Authors: Nevil Shute
At Brixham, full of sailing smacks in those days, we laid the ship against the quay at high tide and let her dry out, and cleaned her bottom, and painted one side of her with antifouling composition before the tide stopped work; after that she sailed very well. We put her ashore again upon a beach in the Helford River and let her lie down on her side as the tide fell while we camped on shore, and painted the other side. There was a lot more hard work in yachting in those days than there is now, and that summer I learned a great deal about kedge anchors, warping, and manœuvring a big boat under sail in narrow channels that has stood me in good stead ever since.
I have given some space to that first cruise westwards
from the Solent because although I have made many since, you can only do a thing for the first time once. Since then I have sailed in a number of yachts and owned two cruising boats, and I have cruised the coast from Portsmouth to the Scillies a number of times, but that first cruise in the old
Aeolia
stays in my mind as the best remembered, and perhaps the happiest, of the lot. Hepherd must have been well over seventy years old, I think; he had spent all his holidays upon the sea throughout his life, which was then near its end, and much of what he knew he taught me that summer, and in the following summer when I sailed with him again in a smaller vessel, the
Rothion
, of 11 tons. He went then to spend the winter in Ceylon with a daughter married to a tea planter, and he planned to come home again in May for a summer on his boat, because he knew no other way of life that brought him such content. I would have cruised with him again that summer, but he died on the way home, in the Mediterranean. It was his birthday and he had celebrated it by winning a deck quoits competition, and perhaps with a good dinner. When his cabin steward called him next morning he asked to see the doctor, and ten minutes later he was dead. He was buried at sea in the Mediterranean, a good end for an old man who showed me great kindness, and who enjoyed his life and the sea right up to the last.
The other thing that happened to me in the Oxford vacations was that I commenced work with aircraft. Through the Professor of Engineering and a colleague of his I got a somewhat indirect introduction to Mr. C. C. Walker. Mr. Walker was one of the senior officials of The Aircraft Manufacturing Company at Hendon, known as Airco for short. Captain Geoffrey de Havilland was the chief designer of Airco and the company had built large numbers of de Havilland machines throughout the war, from the D.H.1 to the D.H.11. By modern standards the
factory at Hendon would be small, but in those days it was enormous and far too large to be kept going on the peace time demand for aircraft.
I wrote to Mr. Walker offering him my services without payment in the university vacations, and to my concern he did not answer my letter. Taking my courage in both hands I went to Hendon and walked into this big works and asked to see him. I found him perfectly charming, and glad to have me as an unpaid, very junior assistant in the design office and on wind tunnel research. And so I learned my first lesson in commercial life—when in doubt about an applicant, wait and see if he’s got enough initiative to come after the job; if he does, engage him, and you won’t go far wrong. In later years when I was sitting on the other side of the desk I pursued those tactics whenever I could and always engaged the man who took most trouble to get the job, and I was never disappointed.
Airco at that time was near its end as a company manufacturing aeroplanes and de Havilland and Walker were already making plans to start a new company of their own, to be known as the de Havilland Aircraft Company. In the meantime they were allowed to go on working in the empty design offices that had been so busy in the war, with a very small staff most of whom were working out their notice. They had the use of a wind tunnel which was seven feet square in its working section and capable of a wind velocity of about a hundred feet per second, a good equipment for its day, and here they were testing models for the new commercial aeroplanes they hoped to build.
I was fortunate in beginning my association with de Havillands at this time, before the new company was formed, when they had practically no staff at all and were glad of any unpaid help. It is interesting to think back to those beginnings of a great company. When I went back to them for the summer vacation I found that all the paid
design staff at Airco had vanished except one apprentice called Mackenzie, but de Havilland and Walker were still working in the echoing, empty offices, and the wind tunnel was still going upon the aerodynamic models of the new designs, and one woodworker was still making the models. Throughout that summer Mackenzie and I worked the wind tunnel and carried on the tests, assisted now and then by Mr. Walker when the job demanded three men, plotting the results on many graphs and estimating the performance of the aircraft, doing the hack work for two great designers, listening to their sane, practical experience as they pored over the results upon our drawing boards for hours on end. Some people are born lucky, and I count myself lucky that my aviation career opened in such circumstances as those.
