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| June 2nd | RNAS Mullion (Operational) |
An airship's view of its base, RNAS Mullion |
In the First World War, German U-boats were continually attacking merchant shipping in the English Channel and it was determined that there was an immediate need for anti-submarine aircraft based in Cornwall. This resulted, in 1916, in the construction of RNAS Mullion on 320 acres of sequestrated land on the Bonython Estate on the Lizard Peninsula. Originally named ‘The Lizard Airship Station’, its strategic position caused it to become central to anti-submarine warfare and with its two vast hangars was the base for a number of airships. Each of the ‘Coastal’ (‘C-Class’) airships had a tri-lobe balloon of a capacity of 170,000 ft3 of hydrogen and an open gondola suspended beneath with capacity for five aircrew armed with four machine guns and a number of bombs which were simply thrown out of the unheated gondola. The cold led to the crew frequently walking around the outside edge of the gondola holding on to the grab-rails and frequently, in the winter after a typical 15-hour shift, the ground staff had to lift them out, whilst as shown below, when landing, a ground crew of at least fifty personnel was needed to anchor it. One of the airships, C-9, dubbed the ‘The Darling of the Airship Service’ is believed to have destroyed three U-boats whilst another, C-22, scored a direct hit on a submarine’s conning tower with a hand thrown bomb. The airbase, by now renamed RNAS Mullion, closed in the summer of 1919, the airships were decommissioned and the sequestrated land returned to its owners. The buildings were dismantled and used to construct new homes on the peninsula. Today, the only visible remains are the concrete foundations of the enormous hangars.
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