Not Much of an Engineer

by Stanley Hooker

  Naturally, after the great struggle and frustrations he had in getting his ideas and engine accepted, he resented the criticisms of those who were now climbing on to his bandwagon. There were plenty of such people, and plenty of criticism when his W.2 ran into such difficulties. Unhappily, he included Rover and Lucas among his bêtes noires, though their one objective was to help. Of course, it must be admitted they were babes in arms so far as the science and technology of his revolutionary engine were concerned.

  Thus it was that, in early 1942, S. B. Wilkes, Rover’s Chairman, appealed to Hs for guidance and help in dealing with this seemingly wayward genius. Rover and Rolls-Royce had always been close friends — according to the advertisements, Rover made one of the finest cars in the world, and Rolls-Royce made the finest car. Hs called me to his office, where I met Mr Wilkes, and said,

  ‘Hooker, here, seems to get on very well with Whittle, and knows all about his jet engine. Why don’t you invite him to visit Clitheroe to talk to Maurice. He can act as a visiting consultant, although I don’t want him to leave his work here on the Merlin’.

  And so, I made a number of trips to Waterloo Mill and to Clitheroe. The first objective was to examine the changes that Rover were proposing, and, hopefully, to reject those that were bad, and to persuade Frank to accept those that were good. I found that Rover, in collaboration with Lucas, had made major changes to the fuel system and to the combustion system.

  Just before the War, a young man called Iffield had come from Australia to Lucas with the design of a compact high-performance pump of infinitely variable capacity. The device could be run either as a pump or as a motor, and Iffield’s original idea was that it would be used as an infinitely variable transmission for a motor car. The engine would drive one working as a pump which would transmit high-pressure oil to a second one at the back axle working as a motor to drive the car. Since the capacity of both pump and the motor could be varied, a highly efficient infinitely variable drive would thus result.

  Dr E. A. Watson, the Technical Director of Lucas, realised that Iffield had the ideal fuel pump for Whittle’s jet engine, which demanded a variable amount of fuel depending upon the altitude and speed of flight. The pump had an inbuilt servo system, which controlled the stroke of the plungers and thereby the capacity of the pump; thus the control of the fuel flow could be automatic. The system could also be utilised to govern the maximum speed of the jet engine, preventing it from overspeeding and being wrecked.

  Naturally, the pump had mechanical problems due to the heavy duty it had to operate at on the engine. One of the early ones was that the balls in the bearing used to crack and split. Herriot, who had past experience in such matters, claimed that the cracks were there before the pump was run, and were due to a manufacturing defect and faulty inspection. Then he added, ‘What can you expect when you have young girls handling these balls?’ At the meeting to discuss this problem, Elliott, always the soul of propriety, convulsed us by saying in his quiet way: ‘What are you suggesting, Mr Herriot. That we should employ married women for this work?’

  Watson was a great engineer. He was modest, versatile and extremely sound in his thinking. His breadth of experience and inventions ranged fom miner’s safety lamps through ignition systems on motor cars, to the control of gun turrets on tanks. His influence on the progress of the jet engine was considerable. With the enthusiastic encouragement of Oliver Lucas and later of Sir Bernard Waring, he brought to bear the great facilities and expertise of Lucas upon the problems of the complicated fuel system, the atomization of the fuel necessary for good combustion, and the mechanics and thermodynamics of the combustion chambers, which were still proving such a headache to Whittle.

  The design of the combustion chamber to give smooth and efficient fuel burning was a ‘black art’. There was no theoretical basis to guide the designer, nor any known stable flow pattern for the air. Dr Watson, therefore, decided to employ an expert on combustion, Dr Stanley Clarke, from the Birmingham Gas Company, and to provide him with facilities for experimental work at Burnley. Thus Clarke began his outstanding contribution to the combustion chambers of gas-turbine engines, and the basic designs he laid down were copied all over the world, starting with the United States and, later, the Soviet Union.

