Alan Bristow

by Alan Bristow

  Harry Hyams, who’d built Centrepoint in London and been pilloried for leaving it empty, was a very keen gun with a shoot in Wiltshire. He was due to come to Baynards to shoot one weekend, but he called to cancel. ‘Why?’ I asked him. Harry sounded subdued.

  ‘I’ve just shot one of my favourite ducks,’ he said. ‘It rose off the lake and I shot it. I don’t know why, but it’s put me right out of sorts. I’m never going to shoot again.’

  And he didn’t. In fact, he became a recluse and rarely ventured out of Ramsbury Manor after that, and none of his friends heard from him again.

  I remember wonderful days when I shot ten brace despite being number eight gun, out on the wing where I thought I wouldn’t see a bird without a telescope. I remember the great shoots vividly, as though they had happened this afternoon, and I even remember individual birds, like a partridge I shot in a howling gale when it blew half a mile downwind beyond the pickers-up. I had a passion for shooting, I was good with a gun, and it’s gratifying to think I was able to create so much business for Bristow Helicopters Ltd while pursuing a pastime I loved so much.

  By the early 1970s we had more than 100 helicopters operating around the world and demand was very strong. BHL had long ceased to be a company where I knew every pilot by name, and it had changed in other ways, too. Alan Green died in 1972; by that time I had already made Alastair Gordon Operations Director and moved Alan sideways. Green’s decline was tragic. He’d been a colleague and a friend for twenty years and we’d been through a lot together, but alcohol had completely taken him over and the pilots had lost respect for him. A lot of people urged me to get rid of him in the later years, but I thought the best measure of an army was how it carried its wounded. I felt partly responsible for an earlier tragedy in Alan’s life. He was coming home from the Persian Gulf and at the last moment I asked him to stop off in Cairo to look at our operations in the Red Sea, where Amoco were wanting more and more flying without increasing the pilot complement. The diversion added about five days to his trip, and when he didn’t show up at Heathrow where his wife was waiting she became very upset. She apparently thought he was off with one of his lady friends in Beirut; whatever it was, it tormented her so much that she committed suicide. Alan arrived back to find her dead in their home, and he was never the same again. His secretary should have contacted his wife about the change of plan, but she didn’t have the common sense to tell her, and neither did I. Her death had a very depressing effect on Alan and he started drinking at all hours of the day and night.

  We were all drinkers, but within reason. With clients, you had to be able to hold your liquor. A chap would put a bottle of whisky on the table and say, well, let’s see if we can sort this thing out . . . Outside duty hours we had company parties, Christmas parties, celebrations of events, we even had our own social club inside the Bristows building at Redhill, which helped to foster a strong sense of company loyalty. It was a happy-hour place, with darts, snooker and table tennis – it showed we weren’t puritanical about drinking and enjoying yourself, we simply wouldn’t countenance it when you were working. In fact, it was always said that the first thing Bristow Helicopters’ employees did when it started a new contract, be it in jungle or desert, was to build a bar. But Alan Green didn’t know when to stop, and it became increasingly clear in the 1960s that he was descending into alcoholism.

  George Fry made it his business to look after Alan, and through his RAF contacts he got him into RAF Headley Court, a specialist rehabilitation unit for servicemen near Leatherhead, where he was dried out. I thought we’d restored him to normality, but he fell off the wagon again when he took up with a young lady who we suspected was after his money. I had virtually given up on him, but George stepped in again and got him back into hospital; I just settled the bills. Green came back to work and for a couple of months we thought all was well, but one day George came in to my office.

  ‘You know what I’ve found, Alan?’ he said. ‘I’ve just been into AG’s office. He’s got gin in every drawer in his desk.’

  Only a few weeks later he was dead. We faced the problem of making sure his two sons got his money, and my lawyers managed to get power of attorney over his estate. We held his shares in BHL in trust for the boys, who were minors at the time, and the company made arrangements for their education. Some years later, after they had attained their majority, I was approached by a lawyer representing the boys. He offered me their shares, so Jack Woolley, George and I bought them and distributed them amongst ourselves. And we never saw the children again.

