1961: By Ladybird round Africa

Ralf Roggeveen

Ralf Roggeveen

Charter Member
'You realise this one is 4.99...' said the woman in the Oxfam shop apologetically.
'That's OK, it's worth it,' I explained, sounding unconvincing. And this is what I paid that princely sum for:




Ladybird Books are still going and will be instantly recognisable to all British readers. starting with very simple ABC type learners and fairy tales they progress up to something quite sophisticated, aimed at 11 - 13-year olds. This Flight series (which I have mentioned here in Sim Outhouse before) appeared between 1958 and '61, Flights 1 to 5: Australia, Canada, United States of America, India and finally this one, Africa. A very, very lucky brother and sister, John and Alice, go on exotic trips to the respective continents, travelling with their somewhat mysterious Daddy, who has 'business' (never explained) to conduct in the many countries (at least 10 in Africa alone) that they visit. Almost everywhere they go (and that includes you, USA) was once a British colony. A strong message of both text (by David Scott Daniel) and pictures (by Jack Matthew) is that all these places have a rosy, successful capitalist future because of what the kindly colonialists have done for them. From the perspective of the 21st Century this stance is, of course, often ironic. As you will see, Mr Scott Daniel, Daddy, Alison and John are never racist, but they are often extremely patronising towards the people who were in Africa long before they came along. My plan is to reproduce the whole text and all of the pictures and try not to be too judgmental - the book is 'of its time' and meant well; but was almost immediately out of date, since the smiling, happy 'Africans' (don't worry, they won't be referred to as 'natives'. You'll see them in the pictures, but they won't ever say anything) were actually fighting for their freedom and had a somewhat different take on 19th Century imperialism...

And, obviously, the other part of my plan is to reproduce the whole trip in fs9, using Cal Classic late '50s/early '60s scenery and AI...



Here's a free sample. Enjoy the daylight while you can because I'm afraid there's a long night flight to start with, but no doubt we will find plenty of sunshine down in the Dark Continent (- that doesn't sound right, but you know what I mean).

Hope the picture sizes are OK. They can be altered if anyone has any suggestions. Please post in and comment/correct - the one thing the Internet has over the printed word is that it's a two way process.

Extinguish your high tar, unfiltred cigarettes, fasten your seatbelts, admire the stewardesses' finer points (not you, children), and here goes...
 
Accidentally posted twice, not a very good start. but still!

Here is the first picture in the Ladybird book:



Jack Matthew, the illustator, was very good at all manner of ships (as you'll soon see), but not, I fear, much interested in aircraft. That's meant to be a BOAC Comet 4.

Here's the flightsim version we're going in:



The Ladybird people used a lot of artistic licence because BA115, the Comet to Africa of the time, left Rome at 21.25 and arrived at its first stop in Africa (Khartoum, Sudan) at 04.20 local time. Although it was more like five hours, not eight, that was still entirely in the dark - rather disappointing. I've tried to use real flights, airlines and aircraft of the time, so 'fraid it will be a while till the sun comes up.

By 1961 they would have been using Rome, Leonardo da Vinci International which officially opened on January 25 that year, though it had already been used for the Olympics held there (at Rome, not the airport) in 1960. I made a (happy) mistake and left from Rome, Ciampino (LIRA - geddit?), which was OK since I also had 1950s AI still up from my previous flying. If you go to Ciampino in the evening with the 1962 Cal Classic AI activated, you won't find much there. In the late '50s, however, it's interesting to have a look round before we leave.

Cattily-wittily-named French Viscount Pierre Laval:



Of course there's a lot of Alitalia (still called Linee Aeree Italiane) here and we will be seeing plenty of Viscounts throughout the trip (though travelling on far more DC-3s).



Beautiful KLM Connie:



We will have a little look round here, 'cos there won't be much to see on the long flight down.



I like this 'Plane-spotters'-view-through-the-wire' shot. Here's the lineup there at 8.15 on a summer's evening back in that Golden Age:



(Glad to report that the Scandinavian DC-7 is NOT called Vidkun Quisling.) And here's our route across the Mediterranean and into Africa:



Note that BOAC used to have a stopover at Cairo, but didn't in the early '60s. Egypt was definitely very pro-Soviet at this time. Memories of the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt (the so-called Suez Crisis, 1956) were still fresh and the British were actually fighting a secret war (in Yemen) against the Egyptians. None of that is mentioned in the Ladybird book of course.

Anyway, the Comet can make it without Cairo!
 
[Administrator: Could you please delete the (other) false start? I tried, but it still seems to be up there. Obviously don't want to screw up the whole thing.]