  The first problem was to obtain an adequate supply of compressed air so that the chambers could be tested independently from the engine. Whittle’s engine had ten separate combustion chambers, so it was possible to experiment on a test rig with a single chamber. In the initial stages the compressed air was supplied by a Merlin blower provided by Rolls-Royce at my instigation. This was installed in Clarke’s laboratory at Burnley, and, driven by an electric motor, it was able to simulate in a single chamber the engine running conditions. From then on progress was rapid. Clarke soon had stable combustion systems, which were adopted on all Whittle jet engines from 1943 onwards.

  Watson, Iffield and Clarke were a remarkable trio — Watson inventive and sage, Iffield also a brilliant inventor, but needing Watson’s restraining hand, and Clarke a great enthusiast who drove himself and his team, by practical intuition, to great success. It was the greatest pleasure and privilege to have worked with all three.

  The W.2 turbojet ran at 17,000 rpm, and Whittle was anxious to keep the shaft between the compressor and the turbine as short as possible to avoid whirling. Any shaft will whirl or vibrate like a violin string when its rpm is equal to its natural frequency, and he foresaw that this would be a problem on fast-running jet engines. As a consequence, there was insufficient length between the compressor and the turbine to accommodate the combustion chambers, so that Whittle was compelled to go to the reverse-flow arrangement. The air from the compressor is led rearwards past the turbine, and then has its direction of motion reversed so that it returns via the combustion chambers to the turbine.

  A much better arrangement was that adopted by Major Frank Halford and his colleague Eric Moult on the first de Havilland turbojet known as the H. 1 and later as the Goblin. Halford had been let into the secret of the jet engine at an early stage, and with Moult, under the auspices of the de Havilland Engine Company, had designed and made their own engine. Though the same as Whittle’s in principle, employing a centrifugal compressor driven by a single-stage turbine, it differed in that it had a longer shaft of very large diameter, which again avoided the whirling problem. Thus they had sufficient length to use the ‘straight through’ type of combustion chamber, in which the air passes from the compressor directly through the chamber to the turbine.

  Maurice Wilkes had seen this engine, and was impressed by its general arrangement. He wished to redesign the W.2 engine to this format. Whittle, who had given every help and encouragement to the de Havilland team, was infuriated by Wilkes’ proposal. He felt, rightly, that there was no time to make such a major change, with the production of the Meteor airframe imminent, and with the knowledge that his reverse-flow combustion chamber had worked very satisfactorily on the W.1 engine in the Gloster E.28 aircraft flight trials. Nonetheless, Wilkes persisted. His Project Designer, Adrian Lombard, of whom we shall hear a great deal more later, produced the modified design drawings of the straight-through engine, and one or two engines were made ready for test by the end of 1942.

  This was the unhappy state of affairs I found in mid-1942. At Barnoldswick, Clitheroe and Burnley, Rover had ample facilities for making jet engines. Ignoring the terms of reference agreed with Whittle, they had started down the road of a major redesign of his W.2 engine, whilst complaining bitterly that the original W.2 did not work, and of the consequential lack of definitive drawings to enable them to produce it in quantity. At Lutterworth, with its small Power Jets team and meagre capability, Frank Whittle was wasting his invaluable nervous energy fulminating at what he thought was the arrogance, ignorance and bad faith of the Rover Company, while facing the formidable technical problems that the W.2 was presenting. In retrospect, it is appalling that the Ministry should have allowed such a situation
to arise.

  I reported to Hs, and said there was no way I could see of getting the two parties on amicable terms, and that the situation was deteriorating week by week. One day in November 1942 Hs called me to his office and said,

  ‘You and I are going to Clitheroe today. We are going to have dinner with S. B. Wilkes, so please be ready to leave at 4.00 pm.

  There were only three of us at the five-bob (25p) dinner in that very comfortable old pub, the Swan and Royal in Clitheroe High Street. After dinner Hs turned abruptly to Wilkes and said with a twinkle in his eye,

  ‘Why are you playing around with this jet engine? It’s not in your line of business, you grub about on the ground, and I hear from Hooker that things are going from bad to worse with Whittle’.

