Pod Insights After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal Britain's Worst Airship Disaster About this episode "It's like the Titanic, except you've never heard of it. And in a way, it's even weirder."
So says today's guest, Cautionary Tales https://timharford.com/articles/cautionarytales/' host, Tim Harford, about the disastrous story he's taking Anthony and Maddy through.
Airships were the ocean liners of the skies, and in the 1920s, Britain had ambitions to connect the Empire in this way. Until it all went tragically wrong.
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Edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Stuart Beckwith. Senior Producer was Freddy Chick.
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1:58 Speaker 01 Forty-eight dead, an empire's dream in ashes. In the 1920s, Britain believed it could conquer the skies, binding together its vast empire with giant, floating palaces in the sky. But behind the optimism lay a clear warning sign, uneasy voices and a dangerous faith that ambition could outrun reality. Until, that is, disaster struck. This is the story of how Britain's bold vision of the future went up in flames, and what that catastrophe revealed about the empire itself. This is Britain's worst airship disaster. Welcome to After Dark.
2:57 Speaker 00 Hello, everyone, and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie.
3:00 Speaker 01 And I'm Anthony.
3:01 Speaker 00 Now, in today's episode, we're exploring a story of disaster that's absolutely evocative of a particular moment in British history. It took place less than 100 years ago, and it's an era in which Britain still boasted and clung to its idea of empire and the airship that was to become a symbol of its future.
3:21 Speaker 01 We hear about these big mechanics of empire so very often, but this is a history that you may know a little bit less familiarly. And how apt it is then that we are joined by the brilliant Tim Harford from the Cautionary Tales podcast, which I was just... We're going to talk about this episode now, of course, but I also want you to go and listen to the Dublin Crown Jewels heist that they have done recently, because it is a great listen. I just realised that I've listened to it recently. But, Tim, welcome to After Dark.
3:52 Speaker 05 It's a delight to be here.
3:54 Speaker 00 Tim, this story we're going to talk about today is not one that I actually knew anything about until we set up this episode. Just tell us where you first came across it.
4:02 Speaker 05 I first came across the story of this amazing airship, the R101, in a book called The World's Greatest Mistakes,
4:12 Speaker 00 which I was... Great title.
4:14 Speaker 05 I was given this book as a little boy for Christmas, and I absolutely devoured it. And it's full of stories of classic tragedies, the Great Fire of London, the fall of Singapore, the charge of the Light Brigade, the sinking of the Titanic, and also some more obscure stories of things going wrong, and lots of little funny episodes such as the time that the bride was accidentally married to the best man, and how they undid it. And I love this, this book, and I think I mentally filed it away for about three and a half decades. And then when the idea came that maybe I
4:55 Speaker 05 should do a podcast, what would I like to do a podcast about? And I said, I would like to do a podcast about things going wrong, epic and comic and tragic mistakes in history, and also not just the story of the mistakes, but what we can learn from them. And that is what Cautionary Tales is all about. And this one is the very first one that I ever wrote. It is not the first to be broadcast, but it's the first one I wrote. It just felt so iconic for me. It's like the Titanic, except you've never heard of it, and in a way, it's even weirder.
5:33 Speaker 01 So let's set the scene a little bit. We're going to be talking air travel in a time when this is still a relatively new development. It's not like you can just hop on a Ryanair flight. But we're juxtaposing that with the idea of empire now.
5:47 Speaker 05 Yes. So between the wars, the 1920s.
5:50 Speaker 01 And we have this idea that the empire is, it's already spread, British Empire, by the way, I'm talking about. And we're in a world where we can join the dots maybe a little bit more easily than we could through sea travel, through the navy, all of these kind of things. So there is a thought that maybe air travel is the way in which to bring the empire together, to steady things, because we're seeing, you know, even in Ireland, we're seeing some movements to go, do we want to be part of this anymore? And air travel is one of the ways in which it's seen that we can do this. But it doesn't have to be just functional. They have an incredible, you've mentioned it already, Tim, this idea that's it's kind of the Titanic of the air. They're very luxurious, particularly in the approach that
6:34 Speaker 01 they take with the R101, which we're going to be talking about today. So just give us an idea about where this comes in the story of air travel at this time. So you were just mentioning before we started recording, Zeppelins, we're after the First World War now. And of course, air travel is going to become much bigger in the Second World War. But this is a pivotal moment, too.
6:54 Speaker 05 It is. So people have worked out you can fly.
6:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:58 Speaker 05 The Wright brothers have built the right flyer. There have been, planes have flown across the Channel and they were used in the First World War. But it's difficult to get very far in an aeroplane. So if you want to fly from England to India, for example, which you might well want to do, because India is under the sway of the British, it's part of the British Empire, you're going to have to stop in continental Europe, and then you're going to have to stop in Cairo, and then you're going to have to stop somewhere further in the Middle East, and then maybe stop in Iran, Persia. So you'll have all of these different stops, and every stop is risky, and every stop, you need this whole paraphernalia
7:40 Speaker 05 of how are you going to refuel? Airports don't even exist. What are you going to do? So there's an alternative. And the alternative is to build a craft that's lighter than air. Now, this is a very old idea. So the Montgolfier brothers had their hot air balloon. But an airship is a different thing. An airship has propellers and engines, so it can be pointed and propelled. You're not just drifting with the wind. So that's the basic idea. And once you start to develop that idea, you realise you could go, you could go big with it. And these ships were very big. So some of them are the size of the biggest New York skyscrapers at the time. So imagine the Chrysler Building or the Empire State Building.
