John Moore-Brabazon, 1st Baron Brabazon of Tara

John Theodore Cuthbert Moore-Brabazon, 1st Baron Brabazon of Tara, GBE, MC (8 February 1884 – 17 May 1964) was a London born English aviation pioneer and Conservative politician.

He learned to fly in 1908 in France in a Voisin biplane. The first resident Englishman to make an officially recogniszed aeroplane flight in England was JTC Moore-Brabazon of 450ft 600ft and 1500ft on the 2nd May 1909 on the Isle of Sheppey at LEYSDOWN KENT and on the 4th May 1909 JTC Moore-Brabazon had his picture taken outside of their aero club Mussel Manor now known as Muswell Manor, along side the Wright Brothers, Short Brothers, Rolls, and many early avaition pioneers. On October 30 1909, flying a Short Brothers aircraft, he flew a circular mile and won a 1,000 pound prize offered by the "Daily Mail" newspaper. On November 4 1909, as a joke to prove that pigs could fly,Arnold-Baker, Charles (1996, 2001): "The Companion to British History." Routledge, London. ISBN 0-415-18583-1.] he put a small pig in a waste-paper basket tied to a wing-strut of his airplane. This may have been the first live cargo flight by airplane. With Charles Rolls he would later make the first ascent in a spherical gas balloon made in England by the Short brothers.

On March 8 1910 Moore-Brabazon became the first person to qualify as a pilot in the United Kingdom and was awarded Royal Aero Club certificate number 1, his car also bore the number-plate FLY 1. During the First World War he served in the Royal Flying Corps, attaining the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and was awarded the Military Cross. He was instrumental in the development of military aerial photography.

Moore-Brabazon later became a Conservative Member of Parliament for Chatham (1918-1929) and Wallasey (1931-1942) and served as a junior minister in the 1920s, then Minister of Transport and Minister of Aircraft Production in Winston Churchill's wartime government. He was forced to resign in 1942 for expressing the hope that Germany and the Soviet Union, then engaged in the Battle of Stalingrad, would destroy each other. Since the Soviet Union was fighting the war on the same side as Britain, the hope that it should be destroyed, though common in the Conservative Party, was unacceptable to the war effort.

Moore-Brabazon was elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Brabazon of Tara in 1942. In 1943 he chaired the Brabazon Committee which planned to develop the post-war British aircraft industry. He was involved in the production of the Bristol Brabazon, a giant airliner that first flew on September 4 1949. It was then and still is (as of 2004) the largest aeroplane built in Britain.

A keen golfer, Moore-Brabazon was captain of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, the governing body of golf, from 1952-1953. At the age of 70 he was still riding the Cresta Run.

Moore-Brabazon was President of the Middlesex County Automobile Club from 1946 until his death in 1964.

In 1906, he married Hilda Mary Krabbé, with whom he had two sons.

References

External links

* [http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/person.asp?LinkID=mp00524 National Portrait Gallery]
* [http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/portrait.asp?LinkID=mp00524&rNo=1&role=sit Photograph by Cecil Beaton, 1940]
* [http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/portrait.asp?LinkID=mp00524&rNo=0&role=sit Portrait in Pastels by Alfred Egerton Cooper, 1958]

Offices held