This is a 7-minute film of a Pan Am Clipper arriving at Lisbon in 1941. It includes the processing of the passengers but it has extensive sequences of the Clipper taxiing in, filmed from a boat on the Tagus. The picture quality is far from perfect but I haven’t seen this film before and found it quite interesting. I hope you do, too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz4gATFYe-8

I’m contending with other matters this week but I’ve had a chance to read Henry Taylor’s 1942 book. There is much about the politics and economics of the mid-20th century, the European personalities of that time and about the conditions and circumstances of people in the countries he visited. Did you know, for example, that, in late 1941, while cigarettes were readily available in London, matches were in short supply? Or that, in Berlin, the exact opposite applied – lots of matches but not cigarettes? Well, I didn’t.

Anyway, I’ll try to pick up on a few of the aviation-related parts.

The Clipper from Horta to Lisbon took off at night. The take-off lane was lit by guide lights from a line of launches and stretching out for a couple of miles. But there was a strong cross wind and the Clipper made several attempts at taking off before succeeding: “We made several tries at it but she wouldn’t lift. A larger launch rode at anchor near the end of the run. Each time we reached this point the launch crew shot a rocket, a brilliant white flare that lit the water like day, lit the sky and the colourful hills on all sides. Our pilot had full vision when he needed it most. By eleven-fifteen we were in the air and it was rough”.

“At Cintra Airport the British ship nestles with the Nazi’s ugly Junkers, their black swastika glaring from a red square on the rudder, the Italian ships of the Littori Line, the bright little ships of Portugal’s Iberia Airways (sic) and the standard Douglases operated into Spain and Morocco by Trafico-Areo-Espanol”.

Regarding Leuchars: “There was not a light on the field as we took off, not even guide lights for the run”. In contrast, a couple of years later, the well-known photo of a BOAC Mosquito about to take off for Stockholm shows a full set of runway lights at Leuchars.

Taylor flew from Stockholm to Helsinki and then back again. “The Air Ministry in London had made it properly clear that they did not know when they could bring me back or whether they could bring me back at all …… The plane returned to Scotland as soon as it could. It left while I was in Helsinki. No one knew when another might might make the trip”. This more or less accords with lazy8’s information. It isn’t exactly clear to me how long Taylor was in Helsinki but he left Leuchars on 27 October 1941 and there is reference to a BBC report about Finland on 1 November and to an editorial in The Times of 6 November, so it looks like more than a week.

I’ll have to leave it there for the time being. More to come in due course, perhaps.

RE-EDIT: Got the above back into the correct chronology now, it having moved around mysteriously – a mystery to me, that is.

Here’s another image of G-AFPZ (a drawing again, I’m afraid). It’s not as clear as the last drawing but the globe is blue this time:

For lazy8 -I have sent you a PM again.

Thank you, longshot, for posting the map of Henry Taylor’s trip. Could you please advise in which issue of LIFE it appeared, as I would like to read the article which it accompanied. The book is indeed a good find, which only came about because of this thread that you started last year.

I have replied to your PM, lazy8. Thank you for that.

I have no specific knowledge as to the colour of the globe in the BOAC logo but wondered if there might be reference to it in the monthly BOAC staff magazine, which was called “Speedbird” for its first five issues and ‘B.O.A.C Newsletter” from September 1946 onwards. The company logo, including changes in logo, might have come up in one of the issues. [I think the name “Speedbird” then became used for a quarterly publication that had previously been called “Wings Over The World”, another possible source of logo information]

I am continuing to see if there is anymore about the Clipper service Mr Taylor took to Lisbon.

Ah, the perils of skip-reading! I’ve had to amend my intended post, as there was a delay on Mr Taylor’s outbound Clipper journey to Lisbon.

Taylor had first planned to travel as far as Finland, visiting Portugal, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, France and Spain (not Britain). He had arranged visas for five of the countries but, at noon on the day before the departure of his booked Clipper flight, the promised German visa was refused. He spent the afternoon getting a British visa, in the hope he could get to Stockholm (and on to Finland) via Britain. He left on his Clipper flight, as planned, on Saturday 4 October 1941. There was first a delay at Bermuda because of an engine problem. The Clipper left Bermuda at 17.00 on the Sunday but turned back because of the conditions at Horta. Twice during the week, Clippers left Bermuda but they went direct to Lisbon carrying mail only.

Taylor eventually left Bermuda on “Friday night” (10 October 1941) and arrived in Lisbon the next day, sighting the Cape Roca lighthouse at 08.55. He spent time in Portugal, then on to Bristol, as described in an earlier post, and London. He was taken to Dover, at the Admiralty’s invitation, early on a Saturday and, that night, took the sleeper to Edinburgh, arriving early on a Sunday morning. He spent the day in the city, next taking a troop train north at 20.15, getting to his destination station ‘by midnight‘. It therefore looks like he left Leuchars late that Sunday evening or in the early hours of Monday. He ‘landed safely at Stockholm at sunrise‘, probably on Monday 20th October 1941.

[It could all have been a week later, I suppose, but that seems less likely] LATER INSERT: In a later post, longshot has posted the text of a contemporary article about Mr Taylor’s journey and this confirms that the flight from Leuchars was indeed a week later than I had supposed.

Taylor writes of the aircraft that took him to Stockholm: “Its guns were dismantled, since we were heading for a neutral port“, which surely means that it must have been a Hudson, not a Lodestar. If it was a Hudson, it could have been either G-AGDC or G-AGDF.

According to Nils Mathisrud’s book, G-AGDC had started to make the Stockholm Run in mid-July 1941 [about a month before the Lodestars] but the first arrival at Bromma of G-AGDF was not until Saturday, 18 October 1941, presumably in the early hours that morning. Not all return flights were immediate [crews often stayed over at a hotel in the city before going back] but let’s assume G-AGDF did return promptly, leaving later on the same day as its arrival. Given night-time flying, it would have got back to Leuchars on the morning of Sunday, 19 October 1941.

Assuming this happened, would G-AGDF, having arrived back from Sweden on the 19th October, have then left Leuchars very late the same day or very early on 20th, in the process carrying Taylor to Stockholm? Or is Mr Taylor’s flight more likely to have been in G-AGDC?

Thoughts, anybody?

It is interesting that you raised that question, longshot. Until I found that image of the “orange Globe” on-line, I had it in my mind that the ‘globe’ was blue, though a somewhat paler shade than your photo analysis would suggest – but I have no idea where I got that notion.

I would have thought, though, that the colour of the ‘globe’ would have to have been somewhat lighter than the colour used for the Speedbird symbol and the words.

Presumably, there was a BOAC document/instruction specifying the colour to be used.