Latest news with #pioneers
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
If you don't understand Oklahoma, you can't understand America
In a moment, I will tell you how I learned to love Oklahoma, a state I have had to point out on a map more times than I can count to Americans and foreigners alike. One with 77 crimson red counties and a license plate that once simply read: 'OKLAHOMA IS OK.' But first, it is important to tell you about my first Oklahoma school history lesson – one I learned when I was eight years old, after my parents moved our family cross-country. Tulsa's reputation as a haven for the devout held deep appeal for my Jamaican parents, whose lives were steeped in Christian faith. The city's predictable rhythms, its flatness, even its so-called boringness – it all offered a reprieve from what they saw as the chaos and moral drift of our old home in New York. One day, my new school gathered every fourth grader and led us to the backlot. We were lined up across the lawn and equipped with wagons, protractors and dulled stakes to drive into the ground. We waited for a teacher's voice to yell, 'Go!' We were to take off quickly, racing each other to find a plot we wanted to take for ourselves. We measured, as well as fourth graders could, the land we wanted to be ours. The entire affair was raucous as us newly minted 'pioneers' yelled, laughed and named our plots whatever our imaginations would allow. We were re-enacting a land run – one of seven held between 1889 and 1895 – that marked the opening of lands once deeded to Indigenous nations, only to be seized again as part of their forced removal across what we now call the American west. It may be hard to believe, but Oklahoma City's public schools didn't get around to banning the practice from history lessons until 2014. In its place came a sanitized, feelgood version of state history – one that, like many civil war re-enactments, recasts the fight to preserve slavery as a story of bravery and idealism. During those history lessons, the ugliness was not even hiding in plain sight. The disregard for the lives on which the state was built was – and still is – a point of pride. Today, the University of Oklahoma – my alma mater and the state's flagship university – leads every game, welcome event and recruiting fair with its famous chant: 'Boomer!' followed by an echoed 'Sooner!' It's a rallying cry repeated across all its athletic programs, which, like many state schools, are funded far more robustly than classrooms. Boomers were settlers, mostly white, who agitated in the late 1800s to open land in Indian territory (present-day Oklahoma) for white homesteaders. Led by pugnacious figures such as David Lewis Payne (the putative 'Father of Oklahoma'), they staged illegal incursions before the land was officially opened. The Sooners entered the land before the legal start time of a land run, cheating to claim the best plots. These rule-breakers are now mythologized in Oklahoma culture. The university's mascot is not an animal or a person, but a covered wagon: an emblem of the pioneering spirit that carved a life from theft and violence. For much of my life, I struggled to feel pride in a place like this – not just because of its history, but because of the lie we told about it. The real story was buried beneath a more palatable narrative, where horrors were treated as little more than pit stops on the way to celebrating homesteaders. Land theft from Native nations, the displacement of Black families, the racial terror that shadowed statehood – these were footnotes, if they were mentioned at all. But over time, it was precisely those harder truths that gave me something solid to stand on. That reckoning – naming the harm, sitting with its consequences – is not just about the past. It's a tool we need now, in 2025, when the country is suspended between two impulses: nostalgia and denial. Across the nation, the fight over whose history counts is really a fight over who gets to claim America. The violence that birthed Oklahoma was not incidental, it was foundational. And unless we confront that, there's no building anything real. Misunderstand Oklahoma, and you misunderstand the country. Growing up in Tulsa, the north star for me and my friends was college, followed by a job that could take us anywhere but Oklahoma. Dallas and Houston seemed almost idyllic: more affordable than New York or Los Angeles while still offering an upgraded version of a lifestyle we were already familiar with. Nothing made me want to stay. Downtown Tulsa felt frozen in amber, a relic of its 'oil capital of the world' heyday, long faded. The place felt ghostly. To me, its nightlife, diversity, direct flights and appetite for progress were all but nonexistent. Until recently, Oklahoma had not had a major-league sports team – though the Oklahoma City Thunder recently broke through, winning the 2025 NBA finals. What professional sports teams we had were literally and colloquially minor, baseball teams with stadiums that left much to be desired. This is a story of haunting familiarity to people whose home towns are seen as flyovers, rarely seen as worth a stop. And then, everything changed. In the decade since I left, Oklahoma has been refashioning its cities, courting new talent, and, according to the Kansas City Federal Reserve, beginning to reverse its long-running brain