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The First World War was the first conflict in which aviation played a major role for all the combatant nations involved. Prior to the Wright brothers’ achievement of controlled aircraft flight in America in 1903, the military services of various nations had used balloons and airships at war. In Britain, the Royal Engineers became responsible for the Army’s ballooning capability. Despite the sceptical views of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff and the First Sea Lord expressed in 1910, an Air Battalion of the Royal Engineers was formed in 1911 Then on the 13th April 1912 the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) was established, formed of a Military Wing and a Naval Wing.
The Military Wing comprised three squadrons, a fourth being formed in August 1912. In September 1912, 3 Squadron (formed as an aircraft unit at Larkhill on 13 May 1912) was playing a role in a war game involving some 75,000 troops across East Anglia. Part of General Griegson’s “Blue Force” tasked with defending London, 3 Squadron’s role was to provide reconnaissance intelligence: thus demonstrating the capabilities of aircraft to a still-sceptical cadre of senior War Office personnel.
The Squadron had been formed from 2 (Aeroplane) Company of the Air Battalion Royal Engineers. It was the first independent military unit to fly heavier-than-air machines and included Captain Patrick Hamilton and Lieutenant Athole Wyness Stuart. Hamilton (b1882), Worcestershire Regiment, learnt to fly at Hendon, gaining his Royal Aero Club certificate (number 194) on 12 March 1912 having spent a spell flying in America. Wyness Stuart (b1882), Royal Field Artillery, was awarded his certificate (number 141) on 26 September 1911 having learnt to fly at Brooklands.
That's the background: Please note, while I'm no expert on old aircraft or the Royal Flying Corps, for many years I believed what I had been told. The obelisk in Willian marked the spot where an airship from Cardington crashed killing all on board. I could find no information on the internet or find any books that told of any event until I found a small paperback written by Richard Whitmore (the news reader) "Hertfordshire Headlines" published 1978. The book was no longer in print but was listed at a Hitchin second hand bookshop. It gave me some of the information to follow. I even contacted RAF Hendon as Hamilton had learnt to fly at Hendon and see if they held any data on the crash. The information I received after 29 days from Peter Elliott Senior Keeper, Department of Research & Information Services, Royal Air Force Museum was not what I expected. Quote:
"Thank you for your enquiry. I'm afraid that we are unable to throw any more light on Captain Hamilton, apart from the fact that he was serving in the Worcestershire Regiment, apparently attached to the RFC. There is a plaque to him in the regimental chapel in Worcester Cathedral."
While they did not have any further information on the first pilot to die on active service, the website did list a crash of the 10th September at Wolvercote, Oxford. For reasons best known, they have no record of the fatal crash of Friday 6th September 1912.
Numerous internet searches gave further information: The RFC's first fatal crash was on 5 July 1912 near Stonehenge. Killing Captain Eustace B. Loraine along with his observer, Staff Sergeant R.H.V. Wilson, flying from Larkhill Aerodrome. An order was issued after the crash stating "Flying will continue this evening as usual", thus beginning a tradition."
Some of the information below was sent to me by the great granddaughter of Captain Hamilton.
Today it stands a Grade II Listed Monument. A simple yet poignant granite memorial obelisk, in the Classical style. first listed 23rd March 2018
If you ever are out going from Willian to Wymondley on the east side (left) you will see a small granite obelisk set back on the grass verge. Inscribed are the words: In Memory of Captain Hamilton and Lieut Wyness Stuart of the Royal Flying Corps who lost their lives whilst serving in the newly formed Royal Flying Corps as aviators on Friday 6th September 1912. So what did happen? What plane were they flying?
The mono winged Deperdussin aircraft had been made under licence from a wealthy French silk merchant Armand Deperdussin who had founded his aircraft-building company Société pour les Appareils Deperdussin (SPAD) at Betheny near Reims, in 1910. The aircraft was a single-seat monoplane but the Royal Flying Corps wanted a place to put an observer so they had extended the single seater without increasing the size of the 119-kW (160hp) Gnôme rotary engine or strengthening any of the cabane struts. Today we know so much more about metal fatigue.
