Remenham House
REMENHAM HOUSE: Temporary airship visit
Location: Just W of the B376 in Wraysbury, about 2nm SE of Windsor Castle
Period of operation: 21st August 1913
A MICHAEL T HOLDER GALLERY
We have Mike Holder, a great friend of this 'Guide', to thank for both discovering this story and providing the press reports, maps and photos. Hopefully, without being too cynical, seeming to be a case of it's not what you know but rather who do you know. I may well be mistaken of course, (there is so much still to discover), but to date this appears to be the only example of an Army Airship attending a private function? In this case a wedding reception.
Photo One and Article One were published in the Daily Mirror on the 22nd August 1913.
Photo Two was published in The Sketch on the 27th August 1913. Article Two was published in the Birmingham Mail on the 22nd August 1913.
Article Three was published in the Lancashire Evening Post on the 22nd August 1913:
Photo Three from Wikipedia of the Army Airship Beta was, I suspect (?), taken at FARNBOROUGH. Article Four was published in the North Bucks Times and County Observer on the 23rd August 1913.
The local area view is from my Google Earth © derived database.
NOTES: In the early years prior to WW1 the main advantages of using balloons, airships and aeroplanes was to exploit their abilities to advance recconnaisance. I think it fair to say that the Royal Navy were certainly more in favour of developing fixed wing aircraft for these purposes, especially when initial trials revealed that they could be launched from ships, and the pilots recovered.
For the Navy the aircraft were expendable when at sea. Pilots would ditch near the ship and be picked up. Stories are told of these pilots being so adept at ditching that they did not expect to get wet as they clambered from the cockpit onto the top wing of their biplanes. It seems that the cost of an aircraft was less than a single sixteen inch shell when fired from the enormous guns the larger ships were armed with.
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