8:25 Speaker 00 And that must have been hard for people to come to terms with on the ground, seeing one of those in this time, right?
8:30 Speaker 05 Can you, can you imagine?
8:31 Speaker 01 No, actually.
8:32 Speaker 05 I mean, this is a, this is a bigger thing.
8:34 Speaker 00 The scale of it, yeah.
8:34 Speaker 05 It's bigger than any building in London.
8:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:37 Speaker 05 And the, and these things would, they would fly over London and everybody would come out. And they would go fast. So they, so the R101, the top speed was supposed to be 70 miles an hour, which is obviously very slow compared to an aeroplane. But it's a, it's a fair old clip. But then the analogy is more with the ocean liner. Yeah. So this is a luxurious way to travel. You are travelling in silence. You are floating on the air currents. You can imagine going on safari and drifting over the African veldt and looking at the zebras and the elephants and you're there in the smoking lounge, drinking champagne with your friends. I mean, this is, this is the vision, if we can only make it work.
9:19 Speaker 05 There are a few technical difficulties, as we will discuss.
9:23 Speaker 00 This is giving Titanic vibes, the luxury, the convenience, and it's all going to go wrong. A couple of things are standing out for me, Tim. First of all, when you talk about the sort of having to stop in all these different locations, I can just see this in a Spielberg-esque Indiana Jones map, a sort of adventure across the world. And there is an airship in one of the Indiana Jones films, isn't there, I think?
9:41 Speaker 05 There should be.
9:42 Speaker 00 Yeah, there absolutely is. I think he doesn't have a ticket and he ends up sort of punching people. So that's, that's my only sort of concept.
9:48 Speaker 05 I mean, they are, they are officially the coolest form of travel. They are utterly steampunk.
9:53 Speaker 00 You heard it, her first kids.
9:54 Speaker 05 They are so steampunk, they're so cool. I used to, this is a separate thing, but I actually used to live next door to one of the world's top 10 airship designers. He always joked, there are only four of us in the world anyway. But yeah, airship's still a thing because they, because they can, they can fly on very, very low power. So you have a solar powered airship, it can stay up there. It's basically as an alternative for a satellite. So it's still a thing, but, but maybe not the thing that people imagined in the 1920s.
10:24 Speaker 00 The other thing that's striking me, and we're going to come to the story we're going to talk about in a minute, but you mentioned there that people are needing to travel like never before across this vast British Empire. Is there a world in which this form of, of travel in the air has been accelerated because of the First World War before this point? I'm thinking about, you know, how war often brings technology along or indeed invents new technologies. I'm thinking particularly about the zeppelins that are used in the First World War. And we were saying off mic that is it your grandma who could remember seeing them?
10:54 Speaker 05 Yes, my, my grandma told me once, after I'd come back from some spectacular trip somewhere. And she said, well, that's, that's all very impressive, Tim, but I've seen something you've never seen. And I said, well, what was that grandma? And she said, Zeppelin coming up the Thames. And she must have been three or four. She was a very young
11:12 Speaker 00 I mean, that is an unfathomable sight.
11:14 Speaker 05 You'd, you'd remember. And I, it wasn't clear, actually, whether it was during the First World War, or somewhat after the First World War. But the Zeppelins were weapons of war, not very effective weapons of war, but terrifying. I think they would have the same kind of impact as Sputnik. You remember Sputnik coming over America and it's, it's been programmed to beep, beep, beep. The beep does nothing. It's just really scary. The sense that it's up there and there's nothing you can do about it. It has absolutely no military significance whatsoever, but it, it had a big psychological impact. And the Zeppelins, I mean, yeah, sure, you can, you could drop a few hand grenades out of them, but they were, they were not, they were not terribly effective military weapons.
11:54 Speaker 05 But they're useful for spotting. And yes, you see them in operation, just as people saw these biplanes in operation. And then they were thinking, okay, where does this go next? And the British Empire spans the globe, but it is being controlled very much by local governors. Westminster, Whitehall, doesn't have a great deal of direct control as to what is happening in, in the British Raj. But the idea of a, of an airship, that's, that's impressive. You could, you could get to India in maybe a week, whereas a, a sea voyage might take a month. Don't quote me on any of this.
12:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, we haven't measured it.
12:32 Speaker 00 We will now be beginning the race.
12:34 Speaker 05 But that, that sort of thing, it suddenly feels, the world feels much smaller, everything feels much closer. And then maybe London can exert more direct control rather than operating through these, these local proxies.
12:50 Speaker 01 Let's talk about that control then, and how it manifests. And we've already mentioned the R101, and that's what we're going to be talking about today. But this was an imagination of a much larger fleet that was going to be part of this travel back and forth or around the globe. This all comes together then in the 1920s in a group of people that are called the Imperial Airship Scheme, or they're working under the Imperial Airship Scheme. And to give us a little bit more of an introduction to this, we have a clip of Tim to set the scene of that story.
13:27 Speaker 05 It was just before lunchtime on the 14th of October 1929, when Christopher Birdwood Thompson stood up from his desk, donned his stiff Homburg hat, adding a little more to his imposing height of six feet, five inches, and walked briskly up the stairs to the roof terrace. Lord Thompson worked on Whitehall, the street at the heart of the British Government. To his left, Downing Street, the official residence of the Prime Minister. To his right, the Houses of Parliament. But he wasn't looking left or right. Like everyone else in London that day, he was looking straight up. Cruising low over Whitehall
14:10 Speaker 05 was the largest aircraft the world had ever seen. It was a long, slim, silver teardrop, an airship. It was enormous. 735 feet long, the size of a large Manhattan skyscraper lying on its side, hovering right over their heads. It was a glimpse, Lord Thompson liked to say, of the future. The vast airship had slowed to a leisurely 40 miles an hour to allow the crowd a better view. People gathered on the Thames Embankment. The Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII, flew his biplane up to take a look.
