Page 121 - KBHA Bulletin 10

118

Town to Mafeking (a distance of 800 miles) observed unidentified aircraft. Near the end
of the month a hovering airship disrupted a match at Green Point Golf Links between

two Cape Town women’s clubs. The women cleared the course while soldiers brought
in guns and heavy artillery to down the object if it came within range. It didn’t, and

when darkness fell, it flew away.

Reviewing the sightings, which ended in late October, an official document prepared by

the Department of Justice noted: “It had a long narrow torpedo shape with planes
attached . . . And everyone was quite serious in his belief that he actually saw or heard

it.” Even so, the Secretary of Justice labelled the entire affair an “illusion.”

Era 2: Flying at the Cape during the Great War 1914 - 18

Planes were used by both sides in the campaigns in South West Africa and East Africa.

The South African Aviation Corps (SAAC) served in those theatres and was initially

manned by the pilots who had graduated from Paterson’s school in Kimberley, and their
numbers were expanded slowly.

Late in 1914 a 90 h.p. Curtiss flying boat was in Simon’s Town being demonstrated to

the Royal Navy. (Figs. 3.22 & 3.23). In September the commander of the Cape Station,
Admiral King-Hall, hired the hydro-plane for £150 a month and created its civilian

pilot, H. D. Cutler, a Flight Sub-Lieutenant in the RNAS. The aircraft was dismantled

and shipped to East Africa aboard the “Kinfauns Castle” with the intention that Cutler
should locate the German cruiser, Konigsberg, that threatened allied shipping. On 3

December 1914 he found her 12 miles up the delta of the Rufiji river, but on a later
flight in December he was forced down by engine trouble and taken prisoner. Much

later, in June 1915, RN ships sank the Konigsberg.

By half-way through the war the human, financial and material cost was proving to be

staggering, particularly England’s loss of her finest young men in the trenches, at sea