A few days later, millions of Britons switched on their television sets to watch the latest episode of The Avengers, ATV’s witty, inventive and hugely popular ‘spy-fi’ series, starring Patrick McNee as John Steed and Diana Rigg as Emma Peel. Rigg, who went on to become one of Britain’s great actors, was Hugh Rigg’s sister. Curiously, that particular episode, ‘The Return of the Cybernauts’, ends with a cameo of Steed mending an electric toaster for Mrs Peel. ‘Will it work?’ she asks. ‘As it has never before,’ replies Steed, extolling the world of twentieth-century invention including ‘thermostats, computers, transistors…’ as they wait for the bread to brown. With a sudden bang, the toaster ejects not just the toast, but itself. ‘That’s the first thing Great Britain’s ever got into orbit,’ says Steed as he and Mrs Peel, eyebrows arched, peer up through a hole in the ceiling.
Pure coincidence? Perhaps, yet The Avengers was a playful, and often surprisingly pertinent, commentary of sorts on Great Britain at a time when the nation was poised between an old world, represented by Steed, of appropriate dress, impeccable manners, vintage Bentleys and an iron-fist-in-velvet-glove approach to necessary violence, and a new world, embodied in the coolly elegant and intelligently fashionable Mrs Peel, of pop art, Lotus Elans and emancipated women. The sharply scripted Avengers was set in a slightly fairy-tale Britain, forever pinstriped, exclusively white and Home Counties, where rich invention, top-secret weapons and ministry testing grounds, very much along the lines of Boscombe Down, were par for the course. Here was a hugely enjoyable cartoon-like take on a nation that, while a fertile ground for novel ideas, was losing the plot not just in terms of its role and status on the world stage, but in manufacturing and industry, too. Within little more than a decade, Britain would have been reinvented as a consumer society that placed all too little faith in machines like the Harrier, and was to find it hard to make pop-up toasters, let alone VTOL fighter jets.
Mrs Peel’s husband, Peter Peel, by the way, was a test pilot who had disappeared ‘somewhere in the Amazonian jungle’. He popped up on screen, just the once; this was at the end of the last episode Diana Rigg appeared in, ‘The Forget-Me-Knot’, when we learn of his sudden return. We never see his face, but, as he drives Mrs Peel away – from a Mayfair mews, and from the show – in a silver Mulliner Park Ward Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow convertible, we know that he is the spitting image of John Steed. In the public imagination, test pilots were the twentieth-century equivalent of gallant, chivalrous knights on horseback. Steed would have fitted the frame; as would Hugh Rigg, too, of course.
In its fourth issue, published on 7 February 1962, the satirical magazine Private Eye ran a cover depicting the Albert Memorial in London’s Kensington Gardens. ‘Britain’s First Man in Space: Albert Gristle awaits blast-off,’ the caption teases. ‘Ho ho, very satirical,’ says a cartoon Queen Victoria shuffling past. This was amusing, partly because the ornate Gothic monument designed by George Gilbert Scott in memory of Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, does look rather like a nineteenth-century British space rocket might have. But the cover was also a poke at Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government, which was seen – not least by satirists – as a club of Victorian fogies trying desperately hard to appear up to date with the latest NASA, computer and jump-jet technology.
For a moment during the transformation of the P.1127 into the Kestrel, it had seemed as if Harold Wilson’s Labour government, elected into office in October 1964, were about to take innovative British engineering, technology and military hardware seriously. In a much-misquoted speech he gave at the Labour party conference at Scarborough in 1963, Harold Wilson spoke of a ‘revolution’ that would change the face of Britain once the Tories were ousted from Westminster. What he actually said was: ‘The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods on either side of industry.’ Whatever the Labour leader meant, and this remains far from clear, a ‘white hot’ technological revolution became a potentially vote-catching idea in the minds of politicians and the media. Here was a revolution in which the roles of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky would be played by John Steed’s thermostats, computers and transistors, or even VTOL fighters and supersonic airliners.
