by Alan Bristow
It was 1952, and while I was 10,000 miles from home I had had a son, whom my wife had named Laurence after her favourite actor.
CHAPTER 12
My First Million
The Northern Hemisphere summer of 1952 was a time of frantic activity. I had money in the bank – a season’s whaling income was topped off with the £6,000 I’d earned for testing the Frankenstein suit, and I had substantial capital in Switzerland, but I knew I’d need every penny to develop, patent and market the aerial humane killer, so I tried to avoid dipping into capital. I worked once again as an occasional co-pilot for Airwork and kept my edge by flying Sea Furies and Seafires with 1832 Naval Reserve Squadron at HMS Hornbill, a Royal Naval Air Station just south of Oxford.
My first job on returning from the Antarctic was to mail-shot all the whaling companies with offers of helicopter services. The word was out about the success of the Onassis experiment, and several companies expressed interest. Onassis wanted to run the Hiller 360A again, but I had greater ambitions for the service. I wanted a more professional approach – indoor hangars for maintenance, two-man helicopters with a pilot and observer to share the workload, and if possible two helicopters so that when one was forced to return to the ship for fuel, another could be launched immediately to take over tracking. In 1952 the biggest whaling companies, Christian Salvesen and Unilever, weren’t ready to make such an investment. Onassis and other fleets ran the Hiller the following season but one company that saw the value of a larger, faster helicopter with greater range was Melsom & Melsom, the Larvik-based operator of the factory ship Norhval. They were prepared to fund the purchase of such a helicopter if I was prepared to fly it and to provide engineering and support services.
The helicopter I had in mind was the Westland WS51 Dragonfly, the licence-built version of the Sikorsky original. I was back in favour with Westlands – Williams, the man I had thumped, had been sacked after it was discovered he was working a fiddle with Rolf Von Barr, the agent for whom he’d wanted me to carry a bag of cash – and the company had offered me my old job back, an offer I declined. Ted Wheeldon was happy to make me Westlands’ representative to the international whaling industry and was very generous in giving me the use of a WS51 to keep my hand in. The WS51 had a three-bladed articulated rotor, which meant it was less susceptible to icing – the vibration tended to throw off ice – and could reach a speed of 95 mph. I ordered the installation of long-range fuel tanks, which gave us more than five hours’ endurance – and endurance was the right word. After almost six hours of sitting on a parachute pack, your bum was numb from your neck to your knees. The 550 hp Alvis Leonides nine-cylinder radial was, however, a whole lot more complex than the Franklin engine in the Hiller, and to look after it I would need an excellent engineer.
When Jack Woolley answered an advert I’d put in Flight for such an engineer it was the beginning of a lifelong business and personal relationship. Jack was a hugely talented engineer with a gift for innovation and an innate mechanical understanding. If an engineering solution to a problem was possible, Jack would find it. He had no real ambition to run his own company but was happy to be my technical director, a role he occupied for the next thirty years. On the rare occasions where we didn’t see eye to eye on an engineering matter, Jack was right as often as he was wrong. Not only could he keep the WS51 in good condition, but I felt he would be an enormous asset in developing the humane whale killer.
Jack was a quiet Yorkshireman who had served his time as an engineering draughtsman with Boulton Paul at Brough. After his apprenticeship he’d joined Pest Control Ltd, one of the companies that was later absorbed into Fison Airwork, as a fitter maintaining Hiller 360s engaged in crop spraying. In helicopter engineering, initiative is often more important than licences, and Jack had it in spades. To tell the truth there were very few experienced helicopter engineers available at that time and I was prepared to take someone less qualified than Jack with me to the Antarctic. I just got very lucky. Jack was a man of sober habits; I recall him only once getting truly drunk, and that was when we were awarded the Certificate of Airworthiness for the Westland WS55, something we worked hard on in 1954. We celebrated in just about every hostelry in Yeovil and ended up at the golf club. Late in the evening Jack was missed, and we went hunting for him. One of the fitters found him; he’d tried to drive off in his big military-style Hillman and got hopelessly lost, ending up driving around the course and into a bunker. Thank god he hadn’t driven over a green – I’d have been expelled. The god who looks after drunks and small children had kept him on the fairway.
