Harrier

by Jonathan Glancey

  This is not to say that Davies, who had recently abandoned the Conservative party to side with Gordon Brown’s New Labour government, was wrong. At the time of his speech at the Ministry of Defence, progress on the Northrop Grumman X-47B UCAV (Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle) was making determined progress. The prototype X-47B had been completed at Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California on 16 December 2008, and the first flight of this carrier-based fighter had been planned just weeks after the Unmanned Air Systems exhibition in London. In the event, this striking jet was to make its maiden flight from Edwards Air Force Base on 4 February 2011. Sea trials began from the deck of the 103,900-ton aircraft carrier USS Harry S Truman on 29 November 2012; according to the US Navy, the aircraft is said to have performed ‘outstandingly’.

  Capable of flying 2,000 miles without refuelling, and kitted out with every latest byte of computer wizardry, the X-47B is an attractive proposition. Only rising costs might shoot it down, yet as the development of the Lockheed Martin F-35B has proved in recent years, the pockets of the US government can be very deep indeed when it comes to ensuring that the country has a military advantage over what it sees as real or potential enemies. Quentin Davies was up to speed on development of this future long-range and pilotless strike, reconnaissance and interceptor aircraft and, unlike Sandys, he was at least untainted by scandal – even though an MP’s expenses claim he had made in 2008 did include £20,000 for the restoration of a bell tower at his ‘second home’, the much-modified eighteenth-century Frampton Hall, near Boston in Lincolnshire.

  Back in the late 1950s, however, the cost of developing machines like the English Electric Lightning and the putative Hawker jump jet made it difficult to sanction ever more money for the development of other new aircraft: Britain’s economy was still only just recovering from the devastating financial cost of the Second World War. Yet the politicians who made these decisions had their own, invariably self-interested agendas to pursue, and never mind the poor old British aero industry, which admittedly sometimes didn’t help its own cause – while some companies were highly innovative and productive, others remained deeply complacent and inefficient. The politicians might also, of course, have been profiting in other ways: influence and favour can always be bought, for a price. And there were bound to be lost chances and missed opportunities. Britain, for example, certainly possessed the technical expertise to develop a Mach 2 two-seat fighter-bomber like the US F-4 Phantom, which went on to become a great global success story, being purchased by no fewer than eleven air forces around the world. But instead we ordered the American aircraft to replace our own Lightnings and Sea Vixens, then proceeded, albeit with the very best of intentions, to degrade its performance by refitting it with Rolls-Royce Spey engines. Who knows what deals were done, when, and by whom?

  Yet war itself, as Carl von Clausewitz, the German-Prussian soldier and military theorist, put it, is always ‘the continuation of politics [or policy] by other means’. And war, or the looming threat of it, can have the most unexpected consequences. I once interviewed Lieutenant General Günther Rall at his beautiful house, a seventeenth-century hunting lodge set high over Bad Reichenhall, a spa town in the Bavarian Alps. ‘Wars – idiotic things – might be caused by weak or morally cretinous people,’ Rall told me, ‘but they are fought and endured by very decent ones.’

  Rall had been a highly publicized young Luftwaffe fighter ace in the Second World War. Flying for all six years of the conflict, against the British, French, Russians and Americans, he shot down 275 enemy aircraft, all of them through the gun-sights of Messerschmitt Bf 109s, and was decorated, by Hitler personally, with the Knight’s Cross, followed by an Oak Leaf Cluster and then Crossed Swords. He had joined the Luftwaffe in 1938. What, I asked him, were his politics? ‘I was twenty years old then,’ he replied, ‘naïve politically, happy to see Hitler bringing the German peoples of Europe together again. We were no longer to be humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles. We were a new Holy Roman Empire.’

  Marriage, during the war, to a young Viennese doctor who helped Jewish friends and colleagues escape under the nose of the Nazis brought Rall to understand the vile politics that had led both to the development of his beloved Bf 109s and to a war that cost the lives of sixty million people. Later, in the mid-1950s, Rall was asked to help form the new West German Bundesluftwaffe. He jumped at the chance and was soon training alongside former wartime colleagues, including Erich Hartmann, the greatest fighter ace of all time with 352 kills, over the American deserts from San Antonio, Texas. ‘Goering’s finest fly again!’ shouted the headline of a local paper with undisguised relish.

