The Ipswich and Cardiff scareship

Spring 1909. On 23 March, Police Constable Kettle in Peterborough reported an airship overhead. He was the first of many. The sightings peaked in the second half of May, and the historian Brett Holman counted 49 in London newspapers that month. The press called the craft the "scareship", or the "phantom airship".

Witnesses described much the same thing. Two lights, usually around one in the morning, moving at a "rapid rate" unlike any airship of the day. One report placed the same type of craft over both Ipswich and Cardiff on a single night.

The Standard of 17 May 1909 printed a table of about 20 sightings. Two came from Ipswich, both dated 24 April, credited to "P. O. Hudson" and Mr. J. A. Smith. Smithsonian's Air & Space later wrote that the papers reported two constables in Ipswich seeing an egg-shaped ship over Suffolk.

About 1.15 on the morning of Wednesday, 19 May. A clear night, no moon. Robert Westlake was signalling trains at King's Junction, Queen Alexandra Dock. "I was startled by a weird object flying in the air," he said. A cigar-shaped "boat", with two lights that could be "plainly seen", about half a mile up and "travelling at a great rate."

He was not alone. Pointsman W. Morrison, traffic foreman C. Harwood, four coal tippers and the third mate of the s.s. Arndale were named as witnesses. A fellow workman said "the whizzing of its motor was heard by us all." The object came from the direction of Newport, curved over the docks and passed out over the Bristol Channel toward Weston. After a minute or two, "the lights on board were suddenly extinguished."

That same week, about 11 at night, Lethbridge was walking home from Senghenydd over Caerphilly Mountain, pushing a truck. He was a travelling Punch-and-Judy showman who also worked at the docks. He saw "a long, tube-shaped affair lying on the grass on the roadside", about 45 feet long. Two men in "big, heavy, fur coats, and fur caps" shouted at him in a language he took to be neither English nor Welsh. The object rose. They "jumped into a kind of little carriage suspended from it." Clear of the telegraph lines, it "turned on two lights and headed towards Cardiff."

The next day he led a journalist to the spot. The hard ground was marked as if a ploughshare had been dragged across it. Nearby lay a red French label on a chain with a small plug, a stockbroker's letterhead cut in half, newspaper scraps about airships and the German army, and an empty tin of metal polish. Two months later he was still "quite positive" he had seen an airship.

The War Office and the Aeronautical Society made inquiries, with no result. The Conservative press favoured German Zeppelins, but the Zeppelins of the day could not have reached Cardiff. Ernest Willows, who built Britain's first airships near Cardiff, was in London at the time. Percival Spencer proposed unmanned model airships heated by spirit lamps, and Dr M. B. Boyd later claimed test flights of his own, though he never produced a verifiable airship. The Manchester Guardian identified the plug as a Michelin tyre-valve pin from a motor car.

Holman found no archival evidence of any airship over Britain in 1909 beyond the known ones, and suggests meteors, fire balloons and press amplification. Yet the named dock workers, the showman's insistence and the strange litter on the mountain keep the Cardiff scareship alive as one of the most vivid stories of the 1909 airship scare.