MUCH has been made recently about the British political class and its penchant for jollies. Free trips at other people's expense.

Maybe they should do what Worcester's MP in the inter-war years, Australian-born Captain William Pomeroy Crawford-Greene, did and pay for their own.

Mind you, when Crawford-Greene died in 1959 he left a bank balance worth £4 million today so he was certainly able to fund what in 1933 was a record-breaking flight from Worcester to Australia.

Chartering a Spartan Cruiser II, which had been named The Faithful City for the trip, he and his guest Lord Apsley settled down in the three-engined aircraft as Patrick Windsor Lynch-Blosse, chief pilot of Spartan Airlines, pointed the plane down the runway of the city's airport at Perdiswell on October 9 and lifted off into the sky in the general direction of Brisbane, the capital of Queensland.

Twenty days, 11,000 miles, 110 hours flying time and 16 official stops later, although there must have been more because the Cruiser II only had a range of 550 miles, they landed in Brissie.

However, not content with that Crawford-Greene and Lord A then went for a whizz around Oz and by the time they arrived back in the UK, at Clacton Sands on Boxing Day, 1933, the aircraft had flown more than 50,000 miles.

It was claimed by the owners to be the longest private charter of its type undertaken.

The choice of destination was no stab in the dark, for Crawford-Greene was Australian by birth and had substantial land holdings and business interests in New South Wales.

The plane made two stops in England, at Heston, London, and Lympne, Kent, before it even got out of British airspace and there followed stop-overs at some of the world's most exotic locations such as Athens, Cairo, Madras, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and even Koepang in West Timor, before it reached Australia.

After his adventure, Capt Crawford-Green told Berrow's Worcester Journal: "It was an extremely enjoyable and interesting trip demonstrating the comfort and safety of long-distance aviation."

The flamboyant MP was born in Greenethorpe, New South Wales, in 1884 and came to England to complete his education at Cambridge.

In 1911 he inherited his father's home estate of 22,000 acres but returned to the UK on the outbreak of World War I, serving throughout with the 13th Hussars in France and Mesopotamia.

He remained in England afterwards and entered politics.

C-G was said to be a fine all-round sportsman, "a sparkling wit and excellent company."

However, his 21-year tenure as Worcester's MP came to a rather turbulent end in 1945, not because of his behaviour but because of that of others.

He had become a distant figure and the feeling was that Worcester would be better represented by a more local person.

Things became so bad Worcester Conservatives decided they could not support Crawford-Greene as their candidate in the forthcoming parliamentary election.

He apparently accepted the situation with good grace and so the process began to choose his successor, the constituency in those days being a safe Tory seat.

A list of potential candidates was drawn up and favourite was J Basil Edwards, a much-respected Worcester solicitor who also sat on the city council.

However, the chairman of the selection committee William Godsell, who happened to be chairman of Worcester Conservative Association, then decided Edwards was not acceptable to him.

Explaining the farrago years later, Mr Edwards said: "This clearly had to do with the fact I had recently replaced him as chairman of the city council's planning and post-war reconstruction committee after he had been given the boot from the post.

"Godsell said that on no account would he have me as Conservative candidate so the selection committee eventually refused to accept me, even though I had been at the top of the list."

Encouraged by popular support, he considered standing as an independent Conservative but this threatened to split the Tory vote and, after intervention by none other than Sir Winston Churchill and considerable personal heart-searching, Mr Edwards decided to step aside.

Which was just as well for the official Conservative candidate George Ward only won by four votes after three recounts.

Meanwhile, Captain William Pomeroy Crawford-Greene was at home in Australia well out of it.

Many thanks to aviation historian Mike Mullins for his help with this article.