Harry Hawker

“ Harry got back to England on Saturday night, June 6th, 1914, and on the Sunday afternoon was at Brooklands, flying both the two-seater Sopwith and the Tweenie. He won an impromptu race with Sippé, who flew a Bristol. “Aeolus,” commenting in Flight on June 12th, said: “Place Hawker anywhere where he can get his hands on a machine, and you simply can’t keep him on the ground.”
On Tuesday, June 16th, ten days after his return from Australia, Harry looped-the-loop for the first time, both with engine on and off. He was flying the 100 h.p. machine. ”

“ Mentally both Harry and Grieve were comfortable, but an attack of seasickness upset Harry a bit. While flying a couple of miles above the dark ocean they did not attempt to probe in their minds the secrets of regions four, five, perhaps six miles below them. Even had they done so, such thoughts could scarcely have had a demoralising effect on souls like theirs. The fallibility of a machine, against which no man can have absolute insurance, was all that robbed them of the joy of completing their intention. ”

“ Mr. Marlowe, in proposing the health of Harry and Grieve, said they were thankful that day to be able to welcome them back [276] to London and back to life. When the master of the steamship Mary last Sunday answered “Yes” to the enquiry of that excellent signalman at the Butt of Lewis, he lifted a burden of apprehension from many minds. “We have not all been able to share the serene confidence of Mrs. Hawker.”
“When the two airmen started, weather conditions were not favourable, and if it had been a matter merely of winning the Daily Mail £10,000 prize the day would not have been selected ”

“ It is a very real scrap of paper. It contains not only a generous gift from a man to whom the whole of aviation owes so much—and whom we hope shortly to see restored to health—but it is also an emblem of the thoughts of your country for a gallant deed done for the honour of your country. I congratulate you, Mr. Hawker and Commander Grieve.”
Amid loud and prolonged cheers, General Seely then handed The Daily Mail cheque for £5,000 to Harry and Grieve. ”

“ After his flight with Harry, Senator Millen said: “I cannot say that there was any feature one could describe as thrilling; nothing can make one feel that one is heroic or any sort of a dare-devil: it seems so beautifully simple, so steady, and so safe.” After stating other opinions of his flight, he said: [151] “My flight with Hawker was one of the most enjoyable experiences I have had. Hawker is master of his machine and seems to manipulate it by a movement of his finger. ”

“ Suddenly the purring of the motor ceased, and like a black-winged peer of the eagle, the biplane sailed across the sky, twisting and turning as it were in pursuit of visible prey. As it descended, the machine appeared to change from black to grey. It was swallowed up by cloud and disappeared altogether, only to return to earth with surprising suddenness.
“Wet? No!” said Harry afterwards. “That wasn’t a wet cloud I went through, it was a dry one. White clouds are always dry. You go through black ones, and you’ll know the difference. ”

“ Harry’s hopes and prospects were now as bright as they could possibly be. As soon as he had taken his “ticket” (i.e., R.Ae.C. Aviator’s Certificate) , he was placed in charge of the hangars at Brooklands, where his real career began. Some of the gay times they had in those early flying days are worthy of record.
The firm, which later developed into the Sopwith Aviation Company, employing about 3,000 men, but consisted then of Mr. Sopwith, Mr. Sigrist, and about a dozen men, launched out with the purchase of a “racing” car when they had made a few pounds. ”

“ He then crossed above the lake in Albert Park, returning by the seashore to the Elsternwick golf-links, to which he descended in a fine spiral glide, ending in a sharp vertical dive and a beautiful landing at only 34 miles per hour. The flight occupied about 20 minutes. He was received with vociferous cheering. As the good horseman after finishing a journey sees that his horse is fed, watered, and bedded before he seeks his own dinner and repose, so did Harry carefully stow away his machine out of reach of the crowd before yielding to any calls for speeches and interviews. ”

