Not Much of an Engineer

by Stanley Hooker

  Barnoldswick was a nondescript little town of about 1,000 to 2,000 people. It had suffered from unemployment during the slump of the early 30s, as evidenced by the various cotton mills there were around ready to be taken over for war work. It was situated on the banks of the Leeds-Liverpool canal, between Clitheroe and Skipton. One had to turn off every road to get to Barnoldswick, and it was overlooked by the forbidding brow of Pendle Hill. As the saying went — if you can see Pendle it will soon be raining; if you can’t see it, it already is.

  To the north and east was the glorious countryside of the Yorkshire Dales and the Trough of Bowland; happy indeed was the day when one could beg, borrow or steal enough petrol for a trip to those beautiful open vales with the tumbling river by the side of the road. It was a part of England where the War never seemed to penetrate, apart from the drain on young manpower for the services. They never heard an air-raid warning blown in anger, and there was no shortage of homegrown food from the local farms — eggs, meat and fish.

  We put the workforce and the big manufacturing shops under the command of Horace Percival Smith at Derby, and HPS sent up his right-hand man, Les Buckler, as the manager. Les could operate every machine himself, and had had years of experience as HPS’s second-in-command in the Experimental Shop at Derby — a hard and exemplary training if ever there was one. Les Buckler brought with him Les Say to handle the Engine Fitting Shop, Harry Simons to supervise the Inspection Department, and Joe Guest to progress the work through the shops and from Lucas at Burnley.

  These men and other assistants from Derby revolutionized the output. Until this time, turbine blades had always been in short supply, and the lack of them was a continuous hold-up in the building of engines for test. Add to this the fact that the blades failed on nearly every test, and it was obvious that the situation needed drastic treatment. Buckler appealed to me, ‘Can’t you standardize on one type of blade? I am making them in all sorts of material — Hastelloy B, Stayblade, Rex 748, Nimonic 80. I am making them from bars, I am making them from rough forgings, and I even have some forged to size to cope with. If you can cut down on the Heinz varieties, then I can let you have a lot more blades’.

  I consulted with the Chief Metallurgist, Harry Gresham, and we agreed that we would standardize on blades made from rough forgings in Nimonic 80. This was a nickel alloy with 80 per cent nickel in its composition and was made by Henry Wiggin at Birmingham — a subsidiary of the Mond Nickel Co. By rough forgings was meant material that had been roughly forged to shape, but still required to be machined all over. It was essential to machine the oxidised skin off the blade, because of intergranular penetration, which was an invisible penetration of the oxide into the surface grains of the material forming little cracks which rapidly extended and failed the blade on engine test.

  Lo and Behold, not only did this standardization give us more blades, but it gave us more reliable blades. In fact, we never changed from Nimonic 80 rough forgings for the next decade. Released from the restraints of variety, Buckler set up a line of machines across the shop, each manned by a girl, and each doing its own particular operation, with the result that within weeks there was never a shortage of turbine blades again. This truly remarkable piece of work transformed the building and testing of engines, and left poor old Frank, who for years had lived hand to mouth, green with envy.

  Maurice Wilkes and the greater part of his Rover engineering team, naturally, stayed with their parent company, so it was necessary to reconstruct the team with people from Derby. I was given more or less carte blanche to choose my team, which was to be modelled strictly according to the Derby format, that is, in three autonomous and separate groups covering respectively design, mechanical development and engine performance.

  On performance, I chose Harry Pearson, who worked for Dorey at Hucknall, and had done excellent work in developing the ejector exhaust system on the Merlin. This was a system which directed the exhaust gases from each cylinder rearwards to produce a jet-propulsion effect worth between 100 and 150 hp. Pearson had taken a Physics degree at Oxford, and had a very broadly based knowledge of aerodynamics and thermodynamics. He was also very sound on fundamental principles, and logical in his thinking. I used him continuously as a stalking horse for ideas. Although he was very conservative, once he had agreed I was certain I was on sound ground.