I accepted the operating contract from Melsom & Melsom and had them buy a WS51 to put on the Norwegian register as LN-ORG. Westlands were grateful for the sale, and a substantial money order winged its way to Switzerland to swell the humane killer fighting fund. Westlands had developed floats that wrapped around each of the WS51’s three wheels, and the helicopter came equipped with HF radio, ADF direction finding and a life raft. With the benefit of my experience the previous season I gave Melsom & Melsom detailed construction plans for the helideck – mounted on the stern of the ship, it was to be significantly larger than that on the Olympic Challenger and had to incorporate my turntable, my blade clamps, and a cable anchor system for rapid securing of the helicopter to the deck. Two Norwegians – a pilot, Jan Kirkhorn, and an engineer, Mickey Mork – were recruited by Braathens acting as agent for Melsom & Melsom.
While all this was going on I was working all hours on the design for the airborne humane killer. I had been put in touch with a biologist from a Hamburg marine institute, Dr Schubert, who established that the best target was about two feet in diameter at a point just behind one of the whale’s flippers, with a harpoon fired from a distance of twenty to twenty-five yards. But it was increasingly clear to me that development of the system might need more funding than I could provide. In a search for sponsorship I approached the British company United Whalers, whose chairman Sir Vyvyan Board had long been keen on finding a more humane way of killing whales. United Whalers, together with General Electric and the Birmingham gunmakers Westley Richards, had formed a company called Electric Whaling Ltd and had conducted experiments aboard the factory ship Balaena in 1949. The International Whaling Commission urged the British and the Norwegians to get together to continue the research, but Electric Whaling Ltd ran into a blind alley. Sir Vyvyan told me they’d spent £120,000 on the system with mixed success. The special cannon they’d created was so poor that it had to be discarded in favour of the standard Bofors harpoon gun, and while they’d tried two hundred different types of forerunner – the cable to which the harpoon is attached – every one of them had some sort of problem. But the biggest obstacle was the antipathy of the Norwegians to the whole idea, which they feared would devalue the profession of harpoon gunner and reduce their income.
‘You’re wasting your time,’ Sir Vyvyan said. ‘The Norwegian gunners and catcher crews will sabotage your equipment in the same way as they did ours, by cutting the electrical cables and disabling the generators.’ But of course, I intended to bypass the catcher crews and operate direct from the helicopter. Sir Vyvyan was kind enough to put me in touch with the management of Siemens in London, the company who had made the electrical cables for the Balaena’s harpoons. Trials with the original Siemens electrical forerunner cable were unsuccessful because the core in the Siemens cable fractured every time a harpoon was fired. This was a very serious drawback, but fortunately Siemens were able to produce a cable with an overall diameter of about 8 mm, with a 5 mm diameter copper core insulated with flexible rubber, and which in turn was protected by a braided nylon sheath. These features in themselves were not, in my opinion, sufficient to ensure the integrity of the copper core and the current passing through it when the harpoon was fired. Jack Woolley decided that the solution lay in a special dispenser – a V-shaped cone made of tubular steel, having a mouth width of about eighteen inches and standing about thirty inches high. An inverted cone
of shallow pitch was welded four inches from the base of the larger cone to form a platform from which the electrical forerunner could run freely without tangling. This cone device was mounted on a hinged frame with freedom to turn through about forty-five degrees in each direction. It worked better than anything Electric Whaling Ltd’s £120,000 had produced, but by the time we’d got this far the summer was over and it was time to head once again for the whaling grounds.
