|
|
Post by Dave Homewood on Apr 28, 2015 11:07:38 GMT 12
|
|
|
|
Post by Dave Homewood on Oct 15, 2015 16:27:23 GMT 12
|
|
|
|
Post by Dave Homewood on Oct 19, 2015 12:28:32 GMT 12
|
|
|
|
Post by Dave Homewood on Oct 6, 2021 15:48:53 GMT 12
Here is a newspaper article about Frederick Carpenter from The Press, 10 September 1956, which gives some background. I just checked and all the links about still work so you can still listen to his fantastic memories.
Christchurch Man Saw First Flight In Britain
During the last week the pride of Britain’s civil and military aircraft have been on show at the display of the Society of British Aircraft Constructors at Farnborough. For Mr F. Carpenter, who lives on Mount Pleasant, this annual exhibition always revives memories.
About 1903, as a boy, Mr Carpenter went with his family to live at Cove, a village near the now famous airfield. Gorse and broom then covered the country which is today part of the Royal Aircraft Establishment, and more than 50 years ago he played among the massive gorse bushes. About 1905 he saw the piles driven for the first shed on the aerodrome. It was for the balloon school of the Royal Engineers.
In those days balloons were an everyday sight near Farnborough. As many as a dozen were in the.air at once, taking part in balloon races. The Gordon Bennett balloon race attracted entries from many countries and the balloons sometimes flew as far afield as Sweden, Norway, or Denmark and then back again without landing. Mr Carpenter has vivid recollections of one of the great figures of early British aviation, Texas-born Colonel S. F. Cody. He watched the Cody kites which earned the colonel a £5OOO award from the British Government. The kite device consisted of a series of box kites held at intervals along a cable. A basket attached to the last kite let up carried the aviator. In 1905 a flight was made to 1600 feet and later a member of the Royal Engineers used the kites to reach 2600 feet. The Christchurch man also saw the first flight of a British airship. It was the Nulli Secundus which Colonel Cody also helped to build. On the day the first flight was made Mr Carpenter was a telegraph messenger for the correspondent of a London newspaper. He recalls that when the sausage-like airship began to emerge from the hangar the journalist quickly completed a dispatch and sent him off with it. When he returned the airship was still in the same position and by the time that it did eventually get into the air London newspapers were rapidly selling on the airfield with the story that the airship had made a successful flight. End of Airship A few days later Colonel Cody and Colonel Capper flew the Nulli Secundus 32 miles to London, circled St. Paul’s and landed near the Crystal Palace where they parked the airship. When a gale blew up during the night the Royal Engineer sentries stuck a bayonet or bayonets into the envelope and it collapsed. The airship went back to Farnborough in a railway truck and it never flew again. Mr Carpenter and his brother Victor, were members of the first Farnborough scout troop. One evening in 1908 they were returning home from a scout parade when they saw in the distance what looked like an oversize box kite with an engine attached to it. They ran towards it. As they approached the engine burst into life and there they saw Colonel Cody sit-
ting on a perforated ■netal seat, not unlike seats seen on "arm tractors, among a maze of wire, bamboo, flaps, and poles. After moving along the ground the strange aircraft took to the air for 100 yards or a little more, and then settled in a patch of gorse, which burst its tyres. Mr Carpenter recollects that Colonel Cody climbed down from his machine, pulled off his hat. which allowed his ’eddish hair to fall about his shoulders,, and danced for joy. Apart from his brother, who was later killed in the battle of the Somme, and himself, Mr Carpenter says that all those who saw the flight were men of mature age, and it is likely that he is now the only man living who saw what is believed to be the first flight of a heavier-than-air machine in Britain.
Colonel Cody did not have much success with his machine afterwards, and the British Government lost faith in him. The Government, however, allowed him to build a hangar on nearby Laffans Plain and to take his machine, less its engine, with him. By 1909 he was again in the air, *lying about 400 yards at a height of about 12 feet at 10 to 12 miles an hour. Distinguished Room-mate In 1909 Mr Carpenter joined the Royal Engineers as a hoy trainee in the balloon school. James McCudden, who was afterwards to become one of Britain’s greatest air aces in World War I, was a room-mate of his, and one of his officers was Hugh Trenchard, later to become Air Marshal Trenchard.
Mr Carpenter’s active association with s Farnborough ended in 1911 when he joined the 19th Hussars, in which he went to France with the Old Contemptibles at the outbreak of World War I. Towards the end of the war he was, however, attracted back to aviation, and while serving with the Independent Air Wing in France he was wounded. The pilot of a DH-9 in which he was flying as air gunner was killed in a fight with three German aircraft, and Mr Carpenter crash landed the damaged aircraft in the back of a French farmyard. Mr Carpenter settled in New Zealand after the war, but a few years ago he returned to England, and in 1953 he was the guest of the Society of British Aircraft Constructors at the Farnborough display, where he saw in flight among other aircraft the Avro Vulcan which is shortly to visit Christchurch A treasured possession of Mr Carpenter is a photograph taken on that occasion of the secretary of the Aircraft Establishment Association and himself standing beside the famous tree to which Colonel Cody used to chain his machine at night and when he was testing its engine.
|
|
|
|
Post by davidd on Oct 6, 2021 16:18:22 GMT 12
In one of the NAC "Flying Review" passenger magazines published by that airline in the mid to late 1950s (or early 60s) there was an article about "Chips" Carpenter, and also published along with the narrative were many of his very good sketches of aircraft of WW1. He was certainly a very skilled artist of these subjects.
David D
|
|