drain. College graduates like me once left in droves. Now, it seems that the tide is shifting. If you are an artist, Tulsa will subsidize your loft or studio. If Teach for America has whet your appetite, Tulsa will help with your housing costs. If you have a startup that might struggle with raising venture capital on the coasts, you will find that Tulsa will offer it to you. Even remote workers with no ties to the state can receive $10,000 or help with a down payment, just for showing up and staying for a year. Convenient, when the airport now offers direct flights to places my younger self could only dream about: New York, Miami, Los Angeles. These are all points of pride for many. But for all the praise, concerns do remain: rising housing costs, shallow community ties, and whether programs such as Tulsa Remote offer lasting benefits to longtime residents, especially since those efforts are not government-led efforts but philanthropic ones, and rely entirely on the continued generosity of a few wealthy individuals. Reinvention has always been part of Oklahoma's playbook. Again and again, the state has tried to become something new by recruiting outsiders, whether settlers in the land runs or now digital nomads with graduate degrees, while asking far less of itself when it comes to honoring the people and histories already here. That strategy may bring headlines, but it rarely brings healing. No matter how overjoyed I was to see my home state in the headlines for the NBA championship – rather than for being ranked 49th in education or 49th in healthcare – my pride doesn't come from Oklahoma's polished reinvention. It lies in the hard work of seeing my state clearly, in all its contradictions: the violence and the love, the buried history and the stubborn hope. And to do that, we need to go back nearly 140 years. I have spent the past five years combing through archives and crisscrossing Oklahoma and the Great Plains, chasing the story of Edward McCabe: the visionary who tried to create a Black state within the US, a figure who stood at the centre of some of America's most volatile collisions. In the 1880s, McCabe, the first Black statewide elected official in the old west, came to the Oklahoma territory with a vision so bold it startled both Black allies and white detractors: a state colonized by Black people, governed by their own hands, and as McCabe promised, 'unmolested by the selfish greed of the white man'. It was a dream not of mere survival, but of sovereignty – and it's why a reporter traveling from Minnesota dubbed him 'The One Who Would Be Moses'. That dream, like so many others on that soil, was paved over by the very forces it tried to escape: anti-Black violence, white economic opportunism and settler colonialism's endless appetite. McCabe did not ask for a utopia without contradiction. His ride to Langston – one of the all-Black towns he helped found – from his post in the territorial capital of Guthrie, where he served as county treasurer during the 1891 land run, was anything but safe. White cowboys stopped him on the road, ordered him to turn back, to stop where he stood. He refused, more than once. Then they opened fire. He lived to tell the story, but just barely. It was a warning: dreams built on contested ground do not go unchallenged, and Black ambition could be answered with bullets. His story, in all its promise and peril, was not that of a perfect man with a clean mission. He promoted colonization while ignoring the fact that the land he hoped to reclaim for Black people had already been promised, stolen, and promised again to Indigenous nations. He stood at the nexus of Black aspiration and Native dispossession. And in doing so, he reflected the central American dilemma: that ambition will never be clean because the ground itself is stolen. McCabe's dream of a Black-governed state was mocked, sabotaged and eventually erased from civic memory. But in the erasures, we find the outlines of what was feared: not just Black people having land, but Black people on their own terms. That was always the deeper threat. Not a land grab, but a claim to belong. A declaration of autonomy. That is why I return to him: not because he got it right, but because he tried. His efforts, and those of his peers, can still be seen in the 13 all-Black towns in Oklahoma (down from the 50 that once stood tall). These towns were founded as havens – places where Black Americans could govern themselves, own land and live free from white oversight. Many who built and settled these towns were just one generation removed from slavery, carrying the memory – often their own or that of their parents – of what it meant to be owned, uprooted and denied the right to belong. Their movement westward was not merely an act of escape; it was an act of creation. They were not just fleeing the violence of Reconstruction's collapse; they were imagining something freer, fuller and governed by their own hands. Today, those towns are no longer exclusively Black, nor are they legally restricted to Black residents. Anyone can move there, marry there, build a life there. But their founding spirit endures. McCabe spoke in what newspapers would call 'nigger talk' – a term of derision meant to dismiss any Black person who dared to articulate sovereignty, self-governance or the audacious idea of belonging on their own terms. But McCabe wore the insult