  In addition, I took Lindsay Dawson and Geoffrey Fawn, who already worked for me at Derby, anyway. The former was a superficially brilliant young man, not too sound fundamentally, but then Harry Pearson looked after that aspect. He was good-looking, and could be very charming. Full of the zest for life, he added greatly to the good-natured atmosphere which prevailed throughout the factory. Geoffrey Fawn was a different type, with a solid and determined nature. Miscast as an engineer, he nonetheless did sterling work on turbine performance for a few years, until he switched to his natural forté of management. He ended up as Managing Director of Rolls-Royce when the crash came in 1971. Just prior to that he ran the Motor Car Division at Crewe with great success.

  In addition, Sharpley Jones from the Carrier Co, and E. Peregrine, who later became a consulting engineer, stayed on at Waterloo Mill to run the facilities there on a research basis. Sharpley Jones was strong on the aerodynamic and thermodynamic side, while Peregrine was an all-rounder with a very fertile imagination.

  In consultation with Elliott and Rubbra, we made Lombard the Chief Designer, and decided to stiffen his team with help from Derby. My old friend Ainsworth-Davis, who lived with me at Donington Hall, came up as Assistant Chief Designer, bringing with him the basic Rolls-Royce design standards and expertise.

  Freddie Morley also came from the Advanced Project Design Office at Derby. He was a mercurial man of great talent, and rose to become the Chief Designer at Derby. Among the many contributions he made at Derby was the design of the Spey engine, one of Derby’s most successful products. Later he was a tower of strength to me when I carried the responsibility for rescuing the RB211 after the collapse of Rolls-Royce in 1971.

  One other man of great importance was Ron Kibby, who was put in charge of detail design. In the design of an engine, the designers do the broad-brush work of the general arrangement and specification of all the comprehensive components. The detail draughtsmen then take each part and break it down into its individual components, and draw these again in a manner which permits the shops to manufacture them, adding all the necessary tolerances and material specifications. They are an essential link between the creators of the engine and the men who have to make it. Kibby was a superb draughtsman himself, and the drawings that were issued from his office were models of precision and accuracy. He also had immense energy, and on many an occasion worked all night to complete the details of parts that were urgently required. He, too, rose to the top at Derby, and became the Chief Detail Designer.

  For mechanical development, I chose Robert Plumb from Derby. He was an expert on lubrication, which was one of the problems on the Whittle engine, and also had considerable experience of the mechanical engineering of the Merlin. He was a quiet and modest man, popular with everybody, and he built up a very skilful and dedicated team of young men under him. I was indeed fortunate that he stayed with me all through his professional life, coming with me to Bristol when I left Rolls-Royce. Without his help, the Proteus engine for the Britannia would have broken me.

  It was obvious that a very important adjunct of our work would lie in the field of the new materials capable of withstanding the high temperatures which were required for the turbine blades and discs. To cover this aspect, the Chief Metallurgist at Derby, H. E. Gresham, made frequent visits to Barnoldswick, and established there a metallurgical laboratory under the control of his able assistant Douglas Hall. They kept closely in touch with the work that was going on at Henry Wiggin in Birmingham on nickel alloys, and also at William Jessop & Sons in Sheffield on new disc materials. Their reports, prefixed by Gresham’s initials HEG, were oft referred to as ‘fresh, stale or bad H
egs’.

  This, then, was the set-up in the early days of 1943, when we bent our minds to our task. We were a relatively young team. Like Whittle, I was in my mid-thirties and most others were younger than that; Lombard was in his early twenties.

  With a workforce approaching 2,000, we had great power. Armed with a letter written in red ink (blood we called it) by Sir Stafford Cripps, Minister of Aircraft Production, which stated that ‘nothing, repeat nothing, is to stand in the way of the development of the jet engine’, we were able to indent on the local factories for any expertise we required.

  And so, regardless of the problems ahead of us of which we were totally ignorant, we forged ahead by the well-established process of running the engine to death, and dealing with the failures on an ad hoc basis as they occurred. The results were dramatic. The B.23 (we left off the ‘W.2’) flew in the F.9/40 Meteor at 1,400 lb thrust on 12 June 1943. It was soon cleared to the full 1,600 lb rating, and in October 1943 it was named the Rolls-Royce Welland I* and put into small-scale production at Barnoldswick, 100 being delivered to Gloster for the Meteor Is. Though this was peanuts compared with our 1,000 Merlins a week, it did at least get the Meteor into the war.

