Daniel Swift

‘One warm night in June 1917 I became the man who nearly killed the Kaiser’

A review of Airborne: Scenes from the Life of Lance Sievking. Planes! Prison camps! Modernist radio! And much of it may be true

Lance Sieveking (right) with Colonel G.L. Thompson broadcasting a running commentary on the final bumping race from a tree in Rectory Meadow, Cambridge, June 1927 [Getty Images/Shutterstock/iStock/Alamy]

The traditional story told about the first world war is that it changed everything: that it was the end of the old world and the beginning of the modern age, and that art and poetry could never be the same again. So it is refreshing to find, not far into Lance Sieveking’s amiable and haphazard memoirs, the claim that ‘I didn’t realise it at the time, but in 1919 I was a comparative rarity: a complete young man, a man with two arms, two legs, two lungs, two eyes.’ He had fought in the war, and came home unscathed, and that was that. Airborne: Scenes from the Life of Lance Sieveking is a slightly otherworldly book: a collection of agreeable stories drawn from a colourful life, all told with good humour and very little fuss. It reads like a document from a lost time.

Sieveking was born in 1896, into a Victorian family of suffragettes, worthy causes and cello lessons, and grew up on the south coast of England. He briefly joined the Artists’ Rifles during the first world war, but when it became clear he was too tall for the trenches — he was six foot six — he transferred to the Royal Naval Air Service. He learned to fly in an open plane, which he describes as ‘a thing like a winged bicycle made of wood, linen and piano wire’, and later was the pilot on Handley Pages on bombing runs in Belgium. In October 1917 he crashed and was captured by a German sergeant with a comic moustache. He spent the rest of the war in a German prison camp, where he wrote nonsense verse and staged plays to entertain the other prisoners.

He then joined the BBC, in its very early days, and there produced avant-garde radio programmes, including his most famous work, the ambitious Kaleidoscope (1928).

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