Strange Stories UK: The ghosts of the Airship R101.

This podcast is based on Eric Dingwall’s private papers that became available to view by the public during October 2025 at London University. It is about the R101 that crashed in October 1930, and resulting seances and investigations into the crash and the resulting Official report. 

This podcast is recorded in one take, (in the garden) without edit and is a lo-fi production.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Hello, Strange Stories UK here again. Calling this one the ghosts of Airship R101. Well, as it's such a lovely sunny day, I'm recording this outside in the garden. So there may be a little background noise, mainly birds, there are swallows feeding young nearby, and possibly frogs, as there is a pond close to the shaded area where I'm recording this near the house, which still an area which still picks up the internet. Well, this podcast is based on some of Eric Dingwall's private papers released by the University of London in October 2025. Dingwall was the chief research officer of the Society of Psychical Research during 1930, and this podcast is about the R-101 airship disaster of 1930, the seance held by Harry Price two days after the crash, Major Oliver Villiers' later private seances, and Archie Jarman's later investigation of the case in the 1950s and 60s. So a preamble to set the scene. The R-101 was one of the largest airships ever built. It was intended to show the British technological strength and help create long-distance air routes across the Empire, especially to Egypt and India. During the 1920s, many people believed rigid airships might become the future of long-distance travel. Germany had already achieved success with its Zeppelin program, and Britain wanted to compete. This division was later criticized because Britain only had a limited number of experienced airship specialists. Splitting them between rival projects may have weakened both efforts. Cardington's in Bedford and the airship buildings that were used are now used for TV and film production. Well the R 101 is expected to carry about 100 passengers, it was to fly at about 70 miles per hour and reach India in about 70 hours. It was therefore not just an engineering project, it was also a political and imperial symbol. Its success mattered to the government, to the British aviation, and to national prestige. From the beginning the R101 had serious design problems. It was too heavy, the use of steel framing increased its weight, the use of heavy diesel engines made the problem even worse. By late 1929, the designers had discovered that the ship only had a half a lift originally intended. This meant that it could not easily carry enough fuel, passengers, and supplies for the long distance routes. The solution being that the R-101 was stripped of any unnecessary weight, then it was physically cut in half and a new 45-foot bay was inserted in the middle of the hull. This increased the length from about 732 feet to 777 feet. This was a major structural alteration. The ship was then recovered and reassembled. The flight records show how little testing followed this reconstruction. The R-101 made several earlier flights in 1929 and 1930, including flights around London, the Midlands, Norfolk, the Isle of Wight, local trials and an England-Scotland-Ireland flight. The new bay was inserted after June 1930. After that, the ship only made one significant trial with the new section. That was on the 1st of October 1930. And the fatal flight followed on the 4th to the 5th of October. There were warning signs before the final flight. At the RAF display at Hendon, large tears appeared in the outer cover. One split was said to be about 140 feet long. Emergency repairs were made with canvas. There were also problems with the gas bags. They rubbed against the girders, the rivets, and other structural parts, some reportedly containing many holes. Around 4,000 fibre pads were fitted to reduce the rubbing. This was later treated as an improvised solution rather than a proper repair. Inspector F. McQuaid was responsible for the airworthiness certificate at the Cardington Works. In July 1930 he warned that the gas bags were rubbing against the structural members and that holes were appearing in large numbers. He did not think the permit to fly should be extended until the problem had been properly dealt with. It was later argued that McQuaid's warning was bypassed and that Professor Bearstow authorised the permit to fly over him. Lord Thompson, the Air Minister, was a major political force behind the flight. He wanted the R-101 to fly to India and return before the Imperial Conference in London in October 1930. Later Archie Jarman believed this deadline placed political display over engineering caution. The flight became connected with government prestige, national honour, and imperial ambition. Anyhow, the R-101 left Cardington at 6 36 pm on the 4th of October 1930. There were 54 people aboard. These included Lord Thompson, Sir Sefton Branker, and senior air ministry officials, also