There were still a few aircraft going through the shops, to be examined thoughtfully in the lunch hour. Mostly these were repair and overhaul jobs. The London-Paris service in those early days was run by Aircraft Transport and Travel Ltd using mostly D.H.16s; the D.H.16 was a single engined aircraft with a Napier Lion engine, based upon the D.H.9a of the war. It was a biplane with one pilot in an open cockpit just behind the engine and under the centre section of the upper plane, and behind him was a very cramped little cabin for four passengers. There was, of course, no wireless and no toilet or anything like that; the machine cruised at about a hundred miles an hour, so that if there was a beam wind or a head wind the trip to Paris would take over three hours. Engines were not so reliable in those days as they are now and there were no navigational aids at all; judged by modern standards there were many accidents, but the service grew.
It was exciting to be in aviation in those days, because development went at such a pace. Already the new model of passenger transport was in operation, the D.H.18. That was the first aeroplane that de Havilland designed solely as
a transport, without using any of the units in production for military aircraft. It was a full gap biplane, which means that the fuselage was so deep as to fill the space between the upper and the lower wings, so that the top wings sprouted from the top of the cabin and the bottom wings from the bottom; in those days this was a novelty in a large aeroplane. To us this was a very big machine; it had one Napier Lion engine of about 450 horsepower; it carried eight passengers and one pilot, and it had the very high stalling speed of about fifty-five miles an hour, which caused a great deal of pessimistic head-wagging among the pilots when it was first introduced. An interesting feature of the machine was that the pilot was seated in an open cockpit behind the cabin looking over the top wing, an arrangement which gave the pilot a fairly good view when flying but a very poor view of obstacles ahead of him upon the ground. The cynical pointed out that since the pilot’s position was the safest in the aircraft, being nearest the tail, it ensured that the designer would get an intelligent account of the accident.
I did not go to de Havillands for the short Christmas vacation of 1920; my father’s retirement from the Post Office was near and he took his six weeks’ leave that winter at Bordighera on the Italian Riviera. I went out and joined my father and mother there in winter sunshine, the first of a number of visits I have made to that coast since then. Bordighera was a good centre for ageing people in those days, and probably still is for those who can solve the modern currency difficulties; it was quiet and cheap and Italian, a good place for sitting in the sun and sketching, a good centre for pleasant inland walks on hills covered in pine trees and wild thyme and dotted about with walled hill villages and terraced flower gardens. Places like that upon the Continent were full of old English people escaping from the grey chill of an English winter; it is
one of the tragedies of modern England that this simple pleasure is denied for economic reasons till the aged are so ill as to be able to get currency upon a doctor’s certificate.
When I went back to work at de Havillands in the Easter vacation of 1921 the new company had been formed, and the move to Stag Lane aerodrome near Edgware had taken place. Stag Lane had been a training aerodrome in the war, a very minor one run by a civilian flying school, and there were still funny little training single-seaters known as the Caudron Louse lying derelict in corners. The new company was in a tiny way of business, and they were still glad to have my unpaid work, for money was very tight. The buildings consisted of one wooden hangar of perhaps ten thousand square feet floor area which accommodated the woodworking machinery, the machinists and the fitters’ shop, and the aeroplane erection, and three canvas-covered Bessoneau hangars in rather dilapidated condition which housed the aeroplanes. The head office was a little weatherboard building of three rooms, one of which was shared by Captain de Havilland and Mr. Walker, one by Mr. St. Barbe the business manager and Mr. Nixon the secretary, and one by the telephone girl and the typists. The drawing office was an old army hut which in the interval between the end of the war and its occupation by the new company had been a chocolate factory, unsuccessful. In this there were assembled ten or twelve draughtsmen of the old Airco staff, and Mr. King who did all stress and performance calculations, and from whom I was to learn my job.
