The new aircraft was found to have a re-
markable performance and manoeuvrability,
the prototype reaching the speed of 132 mph
(212 km/h). It was, in many respects, supe-
rior in all round performance to much later
types such as the S.E.5a and Sopwith Snipe.
Great things were expected of the M.1 by the
hard-pressed pilots in France and Belgium,
who heard early reports of it, and by Bristol,
who understandably believed they had deliv-
ered a winner and expected their successful
relationship with the military would mean
the aircraft was going to enter service rap-
idly. But something went wrong.
The Bristol, on the surface, seemed a
ready-made answer for the RFC in particu-
lar, far better than the ad-hoc designs like
the single-seat B.E.2 being pressed into
service, but as noted W.W.I aviation histori-
an Colin Owers stated; “Its performance was
such that its failure to be ordered for the
Western Front has remained one of the un-
resolved questions of the Great War.”
While it is clear that the Bristol was im-
mediately rejected for frontline service with
the RFC in France, it remains unclear as to
why. Evidence indicates that General Hugh
Trenchard disliked it when demonstrated to
him in France, and wrote requiring no more
were sent – even before he had his pilot’s re-
port. Other concerns that it had a high
landing speed (which was in fact only
slightly faster than the D.H.2 pusher bi-
plane) and that it lacked effective manoeu-
vrability for combat, have been advanced,
but on their own cannot explain the early
official rejection of the type.
Certainly there had been a British military
ban on monoplanes after a number of accidents
(including with a Bristol-Coanda monoplane)
before W.W.I, but that was rescinded before the
Bristol M.1’s appearance. Nevertheless, there
remained a suspicion in official circles of the
monoplane configuration, not alleviated by the
poor performance of French Morane mono-
planes pressed into British service.
One aspect often overlooked today is that
the M.1 has a configuration that has been
regarded as normal in the last half-century
of flight, being a nose-engine powered mid-
wing monoplane with a three-part tail sur-
face arrangement and a standard cruciform
configuration. However in the mid-Great
War, that layout was far from standard and
the sleek looks may have actually counted
against the type in the minds of those that
then, as now, tend to think that if an aircraft
‘looks right it will fly right’. It may simply
have been that the Bristol looked too fast for
use and too streamlined to be structurally
sound in the terms of the era.
Conversely, its known faults, particularly
the lack of forward and downward visibility,
are never cited in period accounts as rea-
sons for rejection, though they were noted
in reports of the time.
A realistic assessment of the real possible
capability of the type is hard to quantify, as
most formal reports have it down with ‘good’
manoeuvrability. While they weren’t fight-
ing for their lives in front-line conditions,
the fact that so many instructors at air war-
fare schools chose Bristol M.1s as their per-
sonal mounts must indicate some signifi-
cant merits as to the type’s dogfighting
ability, and many added superlative-laden
comments in their log books under ‘Re-
marks’ against the type. It also garnered aremarkable array of individual schemes in
the hands of these expert, experienced pi-
lots, this (if nothing else) indicating that
they thought it worth marking up to stand
out on the airfield and in the air.
The last word, almost literally, is the fact
that Harry Butler (see page 46) retained the
Bristol he flew as a combat training instruc-
tor in the UK and had it shipped to Australia,
where, as we see in the preceding article, he
flew many extrovert aerobatic displays. Sad-
ly, it seems the flight regime limits of the
modern replicas, notably Don Cashmore’s
briefly flown example (as G-BLWM) from
the eighties, and the current Shuttleworth
M.1C pictured here are understandably re-
stricted to limits that mean we may never get
a final answer to this performance question.
The first order was for five aircraft: the
first, being the private-venture M.1A A5138,
was supplemented by four more modified to
M.1B standard with improved visibility
wing cut-outs, the Vickers gun mounted on
the port wing root, and other changes. Fur-
ther changes (including moving the gun
centrally in front of the pilot) resulted in the
Bristol M.1C of which 125 were built, mak-
ing 130 of the type in total.
Blocked from operating in northern Eu-
rope, a few were sent as fighters to the
squadrons in combat in the middle east, and
more to the training units in Egypt. This
was an even worse decision than it seemed
at first, given that the rotary engine and its
streamlining cowl and prop-boss were thor-
oughly unsuited to desert conditions. While
eastern Bristol M.1s acquitted themselves
well, they were not the stars one might have
expected in more temperate conditions.
Only five squadrons were partly equipped
with the M.1 for operational use, and some
were even palmed off as foreign disposals.
Several were sent to Chile as part-payment
for Chilean battleships retained in Britain.
This had the unexpected result that one of
these Chilean Bristols achieved a remarka-
ble record far from home, with the first
crossing over the highest peaks of the Andes
mountain range by the Chilean Military
School of Aviation’s Teniente Dagoberto Go-
doy on 12 December 1918, while on 4 April
1919 Teniente Cortinez repeated the feat.
Post-war a couple flew in air racing, but
apart from Harry Butler’s example here, the
Bristol M.1C vanished, like so many other
Great War types, until a couple of replicas
were constructed to bring this unusual and
under-appreciated type back to prominence.Many of the M.1Cs used by fighting instructors were painted
in outlandish schemes, both for reasons of status, and here,
enhancing the aircraft’s presence in the air. [via Author]Another Bristol seen (probably being used for
training) in the middle eastern theatre
[via Author]52 | FLIGHTPATH