Close to the Sun Transcript (Scotland: A Scottish History Podcast)
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You already know the tale. Daedalus made some wings for his son. It was the only way they were going to escape from the prison.
The wings worked but he told the boy that he had to take great care if he was to stay airborne. Fly too close to the sea and the feathers would become clogged with water and he would drop like a stone. Fly too high, the sun would melt the wax which held the wings together and he would drop like a stone.
It didn’t happen. It’s a fable. It’s a lesson to avoid complacency and hubris. Daedalus’ son, Icarus, flies too close to the sun, the wax melts, the wings fail and the boy drowns.
But that’s ancient Greece.
This 1506. Ish. There is a room at Stirling Castle.
There are a lot of rooms at Stirling Castle, thanks mostly to King James IV who has been rebuilding. Across the courtyard in rooms grander than he deserved lived a leech. At least, the Scots nobles called him a leech. The French leech to be exact.
Exactness isn’t the order of the day though - he was Italian. From Lombardy if it matters.
The room is festooned with lumps of metal and little bottles full of oddly coloured lotions and potions. It has a desk covered in parchments, scribbled notes and sketches. There are benches covered in crucibles, scorifiers, cupels, alembics, aludels, cucurbits, receivers, adopters. It’s enough to boggle the mind of anyone who walks in, but most people tend not to do that since a leech lives there.
From Be Quiet Media, this is Scotland. A podcast about the people and places that made us who we are. I’m Michael Park.
Giovanni Damiano de Falcucci has developed a bit of a bad reputation around the castle. The nobles don’t like him much. They thought he was a mad monk at best, and at worst a conman. For five years he was the toast of the King whose education has given him an interest in the wilder possibilities of science. That includes alchemy, something which John Damian - that’s what they called him - claimed to be an expert in.
He could turn boring, lumpy metal into gold. Or so he said. There were a lot of people cutting about in the early 16th century claiming that they could do this too. Most courts in Europe had at least one alchemist kicking around the court somewhere. They were the height of fashion and, by some stroke of luck, might be able to make a monarch incredibly rich. Well, incredibly rich-er.
He was given vast, and I mean vast, quantities of mercury, golden litharge - a kind of lead oxide - and tin to try and make gold.
Like I said, the court was fairly skeptical of the King’s favourite. He constantly rinsed the monarch at cards and marbles, taking him for small fortunes at a time. Not that he couldn’t afford it but they weren’t keen on losing money to him themselves. No-one seemed keen that the king should be paying an alchemist so King James, a bit of a schemer himself, made Giovanni Abbot of Tongland (Tungland) in Dumfries and Galloway.
The abbey had pretty much gone to the dogs and it allowed him to take an ‘honest living’ from the Court while pursuing his wild ideas. He never went near the abbey - there wasn’t much point.
The Abbot of Tungland, Giovanni, the Leech, Maister John, was trying to create the Quinta Essenzia - the fifth element. They knew about fire, water, earth and air, but combining them would allow them mastery of the natural world. It wasn’t all about just turning mercury into gold.
He was pretty terrible at all of it to be honest. Well, we know now that it’s impossible but at the time he was probably starting to worry for his job. And that’s when he changed tack. That’s when hubris took over. That’s when he decided he could fly.
He would fly to France like a bird.
On a warm September afternoon in 1507, John Damian stands on the battlements of Stirling Castle. The wind thwips around the cloaks of the nobles who have gathered to watch him fail. The king is there too. He believes in his favourite. He’s a little bit skeptical. He’s a well-read man. He knows all about Icarus. But he believes.
The wind picked up around John as he tries not to look down. He wished he hadn’t picked the highest part of the battlements. He wished a lot of things. That he had been able to make the Quinta Essenzia, that he had never got on the wrong side of the nobles who had turned up to watch him take flight… or die trying, he wished that he’d not been so sure of himself.