  They were great friends, of course, and Wilkes, smilingly ignoring the jibe, replied,

  ‘We can’t get on with the fellow at all, and I would like to be shot of the whole business’.

  Hs then said,

  ‘I’ll tell you what I will do. You give us this jet job, and I will give you our tank engine factory at Nottingham’.

  In as short a time as that the deal was done. The factory at Nottingham was producing tank engines based on an unsupercharged modified Merlin. Rover took it over and produced these engines, which like the jet fighter were named Meteor, for many years. There was no talk of money, and no talk of getting Government agreement to the arrangement. I suspect that Hs had already done that, but I never knew or cared. When two such big men meet together, decisions of this magnitude can be made on the spot.

  The next day we made a tour of Waterloo Mill and Barnoldswick. On the way back to Derby Hs told me that he wanted me to take over as Chief Engineer of the jet programme, and to gather some staff together forthwith. He also said that he did not wish me to give up my work at Derby. But I argued that I could not do both jobs, that I had a very competent replacement in Oscar Wilde at Derby, and that the jet engine, in whose future I had come to have great faith, demanded all of my attention at that critical time. Reluctantly he agreed, and then added the most important remark of all,

  ‘That place Waterloo Mill is totally inadequate. We will transfer all the experimental work to Barnoldswick, stop talking about production there, and make it into an experimental and development centre only’.

  This decision — which surely ought to have been taken at national level much earlier — changed the whole tempo of the development of the jet engine. Instead of small teams working in holes in the corner, in one stroke nearly 2,000 men and women, and massive manufacturing facilities, were focussed on the task of getting the W.2 engine mechanically reliable and ready for RAF service. The knowledge that Rolls-Royce had taken over, and the personal pressure that Hs was able to apply to all the ancillary suppliers, galvanised everybody into top gear. And, I am glad to say, Frank Whittle was delighted. From then on, he generously gave us every possible assistance.

  I felt I owed it to him to have a serious talk. At the earliest opportunity I invited him to Barnoldswick (which I do not believe until that time he had ever visited!). I said to him,

  ‘Frank, you must realise that now that Rolls-Royce have taken over and intend to put their full weight behind your engine, the control of the engine must necessarily pass to us. With the facilities now at our disposal, it is no use you trying to compete. On the contrary, you must join with us, and give us the benefit of your talents and experience. We will march forward together, and I will keep you fully informed and I hope that you will look to me as your man, only too anxious to have direction and advice from you’.

  Though this moment must have been a crucial turning-point in his life, he readily agreed. In effect, he said that he would leave the final clearing up of the W.2 to us, while he moved on to improving the breed by subsequent marks of the engine. And that is what happened. He went on to design the W.2/500 and W.2/700 engines, with their elegant and efficient compressor and diffuser arrangements, which we adopted at the earliest opportunity and made standard features on the Nene and Derwent engines.

  Frank rounded off his visit by addressing the complete team at Barnoldswick. At this time the jet engine was highly secret. The general public had never heard of Frank Whittle (the first brief disclosure of Allied work in this field was made in January 1944), but I doubt if anyone at Barnoldswick was in ignorance of him. To everyone he was the great man behind it all; but I was almost the only member of the team who knew him. His presence amongst us caused great joy and enthusiasm, which was heightened by his personality and his ability to captivate a large audience.

  Although the official takeover by Rolls-Royce was scheduled for 1 April 1943, we did, in fact, move into full control on January 1st. The management and senior engineers in the factory were old Rover employees, and would be required to staff the swopped tank engine factory at Nottingham. They were all given the option either to continue on the jet engine with Rolls-Royce, or stay with Rover. Most opted to go, but, of those who stayed on, by far the most important were Adrian Lombard, John Herriot and Denis Drew.

