Henry Biard (also known as Henri) was a British pilot and aircraft racer. As chief test pilot for the British aircraft manufacturer Supermarine, he won the 1922 Schneider Trophy air race and briefly held the world record for the fastest speed in a seaplane.
Biard was born in Surrey, where his father worked as a public school teacher, and spent time as a child on his mother's native island of Jersey, where he was educated at Victoria College. He first learned to fly in 1910 at the school of Claude Grahame-White in Hendon, and gained his aviator's certificate in 1912. He joined and resigned from the Royal Flying Corps shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, then worked as a flying instructor at the Grahame-White school. In 1917, he joined the Royal Naval Air Service, where he instructed pilots, flew anti-submarine patrols and saw aerial combat over the Western Front.
Biard joined Supermarine after being demobilised from the Royal Air Force, the successor to the RNAS, in 1919, and became a close colleague of R. J. Mitchell, the company's chief designer. He tested many Mitchell-designed aircraft, including the Swan, the Southampton, the Seagull and the Scarab. He was also the pilot for three of Supermarine's entries into the Schneider Trophy, winning the race in 1922, placing third in 1923 and being forced to withdraw after crashing his aircraft, the experimental Supermarine S4, the day before the 1925 race. Shortly beforehand, on 13 September 1925, he had set a world speed record of for a seaplane over .
After Supermarine's acquisition by Vickers (Aviation) Ltd in 1928, Biard lost his position as chief test pilot. He continued to work for the company until 1933, and released his autobiography, Wings, in 1934. During the Second World War, he re-joined the RAF, but resigned his commission in 1944 on the grounds of ill health. He settled with his wife in Guernsey, and died in Charminster on 18 January 1966.
Early life (1892–1919)
Henri Charles Amédée de La Faye Biard was born in Godalming, Surrey, on 1 January 1892. He was the second of three sons of Raymond Biard, a Frenchman working as an assistant French master at Charterhouse School, and Lucy Constance Delmaine, a native of St Helier, Jersey. Henry Biard learned to swim at the age of four, and was described as a "water baby" in a 1958 article in The Liverpool Echo; he remained a keen swimmer and fisherman throughout his life.
Biard attended Victoria College, a public school in Jersey, between 1906 and 1907. The family lived at 2 Claremont Terrace in St Helier. They left the island in 1908: the Jersey historian Barrie Bertram has suggested that this was a consequence of a criminal charge made against Lucy Delmaine in May, by which she was accused of taking an eighteen-year-old woman, Elizabeth Mary Price, into her home "for the purposes of debauchery" with her eldest son, Raymond, who was nineteen.
In 1910, Biard went to the flying school run by the aviation pioneer Claude Grahame-White in Hendon, northwest London, to take lessons. According to the Liverpool Echo, his parents considered flying "a crazy, dangerous business". On his first day in Hendon, Biard bought a chequered cap in the same style as that worn by Grahame-White, and spent the remainder of the day waiting for a pilot to take him up. The following day, he tricked his way onto a Bristol Boxkite that had been warmed up for flight, took off, piloted the aircraft for a mile across the aerodrome, picked up a mechanic, and flew back safely. He later wrote that he had made the flight "more or less by French leave". Biard subsequently received formal instruction at the school, during which the instructor sat astride his aircraft's fuel tank. He gained his aviator's certificate, numbered 218, on 4 June 1912, and became an instructor at the Grahame-White school.
On 16 April 1913, Biard was commissioned as a probationary second lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps, and was posted to its Central Flying School at Upavon on Salisbury Plain. He recounted in 1934 that, during his time at Upavon, the school's assistant commandant – the future head of the Royal Air Force, Hugh Trenchard – took him as a passenger in a test-flight of an experimental aircraft: the flight ended in a crash, from which both escaped unhurt. He resigned his commission in the RFC; this was reported in the London Gazette of 2 June 1914 as effective the following day.
Biard was staying at his paternal grandfather's farm in northern France when the First World War broke out in August 1914. The farm was on a route used by refugees fleeing the fighting, and was burned by advancing German cavalry. He returned to England and to work at Grahame-White's school, where in May 1916 he piloted the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw on an acrobatic flight. On 2 December 1917, Biard was commissioned into the Royal Naval Air Service; he is named in the Navy List as holding the rank of probationary flight officer, which usually denoted a newly recruited officer under training, in March 1918. He is believed to have undergone training at the RNAS's flight school in Vendôme, France. He served as a flying instructor and took part in anti-submarine patrols, flying a Wright seaplane. He later described dropping bombs against a U-boat and seeing oil in the water, usually a sign of a sinking. He also fought over the Western Front, where he shot down a German Albatros aircraft. On 1 April 1918, the RNAS was merged with the RFC to form the Royal Air Force. The London Gazette reported that Biard had been entered onto the RAF's unemployed list on 22 May 1919, with the rank of second lieutenant.
