by Nevil Shute
From that time onwards, I think I began to lose interest in the company that I had brought into being. Civil work was coming to an end and all new design projects were of a military nature. None of us had ever served in the Royal Air Force, and though that experience may not be absolutely necessary for the production of a good military aircraft I think that our military designs lacked the touch of genius that had characterised our civil aeroplanes. Personally I could not pump up a great deal of enthusiasm for the military work that came our way, and with the approach of war and the conservative policy of our Board no new adventures were possible. Ahead of us stretched an endless vista of producing Airspeed Oxfords, and in fact the company was to go on producing Oxfords to the limits of its capacity for the next eight years. From this production there was not even the incentive of profit, for essentially the I.T.P. system boiled down to work upon a cost-plus basis with a small margin of profit on whatever the costs happened to be. Ahead of the managing director of Airspeed Ltd stretched an unknown number of years to be spent in restraining men from spending too much time in the lavatories in order that the aeroplanes might cost the taxpayer less, with the reflection that every hour so saved reduced the profit ultimately payable to the company. In time of war the sense of national effort will galvanise a system of that sort, and does so; in time of peace it tends to make a managing director bloody-minded. I think it did with me.
From this state of affairs stemmed the personal disagreements that began to plague the company about this time, which were to check its growth and ultimately lead to its absorption into a larger concern. Even the finance was now far beyond anything that we could do about it, for Airspeed by that time was a national asset and no bank dare close us down for such a trifle as an overdraft of £104,000, the figure reached by July 1937. With orders in hand for £594,000 of military aircraft we could cash the wages cheque without a thought about the bank manager, who in his turn had no control over the situation; our overdraft, with that of many other aircraft companies, was now a matter for negotiation far over our heads between the Board of the bank and the Secretary of the Air Ministry.
The prices of our shares upon the Stock Exchange reflected something of my own feelings. As success came to the company through Air Ministry contracts, the price of our shares dropped to an all-time low. The shares issued to the public were 5/- Preference shares, and the quotation of these shares upon the Stock Exchange had been buoyant in spite of our continuing losses. In no month did the average of the dealings in our shares represent a price below par until the first order for 136 Oxfords had been received from the Air Ministry, but from that point onwards there was a steady fall in the value of our shares upon the market. I think investors realised that on Air Ministry contracts the margin of profit was so small that there would be little hope of reimbursing shareholders for previous losses. While we retained freedom of action in the field of civil aeroplanes the high quality of our work technically might well bring profits in the end from which past losses might be recovered, but the flooding of the company with military orders meant an end to these financial hopes. We got the first Oxford production order in October 1936 and in November a steady and continuous fall in our shares commenced which was to go so far as a price of 1/6, and few buyers at that, as deliveries of the Oxford commenced in December 1937. The value of our shares was to recover somewhat as the initial absurdities of the I.T.P. procedure were negotiated out, but I do not think they ever recovered much above par value.
A further 52 Oxfords were ordered from us in November 1937, and yet another batch of 140 in April 1938, but these orders did nothing to restore the spirit that had once inspired the company. Perhaps it had all become too easy. For my own part, I was learning what a better man than I had learned before me, that to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.
11
IN APRIL 1938 MY Board decided to attempt to quell the disputes that were plaguing the company by getting rid of me, and in this they were probably quite right. I would divide the senior executives of the engineering world into two categories, the starters and the runners, the men with a creative instinct who can start a new venture and the men who can run it to make it show a profit. They are very seldom combined in the same person. In Airspeed the time for the starters was over and it was now for the runners to take over the company. I was a starter and useless as a runner; there was nothing now for me to start, and I was not unwilling to go after the first shock to my pride.
The settlement that the Board made with me was a generous one. While we all thought things over they sent me on indefinite leave till the conclusion of my contract with the company fifteen months ahead; when the final settlement was made it gave me enough money to keep myself for five or six years at my then standard of living. I found myself in the totally unaccustomed position in the summer of 1938 of having enough money to live on and no work to do. A holiday abroad to collect my thoughts seemed to be the first thing; my wife and I made arrangements to park the children, and opened the atlas at the map of France. With an unaccustomed sense of freedom I shut my eyes and stabbed the map with a pencil, saying, “Let’s go there.” The point fell on St. Claude in the Jura mountains; it could not have fallen on a better place.
