Not Much of an Engineer

by Stanley Hooker

  Clearly, the efficiency of the supercharger depends upon the efficiency of its component parts — the rotor and the diffuser — and to get the best results the maximum efficiency of the rotor must be made to coincide with the maximum efficiency of the diffuser. I found, by mathematical analysis and much to my surprise, that this happy coincidence did not occur on the Merlin supercharger, and that changes to both the rotor and diffuser were necessary. I even computed that the efficiency of the supercharger would improve from the existing 65 per cent to a new level of 75 per cent by such changes, but could it be true? How could the great Rolls-Royce firm have missed this?

  I checked and rechecked my calculations over the following weeks, and became very fluent in the aerodynamics of the supercharger. I could find no flaw in my deductions. So I took my courage in both hands and persuaded A. G. Elliott’s secretary to type the report for me. With great diffidence I appeared in Elliott’s office and handed it to him. He casually glanced through it, and said,

  ‘This looks very interesting, I must send a copy to Mr Ellor’.

  I learned later that Ellor’s speciality was superchargers, and that he had come to Rolls-Royce from the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, some ten years previously. He had been responsible for the giant supercharger on the famous ‘R’ engines which won the Schneider Trophy in Mitchell’s Supermarine S.6 and S.6B seaplanes.

  I returned to my office wondering what would happen next. Interminable days went by. Then suddenly, one evening just as I was leaving my office, the door burst open and in came the great Ellor himself. He had in his hand my report, and my heart came to my mouth.

  ‘Did you write this?’, he asked abruptly. I admitted to being the culprit, and then smiling broadly he said,

  ‘Well done, jolly good stuff. From now on you are in charge of supercharger development’, and he shook me warmly by the hand and departed!

  The bleak depression of the preceeding weeks lifted like magic, and I drove home elated. I had no idea what it all meant, but doubtless in good time all would be revealed to me. The casual way Ellor had informed me could only be a preliminary before a proper ceremony of appointment at which my duties would be explained to me, and amidst the applause of the assembled company, I would descend to take up my office — or so I imagined!

  But not a bit of it. Life went on unchanged. Then a couple of days later a fine upstanding young man with red hair called on me and said,

  ‘My name is Doug Nelson. I hear that you are my new boss’.

  I smiled at him warily, and replied,

  ‘That must have been as big a surprise to you as it is to me’.

  ‘Not really’, he said, ‘you see I have just read your report and I wish that I could have written it’.

  There wasn’t a trace of jealousy, rancour or disdain in him as we warmly shook hands. I invited him to sit on my empty desk and describe the set-up to me. I remember thinking of W. S. Gilbert’s attractive line, ‘Tell me, pretty maiden, are there any more at home like you’? He said there were a few, including ‘Prof’ Allen who sat in the office next door, and who had given me the original set of curves.

  Frank Allen was really an electrical expert, and had been chosen because the governing arrangement on the electric motors which drove the supercharger test rig was the Ward-Leonard system, which only he understood. It was his duty, also, to compare successive tests to see if, by chance, any improvement in performance had been effected. But Doug Nelson told me that the supercharger for the Merlin III, which was the current production engine for the Hurricane and Spitfire fighters, had not been changed since its original design in 1934.

  Let me hasten to add that the Merlin III supercharger was easily the best in the world at that time, as I was to discover later when I became more knowledgeable about the performance of contemporary superchargers in Germany and the USA.

  The other members of the team, Nelson went on, were Frank Barnes and Frank Nicholls who operated the test rig and produced the experimental data. Any modification to the supercharger was designed by ‘Flap’ Fletcher’s section, but they belonged to the Main Engine Design Department, and it was Nelson’s responsibility to act as the link between the Design Office and the Experimental Workshop to ensure that the superchargers were built to the specified test standard.

