What an extraordinary man ‘PB’ was. I had heard of him as a Member of Parliament, who agitated in the House on behalf of the RFC, but that is not even the half of it. He ran away from home at the age of thirteen and went to sea, he invented hundreds of machines (including the first automatic record changer, which worked very well as long as the gramophone was kept wound up), built lots of aeroplanes, few of which flew, tried to develop a flying boat, which shed its wings as soon as it alighted, and turned into a motor boat, was convinced that the Germans were running England by means of blackmailing the leading personalities in the country – the list goes on and on. I don’t know if he was a seminal figure in World War I, but he was a very interesting person who is worth reading about.