Post by Catsmate on Apr 7, 2014 11:35:12 GMT
Being the fourth in a series of adventure seeds loosely inspired by odd historical events. Comments welcome and requests considered.
In 1935 a 38 year old RAF Wing Commander, Robert Victor Goddard (usually Victor and he wasn't Knighted until 1946, but 'Sir Robert' sounded better) was solo piloting a Hawker Hart light bomber from Edinburgh to Andover. Shortly after passing over a disused and abandoned RAF station near Edinburgh he encountered a severe storm and then a swirling vortex somewhere over the Firth of Forth. After recovering he found himself passing over the same airfield, but now refurbished and obviously operational.
Goddard looked down and saw yellow-painted aircraft and what he described as a modern monoplane; neither of which were then in RAF service. The mechanics he could see were wearing blue coveralls instead of the RAF brown de rigeur in 1935. The formerly dilapidated buildings had been renovated and more constructed.
The implication of these apparent discrepancies is that Goddard had been propelled forward in time a number of years, to the early stages of World War 2; by 1939 the airfield (then Drem) would have been populated with the Hawker Harts (by now relegated to training duties) and Airspeed Oxford monoplanes of 13 Flying Training School.
Now in the real world the explanation for this is prosaic. Firstly the story doesn't make sense. 13FTS didn't operate the aircraft Goddard described, and certainly not painted yellow. There was no corroborating evidence, just Goddard’s account, first published after his retirement in 1951. He may have misremembered the year of the incident or aspects of what he saw on the ground at the time, though he was a trained military pilot.
It's likely that after the blind flying and violent maneuvering brought on by he storm, Goddard was seriously disorientated and ended up above a completely different airfield (Renfrew Aerodrome, home to the Scottish Flying Club is a good candidate); remember aerial navigation in the 1930s was primitive (dead reckoning, map and compass and landmarks). While Renfrew is more than 100km from Drem such a navigational error in a journey of approximately 700km in a bad storm is far from impossible.
But in the Whononiverse prosaic explanations aren't necessarily correct. Let's assume Goddard did pass through a rift in time, and back to 1935 again. Why would there be a time vortex in Scotland in 1935?
Or was the meddling with time happening a few years in the future, and Goddard's plane dragged forward by it?
On 10 May 1941 Rudolf Hess, deputy Fuehrer of Nazi Germany flew to Scotland, alone, hoping (according to history) to arrange peace talks with the Duke of Hamilton, whom he believed was prominent in opposition to the then British government under Churchill. Hess was arrested shortly after he arrived (using the alias Alfred Horn), locked up at various locations (initially the Tower of
London, then transferred to the secret "Camp Z" in Surrey, and finally to
Abergavenny in Wales), later tried at Nuremberg in 1946 and imprisoned at Spandau until his suicide (?) in 1987.
Unless of course the official historical record is wrong........
Getting the PCs involved.
This should be pretty easy, Goddard wrote publicly about the incident in 1951 after he retired from the RAF, later included it in a book and it's been repeated many times. If a time traveller read this they might simply want to pop back and investigate.
Further complications.
Goddard has lots of potential for involvement in time travel adventures and other weirdness.
Really this one man has enough potential for an entire campaign, mostly in the background, lasting decades. The PCs could encounter him repeatedly, not necessarily in chronological order, in various locations and up to various plots.
In 1935 a 38 year old RAF Wing Commander, Robert Victor Goddard (usually Victor and he wasn't Knighted until 1946, but 'Sir Robert' sounded better) was solo piloting a Hawker Hart light bomber from Edinburgh to Andover. Shortly after passing over a disused and abandoned RAF station near Edinburgh he encountered a severe storm and then a swirling vortex somewhere over the Firth of Forth. After recovering he found himself passing over the same airfield, but now refurbished and obviously operational.
Goddard looked down and saw yellow-painted aircraft and what he described as a modern monoplane; neither of which were then in RAF service. The mechanics he could see were wearing blue coveralls instead of the RAF brown de rigeur in 1935. The formerly dilapidated buildings had been renovated and more constructed.
