Archive for November, 2013

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British India’s Hindus and Muslims feared enforced conversion to Christianity

Posted in Historical articles, History, Religion on Thursday, 28 November 2013

This edited article about India first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 467 published on 26 December 1970.

The powder keg in Meerut, picture, image, illustration

Mutineers stormed the jail and freed their supporters while (inset) the band played on

There had been the Sikh wars, and now there was to be the Indian Mutiny. As usual, the British had only themselves to blame. Firstly, they had made enemies of the Brahmins, the most highly educated and influential class of Hindus, who had previously ruled the life of the Hindu. Education, law and religion and nearly every kind of business had been in their hands. But recently the influence of European education and a recently established British court of appeal which could rescind their decisions, were breaking down their privileges and power. Their hostility had increased when a new law was passed in 1856, which legalised the remarriage of Hindu widows. The law may have been passed in the spirit of purest benevolence, but to the Brahmins it merely meant that yet another attack had been made on one of their cherished institutions. Intent on causing as much trouble as possible, they began to spread rumours that the Government intended to abolish the caste system as a preliminary step to the forcible conversion of all natives to the Christian religion.

The native army, too, was becoming hostile to the British. A vast number of the more efficient British officers had been removed, and most of these who remained were either too old or had been worn out by the climate. The native army, too, had suddenly become conscious that they outnumbered their white comrades in arms in the ratio of six to one.

A fuse had been laid to a keg of gunpowder. All that was needed was the spark to set it off.

The spark was provided by the British themselves.

In 1857, the military authorities decided to introduce the Enfield rifle, which needed a greased cartridge with a top to it, which had to be bitten off by its user before loading. Rumours began to circulate that the cartridge grease was composed of beef fat and hog lard, the use of which would have defiled any Mohammedan and made a Hindu lose caste. More rumours followed. It was the intention, it was whispered in the bazaars to reduce India’s manhood to a common state of defilement by making him use the bullet. Then every Indian would be forced to turn Christian at the cannon’s mouth. It was also rumoured that thousands of soldiers were on their way from England to enforce this conversion.

Although these rumours were obviously ridiculous, there was no doubt that many well meaning but ill-advised missionaries had indirectly contributed to the rumours by over zealously extolling their own religion, while violently condemning the Hindu and Mohammedan beliefs. Such fanatical behaviour must have seemed to an equally fanatical people, to be the prelude to a wholesale conversion to the Christian religion.

But it was the bullet which did the real damage.

On 24th April, 85 soldiers of the 3rd Native Cavalry, while on parade at Meerut, refused to accept the greased bullet. A Court of Inquiry was convened which decreed that the troopers must be court-martialled for mutiny. The Court which finally sat in judgement saw no reason for leniency, and the troopers were given sentences from between five to ten years’ hard labour. Incredible as it might seem, they could perhaps count themselves as lucky; two stiff necked officers of the court had asked for the death penalty.

But the army was not finished with them yet. At dawn on 9th May, the prisoners were brought out barefoot on parade to receive their sentences. After these had been read out, their buttons were ripped from their uniforms, and the uniforms themselves ripped up the back by bayonets. The final humiliation was yet to come. Standing there with their uniforms in shreds the prisoners had to suffer the degradation of having fetters hammered on to their ankles. It was too much for these poor troopers who had once been proud to serve the British. Frantically they began to call for help to their comrades, the sepoys (Indian troops) of the 20th Native Infantry, who could only stand there and weep silently for the prisoners.

Let us now move on to the evening of 10th May, that brief hour before sunset when the long shadows of the later afternoon made it possible for the British to venture out of their homes. Nothing could have been more peaceful that evening, as the ladies and their officers went out for their weekly Sunday promenade. There was a band playing, as it had always done, and as usual, the area around the bandstand was full of gallant officers anxiously looking after the wants of the eligible young spinsters, who sat listening to the current favourites of the time. In the native bazaar, things were somewhat different. In this stifling warren of alleyways, the sepoys were bitterly discussing the fate of the comrades languishing in jail. Suddenly, their anger, already close to boiling point, could no longer be contained. A party of troopers started off, shouting: “To horse, brothers. To the jail!” Within minutes, others had appeared as if from nowhere, to join the ever growing tide. By the time it had reached the jail, the band of rebels had reached 200. Freeing their 85 comrades, the mob moved on to the civil prison and freed a further 720 prisoners.