Royal Airship Work staff, officers and crew. Soon after departure, four tons of water ballasts were dropped to compensate for passengers and luggage, including Lord Thompson's excessive baggage. This left little spare ballast forward of the control car, apart from half a ton in the nose. The ship crossed London at about 1,500 feet. It left England near Hastings and crossed the Channel and reached the French coast near the Somme. The crossing was slow because of the wind and a temporary engine or all pressure problem. The problem was apparently dealt with by about 11 p.m. Survivors of the crash later said there was no further serious engine trouble. Wireless messages during the flight were routine. Nothing in the radio traffic suggested immediate danger. Around midnight the crew had settled into a normal night routine. Watch changes took place, and the next change was due at 2 AM. The final message was sent at 1.51 AM and acknowledged at 1.52 AM. Commander H. Carmichael Irwin had recently visited the engine and smoke room areas. He spoke to foreman engineer Leach and Chief Engineer Gent. He said that the after engine was still running well and that he was about to turn in. Leach later inspected the engines again, found them satisfactory and returned to the smoke room. At about 2 AM the R101 reached the Bouvet area in northern France. The airship was flying at roughly a thousand feet in wind and rain. Local people heard the engine as it passed. Soon afterwards a bright light was seen in the sky, followed by a deep explosion. The airship crashed near Alum. The forward section came down in the Bois de Kutum, and the rear section came down in a nearby meadow. The most important witness was a poacher setting snares near the crash site. He saw the airship approach and identified it by its navigation lights and illuminated windows. He said a sudden squall struck the ship. It dived steeply, it recovered something close to level flight, and then dived again. The second dive ended with the bow striking the ground at about a twenty degree angle. Survivor evidence was limited because most of those who knew what happened in the control car were killed. Foreman engineer Leach said everything seemed to be normal before the dive. Then he described the impact as a crushing jolt rather than a violent crash. The lights failed, flames appeared almost immediately, and the ceiling in his passenger berth was crushed down close to the floor, but he managed to escape. Other survivors included Cook, Savory, Bell, Disley, Binks, Church and Ratcliffe, although Church and Ratcliffe later died from their burns. Most of the officers, the passengers and the off-duty crew were trapped and burnt. Radio operator Disley was asleep near the switchboard and was awoken by the first dive. Then he heard the chief coxwain hunt running through the ship, shouting We're down, lads. This was considered important because it suggested that somebody in authority already knew the ship could not be saved before it struck the ground. Two days later after the crash on the 7th of October 1930, Harry Price held a seance at the National Laboratory of Psychical Research. Well first some context about why Price was holding a seance. In short, Price was a master of getting publicity for his stunts and projects. There were strong suspicions that Price had, who had recently gained a lot of publicity since the Daily Mirror, turned the Borley Rectory alleged haunting from a local haunted house story into national press sensation. The newspaper had described Harry Price as the director of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research who had been sent to investigate the ghost of Borley Rectory. And he was recognised as a psychic investigator and a noted person that exposed fraudulent psychic phenomena. Well Borley Rectory would make Price both wealthy and famous for as long as it was thought that it was haunted. And he was working on his third book on Borley when he died in 1947. Anyhow, Price had heard that the London Spiritualist Alliance were planning to hold seances to try to contact Arthur Conan Doyle, who had died in July 1930. Price rushed to organise a seance to try to contact Doyle before the London Spiritualist Alliance, the LSA, so that he could gain any resulting publicity. Harry Price's quarrels with other psychical organizations were about control, status, money and method, and by the summer of 1930 he was in dispute with the London Spiritualist Alliance. The LSA existed alongside other spiritualist and psychical institutions, including the Society of Psychical Research, the British College of Psychical Science, and Price's own national laboratory of psychical research. These organizations sometimes cooperated, but they also competed for authority. The LSA represented a more spiritualist and survivalist tradition. The SPR presented itself as a more cautious, analytical and critical organization, while Price promoted himself as a modern laboratory investigator, while the British College of Psychic Research offered another organized centre for