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Major J.E.M. Pritchard supply) and four riggers’ (Ibid); given that this was such a massive undertaking with far reaching public interest on both sides of the Atlantic Maitland was placed in charge of press and public relations, writing a day-by-day narrative of the journeys, and Pritchard was equipped with a camera (the only one allowed onboard) to record not only aspects of technical interest in furthering airship research but also in an effort to control and strategically release pictures for publicity purposes at a later date by the Air Ministry. Outward Bound The R34 took off from East Fortune in the early hours of 2.7.1919; along with supplies and fuel 112 pounds of mail and parcels were stowed aboard, including letters from King George V and the Prime Minister, for delivery to the President of the United States upon arrival; Maitland, who’s daily narrative survives, records Pritchard as taking part in the ‘first watch’ in the control car for the start of the Atlantic journey; this is one of many occasions that Pritchard is recorded in Maitland’s log including being constantly active with his camera on the first day of the trip, ‘passing over oil steamer going up the Clyde - the crew wave us a greeting. Sunrise over lowest point of Bute. Very big storm over mainland on port beam and very dirty looking weather ahead.... Major Pritchard begins to get active with the camera’; basic conditions, including the only means of cooking food being a plate welded to the engine exhaust pipe, were made worse by the arrival of poor weather on the second day of the journey, ‘the rain is driving through the roof of the fore car in many places, and there is a thin film of water over the chart table. The wind is roaring to such an extent that we have to shout to make ourselves heard’; however, days 3-4 of the journey were to prove the most trying for all concerned - especially due to poor engine performance, increasingly worse weather and a rapidly diminishing supply of petrol; the latter gave particular cause for concern given that by day 3 they had used 75% of their
petrol supply with well over a 1,000 miles still to go to reach their landing site on Long Island; however, as Maitland records, they all mucked in to help the skipper and his engineers, ‘Having burnt a lot of petrol, the ship is so light, so Scott has to force her down on the elevators to get her into the cloud bank. We are now over a large ice-field - masses of broken ice floating on the surface in every direction. Take a turn with Pritchard of pumping petrol, which is a laborious and most unpleasant proceeding, and must be avoided in future ships’; by day four, having started with 5 engines the airship was down to 3, and it now encountered the worst weather of the trip going over the Bay of Fundy on the Atlantic coast of North America, ‘she was to be battered by head winds, threatened by thunderstorms, sent reeling by bizarre shifts in air pressure and jolted by atmospheric electricity. It went on for most of the day and into the evening, forcing the crew into their parachutes and to hang on grimly to anything they could find... there were times that Saturday when they feared for their lives. More than once it looked as if the R34 would meet its end over the islands of the Western Atlantic...... What made the pitching and tossing of the R34 over the Bay of Fundy so alarming and dangerous was the fact that some of the engines were stopping and then flaring back to life in bursts of flame. The possibility of a spark igniting a slight leakage of hydrogen, and then the petrol, was always present’ (Flight of the Titan, The Story of the R34, G. Rosie, refers); however by a combination of luck, and sheer bloody mindedness the R34 arrived over its intended landing place (the Roosevelt Field, Mineola, Long Island) at approximately 9.30am on the morning of 6th July 1919, as the correspondent for The Times describes, ‘With the band playing ‘God Save the King’ and thousands of spectators standing bareheaded, the R34 dipped groundwards and dropped anchor at 10 o’clock this morning after a voyage which up to last night even experts feared might end in disaster’; however, there was still one more problem to resolve - when it had appeared that the airship may have to
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