Good morning, Swansea!

Every day, people cut along Uplands Crescent past the flats at Belgrave Court without a second glance at the small plaque fixed above one of the ground floor windows.

The man it commemorates once did something almost nobody in history had done before him: navigated by starlight across an entire ocean, in an open-cockpit biplane, through fog, ice and a near-fatal spinning dive.

He came home a knight, a household name, and one half of the most famous double-acts in aviation history. Then he settled quietly into Swansea life - and by the time he died in that same building in 1948, most of his neighbours had no idea who he really was.

This week, we share the story of Sir Arthur Whitten Brown.

Arthur Whitten Brown wasn't from Swansea, and for most of his life, nobody would have guessed he'd end up here. Born in Glasgow in 1886 to American parents, he grew up in Manchester, trained as an electrical engineer, and by all early accounts was the quiet, serious type - the sort of person people described as reliable rather than remarkable.

The First World War changed that. Brown joined the Royal Flying Corps as an observer, and in November 1915 his aircraft was shot down over German lines. He was captured, and during his time as a prisoner of war a foot injury went untreated for so long it left him with a permanent limp - a mark from the war he'd carry for the rest of his life. He wasn't released until 1917.

Back in England after the war, Brown approached the aviation firm Vickers looking for a steady job - something secure enough to let him marry. What he got instead was an introduction to a pilot named John Alcock, who was putting together an attempt at something nobody had ever done: flying non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean.

Three other crews had already reached St John's, Newfoundland, hoping to be first across, and Brown and Alcock had never even flown together before that spring. But on the afternoon of June 14th, 1919, their modified Vickers Vimy bomber took off from a rough, levelled field on the outskirts of St John's, known locally as Lester's Field - open cockpit, no radio for most of the journey, nothing but a compass and Brown's own calculations - and headed out over open water.

It went wrong almost immediately. An hour in, thick sea fog swallowed them, making Brown's navigation instruments useless. Then their wireless transmitter failed entirely, cutting them off from the world completely. Through the night they flew blind through snow and freezing cloud, at one point stalling and spinning down out of control, with Alcock pulling the plane level only ten feet above the waves.

More than once, ice built up on the wings badly enough to threaten the engines - and each time, Brown climbed out of the cockpit onto the wing itself, mid-flight, in a howling 100mph gale, to clear it by hand. He did it five times over the course of the night.

At dawn, gaps finally opened in the cloud. Using nothing more than a sextant and a glimpse of the stars, Brown fixed their position and confirmed they were still on course. Just after 8:40am, after more than sixteen hours in the air, Alcock spotted what looked like a flat green field near Clifden, on the Irish coast, and brought the plane down.

It wasn't a field. It was a bog.

The Vimy's wheels hit the bog and the plane flipped forward onto its nose, wheels sinking axle-deep into water and peat. Brown came away with a bloody nose and mouth, but neither man was seriously hurt. Soldiers from a nearby Marconi wireless station, who'd watched the plane come down, ran out across the bog in their pyjamas to help pull them from the wreckage.

A small crowd gathered, confused about where these two windswept, mud-covered men had actually come from. When someone finally asked, the answer - "America" - was met with laughter and disbelief. Asked how the flight had gone, Brown, understated to the last, is said to have replied: "How's that for a fancy bit of navigating?"

Within days, Alcock and Brown were front-page news across the world, credited with the longest non-stop flight ever made and the first crossing of the Atlantic by aeroplane. Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for Air, presented them with the £10,000 Daily Mail prize. A week after landing in a bog, King George V knighted them both at Windsor Castle.

Tragically, six months later, Alcock was dead - killed flying a delivery job to an air show in Paris. Brown, still only 33, was now the last man standing from the most famous flight in the world.

In the years after the flight, Brown stayed on with Vickers as a test pilot and engineer. Then in 1923, the firm's electrical arm - Metropolitan-Vickers, successor to the Westinghouse company where he'd first trained - posted him to Wales as their chief representative for the Swansea area.

He worked from an office on the corner of St Mary's Street and Wind Street. He and his wife Kathleen first set up home on Overland Road in Mumbles, before later moving to Belgrave Court in the Uplands - the flat where he'd eventually live out his final years.

Brown went on to found the 215 Squadron Air Training Corps, which still trains air cadets in the city today. And by every account from people who actually knew him, he was nothing like a celebrity. Local historian Bernard Lloyd, who saw him as a boy in his Wind Street office in the 1930s, later described him as "a well-known figure in industrial circles in Swansea, but would never talk about his epic flight... a very modest hero." Another Swansea resident who met him as a child remembered him simply as "quiet, charming and modest. A wonderful, impressive man."

But the war came back for him too: he'd warned as early as 1938 that Swansea was unprepared for air attack, then refused to take shelter himself during the Three Nights' Blitz in 1941, and in June 1944 lost his only son on D-Day. His own health failing soon after, Brown died at Belgrave Court in October 1948, aged 62, from an accidental overdose of a sleeping tablet.

Brown and Alcock’s flight is often overshadowed by Charles Lindbergh's famous solo crossing eight years later, but Alcock and Brown got there first - carrying nearly 200 letters that became the first transatlantic airmail, and proving non-stop ocean flight was possible at all. It would be another two decades before regular passenger flights crossed the Atlantic, but historians still point to that one battered Vickers Vimy as the moment that made the idea of international air travel thinkable.

Swansea kept trying to properly honour him: a push for a blue plaque in the 1990s, a Guardian letter making the same case in 2019, and finally an RAF-backed exhibition at Swansea Museum that year, on the flight's exact centenary.

But for now, next time you’re in the Uplands, take a moment to pause at Belgrave Court and remember Sir Alfred Whitten Brown, one of Swansea’s most unbelievable, modest hero.

I’ll catch you on Sunday!

Andrew

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Catch you on Wednesday!

Andrew.

Sources: Wikipedia; Encyclopaedia Britannica; Cambridge University Library Special Collections; RAF Museum archive; Brooklands Museum; Science Museum Group collection; The Guardian (Letters, 18 June 2019); South Wales Evening Post/South Wales Daily Post archives (23 April 1993, 22 June 1994, 28 September 1994, via the British Newspaper Archve); Swansea Past Present and Future; Gower Hidden History blog.