“ Grown to manhood, this George Hawker followed the blacksmith’s calling, and on May 24th, 1883, he married Mary Ann Gilliard Anderson, a spinster, of Scottish stock, who was born on October 9th, 1859, at Stawell, also in Victoria. There were four children of the marriage: Maude (the eldest) , Herbert, Harry, and Ruby (the youngest) . The elder boy, Herbert, born in 1885, was unlike his brother in many respects. For instance, as a child he was very delicate, a circumstance which hampered him in his studies. ”

“ The episode seems not to have ended there, however, for within a day or two the officer in charge of the Villacoublay sheds (the friend to whom Harry had confided in an undertone) was requested to report to the controlling authority there, who made serious complaint and requested him to write a letter of apology, containing assurances “that Mr. Hawker would not do this sort of thing again.” It appears that just before Harry had carried out the stunts with the General there had been an epidemic of crashes through foolish, inexperienced young pilots stunting too near the ground. ”

“ Harry flew as unconcernedly as an expert drove a motor-car, and apparently with the same degree of ease and comfort. He made the whole business delightfully simple, and his personal preparations before starting [141] a flight were considerably less formal than those of a motorcyclist before mounting his machine. He wore ordinary clothes, his sole extra covering or protection being a pair of goggles. When he stepped on to the lawn at Government House he was not even ruffled. His hair was nicely parted and his tie straight. ”

“ On Saturday, February 7th, the Melbourne Argus devoted a whole page to descriptive details and pictures of the Tabloid, with which Harry was to give his exhibition in the afternoon. Asked how much there was in the art of flying, Harry replied: “All you have to do is to get off the ground, keep up, and get back again, when and where you want to.” Replying to a request for his opinion as to a certain accident, when an aeroplane fell to the ground and was smashed as if it were an egg, Harry said that the source of the trouble was a heavy machine flying low down near the ground. ”

“ Sopwith and Sigrist and Harry, known as the H. G. Hawker Engineering Company, which started in the production of a 2-stroke motor-cycle and also special aluminium body-work. After the appearance of Harry’s streamlined A.C. a considerable demand for like racing bodies appeared, until most of the best known racing light cars became furnished with Hawker streamline bodies. ”

“ During the latter half of 1912, with the buoyancy of the enthusiast and no idea of the meteoric way in which his latent abilities would be developed, Harry embarked on the flying career on which his heart was set, at a time when the spirit of quantity production had not descended to meet the necessities of war and the aeronautical fraternity was happy in its smallness. ”

“ Aviation, said Harry, had advanced in the direction of knowledge and greater power and control. Never had he heard of an aviator being blown over. On account of the high degree of natural stability in the modern aeroplane it was, he said, a difficult matter to keep a machine on its back when deliberately flying upside down. Natural stability received too scanty attention, and if pilots would let their machines “fly themselves,” so to speak, there would be fewer accidents, was Harry’s opinion.
“Flying,” he said, “is full of interest and is not half so dangerous as the public imagine. ”

“ They came down from 1,500 feet in a spiral glide. Both Harry and Kauper felt very fit after their night’s rest at Beadnell, and the fine weather prevailing gave them an additional stimulus to renewed efforts. At 11.52 they set out for Cromarty, the next [96] control, 134 miles away. Near there the air was exceptionally rough, but an otherwise good passage was made in 2 hours 13 minutes. At this point let us leave the itinerary for a while to enjoy further comments of “The Dreamer,” which were published in Flight on August 30th, 1913:
“The Sopwith-Hawker-Green Combination. ”

“ If anything happened while one was well up, there was a chance of making a good recovery before making contact with solid earth.
Upwards of 25,000 people assembled at the Caulfield Racecourse to witness Harry’s flying exhibition on the Saturday afternoon. In New Zealand, Sydney, and Adelaide, the public had already seen a fair amount of good flying, but, excepting those who had happened to see his previous informal flights, the people of Melbourne had not until this Saturday made the acquaintance of an experienced pilot who was as much, if not more, at ease in the air as on the ground. ”

