Neville Stack was one of the great inter-war aviators. His derring-do earned him headlines from Berlin to Bagdad. And in the summer of 1932, he brought headlines to Blackpool on the Fylde coast.
Stack was the son of an Irishman who had made a fortune in Victorian London. He was working as a mechanic when the Great War broke out, and he enlisted straight away. And it was while serving on the Western Front that he made the move which would shape the rest of his life.
In 1917, he joined the Royal Flying Corps, doing so – a friend would later say – because he wanted more excitement in his life. And he spent the rest of the war fighting, not in the trenches, but in the skies. He served until 1925 on both airmail flights in Iraq and on bombing raids, which was quite a commitment for a man who already had a wife and two young sons.
When he returned to civilian life, Captain Stack became a jobbing pilot. He tested new aeroplanes and taught paying customers how to fly. He made the first aerial circuit of the Mediterranean. And in 1927, he became the first man to pilot a light plane to India. He did that in a sparkling white De Havilland Moth, and when he arrived back in Britain he was awarded the Air Force Cross by the King.
White Moth
In the years that followed, Stack took part in record-breaking flights and made glamorous friends. The flights were to places such as Istanbul and Warsaw, while the friends included Amy Johnson and Sir Alan Cobham. He earned the nickname the ‘Kangaroo Airman’ because of his ‘long hops’. He joined a flying circus. But what brought him to public attention was his Blackpool derring-do.
The town had long been a centre for aviation. The very first official air pageant had taken place there in 1909. The first scheduled air service stopped there. And the pageant the resort hosted in 1927 was the biggest yet seen.
In 1932, Stack chose Blackpool’s Stanley Park as the starting point for another flight to India. The aerodrome there had opened only recently, and the flight would be the first international one to depart from anywhere in the north of England. He wouldn’t be travelling in a Moth this time, but in a larger and more powerful Spartan Mailplane. This was an impressive craft – white again and streamlined, with an enclosed cabin and twin fins at the tail.
The plane had been supplied by its manufacturer, while all the running costs would be met by Blackpool Corporation, which hoped the flight would bring publicity to the new aerodrome. Stack would be accompanied by a journalist named William Courtenay, who had been taken on by the town’s Evening Gazette newspaper. He was the friend who had written of Stack’s desire for excitement, and he would send back vivid dispatches from every stage of the journey.
Fairy palace
Stack departed Blackpool on Wednesday, 15 June 1932, after a civic luncheon had been held in his honour at the clubhouse in Stanley Park, and yet another air pageant had taken place on the aerodrome outside. The weather was glorious. The Mailplane was christened ‘Blackpool’ in a shower of champagne. And suddenly, Stack and Courtenay were off.
They flew over Rome, Athens and the snow-capped mountains of Anatolia. They were above Syria when night fell, enveloping them in what Courtenay called “inky blackness”. And the only lights came from isolated villages along the great Euphrates River.
Baghdad was eventually located, “standing alone, with desert all round, all lit up like some great fairy palace,” Courtenay wrote. “This was a lovely sight I shall never forget – a blazing palace of light, like Blackpool itself illuminated for the autumn season.”
The two men landed at the huge RAF base in the city. “Voices could be heard in the distance,” Courtenay went on. “Officers came forward to greet us. Above the din could be heard friendly Lancashire voices of airmen.” And a great cheer went up when the name ‘Blackpool’ was spied on the side of the Mailplane.
From there they flew to Persia. They stayed in the house of a man who exported opium to Manchester, and were fed a sumptuous meal by locals who arrived on camels, wearing bowler hats. And finally, six days after leaving Blackpool, they reached Karachi.
Civil war
Stack’s engine failed during the return journey, and he had to crash-land on a Greek island. The locals who fed him there insisted on drinking copious toasts to the King and Queen of England and the Mayor and Mayoress of Blackpool. Unfortunately, a breakdown in communication meant that he arrived home a day before he was expected. There was no one to meet him at Stanley Park. He had to do it all again the following day. And the Kangaroo Airman now found himself nicknamed the ‘Too Early Airman’.
He had many other adventures after that. He worked in Iraq again, flew down to West Africa, broke yet more records, and piloted the Prime Minister. He nearly went bankrupt after suing the manufacturer of one of his aeroplanes. And, looking for a quick way to raise money, he got himself caught up in the Spanish civil war.
The second world war might have come as a relief after that. It saw Stack fly with the Fleet Air Arm in the Far East and join that select band of men who served in both world wars and all three branches of the Armed Forces.
He returned to Karachi afterwards and found a job with the sub-continent’s first Muslim airline. But his time there was brief. In February 1949, while walking across the aerodrome, Stack was struck and killed by a military truck driven by a local man. He was, of course, mourned around the world. But nowhere was he mourned more than on the Fylde coast, which had once had a close-up view of his derring-do.
To read the book about Neville Stack in Blackpool, you can find it here on the publishers page.
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