Authors: Nevil Shute
The air station was some three miles from the town, set
in the middle of flat farming land. About a thousand acres had been cleared of hedges but not levelled; in the centre of this desolate heath stood one enormous shed surrounded by the ruins of what had been other sheds. This great building was built of corrugated iron on a steel framework; it consisted of two bays internally like two great cathedrals side by side though bigger than any cathedral ever was. Each bay was capable of housing an airship seven hundred and fifty feet long and a hundred and forty feet in diameter; a row of brick annexes which were to be offices and workshops ran along one side of the shed. The floor area of the two bays was seven and a half acres. Already in those early days the building had suffered from neglect; towards the completion of the ship the rain streamed through the roof upon the work with every storm.
In 1925 we sent a little party up from London to put this derelict air station into some sort of order for manufacturing. They found the floor of the great shed littered at one end with the feathers and remains of many hens; a vixen had had her lair for years in the covered concrete trench beneath the floor that housed the hydrogen and water mains. The rough shooting was quite good. Rabbits infested the enormous piles of steel and concrete débris formed by the demolition of the other hangars; partridge, hares, and duck were common on the aerodrome immediately outside the shed, and we got many snipe. This state of affairs continued till the day we left, though the game moved out a few hundred yards from the shed as the work got under way.
Throughout 1925 and 1926 we laboured to make order of the chaos we had found, and to design the airship at the same time. By the end of the latter year there were twenty houses on the aerodrome occupied by the wives and families of the staff. The water supply and sewage plant had been put in order, and a considerable power
plant installed to supply the electrical needs of the station. A hydrogen-generating plant had been set up beside the shed, and the site had been cleared of the enormous ruins that disfigured it. Offices and works had been set up and equipped; by the end of 1926 the place was running as a reasonably efficient manufacturing concern.
In the middle of all this absorbing work
Marazan
was published. Perhaps no novelist ever treated the production of his first book more lightly; I expected to make little money out of it, and the expectation was realised. By the time the book went out of print it had just made the advance royalty of £30. It stayed out of print for twenty six years; when it was finally reissued in a cheap edition it made £432 in royalties in the first six months. I think it is a very good thing that we cannot see into the future. If I had known that a future as an author awaited me I suppose I should have given up engineering at an early stage, and my life would certainly have been the poorer for it.
One or two points about the publication of that early book may interest young authors. Mr. Newman Flower of Cassell asked me to come and see him, which I did before we moved to Howden. At that interview he said he liked the book and wanted to publish it, but that there was one obstacle; he said that it concerned a matter with which they frequently had trouble when dealing with young authors. I asked what it was, whereupon he said, “The House of Cassell does not print the word ‘bloody’.” So we changed them all into ‘ruddy’.
He then posted me an agreement for the publication of the book. By that time I had joined the Authors’ Society, and had made a study of the terms of a desirable literary agreement. I wrote back to him objecting to practically every clause of the agreement, with the result that he replied that there were so many differences between us
that he thought that no business would be possible, and sent me back the book.
The firm of literary agents, A. P. Watt & Son, had been agents for my father in the past, and for more famous men, including Rudyard Kipling, Conan Doyle, and Edgar Wallace. I had been at Balliol with a young member of the firm, R. P. Watt, and at this stage I took my troubles to him, remarking, I think, that I had made a fool of myself. He undertook to put the matter right and handle the book for me, with the result that Cassell published it upon the standard agreement used by A. P. Watt & Son. Since then I have never done any of my own literary business at all, but I have left it all to Watt. I could not have a better agent, or a more loyal friend.