  John Herriot was not strictly a Rover employee. He belonged to the AID (Aeronautical Inspection Directorate) of the Air Ministry, concerned with the maintenance of manufacturing quality in factories producing engines for the RAF. He had had great experience in the development of engines at both the Bristol and Derby factories, and was well known for the energy and determination with which he carried out his often controversial function. He had been allocated to Rover by the AID, and S. B. Wilkes had asked him to take a special interest in the production of the W.2 engine.

  Herriot had been appalled by the bickering going on in these crucial mid-war years, not only between Whittle and Rover, but also between Maurice Wilkes at Waterloo Mill and Olaf Poppe at Barnoldswick. Wilkes was responsible for engineering and Poppe for production, and the latter was always complaining about the lack of a firm specification for the engine.

  Although Whittle was still struggling to get the design thrust of 1,600 lb, the W.2 would run reasonably at 1,250-1,400 lb. Herriot was anxious to get on with the mechanical development by running the engine for long periods at whatever thrust it gave, and thus to establish the mechanical integrity of the components — the Henry Royce method. In contrast, Poppe had made a number of engines, mostly with detail differences in specification, and these had been languishing at Barnoldswick doing nothing. Herriot and his assistant, Denning, prepared official schedules for testing the engine for 25 hours, 50 hours and 100 hours, and persuaded Poppe to build engines for such tests. He knew the emphasis had to get away from paper towards the new smell of kerosene.

  There were four test-beds at Barnoldswick and, in effect, Herriot and Denning took over the control of this important facility in the latter half of 1942. The result seemed miraculous as 25-hour and 50-hour tests were reeled off on a number of engines, first at 1,250 lb and then at 1,450 lb. The total running hours behind the W.2B/23, as the engine was known at Barnoldswick, soared to unheard-of figures. Running hours are a certain measure of an engine’s progress to reliability, and although these early hours were done at a reduced thrust, the normal mechanical problems began to show themselves.

  When we arrived on the scene in January 1943, Herriot was already well on the way to solving a number of these, and it was a great relief and comfort to me when he decided to stay on and we made him Chief Test Engineer. He was a great organiser, and although he was the first to admit that the technicalities of the engine were beyond him, he often had flashes of insight, born from his past experience with piston engines, which were invaluable. He remained my right-hand man throughout the period at Barnoldswick.

  Adrian Lombard (Lom) was a different kettle of fish. He was one of those rare phenomena, a natural-born designer and engineer. He had been trained as a motor-car designer, first at Morris and then at Rover, and although he had had no formal technical or scientific training, he could quickly grasp any theoretical concept concerned with the aerodynamics or the th
ermodynamics of the engine. And he was a superb designer, ultimately to become the brilliant Chief Engineer and Technical Director of the whole of Rolls-Royce until his untimely death in the mid-1960s.

  Denis Drew was a huge man, who originally came from Lucas. He was basically an electrical engineer, but had joined Maurice Wilkes at Waterloo Mill and had taken a wide interest in the problems of the new engine. He was interested in the vibration failures, because the measurement of high-frequency vibrations could most effectively be made by electrical methods using straingauges, a technique which was then in its infancy, but absolutely essential for the development of gas-turbine engines. One could not give him the wrong job, and he was an invaluable member of the development team. We placed under his control the Test Bed Equipment Department which was run by a man called Biker. Equipment for the beds and rigs does not sound very exciting, but it was all new stuff, very different from that required for testing piston engines, and much new thought had to be put into it. The testing equipment is often the weak link in the development process, but Drew and Biker never let us down, and always the equipment was there ahead of the engine.

  The main workforce were mostly local people and stayed en bloc. We were lucky that Rover had had time to train many of them in their various expertises, particularly the young girls who handled their machine tools with great skill. Many of them lived nearby in a hostel, inevitably called Virgin Villa, and provided the full measure of sweetness and light in the few hours of recreation that were available, because ten hours a day and seven days a week was the normal ration of work. They learned more than their mothers could teach them, and there were no disasters that I ever heard of.