Imperial Airways

British Internal Airmails of the 1930’s

In 1924, Britain’s Airlines were in a desperate situation. Unfair competition from heavily subsidised French and German Airlines meant a massive closure of routes and a threat to the private Airlines very existence. Having refused to provide help to the Airlines the GB government was faced to accept the reality that if they did not help, the British airline industry would cease to exist. Their solution was to amalgamate the existing four companies into one new heavily subsidised airline - Imperial Airways. As can be gleaned from its name, its primary aim was to connect Great Britain with its Empire. Although it could fly internally, it had zero interest in doing so. In 1934, it did in fact in all, but name run the largest internal airline in the country, providing the planes, pilots and aerodromes for the newly formed Railway Air Services. The general view is that Imperial Airways was a purely external airline when flying under their own livery. This is not correct. They were the first major Airline to fly mail internally, when they were contracted to fly the War Bond Conversion flights on the 1st and 2nd July 1932. After that they sometimes flew newspapers to Ireland and later flew souvenir mail on the Southampton to Foynes route. The three types are quite separate and dealt with in separate sections.

Imperial Airways War Bond Conversion Flights. 1st and 2nd July 1932.

In 1932, when in a time of national crisis, the Chancellor Neville Chamberlain managed to persuade investors to swap their 5% stock for a 3.5% issue, in part due to their patriotism but also due to Chamberlain’s promise to redeem those who accepted within a month in cast at par, plus a 1% bonus. 90% of the public accepted the deal and at a stroke Chamberlain had reduced interest expenditure by £20 million. It was a great win for the Government, who had official debt levels at 175% of GDP. Top economist John Maynard Keynes, tried to explain why the public would accept such a poor deal and wrote “The public mind is a peculiar combination such as could only exist, perhaps, in this country, of a keen desire to make the scheme an overwhelming success, both by personal and by communal action, with an unspoken conviction or at least a suspicion that the whole thing is in truth a bit of a bluff which a fortunate conjunction of circumstances is enabling us to put over ourselves and one another, and that the new War Loan may be expected to fall to a discount in due course. I am not sure that the authorities themselves are entirely free from an idea of this kind.” Presenting the public with the forms and the persuasion needed was a massive undertaking as 3 million owned these bonds. Three banks were involved in sending out the forms and letters - The Bank of Ireland, The Bank of England and the Post Office. This massive undertaking was achieved by sending forms by air to Ireland with the aid of Imperial Airways. The following section is a record of that undertaking. Although around 3 million letters were sent out, they were company envelopes without stamps and not something people kept, and it is thought that less than 100 now exist. Little is known of these flights and the little information we have comes from short articles in the Irish Times and Belfast Telegraph on July 2nd 1932. On 1st July a hastily chartered Imperial Airways HP42 'Helena' G-AAXF piloted by Capt Walters arrived at Baldonnell near Dublin in the afternoon with a BoE official to collect some 80,000 envelopes prepared by Bank of Ireland re their Irish Bond holders. This flight returned the same day to Croydon and the envelopes were delivered to the Bank of Engalnd at 7.00 PM. The envelopes were filled with severeal pages of documents overnight and flown back to Baldonnel early in the morning of the 2nd July. Each envelope contained a stamped return envelope, so all returns came back to England by normal postal means. It was a huge undertaking as some of the press releases show.

War Bond Conversion Envelopes

Envelopes were sent out by all three banks and they all had the ‘Special Air’ cachet. The most common are the Bank of England envelopes followed by the Bank of Ireland, the most uncommon being the Post Office which are very scarce. Note that the Bank of Ireland does not have a name on the front. There is a small embossed name on the rear of the envelope.

War Bond Conversion Forms

Each envelope contained several forms which are shown below.

Imperial Airways. Newspaper Flights.

Several newspapers were flown on special flights to and from Ireland by Imperial Airways. Some examples are shown below.

Imerial Airways. Souvenir Mail

On the 5th of August 1939, less than 10 cards were sent from Foynes to Southampton and Southampton to Foynes.

Bank of England.

Post Office Savings Bank

Bank of Ireland. Bank of Ireland. Rear embossed.

Mayo's creation was the four-engined sea-plane Mercury, balanced upon the modified Empire flying-boat Maia. On 20th July 1938 Wilcockson took off from the River Shannon in Maia. Fixed above him was the four-engined seaplane Mercury, flown by Don Bennett with one crew member, Radio Officer Coster. Once airborne, the two pilots released the locking device and Bennett flew Mercury on to Montreal with about 1 ,0OO lbs of mail and newsreels. He landed twenty hours later and, after refuelling, flew on to Port Washington, New York to a tremendous reception. A few days later Bennett flew Mercury back to England entirelv on its own power via Botwood, the Azores and Lisbon. Imperial Airways had hoped that the Air Ministry would recognise the advantage of such a machine to the Empire Air Mail Scheme and would support the building of ten or more of them. They were disappointed: but the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Kingsley Wood, was willing to allow Bennett to make an attempt upon the distance record for seaplanes, and on 6th October 1938 Maia launched Mercury from an airfield near Dundee, and Bennett flew 3,997 miles in just over 42 hours, to land on the Orange River near the Alexander Bay diamond mine settlement in South Africa..