  Rall was duly appointed director of the German F-104 project, through which the brand-new and pencil-thin Mach 2 Lockheed Starfighter – capable of climbing 48,000 feet a minute and reaching 100,000 feet, or the bounds of space – formed the backbone of the Bundesluftwaffe’s fighter fleet. With good reason, German pilots came to know this unforgiving machine as the Witwenmacher or ‘Widow-maker’: 110 of them lost their lives flying it. Meanwhile, Rall himself went on to become Chief of Air Staff in 1971 and the Federal Republic’s military attaché to NATO. His story is rich in irony. Here was a former enemy who was now, as a West German, an ally in the icy stand-off between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and who could usefully oversee his country’s acquisition of a new and capable air force – and all this only a decade after the end of a war throughout which the Luftwaffe had been an ever-present threat.

  The relationship between the body politic, defence industry and armed forces has, then, been often fraught and always complex. So no designer or producer of military combat aircraft, and no one who flies them, can truly detach themselves from the vagaries and vanities of politics. These machines, no matter how special, will always be shaped in the uncertain crucible of the political, be it domestic or international. Of course, fine and alluring aircraft like the Harrier hold a particular appeal that derives from the ingenuity of their design and engineering excellence – and from their dangerous beauty and charisma, too. But it is Camm’s ‘fourth dimension’ that can both give them life and take it from them.

  CHAPTER 1

  A LEAP OF IMAGINATION

  When I was a schoolboy, one of my friends lived in Kingston upon Thames. The last stage of the long journey to this prosperous Surrey outpost was by the 65 bus from Ealing Broadway. This was operated by London Transport’s handsome and beautifully engineered RT double-deckers – buses that, resplendent in their guardsman’s outfits of red, black and gold, ran all but faultlessly through London streets and country lanes around the capital for forty years. The route was fascinating for any young person alert to interesting architecture, engineering and history. The RT would gargle steadily past Ealing Library – originally Pitzhanger Manor, a house rebuilt in an imaginative classical style from 1800 by John Soane, architect of the original Bank of England – on the way to the factories at Brentford, where, allegedly, Julius Caesar had forded the Thames in 55 BC, and so along to Kew Bridge and its pumping station built for the Grand Junction Waterworks Company in 1838. Inside, there brooded one of the largest of all Cornish beam engines, a ‘monster’ according to Charles Dickens, built to pump water to London, which it did for very nearly a century. Luckily it has been preserved, and you can gawp at it, in steam, at Kew today.

  From here, the bus picked up speed to Richmond, before threading cautiously through the town’s narrow shopping streets and then giving a tantalizing glimpse of the Thames as we skirted Richmond Bridge, a graceful spring of stone arches across the tidal river designed by the architects James Paine and Kenton Couse, Secretary to the Board of Trade, in the 1770s. South of Richmond, and on to Ham and Petersham, the bus entered a stretch of genteel suburbia resembling rolling countryside, picking up and dropping off passengers to the accompaniment of the conductor’s bell in an enchanting realm of fine Georgian villas, before making its stately way down a long straight road to Kingston.

  And here, all of a sudden,
was what I used to think of as one of the most awe-inspiring and special buildings within reach of my beloved St Paul’s Cathedral. It was the principal façade and offices of the Hawker factory, Kingston upon Thames, a commanding, part-classical, part-modern design, rather like the 1930s Underground stations designed by Charles Holden, although writ on a much larger scale that spoke eloquently of the confidence and nobility of British manufacturing industry. To make it all the more exciting, I knew that behind that palatial façade, and its great stretch of steel windows, Harrier jump jets were being built for the RAF, the Royal Navy, the US Marine Corps and other armed forces abroad that clearly knew that British was still best. This will sound hopelessly naïve today, yet until the end of the 1960s, it was still possible to feel a part of a Britain that appeared to be able to design and make wonderful things on its own back. Of course, things had changed, although nothing prepared me for my return to that long straight road leading down to Kingston upon Thames when I came this way in 2012 to meet Ralph Hooper at the old Hawker social club set between the factory and the Thames.

