Slide Rule

by Nevil Shute

  Portsmouth had everything to offer us. It had a new municipal aerodrome upon the outskirts of the town, immediately adjacent to good seaplane water in Langstone harbour. At that time the flying boat was in the ascendant and most of the services of Imperial Airways were about to turn to operation by flying boats. There was a proposal to develop Langstone harbour as a great terminal flying boat base for services throughout the Commonwealth. Portsmouth was a town with a good reserve of engineering labour normally working in the dockyard. Moreover, Portsmouth was anxious to have us there.

  In July 1932 negotiations with Portsmouth were in quite an advanced state, and justified a visit by Lord Grimthorpe to the Lord Mayor. This luncheon and the subsequent negotiations went off well, and we left the Guildhall and went to have tea in a small café while we waited for a train to London. Here my chairman raised a point with me which had been troubling him, and which I think deserves a record.

  He had a general arrangement drawing of the Courier which we proposed to build, showing the retractable undercarriage. Already by that time he had a very serious financial commitment in the company, and quite prudently he had shown this drawing to a knowledgeable friend in the aircraft industry to get his opinion on it. This friend had shown the drawing to a great and famous designer.

  In the Battle of Britain, eight years later, the brunt of the battle was borne by the Hawker Hurricane and the Supermarine Spitfire fighters, both, of course, with retractable undercarriages. The designer in question designed one of them, and wild horses will not drag from me which. In 1932, however, he held different views. The drawing came back from him with the message that the Courier was a very good design and should fill a place in the commercial market and do well, provided that the designers would forget about the retractable undercarriage and fit a normal undercarriage to the machine. He, the designer, had been attracted by the retractable undercarriage at one time and had gone into it very carefully. It was no good. The device could not be made to work reliably and if it could it would be of little value in an aeroplane design. Over the teacups in that shabby little café Lord Grimthorpe presented this report to me.

  I had to think and talk quite hard. To think quite hard, because it was essential that so good a friend to the company should not lose his money by a technical error of our own. If we were wrong and the great designer were right, he would probably do so. To talk quite hard, to convince my chairman of things that he already had vaguely in the back of his mind, that a policy of caution, of doing what everybody else was doing, could never bring us through to an established position in the industry. If we did only what the large, conservative firms of the industry were capable of doing we should inevitably lose to them, for with their greater manufacturing capacity they could sell for lower prices than our infant company could hope to manufacture for. Our only hope was to lead the way, to put out something technically ahead of them and so monopolise the market till they had time to catch up.

  Lord Grimthorpe thought about it, and decided to allow us to go on with the retractable undercarriage.

  The negotiations with the Portsmouth Corporation were brought to a satisfactory conclusion in July; I think the terms that they gave us deserve a record as a model of the sort of encouragement that can be given by an enterprising city to an infant industry. They would build us a factory building on the aerodrome to our own requirements, only stipulating that it should be capable of being used as a hangar if our company were to fail. This building, about 14,000 sq.ft. in floor area, would cost about £4000; the Corporation wanted a down payment of £1000 and the balance on hire purchase spread over ten years with 5% interest on the outstanding loan. For the use of the aerodrome we would pay a rent of 1% of our sales turnover up to a turnover of £60,000, ½% from £60,000 to £200,000, and ¼% thereafter. In addition there was a rental of, I think, £50 per acre for the land we occupied. These were generous terms, which resulted in the establishment of a very considerable industry on Portsmouth aerodrome.

  In August the order for the Courier was confirmed by Cobham, the move to Portsmouth was definitely decided on as soon as the factory could be built, and further bank guarantees were entered in to by Lord Grimthorpe and Hewitt. An extra shareholding was taken up by Sir Alan Cobham. As the autumn drew on I was chiefly occupied, I think, in progressing the design and construction of the factory at Portsmouth and in trying to sell the two Ferries we were building as a speculation. It was essential, of course, that we should keep on building something to retain our men, yet we had little capital to spare for locking up in stock and no room for storing any completed aircraft.

  That autumn, as Cobham had forecast, some interest began to awaken in the formation of small private airlines in the British Isles. It came not from the private owners of aeroplanes, as we had thought it would, but from the bus operators. In England the late Mr. Hillman was beginning to consider an airline to Paris from his elementary aerodrome at Romford, and in Scotland Mr. John Sword was making plans for a network of lines joining up Glasgow with Belfast, Edinburgh, Inverness, and the Western Islands.

  I visited Mr. Sword several times and found him a hard-headed business man, but generous and helpful personally. He had worked up from a modest start after the first war to a wealthy and a powerful position in the motor bus world in Scotland; like many such men he was expert in getting value for his money. He was, however, keenly interested in Airspeed Ltd and very sympathetic to the company; having trod the hard way upwards himself so recently he could understand our many difficulties. He bought the third Ferry that autumn and incorporated it in the name of his new company, Midland and Scottish Air Ferries Ltd.

