Juliet Gardiner - The Thirties - An Intimate History of Britain

But others were less anxious to clamber onto the moral high ground. The left-wing New Statesman , which might have been expected to be very harsh about the unacceptable face of capitalism, was kinder. ‘Hatry was not a swindler … he was rather an unbalanced optimist with a defective moral sense. He set out not to defraud the investors in his companies, but to make money, if he could, for them as well as himself … “If only I had been reasonably lucky,” a man in a similar position might say, “I would have retrieved everyone’s fortunes, and no one would have been a penny the worse for my illegality. How right I should have been!”’ For the New Statesman it was the City itself that was particularly to blame: ‘How in the name of fortune did the banks come to give the Hatry group so much money?’ At a time, it probably wanted to add, when it was so unwilling to lend to industry in the depressed areas. Indeed, ‘The Hatry case will have done some good if it rivets public attention on the joint-stock banks and reveals what part they are really playing in City speculation and in financing productive industry.’

A model prisoner with influential and eloquent supporters such as Harold Nicolson, eighteen MPs and his lawyer Birkett prepared to petition for him, Hatry was released from prison after serving nine rather than fourteen years. He subsequently borrowed sufficient money to purchase the ‘carriage trade’ bookshop Hatchard’s in Piccadilly. Again he expanded and acquired and amalgamated and diversified, and again his rickety empire crashed. In the late 1950s Hatry was to be found cashing in on the coffee-bar craze, buying up premises in the West End to serve ‘froffy coffee’ to a newly affluent post-war generation of teenagers. He died of heart failure on 10 June 1965.

It would be a coup de maître . British prestige confirmed with a stylish gesture. The country’s position as an imperial power elegantly underlined. Brigadier-General the Right Honourable Lord Thomson of Cardington, Secretary of State for Air in the Labour government, would stroll coolly into the meeting of the Imperial Conference in London on 20 October 1930 as the delegates were getting down to a discussion of air power. Thomson would have just arrived back from a round trip to India which had taken little more than a fortnight, while the representatives from Australia and New Zealand had taken six or seven weeks to get to the mother country. It would demonstrate that Britain had taken the lead from Germany in the development of ‘lighter than air’ machines. Furthermore, Thomson was being canvassed as the next Viceroy of India, and the subcontinent had been showing disturbing signs of nationalist unrest for over a decade now. The previous year Jawaharlal Nehru, the President of the Indian National Congress, had pre-empted the Simon Commission’s recommendations on India’s constitutional future by declaring for purna swaraj (complete independence). Perhaps the choice of this destination for the R101, the airship in which Thomson would make his flight, would be read as evidence of how close and how benign the ties of Empire were — at least as far as Britain was concerned.

During the First World War, rigid German airships named after Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, a German cavalry officer who had been interested in constructing a ‘dirigible balloon’ ever since he had seen the French using them during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71, had become an ominous sight over England. By the outbreak of the war there were a total of twenty-one Zeppelins in service for commercial passenger transport. Recognising their military potential (which Zeppelin had always intended), the German army and navy purchased fourteen airships, most of which were used for reconnaissance. However, on 19 January 1915, in the first ever bombing raid on civilians, two Zeppelins dropped twenty-four fifty-kilogram high-explosive bombs and a number of incendiaries on towns along the Norfolk coast, killing four people, injuring sixteen and causing considerable damage to property. In the course of the war there were fifty-one such raids; 557 British civilians were killed in all, and 1,358 injured. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, all airships were transferred to the Allies as part of the war reparations package.

The British had started to experiment with rigid airships in 1908, but a series of disasters, beginning with the unfortunately appropriately-named Mayfly in September 1911, put an end to their development until towards the end of the war. After it resumed, success seemed as elusive as ever: a review in 1923 revealed that out of the 154 rigid airships that had been completed and flown by Germany, Britain the United States and France, 104 (68 per cent) had been lost, along with a total of 584 lives. One life had been lost for every sixty-five airship flying hours. However, one German commercial aircraft company had flown 138,975 miles without a single fatality, and airships had the edge over ‘heavier than air’ aeroplanes when it came to spaciousness, comfort, load-carrying and quietness.

On leap year’s day 1924, Lord Thomson, newly appointed Secretary of State for Air in the first Labour government, announced a three-year Government Research, Experiment and Development airships programme. The gauntlet was picked up by Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives when they came to power in November that year, and in 1926 the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Samuel Hoare, announced that not one but two airships, each capable of long-distance overseas voyages, were to be constructed, in the hope, as Hoare told the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, that ‘in a few years it will be possible to have a regular airship service between London and Bombay as it now is to have an aeroplane service between London and Paris’. At that time the sea voyage took seventeen days. While an airship could not fly fast as an aeroplane (then averaging around 120 mph) it would be able to sustain a regular 60 mph, and unlike a plane it could remain in the air throughout the day and night. One of the airships (the R101) would be built by the Air Ministry at the Royal Airship Works at Cardington, near Bedford, the other (the R100) by a private company, the Airship Guarantee Company Ltd, owned by the engineering firm of Vickers, at Howden in Yorkshire, where Barnes Wallis, later to develop the famous ‘bouncing bomb’ used by the ‘Dambusters’ in the Ruhr in May 1943, was chief designer.

This dual capitalist/state enterprise approach was intended to ensure ‘competition in design’, and would mean that the failure of one ship would not terminate the whole programme, but what it also did, according to the stress engineer for the R100, N.S. Norway, later to be better known as the writer Nevil Shute, was to ensure that the lessons learned in one experiment were not shared with the other: it was rivalry, not collaboration.

The airships were to be built to the same rough specifications, designed to carry a hundred passengers in comfort, plus ten tons of mail and cargo, and to be capable of flying non-stop for fifty-seven hours at an average speed of 63 mph. But while the R100 was intended as a commercial craft, built along largely conventional lines gleaned from the German Zeppelins, the R101 was to be absolutely cutting-edge, employing the latest technologies.

The plan had been that the R101 would make its first trip to India in the early spring of 1927, but delays, design problems, and costs escalated at Cardington. By the end of 1927 only part of the R101’s structure had been delivered, whereas the framework of the R100 was almost finished, despite the fact that at Howden, where Vickers controlled the purse strings, many more calculations were made on the drawing board before work was put in hand. The R100 made its first flight of 150 miles (which took five hours forty-seven minutes) on 16 December 1929, and seven months later, in the early hours of 29 July 1930, took off for Canada. Meanwhile, the R101 had made a couple of flights round Britain, in ‘very perfect flying conditions’, as its chief designer, Lieutenant-Colonel Richmond, put it, but had not been tested on an overseas route. And the Imperial Conference at which Lord Thomson planned to make his dramatic entrance was due to open on 1 October.