By then the army had been joined by all the criminal elements of the bazaars. Howling like demented dervishes, the mob went on its way, killing looting and burning, turning Meerut into a city of terror and horror for the 2,028 Europeans living there. In the orgy of murder and destruction that took place, no one was spared, from the Colonel of the Native Infantry, who fell from his horse under a hail of bullets, to innocent women and children who were dragged from their homes and butchered in the streets.

Then as quickly as it had flared up, the violence petered out. It was almost as if sanity had suddenly returned to a group of lunatics who had found themselves standing with bloodstained hands, amid scenes of hideous carnage of their own making. Aghast at what they had done, the sepoys began to flee from the city in small groups. All of them were heading for Delhi, where there lived the one man who might help them – Mohammed Bahadur Shah, last of the Moghul Emperors.

Shackleton’s heroic determination to save his men drew on his sense of honour

Posted in Adventure, Exploration, Heroes and Heroines, Historical articles, History, Ships on Thursday, 28 November 2013

This edited article about polar exploration first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 467 published on 26 December 1970.

The Quest, picture, image, illustration

Shackleton's last expedition was on the Quest which set sail in September, 1921 by C L Doughty

One of the epic stories of Antarctic exploration is that of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s heroic voyage with five men in an open boat from the bleak ice-caked rock called Elephant Island to the whaling colony of Grytviken, South Georgia.

Early in 1914 the dedicated polar explorer, who had slogged to within 97 miles of the South Pole in 1909 (almost three years before it was first reached by Amundsen), set out on what was called the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The object was for Shackleton and a party of men to trek right across the Antarctic Plateau by way of the South Pole. Unfortunately his ship. Endurance became trapped in the drifting ice of the Weddell Sea and broke up. Without the loss of a single life the crew were able to reach the doubtful safety of Elephant Island, whilst their leader and five men set out in a ship’s life-boat to cross 800 miles of the stormiest ocean in the world to the island of South Georgia, the nearest outpost of civilisation from which help could be brought.

The incredible, almost impossible voyage, and the fantastic crossing of the island from one side to the other, including the scaling of a 7,000 ft. mountain range in 36 hours by Shackleton and two exhausted comrades, is a well-known and oft-told tale.

The men on Elephant Isle were duly rescued and the members of the expedition then scattered across the world in the service of the country, at that time fighting the First World War.

Even though the war gave no chance for polar exploration, Shackleton still served his nation and the cause of her allies in the conditions which he knew best. He was sent to North Russia in charge of Arctic Equipment and Transport.

The war over, he planned to lead a large expedition into the Canadian Arctic, but the Dominion Government decided not to finance the venture, so Shackleton eagerly took up the offer of a wealthy sponsor to take charge of a scientific venture in the Antarctic.

He gathered together many of his old comrades and set sail in the September of 1921 from the Thames in the small wooden vessel, Quest.

A year later the wooden vessel had survived a storm in the South Atlantic and dropped anchor in the little whaling harbour of Grytviken. This was to be the last port of call before heading south towards the frozen continent. It was a place that Shackleton knew well. He looked towards the icy mountains, which he and his two companions had been the first to cross. In fact they remained the only men to cross them for many years to come.

Grytviken was the finishing point of his greatest adventure, and also of his life, for here he became ill. He had spent 22 years – almost half his life – in the frozen ends of the earth. Much of his time at home had been spent anxiously raising funds and gathering men and equipment for further adventures. And so it was appropriate that he should die at the gateway to the Antarctic . . . from heart failure following influenza.

There, at the foot of those cold mountains, is his grave.

Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by a deranged Confederate actor

Posted in Actors, America, Famous crimes, Famous news stories, Historical articles, History, Theatre on Thursday, 28 November 2013

This edited article about America first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 466 published on 19 December 1970.

Assassination of Lincoln, picture, image, illustration

The Assassination of President Lincoln by John Keay

The guns had not all fallen silent on that black Good Friday of 1865. True, General Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant five days earlier on 9th April, which virtually brought the terrible American Civil War to an end, but there were still some Confederate forces holding out in the South. Meanwhile, the supreme victor, President Abraham Lincoln, was off to Ford’s Theatre in Washington for an evening out with his wife to see a British play, Our American Cousin.

He had not really wanted to go, but his wife had arranged the party and he did not feel inclined to argue. Besides, it would be a relaxing evening. He had borne greater burdens over the last five years than any other American since the Father of the Republic, George Washington himself. General and Mrs. Grant had been invited to the play, but had declined, so their places were being taken by a young officer named Major Rathbone and his fiancee, Miss Clara Harris.

