"An ingenious inventor is keeping his secret in some remote farm building between Market Harborough and Peterborough"

I've blogged before about the C.W. Allen and the phantom airships of 1909. It turns out that excitement was running so high that the Daily Express sent a special correspondent to Market Harborough. Here is part of his report.

THREE EYE-WITNESSES

“Express” Special Correspondent

MARKET HARBOROUGH, Tuesday Night

The mysterious airship with blazing headlights, which is reported to have been seen flying by night round Peterborough and across East Anglia, is being eagerly watched for again to-night. 

This strange aerocraft, with its suggestion of Mr. H. G. Wells' "War in the Air," has fired the imagination of the countryside, and the villagers everywhere are watching the sky for its reappearance. It has been seen driving through the night by several credible witnesses in districts wide apart, and many people believe that an ingenious inventor is keeping his secret in some remote farm building between Market Harborough and Peterborough.

I have motored this evening across part of ' the district in which the airship—judging from its line of flight—is understood to be concealed. The fenland of the country round is as flat as a billiard-table, and remote from the main lines of railway and high roads, and is thus admirably suitable {for an aeronaut who desired to keep his trial flights secret. 

Among the first to see the airship that flies by night was Mr, C. W. Allen, the pedestrian holder of the 2,000 miles road record, who lives in Northampton Road, Market Harborough. 1 have today seen Mr. Allen, who has given me an account of what he saw.

You can read Allen's account in an earlier post on this blog – he lived at 43 Nithsdale Avenue, not on Northampton Road. It seems there was a second panic over these mysterious airships in 1913.