by her father and wealthy air enthusiasts she made a record-breaking solo flight to Australia in 1930 inspiring a popular hit, ‘Amy, Wonderful Amy’. In 1932 she met and immediately married Mollison, a Glasgow-born flier and former RAF short service commission officer and instructor at the Central Flying School. They competed as a team in air races and were fêted as ‘the Flying Sweethearts’. The marriage crumbled after four years, due it was said to Mollison’s drinking and inability to cope with his wife’s fame. When the war came she joined the RAF as an Air Transport Auxiliary pilot delivering service aircraft around the country and died in mysterious circumstances after baling out from an Airspeed Oxford over the Thames Estuary in January 1941.
Aviation attracted the wealthy, fashionable and aristocratic but it was also promoted as a marvel of the new democratic age that should be open to everyone. No one pushed this message harder than Alan Cobham. Even in an industry not lacking energetic egotists, Cobham stood out. He flew with the RFC in the First World War, then joined de Havilland as a test pilot before making a series of flights to Australia and around Africa for which he was knighted by King George V. He played himself – the starring role – in a 1927 silent movie, The War Commander. In 1929 he set out on an air tour of Britain to encourage a trade-boosting programme of municipal airport building under the slogan ‘Make the Skyways Britain’s Highways’. His great achievement, though, was to get a generation of British boys and girls airborne. Cobham believed that ‘air-mindedness’ was best started early. The airliner he flew around the country was called ‘Youth of Britain’ and on the first tour of Britain the Castrol oil magnate Lord Wakefield paid anonymously for 10,000 children to get a first taste of ‘going up’ in it.
His proselytizing drive, as well as a keen business instinct, led him to dream up an event which he hoped would ‘embed itself in the public consciousness as deeply as Pancake Tuesday or Fireworks Night’, by persuading hundreds of towns around the country to host their own National Aviation Day.20 Cobham provided the spectacle with a team of ‘aces’, dashingly kitted out in white flying overalls manning up to fourteen aircraft. They laid on exhilarating displays, putting the aircraft through rolls, inverted loops, and ‘falling leaf’ manoeuvres as well as clambering out of the cockpits for displays of wing-walking. In 1933 they visited 306 venues in the British Isles and 800,000 people paid to see them. Ticket prices were low – 1s. 3d. for an adult and 6d. for a child – but, to Cobham’s exasperation, many others watched for free from what he called the ‘Aberdeen Grandstand’ – neighbouring high ground.21
Part of the huge appeal of Cobham’s Flying Circus was the chance for punters to get airborne and about one in four of those who attended did so. This could be done sedately, in a multi-seat airliner or, more thrillingly, in the rear cockpit of one of the smaller planes. The tickets were priced for a wide range of pockets: a pound for a white-knuckle full aerobatic flight (about £60 today), 10s. for a seat in the opening Grand Formation Flight or 4s. for a four-minute flip.
For thousands of the young men who flew with the Royal Air Force in the Second World War, this was their initiation to the air and for many it was as powerful and unforgettable as a first sexual encounter. Charles Fenwick, son of a captain in the Royal Engineers, was in his early teens when Cobham’s circus came to Rough Common just outside Canterbury. His aunt Edie took him to watch the show. Fenwick had never seen an aeroplane before. What followed was a coup de foudre. ‘Soon after we arrived the first plane taxied out and flew off into the lovely clear morning sky,’ he recalled, ‘and sitting behind the pilot was a young boy.’22
Fenwick was ‘green with envy’. Then Edie offered to treat him to a ‘flip’ and a few minutes later he was climbing into the rear cockpit of an elderly Avro 504. He had barely time to strap himself in ‘before we were rumbling across the field. After a final frenzied race across the meadow the rumbling suddenly stopped and my heart followed suit as I left the earth for the first time.’ Many years after the event he wrote: ‘the thrill as we climbed up and away from the solid old Earth will never fade. I was dumbfounded … we sailed over Hall Place and peered down into the rookery as the inmates squawked their way to safety … there was our home, the Claverings, looking for all the world like a doll’s house. On, on we flew. This was utterly stupendous …’ When he left school Fenwick went to the aircraft manufacturer Short Brothers as an apprentice, joined the Volunteer Reserve six months before the outbreak of war and flew Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain.
Boys who were not lucky enough to take a joy ride could fantasize about flying, their imaginations stimulated by a vast range of juvenile literature featuring aeroplanes and aviators. Lively mass circulation comics like Modern Boy were full of now-forgotten flying adventurers such as Jaggers of the RAF and Scotty of the Secret Squadron. The greatest of them all was James Bigglesworth. Biggles was the creation of W. E. Johns who had a brief but dramatic career as a bomber pilot with the RFC on the Western Front. Shot down in the last weeks of the war, he was captured but managed, briefly, to escape. He stayed on in the post-war RAF as a recruitment officer. On leaving he turned to editing, writing and illustrating on aviation themes. In 1928 he became editor of Popular Flying where Biggles appeared in the first of many short stories. In September 1932 a collection appeared called The Camels Are Coming. It was the start of a literary phenomenon. Johns was prolific and Biggles books flowed from his pen sometimes at the rate of four a year.
The characters were reasonably close to life and the detail and plots rang true. The young readers were not spared the realities of air fighting including the prospect of a ghastly death burning alive in a slow descent. But against this was set the camaraderie and gaiety of squadron life and the compelling figure of Biggles himself. Cool, technically competent and skilful yet understated, full of pluck and vitality, he was a hero made for his time.
Before long he would have a female counterpart. In 1941 Johns followed up with the first in the ‘Worrals’ series featuring the adventures of Joan Worralson of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and her sidekick Betty ‘Frecks’ Lovell. Johns revealed that the character was based on two women fliers of his acquaintance, Amy Johnson and Pauline Gower. As well as setting up her own joy-riding and air taxi service in Kent, Gower wrote stories with air themes for the Girl’s Own Paper. She would go on to head the Air Transport Auxiliary during the war.
The Air Ministry exploited the glamour of aviation to burnish the RAF’s reputation and appeal. The annual Hendon Air Display and the Empire Air Days put on at RAF stations around the country from 1934 to 1939 emphasized the excitement of flying rather than the realities of aerial warfare with spectacular demonstrations of stunt and formation flying. Sometimes they included mock imperial policing operations in which aircraft dropped flour bombs on villages inhabited by rebellious ‘Whatnot’ tribesmen or on fake wooden battleships. The main purpose, though, was to impress and entertain.
In official publications the RAF naturally emphasized its defensive and deterrent role. The bomber force was designed for a counter-offensive not to launch aggressive war. This was a British version of air power framed by national characteristics of restraint and reserve, with rearmament presented, reasonably enough, as a reluctant necessity. A pre-war recruiting poster showed a young family picnicking on the cliffs on a sun-drenched summer day. Father and son are looking upwards at a flight of twin-engine bombers heading out to sea while mother and daughter prepare tea. The copy reads ‘Air Defence is Home Defence’.23
When it came to attracting the specialist ground tradesmen needed to service the expanded squadrons, the RAF used a different approach, which ignored the prospect of war and made no appeal to duty and patriotism. The competition for skilled men was fierce, and there were plenty of well-paid jobs available in war industry factories. Advertising campaigns played up the prospect of travel and adventure and the attractions of outdoor life over a dreary works in the Midlands. A poster that appeared in 1939 showed a
