by Nevil Shute
In 1925 we sent a little party up from London to put this derelict air station into some sort of order for manufacturing. They found the floor of the great shed littered at one end with the feathers and remains of many hens; a vixen had had her lair for years in the covered concrete trench beneath the floor that housed the hydrogen and water mains. The rough shooting was quite good. Rabbits infested the enormous piles of steel and concrete débris formed by the demolition of the other hangars; partridge, hares, and duck were common on the aerodrome immediately outside the shed, and we got many snipe. This state of affairs continued till the day we left, though the game moved out a few hundred yards from the shed as the work got under way.
Throughout 1925 and 1926 we laboured to make order of the chaos we had found, and to design the airship at the same time. By the end of the latter year there were twenty houses on the aerodrome occupied by the wives and families of the staff. The water supply and sewage plant had been put in order, and a considerable power plant installed to supply the electrical needs of the station. A hydrogen-generating plant had been set up beside the shed, and the site had been cleared of the enormous ruins that disfigured it. Offices and works had been set up and equipped; by the end of 1926 the place was running as a reasonably efficient manufacturing concern.
In the middle of all this absorbing work Marazan was published. Perhaps no novelist ever treated the production of his first book more lightly; I expected to make little money out of it, and the expectation was realised. By the time the book went out of print it had just made the advance royalty of £30. It stayed out of print for twenty six years; when it was finally reissued in a cheap edition it made £432 in royalties in the first six months. I think it is a very good thing that we cannot see into the future. If I had known that a future as an author awaited me I suppose I should have given up engineering at an early stage, and my life would certainly have been the poorer for it.
One or two points about the publication of that early book may interest young authors. Mr. Newman Flower of Cassell asked me to come and see him, which I did before we moved to Howden. At that interview he said he liked the book and wanted to publish it, but that there was one obstacle; he said that it concerned a matter with which they frequently had trouble when dealing with young authors. I asked what it was, whereupon he said, “The House of Cassell does not print the word ‘bloody’.” So we changed them all into ‘ruddy’.
He then posted me an agreement for the publication of the book. By that time I had joined the Authors’ Society, and had made a study of the terms of a desirable literary agreement. I wrote back to him objecting to practically every clause of the agreement, with the result that he replied that there were so many differences between us that he thought that no business would be possible, and sent me back the book.
The firm of literary agents, A. P. Watt & Son, had been agents for my father in the past, and for more famous men, including Rudyard Kipling, Conan Doyle, and Edgar Wallace. I had been at Balliol with a young member of the firm, R. P. Watt, and at this stage I took my troubles to him, remarking, I think, that I had made a fool of myself. He undertook to put the matter right and handle the book for me, with the result that Cassell published it upon the standard agreement used by A. P. Watt & Son. Since then I have never done any of my own literary business at all, but I have left it all to Watt. I could not have a better agent, or a more loyal friend.
When this book was published, I had to face up to the question of acknowledging the authorship. Writing fiction in the evenings was a relaxation to me at that time, an amusement to which I turned as other people would play patience. I did not take it very seriously, and I don’t think it entered my head at the time that it would ever provide me with a serious income. During the daytime I was working in a fairly important position on a very important engineering job, for a very large and famous engineering company. It seemed to me that Vickers would probably take a poor view of an employee who wrote novels on the side; hard-bitten professional engineers might well consider such a man to be not a serious person. Of my two activities the airship work was by far the more important to me in the interest of the work, apart from the fact that it was my livelihood, and I was pretty sure that in my case writing in the evening was no detriment to the engineering.
For these reasons I made up my mind to do what many other authors in a similar case have done in the past, and to write under my Christian names. My full name is Nevil Shute Norway; Nevil Shute was quite a good, euphonious name for a novelist, and Mr. Norway could go on untroubled by his other interest and build up a sound reputation as an engineer. So it started, and so it has gone on to this day.
So much for the book, which, as I say, was a matter of small moment to me at that time, for at Howden our difficulties were enormous. The contract for the construction of the ship had been taken at a fixed price, which was usual in those days though in later years the continual losses under fixed price contracts forced a more equitable form of agreement in the industry for the construction of experimental aircraft. However, there it was; it had become apparent even in those early days that a loss would be incurred upon the building of the ship, and the future did not hold sufficient prospect of continuity to justify a greater capital expenditure than was necessary for this one contract. It has been said that an engineer is a man who can do for ten shillings what any fool can do for a pound; if that be so, we were certainly engineers. Excluding hand tools, there were not more than a dozen machines employed in the construction of R.100. Economy was the paramount consideration in the shop equipment. A bitter little tale went round at Cardington, where they had everything they cared to ask for, to the effect that R.100 was getting on rather more quickly now that one of us had bought a car and lent the tool kit to the workshops.
