Lambeth Fantastical July 2024
Up, Up, and Away in Vauxhall
Aeronauts Fact and Fiction
At the end of June this
year an attempt to cross the Atlantic in an open basket hydrogen balloon,
launched from Canada, was cancelled. Led by British explorer Sir David
Hempleman-Adams, the attempt was abandoned after seven hours in the air.
The dream of crossing the
Atlantic by balloon has its origins in Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. More than a
century and half ago the celebrated aeronaut, Charles Green, who made numerous
ascents from Vauxhall, posited that it would be feasible one day to make such a
crossing and drafted plans for doing so.
Charles Green
Green had built the
balloon ‘The Great Nassau’ for the owners of the Pleasure Gardens and subsequently
purchased it from them. In 1836 he ascended from Vauxhall at 1.30pm in
the afternoon with two companions. The balloon crossed the English Channel at
Dover and landed 18 hours later at Weilburg in Germany, having travelled five
hundred miles. It set a record which would not be broken for over a century. In
1838 he made two experimental ascents from Vauxhall which also set records. The
first achieved an altitude of 19,335 feet, the second 27,146 feet (5 miles).
Tragedy, however, befell one of his other experiments. In 1837 his companion,
Robert Cocking, leapt from the basket of the balloon with a homemade parachute
and died on impact with the ground near Lee in Lewisham.
Margaret Graham
Another Vauxhall
balloonist was Margaret Graham, who was the first British woman to make an
ascent at the age of 19, with her husband, George Graham. In 1826 she became
the first woman to make a solo ascent and went on to make dozens of ascents,
many from Vauxhall Gardens, often accompanied by one or other of her daughters.
On 26th July 1850 she set another record, ascending as the sun set
on Vauxhall, to become the first woman to make a night ascent.
All of this provided
inspirated for a journalist from the Alnwick Mercury who, in 1850, imagined a
future where a huge international balloon terminus was situated in ‘Vauxhall
New Town’. The illustration accompanying the article showed crowds gathered on
a raised platform where a huge balloon is coming into dock, and where daily
flights to France, Bombay, and America are advertised.
Rudyard Kipling
In 1905 this notion of
transatlantic and global air travel inspired Rudyard Kipling to make one of his
rare forays into the world of science fiction. Set in the year 2000, ‘With the
Night Mail’, depicted a future where the aeroplanes become secondary to dirigibles
and airships. In this world transatlantic crossing by balloons are commonplace.
The skies are governed by the Aerial Board of Control, while on the ground a
form of benign anarchy holds sway and threatened outbreaks of democracy are
swiftly dealt with. Kipling followed ‘With the Night Mail’ with ‘As Easy as
ABC’ (1912), set in the same world a decade on from the original plot.
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