In July 1966, Tony Benn, formerly Anthony Wedgwood Benn, 2nd Viscount Stansgate, was appointed minister of technology, an entirely new appointment, in Wilson’s second administration. As Postmaster General earlier that year, Benn had opened, to an evidently excited public, the 620-foot-high Post Office Tower (today the BT Tower), a beacon of new microwave communications technology and a daring addition to the London skyline. Queues formed around the block for months on end as families, eager to join in the white hot revolution, or simply keen on an exciting day out in town, whizzed up to the viewing galleries of Britain’s tallest building. Those with the cash to spare stopped off at the Top of the Tower, a revolving restaurant on the thirty-fourth floor run by Billy Butlin of seaside holiday-camp fame. The restaurant offered an ambitious à la carte French menu. Having dispatched a typical meal of L’Avocado aux Fruits de Mer, La Tortue en Tasse, La Sole Meunière Colbert, followed by Les Noisettes d’Agneau Périgourdine, Les Poires Belle Hélène, a Scotch Woodcock and a Café Hag, accompanied by various cocktails, wines, digestifs and perhaps a Havana cigar or Sobranie cigarette, diners were awarded a Certificate of Orbit before descending, at the rate of 1,000 feet a minute, to the streets of Fitzrovia far below.
The young minister of technology went on to champion the magnificent Anglo-French Concorde, the Mach 2 airliner that seemed to prove that white hot Britain was truly on the right flight path into the future. And perhaps Britain’s military aircraft industry would now be in safe hands. After all, Benn himself had joined the RAF at the age of eighteen in 1943. He won his wings in Africa and was just too late to see active service in Europe, transferring as a pilot officer to the Fleet Air Arm in July 1945. His elder brother, Flight Lieutenant Michael Benn DFC, had been killed in June 1944 at the age of twenty-two after the air-speed indicator of his Mosquito had failed, causing him to crash-land near Chichester. Tony and Michael’s father, Air Commodore William Wedgwood Benn, DSO, DFC, Croix de Guerre, Croce al Merito di Guerra, the first Lord Stansgate, had flown as an observer-navigator and then as a pilot in the Great War. He had flown in action with the RAF, despite being in his sixties, in the early stages of the Second World War, becoming Secretary of State for Air in Churchill’s wartime coalition government in 1944.
But for all its promise of thrilling all-British things to come, the ‘white hot’ revolution, if it had ever really existed, soon burned out. Concorde made it, partly because it was a joint project with the French, and the Kestrel flew through the political barrier, too. In fact, it was the Ministry of Technology that placed an order for six pre-production Harriers. The tripartite tests with the Kestrel had finally convinced the Germans and Americans as well as the British – there were many in the various Whitehall ministries, as well as some in the RAF, who had been P.1127 sceptics – that this small subsonic jet really was the Cold War warrior NATO was missing.
The minister of defence, Dennis Healey, had taken against the VTOL aircraft on the grounds of cost and because he believed that investment in American Phantoms and Anglo-French Jaguars offered better value. But ‘MinTech’, as Benn’s fiefdom was known, prevailed, and once built, the six aircraft were dispatched for testing and training at Dunsfold, Filton, the RAE, the A&AEE and the Blind Landing Experimental Unit (BLEU) at RAF Woodbridge and RAF Martlesham Heath, Suffolk. Trials in hot and cold weather were carried out in Sicily and Canada, while, at sea, one of the aircraft was flown successfully from a helicopter platform at the stern of the new 6,500-ton Italian cruiser Andrea Doria.
In September 1969, another pre-production Harrier was demonstrated on board the 19,900-ton Argentine carrier Veinticinco de Mayo (‘25 May’). To say the least, this proved to be a strange meeting. The Veinticinco de Ma
yo had just entered service with the Argentine Navy, but she had been launched on 27 November 1944 as HMS Venerable, a Royal Navy carrier. Sold to the Netherlands in 1948, she had operated as the Karel Doorman until bought by Argentina in 1968. And fourteen years later, in 1982, she was to find herself in action against the British in the Falklands War. Although the Veinticinco de Mayo attempted to engage the Task Force on 2 May with her Douglas A-4 Skyhawk jets, heavy seas made this impossible, and after the sinking of the Argentine light cruiser General Belgrano – launched as the USS Phoenix in 1938, she had been sold to Argentina in 1945 – by the British Churchill-class nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror, the carrier returned to port and stayed there for the rest of the conflict. And yet, if the right deal had been made in 1969 between the British and Argentine governments when the Harrier was wooing the brass hats of the Argentine Navy, the Veinticinco de Mayo might well have had a complement of Harriers during the Falklands War, and the outcome of that fight might have been very different. As it was, it would take a further four years before the Harrier entered service with the RAF, yet it had now emerged, almost fully fledged and attracting international attention, welcome or otherwise, from beneath the wings of the P.1127 and Kestrel.