At Howden I lived with two of my staff of calculators in the village, in digs with a friendly garage proprietor; it was three miles from the airship shed and we used to walk that every morning and evening, sometimes with our dogs. We all had cars; the Morgan three-wheeler was soon to give place to an ancient Morris Cowley two-seater that served me well for some years. We tried to inject some night-life into Howden by gathering up the local girls and starting a Badminton club in a disused village hall, but that was a bit of an uphill job because the Howden residents were not night-life-minded. We joined a club in York and used to go there on Saturdays for relaxation and shopping, and on occasion we used to go as far as Leeds to dance at the Palais. We did a good deal of rough shooting, but my own main relaxation quickly became the Yorkshire Aeroplane Club, at that time in a hangar on Sherburn-in-Elmet aerodrome between York and Leeds.
This was one of the first light aeroplane clubs to be assisted by the Air Ministry; it was started off with the gift of two de Havilland Moths with Cirrus Mark 1 engines, and a subsidy of a thousand pounds a year. That made a flying club financially possible, and the Yorkshire Club quickly attracted a fair cross-section of young Yorkshire men and women, so that a Sunday spent at the Club was a merry Sunday. Later on, I was to meet my wife there for the first time. As a pilot of a sort and as an aeronautical engineer I soon found myself elected to the Committee and charged with the business of looking after the day-to-day running of the enterprise. We had a full-time pilot instructor in charge, and a ground engineer, and I got into the habit of going over to the aerodrome twice a week to help them to sort out their troubles, and to do as much flying myself as I could afford. Quite early on I distinguished myself by hitting a wire fence with the undercarriage of the Moth as I was coming in to land and depositing it upon the aerodrome in an inverted attitude; after that episode it was to be twenty-four years before I damaged an aeroplane again, at Brindisi when I was flying back from Australia.
The Yorkshire Aeroplane Club taught me a good deal about management. Our first pilot was a charming man, a good pilot and a good instructor. He was separated from his wife and lived in the village inn, and as he was a sociable, humorous, and weak character the village inn became
the focus of a rowdy party almost every night. Next morning the pilot would be watery-eyed and disinclined to fly, with some reason, and members coming to the aerodrome for a lesson would find that they could not go up because the pilot had a hangover and wasn’t feeling well. So in the end he had to go.
Our next pilot was a hard-headed bachelor, again quite a merry customer. He was efficient and good company, and though the rowdy parties continued there was never any difficulty with a hangover. Unfortunately he was involved with a married woman living apart from her husband, who established herself in the village while her divorce matured; so far as I remember, our pilot was the co-respondent. The Wives Trades Union of Yorkshire took the matter up, and members started to complain that their wives were becoming very unpleasant, and would not come to the Club because they would have to meet ‘that woman’. In the end the pilot realised the position and got a better job in Canada, where I meet him from time to time and I am always glad to do so.
Our third pilot was the best of the lot. He was a stout, good-humoured man of forty-five, happily married, with three children at school, a little suburban house with a garden which he cherished, and a couple of dogs. He was an unadventurous man who never boasted of the time he flew the aeroplane through the hangar as all the others had done, but he had been a Martlesham test pilot in his day and probably knew more about aeroplanes than any of them; later, in the second war when he must have been nearly sixty years old, he became a test pilot again and flew over seven hundred Lancaster bombers on their first test flights. He was quite content with the instructional routine in our club; if asked he would perform aerobatics on the Moths and Bluebirds, but he never did them voluntarily. Like another of my pilot friends, he had no ambition to be the most famous pilot in the world. He just wanted to be the oldest.
These pilots taught me that the good test pilot is not the daring young bachelor of fiction, with half a dozen girl friends and a big sports car. It may be necessary to employ such men very occasionally for the sake of their physical fitness; if, for example, a machine has to be flown to forty thousand feet unpressurised. But such occasions are very rare indeed, for the obvious reason that production aeroplanes have to be capable of being flown by ordinary people. In the hands of such a man your aeroplane will never be safe. Such a pilot is fundamentally irresponsible because he has no stake in the country, nothing to lose. He will cheerfully risk his life to satisfy his vanity or to improve his skill; his life is a small matter, but the safety of your aeroplane is important. The good test pilot is the happily married man with a wife and young children dependent on him, helpless people that he loves and who will be grievously injured if he loses his life. Such a man is interested in preserving his own life, and your aeroplane; he will engage in no daring adventures outside his instructions, and he will land immediately if anything seems to be wrong with the machine to tell you all about it. In the hands of such a man your experimental aircraft is as safe as it is possible for it to be. The happily married man with a large family is the test pilot for me.
At Howden the ship grew slowly. Her girders were formed of three duralumin tubes rolled up helically from sheet metal and riveted with a helical seam; Wallis finally perfected this method of construction during the summer of 1926. The first girders were built during the autumn, and the first transverse frame, a polygonal ring of girders a hundred and ten feet in diameter, was lifted and hoisted into a vertical position hanging from the roof of the shed by about Christmas of that year. Another frame soon followed it and was joined to the first by the longitudinal girders; one section of the ship was then in place which would eventually house one of the gasbags. There were many delays. We were feeling our way with an entirely new form of construction; in a sense we were experimenting on a gigantic scale. From Hansard we learned that at Cardington an entire section of their ship had been erected for experimental purposes and scrapped, at a cost to the taxpayer of £40,000. The designer of the capitalistic ship could take no such refuge from responsibility.
