by Nevil Shute
Ulm cabled his order from Australia. He wanted the longest possible range when carrying a crew of three, for the distance from San Francisco to Honolulu is about 2,200 nautical miles. I forget what tankage we were able to put into the Envoy but it probably gave him a range of about 3,000 nautical miles at about 170 m.p.h. To achieve this it was necessary to build a very large petrol tank in the fuselage filling the cabin section entirely, and this tank, of course, had to be located on the centre of gravity of the machine. The room that was left in the machine forward of this tank was certainly cramped for three men with wireless and navigating gear but it was possible; the navigator had to work upon a folding chart table and there was little elbow room.
There was some urgency about the delivery of the machine; Ulm was an energetic man, usually in a hurry. The construction of the machine was well advanced when he arrived in our works. He at once declared against the seating arrangement that we had prepared; the men were too much on top of each other in his view, with the result that nobody would be able to do his work properly.
There was a large, empty space in the rear fuselage of the machine, behind the great petrol tank. Ulm decided to transfer the navigator from the front to the rear of the tank and to put the wireless with him, as he was also to be the wireless operator. In that position we were able to provide a big chart table with proper facilities for navigation, while there was now ample room for Ulm and the pilot ahead of the tank. We provided a speaking tube past the tank from Ulm to his navigator. This new arrangement was obviously better in all ways except one. Ulm was the captain of the aircraft, and he could not now see the charts or calculations for himself, or touch the wireless. However, he was the purchaser and that was the arrangement that he wanted.
His crew joined him to take delivery of the machine. Both were, of course, Australians and we were surprised to hear that the navigator had little previous experience of navigating in the air; he was a ship’s officer. Perhaps at that time it was not easy to find experienced air navigators in Australia, for that was a new technique and Australia is a small country. However, that was nothing to do with us. Ulm test flew his aeroplane and was satisfied with it. It was then dismantled to be shipped across the Atlantic. It was erected in the United States and flown across the continent to Oakland airport near San Francisco, from which the Pacific flight was to commence.
They took off from Oakland late in the evening, timing their departure so that they would arrive at Honolulu an hour after dawn. The purpose of this was that if they failed to find the islands they would have all the hours of daylight in which to look for them, until their fuel ran out.
And that is what happened. They failed to find the islands, and were heard calling Honolulu on their wireless for five hours after they should have landed. Radio was less developed in those days, and though Honolulu made every effort to help them their signals were too weak through distance for the airport to get a bearing on them; there was no means of telling them which way to fly for a safe landing. All through the forenoon the distressing calls went on as Ulm made visual searches for the islands in every direction, till at last the final message came that fuel was exhausted and they were going down into the sea. No trace of men or the machine was ever found.
Our own analysis of this disaster was based on the position of the navigator. Ulm was the experienced man in air navigation over the ocean, but Ulm could not himself examine either charts or radio log in the air. It seemed to us that the probable course of events was that the machine had had a strong tail wind during the night which the navigator had not appreciated or allowed for, and had over-flown Honolulu before dawn and had gone on to the west of the islands. When they started looking for the islands they were probably far beyond them, and going further away each minute. Their own radio direction finder might have given them a clue during the hours of darkness, and it seems possible that at some stage they got on to a reciprocal bearing without realising what had happened. In short, there was clearly a mistake in navigation which Ulm might well have found if he could have taken control, but with the seating arrangements as they were this was impossible. When the navigator got bushed Ulm could not get at him to steady him or to take over. So they died.
10
IN JANUARY 1935 Airspeed Ltd signed an agreement with Fokker and his company by which we took the manufacturing licence for the Douglas D.C.2 and a number of Fokker types; Mr. Fokker was to be consultant to the company for seven years. In connection with this we made another public issue of shares for about another £100,000. This issue was oversubscribed, though not so much as the first one; the City were justifiably wary of a company that came back for more capital before showing profits made upon the first lot.
In Newcastle Mr. Fokker failed to pull the rabbit out of the hat for the shipbuilders, as we had failed before. There would at that time have been no particular technical difficulty in building great flying boats in their shipyards, though more suitable locations for building flying boats could be imagined. The trouble was to find anybody to consider placing an order for boats built in such circumstances; it took a little time for the shipbuilders to appreciate that their great name earned in shipping did not automatically induce Imperial Airways to place orders for flying boats with them. Another difficulty concerned money; conversion of the shipyards to the new type of manufacture would absorb a vast amount of capital which nobody seemed very willing to produce. The negotiations to build flying boats upon the Tyne dragged on for a year or so, and finally expired as increasing Admiralty orders for ships under the rearmament programme made it clear that every shipyard would be fully occupied in its original function.
