Читать книгу The Imperial Aircraft Flotilla - Margaret Hall - Страница 9

Neither Anglo-German naval rivalry in the period before the outbreak of war, nor the Patriotic League’s subsequent efforts at fundraising for a battle cruiser, indicated any lack of interest in aviation on the part of the British public. It was quite the contrary, given the ‘Zeppelin factor’ in popular perceptions of threats to the nation. War in the Air by H. G. Wells was published in 1908; in this the West’s major cities, including London, were destroyed by airships. Press articles in Lord Northcliffe’s newspapers, the Daily Mail and The Times, drew attention to the allegedly paltry resources devoted to aeronautics from 1909 onwards; and in that same year an Aerial League of the British Empire was also formed (and continued with propaganda activities throughout the Great War).1 Then in 1913, the peak year for ‘air agitation’,2 public disquiet over Britain’s new vulnerability from the skies was fanned by reported sightings of German Zeppelins over England (denied by Germany).

For a good eighteen months before the outbreak of the Great War, therefore, pressure had been building for more spending. Great Britain, it was claimed, was lagging behind France and Germany in both government funding and voluntary fund-raising. At a meeting of the Aeronautical Society, then Brigadier General David Henderson stated that the reason the War Office had ordered so few aeroplanes, and none at all between September 1912 and January 1913, was down to lack of money.3 His interest lay in maximising funding for the RFC. Henderson qualified for his pilot’s certificate at the advanced age of forty-nine in 1911, and as Director of Military Training he exercised oversight of pilot instruction from the RFC’s very beginnings. When in August 1913 the War Office created a Directorate of Military Aeronautics, Henderson was put in charge, and retained this responsibility, one way or another,4 until replaced by Sir John Salmond in the autumn of 1917. Henderson was to play the key role on the service side in nurturing the Imperial Aircraft Flotilla campaign during its early stages.

While a Parliamentary Aerial Defence Committee (established in 1909 by Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and others) pressed the Government for greater public spending,5 a number of private money-raising schemes had already been floated. In 1913 Captain Walter Faber MP proposed a voluntary scheme along the lines of the French Avions Départementeaux, which had raised the equivalent of £150,000 and provided the French Army with ninety-four military aircraft and training for seventy-five pilots in preparation for military service.6 On the naval side, a large meeting was called in London under the auspices of the Imperial Maritime League to draw attention to the ‘new peril of the air’. Held at the City’s Baltic Exchange in April 1913, it appealed to Government to take the necessary steps to increase the numbers of both Dreadnoughts and naval aircraft.7 In May, a short-lived National Aeronautical Defence Association launched at a meeting at Mansion House presided over by the Lord Mayor of London, its aim to bring together the various existing pressure groups.8 In Liverpool, three thousand people attended a meeting convened by the Lord Mayor to call for the city’s very own dedicated flying corps to defend it; a message from the Secretary of State for War, Colonel Seely, explained why that was undesirable and invited a contribution of £40,000 from Liverpool to equip an RFC squadron instead.9

The Great War was upon Britain before any of these initiatives bore fruit. However, in August 1914 Britain’s first aeroplane gift of the conflict was indeed forthcoming from a Liverpool businessman under the Imperial Air Fleet scheme (outlined in chapter eighteen). The donor, William E. Cain, requested that it should ultimately go to the Commonwealth of Australia, in recognition of all the support that country was giving to Britain in the war.10 It was handed over in formal ceremony at Farnborough; the Australian High Commissioner’s wife broke a small bottle of champagne on the propeller to christen it Liverpool and Australia thereupon lent it to the British War Office to hold in trust.11 A theoretically Australian-owned Liverpool was then allotted to the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France at the end of 1914.12 It was a Blériot Experimental 2c model (BE2c), a reconnaissance biplane and the first aircraft to be manufactured in substantial numbers for the RFC.

