Old Welsh Harp
Note: This map only gives a rough position within the UK, largely in part due to the uncertain locations listed below. The Old Welsh Harp was demolished many years ago.
OLD WELSH HARP: Aircraft assembly site and early flight attempts
NOTES: It has to be remembered that so much of early aviation history took place at disparate sites. For example in 1908 Mr Handasyde began work with Mr Martin to build a monoplane with a Beeston-Humber engine and a three-bladed metal propeller in the ballroom of the Old Welsh Harp at Hendon. “When it was taken out for trial in a neighbouring field, and the engine started, the propeller tore apart and lifted the engine out of the machine, and thus ended the career of the first of the line of Martinsydes.” Quite often aeroplanes were built at locations convenient for their manufacture and very often transported a considerable distance for ‘flight testing’ - the general rule being, as in this case which back-fired, that most aircraft were assembled next to a flying site or ‘aerodrome’ of some sort. Very often a barely prepared field or ‘weed preserve’ as C C Turner described one site.
It has baffled many serious and highly qualified aviation historians as to exactly where the balloon and fixed wing early flying experiments took place near the WELSH HARP. To complicate the picture further it appears Cecil Compton Paterson also conducted early experiments in fixed wing flight in this general location. This defies the normal logic that like-minded experimenters would band together and use a suitable site, managed by all involved, establishing in effect at least, an aerodrome. All the more baffling since Paterson knew Grahame-White very well. But of course the explanation could quite easily be that he felt rather shy about testing his aeroplane in front of the ‘giants’ of aviation resident at HENDON.
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