The Man With His Head in the Clouds

by Richard O. Smith

  Sadlers’ Royal Ascent: Celebrity and Family Fortunes

  7 SEPTEMBER 1813: WINDHAM SADLER’S DEBUT SOLO FLIGHT

  Windham had not expected to fly solo when James Sadler planned another exhibition flight from Cheltenham in the late summer of 1813.

  In spite of deploying almost three tons of vitriolic acid and iron filings, James and Windham were clearly struggling with a porous balloon leaking more than an undetected spy at GCHQ.

  The balloon and basket were paraded from the Pump Room to the launch site, with the members of the flight committee striding alongside: “comprised of twelve gentlemen of the town, distinguished by wearing upon their breasts large silver medals that were presented to Mr Sadler by the inhabitants of Birmingham after his last ascension in that place. On one side is an excellent likeness of this celebrated character, with an inscription stating it to be James Sadler the first English aeronaut. On the other side Mr Sadler is represented seated in his elegant car, under a balloon and stating it to be his 21st ascent on 7 October 1811 and that he traversed 112 miles in one hour and twenty minutes.” The silver medal’s inscription neglects to mention that Sadler crashed violently on that flight and was feared dead.

  Sadler’s Birmingham Medal (Smithsonian Institution)

  Although the pomp and ceremony went to plan in Cheltenham, the launch did not. During the inflation “the wind blew extremely boisterous” and toppled over the poles acting as the tethered balloon supports. Again, seemingly forgetting the Birmingham flight from 1811 - even though he was currently wearing a huge silver medal specifically as a reminder of that ill-fated endeavour around his neck - Sadler was once again preparing to take off in a gathering gale.

  The Morning Chronicle observed: “it is to be greatly lamented that out of the concourse so few had paid an admission to see the ingenious and enterprising artist Mr James Sadler, the first English aeronaut, will be the loser of several hundred pounds rather than the gainer.”

  He was reported as having given up a prestigious engagement in Ireland to be lured to Cheltenham, and the town had responded by closing every bank, shop and school for a half-day holiday to see Sadler’s ascent. But now the ascension was running late due to problems with pumping hydrogen into the envelope. These problems were blamed on the silk supplier, whose crimson and white material was smaller than the amount Sadler had ordered, and the quality was branded ‘insufficiently strong and prepared”.

  After three hours of attempted balloon filling and mindful of the capacity for frustrated crowds to riot, Sadler concluded it could not take his weight. Cometh the hour, cometh the man - or rather, the man’s son. Windham Sadler stepped forth into the basket. The local press reported: “an interesting youth, the son of Mr Sadler, only 16 or 17 years of age, entered the car with all composure, fortitude, courage and indifference that his veteran father possesses.” Windham may not have possessed much aeronautical piloting experience, but he held one key attribute for ballooning over his father: his weight. The teenager was likely to have been considerably lighter than his father; James Sadler was used to munching his way through numerous banquets held in his honour.

  Windham flew out of the county with his father pursuing on horseback. At one stage Windham flew through a snow storm, which was so violent that he had difficulty operating the vent to lose necessary altitude. Showing that he had learnt piloting skills from observing his father, he calculated correctly the amount of ballast to jettison, particularly where he feared entanglement with trees when the balloon commenced a fast descent.

  Finally he landed just outside Chipping Norton where he was greeted by locals approaching with a raised pitchfork and demanding, “Lord, Sir, where have you come from?” Fortunately the local vicar, Rev. G.D. Davies, then appeared, and presumably took less persuading from the youthful debutant that he was not an alien visitor intent on enslaving all earthlings.

  Windham then returned to Oxford, where locals paraded him around the city in celebration - a tribute Oxford citizens had bestowed upon his father many years previously. Both Sadlers returned to Cheltenham the next day with their trophy balloon pulled by four horses resplendent in “shining silver breast plates”.

  Here they indulged in several laps of honour and the townspeople took turns to pull the aeronauts’ cart by hand, parading them before numerous impressed and bowing locals.

