Chapter III. The Beginnings of Flight in England.... I have been

terribly slow. Some quite small things have cost me hours of turning over pages, not to speak of letters or waiting for answers.”

But when the chapters were written they were by no means finished. The Air Ministry had come into being only towards the end of the war. The Royal Air Force itself was formed on April the 1st, 1918, by the amalgamation of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service. The records telling of the early history of those two services were scattered. The collection and collation of those records took time. But it was soon seen even in the early days that there would be sad gaps. Some important records were definitely lost. Others were missing. But apart from this even where they were complete, Sir Walter found much difficulty in weaving his story from official records. He wanted so much to get the personal element into his book. Official records he discovered were invented to conceal interesting facts. They were packed in wool and cut no ice. He once complained that he asked for butter and received a cow. So we were always trying to supplement the records with first-hand evidence. Much of this material came late. Many important facts turned up after the chapters had been written. They were constantly being touched up (alas!).

An early example of this sort of thing was when Mr. G. B. Cockburn, who had taught the navy to fly, kindly sent us his reminiscences. “The reminiscences of G. B. Cockburn matter so much that I am rewriting the whole of Eastchurch and Larkhill. It is a nuisance, but I suppose is bound to happen again.” He was so considerate for his readers. “I can’t say to readers, ‘You all know what an air-raid is like, so I shall only tell you how many they were and what weight of bombs was dropped,’ they must be helped a little to see the thing!”

So passed the summer vacation and then Oxford filled up again and engulfed him. The prospect of 4,000 students in Oxford, although it was not what he expected when he undertook to write the history, was a prospect which pleased him. His research into the history stimulated him. When he came to lecture to his new students he was better than ever. His lectures were inspiring. “Oxford is full of the best lot of men we have ever had, mostly back from the war, and when they want my services I can’t refuse them, so I have no time. But I shall shut the door in mid-March.” In mid-March he shut the door and prepared for a visit to town. “I am always cheered by a visit to the factory of air history,” he wrote, and further, “the weak point of this show is the Old Historian.”

By the summer of 1920 the pre-war period of the history was finished and he was working on the war period, and the war period offered different problems. Sir Walter looked upon himself as holding a special brief for those members of the air services who did their duty and were content to do their duty without any sort of publicity or reward. He was no believer in star-turns. He believed, with the officers who commanded the air services, as he says in his Introduction, in a high tableland of duty and efficiency and not a low range of achievement rising now and again into sharp fantastic peaks. “The humblest flier,” he wrote in a letter discussing this subject, “who went and strafed a Boche and got done in is not going to be sacrificed or even subordinated to the star performers. Every V.C. shall be clearly told that men who deserved as well or better than he did are forgotten, in large numbers, because they faced certain death without witnesses. The hero of the book is chosen and is the Air, not the stars.” And this is how he tells them in his book. “No history can be expected to furnish a full record of all the acts of prowess that were performed in the air during the long course of the war. Many of the best of them can never be known; the Victoria Cross has surely been earned, over and over again, by pilots and observers who went east, and lie in unvisited graves. The public dearly loves a hero; but the men who have been both heroic and lucky must share their honours, as they are the first to insist, with others whose courage was not less, though luck failed them.”

Like his friend Sir James Barrie, Sir Walter believed courage to be the lovely virtue. He was fond of dissecting the British character. His book on the air is full of delightful passages on this subject. Courage, he says in his book, is found everywhere amongst English-speaking peoples. Originally he wrote that courage was an epidemic virtue among English-speaking peoples. Some people who were privileged to read his original manuscript, were a bit doubtful about this use of the word ‘epidemic.’ One distinguished air officer spoke rather roughly about “outbreaks of pimples.” Sir Walter altered the phrase and in a characteristic note, which shows the trouble he took to find a single correct word, he wrote to me on a postcard, “I find _epidemic_ is used by Milton and Swift as I use it. Later the word was restricted to medical uses (and metaphors drawn therefrom). I suppose my writing is too much under old and classic influences, for I did not at first understand the objection. I don’t know what to do. Where modern semi-educated usage impoverishes a word, I hate to give way. But I want to be understood.”

Official documents do not always show such nice choice of words. Sir Walter accordingly sometimes got high fun out of the records. A pamphlet (a very able one) was sent to him mostly dealing with the supply of munitions. “I wonder,” he wrote, “in what language does the Munitions Man write to his wife? I shall set him to my classes to translate, e.g., ‘The output of light bombs was greatly in excess of that of the heavier natures’ = ‘The bombs made were mostly light bombs.”

“When he says ‘in the case of bombs,’ he doesn’t mean the case. When he says evolve, factors, evaluate, and the like, he doesn’t mean anything much. Public office English is ‘a bloody jargon.’” And again, “Lord Haldane, in a letter to me, says the Wrights were ‘empirics.’ I suppose he means they merely did it.”

