Sopwith "Tabloid"

while some of you will most likely be horrified…

Yes true. But only because we’ll probably never see them over here.

Lovely job. Well done.

Moggy

Coming along nicely!

Good work.

Speaking to a friend of mine from the UK, she pointed out that a tabloid format newspaper is generally wider than a regular newspaper.

The prototype Sopwith Stb was two seats side by side… and therefore somewhat wider than other aircraft of the day… but still a pretty compact plane.

for what it is worth… nothing that can be confirmed or denied.

at any rate… Looking at the period issues of Flight, the name Tabloid came into common use almost immediately after the plane made its appearance…

Rob

Or do you think HF King hauled back a bit on CGGs self promotion? 😉

This sort of quest is full of little pitfalls and moments of joy as you stumble on something useful. There is an interesting parallel with other created words – think of the Mini car – an invented word adopted into the language for anything small (or short).

. . . and unlike Flight there’s no benefit to the current copyright owners for digitising a different name magazine – as yet.

My hope is that the British Library might be persuaded to do it one day. But they’ve got an awful lot of newspaper/magazine stuff microfilmed to work through.

AllanK

Hi Batman,
Great find!

However, as per my earlier remark regarding difficulties of direct attribution and primary sources, this is a report, not a personal claim of origination. Careful reading shows Grey does not actually claim he bestowed the term himself, [or by The Aeroplane] just that he supported and protected it, after previous use. Grey was unlikely to miss the chance of stating his own naming of it if he had, or even (as I’m no fan of the man) claiming to have done so if he thought he could get away with it. If it was a The Aeroplane coinage (by, say, another writer in the magazine) he’d certainly have thundered about it to that effect. Editors always do that.

Regards,

It appears to have come from C G Grey.

In Putnam’s “Sopwith Aircraft”, by H F King, pg.51

Quote from Grey: “It was nicknamed the Tabloid, and those universal benefactors Burroughs Wellcome & Co objected to the use of their registered trade name – thinking that it was poking fun at them. I took much pains to show them that it was a compliment, and we went on using it.”

Looks like Allan’s solved 80% of the question. If the term ‘tabloid’ had already been challenged in the courts and deemed to be a common term for compressed then the association with Sopwith’s aircraft is much more obvious. Whether it was Grey of some other that first used it is not so much of an issue.

James, I agree with you, CGG was not known for his objectivity and he’s certainly not the kind of guy I’d want to meet in the pub. But Aeroplane is a nice offset to the rather dry style of Flight and an archive would be welcome.

Cheers

More negative info; nothing in Brewer’s Phrase & Fable, and Partridge’s Slang just has “‘Tabloid Sports’: a miniature sports meeting, army officers 1930-70” which seems late.

Fascinating thread.

Like others here I’m well aware of the usual attribution, but I’ve never seen any reliable original primary source.

I just wish that Aeroplane, Aviation, Aero Digest and so on could be induced to do the same.

I agree, although for reliable information Flight doesn’t suffer from the C.G.G.s. The archive of the original Aeroplane does not, I understand, have any connection with the modern magazine, and unlike Flight there’s no benefit to the current copyright owners for digitising a different name magazine – as yet.

The Tabloid is well documented but I still have this lingering suspicion regarding the name. It was a brand name for a wide variety of medical products, bandages, ointments, tablets etc. with no obvious reason why it would have been linked to Sopwith’s SS aircraft.

The ‘obvious reason’ would be the ‘compactness’ of the aircraft and the ‘porting’ of a popular contemporary term for a compact item as illustrated by Pondskater. Like most of these transmissions of a term, they are notoriously hard to pin down to a person or source, as they often grow out of verbal discussion and first written records are often (at best) relaying anecdotes, themselves often secondhand accounts.

On the other hand, I don’t believe there’s any real reason to doubt it. The generally accepted story isn’t unlikely, nor are there any other competing explanations offered. As a word, it’s a lot less likely to be reverse engineered into a comforting but unsupported example, like the alleged explanations for CHAV (CHeltenham Average Value) or POSH (Port Out Starboard Home) for instance.

Just a few thoughts,

Hi,

I only have two or three Aeroplane magazines from that era but this might be of interest: 1st January 1914 had a review of 1913 and in the November write up was this paragraph:

Also, I’ve had a look at the origins of “Tabloid” in the Oxford Dictionary.

Tabloid – a term registered on 14 March 1884 by Messrs Burroughs, Wellcome & Cos a trade mark applied to chemical substances used in medicine and pharmacy and afterwards for other goods; held by the court of appeal to be a “fancy word” as applied to the goods for which it is registered and legally restricted to the preparations of the firm named.

