At 2.30p.m. on Tuesday 05 November at Gold Hill Museum Tony Otton will give an illustrated talk on the remarkable career of aviation pioneer Louis Strange, born on the family farm at Spetisbury, Dorset, in 1891. The first powered flight in Britain was achieved in 1908 by the American Samuel Cody. Louis Strange saw the first Bournemouth Air Show in 1910, where Charles Rolls, co-founder with Henry Royce of Rolls Royce Ltd, crashed and was killed. Undeterred, Strange took his first flight in 1911 as the passenger of exhibition pilot Lewis Turner, who lived at Sturminster Newton but was best known for stirring flying displays at Hendon. Having been kicked by an unruly ewe in July 1913, and rendered temporarily unfit for farm work, Strange sought out Turner at Hendon, determined to learn to fly. By the end of 1913 Strange was established as an exhibition flier, race winner, and instructor. In 1914 he transferred from the Dorset Yeomanry to the infant Royal Flying Corps, and trained on military aircraft – such as they were – at the Central Flying School on Salisbury Plain. In August 1914 he was one of 37 pilots who left for France in a motley collection of under-powered aircraft, with a brief to gather intelligence on the enemy’s movements. This was a hazardous pursuit, with slow and level flight often provoking a hail of friendly fire. Strange and his colleagues, lacking an effective playbook, began to write their own, as you can read in an earlier blog. By August 1915 Strange was the last of the original 37 still in France, and a wise C.O. ensured that he was posted to Home Establishment, where his talents and experience could be employed in improving the quality of training and thus the longevity of new pilots. He didn’t return permanently to France, in a much more exalted role, until July 1918.

Captain W.E. Johns might have been remembered as the RAF Recruiting Officer who in 1922 rejected the thinly disguised Lawrence of Arabia, who presented himself as T.E. Shaw. When “Shaw” came back with an official letter from the Air Ministry, Johns referred the weedy specimen as a special case to the medical officer, who also declined to accept “Shaw.” By the winter of 1928/29 Aircraftsman Shaw had been posted to RAF Miramshah in British India, where his presence complicated the first mass evacuation by air from Afghanistan.

Johns states in his Foreword that Biggles was a fictitious character, yet he could have been found in any RFC mess during those great days of 1917 and 1918 when … air duelling was a fine art … he represents the spirit of the RFC – daring and deadly when in the air, devil-may-care and debonair on the ground. By the last chapter Biggles has been promoted Major to command 319 Squadron, and crash-lands behind German lines, only to discover that an Armistice has been signed half an hour earlier. It’s a great ending but one that would have to be forgotten about as Johns began writing another 90 or so Biggles books, which ultimately also embraced the inter-war period, the Battle of Britain, and the beginning of the Cold War. Biggles is said to have been born in India in 1899, which makes him just about old enough to have flown a Sopwith Camel and young enough to have been a Squadron Leader in 1940.

The Sopwith F1 earned the nickname “Camel” because of the hump over its forward-facing twin Vickers machine guns, synchronised to avoid hitting the propeller. It was introduced in 1917 when Louis Strange was Assistant Commandant at the Central Flying School. In the hands of an experienced pilot it was a formidable piece of kit, but too many novices lost control, and their lives. In spite of the care we took, Strange wrote, Camels continually spun down out of control when flew [sic] by pupils on their first solos. At length, with the assistance of Lieut Morgan, who managed our workshops, I took the main tank out of several Camels and replaced [them] with a smaller one, which enabled us to fit in dual control.

Both Strange and Biggles have breaks from their RAF service between the Wars. Strange retired on medical grounds in 1921 while according to Hilary Mantel Biggles was a charter pilot with a side-line in working for MI6. After going back to farming, in the 30s Strange became involved in the running of commercial airlines. In 1939 he joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve as a humble Pilot Officer; by 1944 he was helping to plan the execution of the D Day Campaign, and back in France. His story is (pardon the pun) stranger than fiction.

Tony’s fascinating talk is free to S&DHS members. Seats should be available to non-members from 2.20p.m. on payment of £5 at the door.