Having taken their seats in the President’s box, they found that the play was quite amusing. Some time after ten o’clock – no one quite remembered later at what point in the play – a fanatical Southerner called John Wilkes Booth entered the President’s Box and, completely unobserved, aimed a pistol at Lincoln’s head. As the shot rang round the theatre everyone was momentarily stunned. Then all eyes turned in the direction of the President where they saw Major Rathbone struggling with the assassin.

Booth whipped out a knife and struck the Major down. With a cry of “Sic semper tyrannis” (this is the fate for tyrants), he jumped from the box to the stage. In doing so, he caught one of his spurs in the drapery, which resulted in his breaking a small bone in his leg. But he managed to run behind the scenes, mount a horse that was waiting at the stage door, and ride away into the night.

Booth was the brother of the great actor, Edwin Booth, who was playing in Boston at the time. The assassin was an actor too, but had become more and more unbalanced as the war went on and his beloved South headed for defeat. His hatred of the North centred on Lincoln.

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Gaslight illuminated dangerous streets and extinguished the domestic candle

Posted in Famous Inventors, Historical articles, History, Industry, Inventions on Thursday, 28 November 2013

This edited article about gas-lighting first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 466 published on 19 December 1970.

Lamplighter, picture, image, illustration

The Lamplighter by Peter Jackson

Often it seems in history that for long periods there is no perceptible change – and then the changes come, all in a rush. The truth is, of course, that the ideas and the experiments which make for “sudden” change are going on all the time. This is very true in our story of lighting.

Who in ancient times, one wonders, first thought of pressing with finger and thumb the clay saucer which was to be baked into a round holder for melted fat and a wick? This pressed-up lip held the wick snugly and was a great improvement on the floating wick.

We do know, however, of a man named Ami Argand, a Swiss from Geneva, who designed a lamp so strange and new that it quite revolutionised all previous thought in the field. Argand was working in France towards the end of the 18th century when the idea came to him. In 1773, a Monsieur Leger had introduced the flat cotton wick. Argand conceived the notion, simple enough, to twist the flat cotton wick into a “round”. He went a step further, making his “flat” wick wider than Leger’s, and fitting it round a central tube so that air could get inside the flame and produce a brighter light. Very soon it was found that a glass “chimney” was required, efficiently to contain the brightness. Of course, the eternal question of cost arose, for oil was consumed very quickly.

Oil, in fact – like beeswax – was so expensive that only the rich could afford good lighting, and so, for many years experiments were made with different types of fuel. Coal gas, for example, was “perfected” as early as 1732 by an Irishman – Dean Clayton of Kildare. His first experiments were started in 1688, but it was 44 years later when he presented his findings to the Royal Society.

It was left, however, to a very colourful character named Winsor – of German extraction – really to attract the public to the idea of all-gas lighting. In 1804 F. A. Winsor hired the Lyceum Theatre in London to propound his ideas. His English being poor, he hired a capable Englishman to read his lecture while he himself demonstrated aspects of gas-lighting, claiming that he had invented it. He also employed a boy to distribute a “paper” setting out details of his “National Light and Heat Company.”

This pamphlet promised glittering wealth to all who invested in his company which would provide glittering light! Winsor did, indeed, excite the interest of the solid English business man, and from his lead many other companies leaped upon the “gas-wagon”. By 1829, there were over 200 gas companies in England.

All the same, the real pioneer of gas-lighting, far less theatrical than Winsor, was a brilliant engineer named Richard Murdoch. In 1792, 12 years before Winsor began selling the idea of gaslight in the Lyceum Theatre, Murdoch had lit with gas both his home and his offices at Redruth in Cornwall. Thereafter he went on to light with gas the Soho Birmingham works of the large firm of Boulton and Watt.

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The architectural grandeur of Newcastle reflected its proud industrial might

Posted in Architecture, British Cities, British Towns, Historical articles, History, Industry, Ships on Thursday, 28 November 2013

This edited article about Newcastle first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 466 published on 19 December 1970.

Newcastle, picture, image, illustration

Grey Street and Grey Monument, Newcastle – of the finest streets in England

In 1644 the Scots were besieging Newcastle in support of the Parliamentarian cause. It had already been a long siege and the Scots, who were anxious to get the issue settled and continue their advance, issued an ultimatum that if the town did not surrender they would destroy the 200 ft. tower of the church of St. Nicholas. This (now a cathedral) rises to a crown-like spire and was not only useful as a guide at night when a light was placed in it, but was also the pride of the town.

