by Nevil Shute
I had a friend in York whose unhappy business was to try to sell Rolls Royce motor cars in that time of depression; I think he had a worse job than I had, but not much. The rebuffs that we both got were of much the same quality. My own routine was to go as inexpensively as possible to some city in the north of England, say Newcastle or Leeds, and go into conference with a local stockbroker, who would give me names and details of wealthy people in the district who would be likely to invest in such a company as ours. The depression was hardly realised in England at that time even by the stockbrokers; it was something new that had developed after eighty years of industrial prosperity and free investment. It was regarded as something very temporary that would quickly pass; if things were difficult today, in three months’ time investment would be flowing easily again.
Sometimes the stockbroker would make an appointment for me to see the client; at other times he would say cautiously that perhaps I had better approach him myself. This meant an uphill telephone conversation with a worried, short tempered man to try to induce him to see me in order that I might sell him something that he didn’t want to buy. There was nobody to teach me this part of the job, and I soon learned by experience to write off prospects of this sort. It was very soon apparent that if Airspeed Ltd got started at all it would start with tenuous capital, which meant that the risk of the investment would be much increased. Unless the investors could afford to lose their money if the venture failed, unless they were in the mood to risk their money on the chance of big profits if the venture should succeed, it would be better not to get them into it even though this should mean that Airspeed Ltd would never start. Even in those days I sensed the intolerable situation that would be created for the management if shareholders were induced to subscribe on any pretence that the venture was a safe one. What we wanted was a crowd of cheerful gamblers as our shareholders.
I found a considerable number of people of this type in Yorkshire and the north of England. These men would give me an attentive and a sympathetic hearing; they would show evident interest, take a copy of my draft prospectus to read in detail, and ask for a copy of the final prospectus and invitation to subscribe when the time came. I do not think that one of them ever took up shares. They would have been subscribers, no doubt, in times of normal prosperity; no doubt they were in secret difficulties themselves due to the depression, which was novel to them and which they hardly comprehended. They probably anticipated, as we all did, that in a month or two things would improve; in that case they would have been glad to take up shares in the new venture. However, the improvement didn’t come.
This trying, unremunerative work went on for two or three months during the winter of 1930/31, a period of travelling to bleak, grey cities, of waiting for telephone calls in very cheap hotels, of frustrations and disappointments. I was lucky in having the hobby of writing to turn to in the evenings, to take my mind off the troubles of the day. I was living, as I have said, in the St. Leonards Club in York, and in that club there were one or two restless men whose minds were turned back to the glamour of the war, such as are found in many men’s clubs all the world over. The novel that I began to write was Lonely Road.
At the conclusion of this difficult time we arrived at the position when we had a number of potential subscribers for shares in the new company, and we had covered the area within a hundred miles of York as well as we were able. We had firm promises from members of the Board totalling about four thousand pounds. This situation could not be described as rosy, but having got so far there seemed nothing to be done but to issue the final prospectus and invitations to subscribe, and see what happened.
An unpleasant and illuminating little incident marred the final drafting of the document. We had discussed the company with the manager of one of the banks known as the Big Five, and had received his consent to the use of his bank’s name as the company’s bankers. We now received a letter from the bank asking for a fee of a hundred guineas for the use of their name on the prospectus. Hewitt was furious, for a hundred guineas looked like being quite an appreciable percentage of the capital that we were likely to raise. The manager said he had no option— ‘it was always done’. Hewitt approached another bank of the Big Five, who waived all claim to a prospectus fee, and we transferred the account. We hadn’t enough money to permit the rats to get at it like that. That was over twenty years ago, but still whenever I read an urbane statement by a banker about the assistance that banks give to industry it raises a wry smile.
Accordingly we issued the final and formal prospectus for subscription. I forget how many days our potential shareholders were given in which to subscribe their money; as they didn’t do it the point is only of an academic importance. Probably it was a fortnight, in which we were all working like beavers; I myself was engaged in an abortive negotiation with the city of Hull to set up our industry upon their aerodrome if a reasonable subscription of capital were to be forthcoming from their district. As the days went on it became apparent that our issue was to be a failure, and the only bright spot in a grey scene was the arrival of Tom Laing.
