ever since. For no accountable reason, the Royal George suddenly began to descend from several hundred feet ‘with fearful velocity’. As it dropped, it was claimed by witnesses that some kind of struggle was briefly observed in the basket. The partially deflated balloon plummeted ‘with frightful rapidity’ into a large oak tree in the park, tore through the light spring foliage (it was only May) and dashed its passengers to the ground. ‘They were shortly afterwards discovered, buried beneath a monumental pile of silk and network.’ Both of them were outside the basket, but while Thomas Harris was dead, Miss Stocks was alive and conscious, though quite unable to give a coherent account of what had occurred during the last few seconds.
What had destroyed the balloon seemed obvious to the coroner. The new large gas valve – ‘the preposterous aperture’ – had been released prematurely. The coroner ascribed this to Harris’s fatal error in pulling the wrong valve line while still in the air. Later aeronauts, like Charles Green, analysed the sequence of events more subtly. Green suggested that Harris’s only error was to have tied the larger valve line to a point in the basket, precisely to keep it safe and out of the way, especially with Miss Stocks aboard. However it had pulled itself taut – ‘a longitudinal extension of the apparatus’ – when the balloon contracted, thereby unexpectedly and fatally releasing the deflation valve by itself. This was a kindly, if ingenuous, explanation, which did not quite square with the evidence that Miss Stocks gave afterwards: ‘Miss Stocks declares that she distinctly heard the peculiar sound which always accompanies the shutting of the valve, as soon as Mr Harris had let go the line.’ This sounds as if Harris had indeed pulled the line himself, and realising his error, had let it go too late. But of course, Miss Stocks could have meant ‘as soon as Mr Harris had untied the line’.20
The much larger question, and the one that made ‘le mort de Harris’ a cause célèbre in France, was a more human mystery. Why did Miss Stocks survive when Lieutenant Harris died? The disposition of the bodies gave little clue, both presumably having been thrown from the basket on impact. But the suggestion almost inevitably arose that the gallant Harris had somehow saved the beautiful Miss Stocks.
British commentators were brusque about this mystery ‘that has hitherto clouded the event’, and gave romantic explanations short shrift. Most probably, a branch of the oak tree, ‘projecting horizontally’, had protected Miss Stocks (though unfortunately not Harris). Just possibly Miss Stocks ‘had fainted, and fallen forward … upon the body of Mr Harris’. Thereby he had unintentionally protected her from ‘the first violence’ of the impact. Anything else pandered to ‘false and scurrilous reports’.21
French journalists were more liberal in their interpretations. Lieutenant Harris and Miss Stocks could have been distracted ‘in many ways’, so that the wrong valve line was pulled. Lieutenant Harris would surely have tried to protect Miss Stocks with his body during the terrifying descent, ‘if not before’. But most likely of all, and the real reason for her survival, was that Lieutenant Harris ‘in a spirit of admirable chivalry’ had leapt from the balloon basket before the moment of impact, in a quixotic attempt to reduce the speed of her fall.22 It was a gesture of true English gallantry from a true English naval officer. The romantic image of Lieutenant Harris leaping from the balloon to save his beloved became an iconic one in France, and featured alongside images of the death of Pilâtre de Rozier and Sophie Blanchard in a famous series of French balloon cards. They marked the end of an era.
The growing scepticism about the future of ballooning was summed up by the satirical artist George Cruikshank. In his brilliant coloured cartoon of 1825 entitled ‘Balloon Projects’, he depicted a row of gaudily striped balloons tethered down the length of St James’s, like a rank of hackney cabs waiting for hire. A fashionable couple are about to climb gingerly into one of them (with pink plush upholstery), to embark on a ‘one shilling’ flight from Mayfair to the City. Each balloon car is manned by a suitably villainous driver, one of whom is shouting to another, ‘I say, Tom, give my balloon a feed o’ gas, will you!’
Above them the sky is filled with a mass of grotesquely shaped balloons, one in the form of a hogshead of beer, another with a weathercock on top, and a third on fire with its passengers leaping out. Behind them all the buildings are advertising balloon companies and businesses, which is probably the real point of Cruikshank’s satire. These dubious establishments include ‘The Balloon Life Assurance Company’, ‘The Bubble Office’, ‘The Office of the Honourable Company of Moon Rakers’, and perhaps most ingeniously, ‘The Balloon Eating House – Bubble & Squeak Every Day’.23
The historical painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, friend of John Keats and Charles Lamb, who kept a close if disillusioned eye on London freaks and fashions from his studio near Baker Street, noted grimly in his diary for 6 June 1825: ‘No man can have a just estimation of the insignificance of his species, unless he has been up in an air-balloon.’
Of course, not everyone was so disillusioned. A remarkable balloon is featured in Jane Loudon’s extraordinary science fiction novel The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-First Century (1827). It was written when Loudon was aged twenty, ‘a strange, wild novel’, as she herself called it, full of totally unexpected technical inventions, such as ‘steam percussion bridges’, heated streets, mobile homes on rails, smokeless chemical fuels, electric hats (for ladies), and most spectacularly a full-size balloon made from a nugget of highly concentrated Indiarubber. Small enough to be stored in a desk drawer, such a ‘portable’ balloon once inflated is large enough carry three people from Britain to Egypt.24
Loudon’s description of an aerial balloon carnival is brilliantly prophetic of modern balloon fiestas, especially the more psychedelic American ones: ‘The air was thronged with balloons, and the crowd increased at every moment. These aerial machines, loaded with spectators till they were in danger of breaking down, glittered in the sun, and presented every possible variety of shape and colour. In fact, every balloon in London or the vicinity had been put into requisition, and enormous sums paid, in some cases, merely for the privilege of hanging to the cords which attached to the cars, whilst the innumerable multitudes that thus loaded the air, amused themselves by scattering flowers upon the heads of those who rode beneath.’ The fantastic balloon shapes include, for more sportive individuals, ‘aerial horses, inflated with inflammable gas’, and for the more languid, ‘aerial sledges’ which can be flown from a supine position.25
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Airy Kingdoms
1
By the end of the 1820s the early pioneering days were over, and the dream of some universal form of global air transport by navigable balloons had faded across Europe.
Indeed, quite another form of revolutionary transport system was starting to emerge, in the shape of the railway network. The opening of the twenty-six miles of the Stockton to Darlington line in 1825 heralded an era of universal railway building. Five years later, the first genuine passenger service opened between Manchester and Liverpool. From then on, the heavy engineering of the Victorian steam engine, establishing powerful new notions of speed, reliability and a regular ‘time-table’ came to dominate the whole concept of travel.
These weighty considerations were, of course, the exact opposite of what a hydrogen balloon could provide. Victorian ballooning would eventually become the antithesis of the Victorian railway. It would be seen as poetic as against prosaic; as natural rather than man-made. The Victorian railway would mean iron, steam, noise, power and speed, as Turner envisaged in his painting. It would bring