  It is easy to see how endorphins can be created by celebrity, and this perhaps explains Sadler’s willingness to continue making perilous ascents.

  OCTOBER 1813: DERBY DEBACLE

  In October 1813 James and his son Windham took the unusual step of placing an announcement in the Derby Chronicle, stating “that he [Sadler senior] has received injustice” and issuing a stern proclamation about “his feelings to decline entering into any future arrangements with the Derby Committee”.

  It was the culmination of a highly public spat between James Sadler and a committee formed in Derby for the main purpose of placating a town that had rioted when a previous aeronaut, Mr. Wilkes, literally failed to get off the ground.

  The Derby Chronicle lauded “Mr Sadler the celebrated aeronaut who gave up his arrangements for exhibiting balloons in Bristol on the solicitations of some gentlemen at Derby to go there ahead to ascend with his balloon as a consequence of the disturbed state of the public mind as a consequence of the failure of Mr Wilkes.”

  Mr. Wilkes, a would-be balloonist, had failed to launch in Derby on 20 September 1813. “After incurring insurmountable difficulties inflating his envelope, Mr Wilkes had abandoned his Derby flight” in front of an audience who were in apparently no mood to disperse without seeing a balloon launch. This led to “a very alarming riot that was principally quelled by the gentlemen who had supported him in his attempt, assuring the populace that they would apply to Mr Sadler the celebrated aeronaut to ascend from Derby with his balloon.”

  The Derby committee then “sent an express to London to apply to Mr Sadler, but not finding him there, the application followed him to Bristol where Mr Sadler was making arrangements for the exhibition of the balloon, which his son Sadler ascended with, and a new balloon, the largest that was ever made, the size of which is so enormous that no place in London could be found sufficiently large to make it in. The nearest place that could be procured was Reading Town Hall, where several first rate artists were employed to ornate it at the expense of several thousand pounds.”

  It was widely reported in the press on 2 October that Sadler intended to move his balloon to Bristol, and then attempt to fly across the Irish Sea. But, being given a better offer by the burghers of Derby, he apparently intercepted the coaches carrying his balloon and equipment to Bristol and issued instructions for the convoy to turn around immediately and head for Derby.

  An organising committee was set up, and agreed “to pay Sadler 500 guineas” for the ascent, with the strict proviso that he was responsible for all other expenses associated with the fight, including filling the balloon with gas.

  Unfortunately, Sadler arrived in Derby to be greeted with the news that the town’s authorities no longer intended to honour such a deal. “They declined giving this and refused to pay his expenses. He in consequence left Derby in disgust.”

  This prompted an increasingly irritated correspondence between the Derby committee, led by Dr. Forester, and James Sadler himself. All of the letters were given to a Nottingham newspaper, which gleefully published the entire correspondence, duplicated shortly afterwards in the Derby Mercury.

  The Derby committee started by sending Sadler an illustrative copy of their local paper “announcing the great disappointment the town and neighbours of Derby have recently suffered”. Explaining how outraged the local population had become after not seeing a promised flight, the committee asked Sadler to do the job properly. Unfortunately they wrote to Sadler’s then address: 41 Brewer Street, Golden Square, London. Since Sadler was in Bristol at the
time, the letter took several days to find him, mainly because he was then travelling to Nottingham to stage another flight. When the letter did eventually reach him, he replied immediately accepting the job, and travelled to Derby post haste in post chaise.

  Post haste was precisely the Derby committee’s problem. The bid to organise a flight at such short notice meant that the committee had only just started a public fund-raising subscription to cover its costs. If it was not obvious before, after a few days the committee members realised that it would take several months, not days, to raise the necessary 500 guineas of capital.

  Hence Dr. Forester wrote to declare that Sadler’s terms were “inadmissible”. Sadler fired back: “I regret that my propositions should have been inadmissible” - implying “because they’re not” with a sarcasm garnish. He also reasonably pointed out to Dr. Forester the short notice given to make provision for the Derby ascent.

