The Memorial to the Home of Aviation is a stone memorial sculpture at Eastchurch, on the Isle of Sheppey in the English county of Kent. The Grade II* listed memorial, unveiled in 1955, commemorates the early aviation flights from Leysdown and Eastchurch by members of the club that became the Royal Aero Club of Great Britain in 1910, and the air base established by the Royal Navy near Eastchurch in 1911.
The Aero Club established a flying ground at Leysdown in 1909, with its clubhouse at Mussel Manor, near sheds where the Short Brothers assembled licensed versions of the Wright Flyer. The Short Brothers factory moved to a better site at Standford Hill, south of Eastchurch, in 1910, where its Grade II listed sheds survive. The Aero Club moved to Stonepitts Farm near Eastchurch, and the Admiralty established a Royal Navy flying school at the Eastchurch flying ground in 1911, which became the headquarters of the Naval Wing of the newly-established Royal Flying Corps in 1912, and then the location of a Royal Naval Air Service station in 1914, and later RAF Eastchurch. The Stonepitts site is now used as an open prison, HM Prison Standford Hill.
There were moves to commemorate the historic importance of the site in the late 1940s and 1950s. A public meeting in late 1949 called for a museum or library in an extension to the Eastchurch village hall, and a letter was published by The Times on 11 February 1950, signed by Winston Churchill, Lord Brabazon of Tara, and Hugh Oswald Short, appealing for public support.
The memorial was erected on the west side of Church Road in Eastchurch, at its junction with High Street, opposite the Grade I listed All Saints Church. One of the roads leads towards Leysdown and the other towards Eastchurch Aerodrome. It was unveiled on 25 July 1955 by Lord Tedder, former Chief of the Air Staff. It was rededicated fifty years later, in 2005. It was listed at Grade II in 1978, and upgraded to Grade II* in 2018 at the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Air Force.
The memorial was designed by the Kent county architect Sidney Loweth and comprises a curtain wall facing to the east faced with Portland stone, bearing allegorical sculptures and an frieze of early aircraft, sculpted by Hilary Stratton. It was constructed by G.E. Wallis and Sons of Maidstone (who in earlier years had constructed the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment Cenotaph in Maidstone, and the Royal Berkshire Regiment War Memorial in Reading). The upper white Portland stone panels of the memorial are support by lower walls of Kentish ragstone with integral wooden seating, and the area below is paved with flint cobbles. Beneath the central plinth is an area covered with blue glass setts.
The memorial has a central plinth with a bust of Zeus, flanked by walls to either side bearing relief scriptures of aircraft from 1909 to 1911, each wall ending with a stone pier. From above, the walls resemble the curved camber of an aeroplane wing. The wall to the south is curved, and maintains the same height out to the pier, which is topped by globe. Carved stone panels on the south wall depict an Avro Triplane, Cody 1, De Havilland Biplane No. 1, Howard Wright 1909 Biplane, Dunne D.5, Bristol Monoplane, Handley Page Type E, and a Sopwith-Wright biplane. The central plinth is carved to depict a Short Flying Boat which seems to be landing on the blue glass setts below. The wall to the north is straight but steps down to a pier topped by a bust of an aviator. The wall bears stone panels depicting a Short biplane, a Short Type 184 seaplane, Short Twin, Short S.38, Short S.27, the Short Biplane No.2, and Short Biplane No.1.
An inscription on the central plinth reads: "THIS MEMORIAL / COMMEMORATES / THE FIRST HOME OF / BRITISH AVIATION / 1909 / NEAR THIS SPOT AT / LEYSDOWN EASTCHURCH / (MUSSEL MANOR) (STONEPITTS FARM) / FLIGHTS AND EXPERIMENTS WERE / MADE BY MEMBERS OF THE AERO / CLUB (LATER ROYAL) OF GREAT BRITAIN / ALSO THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE / FIRST AIRCRAFT FACTORY IN GREAT / BRITAIN BY SHORT BROTHERS 1909 / AND THE FORMATION OF THE FIRST / ROYAL NAVAL AIR SERVICE STATION / 1911".
Other inscriptions identify the aircraft depicted, list names of early aviators (including John Moore-Brabazon, Charles Rolls, Frank McClean (who granted a lease of the Eastchurch site to the Aero Club), A. K. Huntington, J. W. Dunne, Maurice Egerton, T. O. M. Sopwith, Cecil Grace, Alec Ogilvie, Percy Grace, Ernest Pitman, G. P. L. Jezzi, and James Travers) and early aircraft designers and engineers (including Horace Short, Eustace Short, Oswald Short, and the first four pilots of the Royal Naval Air Service: Charles Rumney Samson, Arthur Longmore, and Reginald Gregory RN, and Eugene Gerrard RMLI.
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Charles Stewart Rolls was a British motoring and aviation pioneer. With Henry Royce, he co-founded the Rolls-Royce car manufacturing firm. He was the first Briton to be killed in an aeronautical accident with a powered aircraft, when the tail of his Wright Flyer broke off during a flying display in Bournemouth. He was aged 32.
The Isle of Sheppey is an island off the northern coast of Kent, England, neighbouring the Thames Estuary, centred 42 miles (68 km) from central London. It has an area of 36 square miles (93 km2). The island forms part of the local government district of Swale. Sheppey is derived from Old English Sceapig, meaning "Sheep Island".
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The Royal Aero Club (RAeC) is the national co-ordinating body for air sport in the United Kingdom. It was founded in 1901 as the Aero Club of Great Britain, being granted the title of the "Royal Aero Club" in 1910.
Short Brothers plc, usually referred to as Shorts or Short, is an aerospace company based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Shorts was founded in 1908 in London, and was the first company in the world to make production aeroplanes. It was particularly notable for its flying boat designs manufactured into the 1950s.
This is a list of aviation-related events from 1910:
This is a list of aviation-related events from 1914.
Captain Sir John William Alcock was a British Royal Navy and later Royal Air Force officer who, with navigator Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown, piloted the first non-stop transatlantic flight from St. John's, Newfoundland to Clifden, Ireland in June 1919. He died in a flying accident in France in December later that same year.
Eastchurch is a village and civil parish on the Isle of Sheppey, in the English county of Kent, two miles east of Minster. The village website claims the area has "a history steeped in stories of piracy and smugglers".
Leysdown-on-Sea is a village on the east coast of the Isle of Sheppey in the borough of Swale in Kent, England. In 2020 it had an estimated population of 936. The civil parish is Leysdown and includes the settlements of Bay View, Shellness and Harty. In 2011 it had a population of 1,256.
Transportation needs within the county of Kent in South East England has been served by both historical and current transport systems.
The Dunne D.5 was a British experimental aircraft built in 1910. A tailless swept-wing biplane, it was designed by J. W. Dunne and built by Short Brothers at Leysdown for his company, the Blair Atholl Aeroplane Syndicate Ltd. Like its military predecessors it was driven by twin pusher propellers, but it had a considerably more powerful engine.
Royal Air Force Eastchurch or more simply RAF Eastchurch is a former Royal Air Force station near Eastchurch village, on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, England. The history of aviation at Eastchurch stretches back to the first decade of the 20th century when it was used as an airfield by members of the Royal Aero Club. The area saw the first flight by a British pilot in Britain.
Cecil Stanley Grace was a pioneer aviator who went missing on a flight across the English Channel in 1910.
George Cyril Colmore (1885–1937) was an English aviator and the first Royal Naval Air Service officer to gain a Royal Aero Club Aviators Licence.
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Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Francis Kennedy McClean, was a British civil engineer and pioneer aviator.