CHAPTER 3
COLD WAR WARRIOR
The race was on. Cheered on by those in the know and curious passers-by, Squadron Leader Tom Lecky-Thompson sprinted from the entrance of the Post Office Tower to a nearby building site where a Westland Wessex helicopter of 72 Squadron whirled him the short distance to RAF St Pancras. This was a coal-yard in Somers Town situated close to St Pancras station, the Gormenghast-like London railway terminus designed by George Gilbert Scott, architect of the Albert Memorial. The RAF test pilot leaped from the helicopter, raced to a specially constructed metal platform, scrambled into the cockpit of XV741, a brand-new Harrier GR.1, and, blowing clouds of coal dust over thrilled spectators, roared straight up into the cool May morning sky. It had taken Thompson just six minutes and fifty seconds to get from the top of the Post Office Tower and into the air on his way to New York.
The occasion was the 1969 Daily Mail Transatlantic Air Race, which was held to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the first non-stop flight across the ocean separating Britain from America, made by Flight Lieutenant John Alcock (pilot) and Second Lieutenant Arthur Brown (navigator) in a modified First World War Vickers Vimy bomber. (They had won a £10,000 prize sponsored by, of course, the Daily Mail.) For those with little imagination, the May 1969 event was considered to be a waste of time, money and fuel. And yet here was a golden opportunity to show an American audience what the new Harrier could do. The 3,500-mile race was from the top of the Post Office Tower to the top of the Empire State Building, and the new British VTOL fighter had the great advantage over every other aeroplane in the race that it could take off and land in both cities. The Fleet Air Arm entered an F-4K Phantom and, although it flew far faster over the Atlantic itself, it had to land at conventional airfields; this meant a long sprint from the cockpit of the Mach 2 Navy jet to and from the Empire State Building and the Post Office Tower. The race was held in both directions across the Atlantic.
Within ten minutes of take-off, and at 36,000 feet, Thompson was taking on fuel from a Handley Page Victor, a former V-bomber that had found a new lease of life as an aerial tanker to British military jets. The Harrier pilot duly landed by the East River at the end of New York’s 23rd Street and, riding pillion on a motorbike, was at the top of the Empire State Building in six hours, eleven minutes and fifty-seven seconds, after a flight of five hours and fifty-seven minutes that had included four air-toair refuellings. Thompson won the £6,000 first prize for the East to West Atlantic crossing, while Sir Billy Butlin, the proprietor of the Top of the Tower revolving restaurant, won a £500 prize for the fastest journey by chartered business jet – eleven hours and thirty minutes – flying in the cocktail comfort of a Hawker Siddeley HS.125. Significantly, the Manhattan landing site for Thompson’s Harrier had been chosen and prepared by the US Marine Corps. For within six months, the Marines had ordered the first of the several hundred Harriers that were to be built under licence in the United States and continue to fly on front-line duties today.
The race had been a terrific publicity coup for Hawker, the RAF and the men from the various British ministries involved in the Harrier’s development and, now, promotion overseas. For the Americans, the very idea of a foreign military aircraft flying into US air space and over New York came as something of a shock. Yet the gymnastic Harrier was not just a superb aircraft, but an endearing one, too. With a length of under forty-six feet and a wing-span of little more than twenty-five, the Harrier, painted dark sea grey and green and light grey, was positively tiny compared with a McDonnell Douglas Phantom. It was also a magical machine, as any London schoolboy who happened to play truant from school that morning can verify.
