"Colonel Samuel Franklin Cody"

According to his own dubious stories, he was a prodigy with his lasso, roping calves and cockerels from the back of his pony at the age of 6.  'In those days,' he would tell awestruck European audiences in later years, 'I felt I could ride anything that wore hair.  Buffalo, wild steers, wild horses, wild elks?'  As a boy he was a superb horseman, and by 1881, at the age of 14, Cody had moved to Montana and was breaking in horses professionally.  Then, it seems, he became a cattle-trail cowboy, then trail boss.  Sometime in the early 1880's he took part in, and maybe even led, an epic drive of 3,275 cattle from Texas to Montana.  He and his fellow riders covered 1,200 miles of open country in four months, losing only 74 head.

There followed an unsuccessful spell as a Klondike gold prospector before he became a mustanger, capturing wild horses.  The mustang business would continue for the rest of the century, but by 1888, falling beef prices and a series of terrible winters had sent the cattle industry into decline.  Cody joined the flow of cowboys heading east to start new careers with the popular Wild West shows.  That spring, he joined Adam D. Forepaugh's famous troupe of performing cowboys and Indians as it toured through five states, before winning a role in a revue called Deadwood Dick, or the Sunbeam of the Sierras, produced by Annie Oakley, the phenomenal sharpshooter.  Romance had never been high on the young Cody's agenda.  His youth had been uncompromisingly chaste.  'The real cowboy,' he once said, 'must be a good shot, a good roper, able to mount any horse, act as a veterinary, blacksmith, tailor, to wash his own linen and wear it unstarched, cook his own food and last, but by no means last, he must consider womankind non-existent.'

But at 22, Cody married Maud Lee from Pennsylvania - her father's blessing having been secured thanks to the misapprehension that his new son-in-law was related to Buffalo Bill.  The young Westerner took his bride to England, where by the 1890's the British had formed a passion for the Wild West after the visits of Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley.  On the streets of London, Cody must have seemed the embodiment of all that was most dangerous and alluring about the Texas cowboy.  Consciously modeling himself on Buffalo Bill, he wore his hair long, tended his beard and moustache lovingly and always dressed in buckskin.  

He quickly found work in a show - a 'Wild West Burlesque' at London's Olympia.  Maud was now part of his act , holding glass balls perilously close to her body and head while her husband shot at them from over his shoulder, between his legs - sometimes even using mirrors.  When the show closed prematurely, owing to a legal action brought by Buffalo Bill, who claimed he owned all right's to the term 'Wild West', the intrepid pair set up on their own, impudently billing themselves as 'Captain Cody and Miss Cody: Buffalo Bill's son and daughter'.  Buffalo Bill's solicitors went into action again, and eventually Maud left her husband.  Perhaps she really had believed he was the son of the famous Cody.

However, in any event, the dashing imposter had found another love, Lela Blackburne Davis, daughter of a leading English bloodstock agent, who had four children by a previous marriage and was 15 years older than Cody.  Nevertheless, they were to remain devoted to each other.  Not even did she let Cody train her children to become part of his act - billed as 'S.F Cody And Family, Champion Shooters Of America', she took part herself, allowing him to shoot at 20 glass balls around her body.  She wore blood-red tights so that if she was grazed by a bullet it would not show.  The 'Family' were even more of a success when they crossed the Channel to Paris at the end of 1892.  Brash and exotic, Cody was immediately christened 'Le Roi des Cowboys'.

It was among the bicycle-mad French that the ingenious Cody dreamed up a lucrative new outlet  for his energies - 'the horse-versus-velocipede' race.  His first wager, against one of the country's champion cyclists, was a gruelling affair, but he won the 10,000 francs in style, crossing the finishing line standing astride two of his mounts.  The event was so popular that other events were staged, drawing crowds of thousands, not just in France but all over Europe.  For the next five years the Cody family led a peripatetic life, putting on Wild West performances as their stock-in-trade while the famous horseman continued to issue challenges to all and sundry, from long-distance runners to tandem cyclists, most of which he won.

Back in England again, he failed to sell the patent of the rapid-firing pistol he had invented to the War Office.  After demonstrating it's remarkable firepower by shooting holes in a hail of sixpence pieces thrown into the air, the government's only response was to send him a pompous letter, warning that he would face a 'severe penalty' if he continued defacing 'coins of the realm'.  Undaunted, Cody returned to the boards, staging a show at Alexandra Palace in the summer of 1898 which gradually evolved into a full-scale, popular melodrama called the Klondyke Nugget, featuring trick shooting, knife battles, galloping horses, exploding bridges and an Indian war party.  It became one of the most popular and lucrative touring productions of it's era.