Melsom & Melsom’s Norhval sailed for Antarctica in October 1952. The voyage from Europe to the Antarctic seemed always to be in beautiful sunny weather and by the time fishing started in the Antarctic nearly everyone had a golden tan. With the factory ship under way, Jan Kirkhorn and I practised helicopter deck landings and navigation exercises to ensure accuracy when flying creeping line ahead and box formation searches. Kirkhorn was a good pilot but he sometimes let his concentration lapse and wasn’t always aware of his exact fuel state; in fact, in the following season he ran out of fuel and lost a helicopter, but fortunately he survived. Throughout the season we endured the rough living, survived the storms and worked ourselves to exhaustion. For helicopter crews, the only rest came when the weather turned bad and they could catch up on sleep or maintenance. The food was monotonous, although livestock was taken down for slaughtering on board – fresh food was always at a premium. For the pilots, the great advantage of the WS51 over the Hiller was that it had a proper seat, rather than the life-raft bench I’d put up with in the Hiller, and when you got out of the WS51 after a five-hour flight you found you could still walk. Maintenance work was often carried out in harsh conditions, out in the open in the gales and the sleet. The engines had to be washed clean of salt regularly, and no job was too big – engine and gearbox changes were accomplished when necessary. Everything that could be pre-rigged was prepared before the Norhval sailed in order to reduce the amount of work that had to be done in bad weather. Nonetheless, the engineers worked minor miracles in the most challenging of circumstances.
I was interested in creating a refuelling capability from the catchers, so that the helicopter did not have to return to the factory every time it was low on fuel. If one was searching at long range and one found whales, it was necessary to direct the catchers onto them, which often encouraged pilots to leave insufficient fuel for contingencies such as bad weather on their return to the factory ship. The catchers were too small to have helidecks, but I thought it would be possible to hover over them to take up fuel. We did some experiments that worked quite well, but it was difficult to get enough pressure to drive the fuel up to the helicopter, and the transfer could only be made in reasonably calm conditions where you could hover accurately over the catcher’s stern. I envisaged that in future seasons, all catchers should have a refuelling capability, largely to improve the helicopter crews’ chances of survival. But it would mean you could get another four hours out of an S51, provided your backside would stand it. In the event, the use of multiple helicopters reduced the need for it, although the experiments we did were built upon by a British company, Flight Refuelling Ltd, and developed for some of their own operations.
Life in Antarctica revolved around the whale, and distractions were few. There was always a poker game going on somewhere, and the mess hall could be converted into a cinema. We had about a dozen films, some of them in Norwegian, and they’d been shown several times when a rival fleet’s ship came alongside and we swapped movies. Drink was allowed once, at Christmas when the supply tanker came down to take off the whale oil, and we flew, and flew, and flew. Some days the sky would be a vivid metallic blue and you’d think you’d never see a cloud again; a few hours later the wind could be blasting the surface off the sea and the ship would be pitching and rolling, battered by mountains of icy grey water that seemed certain to send her to the bottom. The helicopter somehow stayed stuck to the stern however crazily the ship heaved, and when the storm abated, we flew again. The sun rolled monotonously around the horizon until one day it dipped out of sight and dusk returned, indicating that the short months of the whaling season were coming to an end. Melsom & Melsom were well pleased with the results of the work and indicated they wanted me to return for the 1953/54 season. I told them I would be happy to do so. Once again they put me off at Cape Town and I hurried home by air, keen to get on with the business of perfecting the electric harpoon.
It was clear to me that I could no longer continue to operate as a one-man band and I needed to incorporate as a limited liability company. On 6 June 1953 I formed Air Whaling Ltd, a name I thought told the full story. The company moved into its international headquarters, a Nissen hut on Henstridge airfield in Somerset, which in those days was a Royal Naval Air Station by the name of HMS Dipper. The name of Air Whaling Ltd was solemnly painted above the door, there to remain for at least twenty-five years, long after Air Whaling had become Bristow Helicopters Ltd and decamped to Redhill. The primary objective of Air Whaling was to sell helicopters to whaling companies and negotiate management contracts for their operation in the Antarctic, and Westlands were persuaded to appoint Air Whaling as their exclusive worldwide agent to the international whaling industry.