He tugged at the flimsy frame all covered in feathers that were going to let him take to the air like a bird. He wished he’d tested them a few more times. He brushed his hands over the eagle feathers that the servants had spent days weaving into the frame. Were those… some chicken feathers in there?
It didn’t matter. He spread his wings and stepped out into the air, feeling the wind pick up underneath the wings. Could it be?
[crash]
Lying in a heap, in a rubbish tip under the battlements of the castle, his flight was over before it had begun. The agony from the fractured bone in his thigh was blinding but he knew enough to know where the plan had gone wrong. Those were chicken feathers in there. Chickens can’t fly.
Their feathers were useless.
Mid Roll
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It is the 21st of December 1941. In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on a freezing night, the escort carrier HMS Audacity has broken away and is steaming fast to draw the attackers off the merchant ships. The Captain of the Audacity knows that they’re out there, somewhere below the surface. He knows that they probably have orders to sink his carrier because they’d been giving the enemy such a hard time in the last couple of months. He just doesn’t know where they are.
About half a mile away there’s a little break in the water. A periscope spins slowly.
U-751 is on the prowl, her captain knows that the Audacity is out here somewhere. He just doesn’t know where.
And then suddenly there she is, illuminated in a brilliant burst of light. One of the merchantmen in the convoy has let off a flare and given them all away. U-751 couldn’t care less about the convoy and brings her torpedo tubes to bear on the Audacity.
Seconds later there is another burst of light as the first torpedo rips through the hull and explodes in the engine room.
The crew begin to hurl themselves into the sea, unable to stem the fires as another salvo of torpedoes from the hidden submarine smash into the hull. One of the torpedoes strikes a tank of aviation fuel. It wasn’t long until the HMS Audacity disappeared completely from view.
The survivors were in the water for hours, in the freezing mid-December Atlantic. Rescue ships came and scooped some of the sailors out of the water but they had to turn back - the water was crawling with U Boats and they couldn’t risk being sunk themselves.
Men who weren’t killed when the torpedoes hit caught hypothermia in the water. Some of their bodies gave up under the extreme conditions. Only a few who were left in the ocean overnight survived. One of them was a young pilot by the name of Eric Brown.
Eric Brown - they called him Winkle because he was only five foot seven - was a good pilot. He was a great pilot and had spent time flying planes in Nazi Germany thanks to a family connection to Generaloberst Ernst Udet.
Udet had been an ace fighter pilot during the first world war and by the time he a seventeen year old Eric in 1936 at the Berlin Olympics, was in charge of research and development in the German Luftwaffe. The one they weren’t supposed to have.
While attending Edinburgh University in 1938 he was invited back to Germany by Udet for a demonstration of the Focke-Wulf Fw 61. It was flown by another young pilot with something to prove. Seven years later, Hanna Reitsch, whose hands were on the controls of the first ever practical, functional helicopter, would land a plane just yards away from the Brandenburg Gate for a meeting with Hitler.
Brown wasn’t interested in their politics, but he was very interested in their aircraft. The Luftwaffe was producing flying machines at a staggering rate and the innovation was incredible. He would go back to Germany one more time in 1939 on an exchange programme to the Schule Schloss Salem. He was woken up by a loud banging on his door on 1st September 1939. Britain and Germany were at war.
His body was still bobbing in the water on that day in 1941. The cold was all-consuming but yet something kept him holding on. His friend Udet had died a month before. The Nazis had reported that he had died testing a new weapon to help the Reich. That’s probably what Eric had read in the newspapers.
The truth was he’d shot himself.
The rain started to break the surface of the ocean as Eric started to think about giving up. He had held on for hours but now he seemed to be alone. Alone except for the bodies. Alone except for the fuel that they were lucky hadn’t ignited on the surface of the water. The HMS Audacity was long gone, dragging bodies to the bottom of the Atlantic.