In the spring of 1935 I spent about three weeks in Athens. The Greek Government wanted to buy fighter aircraft, and the Fokker D.17 suited them well; this was a single-seater rather like a Hawker Fury, but built with wooden wings. The Greeks had to place their aircraft orders in Great Britain, however, for currency reasons, and the proposal was that Airspeed should build these Fokker fighters for Greece. It was a reasonable proposal and might have come off, but it would have taken a better man than I to close the deal. I spent three weeks in Athens with a representative of the Fokker company who was well accustomed to methods of business in the Balkan states; those who want to find out what those methods were may read my novel Ruined City. In the end, I don’t think the Greeks ordered anything at all. After three weeks I came to the conclusion that I was wasting my time, and came home.
At home, however, orders for Envoys were beginning to come in from reputable concerns who had real money with which to pay for their machines. We sold the manufacturing licence for the Envoy to Mitsubishi, the airline of Japan, with an order for two machines; three months later they came back and ordered four more Envoys making six machines in all. The Japanese were curious little men very active with Leica cameras; when we offered them entertainment at the weekend they usually chose to go and see the Victory, Admiral Nelson’s old flagship laid up in the middle of Portsmouth dockyard. One of them got drunk one night, and told us a lot about his hatred for Britain and the coming war, which we passed on to the proper quarter.
Two Envoys followed for the Czechoslovak State Air Line and three for North Eastern Airways, an internal airline operating through Britain in which Lord Grimthorpe had an interest. A number of hire purchase orders for less substantial companies were in hand also, some of which came back to us and ultimately found their way to Spain. With these orders in hand and with the increased production that they indicated the company was gradually getting on to a firm basis, though it was still working at a loss.
A very unpleasant part of the duties of a managing director came upon me at this time, due to the growth of the company. In some cases the earliest members of the staff, sometimes considerable shareholders, were proving inadequate in the larger job. In the York days one of the earliest supporters of the company had been appointed Secretary, though he had no qualifications in accountancy. This was all right while the to
tal of the employees did not exceed fifty; he put up a brave show as the numbers rose, but even before we became a public company he had to be replaced by a man with qualifications and put on other, less important work. In turn, in 1937 this second Secretary was to prove incapable of handling the accountancy of what was by that time a great company, and had to be replaced by yet another, higher grade of man.
In the summer of 1935 this process had to touch Tom Laing, our first and best employee and a supporter of the company to the limit of his finances. Tom Laing simply did not know what went on in a works making aeroplanes on the production line; he was a first-class man in the shop, but the technical knowledge required by a works manager employing four hundred men just wasn’t there. Tom was the first to admit it and to recommend that we look for someone out of one of the big companies, under whom he would serve loyally as an assistant. We did this and got a first-class man from Avro. Tom Laing worked under him and they became great friends; when in the war a great shadow factory for Airspeed was put up by the Air Ministry at Christchurch Tom Laing became works manager of that and remained so till his death. But it was not always so easy.
I think this is the most miserable part of being the managing director of a growing company. One by one I had to replace our earliest supporters as the job grew too big for them, as the company grew to a size when it could afford properly qualified staff, till in the end the same cup came to me and I was myself replaced. It is a process which is inevitable in a growing business and which takes much of the fun out of it, so that after a few years of sacking one’s old friends one grows to feel that success may not be such a good thing after all, that possibly there may be other, less sorry ways of earning a living in this world. When success ultimately came to Airspeed, I was ready to leave the company, having come to the conclusion that I didn’t much like my job.
By the end of the first financial year of the new company it was evident that we were still working at a loss, though in the first flush of optimism we had paid one interim dividend. This loss was due primarily to our small turnover coupled with the ever decreasing basic price of small civil aeroplanes dictated by our competitors. At the annual general meeting to announce this loss Lord Grimthorpe resigned from the chairmanship of the company, to my regret. He had seen the company through its earliest days two thirds of the way to success, but the business now demanded much work from the chairman and was located in the south of England, while he lived in the north. He remained a member of the Board and was succeeded as chairman by Mr. Richardson, who enjoyed the confidence of our aged shipbuilding associates, could talk to them like a Dutch uncle, and often did. He worked hard for the company and picked up a knowledge of our peculiar business very quickly, while his reputation in the City probably saved us from a good deal of trouble as we passed our dividends year after year.
By the beginning of 1936 an order for seven Envoys had been received from the South African State Railways. It reflected the condition of the world at that time, that these were civil aeroplanes for use on an airline but they were to be readily convertible to military purposes. Bomb racks and release gear were to be provided, a mounting for a forward firing gun, and the roof of the lavatory was detachable and replaceable by another roof which carried a gun turret. Apart from this and one or two other orders, we had taken sub-contract work from other aircraft companies to the value of about fifty thousand pounds, so that we had orders in hand totalling about £90,000 though no Air Ministry orders for machines of our own design had yet come our way. A further extension to the factory was put in hand to cope with all this work, and with the larger orders which were now certain to come in due course.
