Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air. Richard Holmes

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      Sophie Blanchard’s death in 1819 effectively ended the first great wave of ballomania and the celebration of ballooning in France. Something similar happened in England with the equally shocking death of Thomas Harris five years later. Amazingly, Harris was the first English aeronaut to be killed on home ground. A glamorous young naval officer, he made a much-advertised ascent in his new balloon the Royal George on 24 May 1824. As part of his publicity, he took with him a dazzlingly pretty eighteen-year-old cockney girl, known to the newspapers only as ‘Miss Stocks’, who was generally assumed to be his mistress. Miss Stocks and the balloon, which had cost Harris a thousand guineas to construct, had both been exhibited at the Royal Tennis Court in Great Windmill Street, and stirred much excitement and comment.¹⁹

      The balloon had a new kind of duplex release valve, which Harris said would allow him and Miss Stocks to make a perfectly controlled landing. One valve was housed inside the other at the top of the balloon. The smaller, inner valve was the conventional safety mechanism, as invented forty years previously by Alexander Charles, designed to release excess gas pressure during flight, or to commence a controlled descent. The larger outer valve was a radical solution to the problem of keeping the balloon safely on the ground once it had landed. When the larger valve line was pulled, it would deflate the entire balloon in a matter of seconds (the equivalent of the ‘rip panel’ in a modern hot-air balloon). This, claimed Harris, would prevent the terrible bouncing and dragging across fields which had caused so many injuries, and so much damage to crops and property (especially chimneys and rooftops) which had undermined the general popularity of balloonists.

      Harris circulated a campaigning pamphlet saying that he was trying to save the declining art of ballooning in England. ‘The Science of Aerostation has lately fallen into decay, and has become the subject of Ridicule,’ he lamented. This decline was caused by the ‘total want’ of serious technical inventions by recent aeronauts, who had been content (like that Frenchman Garnerin) to exploit frivolous novelties like parachutes and fireworks. The Royal George, with its new system of valves and its beautiful young passenger, would show the way ahead. In the event it showed something quite else.

      Harris took his balloon and Miss Stocks from the West End to the East End to generate further interest, and launched successfully from the large courtyard of the popular Eagle Tavern, in City Road. It was noted that Lieutenant Harris wore his best blue naval uniform, and Miss Stocks a charming dress, much as if they were a honeymoon couple, which perhaps they were. The change in venue was probably made because the wind was blowing south-westwards that day. It took the balloon back across London and the river Thames, an excellent display route, and then on into Kent and towards Croydon. All went well in the basket, champagne was drunk, and Harris then attempted his first perfect display landing at Dobbins Hill, just outside Croydon. However, this did not quite go to plan.

      Distracted either by Miss Stocks or by his new duplex valve, he forgot to hang out his grapnel line in time, and was forced to throw out ballast to avoid colliding with some nearby trees. This was by no means a disastrous error, but it evidently rather flustered Harris. The balloon rose several hundred feet in the air, and was carried on over Beddington Park, on the other side of Croydon. Here Harris evidently prepared for a second attempt at a landing.

      The swift sequence of events that followed has remained a matter of dispute ever since. For no accountable reason, the Royal George suddenly began to descend from several hundred feet ‘with fearful velocity’. As it dropped, it was claimed by witnesses that some kind of struggle was briefly observed in the basket. The partially deflated balloon plummeted ‘with frightful rapidity’ into a large oak tree in the park, tore through the light spring foliage (it was only May) and dashed its passengers to the ground. ‘They were shortly afterwards discovered, buried beneath a monumental pile of silk and network.’ Both of them were outside the basket, but while Thomas Harris was dead, Miss Stocks was alive and conscious, though quite unable to give a coherent account of what had occurred during the last few seconds.

      What had destroyed the balloon seemed obvious to the coroner. The new large gas valve – ‘the preposterous aperture’ – had been released prematurely. The coroner ascribed this to Harris’s fatal error in pulling the wrong valve line while still in the air. Later aeronauts, like Charles Green, analysed the sequence of events more subtly. Green suggested that Harris’s only error was to have tied the larger valve line to a point in the basket, precisely to keep it safe and out of the way, especially with Miss Stocks aboard. However it had pulled itself taut – ‘a longitudinal extension of the apparatus’ – when the balloon contracted, thereby unexpectedly and fatally releasing the deflation valve by itself. This was a kindly, if ingenuous, explanation, which did not quite square with the evidence that Miss Stocks gave afterwards: ‘Miss Stocks declares that she distinctly heard the peculiar sound which always accompanies the shutting of the valve, as soon as Mr Harris had let go the line.’ This sounds as if Harris had indeed pulled the line himself, and realising his error, had let it go too late. But of course, Miss Stocks could have meant ‘as soon as Mr Harris had untied the line’.²⁰

      The much larger question, and the one that made ‘le mort de Harris’ a cause célèbre in France, was a more human mystery. Why did Miss Stocks survive when Lieutenant Harris died? The disposition of the bodies gave little clue, both presumably having been thrown from the basket on impact. But the suggestion almost inevitably arose that the gallant Harris had somehow saved the beautiful Miss Stocks.

      British commentators were brusque about this mystery ‘that has hitherto clouded the event’, and gave romantic explanations short shrift. Most probably, a branch of the oak tree, ‘projecting horizontally’, had protected Miss Stocks (though unfortunately not Harris). Just possibly Miss Stocks ‘had fainted, and fallen forward … upon the body of Mr Harris’. Thereby he had unintentionally protected her from ‘the first violence’ of the impact. Anything else pandered to ‘false and scurrilous reports’.²¹

      French journalists were more liberal in their interpretations. Lieutenant Harris and Miss Stocks could have been distracted ‘in many ways’, so that the wrong valve line was pulled. Lieutenant Harris would surely have tried to protect Miss Stocks with his body during the terrifying descent, ‘if not before’. But most likely of all, and the real reason for her survival, was that Lieutenant Harris ‘in a spirit of admirable chivalry’ had leapt from the balloon basket before the moment of impact, in a quixotic attempt to reduce the speed of her fall.²² It was a gesture of true English gallantry from a true English naval officer. The romantic image of Lieutenant Harris leaping from the balloon to save his beloved became an iconic one in France, and featured alongside images of the death of Pilâtre de Rozier and Sophie Blanchard in a famous series of French balloon cards. They marked the end of an era.

      The growing scepticism about the future of ballooning was summed up by the satirical artist George Cruikshank. In his brilliant coloured cartoon of 1825 entitled ‘Balloon Projects’, he depicted a row of gaudily striped balloons tethered down the length of St James’s, like a rank of hackney cabs waiting for hire. A fashionable couple are about to climb gingerly into one of them (with pink plush upholstery), to embark on a ‘one shilling’ flight from Mayfair to the City. Each balloon car is manned by a suitably villainous driver, one of whom is shouting to another, ‘I say, Tom, give my balloon a feed o’ gas, will you!’

      Above them the sky is filled with a mass of grotesquely shaped balloons, one in the form of a hogshead of beer, another with a weathercock on top, and a third on fire with its passengers leaping out. Behind them all the buildings are advertising balloon companies and businesses, which is probably the real point of Cruikshank’s satire. These dubious establishments include ‘The Balloon Life Assurance Company’, ‘The Bubble Office’, ‘The Office of the Honourable Company of Moon Rakers’, and perhaps most ingeniously, ‘The Balloon Eating House – Bubble & Squeak Every Day’.²³