The second and third aircraft to be presented in the war came from much further afield—or, rather, the funds for them did—from the island of Dominica in the Caribbean. Dominica was an atypical British Caribbean island in many respects. It possessed relatively few landless labourers working on large estates, and had a much smaller planter aristocracy than was commonplace in the West Indies. Green and mountainous, with an area of little more than 300 square miles, most of the population of about 35,000 comprised an independent peasantry speaking a French patois, and owning plots of land of sufficient size to grow their own food and raise small cash crops of cocoa and limes. Dominica had its own resident British Administrator, but was under the supervision and control of the Leeward Islands’ Governor based in Antigua.13

This was Sir Henry Hesketh Bell during 1912–16. Elegant, whimsically humorous, inventive and vain, Bell was nonetheless no mere lightweight. Born in the West Indies of French extraction, Bell had started out as a lowly 3rd class clerk in the office of the Governor of Barbados and the Windward Islands, and worked up from there. As well as winning the backing of one of the foremost British politicians of the age, Joseph Chamberlain, his talents impressed the mandarins of the Colonial Office.14 As Governor of Uganda (1905–1909) he had rolled back a most deadly epidemic of sleeping sickness through the temporary evacuation of designated tsetse fly-infested zones around Lake Victoria, guided by an interest in entomology and his observation that few cases were found more than two miles from open water.15 It was a pioneering and effective measure.

The Governor had a special interest in Dominica, where he had made quite an impact as Administrator from 1899 until his Uganda posting. During his term of office a new road across the island begun by his predecessor (entitled the Imperial Road) had opened up the interior to estate cultivation. He encouraged settlers from Britain to come to Dominica and invest in lime and cocoa estates run along modern lines, on lots carved out from Crown land; he also devised an accompanying scheme to provide insurance cover against hurricane damage to property in the West Indies.16 Again, his scientific curiosity had been in evidence. He made a study of hurricane activity that persuaded Lloyds of London that the venture was worthwhile. Bell was full of ideas, not all of which came to fruition, like his scheme to bring 3,000 Boer War prisoners from South Africa to settle in the interior. (Volcanic eruptions on nearby Martinique warned off the British authorities, which after the scandal of the concentration camps in South Africa probably wanted no more bad publicity over the treatment of Boer captives.)

Sir (Henry) Hesketh Bell by Walter Stonemason, 1919

© National Portrait Gallery, London

Bell had exercised his charm on those in a position to further his plans; wooed the press; sent letters and articles to British newspapers and magazines publicising the attractions of the island; written recruitment pamphlets and a guidebook; and established his own experimental plantation off the Imperial Road (‘Sylvania’), where prospective settlers could see tropical products being scientifically grown.17 All this was in accordance with the imperial policies of Hesketh Bell’s patron, Secretary of State for the Colonies Joseph Chamberlain, who looked to the advancement of the more economically backward corners of the British Empire through the agency of a British planter class, assisted by modern scientific agricultural methods and the provision of improved communications. Chamberlain had viewed Dominica as a test case, and advanced Colonial Office grants for the island’s development.18

Hesketh Bell retained a soft spot for Dominica generally. He wrote of ‘99 per cent’ of its population: ‘These people live simple, quiet lives and are considerably under the good influence of the Roman Catholic Church. In complexion the peasantry and working classes vary from almost pure black to a very light shade of yellow.’19 However, it was the one per cent constituting ‘Society’ that formed his immediate world. During Bell’s period as Administrator, Government House in the island capital, Roseau, had become the heart of social life for its members, whether newcomers or old established families. ‘Society’ comprised the principal officials, planters, professionals, and heads of the main commercial houses. Most were of purely European descent, according to Bell, but the proportion of well-to-do people of light colour and good education was steadily increasing.20 He was a fine dancer, held balls, waltzed with future writer Jean Rhys, then fourteen years old, at a children’s fancy dress dance.21

During his term as Administrator some thirty to forty British settlers and their families were attracted to try their hand at planting on Dominica;22 and the number of Europeans on the island increased from just a handful to almost four hundred between 1891 and 1911. One amongst them was Robin Hughes Chamberlain. Born at Greytown, Natal, in 1887, his father had fought in the British Army in the Zulu Wars, and later settled down as a Justice of the Peace (JP), with as part of his remit to combat gun-running in the vicinity. Initially taught at home by a governess, Robin was dispatched at the age of eight to continue his schooling in England and France. In 1907, he moved to Dominica to learn plantation management at the invitation of a resident, a solicitor to whom he had been introduced in England. After one year he settled down on his own lime and cocoa estate at Wotton Waven outside Roseau.

