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  Having taken off from a ship, Ely went on to achieve the far trickier task of landing on one, putting down a modified Curtiss plane on a wooden platform constructed on the USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco Bay in January 1911. The cruiser was at anchor and the closing speed on landing had been dangerously fast. Ely arranged for twenty-two manila lines to be stretched across the deck, weighted with sandbags, to snag on hooks welded on the undercarriage of his aeroplane. Thus was born the transverse arrester, a system that in its essentials would last to modern times.

  The navy’s venture into the air was speeded up by the intervention of an outsider. Frank McClean, an engineer and amateur aviator, offered for pilot training the use of two of his Short biplanes, which he kept at the Royal Aero Club aerodrome in Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey (where the Short brothers who had switched from balloon to aircraft-making conveniently had a factory). Applications were invited from interested officers: they had to be unmarried and wealthy enough to pay their own instruction costs. Two hundred applied for the four places available and Eastchurch became the cradle of early naval aviation. The base began to fill up with mechanics – engine-room artificers, carpenters, shipwrights and wireless operators, all volunteers, to provide the vital expertise to support the men in the air.

  The project had the blessing of the Admiralty’s political master, Winston Churchill. In 1912 Churchill made his first flight and had instantly caught the benign contagion of air enthusiasm. ‘I am bound to confess that my imagination supplied me at every moment with the most realistic anticipation of a crash,’ he wrote afterwards. ‘However, we descended in due course with perfect safety . . . having been thoroughly bitten, I continued to fly on every possible occasion when my duties permitted.’ Fortunately, these were not too numerous. Churchill was keen but inept and his instructors came to dread his appearances.

  Despite Ely’s feats, operating aircraft from ships was a delicate operation, requiring optimum conditions of wind, weather and sea. While the experiments were going on Curtiss was already developing another concept: the ‘hydroaeroplane’, later shortened by Churchill to the handier ‘seaplane’. This was one of Curtiss’s standard aircraft – a ‘pusher’ with the propeller mounted behind the cockpit – fitted with a central wooden float instead of an undercarriage and two stabilizing floats under each wing-tip. On 17 February 1911 Curtiss took off from a shore base at North Island off San Diego, California, and flew out to the USS Pennsylvania, where he landed alongside. The aircraft was hoisted on-board, then placed back in the water. Curtiss took off and flew back to North Island without mishap. This provided a simple demonstration of how aviation could be of great practical use to navies. The Government provided funds, which resulted in a Curtiss amphibian machine that could operate with floats or wheels. Equipped with a 75-hp engine (also Curtiss-designed) it could carry an observer, had a range of sixty miles and could reach 1,000 feet, vastly increasing a commander’s knowledge of what lay in the surrounding waters.

  British naval aviators were heading in the same direction. Lieutenant Arthur Longmore, one of the original Eastchurch trainees, managed to land, on improvised rubberized airbags, on the River Medway. In May 1912 his colleague Lieutenant Charles Samson took off from a platform built on the foredeck of a warship while she was underway. Later HMS Hermes was fitted out as a parent ship for seaplanes. They took off on wheels, set into their floats, and landed on the water to be collected and winched ashore.

  The Short brothers came up with an innovation that helped to overcome a basic problem that arose from trying to marry aeroplanes to ships. They invented the Short Folder Seaplane with hinged wings which reduced the span from fifty-six feet to twelve. One of this type was on Hermes as part of the ‘Red’ force during the Fleet’s 1913 manoeuvres. Equipped with a radio transmitter, it was able to send back valuable information on ‘enemy’ positions.

  The army had already used aircraft in their manoeuvres the previous autumn. They opened on Monday, 16 September 1912 in the flatlands east of Cambridge. There were two divisions on either side. Red Force, under Sir Douglas Haig, was the attacker. Blue Force, under Sir James Grierson, defended. Both had aircraft to support them – a balloon and seven aeroplanes each. More had been intended, but summer had seen a spate of fatal accidents. Most of the crashes had involved monoplanes. The decision was made to drop single-wing aircraft, relatively quick and nimble though they were, in favour of more stable biplanes.

