Flight Of The Mew Gull

Alex Henshaw

• Publisher: Airlife
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781847974082
• Topic: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Subtopic: Aviazione

Alex Henshaw had the luck to grow up in the '20s and '30s during the golden age of flying. The Blue Riband of flying in the British Isles between the two World Wars was the King's Cup: Henshaw set his heart on it, developing a technique of racing which extracted the very maximum from his aircraft: first the Comper Swift and then the DH Leopard Moth. Parallel with his search for speed was an obsession with making accurate landfalls, and he developed this blind-flying taken deliberately in a flying partnership with his father on many carefully planned long-distance survey flights. His exciting apprenticeship in these two skills was crowned by the acquisition of the Percival Mew Gull G-AEXF in 1937. His amazing solo flight to Cape Town and back in February 1939 established several solo records that still stand today, almost 60 years later. This feat of navigation and airmanship must surely be one of man's greatest flights - 12, 754 miles over desert, sea and jungle in a single-engined light aircraft.

PART ONE

AGE OF INNOCENCE

CHAPTER ONE

FIRST WINGS

I must have caused my parents a great deal of worry. The earliest recollection I have of shock was on my mother’s face when a policeman came to the door with a summons for Alexander Adolphus Dumfries Henshaw. I think I was nine at the time. I was petrified and immediately thought of my poaching efforts on the railway cutting with my double-barrelled .410, but from the injured and ashamed look on my mother’s face, I guessed it must be something more serious. I had forgotten that two weeks before I had cycled to the cinema in Lincoln, and when I came to ride home in the dark, my lights failed. As it was five miles or more, I couldn’t walk, so I took a chance. Unfortunately for me, just when I thought I was in the clear an enormous figure loomed out of the night and grabbed my handlebars, and although I explained to the policeman that my dynamo had failed, he said I ought to know better and wrote things down in a little book. I now looked at this very official document with my name in clear print and wondered what my father would say. In fact he said very little, although he was not at all pleased. ‘You want to learn the eleventh commandment,’ he said. ‘It’s one of my own: Thou shall not get caught.’

I suffered days of anguish whilst my parents discussed who was to take me to court. Then quite suddenly the position came to me very clearly: no one was going to take me; I had got myself into this mess and I would get myself out of it. My mother would not hear of it, but my father, who I think really appreciated my stand, said ‘OK, if that’s how you feel about it.’ I knew the ancient Roman Stonebow very well, but I had not known it was also a Magistrates Court. I sneaked in and hid behind a chair.

Then suddenly huge lumbering policemen seemed to be everywhere and they were calling ‘Henshaw, Henshaw’. When I moved out of my hiding place, a policeman nearly fell over me and said, ‘What are you doing there, sonny? This is no place for you.’ ‘My name is Henshaw,’ I said. The magistrates were somewhat nonplussed and in reply to their query as to who was defending me, I said I didn’t understand what they meant. Then one of the elderly gentlemen on the bench asked me if I had any money. When I said I hadn’t, he asked, with a loud guffaw, if I knew the prison sentence for non-payment of fines. Before I could reply, a lady magistrate spoke up sharply and rebuked him for frightening the child. There was a hushed conversation between the Chairman, the Clerk, the policeman who booked me and a senior police officer. I guessed the police were getting it in the neck for having brought me there, as the constable, to my glee, back-tracked from the bench, very red in the face, and the lady magistrate said in a very kindly voice, ‘If you promise never to do it again, you can go.’

