Grahame-White's interest in aviation was sparked by
Louis Blériot's crossing of the
English Channel in 1909. This prompted him to go to France, where he attended the
Reims aviation meeting, at which he met Blériot and subsequently enrolled at his flying school. He became a celebrity in England in April 1910 when he competed with the French pilot
Louis Paulhan for the
£10,000 prize offered by the
Daily Mail newspaper for the first flight between London and Manchester in under 24 hours. Although Paulhan won the prize, Grahame White's achievement was widely praised. circa 1912 On 2 July 1910, Grahame-White, in his
Farman III biplane, won the £1,000 first prize for Aggregate Duration in Flight (1 hr 23 min 20 secs) at the Midlands Aviation Meeting at
Wolverhampton. In the same year he won the
Gordon Bennett Trophy race in
Belmont Park,
Long Island,
New York, for which he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Aero Club. On 14 October 1910, while in Washington, D.C., Grahame-White flew his Farman biplane over the city and landed on
West Executive Avenue near the
White House. Rather than being arrested Grahame-White was applauded for the feat by the newspapers. On 26 September 1911 at an International Air Meet at
Nassau Boulevard Long Island New York attended by
Eugene Ely,
George W. Beatty,
Harry Atwood,
Bud Mars,
J. A. D. MucCurdy and Matilda Moissant, Grahame-White won a prize of $600.00 in a speed contest for flying his monoplane ten miles at a speed of miles per hour. He is known for activities related to the commercialisation of aviation, and he was also involved in promoting the military application of air power before
World War I with a campaign called "Wake Up Britain", also experimenting with fitting various weapons and bombs to aircraft. He appeared in the 1914 film
Across the Atlantic (also titled
Secret of the Air) with fellow aviator
Gustav Hamel; the film was directed by
Herbert Brenon and starred
King Baggot. Grahame-White formed the
Women's Aerial League in 1909 and trained several women to fly. Members of the league included test pilot
Winifred Buller, Lady
Anne Savile,
Eleanor Trehawke Davies and suffragette leaders
Emmeline and
Christabel Pankhurst. He established a flying school at
Hendon Aerodrome.
Cheridah de Beauvoir Stocks, the second
British woman to gain a
Royal Aero Club aviator's licence, trained at the school, earning her certificate in November 1911. In 1912 Grahame-White gave
H. G. Wells his first flight. During
World War I, Grahame-White flew the first night patrol mission against an expected German raid on 5 September 1914. Hendon Aerodrome was lent to the
Admiralty (1916), and eventually taken over by the
RAF in 1919. It was purchased by the
RAF in 1925, after a protracted legal struggle. After this he lost his interest in aviation, eventually moving to
Nice in his old age, where he died in 1959 having made a fortune in property development in the UK and US. Hendon Aerodrome later became RAF Hendon but after flying ceased there in the 1960s it was then largely redeveloped as a housing estate which was named Grahame Park in tribute to Grahame-White. An original World War I Grahame-White aircraft factory hangar was relocated a few years ago to the nearby
Royal Air Force Museum London, where it houses the museum's World War I collection and is named the Grahame-White Factory. Grahame-White was a co-founder of
Aerofilms Limited in 1919. ==Grahame-White Aviation Company==