14:54 Speaker 05 He would have been able to read in clear, black letters near the airship's nose, its utilitarian name, R101.
15:04 Speaker 05 It must have been quite a moment for Lord Thompson. Lord Thompson was the British Secretary of State for Air, and if not for his bold ideas, this remarkable ship would never have existed. I do very often have a sort of vision as to what aviation will be in the future. And I can
15:22 Speaker 02 See the time when noble lords will travel in gliders with light engines, winging their way westward along the valley of the Thames, northward to Scotland, and southwards to Hampshire, Berkshire, and Kent. On their way, they will need to rest. Perhaps they may call in at one of these giant airships, floating serene and safe, high up and far removed from terrestrial dirt and noise.
15:51 Speaker 05 It was a vision indeed. The R one oh one accordingly was designed as a luxurious floating hotel, a hotel that would swiftly carry men like Lord Thompson to the furthest corners of the British Empire. But the R one oh one had a rival. When he commissioned the R one oh one, Lord Thompson had proposed a competition between two teams of airship designers. A private company, Vickers, would build the R one hundred. Lord Thompson's air ministry would design and build its own ship, the R one oh one. The air ministry, of course, would be the one to adjudicate which of the two airships was best.
16:35 Speaker 05 Lord Thompson had argued his case in a cabinet meeting.
16:39 Speaker 02 These arrangements will promote a spirit of friendly emulation.
16:44 Speaker 05 Come off it. What you mean is bloody competition. That competition came to represent more than a clash between two teams. Rather absurdly, it came to symbolise a struggle for supremacy between the two contrasting economic systems. The press quickly caught on to the idea of this contest, dubbing the R one hundred, the capitalist airship, and the R one oh one, the socialist airship. Lord Thompson affectionately called them "my children", although he certainly had a favourite child. He once said-
17:20 Speaker 02 The R one hundred brought me pleasure. I hope-
17:23 Speaker 05 That the R101 will bring me joy. But the sibling rivalry would be less than friendly. In fact, it would be deadly.
17:34 Speaker 05 We're sometimes told that competition is good. It raises everyone's game. It brings out the best in us. But sometimes competition leads to tragedy.
18:05 Speaker 01 How lucky are we to get to listen to that? Thank you so much for sharing that with us. That is such a... Now, hold on, was that Alan Cummings?
18:12 Speaker 05 I think it might have been Alan Cumming. We had some amazing actors throughout Cautionary Tales. And also you heard a glimpse of it there as well. The amazing music and sound design.
18:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:27 Speaker 05 By Pascal Wise. So yeah, the vision of Cautionary Tales was always come and come and sit by the fire. I'm going to tell you a story and we're really going to luxuriate in this in this storytelling. But yes, I think that's Alan Cumming playing Lord Thompson.
18:43 Speaker 01 I was like, I know that voice.
18:44 Speaker 05 We also had Helena Bonham Carter.
18:47 Speaker 01 So you've just got some C-list.
18:48 Speaker 05 Playing her own distant cousin Florence Nightingale.
18:53 Speaker 00 Really? She's related to Florence? I'll have to get her on, Helena, if you're listening.
18:58 Speaker 05 So yes, I occasionally pinch myself that I'm, you know, I can't remember writing scripts for Alan Cumming and Helena Bonham Carter. But that does set up this competition. So Lord Thompson has this vision. He has this interesting idea, not a crazy idea, I think, that, yeah, that we have two organisations building these airships. But It goes toxic quite quickly. And I think part of the problem is, on the one hand, the R100 is being built up in Howden in Yorkshire, they don't even have an airship mast. This is the private sector team, Vickers, they're feeling very under pressure, very
19:42 Speaker 05 underfunded, understaffed. However, the airship designer is Barnes Wallace, the guy who later built the bouncing bomb, he's a genius. So they're really good, but they basically feel that the whole playing field is tilted against them. Meanwhile, the R101, this is the so-called socialist airship, is being built by the Air Ministry, they're much closer to London, they're at the Royal Airship Works, which is, I think, near Luton, and they, effectively, they are going to judge the winner of the competition. Like, whose airship is the best? Ours or theirs? At least that's how the R100 see it. And so there are a couple of things that are going on there. One of the ideas with all of our cautionary tales is not just we'll tell you the story,
20:25 Speaker 05 but we're going to try and learn the lesson. And competition can be very healthy, it can really bring out the best in people, but it can also be toxic. And this competition was toxic. The R100 felt they had been so unfairly treated, that when they saw the plans of the R101, and they thought, well, this is just absurd, they didn't offer any comment, they didn't give them any tips, they thought, well, we're already doomed to lose, why should we give them any help? Meanwhile, the R101, they had every advantage, but they were also under massive pressure. So they had Lord Thompson leaning over them, pressing them to accelerate their schedule. So when things started to go wrong, you had the R100 who didn't want to get involved,
21:10 Speaker 05 and didn't want to take their foot off the accelerator, and the R101 who felt that they couldn't back away either. And so in the end, the whole project was rushed, and, I mean, the R101 should never have taken off.
