Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (8 page)

With this, the chocks were removed from in front of the plane’s wheels, whereupon the machine lurched forwards across the rough paddock towards the cliffs, the air poured over and beneath the curved wings, providing that magic upward lift…and in no time at all he was
flying
towards England!

Behind Blériot on the cliffs of Calais, there was no wild applause or cheering as he took off, the tension was simply too strong.
⁸
At the instant of take-off, Alfred Leblanc and other support crew, together with reporters and the hundreds of spectators, at this early hour, rushed up the nearby sand dunes so they could watch the plane for as long as possible. And it was going well! The fact that it was 60 metres high already was incredible; as no-one had seen a plane at that altitude before.

‘Gradually,’ ran the account of one eyewitness, ‘we lost sight of the tiny little black spot which carried our fervent hopes, and nothing remained except the luminous sheet of water and the radiant sun. We were truly overcome by the disappearance.’
⁹
Between them there was a mixture of excitement, wonder and fear. They had either just witnessed a man flying to his death…or an historic triumph.

Quickly they jumped onto bikes and into cars and headed to the Marconi wireless hut a couple of miles away, which had been installed by the
Daily Mail
and was in contact with another wireless station installed on the roof of the Lord Warden Hotel at Dover. It was from here that Harry Harper’s reports to the
Daily Mail
had been transmitting all morning, and now, if there was news, this would be the place to hear it.

With just 17 gallons of petrol on board, it was imperative that Blériot cover the 22 miles to England in as direct a manner as possible. And, not to forget, every three minutes he had to furiously pump a hand-plunger atop an oilcan, to prevent the engine from seizing up. Strangely, because there was an endless expanse of water beneath him, with no rushing landmarks, Blériot had the sensation that he was travelling distinctly and unnervingly slowly, whereas on land it was
merveilleux
the rapidity with which everything passed beneath. And yet, travelling at just a little over 40 miles per hour, at an altitude of around 250 feet, the Frenchman quickly outstripped his naval escort, the destroyer
Escopette
, which, with his wife Alicia on board, had been sent out by the government for his possible salvation. Alicia saw her husband go overhead, flying just to the left of the smoke from the destroyer’s funnel, and waved furiously, but couldn’t help wondering if she would ever see him again. (She wished that sometime in his busy but not always glorious life to this point her husband had learnt how to swim.
Merde!
)

As it happened, Blériot was also soon wondering if he would ever see his wife again, as his remaining petrol reduced to
très peu
, and
Angleterre
refused to show. Only a few minutes after passing over the
Escopette
, he looked behind to check its position and found that both it and the French coast had disappeared! No shoreline behind…none in front…no boats in any direction.
¹⁰
He was totally,
totally
alone, if one did not count the ghosts of the Norman invasion of 1066 and all that, looking up in amazement as he passed over.

Adding to his worries was that the wind, which had been blessedly mild to this point, was now starting to buffet him and his tiny machine from side to side and up and down. Where, oh
where
, was England? It was all very well to just head roughly north-west and hope to hit it, but which way was north-west, anyway? He had neglected to bring a compass, and as a matter of fact, didn’t even have a watch. He simply continued to point his nose in the direction that Alfred Leblanc had indicated, trying to keep his shadow on the water just forward and out to his left as it had been when he had set off, and felt he must still be on track. Well, at least he hoped so.

Just as he began to feel the rising bile of panic, Blériot was at last relieved to see a thin grey line in front of him that
had
to be England. But,
hélas
, where were the fabled white cliffs of Dover? Of them, no sign at all…What he did see
however
were three small ships, all pointing in the same direction—surely towards a port—and he decided to follow their aquatic arrow. As he passed over the ships, the sailors took off their hats and waved at him, cheering all the while, which was heartening. And if he had spoken a word of English he might even have swooped low and asked them which way was Dover. Still, he felt, he
must
be getting close.

Sure enough, just a few minutes later, which was to say thirty-seven minutes after he had left France, he saw not just the white cliffs, but beyond them Dover Castle, where he intended to land. Blériot flew in over Dover Harbour, where by pure happenstance the suddenly puny-looking toy warships of the Home Fleet were anchored, and headed to the castle.

Not far away, an English writer by the name of H.G. Wells gazed, stunned, as what had been just a tiny speck on the horizon turned into an extraordinary flying machine soaring over his head. The English Channel had been conquered! On that feat alone, the possibilities of the future were astounding and, in that instant, as he would often later recount, his writer’s mind leapt forward to the days when the entire world was girdled by huge aerial fleets taking people hither and thither across the globe.
¹¹

For Blériot, Dover Castle now loomed large, and there, on a meadow just before it, was a friend waving a French flag! As it turned out, an enterprising French journalist, Charles Fontaine, had crossed the Channel by boat the previous day, having packed the French flag in the hope that he would be able to do precisely what he was doing as Blériot flew over.

Blériot swirled around to come in for something that was a lot less than a ‘landing’, and—some habits died hard, no matter how much improved his plane was—a lot closer to a ‘falling’.

‘
Merde
,
pas encore
,’ he murmured to himself, just before impact, but the main thing was that once again he survived intact—enough for a weeping Fontaine to immediately wrap him in the flag, bury him in kisses and shower him with many a heartfelt ‘
Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!
’

Within minutes, police, press and the people of Dover—many of them still getting dressed—had started to crowd onto the little field, all eager to shake the hand of the amazing Frenchman. Can you believe it? He flew here from France!