Already fascinated by aviation (and an avid reader of novels by such writers as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells), it was while on holiday in England at the very beginning of 1914 that Robin Hughes Chamberlain paid his two guineas for his very first short passenger flight, at a flying display at Hendon aerodrome.23 Back once more in Dominica, the Great War broke out. In January 1915 he returned to England bearing letters of introduction from the then Administrator, Edward Drayton, and Leeward Islands Governor Hesketh Bell, with the intention to train as a pilot and serve on the Western Front. Three or four days after his interview at the War Office he was undergoing instruction at Brooklands.

Pilot training in the initial stages of the war usually implied a private income, for potential recruits had to qualify for a Royal Aero Club certificate for which they paid £75 upfront (it was generally refunded later if they were commissioned into the RFC as flying officers). In the British Caribbean islands, as throughout the whole of the empire, British expatriates and residents of British descent and military age made their own way to England after war was declared, usually at their own expense, to join the army as volunteers. Robin Hughes Chamberlain was Dominica’s only pilot.

Dominica had twenty-nine volunteers fighting on the Western Front at the time—most likely all drawn from the ranks of ‘Society’ and especially from the ranks of recent British settlers of military age. One amongst them, who had been studying at McGill University, joined the Canadian Royal Horse Artillery. With the formation of the British West Indies Regiment (BWIR) in October 1915, ordinary Dominicans—labourers, mechanics, and sons of small peasant proprietors—were enabled to volunteer. By mid-1917 there were 139 men from Dominica serving in BWIR ranks. They were employed on the Eastern Front (Egypt, the canal zone, Sinai and the borders of Palestine) on guarding the lines of communication and patrolling railway and pipelines, rather than frontline fighting.24

Dominica’s aeroplane gift came about as follows: On 26 September 1914—when Robin Hughes Chamberlain was once more in Dominica and before he returned to Britain to join up—the island’s Legislative Council introduced a resolution approving a grant of £4,000 from Dominica’s financial surplus, to be offered to the British Government as a contribution to the RFC. Though the relevant official papers of the period do not actually mention the name of Hughes Chamberlain,25 the gift, intended specifically for the RFC, was surely connected in some way with his intention to proceed to England for pilot training, reflecting local pride in one of their number, even if he was a comparative newcomer to the island:

Mr. Rolle and Dr. Nicholls spoke also in support of the Resolution. Both members suggested that the Home Government might be asked to devote, if agreeable, the amount voted to the purchase of an armoured aeroplane to be called ‘DOMINICA’, and His Honour the Administrator promised that in his dispatch he would certainly mention this.26

Thus recorded the island’s principal newspaper.

The Colonial Office subsequently directed that any monetary contribution to the imperial war effort on Dominica’s part should go to the Prince of Wales’ Fund (for the relief of dependents of those fighting at the Front, and others suffering economic effects of the war). But Administrator Drayton argued that he could not, at that late stage, have changed the published proposal, which was warmly supported by public opinion; however he had managed to modify the terms of the resolution so that it no longer specified an armoured aeroplane, but rather that the grant should, if possible, go to the war expenses of the RFC, or be expended on any other war purpose His Majesty’s Government saw fit.

Governor Bell forwarded Drayton’s dispatch to the Colonial Office with his endorsement of the Administrator’s action.27 The island’s correspondent for the London-based West India Committee later reported that despite a cable from the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Dominica’s Legislative Council had persisted in their desire to present the money for some war purpose, preferably to the benefit of the RFC, and Lewis Harcourt had gone along with this.28 Dominica’s Legislative Council (made up of six officials and six nominated ‘unofficial’ local members) passed the modified resolution unanimously on 7 October 1914.

The Admiralty then wrote to the Colonial Office to claim their share for the RNAS:

The £4,000 voted by the Legislative Council of Dominica should be equally divided between the Naval and Military Wings. … It would appear appropriate that the money available—£2,000 in each case—should be allocated for the construction of the aeroplane for the use of the particular Wing. The machine could have a plate fixed to their chassis recording the name of the donors etc., and the donors could be kept informed of any good work done by these machine. … Should the cost of the Naval machine exceed the £2,000, the balance would be borne by Navy Votes, while any small saving would be credited to the Vote for aeroplane construction.29

This letter must have been cleared with the War Office, for the Army Council wrote in identical terms, save that excess costs were to be borne by the Army Vote.30

The War Office later forwarded to the Government of Dominica a photograph of the 100 hp. Gnome Vickers Gun Biplane presented to the RFC with its half share of the £4,000. The photograph was put on exhibit at the Free Library in Roseau in April, and reproduced on postcards placed on general sale for three pence apiece. (An enterprising retailer in Roseau also advertised Dominica Aeroplane Souvenirs in the form of ‘pendants and brooches for the Ladies and Gentlemen and spoons for the table’.)