On Friday 6th September 1912 just after 06:00 Hrs on a gusty morning Captain Patrick Hamilton of No. 3 Squadron under orders took his Mono winged Deperdussin into the air from an airfield near Wallingford in Berkshire. Flying conditions were not ideal but they were not the worst Captain Hamilton had encountered, he had also survived two crashes. Seated in front muffled up in the wicker seat was Lieutenant Atholl Wyness Stuart, the observer. There was also a second aircraft piloted by Major Brooke Popham Officer Commanding of the Battalion's Aeroplane Company who was flying a much faster and stable bi-plane. The three Army officers who were fascinated by the exciting prospects of powered flight, had left their regiments to join the fledgling ranks of the Royal Flying Corps that had only been formed on the 13th April 1912 Constituted by Royal warrant along with a naval wing and a training school wing. The outcome of the manoeuvres were awaited with great interest by the generals in Whitehall.
Captain Patrick Hamilton had already had a narrow escape from death while flying in America in his privately owned Deperdussin, when his aircraft crashed after being sucked into an air pocket. In fact, the three men were flying at a time when there was still much to be learned about aviation and when many still held doubts about its potential. Since there was as yet no aeronautical language, motoring terms were frequently applied to these new vehicles of the air. The control column was 'the steering wheel', the metal engine casing or cowling was 'the bonnet' and airfields were known, daintily, as 'alighting grounds'. Aviators of this time had no standard flying kit beyond an assortment of leather coats and jerkins, breeches and leather caps which had been designed originally for the pioneer motorists and motorcyclists of the day.
The manoeuvres taking place in eastern England that autumn had been organised on an impressive scale. There were a total of 75,000 regular soldiers and reservists taking part in a mock battle in which Blue Force was defending London against the Red Force invaders who had landed on the east coast. Captain Hamilton and Major Brooke Popham were on reconnaissance for the defenders. As their aircraft reached the Hertfordshire border the three men waved and Brooke Popham in his faster bi-plane broke away to make for his own reconnaissance area. That was the last time he saw his two colleagues alive. When he touched down at the rendezvous point at Willian later that morning, he learned that Captain Hamilton and Lieutenant Wyness-Stuart were lying dead beneath the wreckage of their aircraft, barely a mile away.
For the people of North Hertfordshire, flying machines were the cause of much wonder and excitement; when one passed overhead (which was rarely), work stopped, housewives ran to their windows and small boys jumped on their bicycles to pedal off furiously in vain pursuit. The Deperdussin was approaching the ‘alighting’ area, which was part of a 100 acre field in Willian (owned by Mr Walter Brett, then landlord of the George and Dragon public house in Graveley) which had been prepared for its arrival. There was great excitement as one was going to actually land on the edge of the new Garden City. As a result, when Capt Hamilton passed over Stevenage and and began his descent, hundreds of eyes were upon him. There were many, therefore, who witnessed with horror what happened next. Because there were so many witnesses it was some time before a full and accurate picture of the last moments of the Deperdussin and its crew was completed.
Nearly all estimated that the aircraft was at about six hundred feet when the trouble began. Some claimed to have seen one of the aviators fall from the aircraft to his death some time before the machine began its final dive. One said it 'plummeted to earth like a dart', another that it 'fluttered to the ground like a bird shot on the wing'. However, most agreed that the 60hp Gnôme rotary engine, capable of producing speeds of 70 knots, was giving the pilot trouble well before the crash dive. It was clear, too, that - for some reason - the port wing folded and collapsed while the pilot, his engine having cut out, was desperately trying to reduce height for an emergency landing at Willian. Instead, his aircraft virtually disintegrated in mid-air and fell some 500 feet to plunge into a thick hedge at the bottom of a meadow. 'I saw the aircraft wobbling about,' Mr Brett was to tell the coroner later. 'It dipped and then came a report like a gun: Then the aircraft seemed to collapse altogether. I was too horrified to look any more I ran down and found the officers lying with the machine on top of them.' Both had died immediately upon impact.
