The R100

New Month Old Post: first posted 10th July 2016.

In his autobiography, Slide Rule, the author Nevil Shute (1899-1960), a man of his time with attitudes to match, remembered working as an engineer on the R100 airship during its construction at Howden in Yorkshire in the nineteen-twenties. Much of the workforce consisted of local lads and girls trained to carry out riveting and other tasks high up in the ribs and spines of the airship skeleton. Of them he writes:

The lads were what one would expect, straight from the plough, but the girls were an eye-opener. They were brutish and uncouth, filthy in appearance and in habits ... these girls straight off the farms were the lowest types that I have ever seen in England, and incredibly foul-mouthed ... we had to employ a welfare worker to look after them because promiscuous intercourse was going on merrily in every dark corner ... as the job approached completion ... we were able to get rid of the most jungly types. 

Jungly types? That is my maternal grandma you are talking about, Nevil, and her friends and cousins. They never had the chance to be privately educated and scrape through Oxford with a bad degree. While your evenings and weekends were spent dancing, playing badminton, flying aeroplanes and writing novels, they were toiling away tending crops and animals from their damp and dingy dwellings. Better check your privilege. 

And, how come the lads were “salt-of-the-earth, vital rustic types”, while their sisters were “jungly beyond vulgarity”? How was it different from when you were in the army? 

The language of the men was no novelty to me, of course, and I could out-swear most of them, but their attitude to women was shocking... 

Workers at Howden, high up in the ribs and spines of the R100 skeleton.

Both my parents had memories of the R100. My mother’s mother worked there for a short time, and had a small, airship-shaped piece of duralumin silver metal, around an inch and a half long (4cm) and flat on one side. It was from a batch of airship brooches unfinished when they ran out of metal. She gave me it as a toy and it became an imaginary submarine. 

My dad remembered going to see the R100 in its construction shed at Howden. His dad borrowed the Model T van from work to drive there across the newly opened Boothferry Bridge. He said that the river was swollen by floodwater. Looking up in the shed, the airship was so big my dad could not see it. At 700 feet long (220m) and 130 feet in diameter (40m), it was around the size of two rows of twenty-five terraced houses with front gardens and a road between. He thought he was looking up at the roof.

The R100 in its construction shed at Howden
with one of the control gondolas hanging from the airship
which my dad thought was the roof.

The R100 squeezed out of its shed and left for Cardington in Bedfordshire in December, 1929. It was one of two airships built in competition to explore the possibility of commercial flights to Canada, India, and Australia, then still too far for aeroplanes to carry heavy loads. The other was the R101 built at Cardington. 

No more large airships were built in Britain. The R100, the better of the two, made a successful flight to Canada and back in 1930, crossing the Atlantic in three days. Rather than admit defeat, the R101 team attempted a premature flight to India, but the airship hit the ground and caught fire in France in October, 1930, with the loss of 48 lives. The airship project was abandoned and the R100 broken up for scrap. Large airships were built later in other countries, such as the Hindenburg in Germany, but these also ended in disaster. They were filled with hydrogen. 

The R100 over Montreal, August, 1930.

Compass

My first compass, from 1973. And I still have its 24-page instruction leaflet. 

The leaflet goes into great detail, enough to enter an orienteering competition, but I used the compass mainly to check I was heading roughly in the right direction. When you are walking the twenty-five miles through the mountains from Rannoch to Fort William in the Scottish Highlands, the last thing you want is to go wrong at the high watershed and somehow find yourself miles astray at Kinlochleven. I suppose most would use a SatNav now. 

Another brilliant walk was around the hidden, Blea Gill Waterfall near Grassington in Yorkshire. You follow the track along the Western side of Grimwith Reservoir (since considerably enlarged) to Blea Beck, and then climb to the top of the waterfall to Grassington Moor. A circular anti-clockwise route takes you back via Hebden Beck to the starting point on the B6265 road. 

Route around Blea Gill Waterfall (1967 1-inch map)

It was wild above the waterfall, very boggy, with few obvious tracks. There were centuries-old, disused lead mine workings, chimneys, shafts, and spoil heaps, a strangely beautiful landscape of industrial desolation, deserted by the legions of miners that once toiled there. You saw no one else all day, and without a compass it would have been easy to lose your bearings. Proper walking. I am told it has now been cleaned up with signposts, notice boards, and warnings not to fall down the concealed mine shafts. 

Blea Gill Waterfall, 1974

Grassington Moor now

I then looked for routes needing more precise compass work. I remember walking with friend Neville up to Alport Moor from Howden Reservoir in the Derbyshire Dark Peak. The ascent passes through dense evergreens before reaching open moorland, which levels out gradually, curving up so you cannot see the top until almost there. Neville looked dubious when I said the Alport Moor trig point was a little way straight ahead, and indeed there it was. He had complete faith in my map reading after that, often misplaced. 

We also liked to cross the Derbyshire moorland plateau of Kinder Scout, from Fair Brook to Kinder Downfall. I wrote about it here. It is not far across, but the maze of deep, watery, peat ridges and trenches known as hags and groughs, twisting and turning in all directions, make it impossible to keep to a straight line. All distant features are below the horizon, so there is nothing you might aim towards. Unless you check your compass every few yards you go hopelessly off-course. 

Navigating With The Compass

From the top of Fair Brook to Kinder Downfall you follow a bearing of about 255 degrees, but you do not really need to know about bearings. All you have to do is set the compass using the map, and then follow it. Well, that is how I do it. 

The needle of the compass points red to the North. It swivels inside a black dial, which can be manually rotated on a transparent base plate. The base plate has a large arrow pointing away from the needle. 

You place the compass on the map with the large arrow pointing roughly in the direction you want to go, and then slide it so that one of the long edges of the base plate passes through both your current position and your target destination, e.g. from the top of Fair Brook to Kinder Downfall as circled in yellow in the photograph. You then rotate the dial so that North on the dial matches the grid lines on the map. There are lines inside the dial to help with this. It does not matter which way the map or the magnetic needle are pointing at this stage. 

Setting the compass: Fair Brook to Kinder Downfall

You can then put the map away for a while. Stand up and hold the base plate level with the large arrow pointing ahead of you. Slowly turn round until the red needle lines up with North on the dial, and walk straight ahead. It helps to choose a distant feature to aim towards, if one can be seen. 

There is a lot more to it, but I usually find this sufficient. You could adjust for the difference between Magnetic North and Grid North, but over short distances it probably does not matter much, so I am not going into that. It makes only about 2 degrees difference at present, although in past decades it has been as much as 10. It slowly changes. It is also worth mentioning that map grids do not always point to True North, but, again, it does not really matter. I could explain these different kinds of North, but do you really want to know? 

The 24-page leaflet explains all this in greater detail. I have archived a PDF copy here, in case you are nerdy enough to be interested. 

As mentioned at the start, this was my first compass. I later bought a new, supposedly more accurate mirror compass, but never got the hang of it. I simply fold out the mirror and use it in the same way as the old one. I believe that for greater accuracy you can read the needle through the mirror, and look at objects through the hole and the notch. I am told that you can even measure heights, if so inclined. But I would rather enjoy the countryside than study for qualifications in surveying. At least the new compass fits neatly into your trouser pocket without any sharp corners to castrate you when you sit down. And the mirror allows you to check your face is still perfect after a long day out in the wind and rain.