Blériot’s own English was restricted to ‘good morning’ and ‘sank you, ver’ much’, but at least he was able to get that out to everyone who congratulated him.
¹²

Back in Calais a short time later, the large crowd gathered outside the Marconi hut was ravenous for information. They could hear the endless beeps of Morse code coming from within, but what was happening!? Had he made it? Crashed? Disappeared? Been rescued? What? What?
What?!

At long last an elderly Englishman emerged from within, a veteran journalist from the
Daily Mail
with an upper lip so stiff you could hammer a 4-inch nail with it, and spoke to the assembled people displaying much the same emotion as he might have in reading a grocery list, not his own. ‘I am informed by the wireless station at Dover that an engineer of the Ecole Centrale de Paris, Monsieur Louis Blériot, born at Cambrai…piloting a flying machine of his invention…a monoplane, with an Anzani engine of 25 horsepower, equipped with a Chauvière propeller…who at 4.52 this morning left Les Baraques near Calais…has landed safely in a field at Dover Castle and…’
¹³

And that was as far as he got. For the rest was drowned out in cheers, tears and wild yells of exultation. Blériot’s team collapsed into each other’s arms in tears of joy and relief. And above it all, English voices could be heard, rousing the crowd to three cheers for Blériot! Yes, he was French, but his feat belonged to the world, and now so did he.
Man
had now flown across the Channel, and Blériot was that man.

But wait! Back in Dover, amid all the festivities, one thing had to be attended to. Through the throng and pressing towards the airman, came a very solemn, officious immigration officer, intent on doing his duty. First he wished to interrogate Blériot, as the ‘master’ of a ‘vessel’ that had arrived at the port of Dover, and then he gave him his official clearance papers.

‘I hereby certify that I have examined Louis Blériot, Master of a vessel called the Monoplane, lately arriving from Calais, and that it appears by the verbal answers of the said Master to the enquiries put to him, that there has not been on board during the voyage an infectious disease demanding detention of the vessel, and that she is free to proceed.’
¹⁴

Blériot was free to go! And so was his plane.

Which was to the good, as although the Frenchman was very pleased with his survival and his
grand exploit
, he had decided that where he really wanted to be was back in France with Alicia, with whom he had just been tearfully reunited on the Dover dockside, once the French destroyer
Escopette
had berthed. With that in mind, the French couple went back across the Channel on the
Escopette
that very afternoon, Louis thinking that his feat would bring him perhaps a little renown. He had no idea…

As Alicia later noted in her own memoirs, ‘
C’était le commencement de la gloire’
.
¹⁵
Within a day, Blériot had been prevailed upon to return to England, by boat across the Channel this time, where he found that he was the front-page news across the land—no newspaper selling more copies than Lord Northcliffe’s
Daily Mail
, which broke circulation records with its coverage, beginning with the enormous headline on the front page, ‘BLERIOT FIRST MAN TO FLY THE CHANNEL’. An editorial inside, penned by Northcliffe himself, was emphatic that ‘As the potentialities of the aeroplane have been proved, we must take energetic steps to develop a navy of the air’.
¹⁶
For its part, the
Daily Express
put its finger on the nub of the military significance of his feat with its own front-page headline: ‘GREAT BRITAIN IS NO LONGER AN ISLAND’. German journalists had pursued a similar theme, with
Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger
beginning its own coverage almost with martial glee: ‘
England ist keine Insel mehr
‘ (England is no longer an island).
¹⁷
And right there on the
Figaro
front page: ‘
Depuis aujourd’ hui on peut dire que l’Angleterre a cessé d’être une île
’ (From today, one can say that England is no longer an island).
¹⁸
After all, what price a mighty navy of Britannia ruling the waves, if there was now an entirely different realm above it which Britannia did
not
rule?

As Blériot alighted at Victoria Station from the saloon carriage specially attached to the regular train for the exclusive use of him and Madame, he was stunned to see an enormous crowd waiting for him, and all these people applauding and calling out his name in that strange accent they had—‘Mind the foot!’
¹⁹
someone shouted as he limped along, a little dazed—even as Madame Blériot was presented with a massive bouquet of carnations!
²⁰
And thus it continued all through the streets of London. People cheered at his very sight, as they proceeded along Buckingham Palace Road and entered The Mall, before going through Trafalgar Square, the crowd swelling as the couple neared their destination.

At a massive luncheon banquet held at the Savoy Hotel, situated on the Strand, and hosted by Lord Northcliffe, Blériot—who two days earlier had been more anonymous than a lost dog in the Bois de Boulogne—found himself seated right beside Sir Ernest Shackleton, whose own fame had been built on two journeys towards the South Pole, covering a combined distance of 35,000 miles and lasting a total of three years. The climax of the lunch was when Lord Northcliffe presented the Frenchman with a gold trophy and a cheque for £1000—or at least would have presented both things, had not Alicia stood up and reached forward at that precise moment to grab the money and crisply put it in her purse.
²¹

In response, Monsieur Blériot made a simple, elegant speech in French, which was translated to the crowd. Holding a glass of wine in his right hand he said, ‘I am deeply touched by your welcome, a welcome which is altogether out of proportion to the feat which I have accomplished. I hope that France and England, already united by water—by the Channel that was below me during my flight—may now be still closer united by air. I drink to England and to her King, and as you say in English, “your good health”.’
²²

With which, Blériot raised his glass and then sat down, beaming at his wife, as she beamed back at him, and all around that massive ballroom—resplendent with French and British flags awash in the glorious light of so many candles refracting through all the crystal glassware—a spontaneous standing ovation took place as lords and ladies, cabinet ministers, industrialists, magnates and many of the good and great of the day expressed their deepest admiration.