Avro Heritage Museum, Woodford, Cheshire (March-September 2026) Part 9 of 10

The last time we were together, I was walking along the streets near the Science and Industry Museum. This residency is drawing to a close. We are swiftly approaching the end of September. The research is completed, the interpretation is established, and the poems have been finished and sent to print.

Looking back to that day in Manchester in the rain, I returned to the archive recharged on a Mexican chicken wrap and a bottle of beet juice. What stood out to me the most was an unpublished manuscript belonging to Humphrey Verdon-Roe, the younger brother, the businessman who had helped his brother establish the first aeroplane company in England.

The manuscript was written on the most beautiful paper I had ever seen, a translucent, white-coloured paper that I’m tempted to call rice paper. Humphrey, unlike his brother, had received no official recognition for his role as a pioneer of British aviation. This was his way of telling his story, of giving himself the recognition that he deserved, I thought. But the novel never saw the light of day. Humphrey died before it could be properly redrafted. This was a rude awakening for me, a novelist who likes to put things off.

His writing was commendable. From his account emerged a fuller picture of the brothers’ journey. Both were born in April: Alliott on 26 April 1877 and Humphrey 18 April 1878. They were less than a year apart in age and did almost everything together.

But as they got older, Alliott began to show excellence in engineering, while Humphrey was more introspective and wistful, with no real idea of what he wanted to do. He later joined the Manchester Regiment, and was sent to Gibraltar in 1898, where he learned to fire a rifle, marched for miles without resting and led a squadron of nearly two hundred men.

This is not a photograph of Humphrey's manuscript, The Two Pioneer Brothers, but it is very similar to it.

Humphrey’s diaries contained many of the accounts later used in his novel. The days of fighting in

Ladysmith in the Boer war. The lack of food, and the hunger he sustained. His letters home to his mother and father were filled with these woes. There were horrid stories in the pages of his diaries, some of which he had omitted from the novel. But these were fascinating first-hand accounts for me as someone living in 2026. Things Humphrey had witnessed, which had no name back then, have a name today. For example, one night, he had just come off his watch in Gibraltar when he heard a gun go off.

The fort in Gibraltar would occasionally come under attack, either from enemy soldiers or from the local people opposed to the army’s being there. To minimise the risk, picquets were stationed at the wall around the clock. Humphrey had just come off a graveyard shift when he heard the gunshot. He ran to the aid of his men only to find the wall safe, but was confronted instead by a story of a near murder.

One of the soldiers who had been asleep had woken up, walked over to the man on guard, seized him by the neck and proceeded to squeeze. A fellow soldier fired his gun to wake the sleep-walking soldier. Today, such symptoms might be associated with PTSD, though those men had no such term for what was wrong with their comrade.

Humphrey documented this incident as he did many others, including his own illness. He would sometimes provide illustrations in his diaries to support his writing. Rough sketches of the Caesar Camp, the tents they lived in, the landscape and the wildlife. He also sketched himself being carried in a dhoolie, a type of stretcher, down a hill from camp.

He had been fighting a fever for days that had left him severely weak in the knees. This illness later led to his resignation from the army and to his travelling to Manchester to stay with his Uncle Henry, the then owner of the mills that were to become famous in British aviation history.

When I left the museum that evening, I knew that I had achieved what I needed to create the poetry collection. Yet many of these stories never made it into the poems.