  At this stage I had to admit to Nelson that I had never seen a supercharger in the flesh. He immediately offered to take me on a tour of inspection, a suggestion I welcomed with open arms. We left the office block by the back door which led along a short corridor into the Experimental Workshop, which was the kingdom of one Horace Percival Smith, or HPS. He was a complete autocrat. He allowed no one into his shop except on a ‘need to be there’ basis. We made a courtesy call on him, and found him seated at a table covered with blueprints. By his side was the longest array of pushbuttons I had ever seen.

  He looked up. ‘Yes, yes, yes, what do you want, what do you want?’, he barked abruptly in his repetitive style. Nelson explained that I was the new man in charge of supercharger development, whereupon he pressed a couple of buttons, and almost instantaneously two men in overalls burst into the office. ‘This is Roy Speed, who is in charge of the supercharger assembly, and his assistant’. He then turned to them and said ‘You now take your instructions from this man, and he is to be allowed into the Shop at all times’. Then he smiled and we all shook hands.

  The informality of the whole thing astounded me. I had yet to learn of the tremendous esprit-de-corps that existed between the engineers and the Experimental Workshop, and the single-minded purpose of all to work together with energy and harmony to improve Rolls-Royce engines. It was enough for them to know that I had been appointed for me to be accepted.

  HPS was an impressive character. He was well dressed, with his hair parted exactly in the middle and well smoothed with hair-cream. He wore thick horn-rimmed glasses and oozed authority and efficiency. The whole workshop stood in ‘awesome’ respect for him, and men were prepared to work day and night at his command. Little did I know that the time was to come when HPS on passing my office would open the door, put his head in and bark rapidly,

  ‘What do you want me to make. What do you want me to make?’, and leave.

  The greatest privilege that one could enjoy in Rolls-Royce was the right — which had to be earned — of entry direct to HPS with a request for something to be made. Woe betide you if you wasted the great man’s time on something trivial.

  The four of us backed rapidly out of his office, like schoolboys leaving the Headmaster’s study after clemency. Roy Speed laughed and said,

  ‘Thank God it was only to meet you. I thought I must have put my foot in it somewhere. What do you want, anyway’.

  I threw caution to the winds and said could I please see a supercharger.

  ‘Which supercharger’, he replied, ‘I’ve got half-a-dozen over there that I’m building’.

  I said, ‘Any one will do, because I’ve never seen one before’.

  The two shop-men gazed at one another in amazement. They then led the way into the largest workshop that I had ever been in. On the right were the machine tools in rows upon rows, each with its busy operator. On the left was a fenced-off area equipped with large benches on which were laid out components of stripped down aero engines, each bench labelled with its engine number, while inspectors equipped with micrometers, clock-gauges and magnifying glasses pored over the component parts looking for cracks and measuring wear or other deficiences arising from the last test of the engine. The whole place hummed with activity.

  We passed through the shop to the further end where the engines were built for experimental test. Roy Speed went up to one and laid a hand on it. ‘This here’, he said ‘is a Merlin engine. This is the front end where the propeller is bolted on, and this contraption on the back end is the supercharger with the gears that drive it’.

  My mind boggled as I looked at my end, with, as I could read, its SU carburettor, and rods and levers
operating the throttles. I felt I ought to say something intelligent, and stuttered,

  ‘What is the power of the Merlin’?

  He lapsed automatically into the lilt of Eskimo Nell:

  ‘It has the driving force of a thousand horse … and it’s your job to make it do better. Nobody has managed to do that yet, so the best of British luck to you’.

  We both laughed, he confidently and I nervously.

  An apprehensive Nelson said, ‘Come on, don’t let’s hang about here or Horace will jump down our necks for holding up the work. I am going to take you now to see the test rig’.

  We left by the side doors and turned left down the wide driveway between two rows of workshops. I suppose it was about a quarter of a mile before we turned right and came to the experimental test beds, where engines were roaring away, belching flames and fumes from their short exhaust pipes.

