Alan Bristow

by Alan Bristow

  Back at the airfield Les had a word with the Transport Manager, who put two cars on standby to pick us up. It was clear we had a recurring problem with these engines, but it was important for the company that we delivered them to Boscombe Down. As it happened, we didn’t need the help of the Transport Manager with the third helicopter because we didn’t even get off the airfield – the bang came just as I was commencing the climb.

  ‘Do you really have to do this?’ asked Les as we surveyed yet another oil-splattered engine bay.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We get paid on delivery and “Daddy” Fearn says the company needs the money.’

  The fourth engine failure came as we were at 6,000 feet above Shepton Montague, and I set it down in a farmer’s field. Westland’s car arrived within minutes, and soon afterwards Les and I stood looking at the last two helicopters in the line. Les opened the cowling and examined all the cylinder head bolts he could see.

  ‘Looks okay,’ he said. But it wasn’t, and the fifth engine failed just too far from Yeovil to make it back over the airfield boundary.

  And then there was one. ‘It’s definitely going to fail, isn’t it,’ said Les balefully.

  ‘If we get one to Boscombe Down today, Johnny Fearn will consider it a success,’ I said.

  ‘He should consider it a bloody miracle,’ grumbled Les, getting into the helicopter. Les had great faith in my flying skills. The sixth one failed between Sherbourne and Yeovil, about half a mile from the golf course. We went into the clubhouse and had a drink. We weren’t in a hurry to get back to Yeovil at that point. The subsequent investigation found that Alvis had made a batch of engines where the threads on the cylinder head bolts were slightly crossed, and the metal quickly fatigued where the bolts had been forced into the crankcase.

  Around this time, two skeletons from my past emerged from the closet to cause trouble. The first came in the form of a knock on the door at Charlton Mackrell. A very polite naval Lieutenant, accompanied by a Master-at-Arms, required that I accompany them to London to answer questions relating to my service in the merchant navy, and in particular about the manner of my leaving it, which was described as ‘desertion in the face of the enemy’. I was required to report to the Admiralty in Queen’s Gate to appear before a disciplinary panel chaired by a Rear Admiral. There I was told I was accused of having joined the Fleet Air Arm without being properly discharged from the merchant navy at a time when merchant seamen were bound to the service by wartime regulations. How did I answer the charge?

  ‘Well, I was just fed up with being sunk,’ I said. ‘I wanted to meet the enemy on less one-sided terms.’

  The panel was sympathetic and conferred among themselves in low voices. I knew I was on a winner when the Rear Admiral looked up and asked: ‘Aren’t you Commodore Bristow’s son?’ A few minutes later he pronounced: ‘This matter is closed. Care to join us for a pink gin?’

  The second skeleton emerged in the form of a phone call at my office at Westland. ‘Is that you, old sport?’ It was Vernon Hussey Cooper.

  ‘What the hell are you calling me for?‘

  ‘Good to hear your voice after all these years, old chum. I thought we might get together and talk about old times.’

  Hussey Cooper had inherited the family fortune and was a gentleman of leisure, well-connected in the Wells area. It was eventually arranged that we’d have dinner together at a hotel in Wells. We celebrated old times on the Matiana, the Malda and the Hatarana, had a good meal and far too much good wine, and Hussey Cooper became voluble and dramatic. ‘This chep saved m’life in a shipwreck,’ he announced to the whole restaurant.

  ‘Come on, Vernon, let’s move on,’ I said. He paid the bill and we wobbled into the night. Next call was a pub, and after closing time Vernon announced: ‘I’ve always fancied riding around town in one of the city buses.’

  There happened to be such a thing at the bus station, with the keys in it, and we drove around Wells with more panache than skill; a bus is quite difficult to drive on tight corners and narrow streets, and with Vernon at the wheel we fetched up against a lamp post.

  ‘Pretty good,’ said Vernon. ‘We didn’t kill anybody.’

  A policeman approached on foot, pushing his bicycle. ‘Are you two men drunk?’ he enquired. ‘I think we’d better put you in a cell for the night to sober up.’

  ‘You’ll do no such thing,’ said Hussey Cooper. He snatched the policeman’s bike and pedalled furiously off down the hill. The policeman stuck with his bird in the hand, so it was I who spent the night in the cells, and in the morning Hussey Cooper’s family lawyer turned up to get me out. I was required to appear before the magistrates, who took a dim view and awarded the bus company the full cost of alleged damage to a lamp and a radiator. It cost me the best part of £200, which was a lot of money to me.

  ‘Sorry, old chep,’ said Hussey Cooper in his excruciating accent.

  Perhaps a year later the phone rang again. ‘Thet you, Alan?’

  I wasn’t keen to repeat the experience and tried to cry off, but Hussey Cooper was insistent. ‘Come to dinner with my sister and her husband,’ he said. ‘They’re dying to meet you.’