However, Cody was being drawn to a new and still more challenging arena.  It was at the end of the 1890's that towns throughout Britain, wherever the Klondyke Nugget was playing, began witnessing a curious sight.  Dressed in their distinctive Wild West outfits, Cody, Lela's sons and a group of helpers, would arrive at an open space and spend hours laying out what seemed like miles of ropes and wires, then assembling a mass of bamboo and canvas into vast, box-shaped kites.  The crowds would thicken as, one by one, the huge constructions were allowed to catch the wind.  To the onlookers' astonishment, Cody would climax the performance by climbing into the basket attached to the last of the kites, bark his customary instruction to 'let her go', then ascend imperiously into the air.

What first fired Cody's interest in kites is uncertain, but in any event, by the dawn of the new century, Cody the touring Wild West showman was pouring more time and money into man-carrying kite experiments than anyone else in Britain.  His designs grew more and more ingenious, some able to bear a man in a basket beneath it hundreds of feet into the air.  By 1901 he was writing to the Under-Secretary of State of War to offer his 'Aroplaine or War-Kite' for use in battle by military observers.  In a test flight that year Cody rose 300 feet into the sky.  It was, he crowed: 'The highest ascent known to man without the aid of gas.'  Unfortunately, he then crashed to earth, somehow managing to escape without serious injury.  By the summer of 1902, Cody's kites were matching the Klondyke Nugget for thrills and spills.  In Blackpool, police were drafted in to control the crowds on the beach when Cody flew a line of seven kites close to the towns famous tower.

In Glasgow, the constabulary complained that his flights from the roof of the Metropole Theatre were causing chaos on the streets where people walked around with their heads staring skywards.  In 1906, Cody became chief kite instructor at the Military Balloon School at Farnborough and then chief engineer on a secret project to get Britain's first powered airship off the ground.  The Nulli Secundus took to the air successfully in September 1907.  By the end of that year, however, Cody, not a great believer in airships, was embroiled in a more ambitious project.

In the Nulli Secundus's huge hangar, he began building his first aeroplane.The basic configuration was essentially the same as Orville and Wilbur Wright's successful design - 40ft biplane wings, fitted with a tightening or 'warping' mechanism, a forward elevator to control pitching, a single rear rudder and an engine driving two propellors in counter-rotation to each other.  On 16th October 1908, Cody's cumbersome machine, Army Aeroplane No1, took to the air for the first time, held a course 30ft above the ground for about a quarter of a mile - and crashed.  His flight had lasted just 27 seconds.  But the story of Britain's first aeroplane flight made front-page headlines the following day.  For Cody, the vindication of his self-belief, dogged hard work, courage and intuitive skill as an aeronautical designer was a personal triumph.  But from then until his death, he would have few other resources to rely on.  To the disgust of his supporters in Britain, the Army severed it's ties with the American aviator, even though he became a British citizen.  He was allowed to keep his plane, but was left virtually without funds. 

Fortunately the country was in the grip of flying fever.  The first air shows were taking place, with appearance money for the pilots.  And there were races.  Lord Northcliffe of the Daily Mail, who was enthusiastic about aviation, put up generous prize money for those who could fly fastest and furthest in ever-more demanding contests.  Cody's enormous biplane, nicknamed the Flying Cathedral, was slower than some of the light-weight 80mph monoplanes designed for racing, but it was also sturdier and more stable.  In 1909 the Cathedral's first passengers went aloft, including his wife Leila, with her dress taped up to stop it billowing.  More to the point, Cody's exceptional courage and experience made him a match for any pilot flying then.  In 1911, he became the hero of the inaugral 1,010-mile Circuit of Britain Challenge, for which Lord Northcliffe had put up a prize of 10,000.  During the fortnight of gruelling flying and navigating entirely by landmarks (when visible), he overcame breakdowns, fogs, and gales that swept him off course and out to sea.  He did not win, but The Aeroplane magazine commended Cody's performance as the finest in the race because of his pluck. 'Cody built his machine himself' the editor wrote, 'against odds which would have beaten any other man.'

The former horseman from Iowa had become a British national treasure.  Cody went on to win other prizes, but none matched the satisfaction he gained when an improved version of his Flying Cathedral came top in Army trials of rival aircraft from Britain and Europe.  The Army, which had once been so short-sighted as to reject his services, now found itself handing over 5,000 in prize money to him.  Cody's finest hour lasted the rest of the summer.  The Royal Aero Club awarded his it's highest honour, the Gold Medal.  King George telegrammed his congratulations and ordered a command performance during Army manoeuvres at Cambridge.  But Cody's luck was about to run out.

In 1913 Lord Northcliffe announced two new prizes: 5,000 for the winner of a race around the coast of Britain and 10,000 for the first airman to cross the Atlantic.  Cody designed and built a hydroplane to meet this new challenge.  'This machine is a beauty and as steady as a rock,' he boasted after a test flight.  But alas, it was like a rock that the machine inexplicably fell out of the sky on the morning of August 7, 1913, killing the pilot and his passenger instantly.  Cody's death at 46 was 'swift and sudden' and in one of his own aeroplanes, as he had always wished.  Cowboy, sharpshooter, actor, dramatist, kite enthusiast and founding father of British flying, he was, even in an age of flamboyant pioneers, the frontiersman supreme.

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