  The RT buses had long gone, replaced by heavy, noisy, ugly provincial buses with squealing brakes bought off-the-peg from God-only-knows where and appearing to cock a snook at London, its history and design culture at every turn of their loutish wheels. What had also gone on Richmond Road was the Hawker factory itself. This came as a shock, and not least because this great workplace and its grand façade had been replaced by a dismal estate of the most banal and indifferent homes, a development careless of architecture and urban design. Here was a story, all too graphically expressed by these new buildings, of how Britain had turned its back on manufacturing industry and engineering prowess wherever possible over the past forty years. The blame for this has partly, and with justification, been laid at the door of Margaret Thatcher’s Tory governments from 1979. And yet, Mrs Thatcher would never have been voted into office a second time by such a sweeping margin without British victory in the Falklands War and without the Harriers, built here in Kingston upon Thames, where the vapid new housing estate now stood in all its gormlessness.

  On my journey down to Kingston, I read an article from the Surrey Comet, dating from 7 March 1959. ‘For almost half a century,’ it began, ‘Kingston has been closely associated with the aircraft industry and lays proud claim to being the birthplace of machines which bear some of the most famous names in the history of military aircraft. Mention the name of Hawkers and one phrase springs immediately to mind – renowned fighter aircraft. In all the successes and setbacks that have attended it since its early days, the people of Kingston have come to look upon the Company as an organisation in which they can take personal pride. The admiration is not one-sided: it is matched by the regard which the Company has for the town.’

  The litany of fighter aircraft built by Hawker at Kingston is indeed a wonder: Hart, Fury, Hurricane, Typhoon, Tempest, Sea Fury, Sea Hawk, Hunter, Hawk and, of course, Harrier, all of these under the design direction of the brilliant Sydney Camm. At times in the 1930s, eight in ten RAF aircraft were one of the powerful fighter biplanes designed by Camm in Kingston. The Hawker legacy, however, stretched back further than these legendary piston-engined and jet fighters. Hawker had been founded by Tommy Sopwith – or, to give him his full name, Sir Thomas Octave Murdoch Sopwith (1888–1989) – in partnership with Harry Hawker (1889–1921), who had been chief engineer and test pilot for the Sopwith Aircraft Company, which had been wound up, after great success in the First World War, by a punitive government tax called the Excess War Profits Duty and by the simple fact that thousands of its new fighters were no longer needed.

  Sopwith was a debonair, Kensington-born sportsman who taught himself to fly in 1910 in a Scottish Aeroplane Syndicate Avis, a 40 hp JAP-engined machine that resembled the aircraft Louis Blériot, the French aviator and engineer, had designed, built and flown across the English Channel in 1909, the first pilot to do so. Sopwith founded his first aircraft company in 1912 when he was just twenty-four years old. His biographer, Bruce Robertson, wrote:

  Sopwith had four great assets: a private income from his father [a successful civil engineer]; a bevy of devoted sisters conveniently placed socially and geographically; a mechanical aptitude fostered by an education in engineering and certainly not least, an abundance of pluck and drive.

  His friends included the pioneer British aviator Charles Rolls, who was soon to team up with Henry Royce, A. V. Roe and Hugh ‘Boom’ Trenchard, the legendary, and famously loud, ‘Father of the RAF’. Young Sopwith could hardly have fallen in with a more influential, brilliant and effective crowd.

  Sopwith taught Boom to fly. He also taught Harry Hawker, a young Australian and blacksmith’s son who had sailed to England in 1910 in search of work in the fledgling aviation industry. After brief stints with the Commer Car Company and the English branches of Mercedes and Austro-Daimler, Hawker was taken up by Sopwith in June 1912. He flew solo after three lessons and became not just the Sopwith Company’s first test pilot, but also the first professional British test pilot. Sopwith built two Wright-style aircraft at Brooklands that year before founding his own factory in an old ice-skating rink close to Kingston station. A highly competitive sailor as well as a pilot, Sopwith was also a skilled ice-skater and a member of the British national ice-hockey team. Beginning with the Sopwith Bat flying boat designed with S. E. Saunders in 1913, the new company responded immediately to the demands, and opportunities, of the Great War. Hawker had already designed the Sopwith Tabloid, a small, fast and lively biplane that, in seaplane guise, won the 1914 Schneider Trophy held that year at Monaco; its fastest two laps were timed at 92 mph.