Tom Laing was a man of about forty-five, a burly, cheerful individual who limped heavily upon a stick, the result of an aircraft crash. He was the son of a Sunderland shipbuilder. In his youth he had been to Oxford, had served a three years’ apprenticeship with Metropolitan Vickers in an engineering shop, and had inherited ten thousand pounds. He told me once that such an inheritance was the worst thing in the world for any young man, for the income was sufficient in those days to relieve a bachelor from the necessity of working though insufficient for a married man. In the first world war he served in the Army Service Corps and in the Royal Flying Corps, where he rose to the rank of captain, flying Bristol Fighters. After that war he went to Canada with his brother, fruit farmed for a time, and finally started up a passenger service of Chris Craft speedboats running from end to end of Lake Okanagan. That finished his money.
When a wealthy man comes to the end of his patrimony he shows the world what he is made of. Tom Laing ‘jumped the border’ into the United States riding the buffers of a freight train, and set out to look for work. He was a powerful and self-reliant man, and he became the chargehand of a platelaying gang on the Santa Fé railroad. He held the job of strawboss for two years, became a signalman for a short time, refused promotion into the railroad office, and left to go back to aviation barnstorming as the pilot of a joyride Curtiss J.N.4. When winter brought that to an end he got a job as a chargehand in the Ford Aircraft factory at Detroit, installing the wing engines into Ford Trimotors. He left that next year to go back to flying, this time as an instructor. He was crashed by a woman pupil in a Fleet trainer and suffered a crushed foot, so that he walked heavily upon a stick for the remainder of his life. When he came out of hospital he went home to his mother in Scotland, and when he heard about Airspeed Ltd he came to see us. His proposal was that his mother would invest a thousand pounds in the company and he would work for us as works manager on a salary of three hundred a year, about the wage of a skilled woodworker or fitter in those days.
His proposal raised an important point of principle. Most industrialists would agree that it is thoroughly bad practice to sell jobs for capital. My experience has led me to believe, however, that this purist doctrine may need a good deal of qualification in the case of a hazardous, new venture. A small, struggling company cannot engage a first-class staff in any case; it cannot pay first-class salaries and good men will not leave good jobs to come to a company which may be in liquidation in six months. Tom Laing had no experience of works management but he had all the basic qualifications for a good works manager; at the salary that we could afford to pay he was probably as good a man as we could hope to get. He was enthusiastic over the qualities of our design and for the general prospects of the venture. We took him on as our first employee, and he served the company loyally and well till his death in its service seventeen years later. Without the untiring energy and smiling confidence
of this man the company could hardly have got through its early production difficulties. Without the financial assistance given by his mother as the years went on from her quite slender resources, in shares, debentures, bank guarantees, and second debentures, the company might well have failed to battle through to maturity.
As time went on we were to depart from the purist principle quite widely. In those years of depression there were a number of young men with some experience of aeroplanes and with some capital at their disposal who were prepared to invest in the company and come and work for us upon a very low salary or, in one case, on no salary at all. There were so many of them that we could afford to pick and choose, and I can remember rejecting at least two applicants with substantial capital to invest because they would be obviously incompetent and useless to us. In the end there were to be no less than nine shareholders working whole time in the company, all in it financially up to the neck, many of us individually facing ruin if the venture failed. In its first three years, in fact, the company was principally financed by Lord Grimthorpe and by shareholders working whole time in the company on salaries that were frequently less than those of the men working on the bench.
The company held its first board meeting at the end of April 1931. There were practically no subscribers for shares to report; the issue of the prospectus had been a complete fiasco. Apart from those of us who were intimately concerned with the venture, I do not think that five hundred shares were applied for. I think we had stated in the prospectus that we would not proceed unless we had applications for fifteen thousand pounds’ worth of share capital; on that prospectus we could not proceed. The issue was a total failure.
