... landed on what appeared from the air to be a suitable green field; the aircraft was damaged, but neither airman was injured. It was not far from their intended landing place, but Brown said that if the weather had been good they could have carried on to London.
Both were knighted a few days later. Their historic flight won them a £10,000 prize from the Daily Mail; it was presented to them by Winston Churchill, who was serving as Secretary of State for Air at the time.
Pilot John Alcock died just six months later, after he crashed in fog near Rouen while piloting a Vickers Viking to the first post–war aeronautical exhibition in Paris. He was buried in Southern Cemetery, Manchester. (He was born in 1892 at Basford House on Seymour Grove, Manchester – where his father was the coachman – and attended St. Thomas's Primary School in Heaton Chapel, Stockport.)
Arthur Whitten Brown was born in Glasgow, to American parents, in 1886. After the historic flight, on which he was Alcock's navigator, he took a job with Metropolitan–Vickers, and became General Manager of its operations in Swansea. He served as a Lieutenant–Colonel in the Home Guard, but resigned his commission in 1941 to rejoin the RAF. He was deeply affected by the death of his only son, also named Arthur (but known as Buster) in 1944 while serving in the RAF. He died in Swansea in 1948, from an accidental overdose of sleeping tablets.
© Haydn Thompson 2019