Something for April the First

The First of April, 1918

A date on which many celebrate the birth of the Royal Air Force (while others mourn the brutal killing off of the Royal Naval Air Service). 

A date on which Major Percy “Pranger” Double-Barrel sauntered out to test Sopwith’s new wonder plane. He appears not to have been alarmed by the new kite’s unique ‘asymetric bicycle undercarriage’, but was halfway through a bottle of whiskey and may not have noticed. Fortunately for Percy, the aircraft merely described an agricultural circle in the grass and failed to get into the air. Even with two main wheels, it is doubtful that it could have flown, having been intended for ground attack and thus fitted with extensive armour plate and a bomb bay.

At the subsequent Official Enquiry, a representative from the Sopwith's design office explained that the instruction to “repeat on the other side” had been accidentally cut off the plans sent to the workshop but it was “clear and obvious” and “only a blithering idiot” could have carried on and installed only one mainwheel leg. 

Many years later, an aviation researcher stumbled on one of the mechanics who had worked at Sopwith's. Sitting in an invalid chair in a care home, the old gentleman was asked about this long forgotten Sopwith type. He became agitated and stuttered that they had been told never to talk about it. Had it ever been given a name? His response was unrepeatable here; indeed he seemed on the verge of apoplexy, and a nurse soon hurried in and ushered the researcher away.

An alternative history:     

This was buried under greenery in one of my plant pots. I don't have a garden as such, but a couple of small yards front and back, featuring a number of pots. Apart from some watering, I've been neglecting them, and I figured I should go down to the garden centre and get some cheap colourful plants this year, enough to mollify the neighbours. I did once aspire to be a person of taste and discrimination; not so much when it occurred to me that garden decoration wasn't limited to gnomes with fishing rods. I spotted Percy, partly obscured by a fern, and decided to revive him and his questionable aeroplane.

This one wasn't actually supposed to be any kind of garden decoration. Originally, I picked it up cheap, on account of its lack of a full complement of undercarriage legs, and it was actually a money box. A ‘piggy bank’, I should say. Kids were often given them to encourage a habit of saving for a ‘rainy day’. They often were styled as pigs, I suppose because that lent them a portly shape suitable for accumulating a bit of money. You can see (right) the lid underneath for extracting ones precious savings - ha'pennies, pennies, tanners (ie. sixpences) and thruppeny bits (three pence pieces - they were quite striking, twelve sided I think, and with an impressive portcullis on one side. Of course, as a kid, you never collected enough for anything useful. It would be a hot summer's day, and you'd say to yourself, I've got enough in there for a bottle of pop...

So, I dug it up from that pot, and gave it a thorough clean. Because of its coin slot, on the right hand side of the cockpit, all sorts of earthy gunk had got inside. I carved a piece of resin to size, and filled in the coin slot. Almost invisibly, I'm dead pleased about that. I gave it a coat of primer, old stuff from the garage. Then I decided to continue in that environmentally responsible vein and make use of a load of very old enamel paints and give it a new paint job. Very old, ie. some of them dated back to school days. Eg. ‘Humbrol Authentic Colours’ - remember them? In the end, despite the fact that Percy's plane is a cartoon, the look is much more authentic than before. The green is supposedly ‘RFC green’ (us kids weren't experts all those years ago and we hadn't heard of PC10), and there's more realistic detailing of the engine, the cockpit and especially the propeller. I confess my work on the figure of Percy isn't my finest, but to be fair the original sculptor wasn't exactly going for human verisimilitude. After all this it’s going back into that plant pot, where it will experience the kind of realistic weathering most modellers can only dream of.