as armor. He turned the slur into strategy, the scorn into a blueprint. And they tried to kill him for it. But what they didn't realize is that this was not just talk, it was a creed. A blueprint. A framework for building a world not yet born. That is the lesson Oklahoma teaches. Oklahoma has always been a place America used to test its next chapter. After Reconstruction failed, and the US government abandoned its promises to Native nations, parts of the territory were branded 'no man's land' – as if no person of value had ever lived there. But it was not empty; it was further removed. Oklahoma could have been a blueprint for belonging, a place carved out for those most marginalized: Black people fleeing racial terror, Native nations pushed from their homelands, immigrants seeking a foothold. Instead, it became a proving ground for the ugly zero-sum politics that plague America today, pitting groups against each other. Today, Oklahoma remains at the forefront of deciding what counts as American – whether in its classrooms, its public religion or its laws. Just look at how it is redrawing church-state boundaries in public education, and even forcing social studies textbooks to convey 2020 election conspiracy theories as fact. If we are serious about holding this country together, we have to reckon with the real American inheritance, where ambition and betrayal, dreaming and dispossession, are not opposite. They are co-tenants. What McCabe knew is that place matters. Not just as geography, but as some kind of theology. It matters that this particular expression of Black belonging emerged not in areas with longstanding, high concentrations of Black people – but in a place where white America was still shaping into its newest frontier. And it was in this place being reinvented that McCabe thought he could be most successful. My parents left New York searching for moral clarity in the middle of the country, but found none of this history in any brochure. For me, a child of migrants raised on the rules of holiness, I learned the unholy truth in reverse: that even sanctified ground can be built atop stolen land. That even the righteous can inherit the sins of the empire. Oklahoma is a map of America's legacies. It doesn't pretend to be a blank slate. Instead, its history offers a truer, unvarnished portrait of America, with its ambitions, its erasures, its stubborn beauty and its almost devotional violence. It's not the place where dreams go to die. It has long been the place where dreams go to collide. Caleb Gayle is the author of Black Moses, a Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State, out 12 August (Riverhead books)
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
If you don't understand Oklahoma, you can't understand America
In a moment, I will tell you how I learned to love Oklahoma, a state I have had to point out on a map more times than I can count to Americans and foreigners alike. One with 77 crimson red counties and a license plate that once simply read: 'OKLAHOMA IS OK.' But first, it is important to tell you about my first Oklahoma school history lesson – one I learned when I was eight years old, after my parents moved our family cross-country. Tulsa's reputation as a haven for the devout held deep appeal for my Jamaican parents, whose lives were steeped in Christian faith. The city's predictable rhythms, its flatness, even its so-called boringness – it all offered a reprieve from what they saw as the chaos and moral drift of our old home in New York. One day, my new school gathered every fourth grader and led us to the backlot. We were lined up across the lawn and equipped with wagons, protractors and dulled stakes to drive into the ground. We waited for a teacher's voice to yell, 'Go!' We were to take off quickly, racing each other to find a plot we wanted to take for ourselves. We measured, as well as fourth graders could, the land we wanted to be ours. The entire affair was raucous as us newly minted 'pioneers' yelled, laughed and named our plots whatever our imaginations would allow. We were re-enacting a land run – one of seven held between 1889 and 1895 – that marked the opening of lands once deeded to Indigenous nations, only to be seized again as part of their forced removal across what we now call the American west. It may be hard to believe, but Oklahoma City's public schools didn't get around to banning the practice from history lessons until 2014. In its place came a sanitized, feelgood version of state history – one that, like many civil war re-enactments, recasts the fight to preserve slavery as a story of bravery and idealism. During those history lessons, the ugliness was not even hiding in plain sight. The disregard for the lives on which the state was built was – and still is – a point of pride. Today, the University of Oklahoma – my alma mater and the state's flagship university – leads every game, welcome event and recruiting fair with its famous chant: 'Boomer!' followed by an echoed 'Sooner!' It's a rallying cry repeated across all its athletic programs, which, like many state schools, are funded far more robustly than classrooms. Boomers were settlers, mostly white, who agitated in the late 1800s to open land in Indian territory (present-day Oklahoma) for white homesteaders. Led by pugnacious figures such as David Lewis Payne (the putative 'Father of