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On the Seven Barrows Down near Litchfield you will find a monument to what initially was a failure. From this however the man in question was to become one of the leading lights in the UK aerospace industry.


Photo by John Gray of Highworth.

The person in question is Geoffrey de Havilland. Geoffrey was born in High Wycombe in 1882, and was the son of a parson, in a comfortable middle class Victorian family.
He had always liked anything mechanical, and in his teens while attending an Engineering School, he built himself a motorcycle, the design of which impressed an engineering firm enough to land him a job with them as a designer. It was early in the twentieth century when he became interested in the newly developing field of aviation, and so with a gift of £1000 from his grandfather,- a vast sum of money for the period - , he decided to build himself a plane, even though he had no experience of flying whatsoever.

He set about this task with his wife - who stitched the linen fabric onto the wooden framework, and fellow mechanic Frank Hearle, who in later years was still working with de Havilland. The maiden flight in 1910 of his biplane, with twin rear mounted propellers, was only about 100 foot ( 30 metres), but despite being wrecked when it crashed, it was the start of de Havilland's passion for flying.
He later returned to the same place with his second plane several months later, which was recorded as flying at a speed of 30 mph!
There then followed employment at the Army Balloon Factory at nearby Farnborough as both a pilot and designer, with Hearle going with him as a mechanic.

"From little acorns, great oak trees grow", someone once said, and when the army became interested in the use of aircraft instead of balloons de Havilland found himself ideally placed.
After this stage of his life, he later went onto found a major aircraft company that saw over 50 designs of aircraft bearing his company's name, including the legendary 'Tiger Moth', and later on the 'Mosquito', which could fly at nearly 380 mph, far removed from that 30 mph flight made 30 or so years earlier in this Hampshire field. Sir Geoffrey de Havilland ( as he was to become in 1944 ) died at the ripe old age of 83 in 1965, however two of his sons, who were also test pilots just like their father, met their deaths much earlier in their lives, both while testing planes in separate un-related accidents. A reminder of how dangerous it was for these early pioneers.


Visiting:-
Look out for the signpost on this fast stretch of the A34.
The monument, about 8 miles south of Newbury, was unveiled originally in 1966, but has now been moved to its present location because of the conversion of this part of the road to duel carriage-way






Footnote:- The Hollywood star Olivia de Havilland, was a cousin of Sir Geoffrey.

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