 Epilogue, stories of the survivors and the fate of British airships. After R101's crash, Harry Leach, the engine expert, received from King George V the Albert Medal for a grave risk running into the burning wreckage and disentangling a companion from the network of Red Hot girders. For the rest of his life, he worked on engines and as an engineer. Throughout the 1930s, he fine-tuned the engines used by Sir Malcolm Campbell to set land and water speed records. Leach beamed with delight when Campbell's car roared across the Bonneville flats at 300 miles per hour and cheered when Campbell's boat thundered across Lake Majorie in the Alps at 127 miles per hour. In the 1940s, Leach maintained the engines for Campbell's son Donald when he tried to set water speed records. In the 1950s, Leach worked at the engineering department of the University of South Hampton and at South Hunt's hospital, where he used his engineering skills to build a cesium unit to treat cancer. He died at age 77 in November 1967. Out living Leach by a few years was the rear engine car operator Arthur Ginger Bell, who died in December 1973, age 75. For years, Bell lived at number 18 East Square in Shortstown, less than three miles from the giant sheds, although a reminder of his airship adventures was closer to home. From his house, he could walk 300 feet or so and reach a street named, in his honor, Bell's Close. A few streets over was Binks Court, named in honor of his colleague Joe Binks. After R101, Binks dabbled in airships again. He joined a small team that developed the Bournemouth, a tiny airship a mere 27 feet long, built in 1951 with private funds. Its builders hoped to revive airships. Binks was the last of R101 survivors to die in June 1974, age 82. After Noel Atherston's death in the crash, his wife, Susanna, was paid 10 pounds three shillings for his wages for October 1st to 5th, less income tax of five pounds 15 shillings and 10 shillings and six pints of charges for personal telephone calls from Canada. He called home several times from Montreal while serving on R100. The Air Ministry considered deducting the five pounds advance issued for pocket money in India, presumably lost in R101, they wrote, and the 20-pound advance to purchase a uniform and kit for the trip to India. Some lost in R101, they also noted, but in the end, they waived these deductions. They would look unseemly to have one of R101's widows pay money to the Air Ministry. They awarded her a yearly pension of, as they spelled out precisely in a letter, 191 pounds, 12 shillings and six pints, specifying that it will be paid while you remain unmarried and of good character. Her children, Richard, age nine and a half and Anne, seven and a half, received a yearly allowance of 31 pounds 18 shillings until they reached age 18. Susanna Atherston remarried four years after the crash, was widowed again in 1948 and lived until 1976 when she died at age 81. She preserved Atherston's diaries, which are currently stored by his granddaughter in a bank vault in Southwold and Suffolk. After the R101 disaster, Britain's commitment to airships weakened. In May of 1931, British Prime Minister Ramsey McDonald told the House of Commons that Britain should not continue to build new airships, but neither should the country conclude that the experiments in our experience have been so discouraging that we will let them out of rest and scrap everything. He proposed a middle course, maintain the works as a nucleus for scientific experimental interest in airship development, although he reminded the House that there will be no new construction, no placing of large ships on order at all. He noted that Britain's only existing airship, R100, rested on trestles, with its gas bags deflated in one of the two giant sheds at the works. The ship was, he said, very much out of condition by lack of use. Indeed, after its successful Atlantic crossing in July 1930, R100 had not flown again, not even for a short flight. R100 would become a sort of experimental ship, said the Prime Minister, and undertake no long-distance spectacular flights. He estimated the costs of this diminished airship program as £120,000 in the first year, £130,000 in the second, and £140,000 each year thereafter. This new strip-down program lasted only six months, and mid-November 1931, the government sold R100 for scrap. By early December, the salvage team had removed the ship's tables, beds, decorations, staircase and flooring, which were sold to yacht owners and to those, said the head of the salvage firm, with a sentimental interest. The ship's cloth cover and gas bags were removed and scrapped, the engines detached and sold. And now, with R100 a mere metal carcass, workers attacked it with hammers, hacksaws, hatchets and axes. They locked off the tail and fins, which fell into an untidy heap on the shed floor. The ship's nose smashed to the ground with a grinding sound that echoed throughout the giant shed. With the nose off, they hacked the ship apart from front to back, cut the frame into small pieces by blowtorch, then piled the scrap in a heap and steam-rolled it flat. An undignified end for a