JUMP!

Nah, we won't do that, someone'll get hurt...

Every year, the Royal British Legion Festival of Remembrance comes round on the Saturday before Remembrance Sunday. It’s held in the Royal Albert Hall, London.

Every year I can’t help but be moved to tears. Especially by the poppy drop. The poppy drop is exactly what it says, several thousand poppies dropped from the roof of the hall during Binyon’s “They shall not grow old……” poem. The drop mechanism was the only one of its kind, in the world. Made by the BBC special effects department long before records began, it’s the most elegant and delightfully simple construction. Four long, rotating drums housed in four troughs, each drum and each trough has a slot running its’ length. The drums are filled with poppies and rotated slowly, as the drum slot coincides with the trough slot, a load of poppies fall out. The contraptions were hung in a square from the corona of the hall just under the mushrooms, so the poppies fall some 75-100 feet, spreading out as they fall. Whatever one’s political/pacifist/warlike disposition, the whole event is very moving, but the poppy drop in particular does me in, as the poppies land on the caps of the servicemen and women standing, stock still, faces forward, some of them in tears. There used to be an annual aerial shot of poppies that had landed on the round, white tops of sailor’s hats which had a particular resonance. Note of interest, the drop poppies used to be made of what was left after the sale poppies had been stamped out of sheets of red crêpe, chopped up into poppy-ish shapes. Watching recent footage, I think that the drop mechanism is a bit more c21st and it looks like the poppies are now the same as those sold on the street, without the green, plastic stem, something to do with sharper (HD?) TV images giving the game away?

Each year, one of the armed services takes precedence during the proceedings, I was involved in a particularly memorable RAF year, memorable for several reasons.

The steps leading down from loggia level¹ to the arena are very deceptive. They’re not a uniform, pun intended, pitch. As they go down, they get both shallower and longer to allow for the “bowl” shape of the stalls. This confuses the crap out of ticket holders trying to walk to their seats, let alone service men trying to march down them and, during the Festival of Remembrance, much marching is done. During my time, there was a decidedly “proper” Garrison Sergeant Major, the Hall effectively becomes a military garrison for the few days that the event occupies the venue. He was right out of the Windsor Davies mould, all bristle moustache, slashed peak & pace stick, not very funny and, in his case, not very Welsh. Even he couldn’t shout loud enough to get squaddies to do it right, no matter how many times they tried. The RAF Regiment, however, walked into the building, formed up in the loggia corridor and marched down into the arena from four different entrances, absolutely perfect, first time. I was dead impressed. The first of each column hit the arena floor at exactly the same time. They followed this up with their signature, silent formation drill. Gobsmackingly impressive.

The pinnacle of the evening in question was to be a parachute drop from the gallery.

The idea for this came from Bob Corp-Reader, for many years, the festival’s producer. He was the son of Ralph Reader of Gang Show & FA Cup Final Community Singing fame. Bob had a penchant for coming up with bright ideas that most sane people would consign to the ‘Nah, we won’t do that, someone’ll get hurt’ file.

A parachute drop INSIDE the Albert Hall‽ Nah, we won’t do that, someone’ll get hurt.

Oh, yes we will.

The idea was that we’d find a member of the Royal Marines’ Red Devils parachute display team daft enough to risk jumping from the top layer (Gallery) of the hall, attached to both a parachute and a steel wire cable. Predictably, the Marines had no problem finding one. Between me and Happy Bray, one of the best riggers on the scene at the time, we cooked up a plan to run a tensioned cable from the gallery down through the back door of one of the loggia boxes. The ‘volunteer’ would be harnessed to the cable, we’d pre-deploy a parachute and he’d drop down the cable, landing elegantly on a ramp built in the front stalls, unhitch himself, salute the Royal party and leave the arena to tumultuous applause.

Great, nothing to go wrong there then.

The Festival of Remembrance is one of the occasions in the calender when you get most of the Royal Family and most of the cabinet in the same building, at the same time. They always leave one or two out, just in case something goes horribly wrong and they need to bring substitutes off the bench.

