She used my name for the first time - for what I feared would prove to be the only time in our sessions.
“Sorry,” I say. Deciding not to call her by her name, in case that is a strictly one-way street of familiarity that is only legal for her to go down at the moment.
“That’s OK,” she reassures me, “I feel we are making progress now.”
A voice in my chest is screaming: “But it’s true. You know it’s true. That’s not fair. Tell her it’s true!” I tell my brain to select “adult mode” and take one for the team.
“I realise it can be difficult for men,” she begins, then pauses presumably to allow me to fill in her clearly implied yet unspoken words myself ‘because you’re all massive idiots’, “but you don’t have to constantly peacock with humour.”
Wow. Bit sexist.
“I’ll endeavour to be a shy peacock,” I confirm.
Complimenting me, she says: “You’re very lucky to be good with humour.”
They both ask me questions about school. I am focused, honest and candid. Twice I can’t help myself saying humorous things - and twice the male counsellor smiles - on the second occasion the smile escapes into a laugh which he clumsily disguises as an unnecessary cough. His co-counsellor makes a mark on her pad at this time - probably another cross against his name.
“Is he in trouble?” I ask.
“We’re here to discuss, you, Richard.” Wow, she used my name again.
He laughs again. She makes another mark on the pad. That’s probably another two-day extension to the sex ban he’s currently serving. “If we could all focus,” she continues.
“Tell us why you would like to be cured of your conditions,” asks Steve. It’s a good question, although Claire visibly squirms in her chair at deployment of the word “cured”.
“Because I’m 49,” I say. “Really, I’m genuinely 49. Unlike Carol Vorderman who I calculate has spent at least the last seven years being ‘49’ - and she’s supposed to be good at maths.”
Silence. Outside in the far distance I hear a floating autumnal leaf crash to the ground with a deafening impact. “Tough couch,” I add.
“What makes you feel a compulsion to be constantly funny?” asks Claire.
“Er... Sometimes...” I start to answer, until Claire cuts me off by advising: “Don’t feel a compulsion to be funny here.”
“You don’t have to be under pressure to be funny here,” Steve confirms. “Though you’re funny,” he says, kindly.
“Do you feel the constant need to express yourself through humour is an adult, parent or child reaction?” asks Claire.
“Well, it’s my job actually. And the correct answer, as you well know, can be all three.”
“Yes. You’re completely right,” she responds.
Interesting.
“Did you do your homework?” asks Steve.
“Yes. I...”
The guy bursts into giggles, corpsing like an unprofessional actor. “Sorry,” announces a visibly embarrassed Steve.
“Speaking about school seems to have caused some accompanying regression in our behaviours,” observes Claire.
“That’s true,” I say, “You should be a psychologist.”
Steve bites his lip so hard I expect to see a trail of blood trickle down his chin.
“Do you want us to help you?” she asks calmly.
I’m definitely in trouble. She used a closed question. “Yes, I genuinely do. Really. Thank you for helping me,” I say quickly.
“That’s OK. So if we can all focus, and if you can please stop doing something for me... do you know what I am going to ask you to stop doing?” asks Claire.
“...to stop being the class clown?” I anticipate.
“Exactly,” she confirms.
She’s good.
Sinking in the Last Chance Balloon: Sadler’s Comeback
A report in the snappily titled newspaper The Hull Packet and Original Weekly Commercial Literary and General Advertiser published in 1810 provides insight into Sadler’s precarious financial conditions, his friends’ sympathies and how Sadler is now trying to make amends. Again, it casts his personality in a favourable light.
“Mr Sadler the chief and paternal aeronaut has not done badly. His bills have been stuck up on windows and walls stating his much to be regretted misfortune and his ancient patronage. His present friends are active and alert to free him from trouble and satisfy his claimants.” Handbills were displayed as a public act of support for Sadler, pledging to clear his debts.
Ruin had only just been averted by his friends and with the support of well-wishers. But how could such an important and famous inventor, engineer, chemist, entrepreneur and celebrity aeronaut have hit the debt buffers so hard and speedily? The answer lies in his unceremonious dismissal from the Royal Navy.
