He founded the firm that became Supermarine and promoted air power, and held a strong antipathy towards the Royal Aircraft Factory and its products.

He won his bet, gaining licence number 683 and £500, equivalent to more than £28,000 in 2010,[4] which he used to found an aircraft business, Pemberton-Billing Ltd, with Hubert Scott-Paine as works manager, in 1913.

He resigned his seat in 1921 by accepting the Stewardship of the Manor of Northstead, citing that the House of Commons had been rendered "unwholesome and unfair" by Lloyd George "at the instigation of a camarilla of International financiers".

During the so-called "Fokker scourge" of late 1915 and early 1916, he became particularly vocal against the Royal Aircraft Factory and its products, raising the question in typically exaggerated terms once he entered parliament.

In 1917, he published Air War and How to Wage it, which emphasised the future role of raids on cities and the need to develop protective measures.

His own eccentric quadraplane design for a home defence fighter, the heavily armed and searchlight-equipped "Supermarine Nighthawk", was built in prototype but had insufficient performance to be of any use against Zeppelins.

The journal supported his parliamentary campaigns, also advocating equal voting rights for men and women and electoral reform.

[13] The journal included attacks on "Jews, German music, Pacifism, Fabianism, Aliens, Financiers, Internationalism, and the Brotherhood of Man".

[14][15] The journal's most famous articles were largely written by Spencer, but under Billing's name,[16] in which it was claimed that the Germans were blackmailing "47,000 highly placed British perverts"[17] to "propagate evils which all decent men thought had perished in Sodom and Lesbia".

In this black book of sin details were given of the unnatural defloration of children ... wives of men in supreme positions were entangled.

He also targeted members of the circle around Robbie Ross, the literary executor of Oscar Wilde, who supported and introduced homosexual poets and writers.

He published an article, "The Cult of the Clitoris", which implied that the actress Maud Allan, then appearing in a private production of Salome organised by Ross, was a lesbian associate of the conspirators.

He later indicated he had never believed such a book existed, but that the whole matter had been "to frighten off those in prominent positions whose sexual tastes could have led to them being blackmailed by German agents".

While air power was his main overarching concern Pemberton Billing's primary political campaign was for the establishment of a committee of nine Independent politicians who would watch over the government in the House of Commons.

[23] Following the Russian Revolution, Billing began to express strong anti-communist viewpoints,[15] and, in 1919, he supported British military intervention against the Bolsheviks in Russia.

That allowed over ten minutes playing time per 12-inch side of the records, but the high cost of the long-playing discs (10 shillings apiece), the fact that the speed varied, and the complexity of the playback attachment, prevented popular acceptance.

He advocated the defeat of Germany by bombing alone, and the defence of Britain by a system of spaced light-beams directed upwards, which would confuse enemy bombers.

[31] Billing also proposed a post-war reform of the British constitution, arguing that general elections should be abolished in favour of a rolling programme of by-elections and that a new second chamber should be created, appointed from representatives of trades and professions.

[33] The novelist Pat Barker's award-winning First World War trilogy – Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road – was set against the backdrop of Billing's libel case, with several characters mentioning his ominous black book.

We had not foreseen that a hysterical mob might drag us back to the years when X was imprisoned in an asylum and Rina Faccio sentenced to marriage under Article 554.