Thomas Sopwith

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Thomas Sopwith (1910)

Sir Thomas Octave Murdoch Sopwith CBE (born January 18, 1888 in Kensington , † January 27, 1989 in Hampshire ) was an aviation pioneer , entrepreneur and sailor.

Life

Sopwith was the eighth child and only son of a civil engineer. He went to school in Hove and Lee-on-Solent . His love for flying arose when he eyed the first canal crossing with an air passenger, which John Moisant managed. He went to Brooklands and flew with Gustav Blondeau for the first time . Then he taught himself to fly. The first time he flew on October 31, 1910, he crashed, but was uninjured. Sopwith finally obtained the pilot license No. 31 of the Royal Aero Club on November 22, 1910 .

As early as December 18, 1910, he managed the longest flight from Great Britain to the mainland in a British plane in a competition. He flew around 270 kilometers to Beaumont in Belgium in 3 hours and 40 minutes , earning him £ 4,000 in prize money. He invested this in the establishment of his own flight school , the Sopwith School of Flying in Brooklands.

Sopwith met Fred Sigrist in June 1912 and together with a few others founded the Sopwith Aviation Company , which became an important supplier of fighter planes in the First World War . The best known is the Sopwith Camel . For his personal commitment, he was awarded the Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1918 .

After the production of over 16,000 aircraft, the Sopwith company was liquidated in 1920. Shortly thereafter, Harry Hawker , Thomas Sopwith, Fred Sigist and Bill Eyre founded HG Hawker Engineering , which later became Hawker Aircraft Ltd.

In 1953 he was beaten to a Knight Bachelor degree . After Hawker-Siddeley was nationalized, Sopwith remained a consultant to the company until the 1980s. Sopwith died a few days after his 101st birthday. His grave is in the churchyard of All Saints Church on the Isle of Wight .

Yachts

In 1927 Sopwith commissioned the luxury yacht Vita from Camper and Nicholsons . It was sold to John Shelley-Rolls in 1929 and renamed Alastor . It was confiscated by the Royal Navy during World War II and used in Strangford Lough . In 1946 it sank at Ringhaddy after a fire.

In 1934 and 1937 Sopwith took part in the America's Cup with his yachts Endeavor and Endeavor II . Both yachts came from Charles E. Nicholson . With his highly controversial runner-up in 1934, he became a Cup Legend and was inducted into the America's Cup Hall of Fame in 1995.

In 1937 he received the Philante , also built by Camper and Nicholsons . She was used by the Royal Navy as the escort ship HMS Philante during World War II . After the war she was sold to Norway, where she is one of the last royal yachts in Europe as Norge .

literature

  • Alan Bramson: Pure Luck, The Authorized Biography of Sir Thomas Sopwith, 1888-1989 , 1991 ISBN 1852602635
  • JM Ramsden: Farewell Sir Thomas , in Airplane Monthly April 1989, pp. 200-203

Web links

Commons : Thomas Sopwith  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. http://www.irishwrecksonline.net/details/Alastor93.htm
  2. ^ Yacht 1939, Volume 20: Tall Ship TOM Sopwith , accessed on October 13, 2016