Town mouse on air travel
Clive thinks back to when air travel was glamorous


If you want to get through immigration quickly, register for an iris scan. We contemplated this, snaking dolefully towards Heathrow's passport control after a half-term holiday, but you have to be over 18.
However, the service would surely have appealed to Charles Rolls. Rolls wasn't much of a student at school, being captivated by what the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls ‘things electrical'. No doubt his parents would have had a job keeping him off the computer, if it had been invented. But he went on to establish Rolls-Royce.
Next July will be the centenary of Rolls's death. An aviator, he was killed at Bournemouth, when his tailplane collapsed. It is a moot point as to whether Rolls was the first Briton to die in an aero-plane:
Percy Pilcher, a less famous name, may have beaten him to it when the Hawk he was developing crashed in 1899. It depends what you call an aeroplane. Pilcher's memorial, in a Midland field, is trumped by a statue of Rolls, unveiled in his home town, Monmouth, in 1911.
Rolls is shown admiring a model of an aircraft: good, but excelled by the Spirit of Ecstasy (supposedly modelled on Lord Montagu of Beaulieu's mistress), epitomising the glamour travel had before queues.
* For more town mouse every week, subscribe and save
Sign up for the Country Life Newsletter
Exquisite houses, the beauty of Nature, and how to get the most from your life, straight to your inbox.
Country Life is unlike any other magazine: the only glossy weekly on the newsstand and the only magazine that has been guest-edited by HRH The King not once, but twice. It is a celebration of modern rural life and all its diverse joys and pleasures — that was first published in Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee year. Our eclectic mixture of witty and informative content — from the most up-to-date property news and commentary and a coveted glimpse inside some of the UK's best houses and gardens, to gardening, the arts and interior design, written by experts in their field — still cannot be found in print or online, anywhere else.
-
LAPICIDA — Tile & Stone Specialist
Lapicida is a world-class specialist in luxury surfaces.
By Country Life Published
-
What lies beneath: The weird and wonderful things lurking in Britain's museum basements
From radioactive rocks to great white sharks, and a dolphin called Boris, the things stored in Britain's museum basements make the mind boggle — and now plans are afoot to improve visitor access.
By Deborah Nicholls-Lee Published