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| gave way to snowstorms, then fog again. On the fourth day a German Junker took off with three aboard, and they heard the next day that all three had burned to death when they crashed near Hanover. On the 15th, an Air Union pilot decided to start from Lyon and allow Rattray to hang on his tail — especially necessary once they had started, since the Air Union route lay off the strip maps provided for Rattray by the AA. After Lyon, he took off by himself for Nimes down the valley of the Rhone, followed by a mistral gale which enabled him to average 120 m.p.h. When he landed at Avignon, the wind was too much for him, changing direction through 180 degrees of the compass from second to second. Before he realised what was happening, he found himself at a standstill, tipped up vertically on the propeller with petrol pouring all over the engine. Luckily the propeller was made of metal — if it had been wooden it would have snapped and the machine would either have turned a somersault or fallen on a wing, in either of which cases the flight would have been finished. Luckily also he had a spare propeller the first one being bent out of shape: it had been a close decision at Stag Lane whether to take a spare propeller or another petrol can. He spent the next five days as the guest of M. Henri Thomas, custodian of the airfield, grounded by the 90 m.p.h. mistral, consoled by Mme. Thomas’s Provencal cooking and excursions to the leafless vineyards to eat the remains of the last season’s grapes. At last, on the 20th, he was able to get away, over a blue bay of the Mediterranean, to Perpignan, where he was within sight of the Pyrenees. After refuelling, he climbed 10,000 feet and was beginning to look down — not entirely calmly — on the cold white mountains, when his engine sputtered and the revolution-counter dropped to zero, picked up and dropped to zero again. |
| ’I was to meet Lady Bailey some days later, and she was to tell me that |
| the first time that horrible involuntary silence succeeded the tuneful roar of a second before, her heart “gave such a terrible jump that it started the engine once more”. This was the first time I had ever heard that unpleasant unexpected silence in an aeroplane. Under these particular circumstances, I came to the conclusion it was the most (what I shall call) ‘solemn’ moment in a life which hitherto had not been unfree from adventures’. He turned his machine towards the sea, which seemed preferable to the |
| mountains, and although if he kept it on low throttle the engine ran sometimes for half a minute at a time, the descent was inexorable. He had just enough height to reach Perpignan with 100 feet to spare, and landed. |
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| After lunch he dismantled the carburettor and found fragments of paint or lacquer in it, which was difficult to explain since he had seen that every drop of petrol was filtered through chamois leather. |
| The next day he went through the gap in the eastern Pyrenees which |
| Hannibal had marched through with his elephants, and landed without event at Barcelona, where it was raining hard so he decided to stay the night. On the 22nd, he followed the coast, meeting rain and snow and narrowly avoiding running into the face first of a mountain, and then the island-rock of Altea. At the hight of the storm, his machine bumped so hard that every loose article around him — chocolate, pencils, sandwiches — ‘rose suspended in the air, and the next second disappeared over the side’, while Rattray, already soaked, was smothered with sand, dust and caked mud which seemed to blow up from the floor. For half an hour he flew up and down the edge of a hospitable bay until the storm blew itself out and he was able to get on to Alicante, where the aerodrome had been moved by about ten miles recently without his knowledge (at Tamale he got a letter from the Air Ministry which had just missed him in London, telling him about it) and he had some difficulty finding it. |
| At last on the 23rd he reached Africa, leaving behind the castles and |
| bullrings of southern Spain, Gibraltar ‘like a great purple crouching lion’, and ‘soon I could picket out a faint outline that first I thought was a cloud. It was the coast of Africa, which I was very much pleased to see’. Then Tangier, which ‘gleamed white, tucked away in its bay, and down I came at last in a big quiet swoop over the town and harbour, then opened up again with a roar, and hurried along the white ribbon of road that leads from Tangier to Rabat’. He said to himself aloud, ‘as if it were one person addressing another, “At least you have managed to reach Africa”.’ Approaching the airport, he could see the tall figure of Kirby-Green, the District Officer who had signed his hunting-licences in Central Africa and whom he had not seen since. He was celebrated with champagne and other cheer, and had a chance of speaking Chinyanja for the first time in twenty- five years with a boy from Nyasaland whom the Kirby-Greens had with them. Resisting the temptation to spend Christmas with them, he sent home the cable: ‘Xmas with the Riffs’ and took off towards Casablanca. Carburettor trouble brought him down briefly at Larache, but he reached Casablanca be evening where Lady Bailey was expected the next day in the opposite direction from Agadir. Christmas Day took him to Mogodor, where he phoned Casablanca to hear news of Lady Bailey. She had not arrived and eventually he heard that she had been forced down at Taminar, where the Consul drove him to meet her and bring her back to Mogodor for Christmas dinner: |
