An article in Maldon Museum's 'Penny Farthing' newsletter drew my attention to a little-known eccentric local character. As he was based in South Fambridge, part of Rochford, 'local' might be stretching it a bit, but the two halves of Fambridge were until relatively recent times connected by ferry.

Born in 1881 in London, Noel Pemberton-Billing ran away from home at the age of thirteen after setting fire to his headmaster's office. He made his way to South Africa, and eventually joined the mounted police. He then became a boxer, and eventually enlisted in the British Army, fighting in the Boer War.

Retiring after being wounded, he set up a garage in London, and in 1908 entered the brand-new aviation business, setting up an airfield in Fambridge where he designed and built planes. The airfield was too boggy to be a success, and Pemberton-Billing shifted to seaplane design on the south coast.

In 1913 he won a bet with Frederic Handley-Page, the famous aircraft designer, teaching himself to fly in one day and gaining his pilot's license. He sold his aircraft company in 1915 to his works manager, Hubert Scott-Paine, who renamed it 'Supermarine' – the company that went on to build that thoroughbred of the skies, the Supermarine Spitfire.

Short-lived though the Fambridge airfield was, it does hold the distinction of being the first ever purpose-built airfield in the U.K.

Pemberton-Billing's own aircraft designs did not exactly mirror the Spitfire achievement. The 'Nighthawk', one of his designs to combat German airships, was a 3-ton monster with a heavy gun, a searchlight and four wings. Its two 100hp engines meant it could barely get off the ground.

He built a couple of single seat fighters, the P.B. 23 and P.B. 25 which had a pusher engine mounted behind the cockpit. Odd-looking to our eyes, there were similar designs which also happened to be much better, so very few were produced.

Pemberton-Billing entered politics after these failed efforts, and became notorious for some rather eccentric campaigns. He founded a magazine called 'The Imperialist' and made some unsavoury attacks (even for the standards of the day) against Jewish and gay people. He also claimed that the German army had a secret society called 'The Unseen Hand' which was using young men and female prostitutes to seduce British soldiers, sapping their will to fight and/or giving them venereal disease.

He really got into hot water when he claimed that Margot Asquith, wife of the former Prime Minister, was having a lesbian relationship with dancer Maud Allen, and that this was masterminded by the Germans as part of a conspiracy to undermine powerful men through their wives. He named this conspiracy 'The Cult of the Clitoris', a word which few people had heard of in 1918, let alone used in polite society!

Pemberton-Billing survived the subsequent court case, but his credibility was spent and he lapsed into obscurity, dying in 1948.