Humanity with all its fears
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy Fate.
Longfellow.

12th January 1966, is the one hundredth birthday of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain.

The story of the first hundred years of the Aeronautical Society began with long data-less periods of unfulfilled hopes. Like the paradoxical supersonic aeroplanes which arrive at their destinations before they are timed to take off, the story of the Society was started fifty years before it began, by Sir George Cayley, who wrote a famous paper on Aerial Navigation, laying down the fundamental principles of heavier-than-air flight.

There are some members of the Society who will remember Claude the Condor with some affection, and not a few with a sense of apprehensive hope, as the great stuffed, sombre bird soared slowly and silently on a thin wire at No. 7 Albemarle Street. It hung above one end of the long table in the Library, directly over the chair in which the President sat in Council and Annual General Meetings, its raw red neck straight out and its eyes looking down in a gluttonous glare, for the taxidermist had done his job well.

At most Annual General Meetings, and some Council Meetings, someone would be sure to question the suitability of Claude to preside over the affairs of such an august body as the Royal Aeronautical Society. Those with streamline minds asserted it was a drag on free discussion.

On Sunday 3rd September 1939 at 11 am the staff of the Society in their various homes and on holiday heard that this country was at war with Germany.

On the following Monday morning few will forget the tense air of expectancy in London, that feeling the sky would soon be filled with German bombers and anything might happen.

To those members of the staff on holiday the Secretary telegraphed to remain where they were pending further instructions. To those who had gathered at No. 4 Hamilton Place he explained they were free if they wished to take any war work, either in the industry or services.

One of the most remarkable, successful and useful of the Society's activities during the second World War was a series of weekend conferences called to discuss problems arising directly out of the War. To the greater number of members of the Society these valuable conferences and their scope are unknown for they were all highly secret.

All the theories of air strategy and tactics and actual combat and bombing and reconnaissance and the rest of it, only put to the test in peacetime manoeuvres, were now being tried out under the bitter stress of war.

In the long history of the Society many committees of Council have been appointed to advise the Council upon matters concerning the advancement of aeronautical science and engineering, and of the welfare of the Society and its members. Yet the most important committee of the Council ever appointed never gave any advice to the Council during its five years of office. In the whole of my experience, as secretary of the Council and its committees, no committee attained that complete ideal of unselfish endeavour, without any regard whatever for their own personal and business interests, as did The Advisory Committee of the Royal Aeronautical Society to the Ministers of Aircraft Production, which played such a great part in the 1939–1945 World War.

On A recent visit to New Zealand in September 1965, I enjoyed the privilege of attending, as Solicitor to the Society, a meeting of the New Zealand Division Council. Any visitor from the Society to Commonwealth countries is welcomed warmly, and must bring a message from the Old Country. Feeling so remote, they are hungry for any news of any sort. For lack of better material I based my talk to them on my personal association with the Society over the past 45 years.

Such a period of years covers much of the Society's struggle for recognition and retention of its position as the leading technical and scientific Aeronautical body. In this I have been privileged to help.

Inventors who work in secret, and whose vital creations never see the light of day until the world has passed them by, are mostly figures of romantic fiction. Most inventors take good care that their devices are brought to public notice, preferably after patents have been granted to them; and one of their main concerns in the 19th century was therefore the channels of communication open to them.

Sir George Cayley wrote, in 1837, that “the experiments that have been made, and the investigation which it (the subject) has undergone, lie almost unconnected in the periodical publications of the last thirty years; and hence, every new speculator on the possibility of steering balloons takes up the subject merely on his own view”.

The origin of the Society's Stressed Skin Data Sheets was certainly my own paper, R and M No. 1553; it embarrasses me not at all to put it so. In 1930 the Structures Sub-committee of the ARC asked for a summary of the present state of knowledge regarding sheet metal construction, and the chairman, (Sir) William Farren, directed me as secretary to prepare a draft. I did so—the draft was discussed by the Sub-committee, revised and amended and finally in 1933 published over my name. To me the paper was a chore, albeit a welcome one, and all I myself really got out of it in the end was the realisation that I could do with a little more Anglo-Saxon: “What we know about …” would now be my title.

Apart from Royal patronage and the manifest concern with aviation, it must seem to many people that there is little in common between the Royal Aeronautical Society and the Royal Aircraft Establishment. Yet research into the lesser known activities of the early RAE has revealed not only a comparable antiquity but also a remarkable similarity in the early history of the two bodies. Both had to fight hard to stay alive, and often continuing existence depended upon a tenuous thread liable to snap at any moment.

In its early years the Society was essentially a group of dilettante with all the advantages as well as the disadvantages that this entails.