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| ’Christmas dinner at the Consulate at Mogodor with the Consul and his |
| wife and this intrepid airwoman will long remain in my memory. I am afraid we talked aeroplane shop .... I was warned about camels at Cape Juby and gales at Villa Cisneros, told the best height to fly over the Rio de Oro — to avoid head winds, not on account of the bullets of the Riffs. .... I heard for the first time her unforgettable laughter — it was when I was describing my little adventure over the Pyrenees. When, half jokingly, I remonstrated with her, telling her what a solemn occasion I had found it, she only laughed the more. I found out later in the evening it was a habit of hers, for she burst into the same merry peals when describing some particularly ‘sticky’ predicaments she had herself faced and come through. That surely is the spirit which makes some nations great’. |
| He saw Lady Bailey off on the bus for Taminar on Boxing Day, and |
| followed in his plane. She had arranged to turn her machine’s nose into the wind, to give him his landing direction, but failed to do so. After nearly running on into some rocks, he lost his temper ‘and demanded somewhat curtly of the little lady why she had not turned her machine into the wind as arranged, remarking at the same time that “I had taken it for granted she had done so”. Her reply I shall never forget; it should be written in front of every young pilot’s cockpit: “In flying, never take anything for granted”’. He arranged to go on to Agadir to find what had happened to the French mechanic who was to help her, and left her ‘standing with a little group of Arabs who were tending their goats near the machine’. Agadir was under martial law, and he was told he would not be able to fly on because the territory was occupied by hostile tribes; he had to wait another two days before a cable come through saying that the governments of Britain, France and Spain agreed to his proceeding on his own responsibility. Leaving his pistol behind (he was told that cigarettes would be a better defence if he had to land) he took off before dawn of the 29th for Cape Juby, keeping high off the coast ‘in case any Riff might care to have a pot-shot at the ‘plane’. For the next thousand miles he was not to see a sign of habitation except the white forts of Juby and Villa Cisneros. After Juby, he passed the spot where two French pilots had been forced down earlier in the year and held to ransom by the Riffs. At Villa Cisneros a high wind made him nearly crash after more than four attempts. He was given a dinner at the Spanish Government House ‘which would not have disgraced the Savoy’. |
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| There was nothing worse than a puncture between Villa Cisneros and St. |
| Louis, in what is now Senegal and the beginning of West Africa proper. But ten minutes after St. Louis and well out to sea, the engine started sputtering again, and he had just enough time and height to land on a stretch of sand by the beach ‘not unlike the sands between Calais and Ostend’. The machine was firmly jammed, and he decided to start off to tramp the six miles back to St. Louis in his wool-lined flying boots and leather flying jacket, under the mid-morning equatorial sun. A party of French pilots and mechanics took him back in a motor boat, and they arrived as the tide was starting to lap the tail-skid of GBZZ, two sharks which he had noticed earlier still swimming lazily just off-shore. After waiting for the tide to ebb, and a French luncheon (‘no light affair’) they managed to get the plane on to ground where she could take off and he was in Dakar by mid-afternoon. |
| New Year’s Eve of 1928 was spent lying in bed in the British Consulate |
| at Daker, too tired to sleep, listening to the sirens of the steamers in the harbour hooting in the new year. New Year’s day was spent working on the machine, then on the 2nd to Tambacounda (’fairly thick orchard country ‘), Kayes (’my first night under a mosquito net’) and Bamako. He left Bamako on the 6th January, towards Ouagadougou, 500 miles away. Starting at dawn, he was at Sikasso by 10.00, where he landed to replenish supplies; but although there was petrol they were out of oil. |
| ‘It is easy to be wise after the event, and I know now I should have sat |