Speedbird 115 gets clearance...



...and we're off:



I have a horrible feeling that I've done hundreds, if not thousands, of hours playing with this, so no problems with the Comet (except that the Autopilot is a bit difficult to see in the dark). Set to fairly high realism: keep an eye on fuel consumption, which would have been the Flight Engineer's job in those days.



Our climb and turnaround out of the airport:



A slightly scary place for Comets, but I wasn't thinking about THAT. We fly down the Italian west coast:



We can catch the bright lights of Europe that we're leaving behind. People sitting down there in the warm evening, sipping their Camparis...



...Do they see us and our contrail thundering through the night?
 
If I made any mistake in this flight, it was to climb too slowly. We seemed to have been going for hours after reaching Cruise Altitude of 29000 feet, and I thought we'd be at least halfway across the Med. BUT, looking at the map:



Still over Italy! You will note that this route goes a long way East before turning South, around Crete, and going down to the Egyptian coast, roughly following the Nile to Khartoum (which is where the White and Blue Niles meet).



After about two hours we were handed over to Athens Control. I tried looking out to port, but couldn't see anything of Crete or any island.



Just us and the stars, and not much radio chatter either. In this map you can see Crete to the North and Cyrenaica in Libya, bottom left, sticking out from Africa:



The passengers would have had a good sleep.



I did remember to set the AI more accurately to 1962, so it will be correct for the rest of the flight. Overheard LTU mentioned on the radio: Luft Transport Union, the first postwar German charter operator, starting in 1955 and still going today. Got a picture of the (British) Air Safaris Hermes going from Marsa Alam (Egypt) to Luqa, Malta (a British possession in those days). After less than an hour with the Greeks we switched to Cairo Control, still well out over the water. Had hoped to spot the African coast looming up and get a picture of that, but missed it completely and was well over the desert before realising that we'd left the sea behind. The next one we spot will be the Indian Ocean (when we go to Zanzibar and Dar-Es-Salaam).

Here's a BOAC Britannia going from exotic Mallam Aminu Intl, Ivory Coast, back to Rome, LIRF being the later airport, Fiumicino/Leonardo da Vinci:

 
Thanks, wombat! :salute:

You may have noticed in that last shot, if you read the red stuff at the top, that when it was taken we had begun our descent. Around midnight we got Khartoum Control and they told us to go down to 15000. Oh yes, I think it was this Hunting Clan guy who was going to Malta; he passed us quite close:



There he goes:



Then we were sent down to 3000 feet for final approach, and you can see the line of brightness along the great River:



The little dot of light below is the airport beacon:



We've got RW36, so you swing right round and approach from the South. Personally I find this a lot easier in the dark, without so much distraction from knowing how close we come to mosques, minarets, palm trees, etc.



A nice slow landing in the Comet - Phew! I haven't lost it.
 
Nice one, what a great Idea. I will be following this journey, closest thing too a holiday for me this year.
Thanks for sharing and all the screen shots, it must take you a lot of time prpeparing these journeys for us too follow.


Steve
 
Aha, great to see another trip report from you Ralf :applause:
I'm going to follow this one too.
Thanks for sharing again.

Groeten,
Jaap (Spraycan)
 
Thanks very much, friends; I intend not to disappoint. Apologies for the delay in delivering the next bit, it's another quite long stretch and the aircraft required some practice before getting everything right...

Tom, I do have all five books, Africa completed the set:



These two have quite aeroplaney covers...



...but, as mentioned before, flying is usually incidental to showing what a fine job the Anglo-Saxons have made of imposing their hard-working values on the planet! If you like that Britannia flying over the Battery, you're going to really enjoy the next bit of Africa.

The Africa book does have much better maps (which I will eventually post), also making flightsim reconstruction a lot easier. Unfortunately I was wrong when I said that they never used the dreaded N-word:

This book takes you on a thrilling tour of Africa - the dark continent of desert, great rivers and mighty jungle; a land where great industries are being developed and where the throb of native drums can still be heard. You will visit towns ancient and modern, and see something of the wonderful wild life, too.

(Flyleaf of Africa. In the 1959 USA Flight someone is referred to as 'a negro'.) Neither Segregation in America, nor Apartheid in South Africa, are faced up to, but of course they are just children's books and such political issues were beyond their rather vague cultural, industrial and natural history interests.

Here's the first page of text from Africa:



Quite a poetic opening with the stock-character 'Arab' and his camel train. They seem to be stretching 'the Sahara' a bit far West, too; in my atlas it becomes the Libyan Desert quite a long way - several hundred miles? - before reaching the Sudan. And of course the Sudanese are OK because 'They were raised and trained by the British.' Daddy will give us a bit more of the neoliberal history lesson on the next page, but in the meantime we will take a little look round HSSS, Khartoum International.
 
