Royal Engineers Museum - Specialist (original) (raw)

| Page revised: Sat 05-Aug-2006 | | | ----------------------------- | |

| Royal Engineers and Aeronautics | | | ------------------------------- | |

The Royal Engineers had been interested in aeronautics since the earliest days of flying. A Balloon School was started at Chatham in 1888, following the Sudan (1884-5) and Bechuanaland (1885) Campaigns, where balloon sections were used by General Sir Gerald Graham VC and General Sir Charles Warren, both ex-Royal Engineer officers.

A regular balloon section was authorised in 1890, joining the RE troops at Aldershot, and in 1892 the School of Ballooning and the Balloon Factory were set up on the Basingstoke Canal near Laffan's Plain, a place mentioned in the Corps song. Further expansion came in 1900. Three sections were despatched to South Africa, operating for artillery observation at Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley, while a fourth joined the international force containing British and Indian Sappers that occupied Peking during the Boxer Rebellion. Later this section moved to Roorkee where an elephant provided a holdfast for the Bengal Sappers and Miners experimental Balloon Section.

Members of the Weinling family using their 'secret' process for joining goldbeaters skin, the fabric used to make ballons

After the Boer War, manflying kites and improved balloons and airships were flown by Sapper and Infantry officers.

In 1907 Lieut Colonel J E Capper RE who commanded the Balloon Factory, flew from Farnborough to the Crystal Palace round St Paul's Cathedral in Nulli Secundus, one of the three non-rigid airships he had helped to develop. He also visited the Wright brothers in America in his persistent search for a suitable power driven military aircraft, but failed to get any backing from a disinterested British Government.

It was not until 1910 that another Royal Engineer officer, Lieutenant R A Cammel, made the first official military flight in a Bleriot. The next year saw the first military use of ground to air wireless, when a signal unit of the Royal Engineers sent a message to an airship thirty miles away.

The Balloon Factory was moved in 1905 from the banks of the Basingstoke Canal to a less restricted site at Farnborough, and began to develop so quickly that in 1909 it was transferred to civilian control; today it bears the worldfamous name of the Royal Aircraft Establishment. The Balloon School remained an RE Unit until 1911 when it was reorganised as the Air Battalion Royal Engineers commanded by Major Sir Alexander Bannerman. The unit remained a Sapper one for less than a year, for on 12 May 1912, it was renamed the Royal Flying Corps (Naval and Military Wing). From such modest beginnings the Royal Air Force and the Fleet Air Arm ultimately emerged.

Model of the Bleriot XXI flown by Lieutenant RA Cammell RE in 1910 (the model can be seen in the Museum)

Source: The Royal Engineers - (RE 200 brochure, Institute of Royal Engineers, Chatham 1987)

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