| down and waited for supplies. I had lunch with the French administrator and his wife. They had a dear little six months’ old baby. After lunch, and the taking of many photographs by some of the White Fathers, I set off again at 12 noon, being advised to follow the road which bore away south-east instead of flying on a direct compass course to Koudougou. After flying exactly three hours, during which time I had kept a constant and anxious eye on my oil pressure gauge, I suddenly noticed it had dropped from 17 to 15. A second later it was registering 14, and it continued to drop at the rate of about 1 lb. a second. This gave me about then seconds to decide what to do.... As far as I can recollect, I did not hesitate at all. I dashed a note in my map in red pencil: “Forced landing, 3 p.m., oil ran ____” Here I stopped scribbling and turned my attention to where I was to come down. When the oil pressure gauge reached 4, I shut off and put ZZ’s nose down. A long way ahead I could see what looked like a bare patch among the trees. I headed towards, it, saw it was as good as anything I was likely to find; did ‘S’ turns to lose height, as I |
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| had some to spare; flattened; dodged several large trees; noticed that the ground was covered with ant-hills; crashed through a small tree with my port lower plane, in avoiding a big one which would have carried away both starboard wings had I struck it; crashed into a second small tree, which snapped off, and finally came gently to rest. I jumped out and surveyed the damage: leading edge of port lower plane broken away all along centre and also towards trailing edge, where the aluminium tubing was broken in two; fabric underneath wing badly torn, also fabric under elevator on port side. Everything else was apparently intact. I examined what little oil was left; it was not burned in the least, so I knew my engine was undamaged. I calculated I was down about 100 miles west of Ouagadougou. I had crashed less than 200 miles from my destination, the Gold Coast’. |
| As he inspected the damage a man appeared ‘whose sole article of dress |
| was a large hoe’, giving him the Moshi salutation. He learned that there was a rest-house five miles away, and sent a message via the obliging Moshi to the nearest French post fifteen miles away. Then he made his way to the rest-house, where he was given hospitality by the local Moshi cattlemen ‘as if I had been the Mosh’Naba (kind of the Moshis) himself’. At 2 a.m. a car arrived to take him to Baramo, and the next day oil, petrol and a mechanic came from Ouagadougou. They made their way to the clearing in the orchard- bush where his plane stood ‘glistening in the early morning sun surrounded by hundreds of inquisitive wild guinea-fowl’, and for three days they worked in the sun repairing the damage with bamboo and broomsticks. On 11th January he was ready to take off from the ‘aerodrome’ which hundreds of natives had been working on. |
| From now on it was a triumphal procession. After one more stop at |
| Ouagadougou, the next morning he saw the bungalow at Navrongo where he had lived six months before, just over the border into the Gold Coast, appearing through the thick Harmattan haze. He scribbled a note to Cardinall and put it in a metal tube. As he circled the bungalow, Cardinall was waving to him and he dropped the tube. After a way to Monseigneur Moran at the White Fathers’ Mission, he went on south; over ‘the little compounds, the naked inmates of which I knew by name’, which a detour to Zuarungu to ‘give them a wave’, then along the road to Bolgatanga, coming down in a dive over the Moshi village where his old Mallam lived — ‘to see the village folk disappearing into their huts like rabbits scuttling into their holes’. Then over the Tong hills, just visible through the harmatan haze, where eight months earlier the priest had asked the god’s |
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| blessing on his journey, and after an hour a white circle on the ground with ‘TAMALE’ written across it. ‘Down I came, vultures scuttling as vultures had never scuttled before; one circle over the roof of a house; flattened out; ran to within about ten yards of some huts; and came to rest. No one was expecting me; my wires had not got through, but, in what seemed only a few seconds, old friends were all round. Hill and Harrington first, then Major and Mrs. Walker Leigh, and soon the whole of Tamale’. |
| Another two days to prepare for the last stretch to Accra, 300 miles |
