Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air. Richard Holmes
misleading, as there is no record of a genuine aerial photograph of a city before 1858–59 (Paris and Boston were to be the first). But the combination of balloon and photography evidently had a fashionable, up-to-the-minute appeal.
The ‘angel’s eye’ might also be used to celebrate or commemorate particular events. One of the most memorable of these was the airborne view of the Great Fire of Newcastle, which broke out at one o’clock in the morning of 6 October 1854. Starting with a horrific explosion in a chemical warehouse in Gateshead containing hundreds of tons of sulphur, naphtha, brimstone, and arsenic, the flames leaped across the river Tyne into Newcastle and burned for two days, causing over a million pounds’ worth of damage, and terrible loss of life.
An image of this catastrophe was presented by the Illustrated London News on 14 October, like an action photograph taken from a balloon. From an imaginary viewpoint some five hundred feet above Gateshead, it gives a startling panorama of houses, bridges, churches, quaysides, ships and factories, looking across the Tyne towards the great railway viaduct running through the centre of Newcastle. The pale autumnal tone of the print, predominately blue and white, is clearly the wan, aching light of dawn. But the picture is also realistically coloured and animated with leaping flames, wind-torn smoke and tiny fleeing figures, as if it was being observed in real time. (To the modern observer there is an unmistakable resonance with the hurrying, peopled cityscapes of L.S. Lowry.) It achieves a kind of mythic quality, a vision of the industrial city devoured by fire, the icon of a modern secular version of hell. Or perhaps more accurately ‘cleansed’ by fire, and thereby becoming a kind of purgatory.
The picture was published above a vivid piece of reportage, which itself achieved the extraordinary effect of an all-seeing eye.
The streets in the neighbourhood of the explosion presented a most melancholy spectacle. Men, women, and children in their night dresses might be seen rushing from their abodes in search of shelter, they knew not whither. In Gateshead particularly the scene was most distressing – mothers were vainly trying to return for a child, forgotten in the suddenness of escape – and children were searching for their parents. The quay on the Newcastle side of the river was literally strewed with burning staves and rafters, covered with sulphur, and burning like matches. Adults and children, confused by the awful catastrophe, went staggering to and fro as if intoxicated, uttering lamentable and piercing cries. At one time the whole town seemed to be devoted to the rampant agency of fire … The shop fronts and windows upon the Quayside, the Sandhill, the Side, and all the neighbouring streets, were almost universally blown out, and the gas lights, for a square mile around the spot, were extinguished in a moment, adding a weird and horrible confusion to the scene. The streets rapidly filled with the entire population of the lower parts of Newcastle, hundreds of them in their night clothes, and seriously injured. The blood-begrimed countenances of many, and the shrieks, wailing, and lamentations to be heard on every side, commingling with the voices of others devoutly calling upon the Lord to have mercy upon them, made up a scene which has been seldom paralleled. 8
The fire’s impact was so great that a national disaster fund was launched to relieve the destitute citizens, and the first contribution was made by Queen Victoria herself. The Illustrated London News reported a striking example of Victorian philanthropy: ‘The public sympathy for the numerous poor families, who were rendered destitute by this terrible catastrophe, was displayed in the most marked manner throughout the kingdom. Upwards of £11,000 were subscribed for their relief. No less than eight hundred families applied for assistance from the funds …’ Money was also given to institutions like the Newcastle Infirmary and the Gateshead Dispensary. The image of the burning northern industrial city, with its displaced citizens wandering the streets like lost souls in purgatory, struck very deep. It was said that Queen Victoria, in an unprecedented departure from royal protocol, ordered that the royal train on the way to Balmoral should halt on the famous High Level Bridge above Gateshead so she could look down at the devastated city and weep.
Balloons were also used to celebrate colonial cities, and inspire imperial links, notably in Australia. In 1858 the British balloon the Australian made some startling flights over Melbourne and Sydney. There was a late-summer-night ascent in March from Cremorne Gardens, Melbourne, in which a basketful of local dignitaries sailed over the Botanical Gardens in bright moonlight, with a magical sight of the festival fireworks far below. But, attempting to land at Battam’s Swamp, they found themselves in a working-class district, and the balloon basket was seized by a violent crowd. Amid vocal democratic objections to such ‘superior’ transport, the distinguished guests were forced to escape by jettisoning champagne bottles, picnic hampers, several bags of sand ballast, and finally throwing off a few hardy objectors still clinging to the sides of the basket. Unlike America, ballooning in Australia remained an essentially urban entertainment. There is no record of any practical attempts to explore the Australian interior by balloon at this time. Burke and Wills, starting on their epic journey from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria in August 1860, stuck firmly and fatally to the ground.fn15
Vauxhall Gardens finally closed after its ‘Last Night for Ever’ on 26 July 1859. Many reasons were given for this. The proprietors blamed the magistrates who continually banned their most popular attractions as either too dangerous, or too disruptive to the newly respectable neighbourhood of Kennington. Ballooning and fireworks displays were particularly blamed for this. But other factors certainly played a part: the gardens had become run-down and tawdry, and were considered old-fashioned; the railway, which ran past the main entrance, had made travel further afield much easier and cheaper; seaside towns, with their Vauxhall-like piers, were becoming fashionable; and, finally, the site itself was too valuable as property, and the blandishments of developers eventually persuaded the proprietors to sell up.9
At about this time Charles Green, after more than five hundred successful ascents and now in his seventies, also went into retirement. He purchased an elegant little house on a hillside above the Holloway Road, North London, and named it ‘Aerial Villa’. But he kept a weather eye on the horizon.
5
Wild West Wind
1
For American balloons the horizon was just opening up. From the 1840s, long before the establishment of the Union Pacific railroad in 1869, a generation of small-time fairground aeronauts and showmen had begun to dream of achieving the ultimate airborne feat and publicity coup. It was of course the big one, the epic: a single non-stop balloon flight three thousand miles right across America.
American balloonists, unlike their British counterparts, had a vision of their nation’s untamed nature, the wilderness and vastness – the endless great prairies, forests and lakes. Their long and daring attempts at trans-America flights were always made from west to east because of the prevailing winds. They were also haunted by the idea of crossing the ultimate wilderness, the three and a half thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean.
This was at a time when most long-distance transport in America was still by horse, wagon or stagecoach, or else by boat slowly along one of the great rivers like the Ohio or the Mississippi. Railroad-building had only begun in 1830, with the Baltimore and Ohio Line, and by 1840 there was still only about 2,500 miles of track in the whole country, almost all of it confined to local lines on the eastern seaboard, between Charleston and Boston. The great cities of the mid-west, like Chicago and Cincinnati, were served primarily by paddle steamers or Wells Fargo stagecoaches until the 1850s, and serious railroad-building westwards did not begin until after the passing of the Railroad Act of 1862.
When Charles Dickens went to America