  The first Meteors were delivered to 616 Squadron RAF on 12 July 1944, fitted with Welland I engines, and the first squadron moved later in July to Manston near the east Kent coast. They flew against the V.1 flying bombs, and the first blow was struck by Whittle’s engine when a flying-bomb was destroyed on 4 August 1944. The Meteor was one of the few aircraft that could catch a flying bomb at sea level, and do it without being flogged.

  Even the allocation of these modest resources to the jet engine did not receive universal approval in the aircraft industry. The main designers of fighter aircraft, Sydney Camm at Hawker and Joe Smith, who had succeeded Mitchell at Supermarine, were heavily involved in improving the Hurricane, Typhoon, Tempest and Spitfire, and paid no attention to the jet engine. Accordingly, Sir Roy Fedden, Chief Engineer at the Engine Division of the Bristol Aeroplane Company, in charge of radial air-cooled engines, wrote to Air Chief Marshal Sir Wilfrid Freeman at the M.A.P., protesting that a 400 mph (sea-level speed) fighter could more easily be made by designing a larger piston engine. Freeman passed this letter to Hs for comments, and he passed it on to me. From my knowledge of the Spitfire, Hurricane and Mustang, I was able to show that piston engines in excess of 4,000 hp would be required, that is more than double the power of any engine then in production. Since the power output of a single cylinder had reached its limit due to difficulties of cooling, this meant that engines of up to 36 cylinders would be necessary; a complication that no designer would face with equanimity.

  On the other hand, if the Whittle engine could be developed to 2,000 lb of thrust from its design value of 1,600 lb, then the Meteor fighter already in hand at Gloster would have a top speed of nearly 500 mph at sea level. This was a prospect that could not be contemplated with conventional piston engines.

  Tragically for Bristol, Fedden left the company in late 1942, and his fine development team collapsed. This had a profound effect on the fortunes of the Bristol engines in the post-war era. It was in the early 1950s before a worthwhile Bristol gas-turbine appeared, by which time Rolls-Royce had a ten-year lead. It is very difficult to catch one of the world’s fastest operators if you give him such a start.

  The reply I gave to Hs on the Freeman letter immediately caused me to start to think about a redesign of the B.23. Rover had already designed and made the ‘straight-through’ B.26 version of the W.2B, but had not changed the airflow or thrust. This was a bad mistake, because it is worthwhile making such a drastic change in the mechanical arrangement of an engine only if a considerable improvement in performance and reliability results.

  We already knew, by comparing the dimensions of the Whittle impeller in the compressor with that of the Merlin, that the W.2B was capable of passing 25 per cent more airflow provided that the diffuser was suitably modified. At Derby we had the Vulture test rig capable of testing the full-scale compressor. Wilde set to work at Derby to modify the diffuser on the lines of the Merlin, with 20 vanes, and soon produced test results showing a 25 per cent increase in airflow. At the same time, at Barnoldswick we took the W.2B turbine blades and slightly increased their length so that they, too, would pass a 25 per cent increase in flow. These changes were embodied into a modified B.26 which was designated the Derwent I. On test this gave 2,000 lb thrust, or just 25 per cent more than the W.2B.

  We retained the new straight-through chambers, and added expansion joints which eliminated distortion and cracking. I also left out the inlet swirl vanes, small curved guide vanes in what aerodynamicists call a cascade, which Whittle insisted improved efficiency. No other centrifugal compressor had such vanes, and because they were made of thin sheet and often broke, damaging the engine when the bits were ingested, they seemed an unnecessary nuisance. Later we found eliminating them reduced compressor efficiency from 78 to 73 per cent, so that to give the specified 2,000 lb thrust the engine had to run much hotter, the turbine gas temperature being 843°C and the specific fuel consumption 1.178. When we replaced the vanes we got 2,000 lb at only 754°C with sfc of only 1.083. But against the advice of Harry Pearson I cleared the Derwent I for production without the vanes, because the engine ran reliably and their omission removed a worrying mechanical problem. We made 500 Derwent Is at Newcastle-under-Lyme before the end of the war, and by the end of 1944 Derwent-engined Meteor Ills were helping ‘Monty’ push through the Low Countries to the Rhine.

  * Rolls-Royce named all early gas-turbine engines after rivers, reflecting the idea of steady flow.