Sadly we can't make out very much at this big airport which had a hub status stretching back to Imperial Airways days (we even came here in an airship long, long ago in one of my SOH flights - Willy will remember!). This BA115 arrived in the middle of the night, and our next stretch, down to the Equator, will also leave around 4 o'clock in the morning. I'm wondering if the Sudanese got revenge on Britain by scheduling BOAC slots at such ungodly hours? Yes, it was probably just because of the distances involved; though for anyone who's been on a Redeye more recently, reassuring to find that 1950s flying wasn't all lobsters, legroom and champagne.



We find our parking-space and everybody shuffles out, irritable and yawning (unlike in the Bright-Day-Dawning Ladybird book).



There in the background is the first of many DC-3s/C-47s that we will be encountering (and flying in) on this continent, Sudanese Airways of course. And our next aircraft also visible in that shot as you may have realised.



Round here I have added in some anachronistic later African and Middle Eastern cargo-carrier AI because the old Russian aircraft are so cool. An An-12 having a snooze with his Antonov comrades in the dark there.



Coming up: BA161, HSSS - HUEN. Watch this space.
 
We shall learn from the next page of Ladybird text that Alison & John spent 'several days' in Khartoum and what they found out a bit about the place. They then 'flew a thousand miles south to Uganda.' As with Cairo in the early '60s the Comet 4s weren't stopping at Entebbe, so the Ladybird party would have gone by Britannia:



The Bristol Type 175 had first started flying in 1954, ultimate British 4-engined propliner, designed for the Holy Grail London - New York run. The original 102 could (just) manage that and also took on the old Imperial routes south into Africa and east to Asia. By 1957 they had developed the bigger, more efficient 312 model, and this G-AOVK is one of them, which was with BOAC from 1958 to '65. Flight BA161 left Khartoum at 03.45 in the morning (!) and arrived at Entebbe 09.10 local time.

fs9 said that it would take 3 hours and 27 minutes, and my clock gave an arrival time of about 07.00, though I think I did set it up to leave around the right time. Just wanted to see the sunrise, and you will certainly get that.

Final quick look round Khartoum before we go:



A better view of Sudanese DC-3s. Also spotted this in the dark:



From Aden Airways, a subsidiary of BOAC. That is about as far north as you'll find them, but they had a lot of interesting routes around the Red Sea. They also operated some interesting aircraft like Avro Yorks, though by this time they had a few Canadair Argonauts and Viscounts.

Better go, Speedbird 161 got her slot:

 
Just a quick mention on the An-12 Ralf. When I was doing up my AI set, there wasn't much out there for Soviet airliners so I found an Aeroflot paint for the An-12 and used the heck out of it for flights out of Russia. Like you said, anachronistic, but it served a purpose.
 
I installed a few shabby African and Middle Eastern freight operators which often occupy the Cargo spaces of my fs9 airports while the Cal Classic AI goes to the passenger Gates. Like to think those Antonovs are ex-Aeroflot, perhaps still with Russian pilots and engineers who keep 'em flying in hotter climes!

Here's the map for that next thousand miles (several much shorter flights to come after this):



The Britannia is a real climber, even when fully-laden (we had over 13400 lbs of fuel):



Dangerously slow, you must be careful not to stall her.



The trick is to push forward on the yoke, keeping its nose down a bit and establishing a proper airflow round the wings before you switch to Autopilot (the AP isn't quite as good as the Comet's was, but will hold Altitude and Heading).

This map shows our exit from HSSS:



Looks a bit boring at first, but you can clearly see how the river divides into the White Nile on the left, the Blue on the right. The brilliant Australian writer Alan Moorehead did a book on each river, The White Nile describing General Gordon in the Sudan and the great Central African explorers - Speke, Burton, Livingstone, Stanley - searching for the fabled Source of the Nile. His Blue Nile is about Egyptian and Ethiopian history with the stories of Napoleon's 1798 invasion of Egypt and the Ethiopian Emperor Theodore who fought the British. John & Alison's Daddy could have taken The White Nile, published that year, '61, to read on this trip, but the other one came out in 1965. In a library or Amazon near you if you're interested.

At Cruise Altitude of 28000 you can make about 230 knots or Mach 0.59 (for jet comparison, the Comet was doing about 7.55):



A rare sight above, a large city in the desert (I think it might have been El Obeid).



After an hour & a half's flying dawn begins to break...
 
