‘Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air’, by Richard Holmes – review

‘Caelum certe patet, ibimus illi’ was the phrase blazoned on the side of the Royal Vauxhall, an 80-foot, red and white candy-striped coal gas balloon launched from Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in 1836 to fly overnight from London to the continent. The motto is from Ovid: ‘Surely the sky lies open, let us go that way!’

It well captures the exuberantly adventurous temper of the early days of ballooning, that gorgeous dead-end in the history of human aviation. Richard Holmes himself caught the ballooning bug in a Norfolk fairground aged four, he tells us, when his RAF pilot uncle fastened a red party balloon to the top button of his aertex shirt. The spirit in which he relates the stories of the pioneer generation of balloon aeronauts is thoroughly informed by love: his sense of ‘the mental release, the physical heart-lift, the calm perilous delight’ that is to be found in the basket of a rising air balloon.