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The Balloon Factory

On a wing and a prayer

Alexander Frater
Picador, 243pp, £16.99,

Byron Rogers

Wednesday, 27th August 2008

The Balloon Factory by Alexander Frater

This is a curiously enjoyable book. Its structure is very odd for it is basically two books bolted together across 100 years: the first is the high drama of the dawn of powered flight in Britain as young men, and some not so young, fall out of the skies; the second is tea time, as Alexander Frater completes a stately trundle, interrupted by his own flying lessons, around the locations, and nearby hotels, where these events took place, but so few remember that they did. The effect is remarkable, for it puts into historical context the story of flight, seven-eighths of the entry about which in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica is to do with birds. The whole history of powered flight is in the living memory of some people, only, under skies that are now full of planes, they have forgotten this is so.

The hero of this book, apart from Alexander Frater, patient and polite, asking his questions and eating his Chinese meals (in 1910 there were about as many Chinese restaurants in Britain as there were planes), is the American ‘Colonel’ Sam Cody, a rank he invented for himself, just as he invented his past. Everything about Cody screamed con-man.

He was not made for the skies, being 6’3” tall and weighing 16 stone, wore a sombrero and a red-lined cloak in Regent Street, and had shoulder-length hair, a waxed moustache and an Imperial beard. Nobody knows where he was born, or whether, as he said, he had even been a cowboy. He had come to Britain to deliver ponies to a dealer, then stayed on to turn showman, writing spectacular Western melodramas which lasted three hours and more, in which he played the villain, riding horses across the stages of English county towns and firing his guns.