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Rise and fall of Howden's high flyer
Through the autumn of 1929 a group of aeronautical boffins at a factory surrounded by flat potato fields in East Yorkshire became obsessive about the daily weather forecasts.
For more than three years they had been in serious head-to-head competition with another team of designers and engineers more than 100 miles away at Cardington in Bedfordshire.
The rival sides were each hoping to become the first to finish work on separate airships, crafts that were three times the size of today's jumbo jets and would be the fastest and most luxurious means of air travel – the Concorde of their day. With aircraft then having a range of little more than 500 miles, airships were the best hope for long-haul flights.
But the Yorkshire team lost the race. Their spectacular R100 airship was on the verge of completion three miles outside the town of Howden when news came through that its southern competitor, the R101, had beaten it into the sky.
At Howden they didn't remain deflated for long. On paper the Yorkshire airship was still on course to be significantly faster than the R101.
It would take less time to reach distant corners of the British Empire like India and Canada, for which both craft had been designed. Once in flight, the R100 would be a superior airship.
But as autumn passed into winter, the outlook at Howden began to look bleak. The weather had to change soon...
That the weather did finally change is, of course, a matter of history, and much of that history has been researched by one man. Ken Deacon, a former systems analyst with British Aerospace at Brough, near Hull, has written three books about the R100 and more than anyone else knows what happened the day it finally took to the air.
Monday, December 16, 1929, was cold, frosty and – more importantly says Ken – pretty calm. "For almost a month it had been too windy, and wind was the last thing they needed because the airship was very light and it took 500 people to walk it out of the shed and hold it down. A gust of wind could have caused serious problems."
When the base's own meteorological officer declared that a calm spell would last for a few days, arrangements were immediately made for the flight and the leader of the design team, Barnes Wallis – later to achieve immortality as inventor of the "bouncing bomb" used in the Dambuster Raids of the Second World War – cut short a stay at Harrogate's Cairn Hydro Hotel with his wife Molly.
"Barnes Wallis had been stressed up to hell for weeks, waiting for favourable conditions," says Ken.
"He thought Harrogate would be a good change of scene from their cramped bungalow on the airship station. He suffered migraines, insomnia and a lack of appetite, plus he hated being trapped indoors while waiting for the telephone to ring. When it finally did ring on that Sunday evening, Wallis's migraine just disappeared. He and his wife ate a large dinner and then they drove back to Howden through the night."
The second famous name to be associated with the R100 and that historic day was Nevil Shute, who combined his successful career as an aeronautical engineer with writing more than 20 best-selling novels including On The Beach and A Town Like Alice.
Shute had previously worked as an engineer with the de Havilland Aircraft Company and then Vickers.
He arrived at Howden in the spring of 1926 to become the project's chief calculator, also known as stress engineer, and lived in a simple three-storey house in the town at 78 Hailgate.
Ken says: "Nevil Shute got up really early for the launch. It was two in the morning when he set off to walk to the airship station. The roads were already blocked with traffic, much of it lorries and coaches bringing the 500 soldiers who were needed to hold down the airship. Also, news must have spread fast because thousands of people came to watch the R100 take off, taking up positions on nearby roads and fields.
"Some even brought breakfast to cook, and wind-up gramophones to pass the time while waiting for the airship to appear. It must have been like one of those rocket launches you see at Cape Canaveral."
Nevil Shute himself would later recall the scene, writing in Slide Rule, his autobiography: "It was a wonderful moonlit night, clear and frosty without a cloud or a breath of wind."
Barnes Wallis and Shute made a rendezvous in the airship shed sometime shortly after 3am to start preparations for the launch, and the atmosphere was electric as the huge building began to fill up, first with relatives and friends of the R100's engineers and crew and then the soldiers who would make up the so-called handling party.
The crew went aboard at 5am to begin checks for the flight, culminating 90 minutes later with a nervous switching on of the six Rolls-Royce petrol engines for a short time to warm them up.
Now came the most potentially hazardous part of the operation: moving the R100 out of its hangar.
At about 7.20am, the airship was ballasted up with water and the shed fell silent. The 500 handlers had to be able to hear every single instruction shouted to them as they lifted the airship, some clinging on to handgrips attached to the base of the engine power cars and control cabin. Others held onto ropes, keeping the airship aligned with a white-painted guide line which extended down the centre of the shed and all the way out to the launch area.
"It was essential the handlers held the airship steady," Ken says, "because there was only a couple of feet clearance between it and the shed. If the R100 had been allowed to hit any part of the building, all the planning and work which had gone into it for the best part of five years would have been wasted."
A shouted command of "Go!" brought all that waiting to an end, and the soldiers began to walk the airship – tail-first – out into the cold Yorkshire morning. Deacon says there was one heart-stopping moment when a sudden gust of wind, on what had until then been a completely calm dawn, started to blow the R100 off the white line.
But the soldiers manhandled her back on course, some being lifted off their feet in the process.
The operation took just eight minutes, then Squadron Leader EL Johnson announced it was out of the shed when he shouted: "All clear forrard..."
There was a huge cheer and a cacophony of car horns from those who had come to watch.
For the first time, the public could gauge the immensity of the R100.
She was moved well away from the shed and given final ballasting. With minutes to go before launch, some of the crowd couldn't contain their excitement any longer, surging forward into the launch field itself although keeping a respectful distance. Just before 8am the command was given to "let go". The airship rose gently into the sky, emptying half a ton of water ballast from bow and stern to gain height, drenching many of the soldiers.
"At 500 feet," says Ken, "two of the six engines were increased to slow-ahead and the R100 gathered speed. Two aircraft which took off to act as her escort looked like fleas flying around an elephant."
After several test manoeuvres at 1,000 feet, she circled Howden to give all the residents a full view of her, then headed first to York to make sure she was flying satisfactorily. She was then set on a course for Cardington in Bedfordshire, home of her slightly larger sister, the R101.
She was everything Barnes Wallis, Nevil Shute and the rest of the team had dreamed of, but it was to be the southern-built airship which would eventually determine the R100's fate.
Howden's R100 successfully flew to Canada and back in the summer of 1930, putting pressure on the R101 team to achieve a similar long-haul flight. Sadly, the R101 crashed and burst into flames in France on October 5, 1930, on its way to India, with the loss of 48 lives. The Air Ministry immediately grounded the R100 and hurriedly abandoned its ambitious plans for this form of transport. Just as Concorde's Paris crash a couple of generations later spelt the end of the era of supersonic travel, so the R101 disaster effectively ended Britain's involvement with passenger airships. Deacon records that Howden's R100 was deflated on December 11 1930, just five days short of the first anniversary of its maiden flight.
A year later work began on cutting her up and she was sold for 450-worth of scrap.
Kenneth Deacon's books are: Howden's Airship Station, Howden Airship Station 1915-1930 (with Tom Asquith) and The Men and Women Who Built and Flew the R100.
A R100 exhibition opens at Goole Museum on December 10.
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Weather for Yorkshire
Sunday 12 February 2012
Today
Light rain
Temperature: 1 C to 6 C
Wind Speed: 8 mph
Wind direction: North west
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Sunny spells
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