The scale of the work produced its own peculiar difficulties, for most of us were unaccustomed to working on high places. When we first arrived at Howden I can very well remember venturing up the stairs to the passage ways in the roof of the shed a hundred and seventy feet above the concrete floor, petrified with fear and clinging to the handrails with sweating hands at every step. I remember, sick with fright, watching the riggers clambering about on the first frame to be hoisted, carrying out their work a hundred feet from the floor with the girders swaying and waving at each movement that they made. Within a year I, too, was clambering with them on my lawful occasions, studying wires that fouled and joints that would not close, and saying what was to be done about it. By the time that the ship was half built we had lost all sense of height; it seems to be a matter of habit, because in my case the fear of heights has since returned, and is as strong as ever.
An incident in the early days at Howden confirms this. At that time there was some unemployment among ships’ riggers at Hull, and a rigger turned up at Howden for a job. Jimmie Watson, our works manager, asked, “Can you climb?” The man said he could climb anything.
We had a number of fire escapes at Howden to reach up from the ground to the structure of the ship, and one of these was being overhauled that day and stood fully extended in the shed. Jimmie said, “Well, hop up to the top of that.” Now a big fire escape is a horrible thing to climb when the top is free and not resting against a wall; I hated them till the end of our time at Howden, and never climbed one if I could avoid it. It is about ninety feet long, and by the time you are halfway up the base carriage is behind you so that there is nothing but the concrete floor below, and you feel that every movement that you make will overturn the thing and send you crashing down to death. As you go up the ladder sways with every movement, so that at the top each step upwards sets it swaying three or four feet in space. With your intellect you know that it is safe, but I know nothing more terrifying in the air or on the ground.
The rigger got up halfway, and stuck; Jimmie called to him to come down. The man came down very crestfallen; he said that he had been out of work some time and needed the job badly. We couldn’t take him on unless he could climb, but the men were sorry for him, and Jimmie took him into the canteen and stood him a beer before sending him away. After his beer the rigger asked if he could have another shot at that bloody escape. So they sent him up again, and that time he got three quarters of the way up before he stuck. So they had him down and gave him another beer, and so strengthened he got right up to the top, and got his job. Within a week of starting work he was perfectly all right and able to climb anything, without the beer.
It was not possible to heat the huge shed at all. Howden stands upon low ground; in winter there is standing water on the aerodrome and in the height of summer water is found two feet below the surface of the earth. In consequence the air is always humid; a more unsuitable locality for airship manufacture would be difficult to find. Very frequently the shed was filled with a wet mist so that every girder became coated in water; mould attacked the fabrics in the store, and the corrosion of duralumin became a serious matter. We became experts in corrosion. Halfway through the construction it became evident that the structure of the ship was being seriously attacked, and Wallis took the bold step of deciding to revarnish every girder of the ship by hand. It took thirty men three months to do and probably added the best part of a ton to the tare weight, but when the ship was finally demolished in 1931 the structure was in a very perfect state. On winter mornings it was not uncommon, after a heavy mist and frost, to find the girders sheathed in ice, stopping all work upon the ship that day on account of the danger in climbing.
The labour difficulty was always grave. We were three miles from the little town of Howden and twenty-five from civilisation in the form of Hull. It was difficult to get skilled aircraft hands to work upon the ship however high the wages that were offered; accommodation for workmen of good class was almost non
-existent. In Howden fourteen of our men slept in three rooms of a small pub.
We employed a large percentage of our labour in the form of local lads and girls straight off the farms as unskilled labour, training them to do simple riveting and mass production work. The lads were what one would expect, straight from the plough, but the girls were an eye-opener. They were brutish and uncouth, filthy in appearance and in habits. Things may have changed since then—I hope they have. Perhaps the girls in very isolated rural districts such as that had less opportunity than their brothers for getting in to the market town and making contact with civilisation; I can only record the fact that these girls straight off the farms were the lowest types that I have ever seen in England, and incredibly foul-mouthed. We very soon found that we had to employ a welfare worker to look after them because promiscuous intercourse was going on merrily in every dark corner, and we picked a middle-aged local woman thinking that she would know how to deal with problems that we had not contemplated when we started in to build an airship. But the experiment was not a success. I forget how we solved the problem; probably we never did, because as the job approached completion the need for unskilled female labour was reduced and we were able to get rid of the most jungly types.
Still, the ship grew. For three years the work in the shops came hard upon the heels of the design; the progress of the design regulated the speed of the work. Looking back upon that time, I think that an inferiority complex plagued us more than we quite realised. We knew in our hearts that the work that we were doing was good and that we were building a fine ship, but there is no denying that the incessant publicity of the competing staff had its effect upon our spirits. At times it seemed that every newspaper we picked up had a column describing the wonders of R.101, ending up with a brief sentence that R.100 was also being built at Howden. Our puny efforts at a counterblast could not compete with the Air Ministry press department; moreover we had little energy to waste on matters of that sort. We carried on with our designing and construction, wondering what the end of it all would be.