In these surroundings the new company began work, and many of the team in those days are still with the company in these days; I sometimes wish I was. It is no small achievement for a man to have assisted to build up a great enterprise like de Havillands from such small beginnings; a man who has done that can look back
on his life and feel that it has been well spent. And in those days the beginnings were small indeed. To run the lathes and milling machines—or should those words be singular?—power was needed, and the cost of bringing electric power to the site was probably prohibitive to the infant company, though there was electric light. Perhaps the cost of an electric motor was the difficulty. At any rate, Mr. Hearle and Mr. Mitchell, his foreman engineer, got hold of an old German Benz aero engine from some scrap heap; gas was available on the site, and so they set it up to run on coal gas to drive the machinery, using three of the six cylinders, and that old engine drove the shafting for the machine shop for two or three years.
It was all like that. Apart from aeroplane construction, the earliest venture of the new company was the de Havilland Air Taxi Service, which used a light bomber of the recent war, the D.H.9, converted to carry the pilot and two passengers. That was a biplane powered by a Siddeley Puma engine. At the conclusion of the war many brand new Puma engines were hit twice with a sledge-hammer and sold for scrap metal, and the infant company acquired a considerable number of these engines for a pound or two and proceeded to cannibalise them and rebuild them into engines for the charter fleet.
Most of the test flying at that time was still done by Captain de Havilland himself, but presently the company engaged a second pilot. Hatchett had been a sergeant pilot in the war, and he was a skilled woodworker; when he was not flying he worked on the bench. He was a very steady and reliable pilot. I think the next pilot to join the organisation was Alan Cobham, and I remember his arrival very well because he brought an aeroplane with him, by road. He had been joy riding somewhere, and had discovered a complete new D.H.9 on some aerodrome that had escaped the sledge-hammer altogether; perhaps
Cobham stood the man a beer. At any rate, he bought it for ninety pounds and towed it behind his car to Stag Lane aerodrome to commence an intricate negotiation with Mr. Hearle with the intent that the company should get a cheap aeroplane and Cobham a job. The deal went through. In those early days Cobham was not rated as the best pilot that the company employed, but he had a fantastic capacity for hard work and organisation; he could work eighteen hours a day month after month, and he was soon to prove it by a series of pioneering flights about the world that brought him a great reputation, and a knighthood. Hubert Broad emerged from the half dozen pilots of the charter service as the best test pilot and he remained the chief test pilot for a number of years. Charles Barnard was the most ribald. I had the characters of all these men in mind for Phillip Stenning, a character in my first published novel,
Marazan
.
Another pilot of the charter service was Ortweiler, a very slight, dark-haired, childish looking young man of Jewish extraction, who had been an undergraduate at Cambridge after the war. He had been in the R.F.C. as a fighter pilot and had been shot down over Belgium. In captivity he became an enthusiastic escaper. He was incredibly youthful in appearance, and spoke German fairly well. On his first escape he bought a German schoolboy’s cap; wearing this and telling a tearful story about having been sent home from school to go to his grandmother’s funeral, he travelled as far as the Dutch frontier by train and was only recaptured on a frontier road. He finally escaped to Holland from an island in the Baltic, travelling by train disguised as a commercial traveller and crawling for three days through the marshes at the frontier. He flew with the taxi service for about a year, and was killed in a crash at the aerodrome of Cuatro Vientos, at Madrid. He was a pleasant young man, and we had a lot in common.
The de Havilland Company was in continuous growth throughout my association with it, but in those earliest days, in the summer of 1921, I doubt if it employed more than a hundred people, counting directors, pilots, design staff, and everybody. In so small an organisation which at the same time covered practically every branch of aviation, I had a magnificent chance to get a knowledge of all sides of the business, and I think I took advantage of it. Mr. King and I worked side by side, the senior performance calculator and the junior assistant, and as the new projects came to life upon our graphs and columns of figures de Havilland and Walker still spent long periods cogitating upon our drawing boards, to my immense benefit.