Alan Bristow

by Alan Bristow

  At the same time, George Fry became involved with the company. I had stayed in touch with George, albeit erratically, since our first meeting on top of the Metropole Garage at Olympia at the start of the Paris speed record flight. Following his distinguished war service with Bomber Command, George became a leading figure at a well-known firm of London accountants, Andrew Barr and Co., who had their offices above Dirty Dick’s pub in Liverpool Street. He invited me to the pub for a beer and a sandwich, and afterwards we went up a narrow, winding staircase at the back door that led to George’s office. George Fry was fascinated by helicopters, believed they had a great future and offered to do Air Whaling’s accounts. Kay Sealby was keeping the books perfectly well but I hired George to do the audit, and when Air Whaling got so big that the books outgrew Kay, she and George did them together. I found him to be congenial company, wise and practical – a great sounding board when I was testing out what I should do. An added advantage was the fact that he was treasurer of the Royal Aero Club in Piccadilly. Members were forbidden to conduct business on the premises – in fact I had my ‘London office’ beneath the sign that forbade it, but as a friend of the treasurer I was left to work in peace. It was a very comfortable office, with chairs and couches upholstered by Rumbolds, a company that was famous for first class aircraft seats – all very masculine in beautifully tooled leather. The arrangement almost fell through one afternoon when I was trying to discuss a contract with Basil Butler, who was later to become a director of BP and a knight. Our conversation was being impinged upon by two chaps in the card room next door who were having an uproarious time. Finally I opened the door and shouted at them: ‘Shut up, you noisy buggers!’

  Unfortunately they were two of the most venerable committee members, and I realised I’d made a faux pas. ‘I’m trying to . . . drink coffee out here,’ I said, suddenly subdued. Luckily, as well as being a well-known test pilot with a string of records to my name I was a friend of the General Secretary, Colonel Mossy Preston, or I might have found my London office removed to the street.

  By the late summer of 1953 I had brought together at Henstridge the nucleus of the future Bristow Helicopters Ltd, the directors who would help to turn it into the biggest and most successful helicopter service company in the world. Later I gave Green, Fry and Woolley five per cent of the company each, and they became rich men. George Fry was right. Helicopters had a great future.

  With the Melsom & Melsom contract covered I turned my attention to two pressing matters. First, I opened negotiations with Christian Salvesen, the world’s biggest whaling company, whom I’d found amenable to my idea of a full-scale operation involving multiple helicopters with multiple crews, able to stay permanently in the hunt. It took more than a year of negotiation, but eventually I was able to do a deal. The second, even more time-consuming aim was to develop and patent the helicopter harpoon.

  Jack Woolley was as keen as I was on the aerial humane killer, and we spent long hours on design. Jack was uncannily accurate in his assessment of how long a job would take; if he said a week, it would be done in seven days. In an idle moment I asked him how long he thought it would take us to complete the harpoon. He shrugged.

  ‘I’ve no idea, Alan,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we’ll never get it done.’

  The same troubling thought had occurred to me.

  ‘We’d better get some other work in here, Jack,’ I said. ‘Let’s make sure we have something to fall back on in case there are insurmountable obstacles.’

  Quietly and efficiently, Jack got on with the task I had set him. He installed milling and drilling machines of the highest quality and offered precision engineering work to West Country firms, mostly in industries associated with aviation. Air Whaling Ltd took over a second Nissen hut and built a linking corridor between them, so they became known as ‘the H-block’. The machines soon filled the second hut. Jack was able to create the most exquisitely delicate components, and so fine was his work that this facet of the business grew and grew. The first client was a company called ICL, who would send blueprints for all manner of obscure widgets and who soon became a profitable revenue source. Normalair, the Westlands subsidiary that provided oxygen apparatus for aircraft, diving companies and hospitals, had critical parts made by Air Whaling Ltd, and contracts came for hydraulic test rigs from Westlands, de Havilland and Bristols. We were able to attract good engineers who had worked for some of our clients, but who did not feel at home in large corporations where their particular skills were often underused. Strangely enough, everybody was paid a proper wage. Air Whaling had cash in the bank, and I was reluctant to ask people to work on the basis of the money they would make one day in the future when we were really successful.