  Sadler thundered: “In regard to the offer contained in the resolutions of the Committee to set on foot an immediate general Subscription for my ascent at some future period, I must beg leave to decline giving the Committee any such trouble upon my account. Reflecting upon the very unexpected kind of reception I have been so unfortunate as to experience from the Committee from the first moment of my coming here and, in particular, my personal reception by yourself on my first arrival, make it a duty to my own feelings to decline accepting any future offer whatever from the Committee or from yourself for the ascent of my balloon.” Sadler continues: “I should not have come to Derby.”

  But for the very pressing terms of your letter alluded to, and in which it appears, that you had a wish that I should have ascended even so early as the 5th of the month, together with other resolutions of the Committee contained in the Derby newspaper transmitted to me by you with your letter. It was from these combined circumstances that I became induced to give the fullest credit to you and to the Committee for the sincerity of your intentions to fulfil the promise you had made to the public that I should be engaged to ascend from this place, thereby making a compensation for the money the Committee had already received from the public and to recompense them if possible for the mortifying disappointment they had experienced from the inability of the Committee to fulfil the engagements they had made with the public, and which they had so unluckily made manifest in their unfortunate attempt in attempting to send up a linen balloon.

  So there! Although it is immensely possible that the letter was drafted with considerable input from a secretary or clerk, it does challenge an expressed view that Sadler was incapable of using enough grammar to string together even one sentence. Nevertheless, it remains an extremely rare example of a Sadler letter, there being very few in existence laced with any personality insights. And it captures him in no mood to hold back in admonishing the Derby committee.

  There is also no escaping the unpalatable conclusion that Sadler could evidently be a tad querulous. Was he by now so used to being a celebrity that his behaviour was affected by the backstage tantrums we associated with the famous?

  The Derby committee thought so. Determined to escalate the spat further, the committee’s Secretary W.H. Bailes returned fire in the Derby Chronicle a few days later: “Mr Sadler is under a great mistake in insinuating that the Committee had made an absolute engagement.” They then inflated the agreed sum by one hundred guineas from their earlier account, describing it “as no less a sum as an advance of six hundred guineas”.

  In consequence of the pointed manner in which Mr Sadler has chosen to speak of the unexpected kind of reception, as he calls it, from Dr Forester in particular (as appears in Mr Sadler’s printed statement of the correspondence between him and the Committee), Dr Forester feels himself called upon to declare he is perfectly unconscious of having given any just cause for such an imputation. So far from meaning to show either disrespect or inattention towards Mr Sadler, whose celebrity he was not unacquainted, Dr Forester was most desirous to see the aeronaut in Derby. His intentions to treat him on the footing of a gentleman and man of science.

  After expressing disappointment at Sadler’s decision to go public with their correspondence, and still reeling at the hurtful remarks it contains, the committee member’s correspondence continues. Having claimed to have had two meetings with Sadler, he brands him “as having arrived in Derby with perhaps rather extravagant expectations of various kinds, as there is now reason to think, and finding them not realised, has thought proper in a moment of disappointment to complain of his reception, and insinuate pretty plainly that he has not been sincerely dealt with.”

  8 NOVEMBER 1813: NOTTINGHAM

  Taking off from Nottingham in his latest escapade - a location possibly picked for its longstanding rivalry with Derby? - Sadler landed in the middle of the Cottesmore hunt. This should have provided sufficient distraction for the quarry to escape the hounds, as Sadler’s massive striped bauble crashed nosily to the ground just outside the village of Pickford in Rutland. “The balloon appeared the size and shape of a round haystack inverted ten yards high it was composed of broad segments of crimson and yellow silk, over which was a net, and to that was the appended the basket about four feet high covered with ornamented leather and velvet,” declared one impressed newspaper.

  Venting the balloon a few miles earlier to avoid the turrets of Belvoir Castle, he continued into Rutland’s airspace. Coming into land at Thistleton Gap, the breeze placed the balloon on a direct collision course with a windmill, necessitating substantial ballast release to regain height. It had not been the calmest of flights, and Sadler had traversed a patch of low cloud that showered freezing drizzle on the aeronaut. A female fan had tossed a knitted shawl into the basket as Sadler took off from Nottingham, and he discovered it frosted with icicles upon landing.