Picture of Dominica supplied by the Army Council, as reproduced on postcards Courtesy of the West India Committee, London

The promise to keep donors informed of ‘good work’ done by Dominica, and the forwarding of a photograph, set a precedent for future presentation machines from elsewhere. However, the Army Council later specified that the photographs supplied of aeroplanes presented were not for publication.

Unlike the FMS in 1912, there were no local journalistic critics to query the monies voted by the Legislative Council. Then was peacetime, this was wartime. But it was in part due to the nature of the main newspaper in Dominica. Like those of other British dependencies, the Dominica Chronicle carried news of the war issued by the Press Bureau in Britain (some of the larger circulation papers in bigger British colonies also carried Reuters reports). But the Dominica Chronicle was also a Roman Catholic newspaper, with a circulation of about 450 in an overwhelmingly Christian, and largely Catholic, population of only some 35,000. Moreover, Belgian priests had run it ever since the paper’s establishment in 1909 by Bishop Schelfhaut of the Redemptorist Order.31 It had its own special flavour of war reportage, and published the occasional letter from Catholic priests in Europe, including those of chaplains on the Western Front. It can be surmised that their accounts were also read from pulpits to those in the countryside who did not read the Chronicle.

One particularly gripping report was sent right at the start of the war in the form of a letter to the Bishop of Roseau from the Rev. Father Vermeiren in Antwerp. Father Vermeiren, Superior of the Redemptorist Fathers at St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands,32 just over 300 miles from Dominica and part of Schelfhaut’s Diocese, had been visiting his native land of Belgium when the German army invaded. He wrote forcefully from Antwerp in August 1914:

It appears that Germany is also determined to seize Holland, Switzerland and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The Franciscan Fathers and the Jesuits have put their fathers, brothers, nay their very houses at the disposal of the Government. I suppose we (Redemptorists) will soon do the same. I will try to make myself useful among the English-speaking soldiers.

His account of the siege of Liège relates an exciting, but entirely false, legend about the renowned French pilot Roland Garros (who was not present, and not killed):

The famous aviator Garros succeeded also in destroying a ‘Zeppelin’ occupied by 26 German officers. All were killed on the spot. Unfortunately, Garros himself underwent the same fate, his aeroplane dropping down like a stone after his glorious feat.33

Yet despite its factual inaccuracies, his letter demonstrates the emotional filter through which war news reached Dominica, and the influence of Belgian Catholic sensibilities. This was not a pacifist Church, and this was holy war.

The RFC’s initial establishment in 1912 was as a unitary body to serve both Army and Navy. But the Senior Service was jealous to exercise complete control over naval air operations, including pilot training and aircraft procurement policy. On the eve of war, in July 1914, the RNAS gained official recognition, so that the RFC entered the Great War as the flying arm of the British Army, and the RNAS that of the Royal Navy. No one was then quite sure what precise role in warfare aviation might come to play, but the expectation was that it would centre on reconnaissance, over land or water respectively (in particular, without the aid of sonar in those days, spotting submarines was easier from the air than from a ship).

When war began, Brigadier General David Henderson decided to lead the RFC, leaving the War Office and taking almost all the aeroplanes the RFC then possessed off to France with him. Henderson’s professional army background had been in field intelligence and reconnaissance, on which he had published two handbooks, and the new BE2c biplane, manufactured from a design developed at the Royal Aircraft Factory, Farnborough, was specifically made for this very purpose, as a stable platform with a good view of the ground. Advanced enough for the blueprints to be the object of pre-war freelance industrial espionage for sale to American firms,34 the BE2c was not equipped with a powerful engine, and was unable to carry heavy machine guns. With the development of air fighting, it was soon realised that purpose-built gun-mounted fighting machines were urgently needed.35 By the beginning of 1915, they had left the design stage and were in British production ready for dispatch to the Western Front; and Henderson himself handed over command of the RFC in France to then Brigadier General Hugh Trenchard in August 1915 to return full-time as Director General of Aeronautics at the War Office.