BAKER, William N
BEDWELL, Stanley R
BENNETT, Dennis J
BLACKMAN, Alfred T
BOLTON, William
BROWN, Ernest J
CAMERON, John
CARDEN, John R
CARLINE, George A
CASTERTON, Thomas B
CLARK, William R
CLAYS, Charles E
COCKS, Howard G
COOPER, George W
DANIELL, Conrad S
DUGGAN, John
DUNCAN, David
EDWARDS, Thomas W
FISHER, Frank
That night took seventy three lives but they pulled Eric out of the water and he survived. And he flew again. Less than six months later he was teaching Canadian pilots how to land on the decks of aircraft carriers and flying fighter operations with them to help them out.
He was transferred to Southern Italy where he tested the capabilities of captured German and Italian planes. There was no-one there to teach him how to fly them so, using the scarce captured documents he could find, he and his colleagues taught themselves to fly them. He came back to the UK and kept testing new aircraft as well as captured ones from the axis powers.
In 1944 there was a buzzing noise high in the sky above his home. Eric was away flying some Focker or a Junkers or one of the new Sea Mosquitoes that were just a little bit too heavy to land on an aircraft carrier. There was a buzzing noise and then the buzzing stopped.
The unmanned cruise missile - the Germans called it a V1, the British called it a Doodlebug - fell from the sky at nearly five hundred miles per hour and exploded by his home, almost killing his cleaner and giving his wife a nasty concussion.
Eric threw himself into understanding the enemy’s jet propulsion programme - they would take Spitfires and divebomb them at high speeds to try and replicated the effect of the doodlebug. This led to him testing Britain’s first jet fighters and being awarded an MBE by the King for… basically being a daredevil.
Eric’s experience with helicopters - or lack of - saw him get the chance to fly the first one ever used by the United States Air Force, the disappointingly named ‘Hoverfly’. He turned up for his lesson from the Americans, who handed him a booklet on how to get the hoverfly into the air and left him to it.
And then Eric’s life got really interesting. All that time he’d spent flying captured planes made him the perfect man to take command of Operation Enemy Flight. The war was coming to an end and they had to make sure to capture as much Luftwaffe technology as they could before the Soviets got their hands on it, or worse, some GI with a zippo accidentally burned an airfield to the ground.
The Allies first target was an Arado Ar 234 - the first ever operational jet-fuelled bomber. Eric and his team knew that they were based at an airbase in Denmark and so they set off, confident that they would arrive at the airbase a few hours after it had been liberated by ground forces.
They landed at the airbase and found that there had been a hold up. Not only had the ground forces not cleared the base, the entire Luftwaffe force of 2,000 was still there. Eric and his colleagues could have been shot on sight, but the commander of the base was smart enough to know that the position would be overrun soon enough. He surrendered to the inadvertent liberators, but not before he destroyed the documents that they’d need to understand how the jet engines were built.
Those are just some of the things that this incredible person achieved in the war. He went on to fly four hundred and eighty seven different types of aircraft before he retired in 1970 with the rank of Captain. He still holds the world record for the most different types of aircraft flown by any one person, and they commemorated his incredible contribution to aviation with a statue at Edinburgh Airport.
They called him Winkle, a periwinkle, because he said the only reason he had so many lucky escapes was being able to curl up in the cockpit when things went wrong.
Give the wee man a nod the next time you’re flying out on your holidays.
CREDITS
You’ve been listening to Scotland, it was written and produced by me, Michael Park, and is a production of Be Quiet Media.
The score for this episode was by the human Dorabella Cypher, Mitch Bain. Find him online and listen to more of his great work — search for Mitch Bain Music on Facebook.
Thanks to Hilary Mitchell from Edinburgh Live for suggesting that we look into the life and times of Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown.
You can find out more about the show on our website, thisisscotland.co, and get in touch with your feedback on Twitter… @BeQuietMedia. We’re on Facebook AND NOW INSTAGRAM - if you search for Scotland - Scottish History Podcast.
Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next time