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of Gisburn to raise a regiment of horse during the Civil
War. Even in peacetime the Tempests were in the front
line – Wulstan’s father was on the bench of the West
Riding Quarter Sessions during the 1893 coal strike and
had ridden out among the miners at Featherstone to read
The Riot Act. When war broke out Wulstan and his
brother Edmund were farming in Saskatchewan. Both
men returned home at once and joined the King’s Own
Yorkshire Light Infantry.
Wulstan Tempest was wounded at the First Battle of
Ypres in the first year of the war and returning home to
recover he learned to fly and joined the fledging Royal
Flying Corps. Tempest was posted to No 39 Squadron
and was based at Sutton Farm near Hornchurch with
Billy Robinson flying BE (Bleriot Experimental) craft,
which were Kleenex and spit contraptions of canvas
wood and wire. The pilots tinkered with their aeroplanes,
pimping them in modern parlance, to gain the height
needed to bring down a Zeppelin. It was incredibly
reckless, the modifications made by these young men
included stripping out the fuselage sub-frame and
replacing it with a flimsy skeleton of frames which meant
that the aeroplanes often broke in two when they landed.
An exhaust modification that partly overcame the
problem of fuel combustion becoming disrupted in the
thinning air at higher altitudes led to the planes misfiring
at ground level but all that mattered was bringing the
Zepps down.
Aware of the growing threat, especially after the two
Zeppelins had been brought down on his last mission
Captain Mathy wrote in his diary:
It is only a question of time before we join the rest.
Everyone admits that they feel it. If anyone should say
that he was not haunted by visions of burning airships,
then he would be a braggart.
A week later, on 1 October 1916, Mathy and his crew died
when they were brought down by Wulstan Tempest.
Although there is a somewhat gung-ho account that has
Tempest interrupting a meal with his fiancé in an Epping
restaurant to return to the airfield and scramble to bring
down L31 before returning to finish his meal it is safer to
assume that he was already airborne as part of the relays
that had been established to counter the Zeppelin raids.
Mathy’s L31 should have been part of a swarm of eleven
airships but most had been blown off course by dreadful
weather or were being slowed by the weight of rain and ice.
A pyramid of searchlights locked on to L31 and anti-aircraft
fire caused him to jettison his bombs over Cheshunt in an
attempt to climb out of sight above the clouds.
Fifteen miles way, patrolling above Hainault, Wulstan
Tempest saw Mathy’s Zeppelin and flew towards it through
the anti-aircraft fire. During the pursuit Tempest’s
mechanical pressure pump malfunctioned and to keep up
the pressure in his petrol tank he had to use a hand pump.
Exhausting at the best of times this was an agonising
exercise in the thin air at high altitude for the 30 minutes
it took him to catch up with the Zeppelin and once he
emerged through the cloud cover he only had one free
hand with which to fire at the ship.
I accordingly gave a tremendous pump at my petrol tank
and
dived straight at her, firing a burst straight into her
as I came. I let her have another burst as I passed under her
and then, banking my machine over, sat under her tail and,
flying along underneath her, pumped lead into her for all
I was worth. I could see tracer bullets flying from her in
all directions, but I was too close under her for her to
concentrate on me. As I was firing I noticed her begin to go
red inside like an enormous Chinese lantern and then a
flame shot out of the front part of her and I realized she was
on fire. She then shot up about 200 feet, paused, and came