mediumship and psychic study. Price's relations with the SPR, the Society for Psychological Research were also poor. The wider background was one of dissatisfaction with the SPR. In January 1930, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle resigned from the Society, accusing it of its administrators of being anti-spiritualist, prejudiced and reactionary. His resignation encouraged others to leave, although the SPR council treated the dispute as no more than an honest difference of opinion between spiritualists and critical investigators. Price tried to profit from this dispute by encouraging former SPR members to join his organization. By November 1930, Price was trying to find a new institutional home for his national laboratory. He wrote privately to members of the SPR, proposing that the National Laboratory should amalgamate with the SPR. He presented this partly as a practical solution. He said his health was worsening, he owned a valuable library of psychic research and a laboratory, and he did not want them to fall into foreign hands or into the control of a purely spiritualist body. In practice the proposal would have allowed Price to continue much as before, but under the prestige and authority of the SPR. The SPR rejected the offer. Price then looked abroad, especially to Germany, where he hoped to move his national laboratory. This caused further unease because Price had not been open with his British colleagues, many of whom had helped him fund the laboratory, about his plans to take it out of the country. Eric Price told Price that old mogulation would never happen while the SPR was controlled by the present hierarchy. Dingwall believed that there was an internal war inside the SPR. Many ordinary members apparently felt that the SPR had become obstructive, overcritical and inactive. It was accused of rarely using its own seance room, not holding sittings, not conducting proper investigations, and discouraging published accounts of paranormal phenomena. Price again tried at the SPR annual general meeting in February 1931, with Sir Oliver Lodge in the chair. Molly Goldney, who was Price's lover at the time, moved the motion supporting an amalgamation between the National Laboratory and the SPR. Price claimed that an overwhelming majority of SPR voters supported him. However, the proposal failed, as it was generally regarded as rushed, vague, and politically imotivated. Price's relationship with the London Spiritualist Alliance, LSA, which was associated with the Spiritualist newspaper Light, was also deteriorating. He had been using rooms at the Queensbury Place, which was the headquarters of the LSA, but after his failed negotiations and growing financial difficulties, he begged the LSA to let him stay until he found another address, but the LSA refused, and the National Laboratory was eventually forced to move to a rented Georgian ground floor flat at 13 Roland Gardens in London. The new laboratory's future was uncertain. Some former SPR members had transferred their loyalty to Price and the National Laboratory, which had more than 500 members, but it remained financially weak. Price was losing money and investors. Even so, he continued to present the laboratory as an active, modern, and experimental in contrast to what he saw as the dull, obstructive, and conservative SPR. But Price needed some high profile cases to lift his organization. Overall, Price's disputes with other psychical organizations were not simply personal quarrels. They reflected a larger struggle over who had the authority to investigate psychical phenomena in Britain. The LSA represented organized spiritualism, the SPR represented cautious and often sceptical investigation, and Price tried to claim the middle ground as a scientific investigator with modern equipment and a laboratory to ensure this. His problem was that he needed the prestige and final financial support of the other organizations while also wanting to remain independent of their control. So the 7th of October 1930, at the seance to try to contact Arthur Conan Doyle, those present were Harry Price, the journalist Ian Coster, Ethel Beanham, and the medium Eileen J. Garrett. Garrett had not previously sat at the laboratory and had not met Costa. During the seance her spirit controls Uvani appeared. Then another communicator allegedly came through, identifying himself as Flight Lieutenant H. Carmichael Irwin, the captain of the R one oh one. The communicator spoke in an agitated manner and gave technical sounding statements about the crash. Ethel Beanham, who took down the words in shorthand. The alleged spirit of Irwin mentioned that the airship was too heavy, had insufficient lift, was underpowered, it was having engine and oil feed problems, poor trimming, it was waterlogged, and there were short trials, gas bag troubles and structural weakness. Price was impressed because Garrett supposedly had little or no knowledge of airships or engineering. Price who knew how to play the media did not claim absolute proof that Erling had spoken from the dead at his