This small but informative booklet gives an excellent potted history of the RNAS/RAF airship station at Howden, East Yorkshire. Several previous booklets have been produced over the years but this covers a much wider field – from the station’s earliest days, up to its final closure by the Airship Guarantee Company Ltd in 1930.

Reasonably accurate, the slant is very much on the impact it made on the Howden community. Small inaccuracies do occur but of a minor nature and only apparent to the connoisseur of British airships. One major error (which has been similarly recorded elsewhere!) is on p32 and p33. Two excellent pictures of workers making rigid airship gas-bags are not at Howden, but at Cardington. No gas-bags were ever made at Howden. The R100’s gas-bags were made in Germany by the Zeppelin Company and imported in 1927. The author is quite correct in describing the method used as these well-known photographs confirm. Unfortunately in this case they are of R38’s gas-bags being produced at the Royal Airship Works at Cardington in 1920. Another miss-statement is on p26. The writer explains that the ‘Howden Detachment’ is a nickname. Actually, this was the correct description of the US Navy’s unit which was attached to RNAS/RAF Howden in 1917-18.

The above should not put you off an excellent publication with a number of rare pictures. P11 has a fine photograph of men and women working in an annexe to No 2 Shed forming parts for R100. Of particular interest is Barnes Wallis’ special machine forming the duralumin tubes for her framework, on the extreme left.