ing himself, on high ground at West Ilsley,
south of Oxford. Maps, in those days, were mostly provided by the
officers themselves, and Lieutenant Conner had steered himself
successfully by the aid of a map torn out of a Bradshaw Railway Guide.
Eventually the mobilized military air force of the British Empire, that
is to say, Captains Burke, Brooke-Popham, and Massy, Lieutenants
Barrington-Kennett and Reynolds, arrived in Oxford, at the end of the
first stage. Here there were no tools available for repair, the few
belonging to the company having been dispatched, by orders given at
cross-purposes, straight to Cambridge. Nevertheless the little band of
enthusiasts bravely started on the last stage of their journey. Captains
Burke and Brooke-Popham had engine failure about ten miles out of
Oxford, and, landing in a ridge-and-furrow field, broke a tail skid.
Most of the day was consumed in getting this skid mended, patchwork
fashion, by a coachbuilder in Oxford, to procure whose aid Captain
Brooke-Popham returned to Oxford by earth. When the machine flew again
it was forced to land at once, this time with serious damage. The other
three officers had all been compelled by the bumpy weather to land not
many miles away. In the evening they started again. Captain Massy had
engine trouble fifty yards from the start, and completely wrecked his
machine without hurting himself at all. Lieutenant Reynolds, who was the
next to go, ran into a thunder-storm. His famous accident deserves to be
recorded in his own words:

'That evening, soon after seven o'clock, I started again, it was warm
and fine but rather suggestive of thunder; the air was perfectly still.
I scarcely had occasion to move the control lever at all until I got to
Bletchley, where it began to get rather bumpy; at first I thought
nothing of this, but suddenly it got much worse, and I came to the
conclusion it was time to descend. A big black thunder-cloud was coming
up on my right front; it did not look reassuring, and there was good
landing ground below. At this time I was flying about 1,700 feet
altitude by my aneroid, which had been set at Oxford in the morning. I
began a glide, but almost directly I had switched off the tail of the
machine was suddenly wrenched upwards as if it had been hit from below,
and I saw the elevator go down perpendicularly below me. I was not
strapped in, and I suppose I caught hold of the uprights at my side, for
the next thing I realized wa