#53348
Nick Forder
Participant

I haven’t written the book on Hucks yet, but have an ever growing pile of information on him, including copies of the telegrams he sent to Farnborough when he went Zepp hunting.

John Barfoot’s ‘Essex Airmen’ provides a reasonable outline of Hucks’ life, and there is the 3-part series I wrote for Windsock years ago (though the third part is quite inaccurate).

Presumably your interest is derived from “Constructing The Enemy Within: Rumours of Secret Gun Platforms and Zeppelin Bases in Britain, August-October 1914” by Brett Holman, and the link provided by Maurice ?

I found this a slightly odd article, quite selective in its examples and not linking the regularity of supposed ‘Zepp sightings’ extending back to (at least) 1912 and Sheerness, and I had expected there to be more about Halcombe Ingelby’s campaign. The suggestion that Hucks “provided his own aircraft” is rubbish: Hucks had been commissioned in to the RFC (SR) and his three Bleriots impressed in to RFC service. The fact that he MAY have been issued Bleriot 619 (formerly ‘The Tornado’) to search for the ‘Zepp base’was merely co-incidence. I say MAY because, although Hucks ferried 619 to France I have yet to find any documentary evidence that it was the aircraft he used.