Falling Upwards. Richard Holmes
‘garrulous, and delighting all with his intelligence, his enterprise, his enthusiasm and his courtesy’. But once installed in the aerial kingdom of his balloon basket, he became ‘taciturn, and almost irritable’, rarely speaking, but always ready to ‘roar out’ commands at crucial moments of manoeuvring or landing. Apart from his balloon logbooks, he left few, if any, written accounts of his own flights. Yet he inspired others to do so, and many of the classic descriptions of Victorian ballooning, especially over London, by John Poole (1838), Albert Smith (1847) and Henry Mayhew (1852), were written after memorable voyages with Charles Green.4
Green came from a family of fruit merchants, based in Goswell Street on the edge of the City of London. This was, and still is, a bustling district of small businesses and shops, modest houses and working cafés. It is where Dickens’s Pickwick Papers begins, with Mr Pickwick leaning out of his lodging windows onto Goswell Street and greeting ‘that punctual servant of all work, the sun’ on a cheerful morning in 1827. How or when Green became fascinated by ballooning remains a mystery. Fruit and veg do not seem an obvious source of aerial longings. He would only say that ballooning started as a hobby, after he had been trying to improve the gas lighting in the family shop. Possibly the idea for using mains coal gas to inflate a balloon came to him during these experiments.5
Born in 1785, Green was working full-time in his father’s shop from the age of fifteen, and little is known about his earliest flights until 1821, when he was approaching forty. It would seem that he began ballooning when he was already a successful businessman, perhaps as a kind of sport, and was determined to find a way around the huge expense of hydrogen. He made his first ascent using coal gas, from the newly installed Piccadilly mains, launching from Green Park in London on 19 July 1821. But Green must already have had some reputation as a balloonist, for the launch was part of the public celebrations for the coronation of George IV, the balloon was decorated with the royal arms, and the site at Green Park was close to St James’s Palace. This was not usually a place of popular entertainment, and the ascent must have been officially sanctioned and even subsidised.
Green gradually established himself as part of a new generation of professional balloonists. They could hire out their services, and their balloons, to any employer or institution who wanted to celebrate a special occasion or mark a notable event. But initially Green still had to put on novelty shows like Garnerin, and he is recorded as ascending on the back of a horse harnessed to his balloon hoop from the Eagle Tavern, City Road, in August 1828. This was the same tavern from which Lieutenant Harris and Miss Stocks had launched their fatal flight four years previously.
A friend gave a whimsical description of Green in these early fairground days, going aloft on the back of a pony, while feeding him by hand with beans. He added a brief biography of the pony’s career with Green: ‘Finally having experienced more ups and downs than any horse, perhaps, that ever existed, he quitted a life of public service, and was buried in the garden of his master at Highgate where he now reposes.’6
What made Green exceptional, quite apart from his flying skills, was his ability as a businessman. He drastically reduced the cost of commercial ballooning by negotiating an agreement with the London Gas Light and Coke Company to purchase coal gas to power his balloons. The concept of using ‘pit-coal’ gas for ballooning was not new, and had been recommended by Tiberius Cavallo in his Aerostation study as long ago as 1785. But it took Victorian technology and enterprise to apply it. The London Gas Company had itself only been founded in 1812, but within five years it had laid nearly thirty miles of gas mains, and a decade later had more than enough capacity to inflate Green’s balloons.
Green had calculated, using experiments with small models, that household coal gas was about half as effective as hydrogen, but less than a third of the cost. A seventy-thousand-cubic-foot balloon would cost £250 to inflate with hydrogen, but only about £80 with coal gas. It was also much quicker and safer to use, as it was delivered under pressure by the urban gas mains, which also supplied street lamps and public buildings.7
By 1835 Green had made over two hundred ascents, and established himself as the leading professional balloonist in Britain. He had also invented a new piece of balloon technology: the trail rope. This was a simple, self-regulating ballast device, which allowed a gas balloon to adjust its own height when flying at altitudes below five hundred feet. Made of heavy manila cordage, the trail rope was winched out of the basket and simply left to drag along the ground several hundred feet below. Whenever the balloon dropped closer to the ground, more trail rope – and hence more ballast weight – was transferred from the balloon basket to the earth. Thus lightened, the balloon would rise again to a new point of balance. It was a very neat form of homeostatic device, typical of Green’s supremely practical turn of mind. He never attempted to patent it, and it was soon employed by aeronauts across Europe.
Of course the trail rope could not be used over cities, or any kind of built-up or industrialised area. But apart from London and the sea ports, the cathedral cities of the shires and the manufacturing towns of the Midlands, England was still very largely a rural landscape. So Green employed his trail rope with what now seems amazing insouciance across the whole countryside: dragging it crashing through lines of trees and hedgerows, hissing across fields of crops or cattle, and not infrequently lifting the odd tile or slab of stonework from church roofs or isolated barns. This was a land still without barbed wire, let alone telegraph lines or electrical pylons, and the trail rope suggests a lost age of open parklands, isolated villages and largely unpopulated countryside.fn12 If he descended on a gentleman’s estate, Green could expect immediate help from the estate labourers, and usually a warm welcome and much hospitality from the squire at the great house. The balloon was in its own way an old-fashioned expression of pastoral values and pleasures.
But it was also a commercial proposition. In 1836 Green negotiated an agreement with Frederick Gye and Richard Hughes, proprietors of the immensely popular Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, on the banks of the Thames, to supply balloon events as part of the garden’s attractions to Londoners, alongside brass bands, food stalls and horse-riding. Balloons were also a superb new means of publicity. For the next twenty years Vauxhall became associated with spectacular balloon launches, and various balloon dramas, until it was finally closed in 1859.
Part of Green’s contract provided him with the finances to construct to his own specification a huge eighty-foot-high coal-gas balloon with a seventy-thousand-cubic-foot capacity. It cost £2,000, an unheard-of sum, and was known initially as the Royal Vauxhall. Its livery was a red-and-white vertical candy stripe, with a Latin inscription from Ovid’s Metamorphoses emblazoned grandly round the circumference: ‘Caelum certe patet, ibimus illi’ – ‘Surely the sky lies open, let us go that way!’fn13 This was taken as signifying an appropriate pedagogical gesture on the part of Green or the Vauxhall proprietors: balloon travel was not mere entertainment, it would open the mind as well as the skies.
The Royal Vauxhall was capacious, with a nine-foot oval wickerwork basket, capable of carrying at least nine passengers, as well as a massive grappling iron and a huge hand-cranked winch to raise and lower the famous manila trail rope. To begin with it supplied paying passengers with short, tethered ascents to a hundred feet, so they could admire a view that stretched right up the Thames to the Houses of Parliament and St Paul’s. Equally, of course, the balloon could itself be seen for miles around London, a hugely effective piece of advertising.
After various preliminary trials, Green pulled off the most spectacular advertising coup for the Gardens in November 1836, when he set out on a legendary overnight flight from London to the Continent. The balloon team consisted of Green himself, Robert Hollond, a wealthy MP who partly financed the flight, and Monck Mason, an Irish musician and balloon enthusiast (suitably, he played the flute) who talked and wrote with great fluency, and undertook to record the whole event.
The departure was well publicised, especially the spectacular list of supplies that were intended to victual the three-man