Gerrard, of the Royal Marine Light Infantry. They were keen and apt pupils, as they needs must have been to qualify for their certificates in six weeks of bad weather, which included one considerable snow-storm. Instruction in those days was no easy matter; the machines were pushers; the pilot sat in front with the control on his right hand, the pupil sat huddled up behind the instructor, catching hold of the control by stretching his arm over the instructor's shoulder, and getting occasional jabs in the forearm from the instructor's elbows as a hint to let go. Mr. Cockburn weighed over fourteen stone, and Captain Gerrard only a little less, so the old fifty horse-power Gnome engine had all it could do to get the machine off the ground. In a straight flight along the aerodrome the height attained was often no more than from twenty to thirty feet; then the machine had to make a turn at that dangerously small elevation, or fly into the trees at the end. Fortunately the aerodrome was clear except for a few week-end pilots who practised on Saturdays and Sundays; the instructor and his pupils were energetic, flying at dawn and at dusk to avoid the high winds; and the training was completed with only two crashes, neither of them very serious. The navy pupils were encouraged throughout by frequent visits from their senior officer at Sheerness, Captain Godfrey Paine, who befriended aviation from the first. Eastchurch soon became the recognized centre for the training of naval officers in the use of aeroplanes, and when, upon the death of Mr. Horace Short, in 1917, the Short brothers vacated Eastchurch, and concentrated at their Rochester works, Eastchurch passed wholly under naval control. No honour or reward that could be given to the members of the Royal Aero Club, and especially to Mr. McClean and Mr. Cockburn, can possibly equal this, that they were part founders of the Naval Air Service.