  I drove up to Wells and we had a very boring dinner. Hussey Cooper’s sister was decent company, but her husband was an accountant. Vernon took refuge in drink, and at the end of the meal he said: ‘Come on, old sport, let’s have some fun. Can you ride a motorcycle?’

  ‘Matter of fact I can – I have a Norton 500.’

  ‘I know where there’s a bike parked. Let’s go and get it.’

  ‘Whose is it?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

  He mounted up, and with me as pillion went charging around Wells blowing the hooter and making a fuss. Hussey Cooper was not the world’s best rider, and very soon he missed a corner and the bike went straight up into the doorway of a jeweller’s shop. And that’s where we were sitting when the police came. This time, nobody escaped.

  There was some discussion in the magistrates court next day when it was explained to Hussey Cooper that as my co-accused, he couldn’t appear as a character witness for me. We were warned by the magistrates that if we were to celebrate Hussey Cooper and Bristow winning the Second World War in future, it was not to be done in Wells. We promised faithfully never to get drunk in the town again, and were discharged with a small fine, with time to pay.

  And after that, I never saw Vernon Hussey Cooper again.

  At Westland, the relentless promotional schedule continued. It was part of my job to liaise with the Commercial Manager for important demonstrations, and I was due to fly to Brussels to give a demonstration flight in the limited confines of the Heysel football stadium. It was always difficult to get information from the Commercial Department. I contacted the manager to ask him what type of flying he wanted, and how much, so that I could arrange for mobile fuel bowsers and firefighting equipment to be present. Would I be embarking and disembarking passengers, or was it a rescue hoist routine? How many passengers were to be given flights? All of this had a significant bearing if I was to fulfil a prospective buyer’s requirements.

  Answer came there none. Two weeks before the date of the demonstration I telephoned the sales manager, Mr Williams, to press him for the information. He told me that it was none of my bloody business, and all that I was required to do was to carry a bag of cash to give to the Westland agent for Scandinavia, Mr Rolf Von Barr.

  Wouldn’t this type of transaction be better carried out through the banks? I asked.

  ‘Just do as you’re bloody well told!’ he shouted, and slammed the phone down.

  I left my office and walked the quarter mile across to Williams’s office to ask for an apology and his co-operation, and by the time I got there I had cooled down. But when I opened the door marked ‘A.J.H. Williams’ he began shouting at me again.

  ‘Piss off!’ he screamed.

  Next thing I remember was punching him on the jaw. He went down as though he’d been sh
ot. As he lay on the floor, I pulled him up by his ears and cracked his head against the sharp corner of the wall in a white rage. Then I got up and walked next door to Johnny Fearn’s office.

  ‘You’d better go and take a look at your sales manager,’ I told him. ‘I’ve knocked him about a bit.’

  I walked back to my office. Within minutes, in came Harald Penrose. ‘I can understand you hitting him,’ he said, ‘but why the hell did you have to bang his head against the wall?’

  I had no answer.

  ‘You’d better go home, Alan,’ said Penrose. ‘Take a fortnight off. I’ll let you know when things have been sorted out.’

  Things never were sorted out. I wasn’t in the mood to try to explain or justify my actions. It’s possible that had I done so, I would have stayed at Westland until I retired or got killed. Later I was offered my job back when Westland discovered that Williams was stealing money from the company to fund private ventures with Von Barr. Johnny Fearn came to see me in Paris to ask me to return, but by that time I was under contract to the French Armée de l’Air training pilots to fly the Hiller 360A in Saigon.

  Years later, when I was Westland’s best civil customer, I was invited to lunch with the chairman Sir Eric Mensforth at the RAC Club in Epsom. It became clear that his purpose in inviting me was to apologise for having to dispense with my services due, it was said, to pressure put on the company by the Society of British Aircraft Constructors. Two weeks after leaving Westland I had been employed by the Bristol Aeroplane Company to carry out development flying on the Belvedere tandem helicopter. At the interview in Bristol, I made it clear exactly why Westland had dismissed me and was assured by the managing director, Cyril Uwins, that the Westland matter had been taken into account. I’d been employed at Filton for three weeks when chief test pilot Bill Pegg told me that Mr Uwins would like to see me in his office as soon as possible. Mr Uwins told me he was very sorry, but had to ‘let me go’ as the SBAC had, as he put it, ‘blackballed’ me. I told him as I walked out that he really ought to have the guts to stand up to the SBAC and their spiteful tyranny.

  I started work a few days later with Hunting-Percival Aircraft, who hired me to take part in a unique helicopter development project while, at the same time, doing production test-flying on the Percival Provost. No sooner had I started than the managing director, Mr Somers, asked me to join him for lunch. He too told me that he had to ‘let me go’ because of representations made to him by the SBAC. The only positive thing to say about these shabby episodes is that Bristol and Hunting-Percival paid me handsomely for not very much of my time.

  It was clear that employment in England was not an option. I would have to look elsewhere.

