Cards on the table: I haven’t been so under the spell of a book about dangerous journeys since reading David Grann’s spectacular The Wager, an account of mutiny, murder and survival on a British warship. What Grann did for 18th-century seafaring, David Rooney achieves for early aeronautics and its first heroes. Jack Alcock and his self-taught navigator Ted Brown were the plucky aviators who, back in 1919 (eight years before Charles Lindbergh was mobbed by eager reporters on his arrival in Paris from Long Island, 3,600 miles away), crossed the Atlantic in a flimsy biplane made of wood and linen, fighting their way through ferocious storms. The two men had only met a few weeks before the flight, but theirs proved to be a perfect partnership. They won themselves a £10,000 prize from the Daily Mail (sponsors of the challenge), knighthoods and, you’d imagine, a place in flying history.

Not so. Lindbergh himself sportingly reminded his devotees that Alcock, an Englishman, and Brown, an American (by parentage, not birthplace), had cleared the way for his own solo flight. Today, while enthusiasts still flock to London’s Science Museum to see the modified Vickers Vimy bomber flown across the Atlantic by Alcock and Brown, their names are overshadowed by those of Lindbergh and other aviators. True, a solo flight makes for a more gripping news story, but Rooney also shows that Alcock and Brown were unassuming men who lacked the taste for publicity. It probably didn’t help that Alcock died in a plane crash less than six months after their triumph. 

Rooney sets the scene for the flight by taking us to Brooklands in Surrey. In 1910, an astounded Harry Hawker, a sporty young man, had watched the great escapologist Harry Houdini take to the air at the controls of an unwieldy canvas hut perched above three tricycle wheels in Australia.