Let’s go fly a kite – and put a camera on it, too…

The Chinese are supposed to have invented kites. But a Russian aviator turned them into crucial implements of reconnaissance during the First World War – and created a camera which could take pictures from them. Captain Sergei Ulyanin, who died in 1921, is one of the more important and unusual people buried in Brockley Cemetery. Here MIKE GUILFOYLE tells his story.

Sergei Ulyanin’s grave is close to the grave of the Great War poet and artist David Jones, part hidden off the pathway heading towards the near seamless boundary between Ladywell and Brockley cemeteries.

His last resting place is topped by a broken cruciform headstone – he lies alongside his wife Ludmilla Oulianine, who died aged 83 in 1970 – a last survivor of the power which was imperial Russia before the Communist revolution of 1917.

Aviator and inventor Captain Sergei Alexandrovich Oulianine – also know as Ulyanin – born in 1871, was a hereditary nobleman, fluent in several languages, was based at the famous Imperial Air force flying school in Gatchina, about 30 miles south of Petrograd, now St Petersburg.

This was the first aviation school in Russia and as its head he was responsible for the training of a galaxy of outstanding airmen at the outbreak of the Great War in 1914.

His name was almost as legendary as some of his former students, who became internationally recognised as fighter aces.

He must have been a good teacher. His pupils included the prolific aircraft designer Igor Sikorsky – who went on to create the biggest helicopter maker company in the world – and Pyotr Nesterov, the founder of aerobatics, including the famous death loop.

Nesterov was also the first pilot to destroy an enemy airplane, when in flight in 1914.

In the 1890s, Captain Sergei Ulyanin’s noted enthusiasm and technical expertise led to the development of box-shaped kites especially for aerial photography, which he pretty much invented, before aviation became more widespread.

Ulyanin’s 19th century “drones” could carry a camera either as it went aloft or become the setting for one sent up the string on a small cart once the kite was airborne.

Ulyanin had also invented a type of aerial camera that was built specifically for aircraft and was ideal for military use.

The camera had an altimeter and a clock that time-coded the 13x13cm images.

Ulyanin type kites were used as a part of aerial reconnaissance. They came into their own during the longest siege of the First World War at the Austro-Hungarian fortress of Przemysl in present day Poland from 1914 -1915.

They were used extensively for aerial photography by the Russian Imperial air force.

By April 1917 a total of 77 Russian aircraft had been fitted with Ulyanin’s camera.

He also created a collapsible aircraft. The imperial court noticed.

A remarkable photograph shows Captain Ulyanin meeting Tsar Nicholas II – it is believed to have been taken on a visit to Gatchina on October 26, 1911.

But how did a Russian engineer, balloonist, and military pilot, come to be in London?

Possibly he arrived here as an emigre following the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917 after the October Revolution and the ensuing bloody civil war.

By then, he was a Major-General and came to be in London as part of a military aviation delegation.

All we do know is that he died in exile, a long way from the battlefield of unknown causes, three years after the end of the Second World War, in Lewisham Hospital in October 1921, aged just 51.

Not too far away, families fly kites on Hillyfields, unaware of how the man whose inventiveness transformed them has his memorial close by.

There is a possibility his headstone might be restored by the Russian Heritage in the UK Society.

It has been working since 2016 to study and promote Russian-British shared history and the legacy of prominent Russians who lived in Britain.

It has expressed an interest in helping with the cost of rebuilding his grave.

Main pic: Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Alekseevich Ulyanin