The Sheerness Scareship

In 1912 night flying was rare, and Germany was building rigid airships. Sheerness, a naval dockyard town on the Isle of Sheppey, sat at the heart of British unease. A few miles east, Eastchurch was home to the naval flying school.

Monday, 14 October 1912. The sun had set shortly after 6 pm. Then many people in Sheerness and Queenborough heard what seemed to be an aeroplane engine overhead. Some, among them a Royal Navy lieutenant, thought they saw a red light moving over the town, and possibly a searchlight too. By about 7 pm, after roughly half an hour, it was gone.

The townspeople assumed the aircraft came from Eastchurch and telephoned the air station. There the sound was heard, but nothing was seen. Staff lit flares to guide the aircraft down. Nothing landed.

On 25 October the Admiralty's Air Department ordered the commander of HMS Actaeon to report on the incident. On 18 November William Joynson-Hicks asked in the Commons about "a Zeppelin dirigible passing over Sheerness on the night of the 14th October." The War Minister, Colonel J. E. B. Seely, said the Admiralty had "no definite information."

On 27 November Winston Churchill confirmed that "an unknown aircraft was heard over Sheerness about 7 p.m. on the evening of 14th October." He added: "There is nothing in the evidence to indicate the nationality of the aircraft." Asked about British airships that night, he said: "I know that it was not one of our own airships." Bolton Eyres-Monsell pressed him: "Was not the sound of a motor distinctly heard at the time, and lights seen, which are not carried by aeroplanes?" No reply is recorded.

In private, Churchill was surer. On 6 December he told the Committee of Imperial Defence there was "little very doubt" the airship was a German vessel. In February 1913 he pointed to the civilian Zeppelin Hansa, after a Bristol pilot, E. Harrison, said he had seen it leave Germany on 13 October. Vice-Admiral John Jellicoe told the committee that "A German airship of the Parseval type had flown over Sheerness and back to Germany."

The prime suspect was the German Navy's new Zeppelin L 1. But German newspapers said its North Sea proving flight landed near Berlin at 3:30 pm, about three hours before the sounds. Naval officers told the Daily Mail they thought the published times had been shifted by 24 hours. Count Zeppelin denied that any German airship had come near England. Hansa, for its part, reportedly landed at Gotha at 4 pm.

Historian Brett Holman thinks an unrecorded British flight is possible. In 1998 Granville Oldroyd and Nigel Watson proposed a hoax by the aviator Claude Grahame-White and Churchill. Holman rejects it. No evidence has surfaced, and Churchill waited a month before mentioning the incident.

The conservative press seized on Sheerness as proof that Germany could attack Britain from the air. Parliament rushed through a law banning flights over naval bases. The incident fed the phantom airship wave of early 1913. Holman's conclusion is spare: something was heard, an aircraft was probably flying, and whose it was remains unknown.