seance. He just published a transcript that was taken by Beanham and encouraged comparison with the known facts. Ian Costa was important because he contacted he connected psychical research with journalism and publicity. He worked with Harry Price during the late 1920s and early 1930s and helped with publicity, reports and press interest. The fact that the seance was arranged for Conan Doyle but produced the alleged urban communication helped make the case famous. Eileen Garrett became one of the best known mediums of the twentieth century. Her trans communications usually came through the controls such as Yuvani and Abdul Latif. Later in life she became doubtful that these controls were literal spirits. She increasingly thought they might arise from the subconscious mind. She later founded the Parapsychological Foundation in New York in 1951. The R101 case made her famous, although she herself later learned leaned towards psychological explanations of mediumship. The price sitting is usually treated as the most interesting part of the R101 psychical case. It was early, it was witnessed, and it was recorded in shorthand. It was also not arranged specifically to contact Irwin. However, it remained controversial. The statements were technical sounding rather than always being technically precise. It was argued that they may have come from inference, public information, unconscious knowledge or chance. Major Oliver G. Villiers was an air ministry intelligence official. He knew several of the senior men who died in the R101 disaster. He knew Sir Sefton Branker, Major G. H. Scott, Flight Lieutenant Carmichael Irwin, and Wing Commander R. B. Colmore. Villiers conducted a private psychical research investigation with Arlene Garrett, the medium who gave the alleged flight Lieutenant H. Carmichael Irwin communications after the disaster with Price. Villiers was not an ordinary outsider. He knew some of the voices, the personalities, and the technical background that was being claimed. Villiers held seven private sittings with Garrett between the 31st of October and the 28th of November 1930. In these sittings, communicators claiming to be Irwin, Branker, Scott, Colmore, and Atherstone allegedly described faults in the R 101. Villiers tried to record the material in longhand because he was not a shorthand writer. Villiers was technically and personally close to the subject, and he was able to ask informed questions. But his material was considered less reliable than that of Harry Price transcript because it was not taken down verbatim by a skilled shorthand reporter. This was considered as a serious weakness in the Villiers evidence. Villiers believed that the dead officers were speaking through Garrett. The alleged communicators included Irwin, Branker Scott, and the rest. They claimed that the R one oh one had been unsafe before departure, too heavy, leaking gas, structurally weak, under tested, and affected by engine valve and fuel feed problems. They also claimed that the officers wanted to postpone the flight, but went ahead because of national honour and political pressure and Lord Thompson's insistence. The Villiers communications gave a more dramatic crash story. They said that a weakness near Gerda 5C caused a rent in the outer cover. Wind entered the hull, twisted the frame, and forced the ship into a dive, allowing gas to escape. A backfiring engine then allegedly ignited the hydrogen gas. The communications also suggested hidden protests, missing records, suppressed documents, and efforts by the Air Ministry officials to conceal embarrassing facts. Villiers defended these communications for many years. He believed that they proved that the dead officers had communicated after death and that they had revealed information not publicly known. He also believed that warnings about the R one oh one had been ignored and the official inquiry had not fully revealed the truth. Sorry, interference by a small child there. Archie Jarman had been a flight lieutenant in the Royal Air Force. In the nineteen fifties he was a wealthy businessman and a sceptically minded member of the Society for Psychical Research. Jarman conducted his own private inquiry into the R one hundred one crash. He was a friend of the medium Eileen Garrett. She did not simply want the case accepted as spirit communication, so she asked Jarman to examine whether the trance material contained genuine, verifiable information. Jarman spent about six months on the case and produced a huge report of about eighty thousand words, which was never formally published. Jarman thought Villiers was sincere and honourable, but unreliable. He believed Villiers had a mixed actual seance material with memories of the inquiry, rumours, technical discussions, spiritualist belief, and later interpretation. He also suspected that some of the transcripts may have been written up or expanded later. Several errors troubled Jarman. Villiers gave the wrong route for the R one oh one, saying it went through Deal and Dunkirk instead of Hastings. He accepted the unlikely idea that the