Carleton Hall
CARLETON HALL: Temporary and mistaken landing spot
NOTES: To help illustrate how flying was conducted at the outbreak of WW1 this account by Peter Connon in his ‘In the Shadow of the Eagle’s Wings’ seems worthy of repeating.
“The War Office, which was the body responsible for the air defence of Britain, ordered B.C.Hucks, (the first British pilot to loop an aeroplane), now a Lieutenant in the RFC – to fly to Penrith in order to make a night reconnaissance of the northern Lake District. (It seems that reports that a German aeroplane/airship was secretly operating in the area was treated very seriously indeed!).
On Wednesday August 19 Hucks flew in a Blériot X1 from Preston to Penrith, where arrangements had been made for him to land on the same field used by Salmet twenty days before. Passing over Appleby at 2.45pm Hucks arrived over Penrith ten minutes later and made several circuits of the town, searching for the landing ground which the Penrith detachment of the Cumberland and Westmorland Yeomanry had marked out with flags.
Unaware that the pilot would be unable to hear above the noise of his engines, (I reckon the Blériot had only one engine!), the soldiers fired their rifles into the air to attract his attention. Mistaking the colourful bunting of a garden fete being held at Carleton Hall, south of the town for the marker flags, Hucks landed his Blériot in front of the Hall, to the delight of Geoffrey Carleton-Cooper and his guests”.
It seems that Hucks was far too sensible to attempt flying around this region at night and took off for Newcastle-upon-Tyne the next day. Presumably having convinced the authorities of the futility of his mission”. On another tack, is this the first example of a suicidal directive being given to a British military pilot?
Since WW2 we are conditioned to believe that only the Japanese indulged in ‘Kamikaze’ or suicidal missions. The reality though, is that many RAF missions, even in WW2, met this criteria - and the crews nearly always, if not always, knew it too. I have found a lot of resistance to this, but, being of a simple mind I find it very hard to differentiate between a suicidal mission and undertaking a sortie when it is clear you will not be returning.
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