On October 4th, 1930, the pride of British aeronautical engineering, the Airship R101, left England on its maiden journey, a non-stop flight to India. The weather was far from good, and as the R101 crossed the Channel she was tossed and buffeted by ever stronger gusts of wind. Visibility was reduced to nil, and the airship, travelling at about 1000 feet bucked in unintentional swoops, losing 200 – 300 feet at a time. The crew were hardly able to correct these traumatic movements. And so it was that at precisely 2.05 a.m. the gigantic ship crashed at the edge of a wood near Beauvais in Northern France, and burst into flames.
The R101 was a massive 777 feet long, and required 5½ million cubic feet of hydrogen to give it sufficient lift. The trouble with that was the inflammatory nature of this gas, which caused a huge surge of flame shooting some 300 feet into the air. Beneath the ship there was a gondola with 54 people on board. Only six survived the inferno. The R101 was the pride of British aviation, and the gondola had been supplied with all the amenities of an ocean liner. Travelling on board were Lord Thomson, Secretary of State for Air, and Sir Sefton Brancker, Director of Civil Aviation, and the R101’s Captain, Flight Lieutenant Carmichael Irwin. All three were killed.
This tragedy occurred just 18 years after the sinking of the Titanic. Both had been advertised as the pride of British engineering. In both instances, pride came before a fall. Furthermore, in both instances there were strange premonitions, dreams, and occult connections. We have already spoken about Morgan Robertson, W.T.Stead, and CeliaThaxter in connection with the Titanic. It must now be revealed that in 1925, whilst the R101 was still in its design stage, Sir Sefton Brancker had visited an astrologer, who told him that there was nothing to be seen in his life after six years. Further investigations revealed that when Walter Radcliffe, a rigger who flew in the ship, left home that morning of October 4th, his young son began to cry, saying, “I haven’t got a daddy.” By the following morning, this was sadly true. A friend who carried the sad news to Mrs Irwin was met with her strange comment, “It’s all right. You needn’t worry. I know. We both knew he wasn’t coming back again.”
Most disturbing of all the incidents reported was the information apparently received by a Mrs Eileen Garrett, a medium, who during a trance spoke with a man’s voice. The name “Irwin” was mentioned. The voice listed technical defects that were not known publicly until the following year, when the results of the official enquiry were published.
We do not publish these occult happenings as though to recognise and endorse such activities. Our purpose has been to expose the prior circumstances which, we believe, gave the Dark Powers the authority they needed to sink the Titanic, and to destroy the R101. The lesson to learn, in retrospect, is that human bombastic pride is calculated to play into the hands of Satan. Nebuchadnezzar learned this the hard way, after his pompous declaration about “Great Babylon” which he had built. He was put out to grass for seven years until he repented. Likewise Herod Agrippa, who encouraged the crowds to address him as a Divinity, dropped dead, and was eaten by worms. These examples, from Scripture, are tokens of Divine Judgement. We were sad to hear, during a recent Presidential Election in America, candidates were proclaiming, “The United States is the greatest nation on the face of the earth.” The word “Great” is used of Babylon in the Book of Revelation, but the New Jerusalem is referred to as “The Holy City.”
The tragedy of the R101 put paid to any further progress in the manufacture of airships in Britain. In the Unites States the Shenandoah and the Akron were lost in 1933. The Germans, however, continued their research. They had been the major user of airships since 1900, when Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin built them extensively. TheseZeppelins had carried some 35,000 passengers without mishap. Then eventually they built the Hindenburg, a massive 812 feet in length. But this also ended in disaster, when it exploded at Lakehurst, New Jersey, USA, in 1937, marking the end of airship travel.
