Authors: Nevil Shute
His proposal raised an important point of principle. Most industrialists would agree that it is thoroughly bad practice to sell jobs for capital. My experience has led me to believe, however, that this purist doctrine may need a good deal of qualification in the case of a hazardous, new venture. A small, struggling company cannot engage a first-class staff in any case; it cannot pay first-class salaries and good men will not leave good jobs to come to a company which may be in liquidation in six months. Tom Laing had no experience of works management but he had all the basic qualifications for a good works manager; at the salary that we could afford to pay he was probably as good a man as we could hope to get. He was enthusiastic over the qualities of our design and for the general prospects of the venture. We took him on as our first employee, and he served the company loyally and well till his death in its service seventeen years later. Without the untiring energy and smiling confidence of this man the company could hardly have got through its early production difficulties. Without the financial assistance given by his mother as the years went on from her quite slender resources, in shares, debentures, bank guarantees, and second debentures, the company might well have failed to battle through to maturity.
As time went on we were to depart from the purist principle quite widely. In those years of depression there were a number of young men with some experience of
aeroplanes and with some capital at their disposal who were prepared to invest in the company and come and work for us upon a very low salary or, in one case, on no salary at all. There were so many of them that we could afford to pick and choose, and I can remember rejecting at least two applicants with substantial capital to invest because they would be obviously incompetent and useless to us. In the end there were to be no less than nine shareholders working whole time in the company, all in it financially up to the neck, many of us individually facing ruin if the venture failed. In its first three years, in fact, the company was principally financed by Lord Grimthorpe and by shareholders working whole time in the company on salaries that were frequently less than those of the men working on the bench.
The company held its first board meeting at the end of April 1931. There were practically no subscribers for shares to report; the issue of the prospectus had been a complete fiasco. Apart from those of us who were intimately concerned with the venture, I do not think that five hundred shares were applied for. I think we had stated in the prospectus that we would not proceed unless we had applications for fifteen thousand pounds’ worth of share capital; on that prospectus we could not proceed. The issue was a total failure.
This ought to have produced a state of gloom at our first board meeting. I can only remember a buoyant and a cheerful atmosphere. We had firm promises amongst ourselves for about five thousand pounds, and we set about considering what we could do with that.
I hope I did not talk my co-directors into going on; I do not think I did. So far as I remember, it was Sir Alan Cobham who declared that this venture was too good a thing to let drop, who proclaimed his faith in us in a most tangible manner. At that time he was commencing a
series of flying displays touring all the towns and cities of the British Isles, an organisation which went by the name of National Aviation Day Ltd; those who have read my novel
Round the Bend
will have found a description of this venture in the first pages of the book. Sir Alan told the Board that he would need two large, ten-passenger aircraft for National Aviation Day specially designed for flying out of fields with a very short take-off run. If the Board decided to proceed with Airspeed Ltd he was prepared to order those two aircraft from us. Five thousand pounds would be about the price of each aircraft and our five thousand pounds of capital would be insufficient to set up a works and manufacture them. Nevertheless, he was prepared to place that order with us; he was confident that we could find more capital as soon as we had something to show.
This was a bold and generous proposal. I think everybody felt that if Sir Alan Cobham was prepared to speculate on us to that extent it would be cowardly to draw back, and it must be remembered that the money promised was essentially gambling money. It was a laughing, cheerful roomful of punters in that solicitor’s office in York who went on to consider the next move.
Clearly, five thousand pounds wasn’t going to last us very long. It might well all be gone within a year, perhaps within six months—in any case long before Sir Alan’s aircraft could be built and delivered. Moreover, Sir Alan wanted two or three months to arrange his finances before he could order the machines formally or pay any deposit on them. Yet quick action to produce something that would fly was imperative, because until the new company got an aircraft of some sort into the air there was little basis upon which to seek more capital.
At that time the sport of soaring in motorless gliders or sailplanes was attracting a good deal of attention in England.
The German exploits in this field under the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles had shown that quite long flights could be made without a motor by pilots with sufficient skill, and a number of gliding clubs had been formed in England in the last year to try to emulate the German achievements. No British manufacturer, however, had yet marketed a high performance sailplane. It seemed to us that a sailplane would be something that we could get into the air quickly and cheaply while Sir Alan’s order was maturing. It would give Tiltman the opportunity to engage a nucleus of two or three draughtsmen for the design work so that he would have laid the foundations of a drawing office before the design work for Sir Alan’s aircraft came along. It would give us an opportunity to organise the workshop in a tiny way before Sir Alan’s machines had to be built. It would give us a machine which we could get into the air within three months or so before our capital ran out. We could reasonably hope to capture all the British gliding records that we cared to go for with the sailplane, and with that minute achievement we could probably get in more capital. Moreover, it seemed reasonable to hope that we might sell a few of the sailplanes to the gliding clubs.
Accordingly at that first board meeting we amended the prospectus to say that we would proceed upon a minimum subscription of five thousand pounds, and sent out letters to our few applicants for shares to ask if they would play upon that basis. I must have had this proposal all cut and dried before the board meeting, because at the same meeting we resolved to rent one half of an empty bus garage in Piccadilly, near the centre of the city of York. This building had a floor area of about six thousand square feet, and was to be the works of the company for the first two years. The first board meeting then dispersed, having laughingly refused to accept defeat, and Airspeed Ltd started operations
upon a capital of £5195 and a tentative order for £10,000 worth of aircraft. Tiltman and I were appointed joint managing directors, and Laing’s appointment as works manager was confirmed.
