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Aviation History
1956
1956 - 1798.PDF
962 FLIGHT THE log-fire is crackling, and the antimacassars areagleam in its dancing light. ... Welcome to the hearth,Flight reader from sixty years hence. Permit me to charge your glass, and pray accept this small literary remembrance of our 1895 Christmastide. A selection of Mr. Ruskin's latest essays, you enquire? A recent gathering of Mr. Swinburne's ballads ... ? Oh, no! Come off it, chaps. How corny have you got in sixty-one years? Now, relax. And let's skip the shocked-and-startled stuff. You're not honestly taken in by this antimacassar nonsense, are you? And because I'm wearing the old dundrearies a little long this season you don't have to take me for Air. Gladstone, you know. Let's face it: I've got another six gruesome (pardon, glori- ous) years of the Victorian era ahead of me. The Wright brothers are just a couple of kids, messing about with bikes, and the first issue of Flight isn't coming out till 1909. By then I'll be 50; so you can't expect force-on types like myself to go on stomaching this Ruskin and Swinburne nausea. Besides, what makes you think we're going to sit back on our ottomans and wait twenty or thirty years for the first cover girl? My dear old lad, be your age. At least be contemporary. Now look. You popped back here, in your rosy Christmas dream, for a good old gorge of Victoriana. Right? Well that's what you're going to get—with all the knobs on and all the stops out. So let's take a reading. The trim little number in the boater, decorating the railings here, is Violet. She's the genuine first-prototype cover girl, and she's either recoiling from something nasty in the wood- shed or is civilly retracting her torso to make room for the by-line. "By George Griffith", see; and by George he's really in the groove, this Griffith. Don't on any account miss his other hot numbers, especially Olga Romanoff; the Syren of the Skies. Came out last year—1894. Absolute fizzer. Aero- nautics and anarchy, with a spot of S.A. and blood-and saw- dust on the side, like The Outlaws. What shall it be, now? Aerodynes, anarchy, amours or assassination? How's this—just for style? "Meanwhile, two of the men had risen from their seats. One ofthem tied a red handkerchief tightly round the dead man's skull, to stop what little bleeding there was from the two clean-cutwounds, and then the two picked him up and carried him out of the room." 'I hope I haven't shocked you by such a rough-and-ready TOWARDS the close of the nineteenth century, following thevogue of Jules Verne, came a new movement in English popular fiction. Lively yor.ng writers and illustrators—among themFred T. Jane, who later in life was to found "All the World's Aircraft"—introduced imaginary flying machines into their sensa-tional tales, creating, in effect, an English school of blood-and- thunder science fiction. Anarchy was a favourite theme for theirmelodramas, and the ladies played prominent, if not always pertinent, parts. No bibliography exists, but the first such work appears- tohave been "Hartmann the Anarchist," by E. Douglas Fawcett, the author's annotated copy of which is preserved in "Flight's"own library. Dated 1893, this novel is claimed, doubtless with justification, to have "marked the first appearance of the waraeroplane in English literature—or rather yarning." At about the same period one George Griffith published aseries of similar romances in which aeroplanes figured promin- ently and sensationally. Today his curious tales (they include"The Angel of the Revolution" and "Olga Romanoff; the Syren of the Skies") are all but forgotten; but one—described by H. G.Wells in his own great fantasy "The War in the Air" as "an aeronautic masterpiece"—we now revive as a Christmas dream. administration of justice,' said Max, half turning in his chair andaddressing a girl who sat next to him on his right hand. " 'No,' said the girl. 'It was obviously necessary. If half youcharged him with is true, he ought to have been crucified, let alone shot. I can't think what such vermin are made for.' "As she spoke, she flicked the ash off a cigarette that she heldbetween her fingers, put it between as dainty a pair of lips as ever were made for kissing, and sent a delicate little blue wreathingcloud up to mingle with the haze " And Miss Blandish won't be getting in on this girl's act for another half-century. Anyway, bottoms up, and I'll find you the part where these outlaw types are having a bit of a thrash before they tackle the old airborne anarchy lark. This is it:— " 'Meanwhile, you, Hartog, shall get your thirty-five-knotsea-devil afloat and to business till you've levied ocean tolls enough to give us funds to build an aerial fleet . . . and then we'llhave no more hole-and-corner assassinations and no more petti- fogging bomb-throwing. We'll declare war—war to the knife—on the world that we hate, and that hates and fears us, and then—' " 'Here's your glass, my Lord of the Air that is to be,' said thegirl, handing him a full tumbler of champagne. 'And so let us have your toast.' " 'You shall have it, short and sweet,' said Max. "Here's life tothose we love, and death to those we hate—Vive I'Anarchie and the Outlaws of the Air!' " Well, it's not long before poor old Vi takes a real beating when one of these bods makes a fast, low pass. See, on page 80: — " 'Oh, poor Violet! I see it now—I see what happened! Renaultmust have taken her up in the air-ship with him, and she threw herself out. It was her white dress that we saw falling, and thatmust be her up in the trees.'" Too right it's Vi. So brace yourself for the M.O.'s report: — " 'My dear fellow,' said the doctor, leading him away, 'I'm notgoing to attempt to disguise from you the fact that the poor girl is very badly injured. Of course, I've not been able to make a verycomplete examination yet, but as far as I have been able to go, I have found that the right leg is broken above and below the knee,the collar-bone is broken, and the right shoulder badly dislocated. There is nothing in that that a strong young girl couldn't getbetter from, but I'm sadly afraid that there's serious injury to the spine as well, and concussion of the brain on the top of that.So far, I don't know whether or not there are any internal injuries, but of course there may be." " Now, don't take on, old boy. Vi's going to be O.K. Right as rain in a few chapters. Must have bashed the old boater though. Well, after Vi bales out the amorous aerial anarchist really gets weaving. He's one crazy aviator. Get this : — " 'It is too glorious, too transcendent for words, this conquestof the air really achieved at last, the realization of all dreams of flight from the days of Daedalus until now. Look, look, my eyes,for you have never beheld such a scene as this before, nor have the eyes of any mortal man before me—ntoi, Max Renault, verit-able roi des airs! For what is mere commonplace ballooning to
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