The biplane that changed Britain: how ‘the Moth' took off

Telegraph

28-01-2025

When, now long ago, I told my grandmother that I had just read Beryl Markham's book West with the Night, she was delighted. 'Oh, Beryl Markham! The last time I saw her, she was in the arms of the Prince of Wales under the wings of your grandfather's Puss Moth.'
Only years later, during the research for my book, Captain de Havilland's Moth, would I make the connection: the occasion would have been the London Aeroplane Club's summer party of 1930. Markham was at that time conducting simultaneous affairs with the future
The Moth quickly became a favourite of the wealthy and leisured. But when Captain Geoffrey de Havilland designed it, his dream was to do for the aeroplane what Henry Ford had done for the car with his Model T – to make what had been a preserve of the few a realistic proposition for many. If he could come up with a package that combined light weight with simplicity, ease of operation, reasonable speed and range, as close to £500 as possible, he would be successful. In the end, a Moth cost £650, putting it just in range of the emerging professional classes, and cruised at around 75mph carrying two people and overnight bags for up to 300 miles before needing to refuel. It was the world's first genuinely practical aircraft for the private owner.
The princes, though, found themselves among familiar company. The monarch-in-waiting had many Moth owners in his friendship group: Denys Finch Hatton, famous for organising the prince's two African safaris and latterly as Karen von Blixen's doomed lover in Out of Africa, was one. Then there was Freddie Guest MP, a cousin of
Often during my research, I found the Moth's least expected pilots the most interesting: in particular, the women. Amy Johnson, the typist from Hull, famously flew her Moth to Australia in 1930. Johnnie, as she liked to be called, was representative of a group of pilots who stood outside the ranks of the uber-privileged and who were the first champions of private aviation.
Then there was Lotfia Elnadi, a telephonist from Cairo who, in the same year, became the first African woman to gain her pilot's licence. Though her mother gave full support, her father was unconvinced that this was at all a good idea until she flew him over the pyramids. He was an immediate convert.
Another remarkable female pilot was Sophie Heath, who grew up in tragic circumstances. Her father, a member of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy, bludgeoned his wife to death while she held the baby Sophie in her arms. Brought up by a pair of disapproving aunts, Sophie was outstanding both academically and as an athlete becoming, first, an agricultural scientist and then a founder member of the Women's Athletics Association. As a competitor at the London Women's Olympiad of 1924, she won the silver medal in long-jump. In 1926, she became the first person to attain a private pilot's licence on a Moth and, incidentally, also the first woman in England to make a parachute jump from an aircraft.
Her first husband having died, she married Sir James Heath, a man almost 45 years older than she was. Thereafter, Sophie was a regular air-racing competitor until Sir James, tired of bankrolling a woman he claimed he never saw, put a stop to his wife's gallivanting by announcing publicly that he would no longer be paying her bills and would be divorcing her in favour of a woman even younger than she was. Sophie went on to befriend the American aviation pioneer, Amelia Earhart, and, later, to set up a business operating Moths in Ireland. It was ultimately unsuccessful but arguably she did just as much as Amy Johnson to advance the role of women in this country.
There were some tragic stories too. Maurice Wilson hoped to be the first person to climb Everest. He would achieve this by crash-landing his Moth halfway up. The son of a Bradford mill owner, Wilson was a decorated survivor of the First World War who never succeeded in settling down following his traumatic experiences in the trenches. Buying a second-hand Moth in January 1933, his aim was to learn to fly and take it out to the Himalayas to reach the summit in time for his birthday in May. Despite the best efforts of the British authorities to thwart him, he made it as far as the foothills – crossing the Middle East without proper maps – before his aeroplane was finally impounded.
Undaunted, he set off on foot, eventually dying of exposure at 23,000 feet. His body was discovered a year later – not, though, clad in the women's underwear that he was suspected of wearing, even if his latest biographer makes clear that Wilson was, beyond doubt, a transvestite.
Wilson's lack of maps was familiar to all of those who undertook long-distance flights at that time. For her flight up the west coast of Africa, Lady Bailey used one that she had cut out of a cruise ship brochure. Aspy Engineer and his friend RN Chawla used a school atlas to get them from Cairo to Croydon. It is hardly surprising to learn that they landed 80 miles from Paris in bad weather on what was supposed to be the penultimate leg of their flight. Nor is it surprising that they should have landed in Norfolk instead of at Croydon on what was in fact their penultimate leg. What is astonishing, however, is that when he flew himself successfully back to Karachi to win the Aga Khan Trophy for being the first Indian national to fly solo between the two countries in under a month, Aspy Engineer was just 17.
Truthfully, de Havilland's dream of flying for everyman was only fulfilled when he designed the Comet, the world's first jet airliner in the late 1940s. But the Moth was an important step along the way. What is clear is that, collectively, these exploits in the Moth showed that flying could actually be safe, and, at least potentially, open to all. In doing so, they sealed the reputation of Captain de Havilland's Moth as being one of the most successful, and certainly the most iconic, light aircraft of all time.
by Alexander Norman (Abacus, £25) will be published on Feb 6