“ Several flying-men had visited Australia before, and one or two had left the ground, but Harry was fairly acclaimed the first to show Australians the immense possibilities of mechanical flight. One who stood by while he carefully went over every nut with a spanner, tested each wire and each moving part, recalled to mind previous flights that failed, and bethought himself care is not the whole of an airman’s equipment. But the tightening of a nut might prevent a broken neck, and it was little wonder that an airman should not overlook anything that might mean the saving of his own neck. ”

“ The eight or nine mechanics, carried on these journeys, were generally needed. Tyres were always going off; lamps always going out; and various bits and pieces of the car going astray on the road. All had, therefore, to work their passage.
Harry never tired of telling of the fun of those days, and although he was the keenest of workers, he was always ready for some fun, not a little being provided by the antics of a pet bear kept in the sheds at Brooklands and brought from America by Sopwith. ”

“ Sweeping in from above the new grandstand, he switched off his engine and swooped down, only to find the space too small for landing. He switched on again and passed above the crowd. Three times he repeated this manœuvre, which the crowd cheered and regarded as an intentional feature of the exhibition. On the fourth occasion he landed and ran into the crowd as explained. Speaking of the accident afterwards, Harry said: “I made a very bad landing, but it was a very difficult place. If there had not been so many people there it would have been all right. ”

“ Cork to proceed to the coast to escort Harry over the last few miles of his journey. Four magnetos were installed on the Atlantic on April 14th, in place of the two ordinarily carried, the risk of engine failure due to ignition troubles being thereby halved.
Heavy rain fell during the night of April 14th and the morning of the 15th, but by 11 a.m. the weather had somewhat improved. In view of the keen competition of the Martinsyde, which was by then ready for trial, Harry hoped to make a start from a less sodden [214] stretch of ground which he had discovered at Mount Pearl. ”

“ The night before starting Harry and Raynham both agreed to set out if the weather looked at all promising, and on the morrow they received fewer weather reports than on any previous occasion.
At 3.5 p.m. Harry and Grieve were getting into their flying clothes. Ten minutes later Harry waved his arm and the chocks were pulled away. As he sped down the field he heard the rising cheers of the spectators, which were soon drowned by the engine’s roar.
Before leaving, Harry was feeling particularly confident. “I have a perfect machine for the trip,” he said, “and the engine is the best in the world. ”

“ One man, Mr. G. K. Francis, an uncle of Harry’s friend and mechanic, Kauper, was struck on the nose by the still slowly revolving propeller, and several others in the vicinity received blows from other parts of the machine. Fortunately no one was seriously injured, and the damage done to the machine was very slight. Apart from a damaged landing chassis and a splintered [145] propeller, no other fracture occurred. Before this happened Harry had decided that the crowd was making matters impossible for him. ”

“ Discountenancing any idea of effecting repairs in the air, Harry said, “Once we leave the ground, we must fly or fall.”
There was great activity on Monday evening, April 28th, when hopes of a start were high. Harry replaced his four-bladed propeller by a two-bladed one. For over three hours Raynham and Morgan stood by their Martinsyde, waiting to seize a favourable opportunity to get away. At 6 o’clock they decided to abandon the attempt. Just as Raynham had given orders for his machine to be housed for the night, Harry drove up from his aerodrome. ”

“ The purr of the engine was distinctly heard by the people as the machine passed above their heads. A white cloud from the exhaust-pipe indicated the path of the machine, like the foam in the wake of a liner. To the onlookers it seemed as if the machine proceeded out to sea during part of the flight, but Harry explained afterwards that he did not actually cross the water, but merely followed the coast. As the aeroplane turned down-wind, Lieut. Petre and Lieut. Harrison, of the Defence Department, estimated its speed at over 100 miles per hour. ”

“ When Harry arranged to leave Melbourne for Sydney on Tuesday, February 17th, he did not do so on account of any falling-off in the interest of the residents of Melbourne and district, whose enthusiasm never abated. In fact, when he did leave, and when he departed from Australia for the last time (although he never knew it to be the last) , there were many who, having offered as much as £20 for short flights, had to be disappointed.
There was no narrowness about Harry’s plans for promoting aviation propaganda in Australia. ”