The Imperial Aircraft Flotilla

The Vickers FB5 biplane, nicknamed the ‘Vickers Gunbus’, entered service in February 1915. Its engine was situated at the back of the aeroplane instead of the front, giving the machine gunner a clear range of fire ahead. Tasked with protecting the slow and defenceless BE2c, and taking on the Fokkers, it could itself only manage 70 mph.39 On 25 July 1915, Robin Hughes Chamberlain arrived at St. Omer in France with 11 squadron, the first RFC fighter squadron to be fully equipped with the 2-seater fighter, but he apparently never in fact flew Vickers Gunbus Dominica presented by the island; for neither the original, nor any of its later replacements seem to have flown with any squadron with which he was associated.40 He wrote back of one experience in September 1915:

On the 23rd I was sent off on a long reconnaissance into German territory, going over the trenches we were shelled. A Fokker Monoplane at about 1,500 feet started to climb at me and I kept my machine climbing but he soon caught us up. I slipped into a cloud, turned round and nose-dived on straight at the German. My observers turned the machine gun on him letting off some 60 rounds, whereupon the Fokker dived to earth leaving us master of the situation. On the 26th I was hit in four places—and we ended up by landing in the dark, a difficult job but on this occasion successful.41

Though in 1916 the average life expectancy of a new RFC pilot in France was barely three weeks,42 Robin Hughes Chamberlain survived the whole of the remaining war years—even the build-up to, and opening weeks of, the Battle of the Somme, which he described as his busiest period as a pilot, trying to prevent German air reconnaissance of British positions. The more experienced the pilot, the better his survival prospects, and he had been flying since early 1915. However, he was badly wounded in the foot in August 1916 and only returned to action after an extended period in hospital. By this stage, he was with 24 squadron flying a newer aeroplane, the De Havilland 5 (DH5) scout, which he considered a match for the Fokker in terms of manoeuvrability, but still too slow.

Then he was made an instructor: from November 1917 until February 1918, to the Australian 71st squadron RFC, newly equipped with state-of-the-art, but unstable and difficult to pilot, Sopwith Camels; and from March 1918 with 65 Training Squadron at Dover. Commissioned initially as a 2nd Lieutenant, he was appointed RFC Flight Commander in December 1915, and later became a Major in the newly formed RAF.

When the war ended Robin Hughes Chamberlain was offered, but declined, the post of British Air Attaché in Paris, returning instead to the plantation in Dominica. However the estate suffered neglect during the war years, and the limes had deteriorated. In 1929 he sold up and settled in UK, finding employment in an RAF liaison role with a company that manufactured aircraft gun turrets.43 He was not alone. Most British settlers on Dominica had abandoned their estates for various reasons within a few years, not least the Great War, but also on account of diseases, pest infestations and crop failures. The few still cultivating were resigned to making little profit.44 Many in any case saw their identity primarily as part of the wider British Empire and had not had time to put down deeper Dominican roots: to that extent the planters were ‘transnational’ Britons.

One of the reasons the Imperial Road had taken its specific, and not always completely logical, path was to reach the estate of a planter from Ceylon who had made major investments in Dominica. Its maintenance was difficult to sustain and its economic rationale questionable. Hesketh Bell later admitted that his agricultural scheme for opening up Dominica’s interior had been a failure, blaming poor road maintenance and transport difficulties, serious outbreaks of a disease that afflicted the lime trees, and a ‘ruinous fall’ in the price of cocoa: ‘One by one they gave up the struggle, and there are few who were not obliged either to abandon their plantations or sell them for a song.’45

The small island of Dominica had proved generous in many ways during 1914–18. Throughout the conflict, the larger estates and companies supplied consignments of limes for the wounded at Netley Hospital, near Southampton; and the Dominica Agricultural and Commercial Society organised their shipment through the mail steamer. Belgian relief funds also benefitted. The very same meeting of the Legislative Council that had voted £4,000 for the RFC in October 1914 also voted £1,000 towards the Belgian National Relief Fund, a grant described as the crowning act of the noble efforts of the Rev. Bourchier, Rector of the Anglican Church at Roseau (later a chaplain at the Somme in France) whose private Belgian Relief Fund had already raised £235. By July 1917, the island had given just over £2,000 for Belgian relief, half from Government funds, and half by private donation. At one stage, the Cardinal of the Belgian town of Mechelen wrote expressing his ‘heartfelt thanks’ for all the help forthcoming from Dominica.46 At the official level, Dominica provided £10,000 to the British Government through raising an export tax of one shilling per barrel of green limes.47

As well as dropping coins into the collection boxes for Belgian relief, islanders wishing to donate to war charities, but able to afford only very small amounts, could contribute to the Tobacco Fund through local organiser Alfred Peter Charles, harbour master at Portsmouth in the north of the island. Dominica’s 1914 Christmas present to troops on the Western Front consisted of 50 cigarettes, a quarter of a pound of tobacco and a box of matches.48 Indeed in terms of the sheer numbers of people involved across the empire, the Tobacco Fund was perhaps the most successful of the many ‘patriotic’ funds that right from the very beginning of the Great War were springing up like mushrooms. It began in September 1914. John Evelyn Wrench, founder of the Overseas Club in London, and Director of the Paris office of Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail, was approached by Walter Martin, proprietor of a tobacco firm in Piccadilly—a man, Wrench later wrote, with a prolific mind for salesmanship, who devised a leaflet fit to draw blood from a stone:

In moving language was set forth Tommy’s longing for cigarettes. Each collecting list had a space for 50 names. Every donor of a shilling or upwards entered his name and address. In each packet of cigarettes was enclosed an addressed postcard to the donor. All Tommy had to do was to write a few lines of thanks to his unknown friend.49

