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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Chelsea Flower Show 2025: What else to do in SW3 if you're coming to the world's greatest flower showThere's more to Chelsea than just the Flower Show so we've rounded up some of the best places to eat, stay and shop.
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Uniquely unique? The Yorkshire grain silos transformed into a home that's a symphony in glass, steel and curvesAmid the beautiful countryside of North Yorkshire, on the edge of the Castle Howard Estate, The Silos is a property for which the word 'house' simply doesn't cut it. And that's not the only way in which it's made us throw out the dictionary.