Sadler had invested considered funds of his own into building and equipping a research laboratory in Portsmouth. When suddenly sacked from the Navy, he was left in considerable debt when his numerous creditors came circling him.
Although lacking hard facts, circumstantial evidence is sufficiently strong to allow the assumption that the motivation for Sadler’s return to aeronautical career, fully 25 years after he last stepped into a balloon basket, was financial. Saddled with huge debts after his treatment by Bentham, and reliant on a huge bail-out from his friends and public supporters, Sadler saw exhibition balloon flights as the only obvious way of accessing funds.
7 JULY 1810: OXFORD: THE COMEBACK
In the pre-dawn light, the streets of Oxford were unusually busy with the rumble of carts bringing early risers into the city, all anxious to claim a decent vantage-point to witness Sadler’s return to flying. “From a very early hour carriages of all descriptions, from coaches to fours to common carts, saddles horses, mules and asses, and numerous pedestrians, from all parts of the country, many came expressly from London.”
By mid-morning the city was reported as “full of visitors” with many excursions organised from London specifically to see Sadler. The flight was supposedly part of the celebrations for Lord Grenville’s induction as University Chancellor, but it is fair to say that Sadler upstaged him. Notably, Lord Grenville was a relative of William Windham - hence the involvement of Sadler in such establishment circles.
The huge crowd bellowed a collective cry when Sadler stepped into the balloon and several of the guy ropes immediately appeared to break. Upon inspection, Sadler diagnosed the problem, apparently claiming the ropes had not been tied by Naval men “and not by those who understood sailors’ knots”. Eventually the balloon was ready for ascension, although over four hours late, and four large weights each of fifty pounds each were removed from the balloon basket. Sadler had taken a reported one hundred bags of sand ballast with him, alongside sensible provisions of cold beef, bread, four bottles of water and one of brandy (presumably to numb himself against any encountered coldness at altitude), and... in the distinctly not so sensible category... a cat in a wicker carrying basket. Why? Was he hoping to pop into the vets on the way to the balloon launch, found himself running late and then thought. “Oh, I’ll do it after the flight”?
One snooty newspaper report elects to open with the remark: “The grand finale to the week’s entertainment - in the opinion of the Town at least - occurred this week at Merton Fields when Mr Sadler and his son went up in their car. This exhibition alike excited the attention of the ignorant and vulgar, and of the learned and the great.” It again underlines Sadler’s fairly unique attraction in appealing to the interests of both Town and Gown. Other press sources estimated the crowd size at 50,000, but this is unlikely to be a scientific figure though it shows the extent of Sadler’s surviving celebrity status.
We know that Sadler had to raise money for the cost of the balloon, since he was broke. For most of June 18
10 the balloon was exhibited at the Racquet Court - the site of the current Real Tennis complex just off cobbled Merton Street in Oxford. For a chance to view Sadler’s flying machine, members of the public paid the hardly piddling sum of one shilling, approximately equivalent to £5 today. Yet there was no shortage of shillings, and queues formed along Merton Street to see the essential apparatus for the magic of flight. Balloonomania had not yet been pricked by over-familiarity or the extended absence of its leading man.
With such a fan following, it is worth considering again why Sadler waited for nearly two and half decades to return. The most plausible explanation must remain that he realised ballooning was... well... bloody dangerous. Yet Sadler’s co-pilot for his first comeback flight was none other than Windham, his fourteen-year-old son. Whatever Mrs. Sadler had said about her husband’s aeronautical career, it would be intriguing to hear her views on this latest family venture.
The audience was certainly prepared to be kept waiting. Although the placards declared a 10am flight, Sadler surprisingly miscalculated the amount of time taken to pump hydrogen into the envelope, to such an extent that “it was not until a quarter past two precisely that the aerial machine ascended. The spectacle was very fine. Merton Fields and Christ Church walks were thronged, Cherwell and Folly bridges crowded and every other place from which a view could be caught.” The top of every house was crowded with onlookers, with some spectators - clearly not acrophobia sufferers - clinging precariously to the steeple of Christ Church cathedral.