crew planned a voluntary emergency landing at Le Bourges in the darkness and in bad weather. He accepted technical explanations about valves, girders, gas bags, alter meters and repairs that airship experts later found confused or impossible. Archie Jarman wanted to decide whether Arlene Garrett's alleged messages about the R 101 were genuine, mistaken, or explained in some other way. He studied official reports, technical drawings, survivor accounts and seance records. Jarman had previously written on parapsychological subjects, and from 1962 he was an associate editor of Tomorrow, the magazine associated with Eileen Jarrett's Circle. He contributed articles to the British Psychical Research Journals, including the Journal for the Society of Psychical Research. His position seemed to have been sceptical but not dismissive. One of the best known pieces that he wrote was called High Jinx on a Low Level, originally published in Tomorrow. Later it was available as a separate book version. I've just ordered the last available copy on Amazon, where it's described as a satire on popular occultism, on fortune telling, popular occult and popular occultism, and related beliefs when he attended and exposed or mocked crude fraudulent methods used by bogus mediums. He also wrote pieces with titles such as Psychical Phenomena, Fraud or Frontier, Unsolved Animal Mysteries, A Partial Theory of PSI, and Dr. Gord and Mr Myers. So these titles suggest some interest someone interested in the borderland of psychical research. So as said, Jama was neither a committed believer or a dismissive sceptic. He was open to the possibility of survival after death, but he wanted to test the messages against engineering facts. He corresponded with Kathleen Goldney of the SPR and various airship experts, including RS Booth, Wing Commander TR Cave Brown, Lord Dowding, Charlton and other experts. The Jarman report which was not in booklet form but a mix of official inquiry notes, notes on the Price and Villiers sittings, seance sittings, correspondence with various people and notes on interviews he had with people. Jarman also included notes on his trips to the crash side at Bouvet and his interviews with the survivors. RS Booth was a former airship officer and technically expert. Jarman consulted him because Booth understood airships. Booth found many of the alleged spirit messages confused, inaccurate or unlikely. He argued that if the messages really came from experienced airship officers, they should have been much more technically precise. Wing Commander TR Cave Brown also criticized the technical claims. Booth and Cave Brown argued that genuine evidence would need technical accuracy, characteristic speech and reliable verbatim records. In their view, the R one oh one communications failed these tests. Some statements sounded like aeroplane thinking wrongly applied to airships. Others were vague enough to be interpreted after the event. Kathleen Goldney took a cautious position. She was an SPR researcher. She studied Price's notes, Garrett's testimony, Costa's material, and Charlton's views. She thought that the case deserved study but insisted that Villiers' reliability had to be examined first. Lord Dowding was an air chief marshal. He was commander of the RAF Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain. After retiring from the RAF, he became interested in spiritualism and survival research. He wrote books defending belief in the afterlife, including Many Mansions, Lichgate, The Dark Star, and God's Magic. I've actually mentioned them in a previous podcast called the Fairy Investigation Society, where I think Lord Dowding's wife encouraged him to join the society. In the R101 case, Dowding remained sympathetic to the possibility of genuine communication, but admitted that the evidence was not strong enough to convince a sceptic. Jarman gave more weight to the notes from the price sittings because Miss Beanham had been taking shorthand notes, recording the proceedings more directly and verbatim. By contrast, he regarded the Villier sittings as much more suspect. They were private, and the evidence depended mainly on Major Oliver Villier's own notes, memory and interpretation. Jarman's central technical question was why the R101 did not recover after the first dive. The elevators were found hard up, showing that the crew were trying to raise the nose. After the first dive, the airship should have had forward speed and therefore some aerodynamic lift. If the structure and controls were still normal, recovery should have been possible. That's suggesting, of course, structural failure. The actions of the crew suggested that something far more serious had happened. Signals were apparently sent to slow or stop the engines. Church had been sent forward to release the remaining half ton of water ballast on the nose. Hunt left his station to warn the sleeping crew. Jarman concluded that some catastrophic failure may have already been occurred before the final impact. He was also puzzled by the failure to dump fuel. R101 had emergency fuel