However, the dictionary records mention in 1903 of a court case in which Mr Justice Byrne said

The word Tabloid has become so well known . . . in consequence by the use of it by the plaintiff firm in connection with their compressed drugs that I think it has acquired a secondary sense in which it has been used and may legitimately be used s long as it does not interfere with their trade rights. I think the word has been so applied generally with reference to the notion of a compressed form or dose of anything.

It seems that was the initial verdict overturned on appeal. So use for an aeroplane would be unofficial. Sopwith would have risked action if he had used it in adverts.

Anyway, moving to the 1933 supplement to the Oxford Dictionary , this is found:

That seems a bit late for a nickname to be first used, IMHO, so probably worth still chasing the Aeroplane angle. Long job, I wish you happy hunting.

AllanK

If it was built now it would be the ‘Sopwith Red-Top’

Bruce’s series of articles on early British aviation written for Flight through the ’50s are excellent. The whole Flight archive is a goldmine of information and I dip into it almost on a daily basis. I just wish that Aeroplane, Aviation, Aero Digest and so on could be induced to do the same.

The Tabloid is well documented but I still have this lingering suspicion regarding the name. It was a brand name for a wide variety of medical products, bandages, ointments, tablets etc. with no obvious reason why it would have been linked to Sopwith’s SS aircraft. It may have been some kind of association between small, compact tablets and the aircraft but I sense urban myth creeping in, hence the desire to back track to the original use. The owners of the Tabloid brand name, Welcome, were certainly not amused and Sopwith certainly never used the name in any of their adverts and so on.

The aircraft that Hawker took on his sales tour of Australia was indeed the prototype.

Cheers

I’m happy to be corrected, but I understood the first Tabloid was brought to Australia by Harry Hawker, and was known then a Tabloid, so I wonder if the name was created at that time?, and perhaps by Hawker who hoped to sell some to the Australian Government?

Which is surprising that none were purchased given this aircraft’s capability and performance over the 2x Deperdusins, 2x BE2a’s and 1x Boxkite previously ordered and delivered to Point Cook but at this time not flown?

The first Tabloid was a two seater, and reportedly first flew November 1913, Hawker assembled and flew a two seater Tabloid in Melbourne on 27 January 1914, surely the same aircraft, ie the first example?

On 13 January 1914, Moorabbin born Harry Hawker, and mechanic Harry Kauper returned to Australia from the UK where Hawker was chief test pilot for the Sopwith Company, and bought with them a two seat Sopwith Tabloid. The aircraft was taken to the CLC Motor Company in Elsternwick where it was assembled and tested before Hawker took off from New Street on 27 January and after a 20 minute flight landed in the grounds of Government House to visit the Governor General. On 7 February Hawker provided paying passenger flights and flying displays at Caulfield Racecourse in Melbourne, with between 25-30,000 spectators, while on 11 February 1914 the first member of Cabinet to make a flight was Senator E Millen, Minister for Defence, Lt Harrison was also taken for a flight.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sopwith_Tabloid

The original Tabloid, which first flew in November 1913, was a two-seater with a side-by-side configuration — unusual for the time. It had no ailerons, using wing warping for lateral rolling. It was originally powered by an 80 hp (60 kW) Gnôme Monosoupape rotary engine and when tested by Harry Hawker at Farnborough the Tabloid reached 92 mph (148 km/h) while carrying a passenger. It took only one minute to reach 1200 ft (366 m). A total of 40 were built.

http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/hawker.html

Regards

Mark Pilkington

You can find a great deal on the Tabloid in the Flight Archive… for instance… here is a series written by JM Bruce in 1957: http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1957/1957%20-%201645.html

There is also a lot written when it first appeared in 1913-1914.

The essence of the name came from the small size of the aircraft combined with the the sensation it created when it appeared out of nowhere at Hendon in 1913 and displayed its then amazing speed in front of 50,000 people.

I’m not sure if the Press, or Sopwith came up with the name… that part is not discussed.

Rob

Yes indeed, but the question remains, who first came up with the nickname and when? Certainly not Sopwith.

A caption to a picture of the Tabloid in the Herleyford ‘Sopwith the Man and His Aircraft’ says——This compact biplane was aptly nicknamed the Tabloid at a time when aircraft in general were not given names. Moreover, a threat-tened lawsuit over the use of the name by a manufacturer of a medical compound of that name, apparantly only endorsed it in the publics mind. Although never officially bestowed ‘Tabloid’ it became by popular acclaim!.

Richard