Very interesting post Kath - thank you. Shame most of us missed the Bleriot flyers coming iover to celebrate Jessop's flight. I'd have loved to have seen it.
Many of these early aviators were completely potty - I loved the story of Jules Nardini, the Italian aviator who became the 'resident' aviator at the brief Whitfield aerodrome. Apparantly he had been expelled from France for 'dubious' political activities and fled to Britain in July 1912 - en route he dropped lots of leaflets on Calais justifying his position...
There was also Claude Graham-White who camped out on Northfall Meadow in December 1910 to attempt the Baron de Forest longest-flight-into-Europe prize but had his Farman plane heavily damaged when a tent fell on it. According to Flight magazine: "a relic-hunting crowd succeeded in making off with one aileron, the whole of the trailing edge, and of nearly all the " tendeurs." Nice amiable idiots the average gaping crowd."
Such high praise for us Dovorians.
And then there was Samuel Cody a flamboyant Texan character who became a naturalised British citizen in order to pursue his interest in aviation. He even gave a lecture in the Town Hall on the 12th December 1912 called the Progress of Flight. He was killed in an air crash the following summer.
Those Magnificent Men really wasn't much of an exaggeration!
Samuel Franklin Cody (1897-1913)