  Alan Green had been at my side for almost thirty years, and it sounds harsh to say I didn’t miss him one bit. But by the time of his death he had been so useless for so long that all my sympathy for him had gone. As a company, BHL was very tough on drinking on duty. Anyone who had so much as a small beer while he was working, even if he was in the jungles of Indonesia on a hot day, was instantly dismissed. Apart from its effect on him personally, Alan Green’s alcoholism undermined our stance on that, and he was a bad influence. I should have fired him, but he’d been very loyal to me in the difficult days. I don’t think it would have helped him snap out of it, he was too far gone.

  By the time Alan Green died Alastair Gordon was a member of my executive Board. He had already taken on most of Green’s main responsibilities; I always double-banked my executives so that there was a man ready to take over; behind Jack Woolley there was Bill Petrie, behind George Fry when he was financial director there was the chief accountant John Howard, and behind Alan Green there was Alastair Gordon. Alastair had been a loyal Bristows man since 1954 when he joined while we were certifying the Westland Whirlwind for civilian use. He’d flown with me in the Antarctic, where he proved to be an extremely capable pilot and an inspired engineer. He was universally popular and I found him congenial company, especially on Burns Night when he would force us to eat the dreadful haggis. Even for a man with my Scots antecedents it’s an acquired taste, and I never acquired it. True to his roots, Alastair drank good Scotch whisky, but not a lot of it. His interests coincided with mine. He was committed to the success of the company and to the safety of our operations. He was keen on golf, swimming and sailing, and he regularly accompanied me when I was carriage driving. He had only two employers in his life, the Navy and Bristows, and he was immensely loyal to both. His commercial instincts were not his strong point, but his knowledge of aeronautical engineering and design were invaluable. It was Alastair who translated my ideas for improved safety systems into technical reality, and he was a big part of the reason why Bristow Helicopters’ operations were among the safest in the world, despite the difficult environment in which we flew.

  The technological advances in helicopters during my working life have been nothing short of miraculous. BHL went from operating the Hiller 12C to the era of the Bristow Tiger and the Sikorky S76, from single-engined pistons to multi-engined turbine helicopters with autopilots, stabilisation and diagnostic systems, many of which we developed ourselves. Whenever there was a successful innovation, Alastair Gordon was at the heart of it. Alastair had an instinctive feel for aerodynamic engineering. He once told Westlands’ designers in my presence that he didn’t like their tail rotor control system for the EH101. ‘You really ought to have a duplex system, because if you have a failure in the primary system it’s going to turn the helicopter over right away, the couple is so strong,’ Alastair said. Westlands’ chief test pilot Slim Sear said they’d looked at it and they thought it was fine, but Alastair shook his head. ‘It won’t do,’ he said. They did eventually double up on it, but only after an Italian crew were killed when the aircraft rolled and crashed.

  Alastair was the key man in our development of what became the Louis Newmark LN450 Flight Director, the precursor of the helicopter autopilots that are ubiquitous today. The government was keen to develop such a system for the Navy, and I was invited to the Department of Trade to discuss the issue. At that time the Department of Trade was the control
ling authority for HM Coastguard, who also wanted a flight director capability. The men in grey suits were full of praise for the relatively inexpensive way BHL worked compared to the military, and asked whether we would be able to develop an auto-hover capability for the Wessex. They offered to pay three quarters of a million pounds if I had a working system certificated by the Civil Aviation Authority within twelve months. I asked for a little bit up front, but they said the whole lot would be payable on delivery. No certificate, no money.

  I went back to Redhill and talked to Jack Woolley, Alastair and George Fry about it. ‘It’s £750,000 of good money,’ I said. ‘Can we create a small workforce and ring-fence it so it doesn’t adversely affect our core business?’ Alastair thought it was going to take up quite a lot of his time, so I brought in Mike Norris as his deputy to reduce his workload. Louis Newmark had a good company making avionics, and he and I had done a lot of business down the years. I invited him in to help create the new system, and he remained very enthusiastic throughout the development phase and never pressed too hard for payment because he knew I was being paid only on results. The development group included people from our radio department and software engineers, and in next to no time Alastair and Jack had the basics of a system that was useable.

