Welsh wizard prang

A Pembrokeshire Pioneer
by Roscoe Howells

In 1903, in one tremulous little 12-second hop, just 10 feet off the ground, Orville Wright made the first powered flight by a man. Or was it? In the village of Saundersfoot on the Pembrokeshire coast there is the belief amongst the old who can still remember what their fathers told them that a local carpenter, Bill Frost, flew seven years before the Wrights.

The author of this book, Roscoe Howells, novelist, local historian and farmer, is 87. I must declare an interest at this point. I came across the story about 15 years ago, and wrote about it. In the course of my meeting Mr Howells and many other OAPs what staggered me was the off-hand way they all talked about the event. ‘Oh yes, old Bill Frost. He kept goats, you know. Of course that was after he flew.’

The Sunday Telegraph, which had commissioned the article, did not share my awe and refused to print it on the grounds, unusual for a newspaper, that it did not believe any of it. But the Guardian sturdily printed all 3,000 words, and added a dramatic sketch, for no photograph exists of Frost’s flying machine. In fact little printed proof of any kind exists, and in our time printed proof is all. If it exists we believe it, for we assume, as in the case of Jeffrey Archer’s CV, that someone else has checked it out. If it does not exist, then we do not believe. Which is why Mr Howells’s book is so fascinating.

This is a little classic of oral history, as the author examines a story handed down through the generations. For this is a story which is just not possible. The aeronautical engineers at Boscombe Down, who were going to build a replica had they not been interrupted by the Iraq war, have said that in their opinion the machine could not have flown.