ANOTHER FLIGHT RECORD ATTEMPT.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 78, 1 April 1931, Page 1

ANOTHER FLIGHT RECORD ATTEMPT.

commander kidston FLYING TO THE CAPE. (United Press Assn.—By Electrla Telegraph.—Copyright.) (Received April 1, 12 noon.) LONDON, March 31. The millionaire sportsman, Commander Glen Kidston and two companions, left Etheraven in a high-speed American mail-carrying monoplone, hoping to reach Cape Town in six days. Commander Kidston’s object is to show up the comparative slowness of British air mails and is trying to convince the Post Office and Air Ministry of the practicability of sending letters to Australia in eight days. Commander G. P. Glen Kidston, British naval officer, racing motorist and airman, has had many marvellous escapes from death. Bom in 1899, he went into the Navy as a lad. In September, 1914, he was serving as a midshipman in the cruiser Hogue when she was sunk by a German torpedo. After being in the sea for two and a half hours he was one of the 160 members of the crew rescued. Appointed to the battleship Orion, he survived the heavy shelling which she underwent at the battle of Jutland. He inherited a very large fortune, and when the war was over took part as often as naval duties would permit in motor racing at Brooklands and elsewhere, acquiring a reputation as one of the most skilful and daring drivers on the track. He also took up motor-boat racing, and once when he was piloting one of his vessels at top speed in the Solent it broke in two and he and his four companions, had a narrow escape from drowning. Big game shooting and travelling in wild regions also attracted him. When in 1925 he married a daughter of Roland Soames, they spent the honeymoon in roaming about Ceylon. He had then intended to give up motor racing and take to flying, with which he had experimented. In August, 1928, however, he yielded to temptation and, entering for the Ulster Tourist Trophy, crashed into a hedge when travelling at 95 miles hour and had another of his narrow escapes from death. Soon afterwards he started on a flight to shoot big game in Kenya in the machine from which Captain Loewenstein, the Belgian financier, had fallen to his death in the North Sea. He crashed in the White Nile region and the Expedition ended there and then, but once again he was unharmed. In November, 1929, he started from Croydon as a passenger in a German airliner. Within twenty minutes the ’plane had crashed- and caught fire and he was the sole survivor of the eight persons on board the machine. Though burned and otherwise injured, he hurried to a telephone and after giving particulars of the disaster, drove back to Croydon to resume his journey in another ’plane. Early in 1930 he was engaged in an expedition to Central Africa in a light aeroplane specially equipped to enable him to photograph wild animals from the air, and in July exhibited in London some films showing very successful results.