  With the precision machinery business humming, work could move ahead on the harpoon. Yasha Shapiro, designer of the Cierva Air Horse, was tasked to create a lightweight generator that would produce enough current to kill a whale but would fit in the back of a WS55 Whirlwind, Westlands’ newest, largest and most capable helicopter, which had a large compartment for passengers or cargo. But I was becoming convinced that by concentrating on the cable rather than the gun, I had been putting the cart before the horse.

  Westland and the Air Registration Board, the forerunner to the Civil Aviation Authority, objected to the idea of mounting a conventional lightweight gun on a tripod in the doorway of the Whirlwind because the structure was not designed to take the shock of the recoil. A redesign of the structure would take many months, and the delay, cost and weight would probably be unacceptable. A better solution was a recoilless gun. Such a weapon existed and had proved quite effective during the war. It was called the PIAT – Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank – and unlike the American bazooka or the German Panzerschreck, it was easy to use in confined spaces. It had a spring-loaded ram down the centre of a barrel, which struck and ignited a projectile, but the recoil was absorbed by the spring, while the force cocked the gun for the next shot. It fired a 3-lb high-explosive projectile that could penetrate 100 mm of tank armour, and had been invented by a Royal Artillery officer called Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Blacker. Blacker was an old acquaintance of Westlands chief test pilot Harald Penrose; they had flown together in 1933 when Blacker was proposing an ultimately successful flight over Everest in a Westland PV6. They had in fact had an engine failure at 35,000 feet in practice for that record attempt, gliding down to Hamble in the longest forced-landing then recorded. While Jack Woolley went off to the Antarctic with Alan Green for the 1953/54 whaling season, I went to work on Lieutenant Colonel Blacker.

  Blacker, monocled and gruff, had a neat house on the outskirts of Petersfield in Hampshire, and there I explained my proposal to kill whales instantaneously by electrocution from helicopters. The concept appealed greatly to Blacker, who said that a trained operator using the PIAT could hit a two-foot wide target from a distance of up to 100 yards. This specification fitted in well with the target accuracy for the electrical missile, which was required to penetrate the whale’s body just behind its flippers at a distance of up to 150 yards. Such was Blacker’s enthusiasm for the concept that he asked if I’d like to fire a few of his anti-tank bombs at targets surrounded by earth bunkers in the parkland behind his house, where the PIAT had been originally developed. Blacker had a veritable playpen out there in which he could blast away at targets at will.

  I soon became convinced that the PIAT was the answer to my problems and asked Blacker if he’d sell me the patents. Blacker said he could do so because he was no longer bound by Ministry of Defence restrictions, and thought that £1,000 was a reasonable price. I thought £1,000 was a lot of money, but without the PIAT I could not see a way forward. As a sweetener, Blacker agreed to train me to achieve the level of target accuracy essential to the job. The unique recoilless qualities and the portability of the PIAT led me to accept his price. I took into account the ease with which the gun could be modified to hold and fire the airborne electrical harpoon. The projectile consisted of a cylindrica
l bottle twelve inches long and five inches in diameter, which contained an inflation gas in liquid form, through which a hollow tube carried the electrical forerunner to the barbed spearhead. A lug was welded at the bottom of the cylinder to carry an earthing cable attached to a paravane, which was towed by the helicopter a few feet below the surface of the water. The steel shaft with four barbs on the end ensured that the current was carried deep enough into the whale to kill it instantaneously. The first modification required by the PIAT was to enlarge the width and depth of the circular tray in which the missile rested, with the earthing cable protruding through a long slot in the base of the tray. It had to be bigger to carry the cylinders that held sufficient liquid gas to keep a whale afloat until collected by a towboat.