When this book was published, I had to face up to the question of acknowledging the authorship. Writing fiction in the evenings was a relaxation to me at that time, an amusement to which I turned as other people would play patience. I did not take it very seriously, and I don’t think it entered my head at the time that it would ever provide me with a serious income. During the daytime I was working in a fairly important position on a very important engineering job, for a very large and famous engineering company. It seemed to me that Vickers would probably take a poor view of an employee who wrote novels on the side; hard-bitten professional engineers might well consider such a man to be not a serious person. Of my two activities the airship work was by far the more important to me in the interest of the work, apart from the fact that it was my livelihood, and I was pretty sure that in my case writing in the evening was no detriment to the engineering.
For these reasons I made up my mind to do what many other authors in a similar case have done in the past, and to write under my Christian names. My full name is Nevil Shute Norway; Nevil Shute was quite a good, euphonious
name for a novelist, and Mr. Norway could go on untroubled by his other interest and build up a sound reputation as an engineer. So it started, and so it has gone on to this day.
So much for the book, which, as I say, was a matter of small moment to me at that time, for at Howden our difficulties were enormous. The contract for the construction of the ship had been taken at a fixed price, which was usual in those days though in later years the continual losses under fixed price contracts forced a more equitable form of agreement in the industry for the construction of experimental aircraft. However, there it was; it had become apparent even in those early days that a loss would be incurred upon the building of the ship, and the future did not hold sufficient prospect of continuity to justify a greater capital expenditure than was necessary for this one contract. It has been said that an engineer is a man who can do for ten shillings what any fool can do for a pound; if that be so, we were certainly engineers. Excluding hand tools, there were not more than a dozen machines employed in the construction of R.100. Economy was the paramount consideration in the shop equipment. A bitter little tale went round at Cardington, where they had everything they cared to ask for, to the effect that R.100 was getting on rather more quickly now that one of us had bought a car and lent the tool kit to the workshops.
At Howden I lived with two of my staff of calculators in the village, in digs with a friendly garage proprietor; it was three miles from the airship shed and we used to walk that every morning and evening, sometimes with our dogs. We all had cars; the Morgan three-wheeler was soon to give place to an ancient Morris Cowley two-seater that served me well for some years. We tried to inject some night-life into Howden by gathering up the local girls and starting a Badminton club in a disused village hall, but that
was a bit of an uphill job because the Howden residents were not night-life-minded. We joined a club in York and used to go there on Saturdays for relaxation and shopping, and on occasion we used to go as far as Leeds to dance at the Palais. We did a good deal of rough shooting, but my own main relaxation quickly became the Yorkshire Aeroplane Club, at that time in a hangar on Sherburn-in-Elmet aerodrome between York and Leeds.
This was one of the first light aeroplane clubs to be assisted by the Air Ministry; it was started off with the gift of two de Havilland Moths with Cirrus Mark 1 engines, and a subsidy of a thousand pounds a year. That made a flying club financially possible, and the Yorkshire Club quickly attracted a fair cross-section of young Yorkshire men and women, so that a Sunday spent at the Club was a merry Sunday. Later on, I was to meet my wife there for the first time. As a pilot of a sort and as an aeronautical engineer I soon found myself elected to the Committee and charged with the business of looking after the day-to-day running of the enterprise. We had a full-time pilot instructor in charge, and a ground engineer, and I got into the habit of going over to the aerodrome twice a week to help them to sort out their troubles, and to do as much flying myself as I could afford. Quite early on I distinguished myself by hitting a wire fence with the undercarriage of the Moth as I was coming in to land and depositing it upon the aerodrome in an inverted attitude; after that episode it was to be twenty-four years before I damaged an aeroplane again, at Brindisi when I was flying back from Australia.
The Yorkshire Aeroplane Club taught me a good deal about management. Our first pilot was a charming man, a good pilot and a good instructor. He was separated from his wife and lived in the village inn, and as he was a sociable, humorous, and weak character the village inn became the
focus of a rowdy party almost every night. Next morning the pilot would be watery-eyed and disinclined to fly, with some reason, and members coming to the aerodrome for a lesson would find that they could not go up because the pilot had a hangover and wasn’t feeling well. So in the end he had to go.