| largely over forest where he would not be able to land if anything went wrong. It took him four hours, forty minutes, flying by compass because of the harmattan, circling over the town and landing on the new aerodrome at noon. Again, no-one knew when he was going to arrive because the lines were down between Tamale and Accra, but once the news of his landing came though he was given a celebrity’s reception by the Governor. The first solo flight to West Africa had been made in just under six weeks. The record which he realised would not stand for long (the Elder Dempster Steamers could have made three round trips in the time), but that was not the point — ‘When a man of my own age, nearly forty-eight, after twenty- two years of West Africa — the so-called ‘white man’s grave’ — can go on leave and in four months learn enough about flying, navigation and aero- mechanics to enable him, at the end of that time, to pilot a flying machine along from England to West Africa — then, quite obviously, there cannot be as much difficulty in the whole undertaking as the public still imagines’. At the same time, he did not try to hide his pleasure and pride in being the first person to show the way. |
| Perhaps because the end of the flight was rather an anti-climax after the |
| travelling, he decided it would not end there and set about persuading the authorities to let him go on (or back) to Kumasi. When he had originally suggested this, they had worked out the cost of preparing a landing area at £6,000, which seemed excessive for what was essentially a stunt flight; but they did allow him now to go up to Kumasi by car with Colonel Wilson QC the G.C. Regiment and see what the possibilities were. By nightfall they had decided that the old polo ground was a possibility, if an avenue of trees on either side were cut, and an approach of about 500 yards through the bush. The next morning, they held a meeting with the Commissioners and the returned Asantehene, Nana Prempeh. ‘Within half an hour the preliminaries were settled; within an hour work was in progress; and within four days a very fine aerodrome was completed’, which eventually cost £200, including a hangar. Less pleased were the occupants of two bungalows when they returned for lunch on the first day to see their gardens, roses on one side, and trees and shrubs on the other, stripped flat |
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| and being rolled flatter by a steam- roller. They were unable to contact the authorities to complain because the telephone lines had also been removed to clear the approach. The owner of the roses was even less pleased when a friend complained to him that he thought it was ‘a d___ shame that you should be able to wangle all this free labour to work on your rose gardens’. |
| He went back to Accra by train, looking out at each station to inspect the |
| possibilities of pancake-landing on the double tracks. At Kwaku Praso, near his base of a year before, whitewashed stones spelt out in six-foot letters: ‘WELCOME. THEY SONS SHALL PRAISE THEE’. |
| ‘On Wednesday, 30th January, at 8.50 a.m., I left Cantonments, where |
| many kind friends assembled to see the take-off. Twenty minutes later I was limping back with a spluttering engine, to land on a deserted aerodrome’. |
| The West African climate, which he had been enthusing about as ideal |
| for flying, had answered by coating his contact breaker points with mildew. At 10.35 he took off again, first circling over the sea to make sure the engine was functioning properly and then picking up the Kumasi railway line at Achimota. |
| ‘Below me white stations and townships slipped by; the Mpraeso |
| escarpment across which I flew, with its clusters of white villages on the plateau, looked very pretty indeed. Lake Bosomtwe, to the right of which I passed not long before reaching Kumasi, looked like a great simmering cauldron, the cup-like crater in which the lake lies being full of whirling mists. I saw Kumasi far ahead; it looked like a brown patch at first, amid the green of the forest. I came over it at about 6,000 feet and could clearly see the aerodrome below. I shut off and came down in wide spirals to about 2,000 feet, when I opened up and sailed over in a big lazy loop’. |
| This time there was no question of his arrival being missed. The entire |
| population of Kumasi, it seemed, had massed around the airfield and had been waiting in the sun, 40,000 or 50,000 of them, for hours before he |
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| appeared in the sky. He disapproved of ‘stunting’ over aerodromes at the end of a flight — ‘spectacular and foolish’, but on this occasion he allowed his sense of occasion and showmanship to overcome his sense of good form: |
| ‘Coming up out of the dive, I let the machine rise till her nose was |
| almost pointing straight up, then put on hard left rudder. I really thought ZZ was never coming out of the terrific downward side-slip which resulted .... Kumasi aerodrome, from up above, looked beautifully laid out. There was a huge circle with the name in the centre; a white line, beyond the narrow neck between the bungalows, to indicate where first to touch. It looked, however, rather like flying into the neck of a bottle, although, of course, there was really ample space for a small machine between the two bungalows. I came down once and flew low over the ground, then zooming up, circled again, to shut off and glide down the long approach where the forest had been felled, to touch between the two bungalows, and finally to run across the circle and come to rest’. |
