How appropriate that the cafe I am typing this entry in should be playing The Animals’ ‘We Gotta Get Out Of This Place’ [surely Eric Burdon’s finest moment – a perfect fusion of the Mississippi and the Tyne].\u00a0 This was the repeated plea of my wife as we drove\u00a0up to the mobile home holiday camp at Leysdown which once was home to the Aero – from 1910 Royal Aero – Club\u00a0(“You can’t miss it – the road leads into the sea”).\u00a0 There’s a modest\u00a0exhibition in the bar but\u00a0 Sunday lunchtime drinking at Muswell Manor ceases sharply at 2.30pm, and\u00a0it was now after three.\u00a0 Furthermore, what meterologists were predicting would be the harshest storm\u00a0since 1987 was beginning to hit north Kent, with the main road bridge over the Swale to the Isle of Sheppey already shut – the old King’s Ferry bridge was still passable, but at the back of our minds was\u00a0a genuine concern that we might not get off the island once the wind really got going.\u00a0 I parked the car outside the\u00a0Manor’s locked gates, but found a side entrance and duly took photographs of the house and the\u00a0small memorial\u00a0recording the presence of the RAeC.\u00a0 By this time the\u00a0rain was\u00a0lashing down,\u00a0and Mary was gesticulating furiously from inside the car, but I found time to photograph a statue of the three Short brothers, with Horace’s distorted head scarcely obvious (a generous gesture by the sculptor).\u00a0 Was any statue ever located in a more incongruous setting?\u00a0 The three men are joyously raising their arms to the skies, but against the backdrop of surely one of the bleakest coastscapes in England – acres of brown cropped marshland, rendered even more menacing by the black clouds and 45 degree rain.\u00a0 We\u00a0drove back,\u00a0past the\u00a0pitch and\u00a0portakabin\u00a0of Leysdown FC, surely the most isolated football ground in the south of England, and\u00a0duly passed\u00a0through\u00a0the sad, bedraggled,\u00a0plain desperate ‘seaside resort’ of Leysdown itself.\u00a0 There are around seven mobile home holiday camps, and the cheap beer bars, fast food shops and dingy bingo\u00a0halls were open\u00a0if empty, all eager to\u00a0cater for anyone venturing\u00a0so far from home for half term.\u00a0\u00a0Clearly some mobile homes are rented out but most appear to be owned, and in many cases all the year round.\u00a0 No wonder Ray Pahl’s groundbreaking sociological inquires were focused upon Sheppey, as there are so many questions to ask – not least who lives in Leysdown, and who comes here on holiday?\u00a0 When I taught on Sheppey in the 1970s the shorthand answer was\u00a0East Enders, with diamond geezers\u00a0boasting shady pasts or\u00a0dodgy presents having boltholes in the more remote eastern parts of the island – West Ham shirts were highly visible by way of confirmation (of the East Enders, not necessarily the criminals!).\u00a0 With Mary rightly eager to\u00a0recross the Swale and seek shelter we drove into\u00a0Eastchurch to admire and photograph the memorial to all the great pre-war aviation pioneers who first flew on the marshes at Leysdown and then moved inland to the fields provided by Sir Frank Maclean, which later became an RNAS and then an RAF station before\u00a0acquiring the prison complex that\u00a0is surely the island’s second biggest employer after the NHS (each section, from high security to open, appeared run by\u00a0HM Prison Service and not contracted out, thank God).\u00a0 In Eastchurch we drank tea in the Shurland Hotel, speculating on whether Fairey had\u00a0supped there, and whether we were unique in asking for a pot of tea (if I had ordered a drink then I fear that I would still be there, drowning my sorrows\u00a0 – “What am I doing here, and why did I embark on this project?”).\u00a0 We raised our cups to CRF and lamented his absence from the lengthy lists of, for me now familiar, names on the\u00a0grand, elaborate memorial across the road from the hotel.\u00a0 Elaborate CTC duly recorded our driving around HMP Eastchurch, and it was only as we drove back to the village\u00a0and surveyed a few surviving acres of\u00a0rolling grassland that we gained some understanding as to why so much flying took place here.\u00a0 While I was eager to show Mary where I\u00a0taught (today’s Isle of Sheppey Academy, but in the 1970s The Sheppey School – for me another time, another planet) and to rediscover Sheerness and Queenborough, common sense dictated that we\u00a0returned speedily\u00a0to our friends’ house in Wye before the full force of the storm hit the south-east.\u00a0 At least we weren’t back home in Lymington, directly opposite the Isle of Wight where a wind of 99mph was recorded on Sunday night.\u00a0 The isolation of east Sheppey had been confirmed for me.\u00a0 No wonder that in 1914-15 F.H.C. Rees, ‘Gentleman’, and Fairey’s money man in setting up their company, constantly lamented CRF’s failure to get up to ‘Town’ for crucial meetings – notwithstanding the presence of a rail connection in Sheerness from the 1860s, in Edwardian England a journey from Leysdown and Eastchurch to London remained a\u00a0tiring and time-consuming expedition.\u00a0 The puzzling question is why CRF supposedly resented the Shorts brother’s relocation to Rochester – what evidence is there of this, when surely he would have welcomed being closer to London and living in an urban environment akin to his home in Hendon?\u00a0 Some historians have suggested that security considerations were in J.W. Dunne’s mind when he\u00a0attempted to fly his\u00a0ostensibly stable early prototypes\u00a0at Blair Atholl, on the Marquis of Argyll’s estate, and it would be tempting to say the same consideration was in his mind when\u00a0 conducting later experiments on the far end of the Isle of Sheppey.\u00a0 The presence of Dunne, Shorts and then a critical mass of aviators (Roe, Sopwith et al) is more attributable to circumstance, in that the land was\u00a0made available, and then the process was accumulative – flying at Eastchurch was surprisingly high profile, witness the presence of the Battenberg family in July 1911.\u00a0 Nevertheless, as I stood in the gloom soaking wet and\u00a0staring out across the Thames estuary (“Is that Essex or Thanet?”), I couldn’t help asking again, “Sheppey – why?!”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How appropriate that the cafe I am typing this entry in should be playing The Animals’ ‘We Gotta Get Out Of This Place’ [surely Eric Burdon’s finest moment – a perfect fusion of the Mississippi and the Tyne].\u00a0 This was the repeated plea of my wife as we drove\u00a0up to the mobile home holiday camp … <\/p>\n