Passenger traffic in the 1930s on British imperial air routes: refinement and revision

Journal of Transport History, The, Mar 2004 by Pirie, Gordon

In the 1930s many of Britain's colonial territories were linked to London for the first time by civil air transport. A British airline, appropriately named Imperial Airways, carried passengers, mail and other small freight. Founded in 1924, the airline flew on routes between London and destinations in continental Europe until 1927. Then it took over the RAF service across British-mandated territory between Cairo and Basra. Within a matter of years, after the appropriate route surveys had been carried out, the first sections of an 'imperial' air service to India and Africa were opened for mail and passenger traffic. In 1929 the Basra service was extended east, first to Karachi and then to Jodhpur and Delhi. Empire air services linked Egypt and the Sudan with Central Africa from 1931. Early in 1932, after advancing southwards from Cairo in stages, an Imperial Airways service reached Cape Town. Calcutta was joined to the empire air network in July 1933, and later that year the service was extended to Rangoon and Singapore. From 1934 Imperial Airways operated a scheduled commercial passenger service between England and Australia in partnership with the Australian airline Qantas Empire Airways. Other outposts of empire that were included in the air network were Hong Kong (1935), Khartoum and the Nigerian settlement of Kano (1936). One of the last links of the imperial air network to be completed was the stage in Europe. Only in 1936 did it become possible to fly the entire distance between London and Imperial's empire destinations. Until then, political obstacles - largely Italian intransigence in air rights negotiations - meant that the 950-mile sector between Paris and Brindisi had to be done by rail.

For most of its life Imperial Airways was Britain's only designated overseas airline. Operating within and beyond Europe as a privately owned monopoly, the company was subsidised by the government. Despite these privileges, it struggled to compete with more generously assisted European airlines and it abandoned many of the continental routes that it flew initially. By the mid-1920s Imperial had given up the important London-Berlin and LondonAmsterdam routes and by the mid-1930s it operated just two European services: London-Paris-Zurich and London-Brussels-Cologne. On the eve of the Second World War empire routes accounted for 90 per cent of its route mileage. After its African and Asian services were operational Imperial relaxed its monopoly of air links with Europe and a second British flag carrier, British Airways Ltd, was created in 1936 to serve northern European centres. British Airways was also charged with establishing Atlantic air services to West Africa and South America, but the war broke out before these became operational.1

True to its name, Imperial Airways was the flag airline of the inter-war British Empire. Over a route network stretching to almost 25,000 miles (1938), it carried passengers and air freight across and between Britain's far-flung colonies. The aircraft and routes involved in this operation have been well documented, and the people and politics behind it have been reasonably well studied.2 The history of Imperial Airways forms part of standard survey texts about British aviation history.3 Scholarly enquiry into empire aviation also includes regional work on Africa,4 the Gulf States5 and Australia.6 Despite this research, however, little is known about the passengers who used the empire services. Neither the number nor the nature of the people who flew is well researched. Qualitative information on Imperial's passengers is scrappy and mostly anecdotal.7 Even so, the impression it leaves of variation and questions still to be answered makes it different from information about the volume of empire air passengers. However inadequate, neat numerical tabulations have an aura of authority, objectivity and finality. Yet, as if conceding the limitations of available data, the most recently published book on Imperial Airways provides no information at all about air passenger traffic volumes.8

The primary purpose of the research reported below is to extend and deepen the quantitative record of passenger traffic on the empire air routes flown by Imperial Airways. Fresh empirical evidence clarifies the number of passengers who used the empire airline in its fifteen-year life. The data gauge the contribution that aviation made to transport in the scattered British Empire at its zenith, and to its connectivity. A more precise account of passenger traffic than has been available previously allows reconsideration of the role that the designated empire airline played in imperial interaction. Numerical evidence about the reality of empire air passenger travel also puts into perspective rhetoric about the wonders of the British Empire between the wars. Moreover, data disaggregated into new levels of refinement give a glimpse of paying and non-paying empire passenger traffic, and uncover some of its seasonal and geographical variability. A distinction begins to emerge between passenger traffic comprising the emissaries and functionaries of empire, going to and from imperial capitals, and other trunk traffic between minor airports.