Roe I Triplane

Alliott Verdon Roe trained as a railway apprentice and a marine engineer, and spent his spare time and savings on models and then full-size aeroplanes. In 1907 and 1908 he tested a canard biplane at Brooklands, where he claimed a few short hops that were never officially recognised, before the track’s owners asked him to leave. For his next machine he rented a pair of railway arches at the edge of Lea Marshes in Walthamstow, east London, as a workshop, and in 1909 he built a triplane there: three wings of 20 ft span stacked one above another, a triplane tail behind a triangular girder fuselage, and a chassis of bicycle wheels. To save weight and money it was covered with paper rather than cloth.

Power was the problem. Roe could afford only small engines, and he began with a 6 hp JAP motorcycle engine made by J.A. Prestwich in Tottenham, later replaced by a 9 hp JAP twin driving the propeller through a belt. After weeks of hops across the marshes, on 13 July 1909 he flew about 100 ft, and on 23 July about 900 ft at a height of a few feet. These are counted as the first flights in Britain by an all-British aeroplane: British in its design, its building and its engine. John Moore-Brabazon had flown a French-built Voisin at Leysdown in May, but Roe’s triplane owed nothing to France.

His brother Humphrey Verdon Roe, whose company made braces sold under the name ‘Bull’s-Eye’, helped to pay for the work, which is why the triplane carried ‘BULL’S-EYE AVROPLANE’ on its sides when Roe took it to the Blackpool flying meeting in October 1909. The Roe I led to the improved Roe II, III and IV triplanes, and on 1 January 1910 the brothers founded A.V. Roe and Company in Manchester. The original Roe I is preserved in the Science Museum in London.