ON a windy day, more than 80 years ago, somewhere on Lymington golf course a young, tall, fair-haired inventor set up his rocket which he claimed would revolutionize the country’s postal system.

Gerhard Zucker was confident his rocket, containing 600 letters, would hurtle into the air, soar across the Solent and land in the water off Fort Victoria, near Yarmouth to be picked up by a boat.

With members of the public kept well away from the take-off spot, the inventor launched the rocket and with a fierce hiss and a cloud of smoke it streaked skywards, unfortunately a sudden gust of wind blew it off course and it was later found badly buckled, buried three feet deep in the mud of Pennington Marshes a few miles away.

“Precautions were taken to ensure that in the event of an accident no-one would be injured,” reported the Daily Echo, which was on hand to see the demonstration.

“Onlookers were kept back at a distance of 40 yards while Herr Zucker fired the rocket while lying on the ground”.

“The rocket was badly damaged when it landed in the marshes. It was buried with the exception of one fin but the head was buckled and had to be torn off to extract the letters, damaged by mud and water.

“These were taken to a Lymington hotel, where they were dried before being posted in the ordinary way.”

Like all spent fireworks The planned rocket mail delivery service fizzled out but Zucker, dubbed by some as the “try-try-again inventor”, was not down hearted and went on to carry out other similar experiments mostly without success.

Zucker was obsessed with mail-carrying rockets and before arriving in Britain he wandered the German countryside with small demonstration rockets, setting them up in any village that would tolerate him.

Gradually Zucker producer bigger and more powerful rockets until he proudly revealed one 16 feet long and able to lift 440 pounds of mail.

In 1933 he announced a flight from the German mainland to an island nine miles offshore, however, this only managed to travel a little more than nine feet rather than the intended distance.

Failing to achieve the other 99 percent of his target didn’t faze him and Zucker went right back to his drawing board.

After fleeing Germany from the Nazis, Zucker arrived in the UK where he eventually found himself on the wrong side of the law.

It turned out that Zucker was a fake, as he never really built a true rocket, unlike others involved in German rocketry.

He designed large canisters surrounding old-fashioned black powder firework-style rockets and made money to build these by selling “postage” for his rocket mail.

Things were to get worse for Zucker after he left a large cache of gunpowder in a railway station cloakroom, he spent two nights in jail before being deported as a “threat to the income of the post office and the security of the country”.

With Zucker back in Germany he spent more than a year in jail there for fraud and embezzlement before serving in the Luftwaffe during the Second World War.

After the war Zucker, who died in 1985, became a furniture dealer, and started to experiment with rocketry once more and also dabbling in selling fraudulent rocket postal covers.?