I know you got soul: machines with that certain something Read online

  There is no doubt in my mind that this epic story, set against the background of war in Europe, would make a magnificent film. Having won the Battle of Britain single-handedly in Pearl Harbor, Ben Affleck would be the perfect quintessential Englishman, John Alcock. The Belgian missionary would be played by Jean-Claude Van Damme and his wife by Nicole Kidman. She gives good bodice.

  Obviously, in the vast heat that is Africa, Nicole and Ben would fall madly in love. As he struggled to free the plane, she’d swoon at the muscles in his back writhing like a sack of pythons. He in turn would be mesmerised by her buttocks like ostrich eggs. Maybe Jean-Claude Van Damme could be eaten by a lion at some point.

  However, no matter what happens or who they get to fill all the major roles, the star of the show would have to be the plane itself. The Corsair. Flying boats, you see, are just adorable. Partly this is because they were flying when flying was so glamorous, and partly it’s because they were jacks of all trades but masters, if I’m honest, of none. They therefore have that most human of traits – a flaw.

  The first thing you need to know is that they are flying boats with the emphasis on the word ‘boats’. They are not to be confused with float-planes, which are just normal aircraft that have flotation chambers instead of wheels. A flying boat really is a boat with wings; the underside of its fuselage really is a hull and as a result they are governed by all the usual maritime rules. They must, for instance, fly the flag of the nation onto whose waters they’ve landed.

  When they first came along in the twenties they made perfect sense because airfields required all kinds of civil engineering and bulldozers, and it only took a brief shower to render them muddy and inoperable. In the twenties Heathrow and Gatwick were villages.

  Whereas three-quarters of the world’s surface was water and could therefore be used as a landing strip, either if something went wrong or when you reached journey’s end.

  America was the first nation to really get cracking with the notion of a plane that could take off and land on water. Spurred along by that great aviation pioneer Juan Trippe of Pan Am, they had three different models up and running before the rest of the world had even woken up.

  They were called Clippers after the nineteenth-century sailing ships and they were all magnificent. The Boeing 314, for instance, had seating for 74 and 36 berths. There was a dining room, a deluxe compartment for VIPs, dressing rooms and a lounge. It made the Orient Express look like a Chinese ox cart.

  And they were flown by just the most dashing people. Pilots were earning $8,000 a year at a time when a dentist could only make a quarter of that and a new Pontiac would cost just $500. This put the man in the hot seat on a par with the passengers, who were paying $500 to be up there – the equivalent of £7,500 today.

  Fine, but Britain wasn’t simply going to sit by and let the vulgar, new-moneyed colonials have it all their own way. So a plan was hatched…

  The Postmaster General announced in 1934 that all first-class mail would have to be carried by air. This provided an effective subsidy for any aircraft maker or airline who wished to invest in a long-haul carrier. So immediately Imperial Airways went in search of a plane that could cover the world. Shorts provided the answer with the Empire Flying Boat.

  They were known as the C Class because all the names chosen – and Corsair was one of them – began with a C. They were lovely things, but sadly they were not quite so impressive as the American rivals. They could only carry 24 passengers and had a range of just 700 miles.

  But that was enough to service the British Empire. And I’d like you to imagine that; flying to say Australia or India on one of these glorious machines in 1939, stopping every three hours or so in another country, in another time zone, for food and more tea. It must have been absolutely thrilling.

  But the Americans by this stage were well ahead. Their planes were crossing the Pacific and then, on 26 March, they crossed the Atlantic too. We had a pit pony, charming and charismatic for sure, but they had a racehorse. In fact with the Sikorsky, the Boeing and the Catalina they had three racehorses and as a result they were on the brink of enveloping the world and bringing everyone a little closer together.

  Sadly, it didn’t turn out quite like that, because five months later Adolf Hitler sent his troops into Poland and the world fell apart.

  In the build-up to war the British military had seen the advantage of flying boats and had already commissioned Shorts to build a version with guns instead of tea. It was called the Sunderland.

  Like all the most human machines, the Deltic locomotive, the Space Shuttle and the Jumbo Jet, the windscreen rises up out of the nose to create more of a face. The Sunderland really did appear to have eyes and eyebrows and you know what, it even seemed to have an expression. It looked sad.

  We had 40 by the time war broke out, each of which had a 7.7mm gun in the nose and two in the rear. In addition to this the Sunderland could carry 2,000 lbs of bombs, mines or depth charges. Small wonder the German U-boat crews used to call them ‘flying porcupines’. They really did bristle with death.

  Mind you, they weren’t exactly fault free. In the early days bombs dropped at low altitude would sometimes bounce right off the water and hit the plane that had dropped them. And landing on water meant the pilot had to shift, in the blink of an eye, from being a master of the air to being a salty sea dog with a nose for currents. Make no mistake, these things were not a walk in the park.

  As the war rolled on the flying boat was given more powerful engines and eventually radar that became more and more sophisticated. Couple this to its ability to remain aloft for hour after hour and it became, despite the shortfalls, the most formidable anti-submarine weapon in the country’s arsenal.