Ruined City, known in America as Kindling, had been delivered to Watt a few months previously; my American publishers had got very excited about it and had taken an option to buy the film rights for a stated sum within three months. In St. Claude, only a few weeks after leaving Airspeed, I got news by cable that this option had been taken up and the film rights sold. My wife and I retired to a small café opposite the post office and read the cable through again, struggling to believe the written words. We had never been affluent, never had more than a pittance in the bank at any time. Now several thousand pounds had dropped into my bank account for doing what to me had been a relaxation from real work. Our security for five or six years had grown to ten. For ten years, if I chose, I could just sit in the sun drinking Pernod, and not bother about work. It seemed incredible, but it was all quite true.
We had another Pernod.
When I left Airspeed the orders in hand were worth £1,262,000 and we employed 1,035 people. In the eight years that I was joint managing director the company never made a profit; I left the company in the ninth month of our financial year and in that year a small, tenuous profit was shown for the first time.
In the month that I left the company an order for 200 Oxfords was placed with de Havillands, so that we had the satisfaction of seeing our old friends and competitors pocketing their pride and building aeroplanes of our design while they prepared to wipe our eye again with the Mosquito, perhaps the most successful day bomber of the war. In turn, and later on, Airspeed was to build Mosquitoes. This close association with de Havillands was to lead in the end to an amalgamation. In all, 8,751 Oxfords were built by four companies, of which 4,961 were built by Airspeed. It was a good twin engined trainer for its day, and most of the pilots for Bomber Command were trained upon the Oxford.
Two years after I left the company Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson gave up their venture into aviation and sold their controlling interest in Airspeed Ltd to the de Havilland Company. By that time the urgent need for ships was absorbing all their energies and was to do so for many years to come; in these circumstances they judged it better to yield control of Airspeed to a company more conversant with the nature of the aircraft industry. I think this transfer was a fitting one, for both Tiltman and I had learned our business with de Havillands; if we could not carry on the company ourselves my own vote would have been to let de Havillands take it over.
At the time of that transfer, in June 1940, only two of the original York working shareholders were left in the company, Tiltman and Tom Laing. The rest had either branched off into other and more profitable jobs arising from their work with us, or, in one or two cases, had left the company feeling that they had had a raw deal, which I regret. I do no
t think that anybody who invested in the company at par lost money if they held on to their shares, although they may not have made anything commensurate with the risk taken. All shares were finally transformed into share capital of the de Havilland Aircraft Company on favourable terms.
Tiltman resigned from Airspeed shortly after de Havilland assumed control and only Tom Laing was left, our first shareholder. He became works manager of the great Airspeed shadow factory at Christchurch, Hants, where he built a very large number of Oxfords and Mosquitoes. He always retained the appearance of a country gentleman in a changing industry, and his interests were very close to the good earth. Apart from family happiness he was devoted to shooting, fishing, dogs, good company, and Airspeed Ltd.
He died in the service of the company that he had joined as its first employee seventeen years before. He had been to Market Harborough in the Midlands on business and, driving back after dark, he rang up his wife from Newbury to say that he was very tired and he was going to stop there for the night; she was not to wait up for him. Apparently he failed to get a room because an hour later, travelling at a high speed, he hit a railway arch near Whitchurch and was killed instantaneously. Probably he went to sleep.
Airspeed Ltd has now ceased to exist as a separate entity. It is still known as the Airspeed division of the de Havilland enterprise but the last Airspeed designed aeroplane has probably taken off and it may well be that in a few years’ time the name that I dreamed up in my bedroom of the St Leonards Club in York will be forgotten.
So ended a chapter of my life. I have never gone back to manufacturing and I shall probably not do so now, for that is a young man’s game. Industry, which is the life of ordinary people who employ their civil servants and pay their politicians, is a game played to a hard code of rules; I am glad that I had twenty years of it as a young man, and I am equally glad that I have not had to spend my life in it till I was old. My gladness is tempered with regret, for once a man has spent his time in messing about with aeroplanes he can never forget their heartaches and their joys, nor is he likely to find another occupation that will satisfy him so well, even writing novels.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
MY FULL NAME is Nevil Shute Norway. Readers will find on page 65 an explanation of the reasons that made me use my Christian names alone when writing my books.