Dr Nicola Tallis is fast emerging as one of Britain’s most popular historians, according to fellow writer Gareth Russell. Her brilliant new study of the early life of Elizabeth I, says the doyenne of Tudor biographers Alison Weir, is an outstanding achievement. The Shaftesbury & District Historical Society is delighted to welcome Nicola to Shaftesbury Town Hall at 7.30p.m. on Tuesday 01 October as the 2024 Teulon Porter Memorial Lecturer. This illustrated talk is free to members and open to the public on payment of £5 at the door.

Nicola is a rising star in the firmament of Tudor historians. Her PhD thesis was published as ‘All the Queen’s Jewels 1445 -1548: Power, Majesty and Display’. She is speaking on this subject at a sold-out Six Lives Study Day at the National Portrait Gallery on 07 September. (Coincidentally Elizabeth I was born on 07 September in 1533.) After ‘Crown of Blood: The Deadly Inheritance of Lady Jane Grey’ (2016), Nicola raised the profiles of other Tudor women in ‘Elizabeth’s Rival: The Tumultuous Tale of Lettice Knollys, Countess of Leicester’ (2017) and ‘Uncrowned Queen: The Fateful Life of Margaret Beaufort, Tudor Matriarch.’ (2019)

Elizabeth I was 25 when she became Queen in 1558. An awful lot of personal trauma was packed into her early years, starting with the execution of her mother, Anne Boleyn, on 19 May 1536. Elizabeth joined her elder half-sister, Mary (b.1516), in the non-status of officially decreed illegitimacy. Both were much reduced in rank and household, from Princess to mere Lady. Any sympathy Mary might have felt for her younger sibling tended to be crushed by her burning resentment at Henry VIII’s treatment of her mother, Katherine of Aragon, and harassment over her (Mary’s) traditional religious beliefs. Both were blamed squarely on the malign influence of Anne Boleyn. At the beginning of Mary’s reign, when Kentish gentleman Sir Thomas Wyatt raised an unsuccessful rebellion against Mary’s Spanish Marriage to the future King Philip II, Elizabeth found herself in the same Tower of London quarters, contemplating the same fate, as her mother.

Wyatt had planned to depose Mary and replace her with Elizabeth. If Wyatt had written to her, Elizabeth denied ever having received his letter. Her own ‘Tide Letter’ to Mary, the writing of which delayed Elizabeth’s passage to the Tower beneath the low arches of London Bridge (above), may have saved her from sudden retribution. Elizabeth also knew enough to score out the blank space at the bottom of her letter to prevent any forged additions.

This was not the first time that Elizabeth had to use her quick wits and inner resilience to rebuff bullying by male interrogators. In 1548 she had been part of the household of Henry VIII’s last Queen and widow, Katherine Parr. Katherine was now free to marry Thomas Seymour, uncle of the boy-king Edward VI, and in June 1548 they began residing at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire.

In his will Henry VIII had made provision for advising his son Edward, aged 9 at his father’s death, to be shared by 16 executors. These were all male courtiers, though Mary was named second and Elizabeth third in the line of succession. Within days Edward Seymour subverted the terms of the will by being appointed Lord Protector, and Duke of Somerset. But Somerset’s nemesis was his younger brother, Thomas Seymour, who jealously coveted the post of Governor of the King’s Person. Although made Lord Admiral and given a barony as Lord Seymour of Sudeley, Seymour was not so easily bought off. Handsome, dashing and reckless, his consuming ambition made him a highly disruptive force. (John Guy, The Children of Henry VIII.) Thomas’s behaviour towards the 14 years-old Elizabeth was highly dubious, even by the lax standards of the day. He began to visit her bed-chamber at the crack of dawn. Lady-in-waiting Kat Ashley confessed that if Elizabeth were up, he would bid her good morrow and ask how she did, and strike her upon the back or on the buttocks familiarly … and if she were in her bed, he would open the curtains and bid her good morrow, and make as though he would come at her. Perhaps hoping to curb her husband’s excessive, abusive familiarity, Katherine took part in some of these romps, including a notorious incident in the garden at Hanworth where Elizabeth’s gown was cut to tatters as she was wearing it. I could not do withal, for the queen held me while the Lord Admiral cut it.