In those early days, the greater part of the RFC’s aeroplanes in France were reconnaissance craft, and from early 1915 especially the ubiquitous BE2c. After the introduction in mid-1915 of the faster, and more manoeuvrable German Fokker E-type monoplane, equipped with a synchroniser gear that allowed repeated forward machine-gun fire between the blades of the moving propeller, the BE2c proved fatally vulnerable. It also had structural inadequacies. The observer who sat in front of the pilot had a very limited view, and, although he had a gun for defence, could not fire forward at all because of the propeller, while backwards fire was severely hindered by wires, struts, and the tail plane.36 The ‘Fokker Scourge’, as it was known, lasted from July 1915 until early-mid 1916. However, because of production runs, and because inexperienced pilots thrown hastily into battle were often unable to handle faster, more manoeuvrable, but less stable aircraft, the BE2c biplane continued in use in Europe into 1917.37 (It also developed a new role as a night flyer, employed in Home Defence of England against Zeppelin and air raid attack—one for which its stability proved ideal, and where speed and manoeuvrability were unimportant.)38

The Vickers FB5 biplane, nicknamed the ‘Vickers Gunbus’, entered service in February 1915. Its engine was situated at the back of the aeroplane instead of the front, giving the machine gunner a clear range of fire ahead. Tasked with protecting the slow and defenceless BE2c, and taking on the Fokkers, it could itself only manage 70 mph.39 On 25 July 1915, Robin Hughes Chamberlain arrived at St. Omer in France with 11 squadron, the first RFC fighter squadron to be fully equipped with the 2-seater fighter, but he apparently never in fact flew Vickers Gunbus Dominica presented by the island; for neither the original, nor any of its later replacements seem to have flown with any squadron with which he was associated.40 He wrote back of one experience in September 1915:

On the 23rd I was sent off on a long reconnaissance into German territory, going over the trenches we were shelled. A Fokker Monoplane at about 1,500 feet started to climb at me and I kept my machine climbing but he soon caught us up. I slipped into a cloud, turned round and nose-dived on straight at the German. My observers turned the machine gun on him letting off some 60 rounds, whereupon the Fokker dived to earth leaving us master of the situation. On the 26th I was hit in four places—and we ended up by landing in the dark, a difficult job but on this occasion successful.41

Though in 1916 the average life expectancy of a new RFC pilot in France was barely three weeks,42 Robin Hughes Chamberlain survived the whole of the remaining war years—even the build-up to, and opening weeks of, the Battle of the Somme, which he described as his busiest period as a pilot, trying to prevent German air reconnaissance of British positions. The more experienced the pilot, the better his survival prospects, and he had been flying since early 1915. However, he was badly wounded in the foot in August 1916 and only returned to action after an extended period in hospital. By this stage, he was with 24 squadron flying a newer aeroplane, the De Havilland 5 (DH5) scout, which he considered a match for the Fokker in terms of manoeuvrability, but still too slow.

Then he was made an instructor: from November 1917 until February 1918, to the Australian 71st squadron RFC, newly equipped with state-of-the-art, but unstable and difficult to pilot, Sopwith Camels; and from March 1918 with 65 Training Squadron at Dover. Commissioned initially as a 2nd Lieutenant, he was appointed RFC Flight Commander in December 1915, and later became a Major in the newly formed RAF.

When the war ended Robin Hughes Chamberlain was offered, but declined, the post of British Air Attaché in Paris, returning instead to the plantation in Dominica. However the estate suffered neglect during the war years, and the limes had deteriorated. In 1929 he sold up and settled in UK, finding employment in an RAF liaison role with a company that manufactured aircraft gun turrets.43 He was not alone. Most British settlers on Dominica had abandoned their estates for various reasons within a few years, not least the Great War, but also on account of diseases, pest infestations and crop failures. The few still cultivating were resigned to making little profit.44 Many in any case saw their identity primarily as part of the wider British Empire and had not had time to put down deeper Dominican roots: to that extent the planters were ‘transnational’ Britons.