A few years later my mother looked out the window, exclaimed and said, ‘There’s a policeman coming up the drive!’ I couldn’t think of anything really bad I had done recently, so I was not unduly worried, but when he said in a loud voice he had a document for Alexander Adolphus Dumfries Henshaw I wanted to die. If only the floor would open up and swallow me. I was so shaken that I did not hear my mother’s gasp of joy, or the policeman saying what pleasure it gave him to request, on behalf of the Lincoln County Magistrates, if I could attend an official ceremony to be presented with the Royal Humane Society’s award for saving a boy’s life in the River Witham the summer before. I remembered the incident well, but was embarrassed to read the citation and the press reports, and thought they grossly exaggerated the true situation. Inwardly I wanted to say it was not strictly true and there were others involved as well as myself, but I hadn’t the courage. The press reports said I dived fully clothed into the river and saved the boy as he was going down for the third time. The true story is that I heard the boy yell whilst I was dressing on the bank. I rushed on to the wooden ferry moored near the edge of the water, and paused to take off my trousers and shoes as they were new, and mother had said she would tan me if I messed them up. When I dived in the boy had panicked and I had a job to hold him up, but did so as I trod water frantically; whilst I was working slowly towards the bank, other boys rushed in and grabbed us both, The most gratifying part of the whole incident to me was when I went again to the Lincoln Magistrates Court and heard, not ‘Henshaw’ called, but, ‘Would Master Henshaw kindly step forward, please?’

During that period of my life, water and I seemed to go together, for the next summer I was at Trusthorpe, on the East Coast, when someone rushed up to me one evening and said, ‘There’s a dog in the Grift Drain, drowning.’ I ran on to the beach right away, and saw a small crowd watching a little Yorkshire terrier being swept back and forth as the tide surged up and down the Grift sea defence drain-run, really a large wooden open-faced tunnel on the seaward side, disappearing into the sandhills as a tunnel to link up with the land on the other side, from which it drained all the water. I knew the tunnel well, for in my more daring moments, and when the tide was going out, I had paddled a canvas canoe down it and out to sea. I realised at once that unless the dog was brought out it would be plunged into the tunnel with a large wave and that would be the end. Everyone was making suggestions how to reach the dog, but no one was doing anything, and the old lady who owned it was crying bitterly. I stood it so long, and then without really being able to help myself I slipped off my shirt and boots before anyone could stop me and jumped into the racing drain. I grabbed the small dog in my hands, waited for a wave to surge me upwards and as I did so held the dog up so that those on the side could reach it. Now I was in trouble, but whereas no one had been doing anything for the dog, several men rushed into action when they saw me in difficulties. By the time I was too near the tunnel entrance for comfort and I was a very relieved boy when two men were able to lean over the drain wall and grab me before another wave surged me under. My father played hell over this incident when he heard, but I could see he didn’t mean a word of it, and in any case the pathetic little letter I received from the old lady made it all worthwhile.

My father was a great adventurer. He was one of a very large family, and at the age of sixteen ran away to America, landing with thirty shillings in his pocket. The first winter he spent in a lumber camp, but as the company owning the camp went bankrupt and the weather was bitterly cold, he had to stay there living on bad flour, bilberries and pork. It was not often he spoke of his early days, but when he did I hung on to every word. He trekked off into the Hudson Bay territory and at one time was alone on snowshoes with only a rifle and a little food, and the nearest white man was nearly a hundred miles away. Once he had a huge Scandinavian draw a knife on him, and as he lunged with the knife, my father hit him with all his strength, knocking him out; he took the knife from the inert body and kept it as a souvenir. After a long and often distressing period in which my father said he had never suffered nor worked so hard in all his life, he met by chance an old prospector who took a liking to him. They had the unbelievable luck to discover a silver mine which enlarged considerably the original thirty shillings he had landed with in America, enabling him to return to England a richer and more experienced man.