  The afternoon before the war game began, the commander of Blue Force’s cavalry element delivered some unwelcome news to Grierson. He reported that, as the forces were positioned so far apart, his men would be unable to provide information about the enemy’s whereabouts until at least twenty-four hours after the exercise began. Grierson turned to Major Robert Brooke-Popham, who had obtained his Royal Aero Club certificate only two months before, but was commanding the tiny air component.

  ‘Do you think the aeroplanes could do anything?’ he asked.

  Brooke-Popham assured him they could.

  The following day, at 6 a.m., his pilots and observers took off into clear blue skies. Three hours later they were back with ‘complete, accurate and detailed information concerning the disposition of all the enemy troops’. From then on Grierson relied almost entirely on aircraft for reconnaissance. To the chagrin of the cavalrymen, aircraft were sometimes asked to verify information they had galloped hard to bring in. Blue Force won the war game.

  The different needs of the army and navy sent their air arms in diverging directions, but in April 1912 an attempt was made to bring them together. The Committee of Imperial Defence announced the birth of a new formation, the Royal Flying Corps (RFC). It comprised a military wing and a naval wing, and a training centre, the Central Flying School, was founded at Upavon in Wiltshire. King George V granted the royal warrant. He also approved an inspiring motto, Per Ardua ad Astra.

  Credit for the choice seems to lie with a young lieutenant of the Royal Engineers called J. S. Yule, who was attached to the new corps. He was strolling across Laffan’s Plain one evening in May 1912 with another subaltern. They were discussing the proposal of the RFC’s commanding officer Major Frederick Skyes that the new service should have a motto. Yule had just been reading The People of the Mist (1894) by H. Rider Haggard. The second paragraph of the book describes the hero entering the stone gates of a mansion on which are carved ‘coats of arms and banners inscribed with the device “Per Ardua ad Astra”. Yule liked the sound of it and Sykes agreed.’ The Latin is generally translated as ‘Through struggle to the stars’, though an authoritative translation has never been agreed.7

  The RFC also had its own, suitably innovative new uniform. Officers and men wore a slate-blue, high-collared, double-breasted tunic which fastened on the inside so that there were no buttons showing to snag on wires. It was considered unattractive and soon became disparaged as the ‘maternity jacket’. Those who could took advantage of a rule that allowed officers to wear the uniform of their parent regiment.

  The military wing aimed at an establishment of 160 officers and 1,000 men. The naval wing target was only 50 officers and 500 men. The technical demands of modern warships meant there was a pool of skilled other ranks. The army had to struggle to find technicians and an appeal went out inviting civilians working as blacksmiths, carpenters and joiners, clerks, coppersmiths, draughtsmen, electricians, fitters, harness-makers, instrument repairers, metal turners, painters, pattern makers, photographers and other trades to join up.

  From the beginning the new service attracted adventurous men – and later women – from all levels of Britain’s multilayered society. Wealthy and well-educated young men were both excited and enchanted by aviation. It seemed to offer another dimension in which the ethos of the playing field could expand and thrive. Sir Walter Raleigh, official historian of the 1914 air war, wrote in 1922 that Britain’s scramble to catch up with her continental rivals was greatly helped by the presence of ‘a body of youth fitted by temperame
nt for the work of the air, and educated, as if by design, to take risks with a light heart – the boys of the Public Schools of England’.8

  Among them was Philip Joubert de la Ferté, who came from an upper-middle-class Anglo-French family. After Harrow and the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich he was commissioned into the Royal Field Artillery. On visits to his family home at Weybridge, he had been bewitched by the sight of the aeroplanes at nearby Brooklands aerodrome. The aviators he saw there, lurching into the skies aboard a ‘motley collection of stick and string kites’, seemed to him to be ‘giants, supermen, whom no ordinary mortal could hope to follow’. One day in 1912, while watching the flying near Farnborough with a colleague ‘one of the aircraft taxied close by and I recognized the pilot as someone who had been at the Military Academy with me. I turned to the Major and said, “If that chap can fly, so can I!”’ The next day he set about trying to join the newly formed RFC.