Sorry, that should have been .755 for the Comet's Mach speed of course. Around 5 o'clock in the morning we picked up Addis Ababa Control, so had crossed into Ethiopia.



The African sun makes its first appearance...



and you'll soon be able to see G-AOVK properly...



A very desolate, rocky desert below. The atlas tells us that this part of Ethiopia is called Yedebub Biheroch Bihereseboch Na Hizboch - I'll take their word for it.

After about three quarters of an hour over Ethiopia we were (briefly) handed back to Sudanese ATC. I was looking out for the long Lake Turkana (Northern Kenya), where we made this big heading change to cross the Great Rift Valley and fly SSW to our target, Lake Victoria.



Soon the land below became much greener and more fertile:



The next picture is a bit of a surprise:



We haven't landed yet, it's another Britannia, G-AOVN, at nearby HUSO, Soroti Airport. That's in Uganda and at 06.24 we were handed over to Entebbe Control.
 
Soon we see Lake Victoria up ahead:



People like the Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Persians and Romans all sent expeditions down the Nile to try to find its source. The 'Sudd' part of Sudan means 'Marsh' and every one of them turned back from there when they got that far south, because boats simply couldn't get through - and that was after negotiating the cataracts and rocks between Aswan and Khartoum. British explorers in the 19th century realised that a short cut to the source might be possible by beginning on the east coast of Africa and heading inland across what is now Tanzania. Starting in Zanzibar, Indian Army officers Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke reached Lake Tanganyika in 1858. Burton was sick, but Speke continued north and was the first European to see (and name) the enormous lake, though Arab slave traders had been to it before. So if you went there in 1961, then the Victoria Nyanza had only been known to the outside world for just over a century.

We begin our descent:



The countryside of northern Uganda is extremely green and could almost be Hampshire.



You head out over the water, turn round and final approach is from the south:



There's Entebbe:



Burton & Speke knew that whatever was the source of the Nile's water had to be very high up (over 5000 feet) to flow such a long way to the Mediterranean. This height also makes for a remarkably temperate climate right on the Equator, as Alison & John's Daddy will explain in due course.

 
Hi,

As I remember that Britannia at HUSO was there for crew training. BOAC had a training base there in this era.
 
Britannias are fun on the simulator, but in reality they had quite a lot of trouble with their Bristol Proteus engines and were quite sensitive to the African heat.

Not very much at Entebbe around 7.00 in the morning when we arrived:



There were a couple of nice Dragon Rapides there:



One belonging to East African Airways (who we'll be going with in something else...)



I think the other one was Caspair (?), local operator of the time. Some of these will be touristy wildlife & scenery spotting trips, still popular of course.

This typical cargo-carrier came in just after we'd parked:



The old British companies like Hunting Clan and Air Safaris come with the Cal Classic AI, but I don't think my Antonovs go this far south (they're more around Arabia and the Red Sea).



We park near the famous (notorious?) Terminal building - older readers may remember when that was in the news...

Now that we have reached Lake Victoria, I will let Daddy have his say:



General Gordon got a good revival a few years later thanks to Charlton Heston's excellent film about him (though he never really met the Mahdi as played by Laurence Olivier). That shows the Victorian British trying to deal with militant Islam which has made rather a spectacular comeback a century-and-a-bit later. It is interesting that none of the modern Islamist leaders has dared declare himself 'Mahdi' or 'Chosen One' (not even the late, much unmissed Bin Laden), though that may yet come if someone evil and charismatic enough appears... You read it here first.

Speke was convinced that the Lake - the enormity of which is startling described there as 'half the size of England' - was the source, but Burton was never convinced, knowing that the water had to come from even higher (the Lake is still below 4000 feet). He was sticking with 'the Mountains of the Moon' which those Ancient Greeks had heard of. So-called because they were snow-capped, like the huge peaks, Mounts Kenya and Kilimanjaro, to the far east of the Lake. In fact the ultimate source of the White Nile, such as it is, is now traced towards the west (in Uganda rather than Kenya), where there are also three other quite big Lakes, Albert, Edward and Kivu. Speke realised that when he went back and explored Victoria properly, discovering the Ripon Falls and where the origin of the Nile does come out of it, quite near Entebbe and Kampala. Another good, fairly accurate film is The Mountains of the Moon (1990) with Patrick Bergin enjoying the gift role of Sir Richard Burton.

You can see the Ladybird picture of happy Africans paddling, shouting and singing:



(No doubt their grandsons are wearing T-shirts and baseball caps with Coca-Cola, Lady Gaga and Nike written all over them.)
 
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