  The LN450 Flight Director was a four-axis system that used a digital microprocessor to take information from a collection of sensors built into the helicopter and manipulated the controls accordingly. The pilot had to monitor the system and follow the Flight Director commands, but it did have an automatic ‘fly up’ facility if at any point the pilot thought things were going wrong. It was fairly clunky by modern standards but was ultimately developed into the duplex LN450/400, the first true hands-off system, which relieved the pilot of the controlling workload at critical times. If you’ve ever tried to manoeuvre a helicopter over a casualty in a stormy sea at night or in bad visibility you’ll appreciate what a boon this was.

  Once we had created the basic system we had to run a programme to ensure that it would operate for 100 hours without failure, and that went well. We slowly ironed out the make-do-and-mend bits and it became a substantial, professional set-up with a highly practical interface with the operator. It was configured to deal with a control ‘hardover’ and other emergencies. This all took six or seven months and cost the best part of half a million pounds, but I felt confident of getting certification by the twelve-month deadline and collecting our money. The flying programme went like clockwork, all the paperwork was done, and we submitted the LN450 to the Civil Aviation Authority for certification with ample time in hand. At this point a ghost arose from the past, which almost cost us the entire project. The test pilot to whom the CAA referred the LN450 for evaluation was a chap called Peter Harper, and he was the son of Jimmy Harper, the man I had supplanted at Fison Airwork. Jimmy Harper had never forgiven me and his antipathy had rubbed off on his son, who could barely bring himself to give me good day. Peter Harper hated Bristow Helicopters and did everything in his power to make life difficult for us. Six weeks before our time ran out on the DTI deal, Alastair Gordon came to see me.

  ‘I’m having terrible trouble with this fellow Harper,’ he said. ‘I’ve impressed on him the urgency of the situation but he says it’s unlikely to be certificated in time. We stand to lose the whole deal.’

  I had Jack and George in. ‘Look we’ve got to get this money,’ I said. ‘We’ve got bills stacking up. Louis Newmark’s being very reasonable about not pressing for payment, but if we don’t get this Flight Director certificated we’re out by half a million pounds.’

  ‘Why don’t you have a word with Lord Kings Norton,’ said George. ‘He might help things along.’

  Kings Norton was chairman of the Air Registration Board, on which I represented the independent airline operators. The ARB had been subsumed into the CAA, forming its Airworthiness Division. Lord Kings Norton was far removed from the run of figurehead chairmen one often meets in these jobs. He was an aeronautical engineer by trade, and a brilliant one at that. He had an excellent technical grasp of my business and was a perfect gentleman to boot. I called and explained the situation to him, stressing that time was short.

  ‘Dear me, Alan,’ he said, ‘it sounds very serious. I’ll get my Head of Operations to look into it.’

  The following day Alastair walked into my office smiling. ‘I’ve had Lord Kings Norton’s office on the phone. It seems the LN450 application had inexplicably found its way to the bottom of Peter Harper’s pile of things to be dealt with, but they assure us that it will now be handled expeditiously.’

  But that was just the start of the battle. Alastair and Peter Harper fought like tigers every inch of the way. Alastair kept seeking progress reports and the CAA kept stonewalling him. Finally he got a report on the system from Harper, and it was devastating. The LN450 could not be given a Certificate of Airworthiness, Harper said, because it was dangerous and impractical, and the workload on the pilot was so high that it was totally beyond the capacity of ordinary line pilots to use. Alastair responded by giving six of our pilots, chosen at random, an introduction to the LN450 and asking them to fly with it and write up reports. They all thought it was a great aid to safety, quite simple to use, and said so in their reports. Alastair went to the CAA for a showdown with Harper and his colleagues. By then, niceties had completely gone out of the window.

  ‘I’ve got half a dozen line pilots who can fly with this perfectly well,’ he said. ‘How on earth is a test pilot unable to fly it? This proves I’m afraid, Mr Harper, that you’re a below-average pilot when it comes to flying Flight Directors.’

  The fact was that everything Harper had claimed in his report rejecting the LN450 was given the lie by the real-life experiences of pilots. Under the circumstances it was very difficult for the Authority to continue to block it. Three days before the deadline, Harper’s refusal was rescinded. Alastair came into my office beaming broadly and waving the certificate. The Department of Trade paid us our money. Later the LN450 was installed on our Bell 212s, and it paved the way for the more capable LS400 system that went into our S61Ns. But Peter Harper remained a thorn in BHL’s side and never gave up trying to undermine the S61.

