5:00pm Friday 3rd July 2009
By Tom King
AT 10.20pm on the night of 31 May 1915, a plane took off from an Essex aerodrome and headed south-west, its mission to intercept a hostile airship.
It was the first operational flight from a new air-base. Just a few months beforehand the airfield had consisted of nothing more than cornfields and meadows. Now it was in business. At that moment of take-off, Southend Airport was born.
The pilot, Sub Lt A Robertson, of the Royal Naval Air Service, was riding history in another way that night. His aircraft was a Bleriot XI, one of a batch of a dozen planes forming part of the first flight formation created for military purposes anywhere in the world.
The 12 Bleriots were distributed between Eastchurch aerodrome, on the Kent shore of the Thames and the new airfield at Rochford.
They had been acquired direct from their manufacturer, Louis Bleriot, one of the most legendary figures in aviation history. Bleriot was the ultimate magnificent man in a flying machine.
The plane that launched Southend Airport, was virtually identical to the craft flown by Bleriot when he became hero of one of the most celebrated events in aviation history, the first crossing of the English Channel by air.
This month sees the centenary of that crossing, on July 25 1909. Just as in 1909, there will be major celebrations at Dover, where Bleriot landed, and at the aviator’s home town of Cambrai, a short hop along the motorway from Calais.
Bleriot wasn’t the first man to fly, of course, but he was the first person to make a significant journey in an aircraft.
The Wright brothers made the first powered flight in December 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. But that first human hop into the air made surprisingly little impact at the time.
The Wright Brothers were impressive technicians but lousy self-publicists.
After entering the record books with the first powered flight, these two aerial nerds simply went back to their workshops and their tinkering. Instead of registering as a momentous event, the birth of flight turned for a while into something of an international joke.
The would-be birdmen, in their flimsy home-made frameworks of string, cotton and bamboo were perfect fodder for cartoonists.
Six years passed from Kitty Hawke before the world started to take airplanes seriously. It was Bleriot, nursing his bamboo and cotton flying machine across 21 miles of the Channel, who announced to the world mankind really had achieved the age-old dream of flight.
The Wright Brothers had flown a few yards across a beach. Bleriot flew across the English Channel.
After the flight, Lord Northcliffe summed up the impact. “Britain,” he said, “is no longer an island.”
The Bleriot effect is captured in the centenary exhibition mounted in Cambrai’s magnificent classical town hall.
Bleriot’s business lay in manufacturing car headlamps, but his passion was aviation.
The exhibition exults in the birdman Bleriot’s glory, but it also shows the long, gruelling haul of experiment, trial and error that finally led to the Bleriot XI.
The tenacious Frenchman got there in the end, and the exhibition also captures the way Bleriot’s cross-Channel flight exploded on to the world’s consciousness.
Pictures of an insect-like boxcar with wings, steered by a man with a huge moustache, approaching the White Cliffs of Dover, featured on everything from watches, to boxes of chocolates and children’s stationery.
For a while, Bleriot was the most famous man in the world. Yet the term reluctant hero might have been invented for him.
The Daily Mail’s posed portrait of the great aviator in his cockpit, taken soon after the flight, shows a man who quite clearly wishes he was somewhere else.
Indeed, the identity of the Frenchman who came winging out of the sky that summer morning came as a bit of a surprise, not least to himself.
Lord Northcliffe, proprietor of the Daily Mail, put up £1,000 prize money for the first Calais-Dover flight. The smart money was placed on Anglo-French explorer Charles Latham.
Latham’s first attempt at a Channel crossing ended when his engine conked out and he landed in the water.
That failure prompted Bleriot to have a go. Earlier he had told his wife he would never attempt a Channel crossing, because he was too scared.
He wasn’t a natural pilot, just an inventor of risky contraptions who viewed being the first to fly the things as part of his responsibility, but he needed the prize money to continue with his beloved aviation.
Latham was due to make another attempt on July 25, holding the prospect of a race, but his butler failed to wake him.
Some suspect a conspiracy. Whatever the reason, the gung-ho Latham was still in his bed when Bleriot landed at Dover.
The reluctant celebrity at the centre of all this attention never again attempted to do anything in the public eye. As soon as the fuss started to die down, he returned to his old life.
Aviation moved on, other records were set, but one enduring legacy of that historic trip remained, the plane itself.
The channel-hopping monoplane formed the template for the first production line aircraft.
In addition to the factory in his home town of Cambrai, Bleriot also set up a plant at Brooklands, in Surrey.
The Bleriot XI quickly acquired a name as the Ford Fiesta of early aircraft, noted for its reliability and predictability.
Five years after Bleriot’s Channel crossing, flying ceased to be a matter of light-hearted caprice and became a matter of deadly seriousness.
As the First World War engulfed Europe, it swiftly became apparent air power could hold the balance in great conflicts.
The Royal Naval Air Service, which was responsible for all military planes and balloons, was given the urgent task of defending the air above the Thames.
The service already had one operational base on the Kent shore. A corresponding station was hastily set up on the Essex side, sited on a patch of flat farmland two-and-a-half-miles to the north of Southend seafront.
To equip its flights, the service turned to the only manufacturer on the allied side who was mass producing planes at the time.
The Bleriot XI, now slightly modified, was given the very unmilitary name of the Bleriot Parasol.
In fact, the Bleriot had already been outstripped by more technically advanced aircraft, especially in Germany. The Rochford Bleriots were quickly mothballed in favour of purpose-built fighter planes. That first flight from Southend Airport ended rather more ignominiously than Bleriot’s. Engine failure meant Robertson had to ditch in Leigh marshes.
Had the same sort of mishap taken place on July 25 1909, the Bleriot story would have been very different.
For all his achievements, Louis Bleriot never learnt to swim.
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