21:25 Speaker 00 What's striking me, Tim, is that we have these objects, and on to them are being projected all of these ideas, obviously in terms of this sort of technological arms race between these two rival setups, but also the idea of luxury travel, the idea of the empire of the world getting smaller, of British control over land, people, but also now the air. And
21:46 Speaker 05 Do we get to talk about the smoking lounge?
21:48 Speaker 00 Oh, I mean, please, let's, let's do that. I think, you know, there's, there's so much in here about sort of luxury, about power, all of these things are going hand in hand and all, you know, being sort of pressurized in these airships.
22:01 Speaker 05 Yeah.
22:02 Speaker 00 But talk to me about the actual, the physicality of these airships. You say that they're being rushed.
22:08 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah.
22:08 Speaker 00 What is happening with them?
22:10 Speaker 05 They're amazing.
22:12 Speaker 00 Okay.
22:13 Speaker 05 So we'll, we'll talk about the luxury. We'll talk about the smoking lounge. We'll talk about the champagne and the carpet.
22:17 Speaker 00 Please, I'm always happy to talk about champagne.
22:20 Speaker 05 There'll be a moment to talk about Lord Thompson's carpet. What these things are, is they are these enormous shells, cigar shaped shells with big internal combustion engines hanging off them. And underneath this shell is a, is a cabin. The cabin's not that big compared to the enormous size of the airships. The, the airship's got to be lighter than air. So it's, it's, it is mostly a massive bag of lighter than air gas. Plus you've got the fuel, the engines, and then you need the space for the crew and the passengers. So the luxury is partly about, well, what do, what do we expect to provide our passengers with?
23:02 Speaker 05 Should they, should there be a grand piano? Should there be a five star silver service? Should there be baths? Should there be, what should we provide? Because these are going to be quite long trips. More like ocean liner trips. So they'll take several days. So there was this question of what you should provide. How many servants should be, you know, waiters, cooks should be on board this thing? That's part of it. The smoking lounge. So there were two potential candidates for what gas should be in the balloon.
23:33 Speaker 00 I hadn't even thought about the problem of smoking on a, on an airship, right?
23:38 Speaker 05 Let me talk to you about that. So one possibility is helium.
23:41 Speaker 00 Okay.
23:42 Speaker 05 Two problems with helium. One is the Americans are basically have a monopoly on the world's supply of helium. The second is it's, it's not as light as hydrogen. And that it gets to be quite marginal. So I I I forget the exact figures, but if you've got this enormous space that's filled with helium, maybe it's got 10% less lift. I I don't know what that I forget what the exact figure is. But since so much of the lift is already lifting the engines, lifting the structure, lifting lifting the the superstructure, lifting the fuel.
24:15 Speaker 00 Mm hmm.
24:16 Speaker 05 The switch from hydrogen to helium might be the difference between the airship will take off or the airship will not take off.
24:22 Speaker 00 Wow.
24:23 Speaker 05 So for those two reasons, hydrogen is favoured.
24:26 Speaker 00 Mm hmm.
24:26 Speaker 05 Okay, hydrogen is very light. There are two problems with hydrogen. Number one, the hydrogen atom is so small, it just escapes from anything. It'll get through any hole. So it's difficult to find a substance that will contain it.
24:40 Speaker 00 Okay.
24:41 Speaker 05 What they use is a cow gut.
24:46 Speaker 05 So this enormous silver thing.
24:49 Speaker 00 You're not telling me the whole thing is.
24:50 Speaker 05 It it looks like it looks like an Imperial Star Destroyer, only only sleeker. It looks like like a classic space opera spaceship. It's silver, but inside, so you've got canvas on the outside.
25:03 Speaker 00 Okay.
25:04 Speaker 05 You've got the you've got the metal frame.
25:06 Speaker 00 Mm hmm.
25:06 Speaker 05 Then inside, you've got lots of little balloons and those little balloons.
25:10 Speaker 00 I see.
25:11 Speaker 05 Are are all made of cow gut. And so the whole thing is this kind of the.
25:15 Speaker 00 So surreal.
25:16 Speaker 05 Viscera of this enormous mammalian collective is lifting this whole thing off and the whole thing smells a little bit of kind of cow gut and mould.
25:24 Speaker 00 Yeah, not very luxurious.
25:26 Speaker 05 It's not very luxurious when you actually get into the the the chassis of the thing. But the other problem with hydrogen is it's very flammable.
25:36 Speaker 00 Mm hmm.
25:37 Speaker 05 So if it escapes and there's a spark, it's going to go up big time.
25:43 Speaker 00 Right.
25:44 Speaker 05 Anybody who's ever seen the footage of the Hindenburg. That's a hydrogen airship. That's what happens. And I think, I think the metal is aluminium, which is also flannel. This doesn't help.
25:53 Speaker 00 And had there been disasters before this point? Had, had that happened?
25:55 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah.
25:56 Speaker 00 So people knew this was a problem.
25:57 Speaker 05 The Hindenburg is later, but people knew this is a risk. So you just have to make sure that you don't set fire to the hydrogen. So you wouldn't have a-
26:04 Speaker 00 Small detail.
26:04 Speaker 05 So you wouldn't have a smoking lounge, obviously, unless important people were on your airship, in which case you need a smoking lounge. So they did think about this and they had quite a clever solution. And I don't think the smoking lounge ultimately was the problem. The smoking lounge was slightly pressurised. So you're constantly pumping air into the smoking lounge, which means that air is constantly pushing out of, under all the doors. It's constantly escaping from the smoking lounge. And that means if there's hydrogen around, it's not going to get into the smoking lounge because you're constantly, you know, the, the, the smoking lounge is constantly breathing out. They're clever.
26:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:39 Speaker 05 I mean, they are clever.
26:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:41 Speaker 00 That is amazing, but also this feels like going on the Titanic with a big iceberg magnet on board. I mean, this is just asking, asking for trouble, surely.
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28:24 Speaker 01 The juxtaposition of, and I've seen the internal plans for this, and then I've seen some of the imagery where it looks like, think, yes, Titanic but shrunk slightly. And so you're thinking like Orient Express maybe or something, that some of the, it's really beautifully decorated.
28:39 Speaker 00 Are there any murder mysteries set on airships? Because this is a great, high pressurised environment, literally.
28:46 Speaker 01 But it is a, it's these two worlds, this really volatile thing that's going on around. And then you just see these pictures of these men and there's a viewing platform. It's experiential, supposed to be.
29:00 Speaker 05 So beautiful, so beautiful. But I think that this was, this was part of the problem, that this was to be for very important people. And so one of the, one of the problems with the R101 is that the design was overly heavy and they made it, it made it difficult to lighten it down because you've got all these luxury items going on board. Second related problem is that Lord Thompson is constantly trying to show it off. So one of the things that he does is he invites the membership of the Houses of Parliament, or maybe it's the House of Lords. Anyway, a bunch of super VIPs are all going to come and they're all going to go for a ride on the R101.
29:42 Speaker 05 Meanwhile, the crew of the R101 are like, this is a prototype airship. There are, there are a number of problems which we have yet to fix. We cannot take all these people around. In the end, they compromised, so they were served lunch on the, on the R101, but it was attached to a mast, so it's floating. So amazing, amazing experience. But just this sort of sense of like, oh, these masters of the universe cannot be, cannot be inconvenienced by, by a delay to the schedule.
30:11 Speaker 00 It's slightly giving the Titanic submersible, isn't it? That kind of slight hubris, I think, in terms of rushing the technology, wanting so desperately to have that experience at the cost of safety.
30:23 Speaker 05 To these people. Yes.
30:24 Speaker 00 Yeah.
30:25 Speaker 05 And that and that became a theme over and over again.
30:28 Speaker 00 Mm hmm.
30:28 Speaker 05 People basically identifying problems and the problems not being passed up.
30:33 Speaker 00 Yes. So are there whistleblowers already in this moment?
30:35 Speaker 05 Absolutely, absolutely. So let's talk about some of the some of the things that happened that should have called a halt to this problem, project, or at least put it on pause. So the first is Barnes Wallace, the designer of the R one hundred, is shown the plans for the R one O one and basically says, this is this is crude and over elaborate and unworkable. But he doesn't say anything. He just writes back and says, until our arrangements are shown to be unsatisfactory, I prefer our design for the R one hundred. No, ours is better. See you.
31:09 Speaker 05 But then why would he give? Why would he give any advice? Basically, all of their jobs are on the line. They've got to win this competition. They've got to build a better airship. Why would you give any any advice? The first officer, Noel Afton, is is writing in his diary. He is convinced that the ship is is not airworthy. There is a moment where an inspector Frederick McWade climbs up inside the airship. We might be able to hear that. But there are also several moments where people write to senior officials and say, the airship's not safe, there are problems, and nobody says anything.
31:47 Speaker 05 So one of the weird accidents of history is Neville Shute, the novelist, was actually on the design team of the R one hundred and and rode on the R one hundred. And he wrote a book about this competition. But there's one moment he describes where he went to visit the Royal Airship Works shortly before the these things are due to take off. And some of the team on the R one hundred basically say, come here, we want to show you something. Don't tell anybody this. And they they beckon him into an office and they pull a pull out a desk drawer and they give him a piece of paper. Or it looks like a piece of paper. It's silvery. And he picks it up and it just crumbles in his hands.
32:31 Speaker 05 And he recognizes the silver, this is the color of the the R101. And he says, where did this come from? He said, they said it came, this is, this is the R101. It's falling apart. It's falling apart because they'd tried to, they tried to protect it with a lacquer and the lacquer had kind of destroyed, there was a glue and the glue and the lacquer had not interacted properly and the whole thing was falling apart. And it was all, they were trying to patch it up, but they, they wouldn't say anything to their superiors. And Neville Shute later asked himself, was that a cry for help? Were they asking me to say something? Do something. But he, he didn't do anything. He said, well, I couldn't have done anything, but maybe, he didn't try. Yeah. He didn't try. Done a little bit more potentially.
33:16 Speaker 05 Look, we're coming to the moment now where we're going to get beyond these concerns, even though we probably shouldn't be. So we're at the 4th of October, 1930. A final inspection is being carried out at Cardington. I want you to re-immers yourself back into this land of storytelling and peril and hear what's the concerns that are presenting themselves before we actually take to the skies. A Mr Frederick McWade, official airship inspector, came to examine the R101. Mr McWade climbed up between the mouldering gasbags, puffing and blowing with the effort.
33:56 Speaker 05 He was nearly of pensionable age after all, but then you don't spend 27 years inspecting airships without learning to recognize warning signs.
34:07 Speaker 02 Absolutely ridiculous.
34:08 Speaker 05 He peered closely at the repaired gasbags.
34:11 Speaker 02 This is a death trap.
34:13 Speaker 05 Could the patch up job really be trusted to hold? How many hours of flight before it failed? Mr McWade had no doubts. His report was a thunderclap.
34:24 Speaker 02 I cannot recommend to you the extension of the present permit to fly or the issue of any further permits or certificates.