Happy & I drew up plans and thoroughly assessed the risks, not least of which was the potential for killing or maiming a member of Her Majesty’s services, right in front of his employer and her family. Actually, the biggest risk was of doing some permanent damage to the building, or even pulling part of it down. If you string a cable between two fixed points, tighten it and then run a load down it, the loading and stresses on the cable change as the load moves and we didn’t really know how or where these loads would apply. So we set up a test rig at RAF Hullavington in Wiltshire. At the time Hullavington was home to both the RAF Regiment and the Parachute Packing Unit. They had a number of huge hangers where they laid parachutes out for re-packing and parked various gliders and other things of a potentially airborne nature.

We built a tower and tied it to a wall, strung a cable the length of the hangar and bolted it to the floor, collared our volunteer and dropped him, many, many times. Part of the experiment was to work out how much parachute to use, as a full Red Devils chute is colossal, and part was to assess what kind of loads were applied to the rig during the drop. Modern chutes are parafoils, a series of cells attached together, sort of mattress shaped as opposed to the more traditional looking mushrooms, and we simply got the chute experts to remove cells until we’d got a manageable canopy. We kind of worked on reduced loads as we didn’t have a full RAH height. With a load link²attached in line with the cable, we could measure the load as our friend travelled down the wire. It all went rather well, the load appeared not to exceed 3 tonnes pro-rata at any point, well within our parameters and, with a stripped-down chute, we had it cracked.

A few weeks later the fit up at the hall came around. Happy and I came up with a scheme that allowed us to deploy the cable quickly during the show, there were beams around the box door to take the load, a load link to monitor the load and a team in the gallery to deploy the chute. A couple of rehearsals got our routine right, no surprises regarding loads or chute. The Red Devil descended gracefully, dropped on to the platform, un-harnessed himself and made his way out of the arena, gathering his chute up as he went.

During the days running up to the show, all the usual suspects moved in, staging, projection, sound, and crucially, TV lighting. The now defunct Lee Electrics had a lot to answer for, in many respects. They’d tip up and hang enormous quantities of huge lights, usually in inconvenient places and usually with very bad grace, and often doing significant damage on the way. On this occasion, they confined themselves to the first three.

Come the show all went swimmingly, Happy and I only a little bit tense about what we were about to do in front of the Queen. On cue, the cable was strung and tensioned, the jumper attached and the chute held open by a couple of blokes with broom handles, state of the art stuff here. Our man jumped, the cable took the strain and down he came, well… actually, up he went. About a quarter of the way down, the chute developed lift and effectively, he took off. The reading on the meter went up with him, creeping past our 3 tonnes, past four and, as the cable started to creak and the wall started to groan, it approached 5 tonnes. By this time, our man was actually flying and as the tension on the cable was upward rather than down, he was heading straight for the Royal Box. Showing great presence of mind and not a little courage, he unclipped himself and dropped on to the platform from way too high, rolled in a very authentic parachute landing sort of way, collected his chute and managed a sort of half-hearted wave before staggering off, ashen and shaking.

Image from The Royal British Legion

We stripped the cable out and went and hid until the end of the show, trying to work out what had gone wrong. What had gone wrong was Lee Electrics, well, not them themselves, just what they did. During the fit-up and our rehearsals, the TV lights were off and the hall temperature stayed relatively static. On the morning of the event, all the lights for both the show & TV were turned on for camera rehearsals and general mucking about, and on they stayed all day, right up to and including the show. Therefore, the temperature in the hall rose as the day went on, eventually having the effect of generating enough thermal energy to produce lift under our chute. On his way down, his chute behaved exactly as it would out in the open air, and it was only due to the skill of our man that he didn’t wind up in a horrid, sticky mess in the laps of the occupants of the Royal Box. We finally found him and apologised, he took it all with very good grace, although it was clear that he had been truly terrified as he saw his monarch, and the end of his career, approaching – at speed!

1. Loggia boxes – See Sumo

2. Load link – a device for measuring the load applied to a cable or to lifting equipment. Used in cranage, heavy lifts & rock & roll rigging