  Lieutenant Colonel Blacker was unable to supply detonators, but it was here that the expression ‘it’s not what you know but who you know that counts’ came into play. Alec Quigg, who at the time was Deputy Chairman of ICI, was one of my mother’s favourite uncles. In order to get in touch with him I had to visit to Gleneagles, where he was having his customary summer break. To begin with it seemed impossible to get him interested in the project. It must have seemed fairly small beer to him. Instead of badgering him I suggested we had a game of golf. That evening over dinner he returned to the topic.

  ‘Alan, I think I can help you with detonators providing the quantity isn’t too great, but you’ll have to get yourself licensed as a trader and you have to pay in cash.’

  No problems there. By the time the Blacker recoilless gun had been modified to take the Air Whaling missile I was a licensed explosives trader, permitted to buy the required detonators from ICI. Just as the gun was coming together, I was hearing encouraging news from Christian Salvesen, who intended to send two factory ships to the Antarctic in the 1954/55 season together with a fleet of thirty catchers. They were speaking my language – they wanted four WS55 Whirlwinds with two crews for each. They accepted that single-pilot operations were not the best policy; flying and keeping track of position and fuel were a full-time job, and observers were needed to look for whales. Furthermore they were prepared to install a hangar aboard each ship so that maintenance could be done under cover, a great improvement. For a while I thought we’d also be providing helicopters that season for the Netherlands Whaling Company, but it turned out that their primary interest was in my electronic harpoon. But the sales commission on four Whirlwinds would certainly put Air Whaling Ltd in a sound financial position.

  The problem with the Whirlwind was that it was certified only for military use. It did not have a civil Certificate of Airworthiness, which meant it could not be used in the whaling industry. Worse still, Westlands showed no enthusiasm for entering the civil market with the Whirlwind. At the time, Ted Wheeldon was Managing Director of Westlands and also godfather to my baby son Laurence. Wheeldon and I had been friends since we first met when I was based in Portland with the Sikorsky YR4, and on the strength of our relationship he underwrote a decision to award Air Whaling Ltd a contract to obtain an unrestricted Certificate of Airworthiness for the Whirlwind with the Alvis Leonides engine. My first job was to produce a flight-test schedule that would satisfy the requirements of the Air Registration Board. I can’t recall any situation where a contractor had been commissioned to carry out a complete certification programme for a manufacturer on any particular aircraft. With grim determination and a great deal of self-control and patience we struggled through the bureaucracy that surrounded a simple sub-contract job. Fortunately, Westlands were able to deliver four WS55s in the space of a month for Air Whaling Ltd to begin the flying programme required for civil certification. With the naval presence winding down at Henstridge, hangarage became available for them. I was recruiting pilots for the Christian Salvesen contract; Alan Green, freshly returned from the Antarctic with Jack Woolley, took over the flying school, and he and I converted newly hired pilots onto the Whirlwind. It seemed sensible to combine the two programmes, and much of the certification requirement was flown by instructors and students undergoing training, an economical use of resources.

  The Whirlwind was a docile helicopter but as part of the training syllabus we were required to practise landings in manual control, with the hydraulic boost to the control systems turned off. Without hydraulic assistance the loads on the controls were very high, which made it very difficult to hover the aircraft. The training procedure was to switch the hydraulics off at about 500 feet, reduce the airspeed to forty-five knots and make a steady descent to flat area where a student could roll the WS55 onto the ground, as opposed to hovering before landing vertically. The collective was just as heavy as the azimuth stick and had a tendency to creep up, and I used to keep my left knee over it to make sure it didn’t jump up and stall the rotor. With hindsight, I think the timing of manual landings in the syllabus was misplaced. They should have been introduced when the student had thirty or forty hours of experience. Furthermore, the hydraulics on the Whirlwind were very reliable, and I can’t remember them ever failing in actual use.

  In parallel with the flying programme Jack Woolley was training engineers to look after the Whirlwind, and a number of people joined Air Whaling who would play significant roles in the growth of Bristow Helicopters. One was Bill Mayhew, a Bermudian who had finished his pilot training just as peace was declared and had been told by the RAF to go home. Bill came aboard as Company Secretary and stayed with us for decades, but never once expressed an interest in flying. He was a meticulous and hard-working accountant, which was essential when the machine-tool business was doing small jobs for so many people. He was responsible for laying down the ground rules of the accounting system and a management structure that would stand the test of time. Pilots, observers and engineers swelled the ranks, and some who stayed for the long haul included Alastair Gordon, Clive Wright and Earl Milburn.