  CHAPTER 10

  French Adventures

  So small was the helicopter world in 1948 that not only was it known the length and breadth of Britain that I had been sacked, but the news reached far-flung corners of the globe. It was spoken of at Floyd Bennett Field in New York, at Sikorsky in Connecticut, and in Paris, where it came to the ears of one Henry Boris.

  Henry was a feisty, courageous and far-sighted entrepreneur who had been a senior figure in the rank of Commandant in the French Resistance during the war. He was hunch-backed and walked with a slight stoop, and a prominent nose testified to his Jewishness, but he had somehow contrived to live next door to Gestapo headquarters in Paris without being molested. He’d spent most of the war in England, where he was Commanding Officer of an SOE Lysander squadron operating in support of the Maquis. He had often stayed in France while on operations, boldly going to his Paris home at night in defiance of his German neighbours. He’d won the Legion d’Honneur and the Croix de Guerre, and was as fearless in business as he had been in war. Henry was besotted with helicopters, spoke of little else, and had learned to fly them at the Hiller factory in Palo Alto, California. I don’t know where he came by his money but he clearly had ample, and he had obtained the Hiller distributorship for Europe, including France’s colonial possessions in Africa. When Henry telephoned and asked me to come and see him to talk about helicopters, expenses paid, I was happy to oblige.

  I borrowed a Piper Super Cruiser and flew to Le Bourget, where I was met by a quiet mouse of a man who turned out to be Henry Boris’s accountant. He drove me into Paris in Boris’s big black Citroen and parked in a courtyard beneath an apartment building at 31, Rue François Premier, which runs parallel to the Champs-Élysées. Boris’s apartment, on the third floor, had gorgeous high ceilings and tall French windows overlooking some of the great fashion houses of Paris. Boris stood up at his desk beneath the French windows to greet me, and the mouse disappeared into his office next door.

  Boris wore reading glasses and spoke with his head down most of the time. I thought he must have been a most introverted officer, but nothing upset him and his bravado in business was beyond belief. His enthusiasm for helicopters could hardly be contained. He spoke of selling them across Europe and across the world, for crop dusting, air taxi work and military use. He painted a picture of a future in which the sky was black with helicopters, all of them sold by his company, Helicop-Air. He offered me very good pay to be his right-hand man, running his operations side, hiring pilots, demonstrating the Hiller 360, teaching buyers to fly it and earning commission on sales. I didn’t need time to think about it. We shook hands, and I moved into a second-rate hotel run by a family called Domini while Jean and baby Lynda stayed at home in Charlton Mackrell.

  I worked around the clock for Helicop-Air to recruit pilots and instructors, to find a chief engineer and some mechanics, and acquire the tools and ground equipment necessary to operate the flying school that Henry Boris planned would have six Hiller 360As. He had rented a large hangar at an airfield called Cormeilles-en-Vexin, now known as Pontoise, where helicopters were maintained for the training school and for Hiller 360 owners.

  Boris dealt in cash. I was always paid with large wads of francs by the mouse in the clerk’s office, whom I came to know as a singularly efficient accountant. Whenever I needed money, whether it was for a new drill for the workshop, a stepladder or a week’s salary, I’d walk into his cubby hole and he would open the safe and count out a pile of used notes. Currency control was a major pain at the time, but Henry Boris never seemed to have any trouble. Henry didn’t believe in writing letters, either – his correspondence was minimal, restricted to brief and cryptic notes in his own hand, and there was no office typist. But somehow, the business managed to hang together with effortless efficiency.

  One of Henry’s primary aims was to get a contract to train military pilots, and while it did happen eventually, in the beginning we had plenty of slack on the teaching side and it was catch as catch can with customers. One of my early students was a chap called Gerard Henry, an air traffic controller at Pontoise who was building his own forty-five-foot yacht out of concrete and chicken wire. I met him again many decades later when he was Aerospatiale’s number two helicopter test pilot. Another student was a rich American lady called Donaldson, recently divorced and up for anything.

  The French had a laid-back approach to life. Henry Boris would often come out to the airfield at lunchtime, and we would sit at a roadside cafe drinking red wine and breaking bread, rarely for less than two hours. One of the greatest difficulties I had was limiting the French to one glass of wine at lunchtime. They would say oh, we are French, we know what we are doing, this is like water to us. But I refused to fly with anyone who had more than one glass, and it wasn’t long before they fell into line.

  One of the students, an Armée de l’Air lieutenant, was told to go off and do six power-off landings in the afternoon. Something went wrong; he failed to recover from autorotation and killed himself. A post mortem was held and the French air force declared him drunk in charge of an aircraft. I knew he’d only had one glass of wine, but the judgement meant that his wife was entitled to neither pension nor compensation. To his immense credit, Henry Boris fought a running battle with the Armée over it
for quite a while. He was trying to negotiate an official training contract from them, and he wasn’t doing himself any favours fighting for compensation for this poor woman. But for months he kept at them, to no avail.