There were three shareholders in Air Whaling, myself and two equity partners. The first of these was John Waring, who had the Charrington coal distribution agency in south-east England and who thought that the embryonic helicopter services industry held enough promise to be worth an investment. Our friendship dated from wartime, when I had become involved with his daughter. War being what it is, I went to sea and she went off with a Canadian, but we remained in touch. My second shareholder was the property developer Cecil Lewis, whom I had met under the strangest circumstances while I was working in Paris. I’d been accommodated at the Hotel Dominie, a less than luxurious establishment to which Cecil had gone on a Saturday morning when the banks were shut, having been told that the receptionist there would be willing to cash a traveller’s cheque. I was talking to the receptionist when Cecil walked in with a friend. Cecil heard me speak.
‘I say, you’re English, aren’t you?’ he asked.
‘Indeed I am,’ I said.
‘Very good,’ said Cecil. ‘Look, you couldn’t lend me five hundred pounds, could you? I’m in a bit of a fix.’
It turned out that Cecil had had a very bad night at the casino, as had his companion, a man known only as ‘Monsieur le Shoe’ because of his liking for baccarat. They urgently needed a substantial capital injection and had left the Lancaster Hotel in something of a hurry, neglecting to settle their bill. Five hundred pounds would buy a small suburban semi in those days, and the sensible thing to do would have been to refuse. However, I found it difficult to leave a fellow Englishman in the lurch in a foreign city. Cecil told me he was fairly well off – he owned a company called Burlington Estates, and would be able to wire me the money as soon as he got back to London. I asked to see his passport; it still hadn’t been civilianised and presented him as Lieutenant Colonel Cecil Lewis. I later found out he’d been a private at Dunkirk and a Lieutenant Colonel after Alamein, which was fairly impressive progress. I arranged to settle the debt at the Lancaster, and sure enough, Cecil wired me my money as soon as he got home. But he didn’t invest in Air Whaling Ltd as an act of gratitude; he genuinely believed in my electric harpoon plan and thought it could make him a lot of money.
Jack Woolley became Air Whaling’s Technical Director, and I advertised in the local paper for a secretary. This attracted Kay Sealby, who turned out to be the most unusually efficient secretary and bookkeeper imaginable. Kay was a little older than I was and had gorgeous red hair. Her typing speed was astonishing and her work was always accurate. She’d been trained as a Comptometer operator and had taken down court proceedings verbatim. Her father was a self-employed jewellery maker who worked from home, selling his handiwork to Asprey’s and Garrard’s. Kay seemed never to have been interested in marriage or men. Utterly reliable, she was something of a mother figure to the young pilots who came to join us. She sta
yed with the company for many years, but when we moved to Redhill she found the travelling too much and took up with a local businessman in Crewkerne, whom she married. And then she left us.
I had decided that I would have to stay in Britain that winter to develop the business, so I needed a good pilot to go south for Melsom & Melsom. This time my advertisement brought forth Alan Green, my former student from Portland days, the man for whom I’d appeared as an expert witness when he was in Lord Beaverbrook’s employ. Beaverbrook had sold the helicopter and Alan had gone to the Antarctic in 1952, flying a Hiller 360A for Anders Jahre’s whaling fleet, so he had just the experience I was looking for. I decided he would take the WS51 on the Norhval for the 1953/54 season, with Jack Woolley as his engineer. Jan Kirkhorn and Mickey Mork would accompany them.
Alan Green was a very hard-working pilot with a cheerful personality, and he managed to get along well with almost everyone. In years to come I was to find he had a particular affinity with Arabs, and they had great affection for him. Alan was a Manchester Grammar School boy who’d gone to work as a clerk in a railway ticket office in some obscure northern station before escaping to the Fleet Air Arm and training as a pilot. He’d been flying Chance-Vought Corsairs – big, powerful carrier-borne fighters – towards the end of the war before he graduated to helicopters, and was a safe and competent pilot. He liked his drink, which was eventually to prove his undoing, but in the early days we all got on very well together.