Major LW Learmount

When the Great War began, a grammar school boy from Newcastle upon Tyne who had gone into business as a shipper and trader in the far reaches of the British Empire, found himself in the skies above Flanders. Aviation was in its infancy, and every flight had an element of the experimental about it.

When Britain declared war on a Germany already marching through Belgium in early August 1914, one Leonard Learmount, aged 25, was employed in the Straits Settlements (Malaya and Singapore), working for London-headquartered shipping and trading company Paterson Simons.

*Learmount (front centre) at his club in Singapore*

Life in the British Empire’s warmer climes was good for a young single man then, expat clubs providing social connections and sport.

Learmount had also joined the Malay States Volunteer Rifles (MSVR), a British overseas military reserve unit, as a Private Soldier. Nevertheless, following the outbreak of a war predicted to be “over by Christmas”, that November he took a ship back home to join up.

*The local army reserve unit taught him to maintain and ride a motorcycle*

It’s not clear why he was chosen for training as a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps (RFC), but given the indicators for other such personnel choices at the time, it’s probably because the MSVR had trained Learmount to ride and maintain a motorcycle. These skills, combined with his maths and physics education at the Royal Newcastle Grammar School, probably swung the decision.

Learmount reported to Brooklands aerodrome, Surrey, on 19 March 1915 for RFC flying training, and his flying log book says he got airborne the next day for his first lesson in a Maurice Farman “Longhorn” biplane, an ungainly French-designed machine with many of the same basic features as the Wright Flyer.

His instructor, Sgt Watts, hadn’t been trained as an instructor, he merely had flying experience. The RFC didn’t begin formally training instructors until 1917.

Learmount flew his first solo on 2 April, exactly two weeks later, having flown ten trips within sight of the airfield and logged a total of 3h 10min in the air. The day before – April Fool’s Day – he had flown a sortie lasting 45min, by far the longest duration trip he had flown. In the remarks column of his flying log book he wrote: “First time controlled machine from pilot’s seat. Did several landings. No wind – no bumps.”

Leonard’s entire pilot training lasted 12 weeks to the day he was posted, as a 2^nd Lieutenant, to No 7 Squadron at Saint Omer, France, about 25km south-east of Calais. He’d accumulated exactly 24h airborne time, and the entry in the “remarks” column of his log book for his 9 June final training sortie reveals how much the RFC was prepared to forgive to get pilots rapidly to the front line. It says: “Pancaked over sheds, smashed undercarriage and one wing landing.”

*Learmount’s flying log book at the end of his training*

Estimates of the number of pilot and observer deaths in the Great War have been set as high as 14,000, with 8,000 of them occurring during training. More recent studies, combining fatalities, missing, shot down, and captured suggest 9,000 is closer to the mark for the total, and the number of specific training casualties is uncertain – but it was staggeringly high by today’s standards. A young American aviator training with the RFC at its Montrose, Scotland training base in 1913 wrote home that “there is a crash every day and a funeral every week.” And that was just on his base.

Anyway, the landing at the end of Learmount’s final training sortie was clearly good enough for the RFC, because the next inscription in his log book is: “Arrived in France 12 June 1915.”

*Saint Omer aerodrome, about 25km from the Channel coast and a similar distance from the Western Front battle lines, became the largest RFC bas*e in France or the UK. **http://www.greatwar.co.uk**

Continued tomorrow, Episode 2: Learmount arrives at the RFC aerodrome at Saint Omer, where he learns to fly a new type and to cope with operations in hostile airspace.

A few days ago, on 12 June 2015, I arrived at St Omer aerodrome near Calais, France.

The date was not accidental: exactly 100 years before – on 12 June 1915 – my grandfather Second Lieutenant Leonard Wright Learmount, reported to St Omer aerodrome for active service on completion of his pilot training for the Royal Flying Corps.

The page in my grandfather’s flying log book that records his arrival in France and his first sorties from the St Omer aerodrome. I left a scanned copy of this page with the Aero Club members who welcomed us there.

St Omer has been a continuously active airfield since it became the RFC’s main air base for operations in support of the British military on the Western Front in the 1914-1918 Great War. It is still active today courtesy of the Aero Club de St Omer.

Taxiing along runway 27 for take-off on 09. The other runway is grass

Less than two years after his arrival in France with exactly 24h flying time in his log book, Major LW Learmount became commander of No 22 Squadron in 1917. He survived the war. Most aviators didn’t.

It took a long time for the significance in military aviation history of St Omer to be recognised publicly. But now it has been. The aerodrome is the site of the recently created British Air Services Memorial.

I take my hat off to those who survived and those who didn’t

In its heyday in 1917 and 1918 St Omer was the biggest RFC aerodrome anywhere. It was the RFC headquarters and main support base for the entire airborne effort over the Western Front. About 5,000 personnel were based there – mechanics, fitters, pilots, and all the support and logistic trades.

Now it is the home of the small but proud Aero Club de St Omer. Its runways are too small to support any form of commercial aviation, but the Club members have a powerful sense of the history of their aerodrome and have set up a mini-museum in the WW2 Luftwaffe-built hangar that houses the Club and its aeroplanes.

The Aero Club de St Omer historic record on display

Below: Sqn Ldr LW Learmount RAF ( I have no pictures of him in RFC uniform)

While he was operating over the Western Front he was clearly asked – or perhaps ordered – to write an account for the folks back home of what it was like to be doing his job. This appeared in a newspaper: I think probably the Daily Mirror during 1916 but no detail was written on the cutting.

Newspaper cutting (1916?)

Capt WE Johns, author of the Biggles series of adventure books for boys, could not have put it better himself.

LW Learmount was wounded twice, but his account is written in such a casual way that it is difficult to feel the danger, the fear, and to imagine the horrors he saw each day when he flew over battlegrounds like the Somme, Passchendaele and Cambrai.

My son Charles and I complete our St Omer pilgrimage

But fear he must have felt. In the citation for his award of the Distinguished Service Order, it says this about a photo-reconnaissance flight on 10 May 1917, on which he was wounded, but managed to fly his machine back to base: “On nearly all the other occasions on which this officer took oblique photographs his machine was literally shot to pieces and his escape from injury really miraculous.”

(Below) My grandfather after the war. Here he is standing next to a de Havilland Cirrus Moth floatplane at Seletar Creek, Singapore, in about 1930, where he was a founder member of the flying club there.

Leonard Learmount

Learmount.com

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