One of the reasons the Imperial Road had taken its specific, and not always completely logical, path was to reach the estate of a planter from Ceylon who had made major investments in Dominica. Its maintenance was difficult to sustain and its economic rationale questionable. Hesketh Bell later admitted that his agricultural scheme for opening up Dominica’s interior had been a failure, blaming poor road maintenance and transport difficulties, serious outbreaks of a disease that afflicted the lime trees, and a ‘ruinous fall’ in the price of cocoa: ‘One by one they gave up the struggle, and there are few who were not obliged either to abandon their plantations or sell them for a song.’45

The small island of Dominica had proved generous in many ways during 1914–18. Throughout the conflict, the larger estates and companies supplied consignments of limes for the wounded at Netley Hospital, near Southampton; and the Dominica Agricultural and Commercial Society organised their shipment through the mail steamer. Belgian relief funds also benefitted. The very same meeting of the Legislative Council that had voted £4,000 for the RFC in October 1914 also voted £1,000 towards the Belgian National Relief Fund, a grant described as the crowning act of the noble efforts of the Rev. Bourchier, Rector of the Anglican Church at Roseau (later a chaplain at the Somme in France) whose private Belgian Relief Fund had already raised £235. By July 1917, the island had given just over £2,000 for Belgian relief, half from Government funds, and half by private donation. At one stage, the Cardinal of the Belgian town of Mechelen wrote expressing his ‘heartfelt thanks’ for all the help forthcoming from Dominica.46 At the official level, Dominica provided £10,000 to the British Government through raising an export tax of one shilling per barrel of green limes.47

As well as dropping coins into the collection boxes for Belgian relief, islanders wishing to donate to war charities, but able to afford only very small amounts, could contribute to the Tobacco Fund through local organiser Alfred Peter Charles, harbour master at Portsmouth in the north of the island. Dominica’s 1914 Christmas present to troops on the Western Front consisted of 50 cigarettes, a quarter of a pound of tobacco and a box of matches.48 Indeed in terms of the sheer numbers of people involved across the empire, the Tobacco Fund was perhaps the most successful of the many ‘patriotic’ funds that right from the very beginning of the Great War were springing up like mushrooms. It began in September 1914. John Evelyn Wrench, founder of the Overseas Club in London, and Director of the Paris office of Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail, was approached by Walter Martin, proprietor of a tobacco firm in Piccadilly—a man, Wrench later wrote, with a prolific mind for salesmanship, who devised a leaflet fit to draw blood from a stone:

In moving language was set forth Tommy’s longing for cigarettes. Each collecting list had a space for 50 names. Every donor of a shilling or upwards entered his name and address. In each packet of cigarettes was enclosed an addressed postcard to the donor. All Tommy had to do was to write a few lines of thanks to his unknown friend.49

The costs of the scheme were borne by the organisers. Walter Martin can hardly be said to have been a disinterested party; nonetheless, he did not get rich on the proceeds, so not too many questions were raised. The scheme was enormously successful, thanks in part to the support and coverage of The Times weekly and the overseas edition of the Daily Mail, and, in part, because it was immaterial how small the donation. Each contributor could feel they were helping in some tangible way to ameliorate life in the trenches. Wrench used his press connections to mobilise newspapers throughout the British Empire as local agents for the fund. By early 1916 the Tobacco Fund had received donations from almost 255,000 people outside Britain, and before the war was over, from several millions of donors worldwide. On 24th May 1915 (Empire Day), over £10,000 was collected in pennies from children; in 1916, nearly three million children donated, and postcards of thanks went directly from the trenches to the schools.50 By May 1918, the Tobacco Fund had collected more than £300,000 from donors worldwide.51

Moving forward from organising a fund that had caught on like wildfire, Wrench’s mind turned to aviation. While the Tobacco Fund was the ‘patriotic’ scheme with a human face, designed to establish contact between the soldier at the Front and residents of the empire, this had a more political dimension:

The provision of smokes was all very well, but we were engaged in a life-and-death struggle. Our society must seek to link up residents overseas with the Empire’s war effort on the battlefield. Aviation was more or less in its infancy oversea … The idea suddenly occurred to me that nothing would make some of the smaller or more isolated sections of the Empire feel so linked up with the great events in Europe and in the East as aircraft named after their districts. Australia had her super-Dreadnought. Why should not Ceylon and St. Kitts have their aircraft?52

Surely the idea must have suggested itself from learning of Vickers Gunbus Dominica, and the other aircraft (type unknown) that benefitted the RNAS, although Wrench’s memoirs record it as a brainwave coming to him out of the blue. Perhaps in late 1914 he was even informed of Dominica’s £4,000 war gift by the island’s Tobacco Fund organiser, harbour master Alfred Peter Charles. The timing would fit.

