The British-made Vickers bomber, the Vimy, was designed for use during World War I. It was named for a 1917 battle at Vimy, France, where Canadian troops took a ridge defended by Germans. The plane, however, was not in production before the 1918 armistice. The Vickers design came into its own in 1919 and 1920 when models of the Vimy won three long distance, globe-spanning races that dazzled the world and bolstered the concepts of long-distance travel by air and commercial uses such as air mail.
Pioneers of Air Mail
The modern miracle of airmail transport—such as receiving a letter from Australia in three days instead of six weeks by sea—has become so commonplace that the adventurous trailblazing and pioneer flights that brought it about can be overlooked. Bad roads, slow horses, and indifferent carriers conspired to make long-distance mail delivery uncertain in 19th-century Britain. In the United States Pony Express riders carried letters across the continent in 1860-1861, and transcontinental rail service, beginning in 1869, transported mail successfully for nearly a century. Clipper ships and steamers carried mail between the continents until the advent of regularly scheduled air mail in the 1900s.
Two postage stamps issued by the United Kingdom in 1969 to honor the 1919 flights of the Vimy to Ireland and Australia. |
Mail was carried by air long before the airplane was a reality, dating back to the Franco-Prussian War. In 1870 the city of Paris had been completely encircled and the city was totally cutoff. Unperturbed, the inhabitants called upon the skills pioneered by the Montgolfier brothers almost a hundred years earlier, and launched balloons to convey passengers and mail out of the besieged city. For four months nearly 70 balloons sailed aloft from the French capital bearing letters that had been collected at various bureaus in Paris. Often inscribed Par Ballon Monte, an incredible 2.5 million letters floated out of the city at the whim of the wind during the siege.
By the turn of the century, experiments were taking place with navigable balloons. Ferdinand von Zeppelin and Alberto Santos-Dumont developed the forerunners of the mail-carrying airships and Zeppelins. In 1903 Orville and Wilbur Wright's remarkable flight at Kitty Hawk promoted the airplane as the most likely carrier of the mail.
The first organized air mail operations began in the early 1900s. British manufacturer Charles Rolls, who made the first double crossing of the English Channel in 1910, reputedly carried the first official letter in a heavier-than-air machine. There were two landmark events the following year. In February French pilot Henri Pequt's 13-minute, 5-mile flight in Allahabad, India, became the first official air mail flight and mail celebrating King George V's coronation was delivered by flights from the Henderson Aerodrome in London to Windsor Castle regularly beginning September 9, 1911.
The potential of mail transported by airplanes caught the attention of a few visionaries, but the advent of air warfare during World War I convinced a wide audience of the machine's value. Only a few countries prior to the war's beginning in 1914 had intermittent service, and these included Japan, Germany, Italy, and France.
Souvenir labels and postcards were issued for various aviation meetings taking place in France and elsewhere at the time. The first air mail letters in the U.S. were delivered during an aviation meet on Long Island, when a bag of letters was flown by Earle Ovington between Garden City and Mineola on September 23, 1911.
In 1912 the London Daily Mail sponsored Circuit of Britain and Waterplane competitions with souvenir flown cards. About the same time Germany organized the Rhine and Main charity flights by the Zeppelin Schwaben and the Euler Gelber Hund biplane. A French pilot, Maurice Guillaux, carried the first Australian air mail between Melbourne and Sydney in a Blériot machine in 1914.
Regular air mail service began May 15, 1918, with flights between Belmont Park on Long Island, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. The craft of choice were Curtiss JN-4H biplanes—Jennies. The Post Office Department commemorated the event, and in its haste produced a 24-cent stamp featuring a Jenny upside down. Most sheets of the first definitive depiction of an airplane on a stamp were destroyed, but a sheet of the stamps survived.
Back in Europe, the RAF was flying mail to Cologne for the Rhine Army, but the real air mail challenge came in 1919 with the prospect of regular long distance flights.
Competition Spurs Long Distance Flights
Beginning in 1913 the Daily Mail offered a prize of £10,000 for the first successful nonstop flight across the Atlantic. Following the end of World War I in 1918, the Australian government offered a prize of £10,000 for the first Australians to reach the country by air. Similarly, the South African government offered a prize for the first flight to reach Cape Town.
Copy of the £10,000 check for successful completion of transatlantic flight. |
Inducements like these were tailor-made to show the passenger-and mail-carrying potential of one of Britain's biggest aircraft, the Vickers Vimy bomber, which was developed just too late for the Great War.
In the spring of 1919 a number of competitors took up the Daily Mail's 1913 challenge of a transatlantic flight. They assembled at St. John's, Newfoundland, to prepare their respective flights eastward across the Atlantic Ocean to Ireland. Harry Hawker, a Sopwith test pilot, and his navigator Mackenzie-Grieve were the first away on April 18, 1919. They were forced down halfway across and luckily picked up by a Danish steamer. Newfoundland 3-cent Caribou stamps over printed 'First Trans-Atlantic Post April 1919' were issued for the flight. The precious mail was salvaged some days later, giving new meaning to the term "watermark." At last, in June 1919, British flyers John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown's Vimy made the first nonstop transatlantic flight, carrying with them 197 letters.
One of the 197 letters carried by John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown on the first successful nonstop transatlantic flight in June 1919. |
In November 1919, Australian brothers Ross and Keith Smith and their crew achieved the longest flight yet, from England to Australia. Their Vimy G-EAOU—which the crew said stood for "God 'Elp All of Us"—carried about 130 letters, to which semi-official stamps were affixed after arrival. Alcock, Brown, and both Smith brothers were knighted for their pioneering efforts by His Majesty, King George V.
In 1919 various firms started regular scheduled air mail flights. The Instone company and Imperial Airways—a forerunner of British Airways—used a commercial development of the Vickers Vimy, G-EASI, called the City of London, to fly mail regularly between London and Paris.
