On 24 September 1901 a wine merchant and his daughter, while accompanied by a famous motorcar and aviation devotee and together with an experienced aeronaut in control, set off on a flight in a balloon. The ascent had begun from Crystal Palace and proceeded to fly over Sidcup. As they travelled overhead of this south-east area of Greater London, the wine merchant’s daughter, Vera, made a suggestion – that they should form an aero club within the established automobile club to which they belonged.

The wine merchant was Mr Frank Hedges Butler, a partner in the wine import firm Hedges & Butler. He was already a keen motorist and as such had been one of the first motor car owners in Britain. At the time of their flight in the balloon, Butler was the honorary treasurer of the Automobile Club of Great Britain, an organisation that would attract royal patronage and so become the Royal Automobile Club in 1907. The motor car and aero enthusiast, also in the basket that day, was the Hon. C.S. Rolls. Also a founder member of the Automobile Club, Rolls would subsequently join the engineer Henry Royce four years later in forming a partnership that became Rolls-Royce Ltd in 1907. The fourth person on this auspicious balloon flight was their aeronaut pilot Mr Stanley Spencer, one member of a family of balloonists.

As they glided on the currents over south-east England, the inception of the Aero Club of Great Britain took place. This would be a club that would also later attract royal patronage and become known as the Royal Aero Club. It would take on the responsibility of regulating aviation in Britain and become responsible for issuing licences to pilots in this country. Early certificate numbers and details of who they were issued to can be found by searching TheGenealogist’s Occupational Records online. We are able to find Frank Hedges Butler in these records under the section for pilots, where we see his entry in the R.AE.C. Aeronauts’ certificates and note that he held certificate number 3 issued in 1906. Butler is recorded twice as he is also listed under his status as a holder of a French Aero Certificate with a date of 8 January 1903.

By 1907 Frank Hedges Butler had made more than a hundred balloon ascents, including having the distinction of undertaking the longest solo flight made in England in 1902. This was followed in 1905 by what was then the longest cross-channel balloon voyage, from Wandsworth in London to the French city of Caen. This flight had originally been intended only as an ascent to observe an eclipse of the sun but then became an extended trip across the Channel.

A search of the articles in the Flight Magazine, to be found on TheGenealogist, allows us to read that by 1910 Butler had put up a trophy for long distance balloon challenges and there we are able to see an evocative montage of the enthusiasts, including the provider of the prize himself, at Hurlingham.

The merchant and his partner’s daughter
Mr Frank Hedges Butler was born in London on 17 December 1855. He was the fifth son of the wine merchant James Butler and his wife Frances Mary Butler, née Hedges. Frank’s mother, Frances, was in fact the eldest daughter of her husband’s business partner, William Hedges, and thus James and Frances’s son Frank would carry both families’ names. In time he would also become a partner in Hedges & Butler, a business that was said to be one of the oldest wine and spirit merchants in Britain. It could trace its existence back to 1667 during the reign of Charles II when it was originally set up by an Edmund Harris at the Strand in London.

The family’s wine merchant premises were then established at 155 Regent Street in London and they proudly advertised that they held a warrant as suppliers by appointment to the royal family. A search of the Newspapers and Magazines collection on TheGenealogist rewards us with a full-page advertisement printed in the Illustrated London News on 5 December 1891.

The West End stomping ground
This discovery from the advertisement that Hedges & Butler were well established in the heart of London’s West End means that it comes as no surprise that Frank Hedges Butler himself lived in the exclusive stomping ground off Pall Mall. A record set that can be useful for the researcher to use when fleshing out a family story is shipping passenger lists. In the case of Frank Hedges Butler he appears in a number of records for voyages that he made. From the trip that he undertook in October 1923, when he was aged 67, sailing to Colombo, Sri Lanka (or Ceylon as it was known then) we are given his address in the UK as at Number 1 St James Street in London.

A search of the Lloyd George Domesday records on TheGenealogist for the property that he occupied in around 1910 reveals Butler just a few doors away and just around the corner from 1 St James Street. This suggests that he had moved a few paces there from his previous address in Pall Mall in the decade that followed 1910.

The IR58 Valuation Office survey, often referred to as the Lloyd George Domesday Survey as it was carried out as a result of Liberal Chancellor Lloyd George’s People’s Budget 1909/1910, is a valuable resource, from which we discover that Frank Hedges Butler occupied the second floor of numbers 55 & 56 Pall Mall. This premises was known as Prince’s Chambers and by looking at the linked map we can identify the pin that locates the property on Pall Mall. The site of his next address, 1 St James Street, makes the corner to the left of the Princes Chambers building.