  A report, credited to Sadler, was circulated to the Liverpool Mercury and other newspapers. Whether or not it is ghost written can only be guessed at, but it seems likely. He describes passing over the Great North Road, then “at this moment I was highly gratified with a second view of the aerial regions of Exton Park and its beautiful sheets of water having before passed over it on my excursion from Birmingham in October 1811.” He had travelled thirty miles in an hour’s flying time.

  Certainly Sadler’s appeal was showing no signs of waning by 1813. A crowd of 30,000 people were kept waiting for seven hours before the delayed launch. This flight is commemorated by a distinctive green circular plaque placed above the front entrance of the Fellows, Morton and Clayton public house located on Canal Street, considered to be the site of Sadler’s ascent that day. Erected by Nottingham Civic Society, the plaque was fittingly unveiled in November 2013 exactly two hundred years after Sadler made the first ever flight from Nottingham.

  27 MAY 1814: FIRST BURLINGTON HOUSE ASCENT

  James and Windham flew together as a duo from the gardens of Burlington House in honour of the Duke of Wellington. For once they had chosen a calm day without a blowing gale. As if to prove that the pair were incapable, either separately or together of undergoing a routine, uneventful flight, this time they created more trouble for themselves by recklessly ascending to a dangerous altitude.

  Being a stickler for carrying scientific equipment on board, Sadler senior would have appreciated the danger involved - and yet he rose to a height calculated at five miles.

  Needless to say, the extreme cold bit fiercely into their capacity to function. It also froze the vent shut, which meant the balloon continued to rise in the thinning air. Eventually it was opened, and the balloon then started its protracted descent towards South Ockendon, five miles north of Grays in Essex. Once again, Sadler had narrowly avoided another landing in the sea.

  15 JULY 1814: BURLINGTON HOUSE SECOND ASCENT: WHAT MAN DARE, I DARE

  Deciding to conduct a balloon flight from a take-off point in Central London generally comes under the heading “to be discouraged”. One problem is that there a
re few wide open spaces to offer safe landings in the heart of the metropolis. Deciding to fly in the middle of the capital during a raging gale comes under the heading “death wish”.

  Like father, like son, Windham Sadler mirrored James Sadler’s exploits by taking off in a storm. So concerned were the massed spectators that many held onto the balloon basket and guy ropes, refusing to let the balloon fly. This behaviour contrasts markedly with previous ascents where crowds rioted if a balloon did not launch within minutes of the advertised take-off, regardless of life-threatening gales.

  The reason for such a U-turn in the crowd’s attitude at this particular launch was the presence of a female aeronaut who accompanied Windham in the basket.

  Due to the “strength of the wind, spectators who clung to the car were very loath to let either of the two voyagers, especially a Lady, to the uncertain air,” remarked the London Chronicle. Another newspaper revealed that: “Aerostation is not such a subject of such admiration as it was some years since” before going on to confirm that “the appearance of a lady flying on the wings of the wind is now a novelty in England.”

  Hence the way to regain public interest was to innovate, and now Britain had a female aeronaut to get excited about. “There is a disposition amongst the British public to support and sanction every woman of spirit,” reasoned the Exeter Flying Post.

  Windham’s co-flyer was Miss Mary Thompson, an actress described as being “intimate with the Sadler family” and “renowned in the dramatic corps”. She had flown with the Sadlers in Dublin a few weeks earlier in a short flight, and was now launching from Burlington House for her debut English flight - gale or not.

  And she was certainly a figure that the nation found easy to take to its collective heart. The Cornish Advertiser, which it is fair to assume may not have had its reporter on the ground as an eye witness, nevertheless observed that Miss Thompson refused to acknowledge the concerns of the crowd not to fly in gale force winds, and in so doing was described by one contemporary newspaper as “not before excelled in any example of female courage”. Replying to the question “can you go up?” Miss Thompson is recorded as saying: “Certainly. What man dare, I dare.”