34:32 Speaker 05 R101 was grounded, but this was a thunderclap that nobody was prepared to hear. So they covered their ears. The R101 had been built by the government and the government issued permits to fly. Nobody wanted to disappoint Lord Thompson and so Mr McWade was overruled.
34:54 Speaker 00 We now come to the fourth World War, 1930. We've, we've heard those concerns.
34:58 Speaker 05 Are we feeling optimistic?
34:59 Speaker 00 No. I mean, I'm feeling nervous. I'm feeling really quite stressed about this. It's not looking good.
35:03 Speaker 05 It's called cautionary tales.
35:04 Speaker 00 Yeah. We know something not great is coming, but this is the day that this airship takes to the skies unbelievably.
35:15 Speaker 05 Yes.
35:15 Speaker 00 How do we get to this point?
35:17 Speaker 05 So it's, it's flown before. It's flown test flights. It's flown a demonstration flight over an airshow where it, it plunged.
35:25 Speaker 00 Not the same.
35:26 Speaker 05 It plunged towards the crowd and then, and then just managed to bring its nose up. And everyone was like, oh, it, it.
35:34 Speaker 00 What a good trick.
35:35 Speaker 05 Yes. It, it nodded its nose in salute to the king and queen. It was like, no.
35:39 Speaker 00 It nearly crashed. Wow. Okay.
35:41 Speaker 05 The people on the airship knew it nearly crashed because it's, it's.
35:44 Speaker 00 And was that just the crew who were on?
35:46 Speaker 05 Yeah, the crew were on, were on it. It's, it's unbalanced. It's too heavy. And the canvas is, is crumbling away at the front and the hydrogen bags are leaking because they've been overinflated because they're worried.
35:59 Speaker 00 That it won't stay aloft.
36:00 Speaker 05 It's not got enough lift. So they're pumping too much hydrogen in and they start rubbing against each other and developing these little holes and the hydrogen, hydrogen has a tendency to escape. One of the crews said, what's the point in pumping gas into a bloody colander? So they knew.
36:15 Speaker 00 Wow.
36:15 Speaker 05 And one of the officers on board the ship cycled to the airship works. You could see this enormous silver object attached to the mast and he cycled with his son with his baggage and he's carrying his food and his clothes in a paper bag because they have been told to save weight.
36:38 Speaker 00 Oh, wow.
36:38 Speaker 05 Don't, don't, don't bring your suitcases. Don't bring, no jars of cookies.
36:42 Speaker 00 It's that close?
36:43 Speaker 05 Yeah. Everything in a paper bag. They're trying to save as much weight as possible. And he turns to his son, who's just a boy, and he says, promise me two things. You'll join the navy and you'll look after your mother and your sister because I don't think I'm coming back.
36:55 Speaker 00 Oh. So things were that serious for the crew? They really thought this was going to go badly wrong and yet?
37:01 Speaker 05 They really did. There was a great. Imperial conference taking place in London. And this did not happen very often because the empire is a big place. It takes an enormous amount of effort to get the the Prime Minister of Canada, the governor of India.
37:15 Speaker 00 Could invent some air travel.
37:16 Speaker 05 Exactly. If only someone could invent some air travel. So this only happens every few years and it's a forty five day conference and all the heads of government of all these different imperial and Commonwealth states, they're all there in London. And Lord Thompson's idea is he is going to greet everybody, give the opening speech, fly to India, have meetings in India and fly back before the end of the conference, easily before the end of the conference. In fact, he flies out with the speech that he's going to give when he gets home.
37:49 Speaker 00 Okay.
37:50 Speaker 05 And he said, when he's told, you know, there's a few problems with the R one O one, he says, you must stick to the schedule because I have made my plans accordingly.
38:00 Speaker 00 Wow. So we have, we have a vessel that in an airshow has plummeted towards the earth. And yet now we are flying it to India and back. How many people are on board? And also, something that that strikes me about this is is the description of the ship. Am I right in thinking that it's described as being stormproof? And you kind of get the echoes of the Titanic being unsinkable here. So there's a kind of, there's like a sort of confidence being pumped into this in terms of propaganda.
38:32 Speaker 05 The stormproof thing is very strange. So that seems to be absolutely in Lord Thompson's imagination. He had, he, he says, it has always been my ambition to ride the storm. And on an earlier test flight, he was, he was unhappy that there wasn't enough wind.
38:49 Speaker 00 Oh, the ego of this man, no.
38:51 Speaker 05 Because he would, he had such confidence in this ship. But I think everyone else on the ship knew it's not stormproof. There are, and there are two basic problems. The first is when it rains, the ship gets heavier because the
39:06 Speaker 00 Right.
39:06 Speaker 05 The canopy is not completely waterproof. It absorbs. Oh, my God. Uh, water. I mean, it's, it's sort of waterproof, but it, it, it does absorb the moisture and it does get heavier. And this is very marginal because it's supposed to be lighter than air. So even if it's just a couple of tons of water, and remember this thing is more than 700 feet long. It's the size of a skyscraper. It doesn't take a lot of water to make it heavier. That's your first problem. The second is if the wind blows and it's trying to get into the wind, it's going to make very, very slow progress. And potentially the wrong gust of wind is going to force it down towards the ground. There are 54 people on board. They include the crew. They include Lord Thompson himself, and they include the entire design team of the R101.
39:50 Speaker 05 The crew, as I mentioned, are carrying their spare uniforms in paper bags to save weight. Lord Thompson shows up.
40:00 Speaker 00 Oh.