This ought to have produced a state of gloom at our first board meeting. I can only remember a buoyant and a cheerful atmosphere. We had firm promises amongst ourselves for about five thousand pounds, and we set about considering what we could do with that.
I hope I did not talk my co-directors into going on; I do not think I did. So far as I remember, it was Sir Alan Cobham who declared that this venture was too good a thing to let drop, who proclaimed his faith in us in a most tangible manner. At that time he was commencing a series of flying displays touring all the towns and cities of the British Isles, an organisation which went by the name of National Aviation Day Ltd; those who have read my novel Round the Bend will have found a description of this venture in the first pages of the book. Sir Alan told the Board that he would need two large, ten-passenger aircraft for National Aviation Day specially designed for flying out of fields with a very short take-off run. If the Board decided to proceed with Airspeed Ltd he was prepared to order those two aircraft from us. Five thousand pounds would be about the price of each aircraft and our five thousand pounds of capital would be insufficient to set up a works and manufacture them. Nevertheless, he was prepared to place that order with us; he was confident that we could find more capital as soon as we had something to show.
This was a bold and generous proposal. I think everybody felt that if Sir Alan Cobham was prepared to speculate on us to that extent it would be cowardly to draw back, and it must be remembered that the money promised was essentially gambling money. It was a laughing, cheerful roomful of punters in that solicitor’s office in York who went on to consider the next move.
Clearly, five thousand pounds wasn’t going to last us very long. It might well all be gone within a year, perhaps within six months — in any case long before Sir Alan’s aircraft could be built and delivered. Moreover, Sir Alan wanted two or three months to arrange his finances before he could order the machines formally or pay any deposit on them. Yet quick action to produce something that would fly was imperative, because until the new company got an aircraft of some sort into the air there was little basis upon which to seek more capital.
At that time the sport of soaring in motorless gliders or sailplanes was attracting a good deal of attention in England. The German exploits in this field under the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles had shown that quite long flights could be made without a motor by pilots with sufficient skill, and a number of gliding clubs had been formed in England in the last year to try to emulate the German achievements. No British manufacturer, however, had yet marketed a high performance sailplane. It seemed to us that a sailplane would be something that we could get into the air quickly and cheaply while Sir Alan’s order was maturing. It would give Tiltman the opportunity to engage a nucleus of two or three draughtsmen for the design work so that he would have laid the foundations of a drawing office before the design work for Sir Alan’s aircraft came along. It would give us an opportunity to organise the workshop in a tiny way before Sir Alan’s machines had to be built. It would give us a machine which we could get into the air within three months or so before our capital ran out. We could reasonably hope to capture all the British gliding records that we cared to go for with the sailplane, and with that minute achievement we could probably get in more capital. Moreover, it seemed reasonable to hope that we might sell a few of the sailplanes to the gliding clubs.
Accordingly at that first board meeting we amended the prospectus to say that we would proceed upon a minimum subscription of five thousand pounds, and sent out letters to our few applicants for shares to ask if they would play upon that basis. I must have had this proposal all cut and dried before the board meeting, because at the same meeting we resolved to rent one half of an empty bus garage in Piccadilly, near the centre of the city of York. This building had a floor area of about six thousand square feet, and was to be the works of the company for the first two years. The first board meeting then dispersed, having laughingly refused to accept defeat, and Airspeed Ltd started operations upon a capital of £5195 and a tentative order for £10,000 worth of aircraft. Tiltman and I were appointed joint managing directors, and Laing’s appointment as works manager was confirmed.
