Kite Personalities - Clive Hart

Ben Ruhe

As the author of the only authoritative history of the kite, Dr. Clive Hart occupies a special place in the world of kiting. His Kites, an Historical Survey, first published in 1967 and reissued in 1982, has set the kite record for number of readers-many thousands. (No longer in print, the book is still available through the DF Online Store.) Covering the four-thousand-year history of the kite, it focuses on the technologically advanced Western kite and emphasizes the role the kite had in the development of powered aircraft.

Although Hart has written extensively on the history-and prehistory-of flight, literature is his bread and butter; it is a subject he has taught for many years at the University of Essex in Colchester, east of London. His many books include studies of James Joyce, editions of John Webster's tragedies, and a volume written in collaboration with his wife, called Heaven and the Flesh: Imagery of Desire from the Renaissance to the Rococo. Heavy going for your average kite fancier.

After a geographically varied education, and teaching assignments all over the world, Hart ended up in Colchester because it is within easy range of Cambridge University, which he visits weekly to do research. "I am an active member of the congregation there," he says, using Cantabrigian terminology. "I keep in touch."

Born of an English father and Australian mother in Perth, Western Australia, Hart was raised there. He recalls being taken for a ride in a Dragon Rapide, a DeHaviland biplane, when he was three years old. He flew kites as a boy, found anything to do with flight fascinating, including boomerang-throwing, and eventually became an airplane pilot. "I fly when I can afford it, when I can find the time," he says. While he likes anything to do with flight, he chose powered flight "because I want to be in command, not depend on air currents."

Helping to found an aviation club at Ipswich airport, near where he lives, he is pleased to have been awarded the membership number 001, indicating he is the first member, and charmed to relate that one of his three sons was assigned the James Bondian number 007.

"I did have an engine blow up, but I've never crashed or damaged a plane," he says with pride. He is also pleased to note that he once flew himself into the famous military airport at Farnborough, Hampshire, where, in 1908, Samuel Franklin Cody, the expatriate American aviation pioneer, made the first powered flight in Britain.

Hart was educated in Australia and at the University of Paris before taking a doctorate at Cambridge. He has taught at Newcastle, in New South Wales, which afforded him a chance to study the work of Anglo-Australian aviation pioneer, Lawrence Hargrave, of box kite fame, at the University of Lund, Sweden, even at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Predictably well spoken, he retains the scholar's accurate memory. Retirement is "a non-event," in Hart's words; he says he know exactly what he'll be doing, which is "just what I'm doing now-research and writing books, but on a reduced income."

In addition to Kites, an Historical Survey, Hart long ago wrote a children's book on kites, titled Your Book of Kites. His books on flight include Images of Flight, The Dream of Flight, and The Prehistory of Flight, with one chapter devoted to kites. He also has written a chapter for a book on the Gimbel collection at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. He covered all of the manuscripts to 1914 and books up to 1850. "Only a little bit is kite material."

Hart has done extensive research on kites of the Pacific Ocean area, obtaining much valuable material from the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, but says he may never write a book he started three decades ago since he feels he needs an anthropologist collaborator "of the stature of Margaret Mead" to trace the historical thread developed by his research. He believes the kite was independently invented in the Pacific, as an outgrowth of ocean sailing, and puts its antiquity at 1,500 years ago, or older. He does think the Chinese invention of the kite easily predates this, citing written documentation on kites in China centuries before the Christian era. For anyone interested in the history of Pacific kites, Hart recommends a well researched German volume, The Fishing Kite by Wilhelm Mueller, published in the 1920s.

Of his books, "only two have earned me more than a few hundred pounds," he says. The leading moneymaker was his A Topographical Guide to James Joyce's Ulysses, which earned him "a few thousands." He says, "I write for academic interest. I don't care about marketing. If I break even, I'm delighted."

Fluent in spoken and written French and German, Hart's knowledge of kite research and scholars in Europe, and for that matter in many other parts of the world, is extensive. Commenting on the enormous interest in flight in France at the turn of the century, he says that one of the best archives on kites is held by the air museum at Le Bourget airport, outside Paris. The kite holding at Farnborough, Hampshire, home of British aviation, remains largely unexplored, he says, as does the archive at the Science Museum in London. The late Charles Gibbs-Smith of the Victoria and Albert Museum published a massive volume on the subject of the history of flight and planned a second volume on the subject, much of it kite-related. "Gibbs-Smith had several large filing cabinets filled with flight research material, but it was in chaotic order, says Hart. Where the valuable archive went follow Gibbs-Smith's death is unknown to Hart.

While teaching in Newcastle, in New South Wales, Hart studied the career of the Anglo-Australian flight pioneer, Lawrence Hargrave, at a Sydney technology museum, and made a copy of the very extensive microfilm file of Hargrave's work held by the museum, which he subsequently presented to the Cambridge University library. A similar microfilm file of Hargrave is held by the Royal Aeronautical Society Library in London, along with easier-to-deal-with photocopies of the file. Hart says of Hargrave, "He's an extremely important figure in the history of kites, one of the two or three most important. Who else was as interesting in the kite world before the 1950s? Another reason for my interest in him was that, although English originally, he became an Australian, and I'm an Australian myself."

Hargrave was an important figure from the standpoint of technology, Hart feels. "He put the box kite on the map. But as a theoretician, he is not so important. He really didn't understand aeronautics, kept going down blind alleys. He was very much an amateur aerodynamicist." Hart questions whether Hargrave actually invented the box. He feels the concept was "around" at the time and that Hargrave may simply have developed his own version of it, popularized it, and as a consequence received credit for inventing the kite.

Hart feels there are important sources on kite history around the world that have never really been plumbed by scholars, including some in former Iron Curtain countries, particularly Russia. "Everybody tried man-lifting," he says, "and materials on that subject are all over." He cites a medieval Romanian manuscript on the art of warfare, which includes a chapter on kites, as the sort of valuable document hardly known to the Wetern kite world. Hart, needless to say, has a copy-"delivered by diplomatic pouch," he adds. "Wolfgang Behringer of Munich is an important kite scholar hardly known to the English-speaking kite world," he says.

Hart says that he has never been much of a collector and now has only a few kites, "nothing historic," having given most of his collection to a son. He has, however, kept a parchment and cotton replica he made of perhaps the first kite made in Europe, sometime before 1430. "This medieval creation is the so-called pennon, or pennant, kite, similar to snake kites these days," he says, "but that could change. I do take notice of them."

Hart concludes his acknowledgments in Kites, an Historical Survey with thanks "to the memory of my father, who made my first kite, and like the Thai mandarins, let it fly all night."

"Having worked in an aircraft factory in England as a teenager designing airfoils, a treasured experience for him, my father was always keen on flying," Hart recalls. "I remember him making me a regular old kite with a tail when I was about eight. It flew well and since Perth is the windiest city in the world, he simply tied it to a fence and left it flying overnight. It was still going well the next morning. With kites, and the other aspects of flight he introduced me to, we were simply doing the thing we both liked best."

This article first appeared in the Drachen Foundation Newsletter (December 1996)