The implication of these apparent discrepancies is that Goddard had been propelled forward in time a number of years, to the early stages of World War 2; by 1939 the airfield (then Drem) would have been populated with the Hawker Harts (by now relegated to training duties) and Airspeed Oxford monoplanes of 13 Flying Training School.
Now in the real world the explanation for this is prosaic. Firstly the story doesn't make sense. 13FTS didn't operate the aircraft Goddard described, and certainly not painted yellow. There was no corroborating evidence, just Goddard’s account, first published after his retirement in 1951. He may have misremembered the year of the incident or aspects of what he saw on the ground at the time, though he was a trained military pilot.
It's likely that after the blind flying and violent maneuvering brought on by he storm, Goddard was seriously disorientated and ended up above a completely different airfield (Renfrew Aerodrome, home to the Scottish Flying Club is a good candidate); remember aerial navigation in the 1930s was primitive (dead reckoning, map and compass and landmarks). While Renfrew is more than 100km from Drem such a navigational error in a journey of approximately 700km in a bad storm is far from impossible.
But in the Whononiverse prosaic explanations aren't necessarily correct. Let's assume Goddard did pass through a rift in time, and back to 1935 again. Why would there be a time vortex in Scotland in 1935?
- Was the British government, or an agency of it such as the RAF or Torchwood experimenting with some piece of alien technology or Mad Science?
- Blame the Navy; a side effect of that portal they'd unearthed connecting a disused coal mine to an alien base in the lunar crater Aristarchus.
- What if Goddard did land? He'd have been expected, perhaps he was hypnotised and sent back to preserve the timestream.
- Assuming Goddard was the one who returned, of course. Shapeshifting alien, Auton duplicate, clone, Sontaren or Dalek copy......
Or was the meddling with time happening a few years in the future, and Goddard's plane dragged forward by it?
On 10 May 1941 Rudolf Hess, deputy Fuehrer of Nazi Germany flew to Scotland, alone, hoping (according to history) to arrange peace talks with the Duke of Hamilton, whom he believed was prominent in opposition to the then British government under Churchill. Hess was arrested shortly after he arrived (using the alias Alfred Horn), locked up at various locations (initially the Tower of
London, then transferred to the secret "Camp Z" in Surrey, and finally to
Abergavenny in Wales), later tried at Nuremberg in 1946 and imprisoned at Spandau until his suicide (?) in 1987.
Unless of course the official historical record is wrong........
- Was someone attempting to disrupt Hess's flight? Did this create the time vortex that pulled Goddard's aircraft forward in time?
- What was Hess really doing there? Attempting to negotiate peace? Or was he in fact warning Britain not to negotiate with Germany?
- Had he found the Dark Secret at the heart of the regime he's served loyally? Was the time vortex an attempt to stop him?
- You'll need to supply a suitable
Dark Secret. Hitler is a shapeshifting alien, parallel universe
Cybermen, the Timewyrn is pulling the strings, et cetera.
- Was there a pre-planned secret meeting with Churchill, and possibly Torchwood?
- Was the man who spent forty years in Spandau prison actually Hess? Was he human?
- Was the man who arrived in Scotland actually Hess? There were rumours that
Heydrich learned of his trip and had him killed and replaced, and some sources
do claim that the Messerschmitt that crashed in Scotland had a different tail
number than the one which took off from Augsburg. Also the "Hess" who landed in Scotland wasn't the strutting newsreel hero who took off from Germany, and he seems to have been missing a scar from Hess's WW1 injury. Perhaps the time vortex did capture the real Hess.
Getting the PCs involved.
This should be pretty easy, Goddard wrote publicly about the incident in 1951 after he retired from the RAF, later included it in a book and it's been repeated many times. If a time traveller read this they might simply want to pop back and investigate.
- Perhaps they were the reason for the vortex, a malfunctioning TARDIS or other device perhaps. Especially if someone else was operating another temporal device in the area and the two interacted badly.