There was no time to be lost, for our days were numbered till the capital ran out. We rented a larger office for a drawing office and Tiltman got in one or two draughtsmen. It was to be a month or so before we could get possession of the bus garage, so we started one woodworker on components of the sailplane in a local joiner’s shop. Within ten days we had rented a small sales room on a weekly basis and set up woodworkers’ benches in it, and in these tiny premises the parts for a batch of three sailplanes went in to production. In that time of depression it was not very difficult to get aircraft woodworkers and by the time we moved in to the bus garage we had six or seven men working on the bench. These woodworkers, accustomed as they were to man-sized factories, regarded Airspeed Ltd as a joke. As a class, however, woodworkers are good tempered and tolerant men in any factory, no doubt because of the quality of the material they work with. Metal workers are normally more nervy and difficult, and panel beaters are apt to be bad tempered and hostile to the management, because the incessant clamour of their work and the unsympathetic material that they handle all day fray the nerves. Our woodworkers became infected with a little of our enthusiasm and, as time went on and they found that their employment continued the company, though still a joke to them, became a good joke.
We typed all our own letters, of course, on our own machines, for we had no money for a typist. When we moved in to the bus garage we built a little office about eight feet square and a store of about the same size next to it, and in the office Laing and I had our desks while Tiltman worked in his drawing office half a mile away. Construction of the first glider was well advanced by the middle of July, and about that time Cobham gave us his firm order for the two joyriding aeroplanes.
These were to be quite large aircraft for that time. They were to carry a pilot and ten passengers in and out of small fields. Speed was immaterial and the endurance in the air could be two or three hours only, but economy in operation was important and it was essential that each passenger should have a good view. Tiltman produced a biplane design for this machine, which we christened the Ferry, with three de Havilland Gipsy engines, which fulfilled all t
he requirements. The Ferry had a wing span of 55 feet and an all-up weight of about 6000 lbs; it had a cruising speed of about 85 m.p.h. It had a remarkably short run to take off. It had, in fact, all the performance characteristics of the Gipsy Moth aircraft of the time, but it carried ten passengers. In those days there seemed to be a definite market for a slow, cheaply operated aircraft carrying a big payload because in many parts of the world the aeroplane competes with very slow land transport, with ships or even with pack horses. Not all aircraft need to be fast; cheapness in operation may be more important. With the introduction of metal construction, however, aeroplanes became so much more costly that speed became more important again, in order that the machine might earn its depreciation by running more journeys in a given time.
I think the first sailplane must have flown in August 1931. We had built a trailer to convey it in, in the dismantled state, and we had bought a very old Buick car for £25 to tow this trailer. We took the machine from York to Sherburn-in-Elmet aerodrome for its initial trials, and there we towed it up with the car and a long length of steel cable, myself at the controls. I got about a minute’s flight out of it on each of two launches after casting off the tow; it seemed to handle like any other aeroplane upon the glide, bearing in mind the large wing span, which was 50 feet. It was stable, and the sinking speed seemed to be about three feet a second.
It was essential to get publicity and results with this machine, because our capital was fast running out. I had myself no experience of soaring flight nor had Laing; we therefore had to go outside the company for a pilot. There was a young German glider pilot in England at that time, called Magersuppe, who had come over to demonstrate soaring flight at the expense of one or two clubs. I got in touch with him, and he came up to Yorkshire with a German friend, Haak, that he called his secretary.
Magersuppe, I suppose, was about twenty-one years old and Haak about eighteen, but they were both experienced soaring pilots. I am ashamed to record how little I paid them, and the financial straits that they ultimately got into. My wife and I used to put them up in our flat sometimes and they had a keen nose for Youth Hostels, where they stayed whenever possible. Their angle on the business was a simple one; they wanted to emigrate from Germany, where there was much unemployment at that time. They were good, clean, hardworking lads who spoke excellent English, ready to turn their hand to any manual labour. There was, however, still prejudice against Germans after the first world war and most countries at that time had their own unemployment problem. They had attempted to emigrate to practically every country in the world, and had met rebuffs and frustration in each case. Their forlorn hope now was that they could stay in England and become British citizens by virtue of their skill in soaring flight. When finally I could employ them no longer even on the pittance that I paid they ran out of money and got into debt, and finally they were picked up by the police and deported back to Germany to join the other six million unemployed in their own country. Years afterwards, when I was listening to the bombers overhead during the London blitz, I used to wonder which of them was Magersuppe, and I would wish him luck and think it served us bloody well right. He might have been flying for us.