But Sir Walter could never be anything but good-natured in his fun-making. He enjoyed life to the full and sought fun wherever he could find it. And perhaps he found it most in the dignity of outlook of what he sometimes called the big-bugs. On seeing the photograph of one distinguished public man who takes himself very seriously, he commented, “It was of a face like ----’s that Charles Whibley once said, ‘God has put that mark upon them so that we may know them.’”

Towards the end of 1920 the book was nearing completion. The last chapter was started but had given a lot of trouble. It was a ticklish chapter on the expansion of the air services, and the difficulty was to find the thread of the story. On this he was helped by Sir Sefton Brancker and Sir Hugh Trenchard, whom he always referred to as the General. “I have been in correspondence with Brancker,” he wrote. “He and the General won’t fail us.... I wish I were writing, instead of acting coroner at an inquest where it’s not certain who’s the corpse, and the witnesses won’t talk. But we must do it. We lose a lot by being so near--all the later diaries, lives, etc. Our one advantage is living testimony, and we _must_ get it.”

Whilst he was waiting for further light on the problems of the last chapter he went to stay with Mr. Pearsall Smith at Warsash. “I had a good holiday of ten days--it seemed quite long,” he wrote. “I was taught the art of beach-combing. My friend who taught me got thirty-two oysters in three-quarters of an hour on a repulsive tidal beach. I got five in two hours. But I devoted myself mainly to the cockle who (it is not generally known) is as cunning as sin, very mobile, and quick-sighted. There are also occasional hauls from wrecks. August and September have been a stale-mate, and I’m itching to write. I hope to come up on Oct. 19th when the term is started.”

When he returned from his holiday he found Oxford busier than ever. The last worrying chapter was put aside for the moment. “Oxford’s worse than ever. Not a bed or a perch anywhere.... I lead the life of a defaulting debtor, chivied by people who behave as if they had lent me money.” And again a little later, “This week is a nightmare, but things will get better soon after they get worse. I allude not to the Coal Strike but to committees, boards, lectures and examinations.” But examinations ended and he got back to the troublous Chapter VIII, and by the middle of December wrote, “I pine to show you what I have written. There’s not very much yet--about twenty-five of my MS. pages.” But he got stuck again at the beginning of January. “Your letter was a comfort. Since you left I have stuck. Partly I got wet and tired on a long walk, but chiefly, I can’t see my way clear. The summaries I have are so full of things too trivial (though I must have them and they are invaluable) ... I think a pæan on the squadron must go into the next (i.e., the fighting) volume. It belongs there. It’s really a short treatise on morale. I think I can end Chapter VIII without it, but we shall see.... Official reports are all packed in wool and won’t cut ice.”

Then in February he went down with a slight fever. “I have gastric influenza and fever,” he wrote on the 5th, followed on the 17th by “I’m up and better, only rather groggy (or, to be strictly correct, shaky) on my pins.” Once again Oxford took him off the last chapter. But in mid-March he shut the doors once more, “My term has taken long in dying, but now at last I think it is dead, and my mind (a rag-bag stuffed with its debris) is free for other uses (as soon as I can empty it).”

He got to work again and tackled some of the notes which the office had prepared for him to use in the revision of the early chapters. “Your[1] method of preparing things for revision,” he wrote, “is excellent and will make revision easier.... I have gloomy forebodings about ----. Will he be another of those whose criticisms amount, in effect, to a single complaint that they are wallflowers at the aerial dance?... My troubles are of a different kind. You remember I treated naval co-operation in Chapter VII slightly. Now I have to treat it all over again. I wonder (though with pain) if the passages in Chapter VII ought not to be taken out and the whole thing put into Chapter VIII. Tell me your opinion. As it stands the only excuse is that Chapter VII is things done, and Chapter VIII is organization, constitution, etc. But the doubt paralyses me, for am I writing (or about to write) what must all be recast again?”

Through March he was deep in the last chapter. On the 22nd he wrote: “I am always unhappy if I find myself using an unexplained term. I fear I have sometimes mentioned types of machine with no explanatory comment. You might keep an eye open for this. It is a large comfort to me to have you goal-keeping.” And on the 27th: “You will think me hopeless, but I am really stuck in the naval part of Chapter VIII. You see _I don’t know_. If none of the questions that interest me are answered in the summaries I have, are not my readers likely to be in the same position?”

In the middle of April he came up to town and had dinner with General Brancker. The following day he wrote: “Brancker depresses me, because, whatever I mention he says something true and important that has not reached us. He knows all the people and is a shrewd and cheerful judge of them. I must tell you when we meet.... The latter[2] is wonderful on any period or any incident, shake the tree and a plum falls off.... Brancker is as gay as a lark.”