The first well-formulated scheme for lighter-than-air transport was put forward by Francesco de Lana-Terzi in a scientific treatise in 1670. He visualised a craft made lighter than air by evacuating the air from within it, and conducted the first accurate experiments to determine the density of air, which he found to be 1/640th that of water. It comes to most of us today as surprisingly relevant to recall why he did not carry his idea into practice: he was a Jesuit priest and wrote, in the words of Robert Hooke's translation, “God would not suffer such an invention to take effect, by reason of the disturbance it would cause to the civil government of men. For who sees not that no city can be secure against attack …“.

In the past, the Society did much for Lighter-than-Air, through its lectures, most of which I was able to attend. I well remember that anti-airship man, E. F. Spanner, who used to face a basically hostile audience, and the fighting speeches from that great protagonist for airships, the late Captain Boothby.

The first, I think, to give lectures on airships was the late Colonel Waterlow in 1912 and 1913, but I was at Wellington then, and so was not present. Nobody fought harder than he did for airships, and he was very helpful to me when I used to visit the airship station at Wormwood Scrubbs.

When Airship No. 1, which had been built at Barrow, was finally abandoned in 1912, her officers were sent to Farnborough as “The Naval Wing” to gain experience of the military airships and of the Royal Aircraft Factory where they were built. A German Parsival Airship, No. 4, and a French Astra Airship, No. 3, were bought by the Admiralty for the Naval Wing.

In 1913 I succeeded in getting transferred to the Naval Wing and I found in the Naval Mess a most inspiring community. Lieut. Commander N. F. Usborne was the dominant spirit.

It was with some trepidation that I accepted the Society's invitation to contribute a Chapter to this Centenary issue. As the Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe has it,

“But though the compliment implied
Inflates me with legitimate pride,
It nevertheless can't be denied
That it has its inconvenient side.“

Nearly all those mentioned in the following chronicle of British achievements have known me personally; many have been my colleagues. It would be unfortunate if what I have said, or have failed to say, about their work were to disturb hitherto harmonious relations.

I have been asked to contribute some reminiscences of the first two years of the 1914–1918 War to this Centenary number. Selection has proved difficult: I did not keep a diary and so must rely on memory alone for what I write. This may result in errors of detail and for any such mistakes I apologise in advance.

Early in February 1915 I received a telegram from the Admiralty as follows: “You have been appointed acting junior technical advisor to the Director of the Air Department and should present yourself for duty at the earliest possible moment”.

A Comprehensive review of British contributions to aerodynamics would fill many volumes and take years to compile. For while some aspects of the science are embarrassingly well documented—every library possesses the monumental reports of the Aeronautical Research Council from 1909 onwards and the no less compendious Journals of the Society—other aspects are hardly illuminated at all.

Progress in aerodynamics has flowed in three main streams springing from the work of, first the research establishments and universities, second design offices and flight sections of the aircraft industry and third, the flying schools of the RAF.

The Royal Aeronautical Society may well be considered as one of the more important founders of the science and practice of aeronautics, bearing in mind at the same time the work of Sir George Cayley. Other early claimants in the history of aeronautics are the Royal Aero Club on the sporting side and the Royal Aircraft Establishment, the latter known formerly as the Balloon Factory. These date back many years but so also does the Aeronautical Research Council (ARC), originally called the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (ACA), which although not so old as the other bodies mentioned above, has had an unbroken history of some fifty-seven years.

In 1909, Sir Richard Glazebrook (then Dr.) was Director of the National Physical Laboratory and under him the Superintendent of the Engineering Division was Sir Thomas Stanton (then Dr.). These two scientists were responsible for initiating aeronautical research at the NPL. The main stimulus came, however, from the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, formed in May 1909 with Lord Rayleigh as President and Glazebrook as Chairman. This committee obtained a grant from the Treasury for aeronautical work amounting to £1923 13s 5d for the seven months of that year, with a grant at the same rate for the year 1910; this money was spent at the NPL.

The Outbreak of war in August 1914 naturally gave a fillip to the development of aeronautics and to building up research teams at the NPL and at the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough. I was one of the earlier war-time recruits, in September 1914, engaged—after a mere assurance that I did believe in aeroplanes—by the enthusiast E. T. Busk, who was to lose his life so tragically when the BE2c he was flying caught fire on the 5th November 1914. At Farnborough I found a Cambridge contemporary of the Mechanical Sciences Tripos 1914, H. L. Stevens, who had joined before the outbreak of war, R. H. Mayo, Geoffrey Taylor, Melvill Jones, who had abandoned work on airships for Vickers, and F. M. Green from the motor trade on engines.