  Before starting instruction at the Central Flying School, would-be pilots had to learn the basics and obtain a civilian certificate from the Royal Aero Club at their own expense, though the £75 outlay was refunded later. Only officers were likely to have the money to do so. To qualify, candidates were required to carry out two flights, making five figures of eight, landing each time within fifty yards of a specified point. They also had to climb to 150 feet, cut the engine, then drift down to a controlled landing.

  Strong winds were potentially fatal. Joubert found that he had to get up at dawn or hang around until twilight when there was more chance that the breeze would be gentle enough to allow a few circuits of the aerodrome. Even so, ‘tragedy came from time to time to remind the enthusiasts that they were adventuring along a perilous path.’9 Undeterred, Joubert joined the school in 1913.

  The technical nature of aviation meant that it was not only the officer class who would be allowed into this magical new world. Cecil King, a wheelwright and coach builder by trade, was one who managed to penetrate it. In 1913 he was stuck in a dead-end job in a dreary, subterranean London workshop. He found it ‘very depressing . . . I wanted to get into a more open-air life.’ One day he was strolling through Kingston-upon-Thames when he met two soldiers. ‘They had an unusual badge with the letters RFC on their shoulders. I got into conversation with them and they told me they were members of a new unit called the Royal Flying Corps, which had just started – and why didn’t I join?’

  King had never heard of the new outfit. However, he was keen on the idea of flying. Two years before he had been enthralled by the sight of Gustav Hamel performing at Hendon aerodrome. Despite his name, Hamel was British, educated at Westminster School. In 1910, at the age of twenty-one, he went to the Blériot aviation school at Pau in south-west France. A year afterwards he was performing pioneering feats, such as carrying out the first airmail delivery, flying a sack of letters and postcards the twenty-one miles from Hendon to Windsor. After his encounter with the airmen, Cecil King presented himself at Kingston barracks, where he volunteered for the RFC. A little later he found himself posted to Farnborough aerodrome and awoke each morning to the sound of trumpets and bugles. ‘I was delighted,’ he remembered. King was to serve as a rigger and never flew as a pilot.

  Several tradesmen who entered the RFC in the early days went on to glorious careers in the air. James McCudden, a sergeant major’s son from Kent, joined the Royal Engineers as a bugler in 1910, aged sixteen. Three years later he volunteered for the RFC and in 1914 he went with No. 3 Squadron to France as a mechanic. He was soon flying as an observer, then as a pilot. His exploits over the trenches shooting down German aircraft won him the Victoria Cross and he became, along with Major ‘Mick’ Mannock and Captain Albert Ball, one of the best-known British aviators of the war.

  From the beginning the air force was to act in part as a machine of social transformation, elevating likely young men from the lower classes and making them officers – if not, as army and navy snobs maintained, quite gentlemen. The novelty of the air force made the traditionalists, who were abundant in the ranks of the military, suspicious. Philip Joubert recalled how ‘the criticisms and contempt of brother officers’ that he and his fellow volunteers for the RFC encountered ‘was another trial we had to bear’. One officer, a few years ahead of him, ‘took pleasure in stating that it was only those officers for whom their Commanders had no use whatsoever who were allowed to go into the Flying Corps’. Joubert had the satisfaction of finding himself, two years later, ‘considerably further advanced in seniority than the man who had stuck to the horse as a means of locomotion’.10 Scorn for the ‘arrivistes’ of the new service persisted until well into the Second World War, at least among the likes of the novelist Evelyn Waugh. In his Sword of Honour trilogy the RAF is personified by a pompous senior officer who takes cover under the billiard table of Bellamy’s club during an air raid, while the army types display the correct élan by remaining upright with drinks in hand.

