- Curly's Airships - CD1 - 10 - From the Sidelines
CURLY:
You couldn't accuse them
Of thinking too small.
The new ships would each take
Five million cubic feet of gas,
More than two-and-a-half times
As big as 'Tiny',
And carry one hundred passengers
- Curly's Airships - CD1 - 11 - A Kindly Sort of Cove
CURLY:-
I happened to know
The Director of Airship Development:
Big Boss of the Royal Airship Works
And head of the Government team,
Reg Colmore had been my C.O.
For a month or so in the War,
Kindly sort of cove
- Curly's Airships - CD1 - 13 - A Creature of Grace
CURLY:-
Just at this point, Wall Street
Ran out of gas and crashed,
And the Roaring Twenties
Slumped to the ground
For the Depression.
Now there'd be precious little cash
To spare for Aviation,
- Curly's Airships - CD1 - 14 - A Byronic Sort of Blighter
CURLY:-
Too piss elegant, too aristocratic,
Too infernally suave
For the post-war world,
So they gave him a peerage instead;
'Baron Thomson of Cardington'
Was the title he chose.
That's right, I said Cardington,
- Curly's Airships - CD1 - 4 - Drifting About Like a Bad Smell
CURLY:
Most of us were Navy men.
But our Boss was a topping old
Army General,
And we'd all been made one tiny part
Of this brand-new Royal Air Force.
But they were all Heavier-Than-Air:
'Birdmen',
- Curly's Airships - CD1 - 5 - Curly in the Clouds
CURLY:-
We called her Tiny',
And we loved her like anything.
We waltzed her about
For a couple of years.
Showing her paces
And bending the ears of the bigwigs.
"Not much future on the military side,
- Curly's Airships - CD1 - 7 - A Shrieking of Aluminium
The US Navy
Sent over a crew for us to train.
And we taught them all their stuff
On the R.80,
A topping little airship with beautiful lines
Designed by a young man called Wallis.
He hadn't copied
Some old Zeppelin design;
- Curly's Airships - CD1 - 8 - Curly on Civvy Street
CURLY:-
They closed us down.
Airships definitely
Now weren't quite the thing,
And, with our lovely General gone,
The Birdmen closed in for the kill.
The whole bally Airship Service scrapped;
Turfed out, neck and crop,
- Curly's Airships - CD1 - 9 - That Imperial Airship Scheme
CURLY:-
Of course, the way things go,
It wasn't long before the Powers That Be
Began to have second thoughts.
The lighter-than-air lobby,
The'Airship Push',
Were getting more powerful,
And the case was good
- Curly's Airships - CD2 - 1 - Big Chief and some Minor Bugs
CURLY:-
The trouble was that she flew like a pig.
Sluggish and unsure,
Always trying to drop her nose.
She never had enough lift
And didn't seem at home in the air.
The boffins started scratching their heads,
But all us flying men knew
- Curly's Airships - CD2 - 10 - Hastings to Beauvais
CURLY:-
Ploughing over the cliffs
And crabbing out to sea,
Flying half-sideways into the wind.
Two hours to cross the Channel,
And the yellow light
From the Promenade Deck windows
Shows the white tops of the breakers;
- Curly's Airships - CD2 - 11 - The Muffled Drum
CURLY:-
Then I was standing in the rain,
Watching her burn,
And there was dear old Airey
In his flying kit,
Just as I remembered him.
AIREY:-
- Curly's Airships - CD2 - 12 - The Final Taboo
CURLY:-
So we came back again.
We didn't like their sob stuff
Or the nasty smell of whitewash,
Those strangely missing files.
Managed to convince some friends,
Confirm a few suspicions;
But we were just ghosts,
- Curly's Airships - CD2 - 2 - The Canadian Run
CURLY:-
And now our rivals took the field,
And we could only kick our heels
And watch the R.100 fly her trials:
Bit of a brute to look at
And built as plain and simple
As ours was built too fancy and complex.
Barnes Wallis
- Curly's Airships - CD2 - 3 - Conan Doyle and the Flying Sieve
CURLY:-
And then a weird thing happened:
Got a letter from some woman,
Claimed to be a Spiritualist medium.
Said she had a message for me
From a man named 'Airey'
Saying I shouldn't fly to India.
Well I knew Airey all right;
- Curly's Airships - CD2 - 4 - Horrors at Hendon
CURLY:-
They said they could fix it.
They said they could fix anything.
But meanwhile
We were due back on stage,
Providing the climax
Of the 1930 Hendon Air Show.
The Tax-payers wanted
- Curly's Airships - CD2 - 6 - A Ship of Fools
THOMSON:-
You realise, Irwin, this is most irregular.....
Your superiors have assured me.....
My advisers are confident.....
I must insist on the programme
Being adhered to;
I have made my plans accordingly.
The Great British Public is all keyed up;
- Curly's Airships - CD2 - 7 - The Night Before
CURLY:-
Flying men are fey;
Airmen see more ghosts than most.
There are murmurs in the mess
About prefigurements and omens,
'Cause, when you're up there
In the airy nothing,
You draw close to the unseen;
- Curly's Airships - CD2 - 9 - Bedford to Hastings
CURLY:-
I felt we were leaving real things
And entering some sort of
Wind-blown limbo,
Behind clouds of myth and history,
In the cold dream-space
Between the worlds.
Here, between earth and heaven,