40:00 Speaker 05 In his chauffeured car, unfolds himself, he's a big, tall man, unfolds himself in the chauffeured car. His chauffeur pops open the boot and there's the bottle of, bottles of champagne.
40:14 Speaker 00 God.
40:15 Speaker 05 Uh, in an enormous trunk and a huge ceremonial carpet, really heavy carpet. Because whenever, when he lands at these various, he wants, he wants, well, he wants to lay out the carpet. So they can host a proper imperial dinners on this, on this amazing carpet. And of course, nobody says, mate, the, the crew are carrying their clothes in paper bags to save weight. Could we not leave the carpet at home? They go, yes, of course, my lord. And they, they put the carpet on board. So.
40:48 Speaker 00 Oh.
40:49 Speaker 05 You've, you've taken us essentially to the point of no return, Tim, and. That's what I do. To, to get to that point, we're going back to some of the brilliant storytelling in Cautionary Tales. Back over to you to tell us where this goes next.
41:06 Speaker 05 Down on the ground, despite the late hour and the rain, a Monsieur Alfred Roubaix was out hoping to bag some rabbits for Sunday lunch.
41:18 Speaker 05 As the Titanic ship loomed down out of the low clouds, he gazed in horror.
41:27 Speaker 05 Far bigger than the Cathedral of Beauvais, the R101 was moving slowly forward, her nose down, as though she had given up and just wanted to be allowed to rest.
41:41 Speaker 05 Her thin, wet, fragile front cover had almost certainly ripped under the incessant winds, exposing the perforated hydrogen gas bags to the direct force of the storm. The airship briefly pulled out of its dive, a final show of defiance. Then, she dipped again. We're down, lads! At 2:08, R101 gently nosedived into a forest near Beauvais, the dark branches tearing into her skin. She was travelling at no more than 15 miles an hour. The passengers would have felt an impact like falling off a bicycle,
42:23 Speaker 05 but no bicycle carries 5 million cubic feet of hydrogen.
42:30 Speaker 05 A single spark, and the darkness of the forest was banished by an instant hellish blaze.
42:41 Speaker 05 Alfred Roubaix was the only witness. I heard the people in the wreckage crying for help. I was 100 yards away, and the heat was awful. I ran as hard as I could away from that place. Just eight men managed to get out. Among the 48 victims of the crash were First Officer Noel Atherton, who'd repeatedly called for the flight to be postponed, the entire design team of the R101, and the boss of them all, Christopher Birdwood Thompson. The competition was over. R101, the serene hope of the future, had lost.
43:27 Speaker 05 It's horrible. It's horrible.
43:28 Speaker 00 Tim, I mean, that's so, you told that so evocatively and it's, it's a stressful listen. We'll talk about the aftermath of this and the lessons learned, but something that's really striking me is you mentioned earlier, obviously in this terrible accident, the design team of the R101 have all been lost. And you spoke about the design team for the R100 and that one of the people on that team was the inventor of the bouncing bomb, right?
43:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, Bounce Wallace. Yeah.
43:53 Speaker 00 So how different history would have been?
43:56 Speaker 05 If he'd been on the R101. Yeah. Well, yes. But, but I think the hostility between the teams was such that I didn't think anybody from the R100 team was invited.
44:05 Speaker 00 He wouldn't have, yeah.
44:06 Speaker 05 And I think tellingly, they were also not invited to contribute to the inquiries. There was inquiry, I mean, I think the inquiry is not that interesting, except that at no point did the team of people who were working on a very similar project, at no point were any of them asked to give any opinion about what might have happened with the R101.
44:40 Speaker 01 In a world where swords were sharp.
44:43 Speaker 06 And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians.
44:49 Speaker 01 Me, Matt Lewis.
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44:57 Speaker 01 So for plagues, crusades and Viking raids and plenty of other things that don't rhyme. Subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.
45:21 Speaker 00 So did people learn any lessons from this then? Because, you know, on Quotient Tales, that's, that's the thing that you want to do is to take the lessons from these moments in history and these disasters. And it seems to me that in the immediate aftermath, is there anything that is learned?
45:37 Speaker 05 So, I mean, it's the end of the airship programme in the UK. So the R100, which by the way, flew perfectly well, flew to Canada and back, no problems, no problems.
45:47 Speaker 00 Did people have faith in it though? Was it trusted after that disaster of the R101?
45:51 Speaker 05 No, I think that that's the thing. Nobody really, when you've seen what happens to the R101, why would you get on the R100? And yes, the R100 was better designed. It was it was more stripped down, it was more elegant, it was just a much more robust plane. But fundamentally, it's still a bunch of cowguts inflated with hydrogen. Yeah. And it's highly flammable. And so it is dangerous. And we saw with the Zeppelin, which was a few years later, there is a fundamental issue. If you're going to take these things up full of hydrogen, there's only so safe they can ever be. So you kind of have to build them, you have to inflate them with helium, which is more expensive and harder to get and
46:35 Speaker 05 and less effective. And so that creates all sorts of limits. The other thing, of course, is planes are getting better all the time. So in 1930, you think about the aeroplane technology available in 1930, you could conceivably say, well, look, that's, that's not the future, the airship is. But by 1940, planes can go so much further, they're making so much progress. And of course, by 1950, you're only going to use the airship for very specific uses. It's a particular, it's an observational platform. You might use it for a safari, you might use it instead of a satellite, potentially, maybe you could put one up above
47:14 Speaker 05 a combat zone and with with sensors on it and just keep it up there, using solar power to fix it in place. So there are some specialised uses that you might have. But generally, I think the the real death of the airship was the advances in aeroplanes.