The costs of the scheme were borne by the organisers. Walter Martin can hardly be said to have been a disinterested party; nonetheless, he did not get rich on the proceeds, so not too many questions were raised. The scheme was enormously successful, thanks in part to the support and coverage of The Times weekly and the overseas edition of the Daily Mail, and, in part, because it was immaterial how small the donation. Each contributor could feel they were helping in some tangible way to ameliorate life in the trenches. Wrench used his press connections to mobilise newspapers throughout the British Empire as local agents for the fund. By early 1916 the Tobacco Fund had received donations from almost 255,000 people outside Britain, and before the war was over, from several millions of donors worldwide. On 24th May 1915 (Empire Day), over £10,000 was collected in pennies from children; in 1916, nearly three million children donated, and postcards of thanks went directly from the trenches to the schools.50 By May 1918, the Tobacco Fund had collected more than £300,000 from donors worldwide.51

Moving forward from organising a fund that had caught on like wildfire, Wrench’s mind turned to aviation. While the Tobacco Fund was the ‘patriotic’ scheme with a human face, designed to establish contact between the soldier at the Front and residents of the empire, this had a more political dimension:

The provision of smokes was all very well, but we were engaged in a life-and-death struggle. Our society must seek to link up residents overseas with the Empire’s war effort on the battlefield. Aviation was more or less in its infancy oversea … The idea suddenly occurred to me that nothing would make some of the smaller or more isolated sections of the Empire feel so linked up with the great events in Europe and in the East as aircraft named after their districts. Australia had her super-Dreadnought. Why should not Ceylon and St. Kitts have their aircraft?52

Surely the idea must have suggested itself from learning of Vickers Gunbus Dominica, and the other aircraft (type unknown) that benefitted the RNAS, although Wrench’s memoirs record it as a brainwave coming to him out of the blue. Perhaps in late 1914 he was even informed of Dominica’s £4,000 war gift by the island’s Tobacco Fund organiser, harbour master Alfred Peter Charles. The timing would fit.

By such contagion of ideas was the notion of an Imperial Aircraft Flotilla born. Wrench duly approached the War Office with his brainwave, and at the beginning of 1915 the Army Council gave its formal approval for his fundraising campaign, supplying photographs of the two types of aeroplane then in current production—the brand new 100 hp. Gnome Vickers Gun Biplane, or FB5, at £2,250 (like Dominica) and the 70 hp. Renault engine BE2c reconnaissance craft at £1,500. Propagated by its author, John Evelyn Wrench, a hyperactive newspaperman with a scattergun approach, it overtook, and eventually subsumed, the Patriotic League’s fundraising efforts aided by the Foreign Office, to spread swiftly across the ‘British’ world. Its early success is the topic of the next chapter.

A spoof joint appeal launched by kite balloon officers in France, Lieutenants Francis Bryan Berkeley Shand of Dominica, and Stanley Standford Stone of Trinidad rounds off the Dominica story. They issued the following plea in May 1917:

Well then, old pals of palmier days, will you foot the bill of a Dominica and a Trinidad balloon, just as you did for Dominica I, Dominica II, and presentation exactly as was done in the case of the planes. £800 per balloon will do the trick. Only, buck up, or the war may be over before the goods are delivered … Anyhow, seriously, come up to scratch, as you did before, and don’t let two of your fellow-citizens appeal to you in vain for such a cause.53

The job of kite balloon officer on the Western Front was principally to spot and direct artillery fire, and was dangerous in the extreme, though unlike RFC aircrew, they at least had the use of parachutes. The basket-carrying kite balloons were tethered over the lines, sometimes for ten or more hours at a time, at about 3,000 feet. Thus suspended ‘beneath 28,000 cu. ft. of highly flammable hydrogen in what amounted to a wickerwork laundry hamper that swung wildly in windy conditions’, they were targets for enemy aircraft and at risk from allied anti-aircraft guns attempting to ward off such attacks.54

‘Jauntiness’, ‘pranks’, and the somewhat desperate gaiety evidenced in the memoirs of First World War pilots were evidently common to kite balloon officers too, presumably a coping mechanism for the nerve-shredding quality of their daily working lives. Lieutenant Stanley Stone, newly qualified as a solicitor at Port of Spain just before his enlistment in 1914, had been seriously wounded in France by machine-gun bullets in the spring of 1916.55 Here he was in 1917, poking fun at fundraising efforts for presentation aeroplanes to the benefit of RFC flying service colleagues. (Maybe his nerve gave way eventually, for in December 1917 he was declared unfit for further overseas service, and transferred to a Home establishment Balloon Training Wing.)56 Lieutenant Shand was a barrister-at-law who left his practice in Roseau to join the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) at the end of 1914.57 He served with the balloon ship HMS Manica in the Dardanelles, and had manned observation balloons in France since September 1916.58

Over in Roseau, tiny capital of Dominica, Mrs. Elfreda Shand was apparently taken in by the practical joke and sent the Dominica Chronicle an extract from a letter or notebook that her husband purported to have found on a German prisoner at Beaumont in France, in the hope, she said, that it would speed up subscriptions for ‘A Dominica Balloon’. The extract read:

Their airmen are constantly over our lines, discover our batteries so that they may be peppered, and are always attacking our captive balloons, which is the same thing as putting our eyes out. Meanwhile the sky is black with captive balloons and hostile airmen—but of that I will say nothing, it would merely be pouring water into the Rhine. Solely the English artillery, the English Flying Corps and their balloon observation, have given them the success they have obtained.59

More than six months later, just £40 had been subscribed towards a presentation kite balloon in Dominica. The newspaper eventually saw the funny side and handed the £40 over to the Overseas Club Aircraft Fund—towards yet another machine for the Imperial Aircraft Flotilla and the aviators of the RFC.60