If you want to get through immigration quickly, register for an iris scan. We contemplated this, snaking dolefully towards Heathrow's passport control after a half-term holiday, but you have to be over 18.
However, the service would surely have appealed to Charles Rolls. Rolls wasn't much of a student at school, being captivated by what the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls ‘things electrical'. No doubt his parents would have had a job keeping him off the computer, if it had been invented. But he went on to establish Rolls-Royce.
Next July will be the centenary of Rolls's death. An aviator, he was killed at Bournemouth, when his tailplane collapsed. It is a moot point as to whether Rolls was the first Briton to die in an aero-plane:
Percy Pilcher, a less famous name, may have beaten him to it when the Hawk he was developing crashed in 1899. It depends what you call an aeroplane. Pilcher's memorial, in a Midland field, is trumped by a statue of Rolls, unveiled in his home town, Monmouth, in 1911.
Rolls is shown admiring a model of an aircraft: good, but excelled by the Spirit of Ecstasy (supposedly modelled on Lord Montagu of Beaulieu's mistress), epitomising the glamour travel had before queues.
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'A bluff, honest man in the trappings of greatness': The extraordinary story of the Foundling Hospital, and the sailor who saved the abandoned children of LondonA remarkable charitable endeavour to save abandoned children on the streets of London has a touching legacy in the form of the The Foundling Museum in the very centre of London. John Goodall tells its story; photographs by Will Pryce.
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The elegant country home of a motor racing daredevil who drove round the world in a 1936 Bentley and crashed a Range Rover into his own front porchPeasemore House, with its collection of barns, workshops, stables and more, is an ideal home from which to plan an adventure — something that was a passion of its present owners. Penny Churchill explains more.