| The scene on landing, he said, ‘beggars description. Lindbergh, on |
| arriving in Paris, did not receive a more wild or tumultuous welcome than G.EBZZ was accorded by some 40,000 Ashanti, by ex-King Prempeh and by the entire European population of Kumasi’. ‘Nothing had been seen like it in the history of the town’, he told his sister, ‘Knocked spots out of the reception to P. of Wales’. The symbolic effect of arriving out of the sky in the midst of the people whom he had made it his life’s work to introduce to a wider world did not escape him. Perhaps it was the one occasion in his life when his dream of glory was fulfilled. And naturally it did nothing to comfort the stuffier Old Coasters who still saw him as a cocky upstart: ‘Everyone who matters has been too kind and generous in praise’, he told his sister, ‘A few — only a few — are mad and green with envy’. A few years earlier he might have been upset by the backbiting, but he was above it now, secure in the knowledge that the higher colonial establishment recognised him as an equal, if not one of themselves, and that for the Ashanti he was in a class of his own amongst white men. When he flew back to Tamale to take up his work again, he found the new volume waiting for him from the Clarendon Press. He wrote in it under the title: ‘But gentlemen prefer aeroplanes’. |
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| Chapter 10. ‘My Last Tour’ |
| He made his way slowly north in the Ford, via Tamale and Navrongo, to |
| Tumu, which he had decided to make his base: |
| ‘My decision to select this out-of-the-way place was almost instantly |
| arrived at upon being supplied by a local authority with the following data: one, there was a very large empty bungalow, grass roofed doorless and windowless, but otherwise roomy and capable of being made quite comfortable; two, this house was stated to be haunted by the ghost of my old friend Captain S____, who had died there of yellow fever the year before the war, and was, I found later, buried in the mango-shaded compound;183 three, the place had the reputation of being infested with |
| 183Stewart Simpson tells me that the ghost was actually called Ferguson, a notable lion |
| hunter in his lifetime who on moonlight nights was supposed to stalk through the deserted Tumu station with one or more lions following at his heels. Some years before Rattray's time, the then D.C., Colonel Percy Whittall, had been aroused from his bed by the shouts of the Corporal of the Guard ordering the night detachment to present arms. 'Col. Percy Whittall rose out of bed in some haste, pulled on his mosquito boots and with a hurricane lamp in his hand strode across the compound demanding to know what in hell all the row was about. The corporal of the guard was quick to explain that Capt. Ferguson and his lions had just passed by and as always the guard was turned out to salute him. This was too much for Percy Whittall. Next day he packed up his personal belongings, his office and his district treasury and with carriers provided by the Chief of Tumu he set off for the |
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| lions. A former occupant of the bungalow was reported to have spent a night in the rafters of the roof, to which he had climbed in order to vacate his bedroom in favour of two lions who had wandered in to shelter from a tornado. Four, the place was completely isolated during the rains, and was not on the telegraph or telephone’. |
| The rains were early and he only managed to reach Tumu in his Ford |
| lorry by making a detour through the French territory to the North: |
| ‘Turning south at Leo — auspicious name! we splashed through |
| swamps and eventually pulled up squeakily outside a great rambling barn-like structure which was to be my home on and off for the next fifteen months.’184 |
| He had with him Aboya and his wife, whom he had picked up at |
| Winkogo, Amadu (‘the faithful’), and his pie-dog Adinya, to whom he soon added a pair of cats, Tarface and Taras, named according to the area of their body where they had black patches. The first problem he had to deal with was the swallows: |
| ‘Never speak to me kindly of these sun-loving birds of passage. Every |
| rafter and beam in my barn of a roof seemed to have been selected as the nesting place of some couple; and as the rooms were ceilingless, the results were constantly disastrous. Here they would instantly be pounced upon by my two cats.... Then, be it noted to my eternal credit, I would rescue them gently and cast them out under the eves into the tropical night, in the vain hope that they would stay there’. |
| nearest provincial headquarters at Wa. That was the end of Tumu as a separate political station'. Rattray never saw the ghost, but he told Simpson that the local inhabitants were convinced of its existence.]; |
| 184R.S. Rattray: ‘My Last Tour’ in Blackwood's Magazine, Sept.1932. Unless |
| otherwise indicated, other quotations are from this article. |
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