jettison equipment, and dumping fuel could have restored several tons of lift. Instead, Church was sent to release only about half a ton of water ballast. To Jarman this made little sense unless the officers believed that the ship was already certain to hit the ground, and they may have feared dump fuel beneath the wreck could have made the fire worse. The official inquiry concluded that no main structure had been broken, or had broken up in the air, and that the forward section struck the ground nose down at about twenty degrees. The elevators as said were fully raised, and the explosion and fire that occurred immediately after impact. Jarman accepted parts of this, but thought that the inquiry had failed to answer the main question why had the ship become unrecoverable? Jarman therefore developed his own theory. He considered that the R one hundred one may have been flying low and heavy, with up elevators already applied. A gust controlled difficulty or coxswain error may have started the first dive. During the attempted recovery, excessive strain may have affected the hull, possibly around frames eight A and nine. Structural members may have failed, controlled cables may have been damaged, and the rear section may have dropped. The ship may have been partly levelled but was no longer controllable. Then it struck the ground, the gas bags ruptured, the hydrogen escaped, and the fire followed. Jam also considered possible as sources of ignition. Escaping hydrogen could have been ignited by engine backfire, sparks from the broken metalwork, damaged electrical systems or static discharge. The alleged Irwin communications in the price sitting had referred to friction in an electrical storm. Jarman thought this sounded doubtful, but noted that large airships could accumulate static electricity. He therefore treated the statement as a possibility containing a distorted kernel of truth, but not proof of spirit spirit communication. He was far more impressed by the ordinary details that matched the known final flight. There was no clear alarm in the radio messages. Watch chains were routine. Many passengers and off duty crew were asleep. Irwin had apparently intended to go to bed. Leach had found the engine satisfactory. To Jarmin, this suggested that the disaster developed rapidly in the final minutes, rather than the crew had knowingly flown a doomed ship for hours. In Jarmin's view, the disaster resulted from two main failures. First the original design choices made the ship too heavy. Steel framing, diesel engines reduced the useful lift. Secondly, the lengthened airship was sent to India after only one calm weather trial. Ulman had apparently proposed a much fuller trial program, including a forty eight hour flight in bad weather and six hours at full speed in rough conditions. Instead the ship was sent out after only one seventeen hour trial in good conditions. Jarman was strongly critical of the official report. He argued that Professor Bearstow had too many roles. Berstow had helped shape the original design, had been involved in approving the inserted bay, he had authorized the permit to fly after McWaid refused, and then serving as a technical expert to the inquiry. Jarman thought that he held too many offices. Jarman also argued that the official report shifted blame away from the Air Ministry and onto the dead. It praised Richmond, Coleman, Scott, Irwin and the others, who died, while implying that responsibility rested with them. Since these men were dead, they could not say whether they had been confident, worried, or pressured or overruled. Jarman believed that the confidence of the dead was used to protect living officials. Jarman concluded that Villiers' material was highly unreliable. He believed Villiers had probably mixed the material with later knowledge, technical gossip, and personal interpretation. He did not completely dismiss the original price sitting. He thought some parts deserved examination, and that some details appeared to be closer to the real circumstances of the disaster than chance alone might might have suggested. At the same time, Jarman rejected many of the spiritualist claims. He criticized conspiracy theories around the R one oh one and argued that much of the mediumistic material contained technical mistakes. He considered three possibilities genuine communication from the dead, information obtained from living minds, or a mixture of the two. His preferred explanation leaned towards living mind telepathy, or unconscious access to the knowledge of people such as Costa, Villiers, or others. The Jarman report also offered a psychological explanation. The R 101 became a focus of grief, guilt, loyalty, national prestige, imperial ambition, political controversy, professional pride, spiritualist hope. Many of the men had worked together for years. The airship was small. The airship world was small. The crash destroyed not only a machine but a network of colleagues, friends and families. In these circumstances, emotional intensity could make the seance material feel more meaningful