  Significantly for the future of the company, single-seat variants of the Tabloid flew with both the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) during the First World War; significantly, too, they were employed as fighters, scouts and bombers. In fact, two RNAS Tabloids flying from Antwerp on 8 October 1914 made the first British aerial bombing raids over Germany. In August 1915, one of the Schneider seaplane variants of the Tabloid was launched from the carrier HMS Campania; it was a close call, with even this lightweight aircraft finding it hard to take off despite the ship steaming hard and fast into the wind. And yet, it was not long before Campania was sailing with Sopwith Pups, Babies and 1½ Strutters on board, all of them able to operate successfully from the ship’s 245-foot flight deck. In 1917, the Pup became the first aircraft to land on a moving ship.

  Sopwith employed a staff of five thousand during the war and, working with a wide network of subcontractors, produced 18,000 aircraft between 1914 and 1918. These included 1,850 Pups, 5,500 1½ Strutters and no fewer than 5,747 Camels. The Camel was a demanding machine but, along with the superb German Fokker DVII, it became one of the most effective and best-known fighters of the Great War. In fact, 60 per cent of British single-seat aircraft produced by the time of the German surrender on 11 November 1918 were Sopwiths. During the conflict these machines also flew with the French, Belgian and American military, by which they were much appreciated and greatly admired. The many other aircraft types produced at Kingston during the Great War included the Buffalo, Bulldog, Cuckoo, Hippo, Salamander and Snipe, their entertaining names prompting those within and without the industry to refer fondly to the ‘Sopwith Zoo’.

  Sopwith himself was a remarkable fellow. An enthusiastic sportsman, who raced cars and yachts, and who at the age of ten had accidentally shot and killed his father in a hunting accident on a Scottish island, he built his own J-Class yachts in the 1930s, designed in collaboration with Charles Nicholson, to compete in the America’s Cup. He was at the helm of one of these beautiful boats, Endeavour, in June 1940, sailing to pick up British troops stranded on the beaches at Dunkirk. As its chairman, he oversaw the creation of the Hawker Aircraft Company in 1920 and remained a consultant with Hawker Siddeley and British Aerospace until 1980. Sopwith was always very much up to date with the very latest, and often futuristic, developments. A fift
een-year old when the Wright Brothers took to the air with The Flyer, he went on to oversee Sopwith Pups and Camels, Hawker Furies, Hurricanes, Typhoons and Hunters. One of the first men in Britain to hold a pilot’s licence, he lived to see Concorde soar across the Atlantic at Mach 2, men land on the Moon and, best of all from his point of view, one of his company’s aircraft take off vertically. Interviewed in 1979 by Sir Peter Allen, president of the Transport Trust, Sopwith was asked: ‘On looking back, which of your planes were you proudest of? Would it be the Camel, or something later, say one of the later Hawker Siddeley machines?’ He shot back: ‘I would say, undoubtedly, the Harrier… the Harrier flies forwards, backwards, sideways. Once I’d seen an aeroplane fly backwards under control, I thought I had seen everything.’

  Sadly, Harry Hawker, who lent his name to the superb line of fighter aircraft that ended with the jet-powered Hawk and Harrier, was killed in July 1921 when he crashed a Nieuport Goshawk at Hendon while practising for the Aerial Derby – a race of 200 miles over two laps with turning points at Brooklands, Epsom, West Thurrock, Epping and Hertford, and won at 163 mph on a blisteringly hot summer’s afternoon by Jimmy James, in jacket and tie, flying a Gloster Mars I. Hawker, who would have given James a run for his money, may well have suffered a haemorrhage while pulling a high-g turn and died while attempting to land.