  As Operations Director Alastair was responsible for ensuring our compliance with employment legislation as far as the flying staff were concerned. One day he came into my office to tell me we had a problem with Equal Opportunities legislation.

  ‘I’ve been receiving applications for pilot training from females who are well qualified by any standards,’ he said. ‘It’s becoming very difficult to turn them away.’

  I looked at his applications file. There were indeed several applicants who would have sailed onto the courses but for their gender. Some already had basic fixed-wing training, others had engineering degrees from good universities.

  ‘Can we do this, Alastair?’ I asked. ‘We can’t send them to Nigeria, or the rigs.’

  In fact, women had been banned from North Sea oil rigs in case their presence led to trouble among the men. We had once encountered the problem of having a female doctor who was available to go out to attend to a fairly major medical emergency, but they wouldn’t allow it. The male doctor we had on call was drunk at a party. The lady doctor was fully qualified and perfectly willing to go, but there was a likelihood that she would have to remain on the rig overnight, and that wasn’t possible for a woman. In the event it took us two or three hours to find a suitable male doctor. I don’t suppose the injured party would have given a damn about the sex of the doctor who treated him, but that was the way of things at the time. The rules were changed under pressure from the oil companies, not because they were concerned about equal rights for women but because they were suffering from a shortage of male petroleum engineers when there was an adequate supply of perfectly good female petroleum engineers. And there were no riots on the rigs.

  But now the enemy were at our own gates. ‘It’s the Equal Opportunities legislation,’ Alastai
r said. ‘We can’t discriminate against them solely on the grounds of gender. We’re going to be in trouble if we don’t train some females.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let’s have six of them in on the next course.’

  Alastair turned to leave. ‘Just make sure they all fail,’ I said.

  ‘You want me to minute that?’

  ‘No I bloody don’t.’

  In fact, I’d been one of the first people to employ women captains when I was running British United Airways. Morton Olley Air Services already had female pilots on contract when it was absorbed by BUA, and most of the women ended up working for BUA Channel Islands. They were captains on propeller-driven planes – de Havilland Herons and Doves – and had quite a jump to make to the BAC 1-11 jets. Hiring women at BHL turned out to be one of the best recommendations Alastair had made. They all came out top of their training course, and one of them eventually ran the Falkland Islands base after the war there. Subsequently we took on quite a few female pilots and engineers, and they matched the men in every respect.

  Our operations in the Far East were growing rapidly, but the greatest rate of expansion continued to be on the North Sea. It was clear that a substantial new base would be required at Aberdeen. Jack Woolley designed a hangar and office building that we initially thought would cover all our requirements for the foreseeable future, but when it was under construction I realised it wasn’t going to be big enough. I said as much to Jack, and added that there didn’t seem to be enough room on the site to provide for our needs. ‘There would be if you turned the building through 90 degrees,’ said Jack. So we did that. And we kept growing. In 1972 BHL rented two and a half acres at Aberdeen airport, but within a few years our hangars and workshops covered fourteen and a half acres, plus three acres of concrete hard standing. I invited my carriage-driving colleague Prince Philip to open the new Aberdeen base. As a pilot he was familiar with the Whirlwind and the Wessex, and he was extremely interested in developments on the North Sea. I offered to fly him to Aberdeen in one of our new Sikorsky S61s, but while he accepted the invitation he couldn’t accept the ride – he was constrained, he said, to travel in an aircraft of the Queen’s Flight. He flew up in his own Wessex, performed the ceremony, then took me on as a passenger in the Wessex to a graving dock in Invergordon where he had arranged to be shown how the undersea pipeline was wound and insulated. It was edifying to be attached to a royal party, where everything went according to plan, there are no delays and everyone was unfailingly helpful. Oddly enough, the Queen also took a genuine interest in North Sea oil, and asked my advice before giving a speech at a ceremony to mark the coming ashore of a gas pipeline in Scotland. She wanted to know why the gas was coming ashore at a particular place, and why helicopters were so essential to the work, and I was pleased to help her with a few facts, which she used in her speech.