  The test beds were of the simplest and crudest form, open at each end, with a small cubby-hole for the driver and his instruments. The noise was absolutely tremendous and everything seemed to vibrate — even one’s chest. And yet testers were leaning over each engine while it was running at full power, making sundry adjustments with no protection other than small ear plugs. I watched one take a short piece of steel between his teeth and put the other end on the cylinder block of an engine running at full throttle. In this way he could detect the onset of ‘detonation’ in the cylinders. A detonating engine could be self-destructive by literally hammering small holes in the cylinder head and pistons.

  The main object of experimental testing was to run the engine to the point of destruction, and thus determine the weakest and most vulnerable components, which would then, subsequently, be strengthened by design action. Testers were so skilled that they could detect the slightest change in an engine’s note - even when dozing in the tester’s cabin. In this way they would save many engines from ‘blowing up’, and thus preserve valuable evidence from being destroyed. Their simple philosophy was ‘We will test the engine as soon as you give it to us, be it morning, noon or night, weekends or holidays’. They were the tough-guys of the factory.

  That morning we passed them by, and entered a small building where, in its polished pristine glory, was the Supercharger Test Rig. It consisted of two electric motors in line, each of 250 horsepower. Between the two motors was the control panel, which enabled each to be run at any desired speed, or the motors could be coupled together as one unit of 500 horsepower. The extreme ends of the two motors were arranged to accommodate a supercharger, so that two tests could be made simultaneously if desired. All around were the manometers and pressure gauges for recording the performance.

  I was received with great respect by the Chief Tester, Frank Barnes, and his assistant, Frank Nicholls, who had already heard of my appointment. I felt at home immediately in these surroundings. This was not a factory but a laboratory, and I could recognise the measuring apparatus and soon grasped the set-up. My spirits rose, and with them my confidence. This was my laboratory, and although I knew nothing as yet of the mechanical arrangement of the supercharger, I could easily understand the test apparatus. The data it produced in terms of airflow, air pressure and temperature were something I could handle with ease.

  I returned to my office well satisfied, and indeed thrilled, by the morning’s tour. I was very happy at the co-operation I had received all round.

  Doug Nelson said, ‘Do you want me to get you some drawings of the Merlin blower?’

  I took the plunge, ‘Certainly, which can I have?’

  He returned with a cross-sectional general arrangement, and drawings of the rotor, diffuser and other components. I spread them out on my desk, and found to my surprise that I had little difficulty in interpreting them. I put this down to Professor Levy’s insistence that the mathematical students at Imperial College should take a course in projective geometry, and thereby learn the elements of drawing and of projecting sections.

  And thus it was, as a Junior Section Leader, that I put my foot on the first rung of the engineering ladder in Rolls-Royce. This step was to take me some 30 years later, through many vicissitudes and trials, to the ‘plum’ job in Engineering, that of being the Chief Engineer and Technical Director.

  When I had travelled to Derby for the interview with Hs, I had gone by car. On the return journey, about 10 miles south of Derby I noticed a sign off to the right which said ‘Donington Hall Residential Hotel’. I was committed to Rolls-Royce, so decided to make a detour and explore this place. Donington Hall proved to be a magnificent country mansion situated just outside the attractive village of Castle Donington, by today’s East Midlands Airport. The Hall had a large park around it, which included the famous Castle Donington motor-racing circuit, and one could walk for miles through the splendid grounds of this country estate. There was even a nine-hole golf course which I enjoyed very much. The Hall itself was only sparsely furnished, and the space available to the few residents was enormous. The bedrooms were very large, and one had been converted to four or five bathrooms.

  Since the weekly charge covering bed, breakfast and dinner was only £3, it seemed an ideal place, particularly as the works was on the south side of Derby, and so I booked in as from January 1938. I discovered that there were three other members from Rolls-Royce in residence; Cyril Lovesey, who was a small dapper man about 40 years old; Christopher Ainsworth-Davis; and Francis Tudor Wayne, who was an efficiency consultant seconded to Rolls-Royce at the time. There were three other residents, an Army captain who was in charge of the Army Depot nearby, the local bank manager, and an ex-Naval commander. Altogether, they made an interesting and amusing bunch.

