AVIATION Autograph album signed by a series of pioneering aviators, English cricketers, and other celebrity figures.

Lotto 920
3 500400
With autographs of Jack Hobbs, Ellen Terry, William Gladstone, H.G. Wells and Sir Ernest Shackleton. 1912. Landscape 12mo. Original padded pebble-grained brown calf, rounded corners, lettered in gilt, gilt edges, gilt dentelles, gilt floral end leaves; pp. [106] on variously coloured leaves; with autographs throughout and a couple of watercolours, a pencil drawing, and a pen-and-ink sketch, alongside pasted-in real photographic postcards and other photographic clippings of aviators, signed, and clipped signatures and autographs of English and French aviators of the day with accompanying biographical notes in ink by the collector; externally very good and sound with rubbing to edges, internally a little shaken and cracked with marks and signs of handling, lacking front free endpaper. The autograph album of 13-year-old H.G.Barwell, 26 George Rd., Edgbaston, Birmingham, dated Xmas 1912, of West House School, Edgbaston, and later of Sidney House, Oundle School. With wax seal to first page. A fascinating collection of genuine signatures and autographs of pilots flying in the pioneering days of aviation (many of whom died young) including: Claude Grahame-White (1879-1959), one of the most important flyers of his day, who won the Gordon Bennett Cup in 1910 ; Gustav W.Hamel (1889- 1914), who won the Aerial Derby in 1912 and 1913 and was lost in the North Sea while flying the Channel about May 16th, 1914; Louis Nöel, French aviator, born 1872, who ‘looped the loop’ and flew upside down; Richard Gates, the first manager of London Aerodrome, launched in 1912 by Grahame-White; Pierre Verrier, French aviator; Sir Thomas Sopwith (1888-1989); Bentfield Charles Hucks 1884-1918, innovating aviator who was the first Briton to form a loop in an aircraft; Ernest Thompson Willows (1886-1926), pioneering Welsh aviator and airship builder; George Lee Temple (1892-1914), who died at Hendon in a Blériot monoplane and is known for being the first British airman to fly upside down in this country and also the youngest to fly from Paris to London, and Edwin T.Prosser, born 1895, who is reputed to have flown a Blériot at the age of 16. Also, with several affixed photographic postcards in the Hendon Series of early aviators featuring Grahame-White ; A.V.Roe ; Gustav Hamel etc., with printed autographs. The album also includes 9 signatures of English cricketers who took part in the M.C.C.Australian Tour 1911-12 including Jack Hobbs (Surrey); Wilfred Rhodes (Yorks); Plum Warner, Captain (Middlesex); Herbert Strudwick (Surrey); Septimus Kenneir (Warwickshire); Ernest James ‘Tiger’ Smith (Warwickshire); Frank Rowbotham Foster (Warwickshire); J.W.Hearne (Middlesex) and Schofield Haigh (Yorkshire). Alongside several autographs of celebrities from the stage including Ellen Terry (actress); Ellaline Terriss (actress); Cecilia M.Hutchinson (singer); Sir Harry Lauder (Scottish singer and comedian) and Wilkie Bard, comedian. Also with the clipped signatures of William Gladstone, British Prime Minister; H.G.Wells, author; Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, Antarctic explorer; Sir William Howard Russell, journalist, who covered the Crimean War and was considered one of the first modern war correspondents, and, loosely inserted, Sir Frederick Albert Bosanquet (1837-1923), judge of the Central Criminal Court.