Having done well out of all sides during the war, Argentina’s shops were full of every kind of luxury. The only shortage appeared to be motor cars and spare parts, particularly tyres. Any old banger was highly prized, although the main transport was by British-built trams. All traffic drove on the left, but while I was there the edict came to change to the right, and for a period the population drove with Gallic fervour on both sides of the road — with the added complication that the trams, being on rails, could not be changed over.
When I left England, I had been provided with a letter of credit, since there were rigid controls on the export of sterling. The rate of exchange in 1946 was 16 pesos to the pound. As I write, the exchange rate is more than 3,500, despite the fact that the pound has depreciated to one-fifth of its 1946 value, which only goes to show the ghastly way that beautiful and fertile country has been run during the past 30 years.
I think that their prime mistake was their attempt to blackmail Britain on the price of beef after the war. Their major export had always been beef to this country, but during the war this trade almost disappeared, so they began to eat the beef themselves. After the war, when trade resumed, their price was so high that we refused to buy, and instead developed the meat supply from Australia. In the meantime, rationing went on in Britain until the early 1950s, so our imports were slow to pick up.
At 16 pesos to the pound, my room in the Palace Hotel was costing me £30 per week, which was very expensive in those days. So I conferred with our Service representative, Reggie Longinotto, whose job it was to look after the Rolls-Royce aero engines that were in use in those parts — principally Merlins in Lancastrian and York civil airliners.
I asked him how much he paid to live at the City Hotel.
‘About 350 pesos per week for the room alone,’ he replied.
‘You can’t afford that, can you?’ I asked.
He said that it was hard going, so I asked him why we did not rent one of the Apartementos advertised in the local paper, and share the expense. He agreed to try, and we searched the adverts, and selected a flat in the Edificio Modart in Corrientis, which is the Piccadilly of Buenos Aires. I sent him away to negotiate the deal, and he came back and said we could not get the key for a month.
I said, ‘Did you try him with 100 pesos?’
No, he had not thought of that, so I sent him back again, and he returned with the key of what proved to be a magnificent flat at a cost of 400 pesos per month. This changed our financial outlook more than somewhat, and we now had ample cash to investigate the bars, restaurants and night-life of Buenos Aires, of which there was an enormous variety.
The flat was the service type, and in the foyer of the Edificio a coterie of waiters was always available. One telephoned down, and they would dash in with all the necessary tableware and provide everything for any occasion. They would fetch the food hot from the neighbouring very high-class restaurants — and every other establishment was one of these — produce wine and, in general, join in with great joy and goodwill with anything we wished to organise. It was even better than Oxford!
Buenos Aires was teeming with all the luxuries that Britain had eschewed in the war years: bright lights, night clubs, food and wine, chocolate, silk stockings and fine clothes, watches and jewellery, and all sorts of beautiful leather goods. There was, also, a surfeit of German frauleins, who had obviously been sent to Buenos Aires to get information on the sailing of ships to Europe during the war, and with the collapse of Germany were now left high and dry. It was no problem to set my heart against them.
Apart from the German girls, I saw no signs of the ‘white slave’ racket for which Buenos Aires was so ill-famed. On the contrary, the locals were as straight-laced as in most Catholic countries, except on the dockside area, where the usual dives were to be found.
We did not lack friends, because Reggie had already made a number through his connection with the airlines, and I had kept contact with the two young married couples and the two WAAF girls from the boat. And so we set out to sample the night-life in a city where it was customary to dine at any time between 11.00 pm and 1.00 am, having restored one’s strength in the afternoon siesta.
I kept in close touch with our agent, who had a dark general store, rather like a ship’s chandlers, on a street called Alsina. He sat in state in an inner sanctum, and was visited by quiet gents who slid in and out on palm-greasing expeditions, I more than suspected. Nonetheless, he was a most hospitable and entertaining man. His great joy was his motor cruiser on the River Plate, and he loved to take us for the weekend on the river. The cruiser had two 80 hp diesels, and was equipped en tout confort for about six people. There was a crew of two, one of whom managed the boat while the other did the cooking and waiting.
