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Copyright GEOFF BECKETT |
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Painted in oils on canvas. 1997. 500mm x 750mm. The original painting is in the collection of Mr & Mrs J.Sandrock. |
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‘End of the line?’ This is perhaps the most personal of all my aviation paintings. The inspiration came from my own boyhood recollection of seeing one of these lumbering giants flying over Reading during the war years. If the scale were larger, I would be seen, with open mouth, in Northfield Road. However, one can see the house where I was born, my school, the family church and many other places that played a part in my early life. Eight Handley Page HP42s were built for Imperial Airways, in two slightly different versions. In many ways, they were ‘dinosaurs’ when they first appeared in 1930 because, although some up-to-date manufacturing methods were employed, the design thinking harked back to World War I. Despite their ‘dinosaur’ image, in passenger comfort, reliability and safety, the HP42 fleet built up a record that was unequalled. None of the eight aircraft flew less than 12,000 hours and, in total, the fleet flew more than 10 million miles without a major mishap. ‘Heracles’, shown in the painting, flew in excess of 1.3 million miles with more than 160,000 passengers. At the outbreak of World War II, ‘Heracles’ and two other HP42s based at Croydon were flown to Whitchurch, near Bristol. Without the navigation aids enjoyed by today’s flyers, the pilots would have flown visually, following the main railway line through Reading as shown in the painting. One of the three pilots became lost in fog and the aircraft was destroyed in a crash landing. A few months later, ‘Heracles’ and the other aircraft were badly damaged on the ground when they were blown together during a severe gale. Neither ever flew again. One HP42, ‘Helena’, was used by the RAF for transport duties until the middle of 1941 and a contemporary photograph shows its original silver finish repainted in wartime camouflage. None of the other four HP42s, which were overseas when the war began, survived. Modern research suggests it was ‘Helena’, in its camouflage, that I saw in 1941, probably en-route to Whitchurch from where it was flown to Scotland to be broken up. However, ‘artist’s licence’ surely allows the boyhood memory to be transposed to the earlier last flight of ‘Heracles’. _____________________ |