Louis Bleriot

DAILY MAIL MONDAY JULY 26^th 1909

Fossicking among the old papers in the garage I found a few pages from the Daily Mail, some for Friday 29^th October 1909 of constitutional interest, and a double page spread from July 26th celebrating the crossing of the Channel by Louis Bleriot the day before.

Bleriot was out to win the £1000 prize offered by the Daily mail, and to publicise his own aircraft, the Bleriot monoplane, and perhaps to argue for the monoplane principle. There are photographs, a drawing of Bleriot, a drawing of the plane, a couple of maps (one of the route from London to Manchester, 170 miles and a £10 000 prize), accounts of the man, and Bleriot’s first hand description of the crossing. All this is well known.

It is the pieces around it on the same topic that add to interest.

The first message that Bleriot sent off to London after landing read:

“I am profoundly happy to be the first to succeed in crossing the Channel and to have thus created a new tie which I hope will strengthen still more the bonds which unite France and England. Long live the Entente Cordiale – for ever!”

Beside the editorial column the enterprising Charles Houry of 23 rue Royale in Paris offers for sale the Bleriot monoplane ‘Type Calais -Dover’ as well as the Latham Antoinette monoplane, the ‘original’ Wright biplane, and the Voisin biplane. The telegraph address is ‘Dirigeable, Paris’ – Houry moving from airships to what the editorial refers to as ‘heavier than air’ machines. Latham was the main competitor to Bleriot for the first crossing.

But why not buy one, as one article notes:

“An aeroplane is cheaper than a motor-car. The development of aeroplanes has been far speedier than that of motor cars”

When Bleriot relocated to England the firm made the Bleriot Whippet motor car.

However most striking is the ending of the editorial, unusually prescient for the Mail:

“Every one of us must be conscious of dim forebodings at the consequences behind yesterday’s flight, at the revolution in human relations which it must bring swiftly in its train, and at the prodigious changes in national life which may accompany it”

Seaford

In a passage of a letter that May Sarton wrote on May 25^th 1937 I found that she had visited the town in which much of my growing up was done.

“Then we came back and stayed at Seaford, an incredibly dreary half-baked English seaside resort.. There was an awful moment when we saw the bleak shingly beach and went into a being-repainted boarding house called undoubtedly “Sea View”. It had the atmosphere of the most painful Katherine Mansfield short stories of sea places – I could imagine all sorts of sordid heart-tearing stories. But we escaped and walked five miles through a golden evening across green downs and a little forest to a village which was just like the one in “The Dog Beneath the Skin” – They were having coronation celebrations and were just beginning the wheelbarrow race on the green when we arrived, the curate being judge. The town is a church on a green hill and one beautiful old street ending in a square round a big chestnut like the little French towns. We had a wonderful dinner and then went back to Seaford by bus..”

May Sarton ‘Selected Letters 1916-1954’ ed Susan Sherman (1997) 103-104

As a description of the ambience of Seaford – as experienced twenty years later – it cannot be faulted. She and Julian Huxley were on their way back from Paris and had presumably landed at Newhaven, and where to stay – dreary little Seaford.

It does not seem so bad now, a dormitory for London in part, and with the beach completely altered, raised to the level of the promenade, but formerly it was full of prep schools, and a few rather dilapidated boarding houses along the front, a gas works, and even a factory in the dip near the bus station and Berry’s shop.

And what is the village? Alfriston sprang first to mind, the school bus from Seaford used to drop us under the chestnut tree in the centre at the end of the beautiful old street. But the church is more or less on the flood plain not on a hill – poetic licence perhaps? One cannot imagine West Dean to have the population, and East Dean would be too far. Bishopstone has no real street, Tarring Neville, too small.

A small mystery.