ship that flew 20,000 miles without incident, Britain never again built or flew in airship. For Britain as a world power, the impact of R101's failure had significant consequences. The human capital and the outlays expended on airships over 2 million pounds in 1930 currency, diverted energy and funds from Britain's nascent aviation industry, the foremost in the world when they started R101. By 1930, Britain lost the lead to the United States with a Douglas aircraft company produced in 1934, the DC-3, which revolutionized commercial aviation. And for the politicians who desired to sustain the empire, the failure of a dominant British aviation presence spelled disaster, with the loss of aviation superiority, Britain lost in the next round of imperialism. Germany, Britain's aviation rival, built a strong commercial air presence throughout Europe, Asia, South America and Africa. The German government eager to dominate air routes, funneled money to Lufonza, which became hugely profitable. It flew more miles and carried more passengers than all other European companies combined. Yet the British had in their grasp the innovation that could have ensured Britain remained a dominant world power. While teams of government-funded workers built airships, Royal Air Force member Frank Whittle toiled at near obscurity to create a jet engine. Whittle repeatedly sought government funding of his revolutionary engine, but failed each time. In 1935, he let his patent on the engine lapse rather than pay the five-pound renewal fee. Although the British government eventually funded his efforts, their support came too late. The United States took the lead when Boeing developed in the mid-1950s the first commercially successful jetliner, the 707. Rare minutes of Britain's airship program still exist. Approach Bedford from the south on the A600, and the giant sheds can be seen in the Great Oose River Valley. The sheds were used for a time by the Department of the Environment to test firefighting methods. They were so large that firefighters could build a house, set fire to it, and extinguish it with their test equipment. Over the years, the sheds have housed lighter-than-air crafts, mostly meteorology balloons, or hot air balloons used to train paratroops. More often, they are used for theatrical spectacles or to shoot movies. Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Inception were filmed in shed number two. If you search the grounds surrounding the sheds, you can discover the 12-foot-square concrete bases of the mooring tower's legs. Although the tower was torn down during the Second World War, it scrapped reclaim for the war effort. The only trace of R-101, though, is its charred instant displayed on the wall of St. Mary's Church in Cardington. The instant is framed in oak, and below it is a bronze tablet that lists the 48 victims of R-101. Perhaps the most elaborate memorial was to the quiet, unsung, engineering genius Michael Rope. His wife, Turin, funded the building of a small Catholic church near the family's farm at Kessgrave Ipswich. The church was finished in June, 1931, less than a year after Rope's death. At its dedication, a foundation stone was laid on behalf of Rope's eight-month-old son, Crispin, born shortly after the crash. A scale model of R-101, constructed for metal salvage from the wreck, hangs from the chancel arch. The quiet Rope's memorial grew beyond the church. His wife used insurance funds to create a foundation to support the disabled, to relieve poverty, and to promote the public understanding of science. Among the projects supported by Durin Rope, who died in 2003, was a hospital for treating leprosy in Bolivia, and one in Uganda to help families destroyed by AIDS. Hours after R-101's crash, sections of the ships still smoldering metal framework were hacked to pieces by firefighters and gendarmes. They ripped into the wreckage with blow torches, chisels, and metal saws, chasing away swarms of rats attracted by the plastic coating on the few scraps of cover that survived the fire. They found five bodies in the control car, and in the crew and passenger quarters, they uncovered 20 more bodies. Within a day, the rescue effort stopped. To cart away the remains of R-101, the British government hired Thomas W. Ward in company, shipbreakers of Sheffield, a firm famous for using an elephant to cart scrap. They promised to remove the wreckage expeditiously and quietly, and to prevent souvenir hunters from getting any part of it. The firm's workers finished the demolition begun by the rescuers, and soon the airship's novel and radical framework was no more than tidy piles of metal. The compacted 80-10 framework returned to Britain in two consignments. The first aboard the steamer Fraternity on December 19, 1930. The second aboard the new Pioneer on Christmas Day. R-101's remains shared space in both ships with a cargo of processed food and meat. When the vessels arrived in Liverpool, the wreckage was transported to Sheffield where the company melted the scrap and sold it to the Zeppelin company. They used it to create the Zeppelin LZ-129, an airship better known as the Hindenburg.