TITANIC OF AIRSHIPS: 2/4: His Majesty's Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World's Largest Flying Machine by S. C. Gwynne (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.6 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 21 April 2025
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
https://www.amazon.com/His-Majestys-Airship-Largest-Machine/dp/1982168277
From historian and bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Empire of the Summer Moon comes a “captivating, thoroughly researched” (The New York Times Book Review) tale of the rise and fall of the world’s largest airship—and the doomed love story between an ambitious British officer and a married Romanian princess at its heart.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchew, Sam Gwynn. His new book is His Majesty's Airship, The Life and Tragic |
| 0:10.0 | Death of the World's Largest Flying Machine, rigid airships, competition, nationalism. Kit Thompson |
| 0:17.1 | is a man who's born in India near Bombay in 1875. |
| 0:22.5 | His father's a major general. |
| 0:24.3 | He's related to a man who will become the head of the army in India. |
| 0:29.0 | His mother's family is extremely well known everywhere. |
| 0:32.9 | He becomes a member of the Royal Army and Royal Engineers. |
| 0:37.0 | Goes out to India. |
| 0:38.9 | He fights with everybody. |
| 0:40.0 | As far as I can see, this is Zellig of the British Army. |
| 0:43.1 | He fights with, he fights in the Boer War. |
| 0:46.7 | He fights at Jerusalem and the Second War with Allenby. |
| 0:49.6 | He's in the British Expeditionary Force with Hague. |
| 0:53.1 | And then he's assigned 1915 to Romania, |
| 0:56.6 | and therein lies the tale. |
| 0:58.8 | Who does he meet in Romania, Sam, who comes to dominate his life? |
| 1:05.0 | All right. |
| 1:05.3 | Christopher Birdwood-Thompson is, as you said, a man of empire. |
| 1:08.6 | I mean, he was raised multi-generational in the Raj, his family on both |
| 1:14.5 | sides extremely influential. He is in all those places indeed. This is yet another military |
| 1:22.0 | posting as part of the British Empire. He's sent to Bucharest in Romania, |
| 1:28.5 | which seems sort of like the middle of nowhere, |
... |
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