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Pulham St Mary has a special place in aviation history. Its story begins in the early part of the 20th century, when, on the brink of war in Europe, the Admiralty sought a location for an airship station near the east coast. Until the 1930s, Pulham continued as a site for experimental research into things we now consider routine: parachuting, air traffic control, cinematography and radar. But it is as a base for airships that Pulham is best known; airships are even depicted on the village sign.
RNAS Pulham
The Admiralty first started buying land to the south of Pulham St Mary for the Air Station in 1912. It appointed the head of a local firm of surveyors and land agents, Thomas William Gaze & Son, to acquire a group of farms including Upper Vaunce’s Farm and Home Farm, in total around 500 acres. The Admiralty wanted a site that was near, but not on, the coast, to form part of the defence mechanisms against Germany. To disguise their intentions, the rumour was put out that it was required by a private landowner for racehorse stables.
The Admiralty began clearing the site, and the Air Station was fully in place by 1915. Some small airship sheds (nb airships are housed in ‘sheds’, not hangars) had been constructed to house the little non-rigid airships to be based at Pulham. Hedges were removed, and the surface was levelled and laid to grass.
The Royal Naval Air Service was formed in 1914, and Pulham was a Royal Naval Air Station – the RAF was not formed until 1918, and even after then, RNAS Pulham remained intact.
Initially, hydrogen gas was brought to the site in large containers, but by 1916 a gas-producing plant had been built. The process was extremely dangerous, involving the use of caustic soda, and in 1917 an explosion killed two men at Pulham and injured several others. The poisonous waste from the process was dumped around the site, and to this day nothing will grow there.
RNAS Pulham had three large sheds to house the more modern – and much larger – rigid airships. After the winding-up of the airship industry, following the disastrous crash of the R101 in 1930, one was dismantled and moved to Cardington (where it can be seen today), one was demolished and sold for scrap (in 1948), and the third was moved to Karachi, then in India. At that time, the British Government was installing airship bases and masts all around the British Empire as a communications network. The Karachi shed burnt down after an aircraft fire inside the shed in the 1980s. The sheds were all made by Boulton & Paul in Norwich.
Pulham also had the first permanent airship mooring mast, the base of which can still be seen onsite today. The mast at Pulham was 120 feet high, and it had a ladder up the outside to give access to the airship. Prior to this, various means to tether airships had been used, but none were totally satisfactory. The rationale for mast development was to enable the creation of multiple intermediate stations between those with airship sheds, allowing faster deployment of airships and removing the need to have large ground handling parties to land an airship.
Moving airships to sheds still required large numbers of people on the ground; at Pulham an early tank that had served in France was used to manoeuvre a ship towards its shed. People would then walk the airship the short distance into the shed.
The Air Station site included a parade ground, officers’ mess, accommodation for men and officers etc. It had its own railway line, with the platform close to the officers’ mess on Airstation Lane – this ensured sparks were kept away from the gas stores. During and after WWII the base was used as a storage depot for crashed aircraft from throughout Eastern England. The site was also the munitions store for the East of England and the RAF had a test firing range here. There was radar station at Pulham (Chain Home) from 1939 onwards. This utilised a tower similar in design to the Eiffel tower.
Pulham Air Station (or RAF No 53 Maintenance Unit as it was by then known) closed in 1958, and the land was sold at auction in 1962.
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