Oklahoma'), they staged illegal incursions before the land was officially opened. The Sooners entered the land before the legal start time of a land run, cheating to claim the best plots. These rule-breakers are now mythologized in Oklahoma culture. The university's mascot is not an animal or a person, but a covered wagon: an emblem of the pioneering spirit that carved a life from theft and violence. For much of my life, I struggled to feel pride in a place like this – not just because of its history, but because of the lie we told about it. The real story was buried beneath a more palatable narrative, where horrors were treated as little more than pit stops on the way to celebrating homesteaders. Land theft from Native nations, the displacement of Black families, the racial terror that shadowed statehood – these were footnotes, if they were mentioned at all. But over time, it was precisely those harder truths that gave me something solid to stand on. That reckoning – naming the harm, sitting with its consequences – is not just about the past. It's a tool we need now, in 2025, when the country is suspended between two impulses: nostalgia and denial. Across the nation, the fight over whose history counts is really a fight over who gets to claim America. The violence that birthed Oklahoma was not incidental, it was foundational. And unless we confront that, there's no building anything real. Misunderstand Oklahoma, and you misunderstand the country. Growing up in Tulsa, the north star for me and my friends was college, followed by a job that could take us anywhere but Oklahoma. Dallas and Houston seemed almost idyllic: more affordable than New York or Los Angeles while still offering an upgraded version of a lifestyle we were already familiar with. Nothing made me want to stay. Downtown Tulsa felt frozen in amber, a relic of its 'oil capital of the world' heyday, long faded. The place felt ghostly. To me, its nightlife, diversity, direct flights and appetite for progress were all but nonexistent. Until recently, Oklahoma had not had a major-league sports team – though the Oklahoma City Thunder recently broke through, winning the 2025 NBA finals. What professional sports teams we had were literally and colloquially minor, baseball teams with stadiums that left much to be desired. This is a story of haunting familiarity to people whose home towns are seen as flyovers, rarely seen as worth a stop. And then, everything changed. In the decade since I left, Oklahoma has been refashioning its cities, courting new talent, and, according to the Kansas City Federal Reserve, beginning to reverse its long-running brain drain. College graduates like me once left in droves. Now, it seems that the tide is shifting. If you are an artist, Tulsa will subsidize your loft or studio. If Teach for America has whet your appetite, Tulsa will help with your housing costs. If you have a startup that might struggle with raising venture capital on the coasts, you will find that Tulsa will offer it to you. Even remote workers with no ties to the state can receive $10,000 or help with a down payment, just for showing up and staying for a year. Convenient, when the airport now offers direct flights to places my younger self could only dream about: New York, Miami, Los Angeles. These are all points of pride for many. But for all the praise, concerns do remain: rising housing costs, shallow community ties, and whether programs such as Tulsa Remote offer lasting benefits to longtime residents, especially since those efforts are not government-led efforts but philanthropic ones, and rely entirely on the continued generosity of a few wealthy individuals. Reinvention has always been part of Oklahoma's playbook. Again and again, the state has tried to become something new by recruiting outsiders, whether settlers in the land runs or now digital nomads with graduate degrees, while asking far less of itself when it comes to honoring the people and histories already here. That strategy may bring headlines, but it rarely brings healing. No matter how overjoyed I was to see my home state in the headlines for the NBA championship – rather than for being ranked 49th in education or 49th in healthcare – my pride doesn't come from Oklahoma's polished reinvention. It lies in the hard work of seeing my state clearly, in all its contradictions: the violence and the love, the buried history and the stubborn hope. And to do that, we need to go back nearly 140 years. I have spent the past five years combing through archives and crisscrossing Oklahoma and the Great Plains, chasing the story of Edward McCabe: the visionary who tried to create a Black state within the US, a figure who stood at the epicenter of some of America's most volatile collisions. In the 1880s, McCabe, the first Black statewide elected official in the old west, came to the Oklahoma territory with a vision so bold it startled both Black allies and white detractors: a state colonized by Black people, governed by their own hands, and as McCabe promised, 'unmolested by the selfish greed of the white man'. It was a dream not of mere survival, but of sovereignty – and it's why a reporter traveling from Minnesota dubbed him 'The One Who Would Be Moses'. That dream, like so many others on that soil, was paved over by the very forces it tried to escape: anti-Black violence, white economic opportunism and settler