  In the five years of hostilities Sunderlands killed 28 U-boats and helped to destroy another seven. To fight back the U-boats were given anti-aircraft guns, but it didn’t do them much good. On one occasion they did manage to riddle a Sunderland so comprehensively that the crew on board knew they were finished. So they simply pointed the nose at the sub and deliberately crashed into it.

  Eventually the battle of the Atlantic came down to a technological war between the radar in the planes and the radar-jamming equipment on the subs, a war Britain kept on winning.

  But, surprisingly, the Sunderland was rather more than a flying listening station that could destroy targets when they were identified. It was also a damn good plane.

  On 2 June 1943 a lone Sunderland was on patrol when it was jumped by no fewer than eight long-range Junkers Ju-88 fighters. Now even if the German pilots were blind and mad, a ratio of eight to one should have assured them of victory. I mean, apart from anything else, they were in fighters and they were up against a converted post-office van.

  On their first pass the Sunderland was raked with fire and the forward machine gun was put out of action. On the second the radio was destroyed, and on each subsequent attack more damage was done. The crew didn’t fare terribly well either. One was killed and the others suffered wounds of varying severity.

  But on each of the passes the Germans were taking losses too, until only two of the original eight planes were left. They decided to scarper, leaving the wounded Sunderland to limp back to Cornwall where it landed safely and was driven on to the beach.

  Eight to one. Not even a Spitfire could have managed that.

  Unfortunately, however, while these flying boats were keeping the supply lines from America open their very future was being threatened back at home.

  By the time the war ended Britain was a mass of airfields, which had been hastily built to house the vast numbers of fighters and bombers. So now there was no need to land at sea. Now new planes with wheels and jet engines could land six miles from the outskirts of London.

  There have been attempts over the years to make jet-powered seaplanes. There was the Caspian Sea Monster, for one, and various attempts by the Americans. But really, everyone knew the flying boat was finished. Everyone, that is, except a com
pany called Saunders Roe.

  With airfields changing the face of air travel, this tiny Isle of Wight-based operation decided to have one last go at a truly magnificent flying boat. And what they had in mind wasn’t that far short of sticking wings on a cross-channel ferry. What they had in mind was something called the Princess, a 105-seat monster.

  It sounded daft but Saunders Roe had a reputation for thinking out of the box. Over time they built helicopters, rocket-assisted fighters, hovercraft and space probes, so when they said they were going to make a seaplane, when seaplanes were finished, and that theirs would have ten engines and six props and would weigh 320,000 lbs, the government said ‘sure’ and gave them £10 million.

  It would be the biggest plane the world had ever seen, a 220-foot-wide double-decker fitted with all the appurtenances of gracious living. Powder rooms, restaurants. It would be Blenheim Palace in the air.

  What staggers me about this project is that it didn’t simply wither and die. The boffins at Saunders Roe really did get stuck in and make their amazing plane. And not just one but three of them. And then what staggers me even more is that on 21 August 1952 this giant did actually fly.

  She had been taken out merely to see how she handled while taxiing but test pilot Geoffrey Tyson gave all ten engines some beans and up she went. Much later, when asked why he’d done this, he said, ‘Well, she simply wanted to fly, so I let her.’

  She actually flew on ten more test flights before someone somewhere realised she was heading in completely the wrong direction. The future of flight lay in low cost, not Earl Grey. Three or four hundred people crammed in like sardines, not 105 lounging around on sofas. And as a result the plug was pulled.

  For years people wondered what might become of these three giants, which sat on the quayside on the Isle of Wight, rotting. At one point NASA showed an interest, thinking they could be used to transport Saturn V rockets. At another some bright spark suggested they could be used as a test bed for nuclear-powered aircraft. In the end, though, no one could think of anything and they were broken up for scrap.

  I once saw a Princess and it left a lasting impression. Because unlike normal flying boats, which were planes with sculptured undercarriages, this one really did look like a giant boat, with a keel. And even allowing for the fact I was seven and small, it was absolutely bloody massive.

  It was also an example, like Concorde, of post-war Britain barking up the wrong tree and getting it wrong. However, when you encounter a magnificent folly in the grounds of a stately home, you often wonder what on earth possessed the old blue-blood to build such a thing. But you never think he shouldn’t have bothered in the first place.

  SS Great Britain

  In 1936 the governor of the Falkland Islands, Sir Henniker Heston, decided the old barge in Port Stanley harbour was really too far gone to be used as a floating coal and wool bunker any more. So it was towed out to the windswept and barren Sparrow Cove, where it was holed below the water line, beached and left to rot.

  This was a sad day because the rusting old hulk wasn’t a barge at all. It had started out in life as the SS Great Britain. The most amazing ocean liner of them all.

  It wasn’t the biggest or the fastest, and it certainly wasn’t the most luxurious, but it was Genesis. A ship 50 years ahead of its time. The first iron-hulled steamship with a propeller ever to cross perhaps the most dangerous stretch of water in the world: the North Atlantic.