However, the mayor, Sir John Marley, showed himself to be a typically canny Geordie. He ordered that some of the most important Scottish prisoners should be placed in the tower and then informed the troops at the gates that if they fulfilled their threat they would kill their own companions. The strategy saved the tower but, despite a stubborn resistance, the town fell after a siege of ten weeks.

Newcastle was well acquainted with such troubles for, although for many centuries the map has shown the border between England and Scotland as running along the north of Northumberland, it was this vital Tyne crossing which was the main defence line – most of the county being moorland and poor farms. The river had in fact been the border between the Brigantes tribe of the South and the Ottandini of the North and, even as late as the reign of Stephen, Northumberland was part of Scotland for a time.

The town had first come into being in Roman times. When these invaders occupied Britain in the first century A.D. they quickly established control over south and central England but they found the people and wild country of the north far more difficult to subdue. At first, Agricola had advanced to the Forth/Clyde line, but it had proved impossible to hold this and, in A.D. 122, when Hadrian visited Britain, he gave orders for the erection of a wall from the Tyne to the Solway, a distance of 73¬Ω miles. This marked the northerly extremity of the great Roman Empire and was a massive structure, parts of which can still be seen in the desolate border country. The importance of the Tyne crossing as a gateway to the north was marked by the erection of a bridge at Newcastle which was named after Hadrian’s family – Pons Aelius.

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Navvies laboured in the bowels of the earth to build miles of railway tunnels

Posted in Engineering, Historical articles, History, Railways, Transport, Travel on Thursday, 28 November 2013

This edited article about navvies first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 466 published on 19 December 1970.

Birkenhead tunnel, picture, image, illustration

The New Railway Tunnel under the River Mersey, connecting Birkenhead with Liverpool; breaking down the Last Partition by J R Brown

The most hazardous job of all was tunnelling. The miners worked deep in the earth, often soaked by muddy water, in constant peril from their own explosions, breathing foul air made fouler by the fumes of gunpowder, and working 12 hours a shift, day and night.

If the tunnel was short the miners bored in from one end, or from both ends; but in a longer tunnel work would also proceed from shafts bored vertically into the earth along the line of the tunnel. These shafts were bored by a machine called a gin, which was powered at first by horses attached to a great wheel, and later by steam engines. This boring of the shaft was itself a feat of engineering: most shafts were eight to ten feet across and some were as deep as 600 ft. When the bore was completed men descended to its foot in huge buckets and began to excavate the main tunnel, working in two directions at once from the bottom of the shaft. The soil and the men were brought up in the same buckets. When the tunnel was completed the shafts served as air holes, creating a strong draught, so that the men putting the finishing touches to the masonry of the tunnel worked in a constant gale of wind, a contrast to the fug in which they had laboured for so long before.

The first of the great railway tunnels was that bored under Liverpool in 1827. Henry Booth, treasurer of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, wrote that in some places the substance excavated was a soft blue shale, with abundance of water; in other places a wet sand appeared, requiring great labour and contrivance to support until the masonry which was to form the roof was erected. Under Crown Street, near the Botanic Garden, the whole mass of earth above the tunnel fell in from the surface, to a depth of 30 ft. of loose moss, earth, and sand. No one was hurt.

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During WW1 some conscientious objectors were virtually crucified

Posted in Historical articles, History, World War 1 on Thursday, 28 November 2013

This edited article about World War One first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 466 published on 19 December 1970.

WW1 postcard, picture, image, illustration

A smartly dressed conscientious objector being left behind by soldiers in a WW1 cartoon propaganda postcard with the damning legend: This little pig stayed at home

They put him in solitary confinement for a month. Not in a prison cell but in a pit 10 feet deep and three feet wide. The bottom was full of water and he had to stand on two bits of wood, three inches wide, his feet just above the water-line; sitting was impossible. The sun beat down and there were only clay walls to look at. He felt that he was going mad. But he was a conscientious objector – so nobody cared.

The man, James Brightmore, was a young clerk from Manchester. He refused to fight in the First World War and like 16,000 others was labelled a “Conchy.” “Conchies” were not burned at the stake or hanged like the martyrs of the past, but they were brutally persecuted and the lives of many were irredeemably ruined. In this sense they were martyrs – martyrs for the right to follow their consciences.