NEVIL SHUTE
Langwarrin, Victoria, Australia October 1953
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Series Contents
Series One
Anton Chekhov
Charles Dickens
D. H. Lawrence
Dickensiana Volume I
Edgar Allan Poe
Elizabeth Gaskell
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
George Eliot
H. G. Wells
Henry James
Ivan Turgenev
Jack London
James Joyce
Jane Austen
Joseph Conrad
Leo Tolstoy
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Mark Twain
Oscar Wilde
Robert Louis Stevenson
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Walter Scott
The Brontës
Thomas Hardy
Virginia Woolf
Wilkie Collins
William Makepeace Thackeray
Series Two
Alexander Pushkin
Alexandre Dumas
Andrew Lang
Anthony Trollope
Bram Stoker
Christopher Marlowe
Daniel Defoe
Edith Wharton
F. Scott Fitzgerald
G. K. Chesterton
Gustave Flaubert
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Herman Melville
Honoré de Balzac
J. W. von Goethe
Jules Verne
L. Frank Baum
Lewis Carroll
Marcel Proust
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Nikolai Gogol
O. Henry
Rudyard Kipling
Tobias Smollett
Victor Hugo
William Shakespeare
Series Three
Ambrose Bierce
Ann Radcliffe
Ben Jonson
Charles Lever
Émile Zola
Ford Madox Ford
Geoffrey Chaucer
George Gissing
George Orwell
Guy de Maupassant
H. P. Lovecraft
Henrik Ibsen
Henry David Thoreau
Henry Fielding
J. M. Barrie
James Fenimore Cooper
John Buchan
John Galsworthy
Jonathan Swift
Kate Chopin
Katherine Mansfield
L. M. Montgomery
Laurence Sterne
Mary Shelley
Sheridan Le Fanu
Washington Irving
Series Four
Arnold Bennett
Arthur Machen
Beatrix Potter
Bret Harte
Captain Frederick Marryat
Charles Kingsley
Charles Reade
G. A. Henty
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Wallace
E. M. Forster
E. Nesbit
George Meredith
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Jerome K. Jerome
John Ruskin
Maria Edgeworth
M. E. Braddon
Miguel de Cervantes
M. R. James
R. M. Ballantyne
Robert E. Howard
Samuel Johnson
Stendhal
Stephen Crane
Zane Grey
Series Five
Algernon Blackwood
Anatole France
Beaumont and Fletcher
Charles Darwin
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Edward Gibbon
E. F. Benson
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Friedrich Nietzsche
George Bernard Shaw
George MacDonald
Hilaire Belloc
John Bunyan
John Webster
Margaret Oliphant
Maxim Gorky
Oliver Goldsmith
Radclyffe Hall
Robert W. Chambers
Samuel Butler
Samuel Richardson
Sir Thomas Malory
Thomas Carlyle
William Harrison Ainsworth
William Dean Howells
William Morris
Series Six
Anthony Hope
Aphra Behn
Arthur Morrison
Baroness Emma Orczy
Captain Mayne Reid
Charlotte M. Yonge
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
E. W. Hornung
Ellen Wood
Frances Burney
Frank Norris
Frank R. Stockton
Hall Caine
Horace Walpole
One Thousand and One Nights
R. Austin Freeman
Rafael Sabatini
Saki
Samuel Pepys
Sir Issac Newton
Stanley J. Weyman
Thomas De Quincey
Thomas Middleton
Voltaire
William Hazlitt
William Hope Hodgson
Series Seven
Adam Smith
Benjamin Disraeli
Confucius
David Hume
E. M. Delafield
E. Phillips Oppenheim
Edmund Burke
Ernest Hemingway
Frances Trollope
Galileo Galilei
Guy Boothby
Hans Christian Andersen
Ian Fleming
Immanuel Kant
Karl Marx
Kenneth Grahame
Lytton Strachey
Mary Wollstonecraft
Michel de Montaigne
René Descartes
Richard Marsh
Sax Rohmer
Sir Richard Burton
Talbot Mundy
Thomas Babington Macaulay
W. W. Jacobs
Series Eight
Anna Katharine Green
Arthur Schopenhauer
The Brothers Grimm
C. S. Lewis
Charles and Mary Lamb
Elizabeth von Arnim
Ernest Bramah
Francis Bacon
Gilbert and Sullivan
Grant Allen
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Hugh Walpole
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
John Locke
John Muir
Joseph Addison
Lafcadio Hearn
Lord Dunsany
Marie Corelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
Ouida
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Sigmund Freud
Theodore Dreiser
Walter Pater
W. Somerset Maugham
Series Nine
Aldous Huxley
August Strindberg
Booth Tarkington
C. S. Forester
Erasmus
Eugene Sue
Fergus Hume
George Moore
Gertrude Stein
Giovanni Boccaccio
Izaak Walton
J. M. Synge
Johanna Spyri
John Galt
Maurice Leblanc