  Of all the world’s oceans this is the most psychopathic. The Southern Oceans are always angry and fierce. You know what to expect. But the North Atlantic can kill you in ways you never even thought possible. One moment it’s calm and benign and then, just when you think the trip will be kind and friendly, you find yourself facing the kind of rogue wave that nailed George Clooney in The Perfect Storm. That’s assuming, of course, you’ve managed to dodge the other shipping in the thick cloying fogs that hang over the Grand Banks for months on end, and to miss the icebergs that drift southwards from Greenland between June and September. But sometimes in other months as well, just to catch you out.

  When we think of this 3,000-mile stretch of water we think of the Titanic, and we marvel at the loss of life. 1,500 souls going to their icy graves in what we assume was a freak accident. But it wasn’t a freak at all. It was just another page in another chapter in a roll-call of death that boggles the mind.

  History teaches us that in the eighteenth century France and Britain waged a war in America and that men, messages and supplies were routinely carried between the Old and New Worlds as though the crossing were some kind of train journey. Not so. In the 300 years after Columbus found the Americas tens of thousands died trying to follow in his footsteps. It is estimated that off the coast of Britain alone there are 250,000 ships on the seabed, and in 1839 Parliament reckoned that 1,000 people a year were dying at sea.

  Those that did make the journey talked of icebergs bigger than houses and massive waves over 100 feet tall. They spoke of 120mph winds and holes in the ocean. They spoke of a lumpen, vicious, white-flecked, freezing, grey, watery hell.

  In the nineteenth century, engineering was beginning to work its magic. Invented as a concept in France, where bright men with huge foreheads sat around talking about the possibilities, it was taken up by the British, who actually dug the coal, made the iron and got the machines to work.

  If anyone had come to Britain in, say, 1840, they simply wouldn’t have believed their eyes. Elsewhere in the world it was sail and oxen, but here there were factories and steam engines and trains. It would have been like visiting a country today where they have interstellar travel and dogs in spacesuits. We were light years ahead.

  Leading the charge was Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He’d cut his engineering teeth running a project to dig a tunnel under the Thames, the first tunnel ever to be excavated under water. Then he’d designed the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the Great Western Railway, or Mr Brunel’s billiard table, as it became known.

  Other engineers of the time were wary of putting their know-how to the test in a battle with the Atlantic. They had the machines to power ships but held back, fearful that no boiler, no matter how big and reliable, would be capable of dealing with such immense savagery. Investors held back too, fearful that their cash was bound to end up feeding the fishes.

  What’s more, there was a feeling that in order to have enough fuel to power the fires that heated the boiler all the available space on board would be taken up by coal. That meant no room for freight or passengers. And that rendered the whole idea pointless.

  ‘Pah,’ thought Brunel, and set to work. The idea, he told his paymasters at the Great Western Railway, was that you’d board a train at Paddington Station (which he also built), alight at Temple Meads in Bristol (yup, he built that too) and catch a steamship (which he would build) to New York from Bristol’s floating harbour (which was also one of his).

  The SS Great Western, a paddle steamer, was the result. There may have been only a handful of passengers on that first voyage but all were stunned with this new fangled device. ‘She goes it like mad,’ wrote one in his journal. ‘Its motion is unlike that of any living thing I know; puffing like a porpoise, breasting the waves like a sea horse and at times skimming the surface like a bird.’

  He made it sound terribly romantic, but actually it wasn’t. Smoke from the funnel turned everyone’s clothes black, cinders would regularly land in their hair, setting it alight, and the animal fats used as lubrication meant the whole ship smelled of bad cooking. Not good if you’re seasick.

  Still, the Great Western made the voyage in just fifteen days – the fastest ever crossing from England to America.

  ‘Yesssss,’ cried the world. Mankind has triumphed on land and now we have conquered the waves too. The age of the steamship is among us. We are invincible.

  But we weren’t. A company set up to rival Great Western built a ship called the President. Brunel thought it a lumbering mess and he was proved right, because it took a
pathetic sixteen days to reach New York. On the way back things were even worse, because it simply never arrived. The ship, with 110 souls on board, just disappeared. Then there was the Pacific, which went missing with the loss of 186 lives.

  This was a perennial problem back then and it had nothing to do with the Bermuda Triangle. There were no radios, no search-and-rescue helicopters and no radar. Ships had scheduled departure times, but because of the weather no one knew for sure when they’d arrive. Relatives waited and waited at quaysides, hoping to spot a telltale smudge of smoke on the horizon. Newspapers carried daily reports of vessels that had failed to dock. But nothing was ever heard of them again, and this meant no one knew just how terrifying it must have been to be aboard a liner that was going down in freezing seas, thousands of miles from land.

  They got some idea, though, in 1854, when the steamship Arctic with 281 passengers on board – including many women and children – charged at full speed through a fog bank on the Grand Banks. She smashed head-on into a French steamer called the Vesta.

  To begin with things went well. The chief engineer switched his pumps over to draw water from the bilges instead of the sea, thus turning the engine into an enormous pump. But it wasn’t enormous enough and the ship began to go down by the nose. The crew threw the heavy anchor and chains overboard and the passengers were ordered to the back, to try to counterbalance the weight of the water.