colonialism's endless appetite. McCabe did not ask for a utopia without contradiction. His ride to Langston – one of the all-Black towns he helped found – from his post in the territorial capital of Guthrie, where he served as county treasurer during the 1891 land run, was anything but safe. White cowboys stopped him on the road, ordered him to turn back, to stop where he stood. He refused, more than once. Then they opened fire. He lived to tell the story, but just barely. It was a warning: dreams built on contested ground do not go unchallenged, and Black ambition could be answered with bullets. His story, in all its promise and peril, was not that of a perfect man with a clean mission. He promoted colonization while ignoring the fact that the land he hoped to reclaim for Black people had already been promised, stolen, and promised again to Indigenous nations. He stood at the nexus of Black aspiration and Native dispossession. And in doing so, he reflected the central American dilemma: that ambition will never be clean because the ground itself is stolen. McCabe's dream of a Black-governed state was mocked, sabotaged and eventually erased from civic memory. But in the erasures, we find the outlines of what was feared: not just Black people having land, but Black people on their own terms. That was always the deeper threat. Not a land grab, but a claim to belong. A declaration of autonomy. That is why I return to him: not because he got it right, but because he tried. His efforts, and those of his peers, can still be seen in the 13 all-Black towns in Oklahoma (down from the 50 that once stood tall). These towns were founded as havens – places where Black Americans could govern themselves, own land and live free from white oversight. Many who built and settled these towns were just one generation removed from slavery, carrying the memory – often their own or that of their parents – of what it meant to be owned, uprooted and denied the right to belong. Their movement westward was not merely an act of escape; it was an act of creation. They were not just fleeing the violence of Reconstruction's collapse; they were imagining something freer, fuller and governed by their own hands. Today, those towns are no longer exclusively Black, nor are they legally restricted to Black residents. Anyone can move there, marry there, build a life there. But their founding spirit endures. McCabe spoke in what newspapers would call 'nigger talk' – a term of derision meant to dismiss any Black person who dared to articulate sovereignty, self-governance or the audacious idea of belonging on their own terms. But McCabe wore the insult as armor. He turned the slur into strategy, the scorn into a blueprint. And they tried to kill him for it. But what they didn't realize is that this was not just talk, it was a creed. A blueprint. A framework for building a world not yet born. That is the lesson Oklahoma teaches. Oklahoma has always been a place America used to test its next chapter. After Reconstruction failed, and the US government abandoned its promises to Native nations, parts of the territory were branded 'no man's land' – as if no person of value had ever lived there. But it was not empty; it was further removed. Oklahoma could have been a blueprint for belonging, a place carved out for those most marginalized: Black people fleeing racial terror, Native nations pushed from their homelands, immigrants seeking a foothold. Instead, it became a proving ground for the ugly zero-sum politics that plague America today, pitting groups against each other. Today, Oklahoma remains at the forefront of deciding what counts as American – whether in its classrooms, its public religion or its laws. Just look at how it is redrawing church-state boundaries in public education, and even forcing social studies textbooks to convey 2020 election conspiracy theories as fact. If we are serious about holding this country together, we have to reckon with the real American inheritance, where ambition and betrayal, dreaming and dispossession, are not opposite. They are co-tenants. What McCabe knew is that place matters. Not just as geography, but as some kind of theology. It matters that this particular expression of Black belonging emerged not in areas with longstanding, high concentrations of Black people – but in a place where white America was still shaping into its newest frontier. And it was in this place being reinvented that McCabe thought he could be most successful. My parents left New York searching for moral clarity in the middle of the country, but found none of this history in any brochure. For me, a child of migrants raised on the rules of holiness, I learned the unholy truth in reverse: that even sanctified ground can be built atop stolen land. That even the righteous can inherit the sins of the empire. Oklahoma is a map of America's legacies. It doesn't pretend to be a blank slate. Instead, its history offers a truer, unvarnished portrait of America, with its ambitions, its erasures, its stubborn beauty and its almost devotional violence. It's not the place where dreams go to die. It has long been the place where dreams go to collide. Caleb Gayle is the author of Black Moses, a Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State, out 12 August (Riverhead books)
The Verge
5 days ago
- Business
- The Verge
How about Jeffrey Epstein and AI?