The Chancellor of Oxford University had a safer vantage-point, viewing proceedings from the garden of Corpus Christi College. “Many ladies in gay attire sat watching from the Corpus roof.” Sadler had inscribed the following words around the globe’s entire 36-foot circumference: “Right Hon. Wm. Wyndham Grenville, Baron of Wooton, Chanc. Univer. of Oxon.” The balloon’s dimensions were large, with an impressive 24,429 cubic feet capacity.
When the balloon ascended, freed from its mooring ropes facing the railings of Corpus Christi in Merton Field, the overwhelming majority of the crowd was able to spot it for the first time. They reportedly emitted a collective purr upon seeing its colour scheme of “green, red, yellow and black margins above, then an inscription with the style of Lord Grenville and the date of Chancellerian election, underneath stripes of red and yellow, and below all a beautifully shaped and decorated car”.
The balloon’s dimensions were enthusiastically reported by the press, The Leeds Mercury revealing that Sadler had built a sphere of nearly thirty feet in diameter, containing 86,721 gallons of air. Whereas today the standard comparable measures offered by the press for illustrative purposes are football pitches, double-decker buses or Wales, in 1810 the media used haystacks to provide their readers with an easy visual measurement. “The size was considerably larger than a two tonne hay stack,” the paper confirmed - helpfully.
Fortunately for a pre-planned flight date, the weather was kinder to Sadler than on his previous flight a quarter of a century earlier, and a slight south-westerly floated Sadler and his son over Merton College and then Magdalen Tower. Father and son were waving flags with such alacrity that Sadler junior dropped his white flag, thankfully causing no injuries to the admiring multitude below. Sadler senior threw several handkerchiefs overboard, like a rock star tossing a sweat band or drum stick into a baying crowd to be fought over.
Ever the enthusiastic flag waver, Sadler had brought several on board to acknowledge the supportive crowd beneath them, including a colossal blue flag bearing the inscription “Protected by the conqueror of Napoleon Bonaparte, The hero of Acre, Rear Admiral Sir Sidney Smith”. Once they had drifted in the light wind towards Headington and Marston and were over open fields and clear of the crowds below, Sadler deliberately tossed this blue tribute flag to the earth.
This provides an all too rare insight into Sadler’s preoccupations outside engineering. Sidney Smith (1764-1840) was a naval officer, whose epitaph was provided by Napoleon’s remark: “that man cost me my destiny”. He saw action in the American Revolutionary War, and although his name was prefixed with “Sir”, he was often mockingly known as “the Swedish knight” because the title came from the King of Sweden after he had served in, and masterminded, the successful Swedish naval campaign against the Russian fleet at the Battle of Svenskund in 1790. As a naval man he was a frequent visitor to Woolwich and Portsmouth, and would most likely have encountered Sadler there in the first years of the nineteenth century. Admiral Smith’s naval vessels would have been improved by Sadler’s scientific modifications and carried his re-designed artillery - so praised by Lord Nelson. Smith was recorded as being present that day in Oxford to witness Sadler’s comeback.
Sadler ensured that scientific instruments accompanied him on the voyage, including two barometers, an electrometer, a dipping needle and two bottles for collecting air samples at altitude - science having yet to establish if there were different properties to air at significant altitude.
Descending at 4.30pm, Sadler’s balloon landed near Newport Pagnell, close to modern-day Milton Keynes, in a barley field owned by a well-known local Quaker Mr. Marshall. Sadler had started to exhaust gas twelve miles north-east of Oxford. Throwing out ballast bags to avoid tree tops, he then lobbed his grappling iron overboard to commence the landing process. Skimming a wheat field, the balloon was suddenly propelled upwards again, rebounding fully forty feet airwards after the field labourers below refused to follow Sadler’s shouted directive and grab his landing ropes, preferring to flee. As one contemporary report explained: “The hay makers were much terrified by the phenomenon to lend the adventurous travellers any assistance”, instead preferring to run away or cower in a hedgerow.
