Worthy tribute to Tiger Moth

Press, 23 January 1988, Page 26

Worthy tribute to Tiger Moth

The Tiger Moth: 4 Tribute. By Stuart McKay. Airlife Publishing, Shrewsbury, 1987. 160 pp. Illustrations. $49.95. (Reviewed by Vincent Orange) A great majority of the men and women who learned to fly in Britain or the Commonwealth for at east 20 years after 1931 did so in a Tiger Moth. By the end of the war, thousands of them were buzzing about (in Mr McKay’s words) from "the sundrenched plains of India and Africa to the frozen prairies of Central Canada; from the Elementary Flying Training Schools in the Antipodes to the Grading Schools of Great Britain.” Nearly as many books about this remarkable aeroplane have also taken wing, but there is always room for one more, especially one full of excellent photographs. These photographs (some in colour) of both the original machine and modern reconstructions are drawn from all over the world. They are clearly printed and most are large enough to allow interesting detail to be seen. Many show the Tiger Moth in flight, dressed in her Sunday Best, but others show her hard at work in war and peace; a few show her wrecked or neglected. In one she is painted to look like a Moth, in another to look like a Tiger. My favourite, used on the dust jacket as well as in the text, shows her cruising over the New York skyline and the Statue of Liberty. Four show her disguised as various

German fighters of World War I (including, of course, the Mount of the Red Baron). There are even views of her as a monoplane (one high wing, one low): quite rightly, in neither of these unseemly forms did she deign to fly. Many photographs, in welcome contrast, show her on the ground, in bits, under construction or repair. The book is rightly dedicated to the “memory of Alan S. Butler, without whose generous enthusiasm no de Havilland Moth might have aired her delicate wings.” Mr McKay could have made more of this point. Butler was a wealthy ■ young pilot who saved Geoffrey de Havilland’s newly-founded company from bankruptcy in 1921 by commissioning a biplane and then by providing the capital with which the factory at Stag Lane, Hendon, was bought outright. Without Butler’s money, there would have been no Tiger Moth and (a far greater disaster for all opponents of Nazi Germany) there would have been no Mosquito: that “wooden wonder” which proved to be one of the most versatile and effective aircraft employed by any nation in World War 11. The Tiger Moth, as Mr McKay’s photographs demonstrate, was herself versatile, serving to train pilots in flying, navigation, photoreconnaissance, the use of wireless and even weapons (machine-guns and bomb-dropping). She has been used for touring, racing and farm work, equipped in Canada with an enclosed

heated cabin and with skis or floats instead of wheels. Not least, in recent years, she has provided long hours of contented work and companionship for numerous “Moth Doctors” around the world, eager to keep her flying or see her earn a living from a new generation as an admired museum exhibit. ' Mr McKay makes no claim to have added anything new to a familiar story and though his text and captions are clear and well-written, the strength of his book lies in its photographs. Some plans or diagrams would have been welcome; so, too, a few words of criticism, for the Tiger Moth was by no means faultless. But most of all he needed to find more illustrations of the Gipsy series of engines which were no less remarkable than de Havilland’s airframes. By 1926, de Havilland and his colleagues were acutely aware that they were wasting their time designing excellent airframes unless the company also designed its own equally excellent engines to power them. Frank Halford, a man who “felt what engines felt and sensed what they needed,” designed one that had all the qualities of the Tiger Moth airframe in that it was light, reliable, easy to build, service and repair, and capable of inexpensive, detailed improvements. Just as Alan Butler’s money made possible the airframe, so too it made possible the necessary engine.