How about Jeffrey Epstein and AI? On reread, one thing stuck out to me: how close Epstein was to the pioneers, commercializers, and money men of AI. The WSJ scoop suggests there are still new stories out there; I wonder what's lurking in the field of artificial intelligence — surely I am not the only person who'd like to learn more.
CBC
16-07-2025
- General
- CBC
Volunteers are digitizing headstones in cemeteries around southern Alberta
Photographing headstones and putting them online is part of an endless process to allow people to find out more about their family histories, and learn more about Alberta's pioneers.
Daily Mail
16-07-2025
- Daily Mail
How the forgotten British pilots who became the first to fly across the Atlantic survived 1,900-mile journey and haphazard landing... in a plane with a broken radio and burst exhaust
Today, if you ask most people, they will tell you that it was American aviator Charles Lindbergh who first flew non-stop across the Atlantic. And it is true that, in 1927, he became the first man to make the trip solo. But eight years before his feat, when technology was a generation behind and the risks were even greater, it was two now-forgotten British men who ended up being the true pioneers. Fuelled by the lure of a £10,000 prize put up by the Daily Mail - the equivalent of around half a million pounds now - First World War veterans John Alcock and Arthur Brown became the first human beings to cross The Pond in a single flight. The pair made the perilous trip from Newfoundland on the tip of Canada to the coastal town of Clifden in Ireland in just under 16 hours, arriving on June 15, 1919. The achievement came a decade after Frenchman Louis Bleriot had become the first pilot to fly from continental Europe to England. The Mail's founder and proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, opted to offer prizes for aviation achievements in the hope of boosting British airmanship at a time when the technology was flourishing. He had been frustrated by the British government 's seeming inability to see the military threat posed by ever-improving flying machines. The pair made the perilous trip from Newfoundland on the tip of Canada to the coastal town of Clifden in Ireland in just under 16 hours, arriving on June 15, 1919. Above: The plane departing Newfoundland And so in 1913, after awarding Bleriot £10,000, he offered the same financial reward to the first team to cross the Atlantic. Although the First World War put a pause on preparations, the race continued after hostilities came to an end in November 1918. Alcock and Brown were far from the only team to pitch up in Newfoundland with flying machines. As well as their Vickers plane, there were rival teams from Martinsyde, Handley Page, and Sopwith. Besides Alcock and Brown's effort, only the Sopwith team among the rivals successfully left Newfoundland. But after departing in May 1919, the plane developed engine trouble and the pilots had to ditch in the Atlantic. They were rescued by a Danish steamer. Newfoundland had been chosen so that the crossing would be as short as possible. But, at that time of year, it was bitterly cold and fierce winds would buffet the open cockpit. As for the landscape that they would be taking off from, it was covered with bogs, dotted with ditches and peppered with rocks and fences. Time and money had to be spent on preparing a stretch of land for take-off. Following a successful test flight of their aircraft, Alcock told journalists: 'I am perfectly satisfied with the machine. 'She behaved splendidly, and I shall be off to England as quickly as I can. I hope to be in London before the week end.' And the pilot also sent a cable to Vickers bosses, telling them: 'Machine absolutely top-hole'. In the cockpit they had flasks of coffee, hot chocolate and Horlick's. And in their pockets were the sandwiches that would give them much-needed energy during the bitterly cold journey. They also had a small flask of brandy each. There was more food and drink in a cupboard in the aircraft's tail, should they end up coming down on water. With them too was a bag of what would become the first transatlantic airmail. Among the letters were several written by the two airmen. Alcock wrote to his mother telling her not to worry. And he said to his sister: 'My Dear Elsie. Just a hurried line before I start. Th is letter will travel with me in the official mail bag, the first mail to be carried over the Atlantic. 'Love to all. Your Loving Brother, Jack.' For good luck, they also had their black cat toy mascots. Alcock named his Lucky Jim; whilst Brown's was called Twinkletoe. Both men, as airman veterans of the First World War, were convinced that black cats were a good omen. The flight is now remembered for the fact that it succeeded where rival attempts failed. But those 16 hours in the air were hellish. The radio failed, meaning Alcock and Brown's plan to update operators on the ground with their position at 20 minutes past each hour was dead. A working radio would also have meant that, should the men have to ditch into the Atlantic, they would be rescued in good time. Instead, they had to contend with the knowledge very soon into the flight that no one knew where they were. Mr Rooney writes: 'Whatever happened now, whatever challenges they faced, nobody would hear them. 