– More aerial history of Windsor
Published in Windlesora 04 (1985)
© WLHG
After the hydrogen balloon experiments of George III at Windsor Castle in 1783, and the Grahams’ ascents in the early 19th century, (Windlesora Nos 2 & 3 respectively), Windsorians were able to watch balloon ascents made by Guards officers. These began in 1866.
The greatest balloonist among the Royal Horse Guards at Windsor was Frederick Gustavus Burnaby. He was a man of great size and enormous courage and physical strength. Standing 6 feet 4 inches and weighing 23 stone, he was reputed to be one of the strongest men in Europe, being 46 inches around the chest, and using a dumb bell of 1% hundredweights. He was stationed at Windsor when the Court was in residence at the Castle.
Burnaby’s first balloon ascent had been made with a group of officers on June 12th, 1864 from the gardens of the Crystal Palace, and this was recorded by the great balloonist and meteorologist, James Glaisher, whose name is remembered at Bracknell, at ‘Glaisher House‘, the headquarters of the Royal Meteorological Society. His account of the ascent was included in the Journal of the Household Brigade in that year. It describes the trial trip of the famous balloonist Mr. Coxwell using his new balloon. In the balloon car were Messrs. Coxwell and Glaisher, and ten officers including six of the Royal Horse Guards. Two of these were Lieutenant Westcar and Frederick Burnaby. By 1866 H. Emerson Westcar (now Captain) and Burnaby both owned or hired balloons and were members of the Council of the Aeronautical Society which was founded in that year.
Burnaby’s second ascent was made in July 1864 from the Cremorne Gardens, London in the huge hot air balloon ‘L’Aigle‘. The safety of this balloon was suspect, and the owner, Monsieur Eugene Godard, had been refused permission by the French government to make ascents with it in France. Godard kept quiet about this aspect and managed to arrange a well publicised ascent from the Cremorne Gardens, in which he was to be accompanied by J.W. Prowse of the Daily Telegraph and four others. The balloon was enormous, 500,000 cubic feet in size, the hot air being produced in a great straw burning furnace which stood in the centre of the wooden car. There was considerable excitement about the ascent, especially as rumours about the safety of the contraption were circulating among the onlookers, and it seemed that the aeronauts ran the risk of being roasted as well as that of breaking their necks. Burnaby had not planned to be a passenger, but was dared to become one by a group of fellow officers, who had come to witness the event. Godard accepted the fee of £5, apparently not realising the enormous size and weight of his extra passenger, as he was busy supervising inflation.
The balloon was suspended by ropes between two masts each 200 feet high. When ‘take off‘ time came, the bales of straw in the iron furnace were ignited, and hot air rose up the chimney which projected 13 feet into the balloon envelope, which slowly grew into a ball. It could then be seen that the car was carried by cords stitched to the sides of the balloon. The veteran balloonist Mr. Coxwell commented adversely upon the danger of trusting to a few stitches to hold together the balloon and its load. It was a warm summer day, which further reduced the ‘lift‘ from the hot air, and Godard asked the extra passenger (Burnaby) to get out of the car, which he did, only to be accused of cowardice by his fellow officers, so he vaulted back into the car, which had commenced to rise. It promptly descended with a bump. Burnaby was shielded from Godard’s view by the furnace into which the aeronaut was feeding bundles of straw. Flames roared up the chimney, sparks flew, the crowd cheered, and the two bands present combined in playing lustily “God bless the Prince of Wales“. Due to the heavy load, the balloon rose sluggishly, and commenced to drift in the wind before it had cleared the masts, one of which broke off and crashed through the roof of a house. Ladies fainted, the crowd scattered, and the massive contraption slowly rose away from the buildings it had threatened to damage. ‘L’Aigle‘ (The Eagle) sailed towards the River Thames, pennants flapping. The peculiar ‘skirt‘ which surrounded the balloon billowed out. Godard sounded a little trumpet, and waved his cap at the crowd as they ascended over the City of London. The journalist, Mr. Prowse, wrote in the next edition of the Daily Telegraph:
“The whole expanse of the mighty city was visible, dense clouds curtained it and covered it with a mysterious haze; slowly sank the great red sun, slowly rose the great white moon; away over the open fields gathered the mists of the night; the wonderful roar of London rose up through the evening air, like the passionate clamour-impatient, querulous,irresistible-of the sea. And behind each gazer, close to his head, was the roaring and raging of the furnace . ..”