47:32 Speaker 05 Conclusion you might draw is it's very important that whistleblowers feel that they can blow the whistle and it's very important to create mechanisms whereby that is possible. And there were plenty of warning signs. The Titanic is a different sort of case. The Titanic, they made mistakes, but fundamentally, what happened to the Titanic kind of came out of nowhere. Whereas the R101, it's, no one got on the Titanic and turned around to their son and said, son, I need you to promise me you'll look after your mother because I don't think I'm coming back. Whereas there were a lot of men who got on that airship who really thought there was every chance they wouldn't return and they were right.
48:13 Speaker 00 And was there, was there anyone who refused to get on the airship? Or did everyone do their duty as they saw it?
48:18 Speaker 05 Oh, that's a good question. I don't remember hearing of anybody who refused, but I think that that must have been a possibility that you wouldn't get on. But yeah, duty is a strong thing.
48:29 Speaker 01 It's a, it's a good point though, Tim. It's very easy to call it the Titanic of the skies and you will hear that if you, if you Google it and you'll see it on there. But actually, it's a very different beast of a thing in terms of, well, numbers, first of all, but also the fact that there is a constant voice saying.
48:46 Speaker 00 They're screaming in the background saying, don't do that.
48:49 Speaker 01 Although very quietly unto themselves.
48:50 Speaker 00 Yes.
48:51 Speaker 01 But going, no.
48:53 Speaker 05 Yeah. Yes, the Titanic, you have to work really hard to sink the Titanic.
48:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
48:57 Speaker 05 And they managed it. Whereas the R101, you have to work really hard to keep, to keep it afloat. I mean, those last hours where it's flying, it flies over London, over the English Channel, over France, it doesn't get anywhere close to India. It crashes so soon. It's making such slow progress into the storm. And just that, that sense of this thing just grinding on, and it's just not capable of doing what Lord Thompson thinks it can do. But no one's going to, no one's going to tell him it can't. So they keep trying.
49:26 Speaker 00 Yeah. Tim, this was a really interesting history that I knew nothing about. And it's, it really takes you to that interwar moment when Britain is trying to work out what it is on a global stage. It's trying to. Still uphold the empire as built under Queen Victoria and move forward in this war-racked modern world. There's so much going on here. It was so interesting. Just tell me this before we wrap up. What is it about disasters in history that interests you so much? And why are they so poignant to us as listeners, as consumers of those stories? But in terms as well, learning the lessons from them, why are they important to look at? You know,
50:07 Speaker 00 because you might, I think we also have a dark history podcast, so we are very familiar with this territory. But I think what we're all trying to do here is not the sort of macabre, thoughtless consumption of these horrible stories, but to get something from them. So what is it about them that you think is worth revisiting?
50:25 Speaker 05 So I'm a nerd. And so I'm
50:28 Speaker 00 You're in safe company.
50:29 Speaker 05 Thank you. So I'm always interested in that slightly nerdy angle. So in the R101 story, I looked at some evidence from social science about what it takes for competition to turn toxic. And there's various psychological experiments and measurements of things going on in in organizations. And it more generally, whenever one of these things goes wrong, there is often a theme or something about how organizations work, how complex systems work, or very often how human cognition works, how we all think, that you can carry forward and you can you can learn from in the modern world. So one of the one of the
51:11 Speaker 05 very first cautionary tales we did was about a captain in Berlin before the First World War, an army captain, who just commandeered some soldiers walking down the street, said, you're on a special mission, you need to come with me. They fall in behind him. He gets himself a little army, there's about 10 of them. They cross Berlin, they go to Kerpenick, which is a suburb of Berlin. They arrest the mayor of Kerpenick. The captain says, you've been accused of corruption, orders him to open the safe, to confiscate the money that this mayor has stolen. The mayor's put under arrest. The mayor's wife is put under house arrest. He tells his men to take the mayor to the police station in
51:52 Speaker 05 central Berlin. And then the captain, with the bag of money under his arm, walks into the lavatory cubicle at Kerpenick Station.
52:01 Speaker 05 And then five minutes later walks out again in civilian clothes. He never was a captain. He's just a bloke wearing a soldier's uniform. Wow. And just disappears. And that was one of our very first cautionary tales. And it's funny. It's fun. It's not, nobody dies. It's just fun. But then when you, you start exploring that, you start thinking, oh, why do people, what makes people fall for comms? The idea of the pressure, the idea of someone who looks the part. You know, people vote for tall politicians. People vote for male politicians. People vote for white politicians. There's, there's a lot of this sort of thing going on. And, and in every cautionary tale, there's something. Some of them are funny. Some of them are awful. Some of them are just super interesting and kind of technically interesting, but there's always a lesson.
52:47 Speaker 01 And if you'd like to learn some more of those lessons, then you can find cautionary tales wherever you get your podcasts. The, the appeal to me right now, it's the end of my recording day and I'm gonna want to immerse myself in a bit of storytelling. So this is somewhere you can go to escape into that storytelling world, which is just, Tim, thank you so much for bringing it to our After Dark listeners, because I know they will fall hook, line and sinker for it. We love a disaster on After Dark as well. So if there's anything else you'd like us to cover in terms of, we haven't done Chernobyl, have we? We, we haven't done that. That should, we should do that. We've done Titanic. There's other things. Let us know in the comments or you can email us at [email protected] and we will get on those disasters as much as you like.
53:32 Speaker 01 Thank you for listening to this episode. You can leave a five star review wherever you get your podcasts. And until next time, happy listening.
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