  We made no progress with Mr. Hillman, for a reason which caused us a good deal of concern. De Havillands were after him. Up till that time the small commercial machine had not attracted this company very much; they had built small machines for the private owner in great numbers and they had built large machines for Imperial Airways. When we had bought engines from them for the Ferries they had indicated verbally that they were not very likely to compete with us. However, necessity knows no law. The continuing depression was playing havoc with the sales of aeroplanes for the private owner, and we were pointing the way to a new market. Early in 1933 de Havillands produced the twin engined Dragon to the order of Mr. Hillman, a machine that was a good deal faster than the Ferry and a good deal cheaper, though not, perhaps, quite so safe. In the design of aircraft a designer studies and analyses the machines that are already flying and then goes one better; the Dragon was produced a year later than the Ferry and was a better aircraft for the job, and was sold for a price which in our smaller works we could not hope to equal. From the day the Dragon appeared we had little hope of selling Ferries.

  We sold the fourth Ferry, quite unexpectedly, one day to Mr. Sword, who had expertly concealed the fact that he wanted another. He made us take his 6½ litre Bentley in for £700 as part of the price of the fourth Ferry; in his first affluence he had bought a fleet of seven very expensive motor cars but he was now coming to the view that a wise man could do with rather fewer vehicles. I drove this magnificent thing from Ayr to London to sell it, the best car that I have ever driven or am ever likely to drive, but in the depression there was no sale for a car like that and we could not afford to keep it till the times improved. I think we only got about £400 for it; even at that price we could none of us afford to buy it in for our own use.

  The advent of the Dragon raised a point of policy which was to trouble us throughout the life of the company, till Air Ministry orders were to swamp and obliterate commercial work. We were using de Havilland engines in the Ferry, and were therefore buying engines from our competitors in the same market. However friendly to that company we might be, and our relations with de Havillands were very good throughout, there were obvious commercial dangers in using their engines. We were far too small to think of manufacturing engines for ourselves, besides being inexperienced in such a business, and we began to shape our developmen
ts to use, if possible, engines manufactured by an organisation that did not make aeroplanes.

  In the British aircraft industry at that time such engines were not very easy to find. Lord Nuffield, however, was turning his attention to aero engines and Wolseley Motors had produced a very attractive little radial engine of about two hundred horsepower which was technically very promising. From that time onwards we began to shape our design policies around the Wolseley engine wherever possible, and as time went on we were to get a good deal of co-operation from that company. Their engines, however, in the winter of 1932/33 were in an early stage of development.

  The company’s accounts for the first year of working showed a loss, the first of many. I forget the amount of this loss, but I know that it was reached after capitalising everything that could possibly be capitalised in the accounts, so that the true position of the company was a good deal worse than the stated loss. This result was no surprise to anybody; on the other side was the considerable degree of technical success that had already been achieved. I do not remember that anybody was particularly depressed, though by the end of the year 1932 the position of the company was serious. The issued share capital by that time was £11,800, and the overdraft about £6,000; for the first time we were getting behind in paying the monthly trade invoices. It must have been about this time that I began to defer paying our own monthly salaries, too—a default that was to occur a number of times within the next two years. It did not seem to me quite fair to defer paying our bills for materials and yet to take our salaries in full on the first of each month; if any creditor turned nasty and threatened us with a writ it would add strength to the position if one could say, “Look, old boy, I’m in this as well as you. If we go in to liquidation you and I are both in the same boat. We’re both creditors.” And then one could follow up with the story about the business man in the West Riding who went in to see his bank manager about the overdraft, and asked the manager if he had ever been in the wool trade. The bank manager said, no. The man said, “Well, you’re in it now,” and walked out. Our trade creditors were soon to find themselves involuntarily in the position of debenture holders, and I must say that they were all extraordinarily good about it. In this, of course, they were influenced by the good technical reputation that we were building up.

  That winter we built a small monoplane two-seater designed by W. S. Shackleton and Lee Murray, both firm friends of mine still though rather surprisingly in view of the disputes that we had over what constituted good workmanship. I had taken this job on at a fixed price and in view of the financial situation of the company I well remember the grief and mental anguish that I went through when they called on us to remake a thoroughly bad piece of cowling. The machine was low powered and slow but very delightful to fly in, for it was a parasol monoplane with the pusher engine in the centre section; the fuselage was very low on the ground and the pilot and passenger were out in front ahead of the engine and the wing with a perfect view. Only one machine was ever built, for it came out at a time when the private owner market was dying in England, but it was a good design for club use.

  In March 1933 we moved the company from York to Portsmouth, into the new factory built for us by the Portsmouth Corporation. By that time we had over a hundred men employed in the bus garage in York, but of these I think only about fifty elected to make the move south with us. Some of the others were to join us again later on, for we were to find that the Portsmouth area was attractive to labour. As spring came on, men working in the grey industrial towns of the Midlands and the North would begin to think about the sunshine and the seaside, and would take the opportunity of moving down to a job with us thinking that they would go back north in the autumn. When autumn came, they usually stayed on. The transfer of the company to Portsmouth was probably a wise move on those grounds alone; it enabled our struggling little company to get a good staff together more quickly than otherwise we could have done.