'Jack Alcock and Ted Brown were entirely alone.' Next, the pilots were met with a sound that Mr Rooney describes as having sounded 'like machine-gun fire'. The Vickers' exhaust pipe had burst and a large section of it was now hanging loose. It got so hot that it turned white, before being blown away. Alcock and Brown now feared that the fire they saw emerging from the now-open exhaust pipe would engulf their aircraft. Although the plane did not burst into flames, the weather did not look kindly on the pilots. The men were flying at 3,500 feet when the plane was engulfed in thick fog that left them totally blind. 'There was no horizon, no sky, no sea,' Mr Rooney writes. All around them was total blackness. And then disaster. The plane went into a steep dive. By the time the aircraft left the cloud it had been stuck in, the aneroid - the device that gave a measure of their altitude - read 50 feet. The pilots had been just moments away from slamming into the Atlantic. Thankfully though, the aircraft recovered its height and the perilous journey continued. The rest of the trip was, by comparison, uneventful - until the landing. Above Clifden in Ireland, Alcock circled as he searched for a touch-down spot. Having found an open space, he turned off the Vimy's engines and glided down to the ground. But when the wheels touched the ground at around 8.40am on June 15, they dug into the soil. It turned out that Alcock had landed on a bog. The nose of the Vimy tilted forward and the tail lifted into the air as the plane sank into the soft ground. The nose buckled but did not totally break, meaning the cockpit stayed protected. Although Brown bumped his face, he and Alcock escaped otherwise unhurt. Brown then fired two flares into the sky and within minutes soldiers and officers from the nearby wireless station had appeared. Daily Mail reporter James Hodson arrived to interview the pair. Captain Alcock said in the Mail: 'We have had a terrible journey. 'The wonder is we are here at all. We scarcely saw the sun or the moon or the stars. For hours we saw none of them. 'The fog was very dense, and at times we had to descend to within 300 feet of the sea. 'For four hours the machine was covered in sheet ice caused by frozen sleet; at another time the sleet was so dense that my speed indicator did not work, and for a few seconds it was very alarming. 'We looped the loop, I do believe, and did a very steep spiral. We did some very comic "stunts", for I have had no sense of horizon.' He added: 'The only thing that upset me was to see the machine at the end get damaged. 'From above, the bog looked like a lovely field, but the machine sank into it up to the axle and fell over on to her nose.' The Mail's report announcing Alcock's death King George V sent his congratulations. An official message read: 'The King was delighted to receive your welcome announcement that Capt. Alcock and Lieut. Brown have safely landed in Ireland after their Transatlantic flight. 'His Majesty wishes you to communicate at once with these officers and to convey to them the King's warmest congratulations on the success of their splendid achievement.' The victory party was thrown by the Mail at The Savoy. More than 300 guests attended. Winston Churchill, then secretary of state for war and air, gave Alcock and Brown their prize and announced that they would be knighted. But then tragedy struck. On December 18, 1919, Brown was killed in a crash while flying the all-new Vickers Viking amphibian to the Paris Airshow. The Daily Mail announced Alcock's death on December 20. The news report read: 'We deeply regret to announce the death of Sir John Alcock, D.F.C., winner of the Daily Mail £10,000 prize for the first transatlantic flight and the first airman to be knighted. 'His death followed a crash due to a heavy storm while flying a new machine to the Paris Exhibition.' The report added: 'Sir John Alcock breathed his last in an old four-poster bed of a small Normandy farmhouse at Cottevrard at 4pm yesterday. 'His fatal injuries were received when he crashed into a field three hours earlier while flying the new Vickers combination aeroplane and flying-boat to Paris for the Air Show.' Despite the loss, Alcock's exploits with Brown did achieve the recognition they deserved from fellow pilots. Charles Lindbergh reportedly gave the two men apt recognition when he landed in Paris after his solo crossing from New York in 1927. He allegedly said to rapturous onlookers: 'Why all this fuss? Alcock and Brown showed us the way.' Lindbergh's fellow aviator, Amelia Earhart, described Alcock and Brown's flight as 'an amazing feat, and the least appreciated'. She became the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo in 1932, before disappearing over the Pacific in 1937. And Amy Johnson, who flew from England to Australia in 1930, described Alcock and Brown's feat as 'the greatest in the history of aviation'.