Another useful way of discovering the whereabouts of an ancestor’s address is to consult a residential or street directory. TheGenealogist has a number of Trades, Residential and Telephone directories available on the website that cover different parts of the country as well as different dates. If we search for Frank Hedges Butler in the 1920s, the 1921 Post Office Directory, which provides a handy 1921 census substitute, identifies that he is one of at least 11 households that lived at number 1 St James

Street. From this we can form a picture of the second property as being made up of a number of town flats in this exclusive part of London’s West End.

Wine, spirit and wings
Frank Hedges Butler married Ada Tickle at Halifax in 1880, which we are able to find using the marriage records on TheGenealogist. The couple had two daughters: Frances, who died as a baby, and Vera, who would grow up to be a car and aviation enthusiast and who was born on 17 April 1881. Vera, as we have already seen, was instrumental in the founding of the Aero Club of Great Britain, but it was also because of her motorcar catching fire that they were in the balloon in the first place.

Vera was thought at this time to be the girlfriend of the Hon. Charles Rolls and she, Rolls and her father had proposed to go on a motor tour. This excursion, however, had to be cancelled when Vera’s Renault 4.5 caught fire, thus leaving them at a loose end. The charismatic lady then arranged a balloon flight with the distinguished professional aeronaut Stanley Spencer as something of a distraction from their ruined plans. And so it was that the wine merchant and the man whose name would be forever linked to cars that would go on to sport the Spirit of Ecstasy on their radiators were flying over Sidcup that day when Vera proposed the formation of the aero club. The Hon. Charles Stewart Rolls had the privilege of being granted certificate No. 1 in the new club. A further search of the Royal Aero Club Yearbook 1914 reveals that Rolls, already a balloon aeronaut, then went on to pursue powered flight in aeroplanes and was awarded the Aviator’s Certificate No. 2 on 8 March 1910, having passed his test in a Short Wright biplane. Further entries in TheGenealogist’s pilots’ records reveal that he had, a few months earlier, obtained French pilot’s certificate No. 23, on 6 January 1910 in a Wright biplane. It also records the Hon. C.S. Rolls in the pages of British Aeroplane Fatalities when, on 12 July 1910, he was killed in a plane crash at Bournemouth.

Searching in the Newspapers & Magazine collection on TheGenealogist reveals a copy of Flight Magazine for July 1910 in which there is a picture of Rolls’ machine after the fatal accident. His death at the age of 32 must have been hard for the friends to bear.

Youngest life member
While Vera had once been linked to Rolls by being described as his girlfriend, by the time of his death she had been married to another man for six years. This we can discover from a search of the marriage records on TheGenealogist. In the second quarter of 1904 Vera Frances Butler and Hugh Iltid Nicholl wed at Steyning in Sussex. There is then a charming picture in the 15 May 1909 edition of Flight of their two and a half year old son, David. He is featured as being the youngest ‘life member’ of the Aero Club League, more likely testifying to his mother and grandfather’s shared interest in the burgeoning field of aviation than the young boy’s own interests at such a tender age.

David Iltid Nicholl would go on to attend Eton and so we are able to then find his entry on TheGenealogist in the Education Records where he is listed in The Old Public School-Boys’ Who’s Who. From this we are able to glean that when he grew up he became a chartered accountant and a director of the family wine merchant business. The Nicholl family, into which Vera had married, can be traced back a number of generations on account of their appearance in the Burke’s A History of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain 1914 that we can consult as part of TheGenealogist’s Peerage, Gentry & Royalty records. Their lineage, we can learn, goes back to Llanmaes in Glamorganshire and included a high sheriff and several judges.

In the First World War, Hugh Iltid Nicholl had been an army officer, as we can see by consulting the Military records on TheGenealogist where we find him in Army Lists and in the Medal Cards. He had been awarded a DSO, had been mentioned in despatches and reached the rank of lieutenant colonel on the General Staff. As the Second World War was starting and the 1939 Register was being compiled, he and Vera were to be found living at Orchard House in Amersham, Buckinghamshire. Hugh is recorded now as the managing director of a wine merchants and we are able to use the linked mapping provided by TheGenealogist’s Map Explorer to see the property in its environs near Winchmore Hill.

To build a family story it is always good to have a number of actual records that act as firm points on which the tale can be hung. So in this story of the people who formulated the beginnings of the Royal Aero Club we have found extensive details of the wine merchant, his daughter and the famous motorcar proponent and pioneering aviator. The Births, Marriages and Deaths, Occupational Records, Newspaper and Magazine Collections, the Peerage, Gentry & Royalty records, Passenger lists and the Property and Landowner records on TheGenealogist have all been useful and the documents and accounts found within them have helped to add to this particular family history story. The extensive number of record sets available to Diamond subscribers of TheGenealogist could help you to enhance your own family research into your ancestors in a similar way. {