The Public Safety and Accidents Investigation Committee of the RAeC concluded that the cause of Hamilton and Wyness-Stuarts accident "was due to the breakage of the outer wires supporting the left wing by a derangement of the cabane strut whilst in flight, caused either by: a) the fouling of the cowl by a valve rocker owing to the fracture of a valve tappet, or b) the partial failure or breakage of the propeller which, throwing the rotating system out of balance, caused severe racking stress and strained the attachments of the engine to such an extent that they ultimately gave way and the engine shifted. The engine attachments were too light for the engine.". The full report can be seen further down. The fact is no one knows what event took place but one fact we know to be true. The RFC changed the airframe from the original French design to add a second seat for an observer.
The Daily Mirror reported on the front page "Terrible air fatality at the manoeuvres: Two British officers dashed to death near Hitchin yesterday. VIEW PAGE This was not the first recorded air crash fatality in the newly formed RFC but Capt. Patrick Hamilton and Lieutenant Atholl Wyness Stuart were the first servicemen to die in a military aircraft while under military orders thus became first pilots to die on active service. The deaths were sadly the prelude to a number of disasters which clouded the first year of the RFC. Lieutenant E. H. Hotchkiss and Lieutenant C. A. Bettington were taking part in similar manoeuvres in a Bristol Coanda monoplane which crashed at Wolvercote, Oxford, some four days later on the 10th September. Both had died in the crash. The War Office placed a ban on The Royal Flying Corps flying monoplanes, this came into force on the 12th September, 1912. It would be many years before a monoplane would take to the air with the fledgling air force.
Although it was not until the 1914-18 war that these early aircraft were developed into proper fighting machines, the War Office had recognised their possible usefulness as a means of aerial observation, replacing the balloons and baskets and man lifting kites used during the Boer War. Preliminary trials on Salisbury Plain a few weeks earlier had proved that aircraft could be used to great advantage to spot enemy positions and troop movements and to drop messages to their own troops in the forward lines. Now the time had come to test these 'air scouts' and their flying machines in a large-scale battle situation. This was the mission of the three aviators as their little aircraft set off on a north-easterly course for the fifty-mile flight to North Hertfordshire and the war games.
While villagers and servicemen were working to remove the bodies from the wreckage, news of the sensational crash spread like wildfire. Sightseers came from miles around, lured by the fascinating horror of this new kind of disaster. They saw the shrouded bodies carried to the horse-drawn ambulance that conveyed them to a mortuary attached to St Saviour's Church in Hitchin. Some began searching the crash area and making off with pieces of the wreckage as souvenirs; the steering wheel of the Deperdussin eventually vanished this way and the curio-hunters almost prevented the investigators from discovering the cause of the crash - almost, but not quite.
Fortunately, it was an official who found the small length of connecting rod, fractured at both ends, lying two hundred yards from where most of the Deperdussin had fallen. Thus, at the inquest, Hamilton's flight commander and the works manager of British Deperdussin were between them able to supply enough evidence for the jury to be satisfied that it was a mechanical fault, and not pilot error or bad flying conditions, that had caused the crash. Speculation before the inquest had suggested that with the wind that day gusting up to 40 knots, it had been too dangerous for the aviators and that they should never have taken off; but Major Brooke Popham said both Captain Hamilton and his aircraft had flown safely in far worse conditions than had existed that Friday.
Both he and Mr Fritz Koolhoven, of British Deperdussin, agreed that the cause of the crash was the fracture of the connecting rod, used to operate the exhaust valves of the engine. Having broken away, the rod thrashed about inside for several minutes eventually causing a large section of the engine bonnet to break away; this, in turn, flew back, cutting through one of the main wire struts supporting the port wing. The wing then began to vibrate violently and it was only a matter of minutes before the wooden structure folded and collapsed completely. 'After such a breakage,' Mr Koolhoven commented, 'it would be quite impossible to fly the machine.'