than it actually was. The final conclusion of the report presents the disaster as a result of excessive weight, inadequate lift, rushed reconstruction, insufficient testing, political pressure, and so on. The report says that the psychical evidence is weak, although the problems of psychical research, the need for exact records, the danger of emotional conviction, unreliable witnesses, technical misunderstanding, rumour, and the difficulty of separating genuine anomalies from later interpretation would make any spiritualist explanation very difficult to prove. The official inquiry is criticized by others for protecting the air ministry and shifting responsibility onto the dead men. Bestow's role is treated as conflicted. McGuade's warning is treated as evidence that the ship should not have flown. And Lord Thompson's political pressure is seen as decisive. So what happened to the R hundred, the sister ship to the R101? The R one hundred was privately designed and built by Vickers as part of the Imperial Airship Scheme. The purpose of the scheme was to compare two great British warships, airships, the state-built R101 at Cardington and the privately built R100 at Howden. Unlike the R101, the R100 was more conservative design. It used petrol engines rather than the heavy diesel engines and was built with a strong emphasis on structural calculation and weight control. The R100 did not use the steel frame, but an aluminium type metal called duralum. The drawback was that early dural could be vulnerable to corrosion if not properly protected, especially where moisture entered the structure. It also needed careful design and inspection because lightweight metal structures could fail if overstressed. Neville Shoot Norway, later known as the novelist Neville Schute, worked on the R one hundred under Barnes Wallace at Vickers Armstrong. He was the chief calculator, effectively the chief stress analyst, and he was deeply involved in calculating structural loads, strengths and weak stresses. The R one hundred first flew on the 16th of December 1929. Its early trials were not perfect, there were engine problems, fabric difficulties, and later some tail damage, but the airship was repaired and improved each time. Its great achievement was the Canada flight in 1930. The R one hundred left Britain on the twenty ninth of july nineteen thirty and reached St. Hubert near Montreal after about seventy eight hours in the air. Neville Chute flew aboard the R one hundred on this successful transatlantic flight. The airship then made a spectacular passage of flight over Ottawa, Toronto, the Niagara Falls, before returning safely to Cardington in August. The visit was a public sensation in Canada and huge crowds had come out to see it. The success of the Canada flight seemed to show that privately built Y R100 had proved itself, while the government built R101 had still unresolved problems. But the future of the R100 was changed completely after the R101 disaster. The crash killed many leading figures connected with the British aviation and airship policy, including Thompson, Branker, Irwin, Scott. Shoot was not part of the R101 team, but the British Airship world, as said, was small, and although he worked on the R100, he knew the engineers, officers and administrators who connected with the R101. The deaths in the crash were therefore not distant events for him. After the R101 disaster, confidence in the whole British Airship program collapsed. The R 100 was grounded at Carnington while the government considered whether to continue the airship scheme or abandon the project altogether. In the end, the government abandoned the project. The R 100 remained in the shed for more than a year and was broken up in late 1931. Its dura aluminium frame was dismantled, flattened, and sold for scrap for a very small sum. Neville Shute later gave his own view of the airship program in his autobiography Slide Raw, the autobiography of an engineer, which was published in 1954. He argued that the R101 fell because of management and organization and not simple bad luck. His strongest criticism was that the people who designed and built the R101 were also effectively responsible for approving its airworthiness. He believed this created pressure to overlook or minimise problems. Schuot argued that the R101 was too heavy, it lacked sufficient disposable lift, it was lengthened by inserting an extra bay to solve the lift problem and was not adequately tested after modification. And it was pushed towards the India flight by political pressure before proper trials had been completed. These criticisms were similar to our Archie Jarman's later conclusions about the disaster. Shute is important because he was a professional aeronautical engineer working on the rival airship project. He understood the technical issues, he knew many of the people involved, and wrote a clear first-hand account. His autobiography Slidewall remains one of the most useful accounts of the Imperial airship scheme, although his view naturally came from the R100 side. As a writer, he used