Their ordeal began in February 1916. Through thousands of letter-boxes in Britain came War Office Form W3235. It looked harmless enough but it was to spell misery and despair to many. It informed young men of an age for military service that they were required to join up forthwith. It added that men who failed to comply would be dealt with as deserters in wartime. The British Expeditionary Force had been blown to pieces in the mud of Flanders and the stream of volunteers was insufficient to replace the appalling losses that were being inflicted on the Allied Front. Conscription – compulsory military service – was the only answer, or so it seemed to the Government. But an outspoken minority took a different view.

The opponents of conscription were mainly the same people who had opposed the war in the first place. They included religious sects, such as the Quakers, and political groups like the Independent Labour Party. In the highly-charged emotional months at the outbreak of war it had not been easy for these minorities to proclaim their pacifist principles. But the Socialists, who believed in the international brotherhood of the workers, declared: “Out of the darkness and the depth we hail our working-class comrades of every land. Across the roar of guns we send sympathy and greeting to the German Socialists. They are no enemies of ours but faithful friends.” And the Quakers wrote: “All war is utterly incompatible with the plain precepts of our Divine Lord and Lawgiver.”

Nevertheless, taunted by their families and friends, pilloried in the Press or simply finding that they could not refuse to share the horrors which their fellow-countrymen were enduring on the western front in the name of freedom, some pacifists could stand apart no longer. A group of Quakers established an ambulance unit at their own expense and hazarded their lives as stretcher-bearers while some Socialists and Trade-Unionists passed the resolution that: “Freedom cannot exist where men are not prepared to defend it.”

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The wreck of the Forfarshire was made famous by Grace Darling

Posted in Disasters, Famous news stories, Heroes and Heroines, Historical articles, History, Ships on Thursday, 28 November 2013

This edited article about maritime disaster first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 466 published on 19 December 1970.

Forfarshire hits rocks, picture, image, illustration

Grace Darling and her father struggle to reach the stranded survivors from the Forfarshire by John Keay

The captain thought he saw the Farne Lighthouse. It was a mistake that doomed his ship to complete destruction.

The story of how Grace Darling and her father rowed out to rescue the survivors of a ship foundering on the treacherous Farne Islands, off the Northumberland coast, is familiar to everybody. But the versions of this disaster always concentrate on the girl’s heroism, while details of the actual disaster are usually completely ignored.

On the evening of Wednesday, 5th September, 1838, the Forfarshire, an almost new paddle-steamer owned by the Dundee & Hull Steam Packet Co., sailed from Hull down the Humber estuary bound for her home port of Dundee. She carried a crew of 22 men, under Captain John Humble, an experienced coastwise skipper well liked by all. She had a full complement of passengers aboard, and a mixed cargo of hardware, textiles, machinery and boiler-plates. This was a voyage she regularly undertook.

Soon after she cleared Spurn Head and entered open water the wind swung round to nor’-nor’-east and increased considerably in strength. Heavy rain began to fall after sundown. The ship rolled. Many of the passengers, cooped up below deck, were seasick; not a few, travelling for the first time, were frightened. They would have been even more frightened had they known that there was trouble in the engine-room.

The ship had not been many hours at sea before it was found that two of her boilers had sprung a leak. The Chief Engineer urged Captain Humble to return to Hull for repairs. He was brusquely told to increase the pressure in his remaining boilers: the schedule had to be maintained. Grumbling, he retired, to put into effect his captain’s orders. Back in the engine-room, he found matters had worsened. Water was now flooding out from the two leaking boilers. Since there were fires beneath them, the water-level must be maintained, or they would explode. He had the pumps set in motion; but the water ran out almost as fast as it was pumped in. To make things worse it was so hot that the stokers had to leap clear of it to avoid having their legs scalded. So, the fires went out, and very soon there was not enough to keep the paddle-wheels more than just idly turning. Certainly there was not sufficient way on the ship to counteract the mounting strength of the wind.

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The Sikh Wars led to the annexation of the Punjab in 1849

Posted in Famous battles, Historical articles, History, War on Wednesday, 27 November 2013

This edited article about India first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 466 published on 19 December 1970.

Battle of Mudki, picture, image, illustration

The Battle of Mudki by C L Doughty

The beautiful but unscrupulous Maharani Rani Jindan, ruler of all the Sikhs in the Punjab, looked at the sea of fanatical faces before her. Then she stabbed a dramatic finger in the direction of the River Sutlej, which acted as a boundary line between the Sikhs and the British. “You have only to cross that river and victory is yours. So attack – now!”

That was all the warlike Sikhs needed to hear. With clamorous cries and shouts they began to stream towards the glittering band of the river until finally, the only ones left in the grounds of the palace were the Maharani and her Prime Minister, Lal Singh.

