Down Memory Lane: Pioneering airman’s vision brought flights to Highlands

This year marks the 90th anniversary of Inverness – and the North – having its first scheduled air service thanks to the passion and perseverance of Captain Ted Fresson, whose statue stands in front of the city’s airport.

A remarkable character, a freebooter of flight, Fresson would recall touching down at Dalneigh Farm as pivotal to making his dream come true.

People have heard of the pioneering Fresson, but who was he?

Hampstead-born, Ernest Edward Fresson used his carpentry skills at a Norfolk public school to indulge his passion for building scale model planes from memory – kits didn’t exist then!

Related: Down Memory Lane: A racing certainty that horse play was a real spectacle

He joined the Royal Flying Corps in Los Angeles in 1917, learning to fly with a Canadian training squadron, completing his training next year with the RAF, including ‘spotting’ an underwater U-boat and alerting a convoy, who sunk it.

After the war, Ted gave joyrides from Skegness sands and when his employers, a London tea merchants, sent him to China he was soon giving after-work joyrides at 50 dollars a trip…

In the US, he met pioneer Charles Lindbergh before his 1927 record-breaking transatlantic flight – and the pair were to meet again in 1933 when Lindbergh and his wife called in at Inverness in a Lockheed biplane to visit him!

In 1928, in an Avro 504K, Fresson ‘barnstormed’ places in England and Scotland, carrying 496 passengers in eight days at an income of £126.

With a friend, he set up the North British Aviation Company in January 1929 and a turning point came when he spent six weeks in 1930 along the Moray Firth coastline.

He landed in a field between Ardersier and Fort George on August 6 and, with a ‘wing-walking’ stuntman, he flew over Nairn and gave joyrides from the sands. He gave photography flights over Strathpeffer, Dingwall and Nairn and took Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s family up for circuits of their Lossiemouth home.

Captivated by the North of Scotland, next year Ted, in a Gypsy Moth, investigated more joyriding sites. This took him back to Nairn and onwards to Wick where he asked the hotel waiter for a whisky only to be told it was a ‘dry town’. But the owner poured him one in his office, saying “any time you feel faint again, just come along’.

Next day Fresson flew to Kirkwall to identify Orkney landing sites before returning to his Merseyside base. In summer 1931 he was back north – and at Grantown-on-Spey he struck a £20 bet with a local sports car owner on who could reach Nairn quickest, driving versus flying. Ted won by two minutes!

Charging five shillings to fly return trips from Thurso to Kirkwall, he took 74 customers in a day. This 20-minute trip contrasted with a four-and-a-half hour sea crossing, firing Ted’s thoughts of an air service. Orkney councillors urged him to approach Inverness businessmen. As well as passengers, they suggested, he could carry mail and newspapers arriving at Inverness station.

But raising the funds was challenging. After 4000 landings during 1931, he made his first flight to Inverness, landing at Dalneigh Farm on February 11, 1932. He met Robert Donald, managing director of MacRae and Dick, to explain his vision of an Inverness-Orkney mail service.

Donald said his firm was interested in backing the project. Next day, in Edinburgh, George Law, senior partner of ‘The Scotsman’ newspaper, agreed to engage Fresson to fly his newspapers to Kirkwall.

By the end of April, Donald, his solicitor Robert Wotherspoon and MacRae and Dick company secretary William Hamilton, had tied up a deal, with all three becoming directors of the air company and Fresson as managing director.

Ted was given approval to order a new Monospar aircraft and Inverness town clerk Mr Smith-Laing agreed to turn Longman fields into a council-owned aerodrome for the service.

Highland Airways Ltd was born!

But it was still to fly, and that’s a tale for next week…

– Sponsored by Ness Castle Lodges.