A difficult situation now arose over our association with Fokker. The increasing amount of work for the Air Ministry on which we were engaged made it necessary for everyone to sign the Official Secrets Act and precluded any alien from entering our factory without Air Ministry sanction. This not only excluded the Dutchmen from our factory but made it expedient to exclude them from attendance at our Board meetings. It was unfortunate that the drift towards war had developed to this point only a year after we had gone into our association with the Fokker company but there was nothing to be done about it; we made an attempt to carry on the partnership over civil aeroplanes but from this time onwards the association declined, partly, perhaps, because of the increasing ill health of Fokker himself.
By the end of March the orders in hand totalled £117,000 and the employees had risen to nearly six hundred. There were still no direct orders from the Air Ministry, though verbal assurances had been given to us by officials that our factory would be kept full of work for at least three years to come. By this time the proposal to convert the Envoy to a twin engined military training aircraft, later to become known as the Airspeed Oxford, was well advanced, and the same officials were talking glibly of an initial order of a hundred of these machines, with a total requirement of four hundred.
These prospects, however, were of little value, and the long delays at the Air Ministry in placing orders for the rearmament programme caused a great deal of loss to our shareholders. The layout of a factory for building aeroplanes and the layout of a factory for building small parts of aeroplanes is totally different. Our works was established on an aerodrome and laid out for the construction of complete machines, and in the end the orders were to justify this set-up. While the Air Ministry delayed in placing production orders with us it was necessary to reorganise this unsuitable factory to build small components for more fortunate companies, with a totally different ratio of machine tools to floor area; we entered on this process unwillingly, convinced that in six months the civil servants would have finished drinking their tea and would consent to send out orders for complete aircraft to us, making it necessary for us to rip out all our new installations and re-convert the factory to its original function. This is in fact what was to happen, and involved a totally unnecessary loss to our shareholders in the years 1936 and 1937 due, I think, to ignorance of industry on the part of the politicians and high civil servants in charge of the Air Ministry in those years.
In May we received an order from the Air Ministry for two prototype machines to be known as the Queen Wasp. The Queen Bee was a radio controlled target aircraft based on the well known de Havilland Tiger Moth training machine, and the Queen Wasp was to be a better and bigger edition of the Queen Bee. Tiltman had designed a very beautiful little tapered wing biplane cabin machine with the Wolseley engine for this job, much too good to serve as a target and be shot down, but he had argued very rightly that perfection was the best selling point to senior Air Force officers spending other people’s money. The Queen Wasp was fitted alternatively with a landplane and a seaplane undercarriage; for target use it was always fitted with a seaplane undercarriage and was landed on the sea if it remained undamaged after the shoot.
In July our shipbuilding controllers offered us a general manager from their shipyard, an offer which I was glad to accept. Mr. Townsley was a genial, friendly man with long experience of labour relations in the shipping industry. He filled a gap in our organisation which needed filling, for I had little experience in dealing with trades unions or labour problems on a major scale. By that time we were employing over eight hundred men and the shop was getting slack and out of hand, while the costing and rate-fixing departments on which the whole prosperity of an engineering business must depend needed reorganisation with an expert hand. Townsley was gravely handicapped at first by ignorance of aircraft and the peculiar, rapidly changing aircraft industry, but he made up for these deficiencies by his energy and will to learn. From the first he was a great addition to our team, and under his management the business for the first time looked as if it might some day be working at a profit.
Townsley was young enough to learn the aircraft industry, but some of my shipbuilding co-directors were not. In August 1936, when they had had two years’ experience upon our Board, the minutes show a bitter comparison of our work with shipbuil
ding. The design of a ship, it was stated, took eight weeks, and a cruiser 700 feet long could be delivered complete with all details in twenty-seven months; therefore Airspeed was a grossly inefficient organisation. Age was no doubt a factor in this unwise expression of opinion; I doubt if many men retain the flexibility of mind required to learn a novel industry after the age of seventy. It did not make our day-to-day conduct of the business of the company any easier when time had to be wasted in trying to educate old men to the basic facts about our industry. We were indebted to Swan Hunter for assistance in our public issues and for giving us a first-class general manager, but for little else.
In July 1936 the Spanish civil war broke out, and by August agents for one side or the other were buying up every civil aeroplane that would fly. We made a bulk sale of practically the whole of our stock of unsold Couriers and Envoys to one British aeroplane sales organisation and heard no more of them. One aeroplane was excluded from this deal, our first demonstration Envoy on which we had carried out a large amount of development flying, I think because we could not spare it for a week or two. Then I decided to take the opportunity to shift it. An agent at Croydon aerodrome had a client who wanted to buy it, and for this middle aged aeroplane with Wolseley engines I quoted the very high price of six thousand pounds; I think we must already have heard about the Viceroy sale. The client did not blench but he insisted on seeing the machine first, and would inspect it nowhere but at Croydon aerodrome.