It was very pleasant to cruise slowly among the many tributaries of the giant delta, and then to tie up for the night when drinks and dinner would be served at darkness, around 7.00 pm. It was springtime in Argentina, and the weather was lovely and soft. The river was the usual yellow colour, and not very inviting, but the banks were covered in lush semi-tropical growth, with here and there a little thatched wooden house on stilts where the few very poor peasants lived.
We discussed the sale of Merlins, and the proposed aircraft. Levante told me that the centre of this activity was up-country at Cordoba some 500 miles away. How did I get to see it? He said we must get the permission of General San Martin, the GOC of the Fuerza Aérea, and that he would arrange for me to meet him forthwith.
I met the General, who spoke English, and we took to each other immediately. He welcomed my proposed visit to Cordoba, and I set forth with Johnnie Bruton, who was Levante’s young partner, and an Argentine citizen although of British parents and education. It was necessary to go by night train, which left Buenos Aires at 8.00 pm. The railway system had all been built by the British, and indeed was British-owned until the war. Thus, except for the fact that the carriages and dining cars were bright and clean, and there was a surfeit of attendants in spotless uniform, one might have been travelling on the LMS to Derby.
Dinner, Italian style, was excellent, and there were plenty of good Argentinian and Chilean wines at cheap prices. The Argentinians are quiet and very polite people, but after dinner, when some had withdrawn, conversation began to buzz. I did my best to encourage this by inviting passengers to drink a glass of wine with me, which they willingly did. Presently, one young man began to sing the melody ‘Besame mucho’, and followed this, in my honour, with ‘Greensleeves’. By magic, a waiter appeared with a guitar, and the party was on. But then, I never could sleep on trains. Even more pleasant were later trips, when, on appearing on the platform at Buenos Aires, I was greeted with loud ‘Olés’ by the dining-car attendants!
It was always dark on these journeys, so one could not see the flat countryside as one passed through Rosario en route for Cordoba. On arrival, we booked in at the Bristol Hotel, and were conducted by the Aeronautical Institute to the factory. The conducted tour started from bedrock at the smelly shop where the glue was made from horses’ and cows’ hooves, went on to the place where the plywood was ripped from tree-trunks and glued together, and finally to the shop where a few wooden, small aircraft were made.
I said to the Manager,
‘Can I see the aeroplane with the Merlin engines in it?’
He replied, ‘We have not started to make that yet’.
‘Can I see the drawings, because I understand it is going to be similar to the Mosquito’.
‘I am sorry’, he replied. ‘But we have not started on the design yet’.
It became clear that the place was in no way equipped to make even a small number of such a sophisticated aircraft, and I thought, so much for Hs’ dream of selling them large numbers of Merlins. I did, however, make one last desperate effort by offering to get from Derby full details of the Mosquito powerplant installation, so that they would only have to do the wooden airframe. They accepted this offer with alacrity, and showed m
e the one aeroplane they had made, just like a Mosquito but fitted with two Pratt & Whitney 1,200 hp air-cooled Twin Wasp engines.
This was the IAe.24 Calquin (Royal Eagle). It was brand new, and had only flown once, but they insisted on my going on the second flight. The test pilot, Roberto, was a devil-may-care chap, and we roared off into the mountains north of Cordoba. The Calquin shook and vibrated in no uncertain fashion, but charged along at about 250 knots at low altitude through the beautiful valleys and mountains in the most exhilarating fashion. I enjoyed the flight enormously, but little knew that I was destined to be the only passenger ever to fly in the machine, for reasons which I shall recount later.
We returned to Buenos Aires, and I informed Hs by cable that there was not much substance in his dream, and asking for details of the Mosquito powerplant to be sent forthwith. It was typical of the haphazard way things went on in the Argentine, that our agent was uninformed, and equally deluded and disappointed. In due course, the drawings were despatched from Derby by air, but the aircraft crashed en route and everything was burned. A second set was duly sent, but by this time the situation had changed dramatically.