Our next pilot was a hard-headed bachelor, again quite a merry customer. He was efficient and good company, and though the rowdy parties continued there was never any difficulty with a hangover. Unfortunately he was involved with a married woman living apart from her husband, who established herself in the village while her divorce matured; so far as I remember, our pilot was the co-respondent. The Wives Trades Union of Yorkshire took the matter up, and members started to complain that their wives were becoming very unpleasant, and would not come to the Club because they would have to meet ‘that woman’. In the end the pilot realised the position and got a better job in Canada, where I meet him from time to time and I am always glad to do so.
Our third pilot was the best of the lot. He was a stout, good-humoured man of forty-five, happily married, with three children at school, a little suburban house with a garden which he cherished, and a couple of dogs. He was an unadventurous man who never boasted of the time he flew the aeroplane through the hangar as all the others had done, but he had been a Martlesham test pilot in his day and probably knew more about aeroplanes than any of them; later, in the second war when he must have been nearly sixty years old, he became a test pilot again and flew over seven hundred Lancaster bombers on their first test flights. He was quite content with the instructional routine in our club; if asked he would perform aerobatics on the Moths and Bluebirds, but he never did them voluntarily. Like another of my pilot friends, he had no
ambition to be the most famous pilot in the world. He just wanted to be the oldest.
These pilots taught me that the good test pilot is not the daring young bachelor of fiction, with half a dozen girl friends and a big sports car. It may be necessary to employ such men very occasionally for the sake of their physical fitness; if, for example, a machine has to be flown to forty thousand feet unpressurised. But such occasions are very rare indeed, for the obvious reason that production aeroplanes have to be capable of being flown by ordinary people. In the hands of such a man your aeroplane will never be safe. Such a pilot is fundamentally irresponsible because he has no stake in the country, nothing to lose. He will cheerfully risk his life to satisfy his vanity or to improve his skill; his life is a small matter, but the safety of your aeroplane is important. The good test pilot is the happily married man with a wife and young children dependent on him, helpless people that he loves and who will be grievously injured if he loses his life. Such a man is interested in preserving his own life, and your aeroplane; he will engage in no daring adventures outside his instructions, and he will land immediately if anything seems to be wrong with the machine to tell you all about it. In the hands of such a man your experimental aircraft is as safe as it is possible for it to be. The happily married man with a large family is the test pilot for me.
At Howden the ship grew slowly. Her girders were formed of three duralumin tubes rolled up helically from sheet metal and riveted with a helical seam; Wallis finally perfected this method of construction during the summer of 1926. The first girders were built during the autumn, and the first transverse frame, a polygonal ring of girders a hundred and ten feet in diameter, was lifted and hoisted into a vertical position hanging from the roof of the shed by about Christmas of that year. Another frame soon
followed it and was joined to the first by the longitudinal girders; one section of the ship was then in place which would eventually house one of the gasbags. There were many delays. We were feeling our way with an entirely new form of construction; in a sense we were experimenting on a gigantic scale. From Hansard we learned that at Cardington an entire section of their ship had been erected for experimental purposes and scrapped, at a cost to the taxpayer of £40,000. The designer of the capitalistic ship could take no such refuge from responsibility.
The scale of the work produced its own peculiar difficulties, for most of us were unaccustomed to working on high places. When we first arrived at Howden I can very well remember venturing up the stairs to the passage ways in the roof of the shed a hundred and seventy feet above the concrete floor, petrified with fear and clinging to the handrails with sweating hands at every step. I remember, sick with fright, watching the riggers clambering about on the first frame to be hoisted, carrying out their work a hundred feet from the floor with the girders swaying and waving at each movement that they made. Within a year I, too, was clambering with them on my lawful occasions, studying wires that fouled and joints that would not close, and saying what was to be done about it. By the time that the ship was half built we had lost all sense of height; it seems to be a matter of habit, because in my case the fear of heights has since returned, and is as strong as ever.