I loved to get into an escapade with my father, who sometimes had bright ideas which went wrong. He once thought that a fleet of barges would solve some of the transport problems in his business, so he hired a sea captain to tow three barges on to the Frieston Marshes near Boston. The calibre of the sea captain may be judged by the fact that with a heavy-gauge hemp rope he tied one of the barges tight up to the Boston wharf at high tide and left it; when the tide dropped at least fifteen feet the barge dangled from the wharf with one end under the water like a black sausage on a butcher’s hook. We eventually started down the River Witham in the tug, towing all the barges in a string aiming to reach the marshes at high tide, where the tug would run the barges as near to the shoreline as possible; then we would return with the tug to Boston. Unfortunately it didn’t work out that way. We got rid of one of the barges, but then as we were going full blast with the next one the tug gave a sudden lurch which flung all of us on the deck into a heap, and we came to a sudden but definite stop. We were aground and there was nothing we could do about it until the next tide. We all went below, but as the boat was at an acute angle the quarters were very uncomfortable; the fire also smoked badly and we began to feel rather like badly packed kippers. My father suggested that we try to walk over the marshes and reach Frieston on foot, but the tug captain said it would be dangerous and wellnigh impossible. We stuck it out for an hour or so, but I could see my father was getting restless and working up to something. Finally he said, ‘You stay here, Alex, I’ll see if we can reach the shore on foot.’ I said I could swim and jump, and where he went I would go. I shall never forget that walk over the marshes, with the tide running out of the almost foll creeks and each of us walking over the samphire in the dim light, searching for a firm spot where we hoped we could jump across. If one of us had fallen in I don’t know what would have happened, as the creek water was surging out really fast However, eventually we saw the Frieston bank loom out of the darkness, and with a little more probing we found the local pub and soon had some transport to take us in a very bedraggled state to Boston.

Somewhere between the age of ten and twelve I was burning to do something, and finally persuaded my parents to allow me to take a canvas canoe, with a friend of my own age, from Lincoln to Boston for a week’s camping along the River Witham. We couldn’t afford a real tent but took along a sheet of canvas, which we aimed to prop up on sticks. We had a sail but found that every time we put it up we capsized. We had enough food on board for a week, supplemented by helping ourselves to the odd meal of potatoes growing in the fields near the river, and I had my faithful .410 for rabbits and ducks.

The first day was wonderful. The river was like a black mirror, the only ripples were those made by our paddles and the canoe. The only sounds, a skylark high in the sky, or the occasional waterhen disturbed in the reeds as we went silently by.

The first night was fun and we enjoyed our meal, even if we did forget to salt the potatoes. The ground was not as soft as our comfortable beds at home and I do not think either of us slept very much.

The next day dawned fine and warm, but later on an ominous change took place and the blue sky suddenly developed dark, heavy clouds. By the afternoon it had started to rain, so we looked for a suitable place to erect our tent. We found a good spot underneath a large overhanging hedge: at first we were sheltered and no rain fell on to our makeshift tent, so we were quite happy; but as the rain continued it started dropping from the hedge on to our canvas and to our dismay leaked on to us and our blankets. Soon we were so wet that it did not matter whether we were inside the tent or outside in the pouring rain. We decided to strike camp and paddle down the river in the hope of finding a better shelter. As luck would have it, we came upon an old houseboat half submerged and heeling over at an alarming angle. Part of the roof was still on, and if we clung to the deck rail, we could lie on the wooden deck sheltered from most of the rain; but if we let go we fell into the river. Both of us were feeling very wretched, cold and miserable and only our pride kept us from striking for home. The night was for both of us the worst we had ever experienced. We couldn’t sleep, and if we dozed off we slid into the water, which we did several times. It rained steadily all night and our canoe, tied up to the wreck of the boathouse, was well down in the water with our blankets gently floating in the bottom.

As dawn broke we were pretty demoralised. We couldn’t talk for the wet and cold, we couldn’t make a fire, and our food was ruined. Just when things seemed at their worst, the clouds suddenly started to break up, the rain stopped, and within an hour we were warming ourselves in glorious sunshine. From then on we organised ourselves somewhat better. We replenished our stocks at a nearby shop, dried out all our wet equipment, and then discovered that our canvas kept out the water if we did not touch it from the inside. We reached Boston and found a good spot to camp and prepare for our return. That night we made a large bonfire, and we were enjoying the dying embers before turning in when we heard movements in the tall grass some distance away. As it was dark and we could not see, I whispered to Eric, my friend, ‘What shall we do?’ I quickly loaded my .410 and sat in the entrance of the tent with the gun covered by a blanket. The rustling in the grass came nearer, and then stopped. We shouted out, ‘Who’s there?’ and out of the blackness shuffled a tramp with long hair and a beard which covered his whole face. I cocked the triggers of my .410 and held it under the blanket pointed towards him. After asking if we would heat some water for him in his tin can, he warmed himself for a few moments in front of the dying fire and then went on his way. We ourselves turned in, but I am afraid neither of us slept much that night.