Test pilot for Supermarine
Upon leaving the RAF, Biard became the chief test pilot for the British aircraft manufacturer Supermarine. He was the most experienced of six pilots, all former RNAS aviators, hired by the firm's owner Hubert Scott-Paine: the others included F. J. Bailey and Basil Deacon Hobbs. Hobbs, later a decorated member of the Royal Canadian Air Force, piloted the Supermarine Sea Lion I for the 1919 Schneider Trophy, an annual speed trial for seaplanes. Biard accompanied Hobbs's team and flew spectators around the bay in one of Supermarine's flying boats for a price of three guineas (£3.3s, ), described by the historian Ralph Pegram as "a huge sum at the time". The race was ultimately declared void amidst poor visibility due to fog and confusion among organisers and pilots. In March 1921, Biard flew a delegation of Japanese military and civil officials out above the English Channel in a Channel II aircraft, despite poor weather: the aircraft's good performance in these conditions led Japan to purchase three. When there was no flying to be done, Biard was tasked with other jobs around the Supermarine works: he was once introduced to a set of prospective customers while shovelling coal from a lorry.
During the railway strike of 27 September–5 October 1919, Scott-Paine tasked Biard with flying a daily route in a Channel II from Supermarine's headquarters at Woolston in Hampshire to Le Havre in Normandy, replacing the steam-powered ships that normally sailed from Southampton and whose crews had struck in solidarity with the railway workers. Biard was to fly each day in all weathers, usually alongside another Supermarine pilot. On the return journey from his first crossing, Biard ran out of fuel, having waited in the air around half an hour for his colleague, Hobbs, to take off, and was forced to land at Bembridge on the Isle of Wight: Hobbs did not notice Biard's absence until he himself landed at Woolston. An aerial search was launched to find Biard, who managed to find petrol and return safely. The flights carried passengers for a fare of £12.10s (), and occasionally mail. During an impromptu race against Biard on a return flight from Le Havre, for which neither pilot had any passengers, his colleague Bailey crashed near the Isle of Wight: Biard located the wreckage, where he was met by another aircraft carrying Bailey as a passenger. Having been picked up by a fishing boat and taken to Southampton, Bailey had undertaken to be flown back to the crash site to prove that he had survived.
While at Supermarine, Biard became close friends with R. J. Mitchell, who became its chief designer in the same year as Biard joined. Biard's reports on the performance of Mitchell's designs were an important influence on the development of several of them. Biard flew passenger services to the Channel Islands, which may have included the first commercial flight to them. He was certainly the pilot of the first commercial flights to Guernsey, which commenced in August 1923 under the auspices of British Marine Air Navigation Co Ltd, a short-lived collaboration between Supermarine and Southern Railway from August until November 1923. Biard made these flights in a Supermarine Sea Eagle, initially landing in L'Ancresse Bay; later services would fly to the island's capital, Saint Peter Port.
Biard's colleague at Supermarine, Harry Griffiths, described him in 2006 as "what would now be termed a 'character; Hubert Broad, alongside whom Biard was due to fly the 1925 Schneider Trophy, called him "fey". Biard made a practice of shooting cormorants with a shotgun on the water around Supermarine's Hythe factory, often while riding as a passenger in a seaplane. In an anecdote related by Griffiths, Biard brought a snake hidden in a box to a dinner of the Supermarine design staff, and released the animal partway through the proceedings: the snake bit Biard, and caused a commotion in which a visiting director of the Aeronautical Inspection Directorate cracked his prosthetic leg.
1922 Schneider Trophy victory
By 1920, the Schneider Trophy was considered, in the words of the historian Terry Gwynn-Jones, "the world's most fabled air race". It had also become the only remaining international aviation race in 1920, after the French pilot Joseph Sadi-Lecointe had secured his country's third consecutive victory in the Gordon Bennett race, allowing France to retain the trophy and ending the competition. The Schneider Trophy was won by Italy in both 1920 and 1921; three consecutive wins would have allowed them to retain the trophy in perpetuity in the same fashion.
In previous iterations of the event, competing aircraft had been required to carry a payload to simulate the armament of a military aircraft; this rule was removed in 1922, allowing the construction of more specialised racing machines. Supermarine decided to construct a racing aircraft, the Sea Lion II, specifically for the event. This project was initiated towards the middle of 1921 by R. J. Mitchell at the behest of James Bird, a former naval aviator turned Supermarine director. The prototype aircraft was constructed secretly through the winter of 1921–22 in a hangar at the back of Supermarine's works; Biard, who was to fly the aircraft, was not told of its existence until early July 1922, when he agreed to be the pilot for the race. The race had originally been scheduled for 26 August, but in mid-July the Italian – who were hosting the race as the winners of the previous year – announced, possibly under governmental pressure, that it would be moved forward to 12 August.