It had been decided to hold, in Buenos Aires, the first aeronautical exhibition ever held in South America. I thought this was the opportunity to put on show a Derwent turbojet. At first Hs refused, saying it would prejudice the Merlin sale, but later relented when I said that the chances of that were negligible, and we might as well look to the future.
Finally, he sent an engine by air, and it arrived in the nick of time on a Friday, when the exhibition was due to open on Sunday. No amount of talking would persuade the Customs officials to let us have the engine, so I went to General San Martin who barked out orders, and in no time I was in a lorry surrounded by armed soldiers en route for the Customs. Here there was an enormous hullabaloo, but the Customs officials were swept aside and we left with the three packing cases in which the engine subassemblies were contained. The exhibition hall was in the centre of Buenos Aires. Reggie and I worked all the Saturday night, assisted by a fitter from Derby who had been sent with the engine, assembling the Derwent on the stand.
The show was due to be opened by President Peron at 10 am on the following day, and the ceremony would have been incomplete without the Calquin. And so, the famous wooden aeroplane from Cordoba was flown by Roberto down to Buenos Aires and landed along the dockside, from whence it was towed by hand through the town amid the cheering crowds to the front of the exhibition.
Peron duly opened the show, and came with General San Martin directly to our stand where I spent some time explaining to them both how a jet engine worked. The time was coincidental with the second attempt at the World’s Speed Record made by a Meteor, and I predicted to them that 1,000 km/h would be attained. In the event, Group Captain Donaldson took the record at 991 km/h, but that was near enough.
To say that the Derwent stole the show is to put it mildly. Hundreds of people surrounded the stand all day, and the questions came thick and fast. When I got off the stand at midnight, I was completely exhausted; but the fish had been hooked. Subsequently a licence to manufacture the Derwent I was requested, and the negotiations for the purchase of 50 Meteor aircraft opened up.
The dream of selling Argentina Mosquitos and Merlin engines was not completely ended, because an RAF squadron arrived to demonstrate the Mosquito to the Fuerza Aérea. I went with the British Air Attaché, Air Commodore Beiseizel (inevitably known as Bicycle) to this demonstration, which was at an airfield somewhere in mid-Argentina. We flew in his RAF Anson, and before we left the sergeant pilot whispered to me, ‘I expect he will get us lost’. And he did. After we had exceeded our flight time by about 15 min we had to turn back under the navigation of the sergeant, and finally arrived. I was astounded to see that there was a steady stream of locusts, seemingly unending in numbers, drifting across the airfield; to me, flying seemed very hazardous. But the RAF took off, and put on a marvellous show. On landing, their windscreens were plastered with a layer of dead locusts. What was worse, their radiators were plugged solid with the insects which, with their wings sheared off, just fitted the honeycombs like plugs. But no harm came — nor did the sale of Mosquitos go through.
There was a sad but comical ending to the wooden Calquin prototype in Buenos Aires. The engineers at Cordoba wanted it back to continue the flight trials, so again it was towed through the streets and admiring crowds to the Embarquero for takeoff. In the meantime, Roberto’s father had died, and so he was in deep mourning. The deputy test pilot therefore took control, and climbed into the cockpit in front of what seemed to be the whole population of Buenos Aires, cheering their heads off.
Amidst this encouragement, he started his takeoff run down the dockside. He was thoroughly committed when, out of a siding, puffed very slowly a freight train at right-angles to his path. The pilot had just time to throttle back when he hit the train with a sickening crash, and engines, propellers and bits of aeroplane flew everywhere. A terrible groan arose from the people, only to change to cheering when the pilot staggered out with nothing worse than cuts and bruises. The bits of the aircraft were kicked into the gutter, and were still there when I left a few weeks later. This seemed to typify Argentina.
As I have said, despite Hs’ exhortation, I had gone prepared to lecture on jet engines, and did this to the Fuerza Aérea in Buenos Aires, and to the Institute in Cordoba. It was on one of the trips to Cordoba that I met M Dewoitine, the celebrated French aircraft designer. It appeared that Dewoitine had left France under a cloud after the war, and was living with a new young wife in a splendid villa on the outskirts of Cordoba.
