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Memories of the founder editor: Lieut-Col W. Lockwood Marsh
In the entrance hall to the Royal Aeronautical Society in Hamilton Place in London hangs an oil painting of a balloon ascent. Only recently cleaned and restored it is the oldest work of art in the Society's collection and has a direct relevance to Aircraft Engineering and this journal's 75th Anniversary.
For year's the provenance of the picture and its significance went unrecognised and then, in 1927, Lieut-Col W. Lockwood Marsh identified this historic painting from an engraving as depicting the world's first public ascent of an unmanned hot air balloon - a Montgolfier balloon - flying over the Montgolfier paper works and hydraulic pump at Voiron in the region of Annonay on 5 June, 1783.
Lockwood Marsh, who could with justification be described as one of the unsung heroes of British aviation during the first half of the last century, was the man destined in 1929 to launch Aircraft Engineering and remain its Editor for 32 years. Born in 1886, he was a barrister by training, but his intense interest in aeronautics led him to write many articles for the burgeoning aeronautical press prior to the First World War.
He served in the Anti-Aircraft Corps and the Airship Service of the Royal Naval Air Service before becoming a member of the Civil Air Transport Committee in 1917 and subsequently head of the Equipment Branch in the Admiralty Transport Department prior to, in 1919, entering the Department of Civil Aviation at the Air Ministry.
He was the Secretary of the Royal Aeronautical Society from 1920 to 1925, a position from which he voluntarily resigned to help with cost cutting when the society faced financial difficulties in the post World War I era and he was largely responsible for building the foundations of the RAeS library by persuading the Carnegie Fund to provide funding to purchase rare books.
It is also of interest to note that when, in 1930, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society, his proposal was signed by some of the giants of the aviation and scientific world - Sir Henry Tizard, Lord Brabazon, Sir Geoffrey de Havilland and H E Wimperis.
So he was a man of many parts -...