Mirroring the misfortunes of the very first hydrogen balloon ascent all those years previously in France, Sadler also encountered alarmed agricultural workers who mistook the balloon for something quite different - although this time they were not inclined to attack it. However, one newspaper elaborates on the Oxfordshire labourers’ concerns: “Sadler observed people loading hay that mistook the balloon for a kite in the shape of a tea urn and were hesitant to come near it.”
Eventually the haymakers were persuaded to help, after Sadler senior and Sadler junior had ended their flight with customary recklessness and crashed into a hedge. Some reports claim the balloon ended up in Buckinghamshire, with the basket in Bedfordshire, strewn either side of the dividing hedgerow forming the county border. Workers from three adjoining fields - or at least those convinced it was not a giant teapot - quickly squeezed the air out of the balloon, rolled it up and deposited it in the back of a cart in a farmer’s field - a tradition that has continued almost exactly the same way to this day - albeit hopefully without the crashing into a hedge bit.
Mr. Marshall turned out to be friendly, and provided the Sadlers with bread, cheese and brandy. And more brandy. So much brandy that both generations of Sadler spend the night in Newport Pagnell and returned to Oxford the next morning. (At times one wonders how much of Sadler’s incredible courage was of the Dutch variety, given he never flew without a bottle of brandy.)
And if you’re wondering what happened to the flying cat, he landed with all nine lives fully intact. Sadler managed to touchdown the feline aeronaut safely by using a small parachute self-manufactured to his own design. The cat landed gently in what was then the rural outpost of Headington, long since swallowed up by advancing urban sprawl into the city of Oxford. The cat, christened Puss by the press of the age, became quite a celebrity as an early nineteenth-century example of cats in the news.
The cat in the basket was picked up “by a countryman in a village called Headington, about two miles from Oxford, with a red collar and directions to Miss Roberts, daughter of the coachman proprietor in High Street, Oxford. The countryman took the cat home as directed. On his way home he made an exhibition of Puss, at a premium, to see the cat that had been up in a balloon,
” reported the local newspaper, showing the countryman’s gift for indulging in a bit of opportunistic capitalism. One local newspaper in the Bodleian Library’s archives, published in July 1810, specifically states: “Miss Roberts had most attention we are told afterwards, when she was offered more than a sixpence on many occasions to view her famous Pussy.” The reporter was obviously the great, great, great, great grandfather of Mrs. Slocombe.
24 SEPTEMBER 1810: BRISTOL
Say what you want about the constellations of modern stars, but it is doubtful whether any contemporary celebrity would have the power to visit Bristol one day and expect every school, shop and factory to close as well as have the day formally decreed as a public holiday by the Council. Yet that is exactly what occurred when James Sadler decided to conduct a balloon ascent in Bristol in September 1810.
Reported to be Sadler’s sixteenth flight, and his second after his Oxford comeback, he used the same multi-coloured balloon flown for Lord Grenville’s installation as Chancellor.
“The city was all bustle the whole of the morning, and every house that could command a view of the ascension was crowded. The shops were all shuttered-up, and all business were stood down during the whole of the forenoon. The schools were all out, the day made a holiday, and young and old, rich and poor, all came to watch,” trumpeted The Morning Post. “There was not a house in Bristol that did not boast its party of visitors.”
The venture certainly made some much needed money for Sadler, who was publicly known to be settling his earlier debts. This is the likely motivation for inflating the admission price, as he charged the public a hefty 3s 6d each to access the gardens. Noticeably this time, security was employed to collect the admission, with the Bristol Volunteers employed for this specific purpose. In his comeback years Sadler would always hire a militia to collect revenue and guard the venue’s perimeter fencing to stop ticketless entrants - in contrast to his earlier 1784-85 ascents.
The Man With His Head in the Clouds Page 21