By such contagion of ideas was the notion of an Imperial Aircraft Flotilla born. Wrench duly approached the War Office with his brainwave, and at the beginning of 1915 the Army Council gave its formal approval for his fundraising campaign, supplying photographs of the two types of aeroplane then in current production—the brand new 100 hp. Gnome Vickers Gun Biplane, or FB5, at £2,250 (like Dominica) and the 70 hp. Renault engine BE2c reconnaissance craft at £1,500. Propagated by its author, John Evelyn Wrench, a hyperactive newspaperman with a scattergun approach, it overtook, and eventually subsumed, the Patriotic League’s fundraising efforts aided by the Foreign Office, to spread swiftly across the ‘British’ world. Its early success is the topic of the next chapter.

A spoof joint appeal launched by kite balloon officers in France, Lieutenants Francis Bryan Berkeley Shand of Dominica, and Stanley Standford Stone of Trinidad rounds off the Dominica story. They issued the following plea in May 1917:

Well then, old pals of palmier days, will you foot the bill of a Dominica and a Trinidad balloon, just as you did for Dominica I, Dominica II, and presentation exactly as was done in the case of the planes. £800 per balloon will do the trick. Only, buck up, or the war may be over before the goods are delivered … Anyhow, seriously, come up to scratch, as you did before, and don’t let two of your fellow-citizens appeal to you in vain for such a cause.53

The job of kite balloon officer on the Western Front was principally to spot and direct artillery fire, and was dangerous in the extreme, though unlike RFC aircrew, they at least had the use of parachutes. The basket-carrying kite balloons were tethered over the lines, sometimes for ten or more hours at a time, at about 3,000 feet. Thus suspended ‘beneath 28,000 cu. ft. of highly flammable hydrogen in what amounted to a wickerwork laundry hamper that swung wildly in windy conditions’, they were targets for enemy aircraft and at risk from allied anti-aircraft guns attempting to ward off such attacks.54

‘Jauntiness’, ‘pranks’, and the somewhat desperate gaiety evidenced in the memoirs of First World War pilots were evidently common to kite balloon officers too, presumably a coping mechanism for the nerve-shredding quality of their daily working lives. Lieutenant Stanley Stone, newly qualified as a solicitor at Port of Spain just before his enlistment in 1914, had been seriously wounded in France by machine-gun bullets in the spring of 1916.55 Here he was in 1917, poking fun at fundraising efforts for presentation aeroplanes to the benefit of RFC flying service colleagues. (Maybe his nerve gave way eventually, for in December 1917 he was declared unfit for further overseas service, and transferred to a Home establishment Balloon Training Wing.)56 Lieutenant Shand was a barrister-at-law who left his practice in Roseau to join the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) at the end of 1914.57 He served with the balloon ship HMS Manica in the Dardanelles, and had manned observation balloons in France since September 1916.58

Over in Roseau, tiny capital of Dominica, Mrs. Elfreda Shand was apparently taken in by the practical joke and sent the Dominica Chronicle an extract from a letter or notebook that her husband purported to have found on a German prisoner at Beaumont in France, in the hope, she said, that it would speed up subscriptions for ‘A Dominica Balloon’. The extract read:

Their airmen are constantly over our lines, discover our batteries so that they may be peppered, and are always attacking our captive balloons, which is the same thing as putting our eyes out. Meanwhile the sky is black with captive balloons and hostile airmen—but of that I will say nothing, it would merely be pouring water into the Rhine. Solely the English artillery, the English Flying Corps and their balloon observation, have given them the success they have obtained.59

More than six months later, just £40 had been subscribed towards a presentation kite balloon in Dominica. The newspaper eventually saw the funny side and handed the £40 over to the Overseas Club Aircraft Fund—towards yet another machine for the Imperial Aircraft Flotilla and the aviators of the RFC.60