Book Review: Corsairville: The Lost Domain of the Flying Boat
Book Author: Graham Coster

Review Author: Giles Guthrie (see his website)

The cover shows a poster proclaiming Imperial Airways' new "Empire Boat" service from London to Cape Town in South Africa, featuring the legend "Cross Africa in days instead of weeks". It is the nineteen-thirties, and Britain is enjoying the twilight of its pre-eminence as a major World Power. Neither I nor my parents remember the existence of an airline called Imperial Airways, but that says more about our ages than their standing. For someone who has travelled 13,000 miles in 24 hours as one of 450 people in a Boeing 747-400, the idea of being one of thirty taking days to cover 3,000 is pure anathema. And that has to be where the romance of the whole notion of flying boats comes into force. A boat that flies, much more than an aeroplane that can land on water rather than tarmacadam. Most definitely unhinged. Ask most people about a flying boat and they will almost immediately talk about the Spruce Goose - a wooden contraption (made from spruce trees, hence the name) with ten engines, Spruce Goose was definitely an aeroplane that could land on water. It was also designed and built in America, who's rail infrastructure precluded its practicality, and it was also conceived after the bottom had fallen out of the flying boat business. So Coster's book concentrates on flying boats as they were in Great Britain, and the uses to which they were put in the furthering of British influence. This narrows the field down to the output of Shorts, whose Sunderland model was the 'Empire class' flying boat. He talks at length about their construction, the crash in the River Dungu in Africa, where they went and who they carried. His quest for information takes him further and further from his native Croydon, and this mutates Corsairville into a travelogue. There are evidently things to be seen and adventures to be had in finding out about a class of boats that could fly, but which rusted at the very thought of being in the sea. Coster sees them and has them, and then recounts all in beautiful prose, full of allegory and wonder. It also helps that the book's layout is slightly haphazard, so the reader begins to feel that it is more and more a travel book, and less and less an authoritative history of either flying boats in general or Empire boats in particular. Neither does it seek to be a history of Shorts or of Imperial Airways. Necessarily though it touches on all these areas, plus some history of Africa and America and the Second World War. So Corsairville reels from talking about a crash in Africa, to the rise and fall of the African lakeside hotel industry, through an account of how and why Shorts Sunderlands were maintained off Lake Windermere, plus numerous recollections of passengers. It doesn't stop at passengers though, and it quickly becomes apparent that flying boats touched people's lives in just the way that a 747-400 does not. Those who travelled (and they were the monied few) positively revelled in things that no longer would we tolerate. And so the boats, the era and the book all capture the spirit of endeavour that was engendered in the British population of the time. It says a lot of Coster's writing skills that he manages to make his book everything that it is, encapsulating all the information, the history, and the wonder, all from disparate sources in his own quest for information, to satiate his own desire to understand flying boats. A truly remarkable book then, spanning three continents and five decades. Beautifully and infectiously written, Coster's style is dinner party anecdote rather than history or diary. Enjoyable and interesting to read, whether or not the reader is interested in flying boats, you come away enlightened and entertained, and to me, that's what a book should be. The Verdict? 9/10

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