The Tharston scareship

Spring 1909. Across Britain, newspapers were printing reports of mysterious airships seen by night, from Peterborough and Southend to Cardiff, Hull and Birmingham. Historians would later tie this "scareship" wave to fear of German Zeppelins and of Britain becoming open to attack from the air. By mid May, the reports had reached East Anglia.

Wednesday 19 May 1909. Around midnight. Chatten, 21, assistant to J. A. Lammas, "a local grocer and draper", was cycling home through Tharston in south Norfolk. Suddenly he was "dazzled by a light from above". The trees and hedges around him were lit up brilliantly.

He looked up. Three or four hundred feet above him was "a long cigar-shaped object, a little thicker at the blunt end than a cigar". Beneath it ran "an iron bar, supporting a sort of framework". A yellow light shone at each end, but he saw no men on the framework. It was rising, "the tapering end going foremost, and was moving rapidly in the direction of Norwich", and he heard no "buzzing sound such as a motor would cause".

A Norfolk News reporter interviewed him within days. The Eastern Evening News of 20 May wrote: "It was 400 ft long, rapidly moving towards Norwich. He could not hear any motor." Whether 400 ft was the length or the height has never been checked against the original page.

At Wroxham, about 11.30 pm, a "well-known gentleman" whose motorcycle headlight had gone out was dazzled by a "flashlight" from above for about half a minute. He saw no craft, yet "that it was an airship he has no doubt whatever." At Catton, Mrs Turner of 1 Traverse Street was walking home from the theatre when a light made the street "look like day". She saw "a big star of light in front and a big searchlight behind" and heard a noise like "the whizzing of wheels".

The Norfolk News printed all three accounts together and stressed that the witnesses did not know one another. Only Chatten said he saw the body of the craft.

The paper's editor suspected "a private inventor experimenting in the Eastern Counties", or "an English Government airship undergoing secret trials". Percival Spencer, whose firm sold model balloons, thought them the "most probable" answer. E. Cæsar Hawkins of Long Stratton, the neighbouring village, allowed that a real airship was possible but also suggested "contagious imagination".

Flight thought "a practical joke was being played or that a bold advertising scheme was on foot." Walter Rye, Mayor of Norwich, expected "a big piece of advertisement". On 25 May a "Sizaire Mors" airship linked to Jarrott and Letts was found wrecked near Dunstable. Brett Holman notes it is "now generally assumed to have been the cause of the airship scare". It came down six days after Chatten's ride, and nothing ties it to Tharston.

Mike Dash later judged many of the simpler sightings of the wave to be planets and stars, and many of the complex ones hoaxes, with a small residue left unexplained.

No photograph exists and no official inquiry is known. The press record survives, gathered in Brett Holman's day by day reposting of the 1909 coverage on Airminded. Charles Fort had brought the 1909 reports to wider attention in Lo! decades earlier. Chatten's account still stands apart: a tapered body, a slung framework, a lamp at each end and a silent climb towards Norwich. None of the explanations offered has been shown to fit his sighting in particular.