Whitworth
WHITWORTH: Forced landing site (Aka NICK ROAD FARM, LOBDEN and WARDLE)
Operated by: Mr Bentfield Hucks
Location: Roughly 2.75nm NNW of Rochdale town centre
Period of operation: 4th January 1914
A MICHAEL T HOLDER GALLERY
We have Mike Holder, a great friend of this 'Guide', to thank for both discovering this little known flying site and researching what may be available to illustrate it plus supplying maps etc.
Article One is from the Wardle and Smallbridge History Group.
ROCHDALE OBSERVER ITEMS
These two pictures with seperate captions plus the article in three parts were published in the Rochdale Observer on the 7th January 1914. They serve to illustrate just how much interest could be generated around a single flight, albeit one that failed to reach its destination.
What are we to make of this event today? Hucks was most certainly a very brave pioneering aviator, being the first Briton to perform a loop, this occurring at HENDON on the 22nd November 1913. But to attempt such a flight across the Penines in gale force winds in January 1914 will be considered reckless at best.
View One shows the forced landing site on Lobden Moor looking west, and View Two shows Tab Farm.
ROCHDALE TIMES ACCOUNT
No pictures but the Rochdale Times, also on the 7th January, certainly 'went to town' by featuring this turn of events. By this time aviation was getting into its stride in the U.K., but, we need to remember that Bentfield Hucks then was, as we would say today - a superstar - famous throughout the land.
The local area view is from my Google Earth © derived database.
NOTES: I find it of some interest to see that Hucks in 1914 was, in this account, flying a Blériot monoplane, probably a modified XI that he had performed the first loop in. This being, I think, and without much doubt as it looks so similar, a continued development of the design Louis Blériot flew across the English Channel on the 25th July 1909. Without enough engine power to land on top of the cliffs around Dover. He knew this, which is why he selected NORTHFALL MEADOW to land on. Or perhaps I should say, crash land on. Blériot it seems never really got the hang of how to land an aeroplane.
It is another story of course, but by the outset of WW1 the people in charge of the Royal Flying Corps had decided that monoploanes had no future, so ordered biplane designs. How wrong can you be?
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