Moore-Brabazon, John Theodore Cuthbert 1884 - 1964

John Theodore Cuthbert Moore-Brabazon, first Baron Brabazon of Tara, aviator and politician, as born in London on 8 February 1884. He was educated at Harrow School and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read engineering but did not take a degree. From a young age he had been interested in early internal combustion engines, and spent his university holidays as an unpaid mechanic to Charles S Rolls. When he left Cambridge he became an apprentice in the Darracq motor vehicle works in Paris, graduating as an international racing driver. In 1907 he won the Circuit des Ardennes. In 1906 Moore-Brabazon married Hilda Mary Krabbé, with whom he had two sons.

Moore-Brabazon first flew solo in November 1908 in a Voisin biplane in France. He became the first Englishman to make an officially recognized aeroplane flight in England on 2 May 1909 over the Isle of Sheppey. The flight ended in a crash which nearly cost Moore-Brabazon his life. In October 1909 Moore-Brabazon won a prize of £1,000 offered by the Daily Mail for the first English aircraft to fly one mile, and in March 1910 the Royal Aero Club issued him with its first pilot’s certificate. However, in July 1910 his close friend Charles Rolls died in an air crash, and Moore-Brabazon was persuaded by his wife to abandon flying until the outbreak of war in 1914. Moore-Brabazon served with the Royal Flying Corps on the western front and specialized in the development of aerial reconnaissance and photography. He rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, was awarded the Military Cross and became a commander of the Légion d'honneur.

In 1918 Moore-Brabazon's was encouraged to stand for parliament as a Conservative. He was elected for the Chatham division of Rochester, a seat he held until his defeat in 1929. In 1919 he was invited to become parliamentary private secretary to Winston Churchill, the newly appointed secretary of state for war and air. Between 1923 and 1927 he was parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Transport and was made a peer in 1931. Moore-Brabazon’s loyalty to Churchill was recognized in October 1940 when he was appointed minister of transport in the wartime coalition and was sworn of the privy council. Seven months later he became minister of aircraft production. He had many friends in the industry and kept abreast of its technical developments, particularly the jet engine. In February 1942 however, a speech Moore-Brabazon gave at a private luncheon leaked into the newspapers in which he was alleged to have expressed the hope that the German and Russian armies would annihilate each other. Churchill asked for his resignation, and Moore-Brabazon accepted his dismissal with his characteristic good humour. He was consoled with a peerage.

This episode marked the end of Moore-Brabazon's political career but not of his influence on aviation. He became chairman of the committee that planned the construction of civil aircraft in the post-war years. He was also elected president of the Royal Aero Club, president of the Royal Institution, and chairman of the Air Registration Board. As a father figure of aeronautical enterprise he never ceased to insist that speed should if necessary be sacrificed to safety, comfort, economy, and prestige.

It is unlikely that Moore-Brabazon would have achieved cabinet rank except in a wartime administration led by Churchill. Although he brought an inventive and industrious mind to his ministerial duties, he had no great regard for the niceties of procedure or administration, and his genial presence, heralded by a cigarette in its holder and sustained by the humour of an after-dinner speaker, failed to inspire confidence in his more staid colleagues. With characteristic panache he was one of the last to wear a top hat in the House of Commons.

Moore-Brabazon was tall and muscular and excelled at several sports well into his eighth decade. Except during the two world wars he braved the Cresta run at St Moritz every year from 1907 until his death. Three times he won the Curzon cup, the blue riband of tobogganing. He was a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron and in 1952 captain of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews. He died at Grangewood, Longcross, near Chertsey, Surrey, on 17 May 1964.