) Turkish prison, and it's Alcock got his first taste of serious downtime. Prison is hard to bear anyway, and without an outlet for activity, Alcock turned inward, dreaming of flying the Atlantic. His experience with the O/100 fired his imagination as to what a real transatlantic aircraft would need, and would discuss for hours ideas with his two fellow POWs.

At the end of the month, an improbable combination of marching bands and a state visit by Kaiser Wilhelm II saw an upgrade in accommodation. The after taking an oath that they would not try to escape, the Navy fliers were sent to the town of Kedos [Gediz], where surviving British POWs from the siege of Kut had been billeted. There was no camp and few guards; the town was so remote that escape was unlikely, so the POWs were free to busy themselves and wander as they would. They soon made friends of the local citizens, and Alcock was soon building things for others to his heart's content. The two other navy fliers busy themselves as well. Flight Lt. Wise's hobby was horology, and soon he had a brisk trade in repairing watches and constructing visual aids for engineering lectures. Canadian Flight Lt. Aird soon found his thing organizing amateur theatricals, which were popular with the POWs and the town alike.

These theatricals are why the whole town was empty on the night of the fire. Aird had managed to get a complete score from a contemporary hit west end musical, and things were going swimmingly until the start of the third act, when the blaze was noticed. Then POWs and townsfolk then worked together to save what they could. Morning saw both populations reduced to the same state: both had their lives and the clothes on their backs, but that was about it. The Navy pilots found the remains of the telegraph office, and managed to restore the telegraph to working order, sending a message about the calamity to the Turks.

This seems to have turned the RNAS flyers in the eyes of the Ottomans from "the Constantinople bombers" to "some decent dudes", and at the end of September 1918 when a prisoner exchange with the entente was proposed, Alcock was high on the list to exchange. Since the Ottoman empire was in a terminal recline, this meant Alcock and his fellow POWs had to walk to the port city of Smyrna, escorted by soldiers. The soldiers, ironically, were for the protection of the British POWs: bandits had become endemic to Western Anatolian mountains. Once everybody got to Smyera, the ship the POWs had been expecting to meet had not arrived. It was at this point the Turkish soldiers said "good luck with that" and left. Fortunately, the local expat community took the soldiers in, and kept them fed until a ship could be found to get them back to London.

Once Alcock returned to London on the 16th of December 1918, he discovered the race across the Atlantic was back on. The Daily Mail had re-instituted the prize on the 17th of July 1918. The rationale was the same: in addition to selling newspapers, the contest sought to stimulate aircraft development. The basic rules were any aircraft (that is, airplane, hydroplane, or airship) could attempt the crossing of some 3026 km [1,880 miles] (with Newfoundland and Ireland being allowed as start and end points.) The crossing had to be nonstop, and it had to take 72 hours or less. The purse was once again 10,000 pounds, but soon other organizations would donate to make the grand total 13,000 pounds [about 850,000 pounds in today's money, or $1.4 million dollars Canadian.]

So Alcock had to remain at barracks, waiting to be demobilized, while reading about the plans of others to be the first across the Atlantic. Pilots that Alcock had raced with in prewar had found sponsors and were making definite plans. Clearly Alcock was not the only man, like, super into this race.

Special thanks to Balloon Fish, who helped me out - a lot - understanding both the flight of the O/100 to the Aegean and Alcock's background.