“Now it has begun,” Lal Singh murmured. “Let us hope that it goes as we wish.”

“It will go as we wish,” the Maharani said coldly. “The British will destroy them – never fear.”

Later on that day of 11th December, 1845, 20,000 Sikh cavalrymen crossed the Sutlej, their drawn swords glittering in the late afternoon sun. Oblivious to the shells that were now beginning to fall around them, they headed steadily towards the British lines.

The cause for this conflict, known as the Anglo-Sikh wars, can be traced back in part to 1839, when Ranjee Singh, the wise and wily ruler of the Punjab had died, leaving behind him as a legacy to his people, a magnificent army of Sikhs who had been thirsting to do battle with the British for some time. Officially, the reins of government were now in the hands of the Maharani, who ruled the state in the name of her young son, Duleep Singh. But in reality it was the Sikhs, 500,000 of them, who were the real rulers of the Punjab. Their demands for a huge army and more pay for its soldiers had been accompanied by threats of violence which the Maharani was in no position to ignore. Desperately trying to keep the army at bay, she had given in to all their demands with the result that the Punjab treasury had become seriously depleted.

With the state now on the verge of bankruptcy and faced with a dangerous army Elite which could dispose of her at any time, the Maharani had decided that if the army could not be controlled, it would have to be destroyed. It had not taken much effort on her part, as we have already seen, to launch the Sikhs into battle.

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During WW1 Louis Bleriot turned his talents to aeroplane design and manufacture

Posted in Aviation, Historical articles, History, World War 1 on Wednesday, 27 November 2013

This edited article about Louis Bleriot first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 466 published on 19 December 1970.

Louis Bleriot, picture, image, illustration

Louis Bleriot, aviation pioneer.

Early one July morning in 1909 a man on crutches limped out of a hotel near Calais. There was little or no wind. The pale stars shone coldly.

He limped towards a field in nearby Les Baraques, where mechanics were working busily on a rather stained-looking aircraft. They told him that everything was ready.

So the man in blue overalls, who had badly burned his left foot against an unshielded exhaust pipe when flying only a week previously, handed his crutches to the mechanics and climbed into the cockpit.

He was Louis Bleriot, a manufacturer of car headlamps and accessories who had devoted a lot of his time and all his money to flying. The aeroplane in which he sat was his own, designed and built by himself.

Bleriot signalled that he was ready. His crutches were tied to the side of the fuselage and the engine was started. In a moment he was airborne.

The time was exactly 4.41 a.m. The sun had just broken the horizon.

Below, the French naval torpedo boat Escopette sped across the waves to perform escort duty for the frail-looking aircraft that was attempting the first flight between France and Britain.

Within ten minutes Bleriot had passed the boat. He looked back to use it as a guide to see if he was flying in the right direction but all around him was a blank white, damp mist. He flew on blindly and hopefully.

A while later he glimpsed England, but he had flown too far east of the white cliffs and the castle of Dover. So he flew back along the coast until he saw the field into which he had planned to land. After his superb flight he made a bad landing but, fortunately, he was unharmed.

The time was 5.17 a.m. The time for the 22-mile crossing was 36 minutes. In those 36 minutes history had been made. The newspapers declared: “There are no islands any more!” The pilot was whisked away to London where he was feted and awarded the £1,000 prize offered by Lord Northcliffe of the Daily Mail for the first man to fly an aeroplane across the Channel.

The triumphant Frenchman and his wife returned to France by boat, where the decoration of the Legion d’Honneur awaited him with yet more festivities.

Then what?

He performed no more fantastic feats of flying. He did not become a fighter ace in the 1914-18 war.

What did he do in his obscurity?

Louis Bleriot worked hard and prospered on his reputation. Within hours he had received orders for a thousand of his machines. So he did no more than switch from manufacturing car headlamps to making aeroplanes. He did not fly in action in the First World War because he was busy supplying the French Air Force with flying machines. At one time his factory was turning out fighter aircraft at the rate of 13 a day.

In the 1930s he amalgamated his company with that of Farman-Morceaus; Farman was a name almost as famous as his own in the world of pioneer flying. He was also rich enough, and keenly interested in the advancement of flying, to declare that he would give a prize of £1,000 to the first airman to fly faster than 1,000 kilometres an hour (625 m.p.h.). The prize was not collected in his lifetime.

The gallant Frenchman died of a heart attack on 1st August, 1936.