Mr. Prowse, Daily Telegraph
and others in the enormous hot air balloon, The Eagle, 21st July 1864
Godard damped down the furnace when they were over the Isle of Dogs, they skimmed over the water and landed on the Greenwich marshes in a potato patch with the aid of a hundred men. The flight of the last great Montgolfier balloon had ended. On its next ascent, it caught fire and was burnt to a cinder. But Burnaby had developed a taste for ballooning that was to last all his life. He sometimes hired a balloon from Thomas Wright, and made ascents from the Cavalry Barracks at Windsor, as did Captain Westcar, who had bought his own balloon. Later they made ascents from the Windsor Gasworks in Goswell Road, where the supply of gas was better.
On one occasion they found themselves two thousand feet above his home near Bedford, where the Revd. Burnaby was cutting flowers in his garden. His father recognised the balloon, and was certain that his son would arrive late and require dinner, so he ordered the servants to sit up. It was midnight when the two aeronauts arrived. Said Burnaby, “Here we are, governor! We started from the Cavalry Barracks and came down at Riseley!“
One early ascent was almost his last. He was attracted by an advertisement that a French aeronaut had invented a ‘controllable aerostat‘ (the term ‘airship’ had not come into general use), and had solved the problem of propelling a balloon in any direction, instead of being at the mercy of the winds. The ascent was to be made from the Cremorne Gardens. Burnaby found that it was a huge cigar shaped balloon, below which was suspended a boat-like car which had two sets of large wooden fans. These the inventor called ‘moulinets‘. Such hand-turned propellers had been tried before and found ineffective, but Burnaby was prepared to try anything that might achieve controlled flight, and paid the £5 fee for the doubtful honour: of an ascent in which he would have to take a turn on the handles driving the great fans.
On the day of the ascent, the Frenchman had difficulty in getting his English ground crew to understand his orders, and ‘lift off‘ was much later than advertised, so that the crowd had become both restive and caustic. The massed bands played lustily, and at last everything was ready. The crowd cheered as the giant Burnaby and the two small Frenchmen climbed into the car. The inventor explained in broken English that he would jettison ballast until the airship was on the point of ‘lift off’ with only five pounds holding it down, when, “We will work the Screw-fans and as they revolve we will leave the ground.” All three sweated at the handles, but nothing happened, until at last Burnaby lost patience and surreptitiously dropped a bag of ballast over the side. The craft began to rise, the inventor proudly bowed his thanks for the applause, and called for even greater effort at the handles. It was soon obvious to Burnaby that the craft was as much at the mercy of the winds as any balloon, and they were falling fast towards the river. He threw out another bag of ballast, to the disgust of the Frenchman who indignantly cried, “Why waste ballast when we soar by our own exertions?“. Then he pointed in alarm to the balloon, which had become distended, and Burnaby realised that the neck, which should have been open to allow excess gas to escape, was still closed by a silk tie which no one had remembered to remove in the excitement of take off. It was now forty feet above their heads, and inaccessible. They rose some thousands of feet, while the fabric became more and more taut, until bursting was imminent. There was a sound of tearing fabric, and the balloon split from top to bottom. They fell rapidly, and prepared themselves for death, when the headlong fall slowed and they realised that he fabric had caught in the upper rope work, and was acting as a great parachute. They landed safely, shaken but uninjured.
In March 1882, an unsuccessful attempt to cross the English Channel by balloon was made by a Colonel of Engineers named Brine, and a professional balloonist named Simmons. They encountered winds of varying direction, ending with an air current taking them towards Norway. They were rescued from the sea by a Calais packet boat, the ‘Foam‘. The next boat had on board Colonel Burnaby, now Silver Stick, as he was a full Colonel of the Household Cavalry, responsible to Gold Stick and so to the Sovereign. His duties were such that he needed leave of absence for any project which involved leaving England. To cross the Channel was a basic ambition of every balloonist.
