Qualla: Cyril Ridley

Cyril Ridley: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At fifteen years old, Cyril Burfield Ridley designed and built a glider that could carry a person. It had an eighteen-foot wingspan, copied a design by the American aviation pioneer Octave Chanute, and was assembled in the workshop of Arundel House School in Surbiton, where Ridley belonged to the school's Aero Club. That was 1910, only seven years after the Wright brothers' first powered flight. Over the next two years he would win flying competitions across south London with rubber-powered models of his own design. By the time he was twenty-two he was a flying ace in the Royal Naval Air Service. By the time he was twenty-five he was dead, killed in a peacetime mid-air collision over Cologne. He had survived the war by eighteen months.

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Cyril Ridley: The Schoolboy Engineer

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cyril was born in Esher, Surrey, on 15 January 1895. He competed obsessively against his classmate Reginald Mann and his Aero Club teacher Robert Grimmer, both of whom would later form their own aircraft company. In June 1910 on Wimbledon Common, his monoplane glider took third p...

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Cyril Ridley: Eleven Victories

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ridley joined the Royal Naval Air Service and was posted to No. 1 Squadron in northern France, flying a Sopwith Triplane. On 29 April 1917 he shared his first aerial victory, driving down an Albatros D.III alongside Flight Sub-Lieutenant Herbert Rowley. The squadron re-equipped w...

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Cyril Ridley: Cologne, May 1920

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

After the war Ridley accepted a short-service commission in the new Royal Air Force, holding the rank of flight lieutenant, and was posted to No. 12 Squadron with the British Army of the Rhine, the occupation force stationed in Cologne. On 17 May 1920 he took off from Cologne in ...

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Cyril Ridley: Side by Side at Sudfriedhof

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The two men were buried beside one another in the Commonwealth War Graves section of Cologne's Sudfriedhof, the Southern Cemetery. It is a quiet place, organized in long lines of uniform pale stones, shaded by trees that have grown tall in the century since. The cemetery sits abo...

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Cyril Ridley: What He Left Behind

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ridley's youth coincided exactly with the birth of practical aviation. The aero clubs that proliferated in pre-war Britain produced a generation of pilots and engineers who shaped the industry for decades: his rival Charles Fairey, his old schoolmates Mann and Grimmer, the dozens...

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