the shorter pen name Neville Shoot. His best known novels include A Town Like Alice and On the Beach, the bleak post-nuclear war novel set in Australia, as survivors wait for radioactivity to drift south after global war. At least seven of his films seven of his books were made into major films. A good example is his novel No Highway. It's about an aircraft scientist who predicts metal fatigue in a new airliner, but is ignored and later proved right. The plot involved stress. Calculations, structural failure, official doubt, and the fear that management may disregard uncomfortable technical evidence. It's not an airship novel, but the mindset behind it is very close to the R100 and R101 airship world. The official report on the R101 crash was presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Air, Lord Umlery, on the 27th of March 1931. The report gave special thanks to Professor Bearstow, stating that without his conclusion and explanations it would have been impossible to understand the scientific and theoretical aspects of the disaster. As said Archie Jarman was sharply critical of Bearstow's role. He argued that Bearstow had been involved in too many stages of the R-101 story. He had been president of the airworthiness of airships panels, which had virtually dictated the basic design of the R101, concurred in it and probably the aerodynamics were expert responsible for the insertion of the new bay. He had also been given the permit to fly, after Inspector McQuaid refused to do so. To Jarman it was strange that Bearstow was then appointed as a chief expert to examine and pronounce upon the crash. Jarman did not claim that the official report was inaccurate. In its general account of the R 101's history, construction and technical difficulties. His criticism was more subtle. He thought it was a smooth, carefully written document designed to shift responsibility away from the dead men away from the air ministry and towards the dead officers, dead designers, and to a lesser extent the dead minister of Lord Thompson. He argued that each transfer of responsibility was softened by praise. The dead men were honoured for their skill, courage and devotion, but blame was quietly placed upon them. In Jarman's view, the report could not openly attack the competence of the airship officers because their record and experience was too strong. But if the flying crew could not be blamed, then some physical fault in the airship had to be considered. He believed the report denied the possibility that the ship broke up in the air, and carefully avoided any firm conclusions about structural weakness or structural failure, apart from conceding that a rent may have developed in the nose and contributed towards the final plunge. Jarman argued that the air ministry leaders were responsible for two major follies. The first was the decision to build the R-101 with steel framing, rather than light alloys, and to use heavy engines, diesel engines, rather than the petrol engines that were lighter. Both decisions made the airship excessively heavy and helped create the need to insert the extra bay. The second folly was to send the reshaped airship after only one calm weather trial on a two and a half thousand mile maiden flight, beginning on a rough and windy winter night. Well, October night. Jarmin argued that these decisions could not have been made by the airship officers themselves. They must have come from the Air Ministry and the Air Council. He paid close attention to the report's language about Lieutenant Richmond, who died in the crash. The report stated that the main credit for the general design and construction of the R 101 must be given to Richmond, whose powers were almost autocratic. Jarman saw this as a blame designed as disguised as praise. He sarcastically noted that Richmond received the main credit for what had become a tragic fiasco. For him, this was typical of the report censure concealed inside compliment. Jarman rejected many suggestions that the officers and crew knowingly embarked on a suicide mission. Many had wives, children and families. He believed they were worried and apprehensive, but still thought the flight had a reasonable chance of success. Military discipline, loyalty, career considerations, and confidence in senior leadership made refusal difficult. Even so, he stressed that the officers would have not have flown at the time without Lord Thompson's insistence. He cited Wing Commander Booth of the R10100 and Inspector McQueen as evidence that the R101 would not normally have received the certificate of airworthiness. Well, anybody interested in the actual story, there's a an excellent BBC documentary from 1967 called Airship R101, which is available on YouTube. It includes survivors and others connected with the story and is valuable because it records the memories of people who were actually directly involved in the project. Anyway, so ends that podcast. I'd like to thank anybody listening. I'd like to thank Damselfly for providing the background music. And until next time, I'll say goodbye.