In May 1548, amid a rising tide of scurrilous gossip about the relationship between her errant husband and Elizabeth, Katherine sent the teenager to live with the Denny household. Within months, Katherine, who had been widowed three times, died of an infection sustained in childbirth. She was 36. Elizabeth learned from all these experiences. Thomas, thwarted in his schemes to groom Elizabeth, and to pitch a marriage to Mary, was arrested in January 1549 while trying to seize the person of the King. These were treasonous activities for which he was executed in March 1549. Sir Robert Tyrwhit, sent by Somerset to establish the extent of Elizabeth’s involvement, reported somewhat shamefacedly: I do assure your grace she hath a very good wit, and nothing is gotten of her, but by great policy. Legend has it that when in 1553 Elizabeth was released, reluctantly, by her sister from the Tower into house arrest at Woodstock, she used a diamond to etch into a window pane Much suspected of me. Nothing proved can be.

In 1915 Dorset Royal Flying Corps pilot Louis Strange fell out of the open cockpit of his single-seat Martinsyde S1 Scout biplane at 8000 feet above northern France. In the middle of a dogfight with a German Aviatik, the ammunition drum on his Lewis machine gun had jammed. When Strange stood up to try and free the magazine, the notoriously unstable Scout flipped over onto its back. With no parachute – not yet issued to British pilots – Strange faced the prospect of a long fall to a certain death, perhaps marginally preferable to being consumed by fire in a more controlled descent, the fate of many airmen.

It’s reasonable to assume that Strange escaped from his predicament, otherwise he wouldn’t be the subject of a fascinating talk by Tony Otton at 2.30p.m. on Tuesday 05 November at Gold Hill Museum. See the whole winter programme of lectures here. In fact Louis Strange was a constant innovator: the first RFC pilot to mount a Lewis gun on his aircraft (and then be ordered to remove it, because of the detrimental effect on the plane’s performance); the first to experiment with dropping home-made petrol bombs by hand on the enemy; and the first to drop footballs on a German-occupied airfield at Lille on Christmas Day 1914. After an inter-war sabbatical from flying, back on the family farm at Spetisbury, Strange at nearly 50 years of age was the last to escape from Merville, France, in 1940 in a Hurricane he’d never flown before, hotly pursued by 6 German Me-109s. There are so many dimensions to this man’s life that it is entirely plausible that he was the role model for Captain W.E. Johns’s fictional air-adventurer Biggles, the hero of nearly 100 books. This talk is one not to be missed. It’s free to members of The Shaftesbury & District Historical Society while seats should be available to non-members from 2.20p.m. on payment of £5 at the door.

Professor Maria Hayward, Head of History at Southampton University, has been working on the Privy Purse account books of Charles II’s Queen, Catherine of Braganza. (1638-1705) At 2.30p.m. on Tuesday 05 March at Gold Hill Museum, Maria takes time off her busy schedule to share with members of The Shaftesbury & District Historical Society what she has discovered about an under-rated monarch whose legacy is still influencing the British and American ways of life today. This illustrated talk is open to non-members from 2.20p.m. when seats should be available on payment of £3 at the door.

Last season we heard from Paul Cordle in “Escape or Die” how in 1651 the youthful King Charles II, by a mixture of bravado and sheer good fortune, evaded the posses of Parliamentary troopers on his tail from Worcester to Shoreham, where he found a boat for France. In 1660 he was able to return to reclaim his crowns at the Restoration of the Monarchy, having already acquired an habitually decadent life-style and at least one illegitimate son, James Crofts or Scott, future Duke of Monmouth.

During his continental exile Charles had not been impressed by the charms of any potential Protestant brides. The Braganza kingdom of Portugal, however, was keen to secure an ally in its struggle to remain independent of its domineering neighbour Habsburg Spain. A dowry worth £360,000 plus the trading posts of Bombay / Mumbai and Tangier convinced Charles of the merits of a marriage to the Portuguese Infanta, Catherine of Braganza. While Tangier proved a dubious asset, requiring constant expenditure on its defences, Bombay was to become a jewel in the crown of British India. Trading rights in Brazil and the Portuguese East Indies gave access to lucrative colonial markets, including those for slaves.

