'What is Right with England
3.—An Mr-port and its Makers
[This is the third of ti series of articles in which Major Yeats- Brown sets out to give some account of those activities on which the England of to-day may justly pride herself. In his first article Major Yeats-Brown wrote of the B.B.C., "the best-run show in the world," and last week his subject was the McMillan Nursery School at Deptford.—Ec. Sp:v*61er.] WHY has Miss Amy Johnson so captured the imagination of the country ? Because she has proved that we are still planning and daring greatly.
She was bold, but not rash. She laid the foundation of her success at the engine-bench, in her overalls. Only a few people believed that she would succeed—her father first of all. That she has succeeded -should set us thinking how many other boys and girls there may be who are blazing for us the trails of to-morrow, and suffering under the lot of all such pioneers. One of them is Mr. Nigel Norman, who found a market garden at Heston and has made it into an Air Port.
In February, 1929, there was nothing but vegetables and cucumber frames on the spot where to-day, a year and a half later, an Air Park grows and prospers. From the bay window of the restaurant 'where we lunched I saw Mrs. Cleaver's Gypsy Moth go up, then Mr. Loel Guinness's Bluebird, then the HousehOld Brigade's crimson club machine. A wingless Klemm crawled over the landing field to the far side, looking like some tortured wasp. "It's going to have its compass tested," Mr. Norman explained—" no need to wear wings for that." • A new Avro " five " was warming up itsthree engines ; a school aeroplane swooped down, practising landings ; then an Old D.H.9. Great things are happening on the new-sown grass of Heston, if we look 'beyond the routineof to-day to the romance of to-morrow.
Mr. Norman. one of the two proprietors of the Park, is only thirty-two, and his partner is a few years younger. They were both in the Engineers during the last years of the War ; then one took a small position in the Metro- politan Railway, and the other a post in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Both worked their way up from the bottom, and for a few years they were too busy to think of holidays or hobbies ; but by 1924 both had their feet firmly planted on the ladder of success (one was Assistant to the Chief Engineer, the other, something similar in the British Petroleum Company) and they took up aviation as a sport. Flying fascinated them, so they left their safe and well-paid places to follow, a vision—a fantasy, as it must have seemed to their friends and advisers.
At that date they were both under thirty. Neither was rich, but both had certain expectations and an immense confidence in himself. Such was the position when they decided to make not merely a landing ground, but the best aerodrome near London.
At the beginning of last year this idea was still only a picture in their minds. They had negotiated for the purchase of some orchards and market gardens near the Great West Road ; but not a brick was laid, not a drain was dug, not a blade of grass was sown. There had been a great deal of talk. An older and more experienced partner had thrown up the scheme in dismay at their high-vaulting ambitions. Wise men had explained the difficulties, pessimists had declared they were on the 'Tata to ruin, and even their friends pointed out that neither of them had ever controlled any considerable sum, of money, or bought any land, or managed a club, or built a barn. Nevertheless, they went ahead..
They began by converting cabbage-patches into grass-land, and building a club-house, and sheds, and the first all-concrete air-hangar in England. But this was only a framework. Where was the flesh and blood of public- support, without which their ideal must remain a skeleton ? Yesterday, to many a solid citizen dozing in his club, it must have seemed as absurd to suppose that these young men could do what national :and civic enterprise had hesitated to attempt, just as in Elizabethan coffee houses the rashness of a handful of Devon boys was deplored when they set out to singe the beard of His Majesty of Spain.
To-day there is no beard to singe, but there is a new element to conquer ; and that is perhaps the greatest adventure on which this nation or mankind has yet embarked. Our Moths and Xvians and Bluebirds are descendants of the little sloops of Drake ; and they go out not as pirates but as pioneers. A month ago .Mr. Norman led a fleet of them on a tour through Europe, visiting half a dozen capitals with twenty light aeroplanes belonging to private owners ; and seventy travellers to and from the Continent have passed through Heston Customs House. During all the hours of daylight machines come and go like starlings on a lawn.
So Messrs. Norman and Muntz have justified the faith that was in them. Incidentally, Mr. Norman has designed all the furniture of the club, and runs its re- staurant. The latter I can recommend to anyone with a taste for English cooking, and the former to visitors who would see for themselves how our bright young people (not the B.Y.P. of fiction) are taking to the air to-day. Four of their instructors are at present engaged in training sixty pupils ; and forty others have already received their " A " licences. And teaching is only a small part of the business of the Port. There is an air-taxi service. There are garages where thirty or forty private machines are stored, including the Duchess of Bedford's Gypsy. Moth. (The charges, by the way, are no more than for a motor-ear--a guinea a week.) There are a high-pressure filling station and portable reservoirs. There are half a dozen hangars for private firms, who demonstrate their models here. There are workshops where I saw fuselages being repaired and engines being overhauled. And there is a mast for wireless telephony which aroused my awe, for it is con- nected with a room in the club containing an altar to an unknown god, with an inscrutable face of vulcanite, called a Graham Amplion set, by which one may talk to one's friends in the clouds.
What a world ! I would like to transfer some of the old gentlemen I see in the London clubs to this other club of the newer England, and give them the advice the children gave to Elisha. . . .
. They might not take it,- but I would show them the control tower, with its wireless, and other gadgets ; and the hall, where there is a map prepared by the Aviation Section of the Automobile Association registering wind and visibility in. all parts of England ; and the pilots' office, where the lists are kept of pupils and pleasure cruisers, and the sitting-room, where I would have pointed out to them, had they been with me the other day, the son of a Liberal statesman who had just bought a new Klemm, and vc,as_ taking it to Cambridge, and a man and wife who were taking their golf clubs to the East Coast, and returning to London for a theatre that evening. "All this is not, progress," the baldpates might say, and sink back to sleep in one of Mr. Norman's deep arm-chairs. On the other hand, they might not. They might cease to drivel of our decadence if they saw how young England- yearns for the, air, where we must renew the greatness we won through centuries of seafaring. Thank God that there are men of vision like Lord Wake- field, ready to take risks and back adventure ; and news- papers like the Daily Mail, which has helped flying con- sistently for more than twenty-five years. We can all help, according to our means and capacities : to this vast enterprise of aviation we can all contribute something of confidence, interest, admiration : we can attune our minds to it even if we cannot open our pockets.
Where is our poet of the air ? The Laureate has written gloriously of our older pride, and Mr. Kipling's McAndrew was herald of the newer, but the airmen and air-women of to-morrow must have a retinue of bards to celebrate their, exploits. To-day, some small straw- hatted Byron may be dreaming over there beyond the gasometer of Southall and the wireless of Northolt, where Harrow Church steeple cuts into the haze. If so, his eyes will see these fields of enterprise that are opening out in England, and his lips declare their wonder.
F. YEATS-BROWN.
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