To amuse himself, he had converted one of the rooms to a drawing office, and was designing a single-jet aircraft using what he knew about the Derwent engine. I joined with him in this work, and together we proposed a machine which was subsequently named the Púlqui (Arrow). It was made after I left and was taken over by Kurt Tank, the German designer of the Focke-Wulf 190, who had skipped from Germany and arrived up at Cordoba. I never heard what happened to Dewoitine, who, although wealthy, was far from happy in the isolation of mid-Argentina.
Thus, the threads came together, and apart from the 50 Meteors that Gloster Aircraft sold, Rolls-Royce made a lucrative deal for the licence for the Derwent V, and the supply of the machine tools to manufacture it. In the event, the Argentinians never made a single engine, but this was typical of the laissez-faire attitude which was taking the whole country down the drain.
Chapter 6
The Break and a New Start
In September 1946 I was instructed to leave the Argentine and go to New York to assist the negotiations with Pratt & Whitney. With sadness I took leave of many friends and boarded a DC-4 of Panagra. Unpressurized, we flew at about 2,000 ft over varied scenery via Montevideo, Rio, Belem and Jamaica. We spent many hours rumbling across the impenetrable forests of the Matto Grosso to Belem, where the runway had been hacked out of the jungle four years earlier as a staging post between the US factories and Africa. During the refuelling, I braved the stifling heat and humidity to stroll to the edge of the jungle; it really was impenetrable.
After about a week with Pratt & Whitney, I returned to Derby and was told by Hs to get up to Barnoldswick, because the Avon was in ‘a hell of a mess’. Throughout 1947, while we strove to cure the Avon’s deep-seated ills, Hs looked ahead to the time when the lusty infants we had reared at Barnoldswick would be recognised as the main company products by bringing them to Derby. He did not mean to dispose of Barnoldswick, but to reduce it to the status of an experimental shop for making components and running special prototype engines. The Derwent V was already in production at Derby, and Elliott, Rubbra, Lovesey and (just back from Packard) Ellor were fast becoming gas-turbine engineers. In particular, the new Avon was to be moved to Derby lock, stock and barrel.
Obviously the independence we had enjoyed 120 miles from Derby would vanish; and we wondered just what was in store for us. For my ow
n part, I saw that I could not remain Chief Engineer of Turbine Engines. I asked Hs directly about this. He was embarrassed, and uncertain how to be fair to my team whilst supporting his ‘old guard’ at Derby. The first thing he did was to appoint Rubbra and myself Assistant Chief Engineers of the company. These titles had not previously existed, but titles counted for little in Rolls-Royce; what mattered were the departments and resources one directly controlled. There was no question of Lov and Ellor working for me, and I was pretty much back where I had been in 1938.
I taxed Hs with his promise that I should be Chief Engineer. I told him that if he put the job up for election I should win easily. He replied ‘You’re not ready for that job yet. You can’t control your own affairs, let alone this great firm’. In retrospect he was probably right. My marriage had irretrievably broken down, and the great strain of this, added to that of the Avon, was showing in my life-style and demeanour. So I went back to Barnoldswick and sulked in solitary confinement, while engineers around me were transferred to Derby and shared out amongst their corresponding departments.
I did little but mull over the unfair treatment I was receiving, and bemoan my coming loss of authority, and with it the last vestiges of my self-respect and confidence. I felt very sorry for myself and resolved to play no part in the transfer, and to await events.
With my sulking in the background, it was early one Monday morning in June 1948 that my office door at Barnoldswick burst open, and Hs walked in. He must have left Derby at the crack of dawn after fulminating over the situation all week-end. There was no trace of the usual twinkle in his eye, and his face was stern and set. I rose and stood beside my desk and we faced each other. Without preamble he barked ‘This jet job is too important to leave here in this garage. I am determined to move it to Derby. What are you going to do about that?’ My heart lurched, and my stomach turned over.
Not Much of an Engineer Page 15