When I walked back, grimy from coal dust, to look around St Pancras station after the Harrier had thundered its way west, the ‘Peak’-class 45 diesel-electrics thrumming from its platforms in clouds of carbon monoxide on their way to all points Midland seemed as tame as cockney sparrows. This was the first time I had actually seen a Harrier. I had gawped at photographs and devoured newspaper articles. I had made sure I watched every second of the BBC’s coverage of Farnborough air shows and noted every word of their knowledgeable and crystal-clear commentaries from Raymond Baxter, a former Spitfire pilot who had flown in raids against Wernher von Braun’s V2 rocket sites. I had pored over cut-away drawings in boys’ magazines and, of course, saved my pocket money for the plastic-bagged Airfix kits at two shillings each I saw hanging from their racks in model shops and newsagents. There had, I knew even then, always been that dream of vertical and hovering flight. There had been fantastical magic carpets, hot-air balloons and airships, and hummingbirds and kestrels too, but the Harrier was more than just a fulfilment of a long-held aspiration. It was somehow thrillingly modern too.
Observing those same cockney sparrows take wing from London gardens and, most memorably, from the thin blue balustrade of the slender concrete bridge across the lake in St James’s Park was always a source of immense delight and mystery. Even when you held out your young hands and the sparrows landed so very lightly on them to pick up breadcrumbs, it was impossible to see how they took off in VTOL – or was it STOL? – mode. An aircraft, even a compact one with a powerful Pegasus engine filling its slightly rotund fuselage, could never move so quickly, or so alertly, even when packed as the new RAF Harriers were with the latest in navigation systems. The power-to-weight ratio of the sparrow is very much greater than that of a Harrier, and this despite the 19,000 lbs of thrust from the GR.1’s turbine. But to witness Thompson’s Harrier take off in that cloud of coal dust – and this in an era that spelt domestic central heating (coal-powered, of course) as much as it did The Byrds, Led Zeppelin, Jefferson Airplane, Joni Mitchell’s Clouds and the Moody Blues’ On the Threshold of a Dream – was to believe in the sorcery of aerospace technology and in Britain’s ability to lead the world.
This, too, was the time of what had been the populist ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign, nurtured from New Year 1968 by five hard-working and patriotic secretaries from Surbiton, a south London suburb seen, at the time, as the archetypal English red-brick, lower-middle-class enclave. Harold Wilson’s government endorsed the campaign eagerly. The government and the economy had been hard pressed by events, at home and abroad, of the previous year. The Six-Day War between Israel and a coalition of the United Arab Republic (Egypt), Jordan, Syria and Iraq had forced the closure of the Suez Canal for some while afterwards, badly affecting British exports. A major dock strike that had started late in the summer of 1967 and gone on into the autumn had damaged exports further; and there had been a continuing sense of shame and a loss of national pride in the country at large since the government had devalued the pound in November 1966. Although, theoretically, the weakening of the pound against other currencies should
have been good for exports – of military aircraft as well as fashion items, music and cars – the general feeling at home was that Britain was on the wane.
Furthermore, it had been the French aircraft industry that received a boost from the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War. Equipped with the latest Dassault Mirage III supersonic interceptors and the older yet highly effective Super Mystère and Mystère III jet fighter-bombers, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) took on what, on paper, was an overwhelmingly superior, Soviet-equipped Egyptian air arm. Israeli crews destroyed thirty Tupolev Tu-16 bombers, twenty-seven Ilyushin Il-28 bombers, twelve Sukhoi Su-7 fighter-bombers, ninety Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21, twenty MiG-19 and twenty-five MiG-15 fighters, along with thirty-two assorted helicopters and transport aircraft; in return, nineteen front-line IAF jets were lost. War might be hell, but these spectacular results would have been a heaven of sorts to the management of Société des Avions Marcel Dassault. Nevertheless, Israel had expressed an interest in buying sixty Harriers and Finland – with its extensive forest landscapes and fear of Soviet invasion – considered buying ten. In neither case did the deals come off, yet international interest in the Harrier was growing.
As it was, the ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign got off to a very English start. Campaign T-shirts ordered from the London wholesaler Scott Lester turned out to have been made in Portugal. In defence, Scott Lester’s marketing director explained: ‘We just cannot find a British T-shirt which will give us the same quality at a price which will compare.’ How little has changed.
A tie-in single, written by Tony Hatch and Jackie Trent and sung by the all-round entertainer Bruce Forsyth was issued by Pye Records on 8 January. Despite selling for just five shillings instead of the normal seven shilling and fourpence halfpenny, ‘I’m Backing Britain’ didn’t do well. It sold a grand total of 7,319 copies. Still, as the irrepressibly chirpy Forsyth reminded us, ‘The country has always done its best when it is hard up against the wall.’
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