When a seasick Catherine landed at Portsmouth in May 1662, her first request was for a cup of tea. This quintessential British beverage was then a novelty, first served in a London coffee house in 1657, and promoted for its health benefits. (Boiling the polluted water of the day was a good idea.) In 1658 tea was advertised as That Excellent and by all Physicians approved China drink, called by the Chinese Tcha, by other nations Tay alias Tee. The diarist Samuel Pepys first mentions drinking it in September 1660. Catherine’s preference for tea and its introduction as a standard refreshment at Court functions helped establish tea-drinking as a fashionable activity, initially for the wealthy as tea was much more expensive than coffee.

Something else recorded enthusiastically by Pepys was the King’s dalliance with a favourite mistress, Barbara Palmer, Countess of Castlemaine. At the time of Catherine’s arrival, Barbara was pregnant with one of five children acknowledged by Charles. She had already persuaded the King to secure her appointment as a Lady of the Queen’s Bedchamber. On 21 May Pepys noted walking into Whitehall garden; and in the privy Garden saw the finest smocks and linen petticoats of my Lady Castlemaynes, laced with rich lace at the bottomes, that ever I sawe; and did me good to look upon them … the King dined at my Lady Castlemayne, and supped every day and night the last week. And the night that the bonefires were made for joy of the Queenes arrivall, the King was there, but there was no fire at her door.

Predictably this ménage a trois provoked some furious scenes. The Lord Chancellor, Edward Hyde Earl of Clarendon (born in Dinton), encouraged the Queen to resist the appointment. She struck the name of Castlemaine from the list, and fainted when the two were introduced. The King made it plain that he would not back down under any circumstances: I am resolved to go through with this matter, let what will come on it … If you desire to have the continuance of my friendship, meddle no more with this business … And whosoever I find to be my Lady Castlemaine’s enemy in this matter, I do promise upon my word to be his enemy as long as I live.

Eventually Catherine decided on tactics of conciliation, rather than confrontation. (Uglow) Barbara was a Lady of the Bedchamber until 1673, by which time she had been supplanted in Charles’s affections by Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth. Three illegitimate sons – Charles (b 1662), Henry (1663) and George (1665) – were all given the surname Fitzroy, confirming their royal parentage. Sadly Catherine’s three pregnancies all miscarried.

Charles did show some respect and affection for his Queen at the time of the Popish Plot in 1678. This was the wildest conspiracy theory of the age, a farrago of lies and pure invention which fed on contemporary anti-Catholic prejudices and fears of a future Catholic dynasty should a childless Charles be succeeded by his brother James, a Catholic convert. Members of Catherine’s Portuguese household were accused of plotting to kill the King. The most notorious liar, Titus Oates, even accused Catherine of scheming to poison her husband. Charles was present in person to tear holes in Oates’s fantasies, but it made little impression on the Protestant public, or on Exclusionist Whig politicians like Anthony Ashley-Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury, who would know it was all rubbish but who exploited the furore to try to alter the Succession. As Shaftesbury said later: I will not say who started the Game, but I am sure I had the full hunting of it.

The royal brothers referred contemptuously to the diminutive Shaftesbury as little sincerity – he had changed sides during the Civil Wars, and from supporter of the King to critic in the 1670s – but he was consistent in wishing to retain the role of Parliament in government. He suspected that both brothers were envious of the absolute power exercised in France by Louis XIV and would rule autocratically in Britain if they could. Repeatedly during the Exclusion crisis Shaftesbury urged the King to divorce Queen Catherine and marry a Protestant princess or declare Monmouth to be his legitimate heir. Charles however steadfastly maintained that the Queen could never do anything wicked, and it would be a horrible thing to abandon her.

So Catherine of Braganza’s legacy arguably includes the name of one of New York’s Boroughs; the foundation of British India; the popularisation of tea-drinking; trouser-wearing for women; and quite unintentionally, the beginnings of a political party (the Whigs) and the party system. In 1685, when Charles was on his deathbed, Catherine sent a message to beg his pardon if she had offended him in all her life, to which he replied: Alas, poor woman! She ask my pardon? I beg hers with all my heart.