Inscriptions: Sadler’s balloon flight
The above plaque is on the wall of Merton College in Deadman’s Walk (on the north side of Christ Church Meadow). It is not as old as it looks: it was unveiled by the Lord Mayor on the bicentenary of the event on 4 October 1984. It reads:
James Sadler
1753–1828
First English Aeronaut
who in a fire balloon
made a successful
ascent from near this
place — 4th October 1784
to land near Woodeaton
Above: Sadler’s balloon ascending from Merton Field
James Sadler was the son of James Sadler, an Oxford pastry cook, and his wife Elizabeth and was baptised at St Peter-in-the-East Church on 27 February 1753. He began experimenting with small gas-filled balloons while working as a laboratory technician in the University’s chemistry laboratory. On 4 October 1784 he “ascended into the atmosphere” from Christ Church Meadow, and the hot-air balloon (which was estimated to have risen to a height of 3600 feet) came down six miles away near Wood Eaton.
The next month, on 12 November 1784, Sadler’s second flight (this time from the Botanic Garden, and in a hydrogen balloon) reached Aylesbury after about twenty minutes.
G. V. Cox in Recollections of Oxford wrote:
In this year [1789] and in several following years, an ingenious native of Oxford, Mr. Sadler (afterwards known as “the Aëronaut”), gave lectures on what he called “philosophic fire-works”…. Mr. Sadler was a clever, practical, and experimental manipulator in chemistry, and as such was patronised by the University, or rather by the few scientific men then in the University; what the University, as such, did or even professed to do in scientific matters at that period it were hard to say.
Two of Sadler’s sons predeceased him: Captain James Sadler died in India in 1818, and Windham Sadler died in a ballooning accident in 1824.
Left: Sadler’s grave in St Peter in the East churchyard (now part of St Edmund Hall). The burial register gives his address as George Lane, and states that he died at the age of 75 and was buried on 30 March 1828.
Below: Ian Woodmansey of Altitude Balloons recreates Sadler’s flight from Christ Church Meadow in July 2007 as part of the celebrations of 1000 years of Oxfordshire
Below: Plaque inside the former Church of
St Peter-in-the-East (now St Edmund Hall Library)
Wikipedia: James Sadler (balloonist)