CARDINGTON has come to be synonymous with airships, for the establishment which for many years has usurped the name of that Bedfordshire village was the birthplace of some of Britain's most famous lighter-than-air craft, including the ill-fated R.101. It was also home to a number which had been built elsewhere. The story of Cardington, or Shortstown as it is still known to Bedfordshire people after the name of the firm for whom it was originally built in 1917, is inextricably bound up with the development of the rigid airship. Geoffrey Chamberlain sets that history against the background of world airship evolution, showing how Britain's attempts to catch up with Zeppelin progress in Germany became the pawn of successive political factions.
It was political necessity, too, that sent the R.101 off on a flight for which the giant airship was ill prepared and quite unsuited. It was, however, as Geoffrey Chamberlain shows, mere mischance that turned possible political embarrassment into a major disaster and brought the development of the rigid airship in Britain to a tragic end.
The crash of the R.101 at Beauvais, north-west of Paris, in 1930 did not spell the end for Cardington, which still had an important role to play in the development of the balloon barrage which helped defend British cities during the Second World War and in the training of men for the Royal Air Force.
Today it is the scene of new airship developments which may yet revolutionise air transport