  For some time I had no idea what Lovesey and Ainsworth-Davis did in Rolls-Royce, but eventually I discovered that Lovesey was a real king-pin: Deputy Chief Experimental Engineer under Ellor. He had been in the RAF at the end of World War I, had taken a degree in Engineering at Bristol University, and then joined Rolls-Royce. He had been the man in charge of the ‘R’ engines which won the Schneider Trophy in 1929 and 1931, and then held the world air speed record at 408 mph (657 km/h). He was a man of great experience in mechanical engineeering, and was affectionately known in the firm as Lov.

  Ainsworth-Davis was a junior engine designer at the time, and was being trained in Rubbra’s office to the special standards required by Rolls-Royce, and which had been inherited from the natural genius of Royce himself, who seemed to have known instinctively what constituted good sound design. Sir Henry Royce had died in 1933, but his methods and principles lived on through his protégés Elliott and Rubbra.

  The friendship and partnership between the Hon Charles S. Rolls and the self-made engineer Henry Royce which began at the beginning of the century was, indeed, an event of great portent.

  Rolls, the young sporting aristocrat, hailed from Monmouth, and was educated at Eton and Cambridge where, in 1898, he took a degree in Mechanics and Applied Sciences. All things mechanical interested him, and he was certainly the first undergraduate at Cambridge to own a motor car, at that time a French Peugeot. On leaving Cambridge, he spent some time learning to be a mechanic at the LNWR locomotive works at Crewe in order to be able to cope with the various failures and breakdowns that the unreliable motor cars of the day were susceptible to. Of his motor journeys he said:

  ‘In those days, your passage through the districts was recorded in every local newspaper, and if ever you dared to stop in a town for a moment to take in benzoline or anything, you had to fight your way back to the car. Out in the country, on the other hand, every other man climbed up a tree or telegraph pole to get out of your way; every woman ran away across the fields; every horse jumped over the garden wall as a matter of course; and the horse in every butcher’s cart that was left at the side of the road with the tailboard open, bolted scattering various spare parts of animals about the road’.

  He was fascinated by motor cars, always searching for the best car, and taking a leading part in the sporting-car events
of the day. Thus he gravitated to Manchester, where Royce had made his first few cars. It is recorded that Rolls made a prophetic statement that it was his ambition that there should be a car made which would be connected with his name and would become as well known as a Broadwood or Steinway grand piano.

  Thus, Rolls and Royce met at Manchester, and Rolls had his first run in a car designed and made by Royce. The two men took to each other immediately, and both recognised the mutual benefits of a partnership. For Royce here was the very man, with his great motoring record, who could introduce his car to London Society. Rolls knew he had found the greatest car designer in the world.

  The third element of administration and organisation was supplied by Rolls’ friend Claude Johnson, Secretary of the Automobile Club. He became Secretary of the new Rolls-Royce firm, in which post he stayed until he died.

  Henry Royce’s background could scarcely have been more different from those of his two partners. He wrote of his early days:

  ‘Owing to the want of success (through unsteadiness) and early death of my clever father, who was of a well-known milling family, my mother was left unprovided for, and I became a newspaper boy from ten to eleven years of age. Then one more year at school, from eleven to twelve years of age, and then a telegraph boy from thirteen to fourteen, when I went as an apprentice on locomotive engine work under the Great Northern Railway from fourteen to seventeen years of age when I acquired some skill as a mechanic but lacked technical, commercial and clerical experience’.

  He was born in 1863 at Alwalton near Peterborough, where his father was a flour miller, and was only nine when his father died. His apprenticeship at the GNR was paid for by his aunt, but the little money she had ran out before he completed his indentures, and he had to leave at the age of 17 to find other work. He found it in Leeds with a firm of toolmakers, where he worked long hours each week, from 6.00 am to 10.00 pm and all Friday night, for the princely sum of eleven shillings (55p) a week.