  Chapter 4

  The Nene

  In 1941 Whittle had been instructed to give the design specification of the W.2 engine, and one of his precious prototype engines, to the General Electric Company, in Boston, USA. This was by agreement between the British and American Governments, and the latter had selected GE because they had experience in steam turbines, and also manufactured the turbosuperchargers which were fitted in vast numbers to American aircraft piston engines. The two main aero engine companies, Curtiss-Wright, who manufactured for the Army Air Force, and Pratt & Whitney, for the Navy, were told to get on with piston engine production. In any case, neither was enthusiastic about the new jet engine’s prospects. On the other hand, the giant GE company set forth with tremendous energy to develop the W.2 into an American version which they designated as the I-16. Reports of their progress were exchanged with ours from Barnoldswick. Although GE had more than a year’s start on us we were soon running neck and neck. They were first to fly, however; the I-16 was flown in the twin-engined XP-59 made by Bell Aircraft in October 1942. At this time poor Whittle’s engine in Britain had all but ground to a halt!

  In early 1944 an invitation came from the US Army Air Force’s Col Don Keirn for a party of British jet engineers to visit the USA, and see at first hand the progress that was being made. Our party was led by Hayne Constant of the RAE, and included Leslie Cheshire from Power Jets, W. H. ‘Pat’ Lindsey from Armstrong Siddeley, Moult, Brodie and Clarkson from de Havilland, and myself. We left in April 1944.

  We travelled from Liverpool in the US Coast Guard ship Wakefield, which had been adapted for troop carrying. On the return trip it travelled almost empty, so we had the luxury of lots of space on board. As it had a speed of 18 knots, we did not have to travel in convoy but zig-zagged our lonely way across the submarine-infested Atlantic. Full alert was maintained at all times, and it was most comforting during the day when from time to time a British aircraft would appear over us to see all was well.

  The food was lavish, and very good by our British rationed standards, and one of the most heartening cries was to hear the stewards going through the decks shouting ‘Chow time on the Wakefield!’ We had an uneventful eight-day crossing. After the blackout in Britain it was a thrilling sight, as Boston hove over the horizon, to see the city blazing in light. Later we were to find the shops
full of all the good things of life, which had disappeared years before in Britain.

  Our first visit was to the GE plant at Lynn, just outside Boston. To my concern I found that they had already made, and were running, an engine of 4,000 lb thrust, called the I-40. I had no idea this was happening, and to add to my dismay, when we visited their factory at Schenectady, the HQ of the steam-turbine division, we found them running an axial turbojet, also of 4,000 lb thrust, designed by Alan Howard. This engine became the TG-180 and led to the J35 and the even more famous J47.

  Remember that 4,000 lb is more than the thrust given by a 5,000 hp piston engine/propeller combination. It was clear that the Americans were thinking on a larger scale than we were in Britain, where the most powerful engine was the DH Goblin designed for an eventual 3,000 lb thrust. Then and there, I decided that Rolls-Royce should do something about it on my return to England.

  Having been very hospitably and openly received by GE, we left for the West Coast in a military DC-3 provided by our hosts, the USAAF. We spent a short time at Albuquerque, and I wandered down to the sandy banks of the Rio Grande. It was a rather insignificant, turgid, sienna-coloured river, not at all what I expected. My mind went back to those halcyon days in BNC, when Michael Peacock would convulse us by his dramatic rendering of the legend ‘When Mexican Pete and Dead-Eye Dick came down from the Rio Grande’. Alas, the gay and gallant Michael was no more, nor were John Brody, Hector Pilling, Alex Obolensky and many others, all killed in the early days of the War whilst serving as pilots in the RAF. Was I not standing on the home soil of Eddie Drake, who gave his life in the defence of Britain in the American Eagle Squadron, and who had become a part of Oxford through the munificence of Cecil Rhodes of South Africa? These men had helped to wipe out the resolution ‘That this House will not fight for its King and Country’, and given the lie to the false and insidious eloquence of the Joads of this world. I turned sadly away to rejoin the party. Onwards from Albuquerque via the Grand Canyon to Muroc airfield, now known as Edwards Air Force Base. Flying down the Grand Canyon was an unforgettable experience with its splendid and colourful scenery.