Everyone knows the story of the Tabloid - Harry Hawker's two-seater that astounded the aviation world in 1913. It was developed by Sopwith's into the Schneider Trophy winner, Schneider and Baby floatplanes and the SS1 and SS3 landplane Scouts. You can see its parentage in the Pup and the Camel. You can trace a direct line from this little aircraft to the Hawker Fury and Hurricane, the Hunter and the Harrier. So why are the drawings and dimensions in all the books wrong? Why is this German drawing, which I found on the Net a couple of years ago, the more accurate? Evidence has been available in photographs for some time and yet it has been ignored by scale modellers and historians alike. My story, if you are happy for me to tell it, unravels the clues and you read it first in Sloping Off !
I built a 36" span electric powered flying model of the Tabloid prototype in early 2000. It flew well, but only when the transmitter was switched on and the rudder connected to the servo: because of this small failing I rebuilt it three times, as the Schneider Trophy winner and then as a production Tabloid Scout, which appeared as a plan in the September October 2001 issue of FSM. Eventually, the uncovered rear fuselage formed the basis of the Hawker "prototype Camel" of which more later. Immediately after the plan was published I began to find out a whole lot more about all these Tabloid variants, the Gordon Bennett racers, the SS3 machines for the RNAS and the two replicas. I admired the pragmatic way in which Sopwith modified a number of machines (including the prototype and the Schneider winner) for racing and also for the War effort. These changes are referred to only in passing in various books and periodicals and trawls through the usual sites on the Internet got only marginally more information. The side view above differs in a number of respects from previously published drawings, and yet the differences are in all cases taken from photographs and written evidence that is freely available. In particular, the shape of the prototype and its subsequent rebuilding, the unique Gordon Bennett racers and the development of the RNAS Scouts is carefully and, I hope, fully recorded. ..to be continued!