There was no time to be lost, for our days were numbered till the capital ran out. We rented a larger office for a drawing office and Tiltman got in one or two draughtsmen. It was to be a month or so before we could get possession of the bus garage, so we started one woodworker on components of the sailplane in a local joiner’s shop. Within ten days we had rented a small sales room on a weekly basis and set up woodworkers’ benches in it, and in these tiny premises the parts for a batch of three sailplanes went in to production. In that time of depression it was not very difficult to get aircraft woodworkers and by the time we moved in to the bus garage we had six or seven men working on the bench. These woodworkers, accustomed as they were to man-sized factories, regarded Airspeed Ltd as a joke. As a class, however, woodworkers are good tempered and tolerant men in any factory, no doubt because of the quality of the material they work with. Metal workers are normally more nervy and difficult, and panel beaters are apt to be bad tempered and hostile to the management, because the incessant clamour of their work and the unsympathetic material that they handle all day fray the nerves. Our woodworkers became infected with a little of our enthusiasm and, as time went on and they found that their employment continued the company, though still a joke to them, became a good joke.
We typed all our own letters, of course, on our own machines, for we had no money for a typist. When we moved in to the bus garage we built a little office about eight feet square and a store of about the same size next to it, and in the office Laing and I had our desks while Tiltman worked in his drawing office half a mile away. Construction
of the first glider was well advanced by the middle of July, and about that time Cobham gave us his firm order for the two joyriding aeroplanes.
These were to be quite large aircraft for that time. They were to carry a pilot and ten passengers in and out of small fields. Speed was immaterial and the endurance in the air could be two or three hours only, but economy in operation was important and it was essential that each passenger should have a good view. Tiltman produced a biplane design for this machine, which we christened the Ferry, with three de Havilland Gipsy engines, which fulfilled all the requirements. The Ferry had a wing span of 55 feet and an all-up weight of about 6000 lbs; it had a cruising speed of about 85 m.p.h. It had a remarkably short run to take off. It had, in fact, all the performance characteristics of the Gipsy Moth aircraft of the time, but it carried ten passengers. In those days there seemed to be a definite market for a slow, cheaply operated aircraft carrying a big payload because in many parts of the world the aeroplane competes with very slow land transport, with ships or even with pack horses. Not all aircraft need to be fast; cheapness in operation may be more important. With the introduction of metal construction, however, aeroplanes became so much more costly that speed became more important again, in order that the machine might earn its depreciation by running more journeys in a given time.
I think the first sailplane must have flown in August 1931. We had built a trailer to convey it in, in the dismantled state, and we had bought a very old Buick car for £25 to tow this trailer. We took the machine from York to Sherburn-in-Elmet aerodrome for its initial trials, and there we towed it up with the car and a long length of steel cable, myself at the controls. I got about a minute’s flight out of it on each of two launches after casting off the tow; it seemed to handle like any other aeroplane upon
the glide, bearing in mind the large wing span, which was 50 feet. It was stable, and the sinking speed seemed to be about three feet a second.
It was essential to get publicity and results with this machine, because our capital was fast running out. I had myself no experience of soaring flight nor had Laing; we therefore had to go outside the company for a pilot. There was a young German glider pilot in England at that time, called Magersuppe, who had come over to demonstrate soaring flight at the expense of one or two clubs. I got in touch with him, and he came up to Yorkshire with a German friend, Haak, that he called his secretary.
Magersuppe, I suppose, was about twenty-one years old and Haak about eighteen, but they were both experienced soaring pilots. I am ashamed to record how little I paid them, and the financial straits that they ultimately got into. My wife and I used to put them up in our flat sometimes and they had a keen nose for Youth Hostels, where they stayed whenever possible. Their angle on the business was a simple one; they wanted to emigrate from Germany, where there was much unemployment at that time. They were good, clean, hardworking lads who spoke excellent English, ready to turn their hand to any manual labour. There was, however, still prejudice against Germans after the first world war and most countries at that time had their own unemployment problem. They had attempted to emigrate to practically every country in the world, and had met rebuffs and frustration in each case. Their forlorn hope now was that they could stay in England and become British citizens by virtue of their skill in soaring flight. When finally I could employ them no longer even on the pittance that I paid they ran out of money and got into debt, and finally they were picked up by the police and deported back to Germany to join the other six million unemployed in their own country. Years afterwards, when
I was listening to the bombers overhead during the London blitz, I used to wonder which of them was Magersuppe, and I would wish him luck and think it served us bloody well right. He might have been flying for us.
Magersuppe liked the Tern, as we now called the sailplane. He had his own method of checking the structural strength of the machine, which was new to us in 1931; he got a couple of men to waggle the wing tips up and down and timed the natural frequency with a stop watch. In the air he was a careful and a knowledgeable pilot. We had some difficulty at first in finding a suitable soaring site, the requirements being for a steep slope facing to the west to give good up currents in the prevailing wind. We tried Sutton Bank on the edge of the moors about twenty miles north of York but found it difficult. Then we found a site at a place called Ingleby Greenhow in the Cleveland Hills, and here, soaring above the heather covered moors, Magersuppe had no difficulty in capturing the British gliding records for altitude and distance. It made no difference to these records that the pilot was a German.
I forget what these records were; they were very modest and were soon to be broken as the sport of soaring flight developed in England. I think the altitude record was gained by a flight about two thousand feet above the launching point as measured on a recording barograph carried in the machine, and the distance record I think was gained by landing about twelve miles from the launching point.
That finished our trials with the Tern, and we did no more with sailplanes. The machine had served its purpose and had proved that we could build something quickly that would fly well. I do not think that any of us expected to make much money out of building sailplanes; in fact the three machines were a dead loss. We assembled and sold the first two and ultimately we sold off the components of
the third. Gliding clubs in those days were mostly composed of people with very little money, and the market for an advanced machine that necessarily cost about £250 was trivial. I do not think it was until fifteen years later, after the last war, that sailplanes in this price class began to sell in any numbers.