There had been one successful balloon crossing in 1785 by the Frenchman, Blanchard, with an American, Doctor Jefferies. Subsequent attempts had been disasters. Burnaby had a word with Simmons, and from what he learned, decided that his pet theory that the direction of wind varied with altitude, must be put to the test. He contacted Thomas Wright, from whom he had hired balloons before, insisting that aerial reconnaissance was the job of the Cavalry, not the Engineers. (In the event, it was the Royal Engineers that became responsible for operating military balloons – and the first volunteers for the Royal Flying Corps came from the Cavalry).
Wright offered a nearly new balloon, the ‘Eclipse‘, which held 36,000 cubic feet of gas, with the doubtful recommendation that “Walter Powell had made an ascent in it”. This was a reference to Powell’s flight in July 1881 from the Crystal Palace to Windsor, -where he had come to land on what has been known ever since as Balloon Meadow, because a change in the wind precluded his reaching Malmesbury, where he was M.P. and had a mansion. Wright wanted to accompany Burnaby, but the latter explained that he wanted to take as much ballast as possible, and Wright could hardly be jettisoned to enable the balloon to rise into a favourable current of air.
On March 23rd, 1882, the red and yellow striped balloon was filled with coal gas from the Dover works until it was seventy feet tall. The sun shone, the wind was favourable towards France, being from the north. Burnaby climbed into the basket with his barometer, a copy of ‘The Times‘, some Appollinaris water and sandwiches, and several bags of sand. He was photographed wearing his stripe blazer and pillbox hat, until the balloon rose. He had almost reached Boulogne when the balloon began to lose height rapidly, due to loss of gas in the hot sun, being followed by condensation in a layer of wet, cold air. Several bags of sand had to be jettisoned before the descent slowed; and now he was drifting away from France, and then was becalmed. Fishing boats collected under the balloon, hoping for salvage money, but Burnaby waited for a favourable wind, releasing sand as necessary to prevent loss of height. He ate his sandwiches, drank the bottle of Appollinaris, and,(contrary to all safety rules for ballonists), smoked a cigar. The fishing boats got tired of waiting and went away, leaving him with about three hours gas. He decided to gain height, and dropped one bag of ballast after another, waiting each time for a wind towards France. With only two bags left, the balloon was at a height of 10,000 feet, and at last moving towards Normandy, where he crossed the coast near Dieppe. The warmth over land caused his balloon to rise further, until he released gas and floated over the field workers who shouted, “Descendez! Descendez!” and called their priest to witness the unusual scene. Peering down, Burnaby did not notice that he was about to crash into a hill, the impact of which threw out some of his gear. He released half his last bag of ballast, and managed to reach a valley where he tried unsuccessfully to get his grapnel to hold. He bounced over the fields until a peasant buried the grapnel in a bank, and Burnaby could descend to a welcome of kisses and congratulations plus a superlative lunch at the inn at Envermeu. He sent Wright a telegram outlining his adventures, and subsequently was furious to find this had been ‘leaked’ in transit to the Press, as he had intended to sell his story, and recoup his expenditure. This was not the end of the matter, as H.R.H. the Duke of Cambridge, Commander in Chief, rebuked him when they met shortly afterwards in Windsor at the Duke of Albany’s wedding on April 27th, 1882, where Burnaby was Silver Stick, saying, “Valuable lives ought not to be lost in such freaks“. His political opponents laughed at Burnaby’s supposed humiliation, and added an extra verse to the comic song, “Up in a Balloon Boys”. This was sung at a Corporation dinner at Windsor Guildhall:
“But Burnaby, oh, Burnaby, When you go again
You’d better take your journey by A steamboat and a train . . .”
A cartoon appeared in ‘Punch’, showing Burnaby’s face as the balloon. The text calls him ‘Horatius Cockles’, (he was addicted to Cockles Pills for his liver), and referred to his political aspirations by suggesting he should be Member for Airshire.
The Channel was Burnaby’s last balloon ascent, and he had to cancel a flight with Wright on Whit Monday, stating that “It has been intimated to me that the Commander-in-Chief does not approve of my ascending in balloons. Hence to my regret I shall be unable to keep my promise to you so long as I am on full pay . . .”
He was soon to be involved in arrangements for the Household Cavalry to go to Egypt. Burnaby also became a member of the first ruling council of the Primrose League, the Tories’ own caucus, but that is another story . . .
Gordon Cullingham
Acknowledgement:
The late Mr. Frearson of the Household Cavalry Museum, Combermere Barracks, Windsor for information and illustrations.
Windsor Local History Group 