  Alastair Gordon became a lifelong friend and colleague. He had been working in the design office of the famous Raoul Hafner at the Bristol Aeroplane Company, where the Belvedere tandem rotor helicopter was under development. Alastair had a BSc in aeronautical engineering and had just completed his National Service as a Sea Fury pilot in Korea. I rarely make judgements on people on first acquaintance but I took an instant liking to Alastair. He was technically sound and straightforward and had a natural talent for flying with great accuracy, commitment and enjoyment. An old-fashioned Scotsman, he paid great attention to detail and was loyal, independent and inventive, and he would always fight his corner vigorously if he thought he was right. Throughout the Whirlwind certification programme Alastair flew with me, initially as my student and later as my co-pilot. When he flew with me from the Salvesen ship Southern Harvester that season, I marked him down for a position of greater responsibility in the company, but the job I had in mind for him – Operations Director – was filled by Alan Green. Not until 1970 did Alastair become a member of my executive Board. While Alastair was in training at Henstridge he met a neighbouring farmer’s daughter, Jenny, and after a long courtship they married. I never thought she suited him, and years later after they’d divorced Alastair met Alyce, a secretary in Bristows’ Aberdeen office, and she was just right for him.

  While we were flying the certification programme for the Whirlwind, my fellow shareholders Cecil Lewis and John Waring were getting concerned at the slow pace of development of the electric aerial harpoon. One day they got together and came to see me.

  ‘Alan,’ said John, ‘it’s been a while since we invested with you and we had hoped to see a return by now, so we wondered whether it would be possible to get our money back?’ They were very nice about it; I’m sure if I’d asked them to give me more time they would have done so, but I was quite well situated with regard to cash, and I bought them out. They remained lifelong friends, and Cecil in particular regretted to his last breath having walked away from Air Whaling Ltd before it really came good.

  By the summer of 1954 the aerial harpoon had been perfected and I was able t
o demonstrate it to the Netherlands Whaling Company, who had expressed a serious interest. They sent one of their senior executives, a man called Vinke, with two of his captains to see how it worked. I arranged for the gun to be mounted on a tripod in the doorway of a WS55, and Lieutenant Colonel Blacker himself agreed to man it. With all the practice he’d had Blacker should be able to shoot the eye out of a fly, and there was nobody better qualified. Alan Green drove a fast motor boat towing a forty-gallon drum on a raft across Weymouth Bay at twenty knots, with the Dutchmen in the back of his boat. I flew alongside at seventy-five feet and in the space of a minute Blacker put six harpoons into the barrel. Three more hit the pontoons it was mounted on, and the last one blew the whole assembly to bits. Alan Green told me later that the Netherlands men surveyed the wreckage as the helicopter flew off and muttered among themselves in Dutch.

  ‘They seemed very impressed,’ Alan said.

  They came back to Henstridge for a debriefing. ‘Gentlemen, the first shot would have made you £2,000 richer, and we’d have killed six more whales in ten minutes,’ I said. ‘And that’s just from one helicopter and two men. Think what you could do with a fleet of helicopters. Last season, 1,334 Baleen-type whales were sighted from one S51 helicopter in 185 hours flying. Let us assume in the most pessimistic tone that the ratio of aerial sightings to killings is 2:1. Last season, that helicopter would have taken 667 whales. Of these, let us say 550 are fin whales and only 117 are blue whales, another pessimistic ratio. Taking an average oil production of 60 barrels per fin and 150 barrels per blue whale, we arrive at a total from one helicopter of 50,550 barrels. Taking this oil at £72 a ton, the lowest figure it has reached in recent years – it’s currently over £100 a ton – the gross value of that one helicopter’s work would be £606,600. That’s just one helicopter, in one season, and at the most pessimistic estimates.’