  For the first time in Portsmouth we were all under one roof, a tremendous help to Tiltman and the design office. We had nearly three times the area to work in, with the aerodrome immediately outside the door, giving promise of lower costs and more effective work. The first Courier for Cobham was practically complete when we left York and only the final erection and inspection before flight remained to be done in the new factory.

  This was the first retractable undercarriage machine to be produced in England for many years, and in the test flying therefore we should be breaking new ground. There were, of course, no proprietary hydraulic components already on the market that we could make use of; Tiltman and his drawing office had had to design the manual hydraulic pump and the jacks and the change over cocks and the indicator lights entirely from first principles with little expert help because the design was a new conception. It was inevitable that teething troubles would occur, sometimes in flight, and this would mean that the pilot might well find that he could not lower his undercarriage. To meet this point the design was arranged to retract the undercarriage legs completely but to leave half the diameter of the wheels exposed below the under surface of the wing. In this position the axles were up against a firm abutment and a belly landing could be made upon the wheels with little damage to the aircraft. In fact, a belly landing on the Courier only involved a bent metal propeller and minor damage to fairings, and was normally put right for a repair cost of about twenty pounds.

  The choice of a test pilot for the first flights of the Courier was a serious responsibility, complicated by the financial situation of the company. In the first flight trials trouble with the undercarriage was quite likely to arise and if that happened a first class pilot would be required to use all his experience and skill if the aircraft were to be landed safely, but we had little money to pay the fees of a first class consultant pilot nor had we any great confidence in the civilian pilots who were available.

  In these circumstances we made contact with F/Lt. G. H. Stainforth. George Stainforth was a serving officer in the R.A.F., employed at that time as a test pilot in the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. He was one of the best test pilots in the country; he had been a member of the Schneider Trophy team and held the world’s speed record for seaplanes in the Supermarine S.6B. George Stainforth was keenly interested in the Courier and wanted to fly it, and I think his superiors in the Royal Air Force wanted him to fly it, too, for they made no objection when he requested permission to carry out this test flying for us while he was on leave. Married flight lieutenants in the R.A.F. are not particularly affluent as a class and George was glad to do the job for us for the pitifully small fee that I could offer him; on our part we could have got no better man.

  I have found that it is difficult, if not impossible, to generalise about the mentality of a good test pilot. George Stainforth was a fine character, a big, humorous man, generous to the point of having little sense of money so that he seemed to be in the habit of giving any that came into his hands to his wife lest he should spend it too quickly. When standing a round of beers at the bar he would ask his wife for five shillings, and give her back the change. On the ground he was mentally slow to grasp a technical point, but he had immense tenacity and would never leave a technical matter till he had mastered it in every detail. Before the test flights of the Courier we had the machine supported on trestles and jacks in the hangar in the flying attitude so that the pilot could get the feel of the machine before he left the ground; the open hangar doors in front of the aircraft permitted a full view of the aerodrome, and the undercarriage could be raised and lowered as in flight. In our innocence we had supposed that an hour in the machine in this condition would be sufficient for the pilot, for the Courier was not a very complicated aeroplane, but it was not so. George Stainforth sat in the machine in this condition for five solid hours, all through one working day, with Tom Laing or the chief inspector at his side, asking and re-asking the same questions and receiving the same explanations, or just sitting, feeling the controls and staring at the
aerodrome, in an apparent daydream. I think his one deficiency was that he was not a very quick pupil and I think that he was very well aware of it, so that he required this prolonged study before he could feel that he really knew the aircraft to the extent that he would not have to stop and think in an emergency.

  In the air he was masterly, of course. So far as I remember he did about five hours’ flying on the machine, establishing preliminary performance figures which were practically identical with those established later in the official trials. The undercarriage gave no trouble in these early trials, but he had to cope with an emergency of another sort. Taking off in to an easterly wind from Portsmouth aerodrome the mud flats and tidal water of Langstone harbour lie immediately beyond the confines of the aerodrome, with no possibility of landing undamaged. George Stainforth suffered a complete engine failure at an altitude of about three hundred feet just after taking off in this direction, due, I think, to a defect in the petrol system. The machine was climbing steeply with the undercarriage already up when this happened, and I have never seen an aircraft handled so expertly. Within an instant the machine was forty, five degrees nose down to keep up speed, and turning, while the undercarriage came out in record time; then she flattened out neither too high nor too low and landed neatly and perfectly back in to the aerodrome down wind. In the hands of a lesser pilot the machine might well have been lost; perhaps the long wearisome hours spent in the cockpit in the hangar had paid off.