Further complications.
Goddard has lots of potential for involvement in time travel adventures and other weirdness.
- In 1935 he became deputy director of intelligence at the Air Ministry, where he served until WW2. Is this somehow connected with his little jaunt? Was he a guinea pig for some time displacement device, witting or not?
- What was Goddard really up to during WW2? Supposedly he was a senior staff officer during the Battle of Britain, did he meet the Doctor and was he involved in the 'Ironsides' programme? And his transfer to New Zealand just before the Pearl Harbour attack was awfully convenient; he was the only senior British commander in the South Pacific.
- Assuming he did travel in time, he ended up as Air Marshal Sir Robert
Victor Goddard,a person of some influence and was aware of weird events.
Was he involved with Torchwood? Perhaps he considered them a bunch
of meddling civilians and had his own clandestine RAF unit that
investigated oddities. If the RAF shot down a spaceship they'd be well
placed to loot it and cover up, even before the official cover-up. - Goddard retired in 1951, aged 54. Rather young wasn't it? Was he pushed
out because of his views, or was his little RAF group unearthed by
Torchwood? Or was this a cover for him doing something else? - Then there's the Intrusion Counter-Measures Group. Commanded by an RAF
Group Captain and staffed from the RAF regiment.............. Was
'Chunky' Gilmore interviewed for the job by a retired Goddard, perhaps
in the extraordinarily comfortable armchairs of a private room at the
Hourglass club? - Was Goddard a stalking horse? Did he publicise the story to see what
would happen, and not just attract kooks but actual time travellers?
Especially after the film, The Night My Number Came Up, was released in
1955. - That film is based on a second strange incident that Goddard
experienced, this one in January 1946. Goddard arrived at a party in Shanghai and
overheard an officer talking of a dream in which he (Goddard) was
killed in a plane crash; in the officer's dream the plane iced over and
crashed on a pebbled beach near mountains, with two men and a woman on
board. Goddard himself was due to fly to Tokyo that night on a DC-3, but
the details of the flight didn't match the dream. However by the end of
the evening he was persuaded to take two men and a woman with him. The
plane iced over and was forced to make a crash landing on the Japanese
island of Sado. The crash scene, a pebbled beach near mountains,
resembled that described in the precognitive dream. However, unlike the
dream no-one was injured. Was there some lingering effect from the time
vortex in 1935? - Later in his life Goddard spoke on the subject of UFOs (he probably
coined the term 'ufology') and speculated on whether he were physical
objects from another planet, or paraphysical objects from a different
universe. He's expand on these ideas (and his own experience) in his
1975 book, Flight Towards Reality. Was this suggested by a meeting with a
certain Time Lord who might be in Britain at that time? - That book recounted a third alleged oddity of Goddard's life (the man obviously had the Weirdness Magnet disadvantage. It was a official
RAF group photograph of his squadron, taken in early 1919 just after
World War I ended, and portrayed some 200 men who'd survived the
fighting. After the photo was developed, it's been placed on the
squadron noticeboard so that those who wanted copies could sign up for
them. However there was an extra face in the photograph; the grinning
and hatless Airman Freddy Jackson, a mechanic who'd died by heedlessly
walking into a spinning propeller two days before the squadron posed for
the photo and had been buried that day....... - If Goddard was still involved in strange goings-on into the sixties and later he may have mentored a young Leithbridge-Stewart, was he involved with the creation of UNIT?
- UNIT seemed to have a better relationship with the RAF than the other branches of the UK Armed Forces; at least requests for assistance appeared to be easier. Was there a group or cabal of protégés of Goddard who were more open to odd requests still operating within the service?
- And why was the Doctor drawn to London in 1963 in the first place? Was his TARDIS attracted by a a secret government programme experimenting with time displacement (complete with a Rainbow Codename)?
Really this one man has enough potential for an entire campaign, mostly in the background, lasting decades. The PCs could encounter him repeatedly, not necessarily in chronological order, in various locations and up to various plots.