THE tennis balls have been flying like bullets this week on the clay courts of Roland Garros as Andy Murray has fought his way to the semi-finals of the French Open.

As impressed as I am by Murray’s hellfire serve, I am more impressed by the man after whom the venue is named – Roland Garros. He was a keen amateur tennis player, but he is best known a pioneering French aviator before the First World War – in 1911, he set the world altitude record and, in 1913, he became the first man to defy death and fly across the Mediterranean. Such derring-do made him a French national hero.

When war broke out, he took to the skies, firing his handheld pistol from his cockpit at German fliers. Obviously, a forward-pointing machine gun would have been better, but no one had yet worked out how the bullets could fire through the spinning propeller without hitting the blades.

So Garros invented steel deflector plates that he attached to the blades so that he could fire at the enemy without shooting himself down.

It worked. He marked up a couple of kills (he is not an “ace”, because to qualify to be an “ace” you have to have shot down five enemy planes) before being shot down himself over hostile territory in April 1915 – he was trying to throw bombs out of his plane at a train on a railway line below.

After crashlanding, Garros tried to set fire to his plane to prevent the Germans from seeing his secret innovation, but he was captured before the flames could take hold.

He was sent to prison, and his revolutionary device was sent to the Dutch aircraft manufacturer, Anthony Fokker, who was working for the Germans. Within a fortnight, German planes took off, equipped with this revolutionary device.

After three years a prisoner, Garros escaped, and resumed his aerial battle with the enemy. Unfortunately, tactics and technology had moved on greatly during his incarceration, and on October 5, 1918 – a day before his 30th birthday and five weeks before the end of the war – he was shot down and killed by a Fokker plane fitted with a propeller synchronisation system which had grown from his own idea.

Oh! I say.

A COUPLE of weeks ago in this space, I was being driven batty by batts – Bishop Auckland, Richmond, Bedale, Colburn and Ripon all have riverside pastures called The Batts, and I was trying to work out what this local word meant. Several people have kindly sent me theories, which usually involve military theories. Several of our Batts are close to castles, so could the Batts have been where archery was practised – butts – or could the Batts have been for shooting practise – a diminutive of “battery”?

Then Raymond Jones butted in. His family have lived in Mill Batts Farm in Great Burdon, on the eastern outskirts of Darlington, since 1902, where there has been a cornmill powered by the Skerne on the Batts since about 1190. “I have always understood that the Batts were the floodplain on the banks of a river,” he says.

Which seems about right: pastureland that is at times under water is the Batts. Probably.