Superintendent George Reed, head of the Hitchin Police division, confirmed that a large piece of the engine bonnet was found three hundred yards from the crash point, adding that it was almost certainly this big object falling through the air just prior to the crash dive which led some witnesses to assume mistakenly that one of the airmen had fallen out. Major Brooke Popham revealed the irony that the aeroplane in which the two officers died had, only a few weeks earlier, won a £2,000 prize when flown by a Frenchman during the trials and competitions on Salisbury Plain. Captain Hamilton, he said, had flown this machine for only three hours, but was used to similar machines. The jury returned a verdict of accidental death and paid tribute to the valour of the aviators. To view a copy of the official Public Safety and Accidents Investigation Committee report, click here.
The Graveley air disaster, which brought home to the public with brutal suddenness, the fact that the young men pioneering military aviation were engaged in an occupation that contained far more danger than glamour. Inevitably, Hamilton and Wyness Stuart, who were both aged 30, were awarded a hero's funeral.
The day of the memorial service hundreds of townspeople of Hitchin and surrounding villages turned out and lined the roads up to St Saviour's Church in Radcliffe Road, Hitchin. The church was completely filled by family mourners and members of the Armed Services, they could only stand outside in silence, hoping to catch a few words of the eloquent tributes and the hymn that had been composed especially for the event:
'Direct with thine all-seeing eye Watch each dread journey through the sky; Through every storm and danger zone, Bring each brave pilot safely home.
The airmen's coffins, borne by comrades of the Royal Flying Corps, were carried out to the gun-carriages; a military band, playing a funeral lament, led the cortege to Hitchin railway station past crowds lining the road ten deep in places. From Hitchin, the coffins were taken to different parts of England for private burial. Captain Hamilton, at his mother's request, was buried St Leonard’s churchyard Hythe Kent while Lieutenant Athole Wyness Stuart was accompanied by his young widow to St Mary’s, in the village of Great Elm near Wells in Somerset.
That week in Hitchin a memorial fund was opened and a stonemason put to work, and in the last week of September a large crowd gathered once again near the field where the Deperdussin had crashed. The small granite obelisk, bearing the names of the aviators, was erected, not in the meadow where they had fallen but some half mile away by the side of the road that runs between Willian and Wymondley. Captain Hamilton's mother laid a wreath of chrysanthemums upon it and his flight commander made a short speech after which the uniforms of the dead Officers were buried under the memorial stone obelisk. It was recorded some 7,000 people attended the ceremony.
The crash and ensuing funeral attracted national newspaper coverage. Combined with another crash a few days later also during the military exercises, resulting in the deaths of Lt Bettington and Lt Hotchkiss (commemorated by a plaque on the Grade II-listed Toll Bridge at Wolvercote), the War Office stopped the use of monoplanes in favour of biplanes, which were understood to be more stable aircraft: this policy affected British aircraft development for a number of years.
Of the stone memorial obelisk 'Some people,' said Major Brooke Popham, 'may think a memorial stone a waste of money and that it would have been more profitable to give it to the hospital or some local charity. I beg to differ. We should be a poor nation without recollections of noble deeds and heroic deaths to inspire us. The careless child and the weary wayfarer will pass along this road, look at this stone, read this inscription and realise that they, too, have a duty to perform. They will know that patriotism it not an empty word and that Englishmen are still ready to lay down their lives in the service of their country.'
Two years later, events in Europe proved only too well how right the major was in fact he was to serve in both world wars and be the first RAF officer to be appointed Commander-in-Chief of a joint command during a major world war. He gained the rank of Air Chief Marshal.
A fully restored 1910 single seater Deperdussin Monoplane can be seen at the Shuttleworth Collection at Old Warden which has the Deperdussin listed in its flying display. The conditions have to be right for this aircraft to fly. The aircraft starred in the film "Those Magnificent Men and their Flying Machines"
Lastly, to view an article written in 1913 by Miss Ethel Hamilton, sister of the late Capt. Patrick Hamilton, click here. sent to me by the great grand daughter of Capt Hamilton.
Last edited 14/09/2019 11:34:30 first published June 2001
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