  In reality the RFC was filling up with some of the most effective and interesting warriors of the new century, many of whom would rise to lead the air force through the two cataclysmic conflicts that lay ahead. It attracted the adventurous, the unconventional and a fair sprinkling of the frustrated, who turned to it in the hope it might provide satisfactions that had been denied to them elsewhere. Into this category fell Hugh Montague Trenchard, who combined nineteenth-century mores with a twentieth-century appreciation of the new. He was the son of a West Country soldier turned solicitor who went bankrupt, and Hugh’s education had been dependent on the charity of relations. In his youth he displayed little sign of intelligence or charm. He eventually scraped into the army where he served in India and South and West Africa. In October 1900 he was badly wounded fighting the Boers and was lucky to survive. He went on to spend six years in the interior of Nigeria surveying, mapping and subduing the natives. His exertions brought little reward. In 1910 he was back with his old regiment, the Royal Scots Fusiliers, in the backwater of Ulster. He was nearly forty, a mere company commander, disliked by his CO and unpopular with his fellow officers who found his teetotalism and long silences, interspersed with awkward utterances in a booming voice, a trial.

  Trenchard’s great strength was his tenacity. When Captain Eustace Loraine, a comrade who had served under him in Nigeria, wrote from Larkhill, a military camp on Salisbury Plain which had become the site of the first army aerodrome, describing the excitements of his new life as an RFC pilot, Trenchard set about trying to join him. Like everything in his life so far, this was not easy. Forty was the upper age limit for pilots. He couldn’t fly and his physique – six foot three and heavily built – counted strongly against him. He wangled three months’ leave and set off for Tommy Sopwith’s flying school at Brooklands in Surrey to obtain the certificate he needed to enrol as a pupil at the RFC’s Central Flying School. He did so after one hour and four minutes flying time. He arrived at Upavon in August. His friend Loraine was dead, killed in a crash in a Nieuport monoplane. For once, Trenchard’s enthusiasm and efficiency were fully appreciated by authority. He was soon second-in-command of the school, the start of a rapid ascent up the ladder of the RFC hierarchy.

  He was nurtured by the man who oversaw the birth and first steps of the new force. Brigadier-General Sir David Henderson was an expert in reconnaissance when he was put in charge of the Directorate of Military Aeronautics, formed at the same time as the RFC. He was unusually intelligent and far-sighted, and was blessed with handsome, classical features that seemed to reflect his noble character. They contrasted with the ferrety demeanour of the first commander of the RFC’s military (as opposed to naval) wing, who was to go to France as Henderson’s deputy. Frederick Sykes was bright, sharp, ambitious and seemed to engender instant mistrust in all who encountered him. ‘He never really gained the confidence of his command,’ was Joubert’s diplomatic verdict. Inevitably, scheming Sykes and trenchant Trenchard fell out.11

  The men they commanded, pilots, mechanics and administrators, on the whole s
eem more enterprising, more intelligent and more ambitious than their contemporaries. The thin ranks of the first few squadrons are stuffed with names that would be famous later on. Hugh Dowding, who led Fighter Command through the Battle of Britain, is there, along with Wilfred Freeman, the overseer of the re-equipment programme that provided the Hurricanes and Spitfires. The foundation force includes the Salmond brothers, John and Geoffrey, both of whom would command the Royal Air Force, Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt, a future leader of Bomber Command, and a host of others whose exploits would inspire the airmen that followed.

  In the short time between coming into existence and going off to war, the RFC developed a robust esprit de corps that was felt at all levels. Cecil King noted that ‘everyone who joined the Royal Flying Corps in the other ranks held some trade or other, whereas the men in the general regiments – they might be anyone . . . therefore we considered ourselves a bit superior to the infantry and cavalry, who may have come from any walk of life. We also got more pay than they did, and when they found that out they were a little bit jealous.’12

  Similarly, those who gravitated towards the naval air service were often the cream of the Fleet. What the other ranks shared with the officer volunteers was a modern outlook and a taste for the new. It is reflected in early photographs. Pictures of soldiers and civilians of the period tend to have a stiff, formal air. The subjects fix the camera with a suspicious stare, their faces set in an expressionless mask, guarding their dignity and affirming their status. The airmen look more confident and comfortable in their skins. Sometimes there is even a smile.

  One photograph from 1913 shows pilots of ‘B’ Flight, 3 Squadron in their mess at Larkhill aerodrome. The two in the foreground are hunched over a chess board. Behind them, another is placing a disc on a wind-up gramophone. Three more are reading magazines and someone is sitting cross-legged on a couch, smoking a pipe, a banjo propped against the wall next to him. The whole effect is relaxed, stylish and slightly bohemian.