The time was approaching when I would soon have to make up my mind what I was going to do with my life. I was no great scholar. I hated school, but I loved the wide open spaces. My headmaster’s reports left me somewhat deflated when read by my father; one of them said I was inclined to be pugnacious. I thought at the time that this was a little unfair; I always felt that I didn’t go looking for trouble, but somehow it seemed to find me. I was small for my age, and when an argument started I should have backed down. Unfortunately, I never seemed to be able to do this. As the other boys were almost always bigger than me, I was fair game and I soon realised that unless I could win I was on a hiding to nothing all the time. What I lacked in size I had to make up in speed, agility and hitting power, and this I did. Amongst boys that knew me I was soon treated with a respect uncalled for by a boy of my age and size, and I think we all got on well together.

At heart I wanted to be an engineer; I always loved engines and could strip an Austin 7, under my father’s guidance, from the age of ten. I also had a great feeling for the Services, but doubted whether I was temperamentally suited for such a life. This is not to say that I was unpatriotic, in fact all my life I have felt intense emotions towards our Royal Family and the land of my birth. I have never been able to analyse these emotions to any real degree of satisfaction. It is true that both my father and my mother were always loyal and patriotic, but certainly not in a demonstrative way. It may well be that the seed was sown when as a boy of seven or eight, I sat at the very desk and in the same room that Shakespeare once used, and listened as the form-master recounted details of our struggles in Flanders, the Somme and elsewhere. When from my father’s shoulders, I saw the first Lord Mayor’s show after the 1914–18 war, it was a sight that was to live in my memory for ever. To me it seemed that the Empire of that day was a large family, with typical family troubles, difficulties and quarrels; but like any good family, when a member is in serious trouble everyone else rallies round. When I saw the parade with the Australians, who did the impossible at St Quentin; the New Zealanders, probably the best infantrymen in two World Wars; the Canadians, who took Vimy Ridge at enormous cost; and so many others from Gurkhas to Senegalese, from submariners to airmen, all of whom came to our aid when in dire need, it left me so filled with emotion I was unable to see or talk.

My father was a businessman with an astute mind, and as such he saw no great future in the professions, so my future hung in the balance for a long time. Eventually it was agreed that I should be an engineer. I was to be apprenticed to Rolls-Royce at Derby and would try to take a degree at Loughborough University. I was now at an age when life was a great adventure, full of enormous expectations. I had no real responsibilities, I loved sport and was naïve enough to think all my heroes were made of carat gold and that in the world there were only two types of people, the good and the bad. My great loves at this time were my labrador dog, Jock, and my gun, and I would march or sit for hours in any weather after duck, geese, partridge and pheasant When I was told there was a waiting list of two years at Rolls-Royce, I was not unduly disturbed. I don’t think that my father thought the same way. He had varied business interests in those days, so that I did the rounds to determine if I showed any particular aptitude. First I went into his radio business, which was booming with crystal sets being made and sold in large numbers. I didn’t like that and have never really understood the mysteries of what was then a comparatively new science. I then went into my father’s new garage enterprise. This I liked, but as a future business career it did not appeal.

I then moved over the coast, where my father had a small holiday building concern. I liked this because it gave me a wide variety of practical experience, I wasn’t covered with oil and grease all the time, and I had ample opportunity to shoot the moment the season opened. There was one big snag, however. I didn’t earn much money. I did not expect my father to give me more than he would other boys of my age, but my expenses were rising, so were my day-to-day requirements. I decided to open up a small business of my own, making concrete slabs, posts, etc. As I stubbornly insisted upon putting in my normal working hours for my father, it meant getting up early in the morning, sometimes at four o’clock, and working late in the evening. I made some money, but it was terribly hard work. My fathe...