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NATIONAL LIFE STORIES AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE Ralph Denning Interviewed by Thomas Lean C1379/68

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National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet

Title Page

Ref no:

C1379/68

Collection title:

An Oral History of British Science

Interviewee’s surname:

Denning Title: Mr

Interviewee’s forename:

Ralph Sex: Male

Occupation:

Aeronautical engineer (jet engines)

Date and place of birth:

Cardiff, Wales. 17 December 1925,

Mother’s occupation: Teacher Father’s occupation: Patent Fuel works manager

Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to):

Location of interview:

Interviewee's home, Alveston, Bristol.

Name of interviewer:

Thomas Lean

Type of recorder:

Marantz PMD661 on secure digital

Recording format :

WAV 24 bit 48 kHz

Total no. of tracks

15 Mono or stereo: Stereo

Total Duration: (HH:MM:SS)

10:19:25

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance:

Interviewer’s comments:

Ralph Denning C1379/68 Track 1

4

Track 1

Ralph, I was wondering if we could start this interview with you just briefly

introducing yourself and what you’ve done.

Well, I was born in Cardiff on 17th December 1925. I was christened Ralph Murch

and that was after my uncle, who was James Murch, but I think it was also after my

great grandmother, who was Ann Murch. That was her surname, Murch. My

grandparents all came from England and they went to the Port of Cardiff in the 1800s,

probably around about 1870, 1880, and – during what I call the coal rush. And in my

youth Cardiff was the biggest coal exporting port in the world. I mean, my father

worked in the patent fuel industry and he wanted me to go and do it but I didn’t.

What’s patent fuel?

Patent fuel is compressed coal dust and pitch and it’s done in steam presses. And it

was used by Scott in the Antarctic to take energy out there for his camps. And he

used to build walls with the huge blocks of patent fuel and then burn the walls

gradually. Anyway, and I’m second generation Welsh born. My – both my parents

were born in Cardiff and I was born in Cardiff. I went to Canton High School and I

always wondered about the name Canton. It’s not – it’s not the Far East, it’s in

Cardiff and it’s a canton of Cardiff, if you like. I think it was probably the

multicultural town in Wales or city in Wales in those days. The Dennings are a tribe

and they come from the Frome-Radstock area and in the 1880s most of them lived in

that area. They’re now spread out all over the world ‘cause I’ve been examining the

history of the family. And the – it’s the – the famous Judge Denning, Judge Denning

who was the – what was he? The – he was the Master of the Rolls. And he says in

his book that Denning he’s sure is a corruption of Dane-ing, which means son of the

Dane. And I think it’s definitely a tribal name. And my mother was a Palmer and she

came – her family came from Bristol. They seem to have had a lot of artists in the

family as well.

[0:03:16]


5

Erm. I was wondering if you describe what each of your parents was like in turn,

please.

What my parents were like?

What were your parents like?

What were my parents like? Ah, they were – my mother was a painter and she was

very kind and never hit me very hard [laughs]. My father was a great sportsman and

he used to captain various rugby teams in Cardiff and he played tennis and various

other games. He was also a bit of a gambler and my mother didn’t appreciate that

very much. But anyway, he was a decent chap.

Gambling at what?

Erm?

Gambling at what?

Oh, gambling on horses and dogs and football pools, you name it. And he would also

gamble on playing cards at Christmas with all my uncles. I’ve got quite a big family.

My mother’s family, there were six by my grandfather’s second marriage and six by

his first marriage. She was one of the – from the second marriage.

What were your parents’ names?

Parents’ names? My mother’s name was Rowena, because I think my grandfather

was reading Ivanhoe at the time. My father’s name – he had two names, Herbert

William, and – Herbert William Denning. And that’s – yeah, that’s it.

I wonder if you could actually describe what each of their personalities was like.

Their personalities?


6

Erm.

My mother was a fairly gentle soul and she – as I said, she painted and she did a lot of

needlework and all that sort of thing. And she was a teacher before she married. And

of course in those days, if you were teaching and you got married, you had to leave

the profession. So she was bringing us up and trying to teach us a few things. And

we lived in Cardiff, on the outskirts of Cardiff, and we were there during the war. We

were bombed a bit. And I lived near Llandaff Cathedral and Llandaff Cathedral had

the spire nearly knocked off. They had to remove it ‘cause it had been damaged by a

landmine. And we had another landmine near us, and a couple of other bombs as

well. But anyway …

What was the area like where you grew up?

It was on the outskirts of Cardiff, really almost in the country. They’d built a funny

road out in the country but it gradually has become engulfed by the increasing size of

Cardiff. And – but we – effectively I spent my youth birds nesting and catching

tadpoles and lizards and the like and doing all sorts of other things like scrumping

apples and cutting down trees [laughs]. In those days you could get away with that.

You might get a thump from the policeman but it was all forgotten then [laughs].

Today I’d have probably been trounced as a bit of a tearaway, I should think [laughs].

[0:07:12]

What were you like as a child, do you think?

What was I like? Ah, I was – I think I was a reasonable sort of chap. I worked hard

at school, I played hard. I ran and played – I didn’t play much cricket, although I

played rugby. And then when I – later on I played squash. But I ran for the school

and played rugby for the school, long distance running and short distance running.

[interruption by third party – break in recording]

[0:07:45]


7

You mentioned that you enjoyed running and outdoor activities.

Yes.

Could you give me an idea of any other hobbies you had?

Did I say I played squash, up until I was sixty-two. And I used to do a bit of running.

I played for local rugby clubs here as well. I never aspired to the same level as my

father. My father was quite a good rugby player. He had a trial for Cardiff, which

was quite something in those days. But that was around about 1910, 1912. He was –

he was in the First World War, a gunner. He was a gunner in the First World War,

yes.

Did he ever talk about it?

Not an awful lot, no, no. I’ve never yet met a World War II guy who wanted to talk

about World War II. [Interviewee correction: “I’ve never met a World War I guy who

wanted to talk about World War I”] It must have been such a grim dismal dangerous

business, fighting in the trenches, that they just wanted to forget it, I think. Whereas

in World War II, I think it was a lot different. There were some dark periods but –

you know, fighting in the Air Force was something – it was something to talk about,

although it was a bit grim at times. But no, I get the feeling that World War I was an

absolute disaster from the point of view of the soldiers in the trenches.

What sort of chap was your father?

Oh, he was a sportsman, as I say, a bit of a gambler. He was a manager of a patent

fuel works in South Wales for Powell Duffryn and Gueret, Llewellyn and Merrett, and

then the Coal Board finally. Not particularly well paid, as far as I know. But, you

know, what they paid you in the 1930s just seemed silly to us, the price of a round of

drinks for a week’s wages.

Was sort of personality did he have?


8

Oh, he had an outgoing personality. He was one of the boys, I suppose, yes. And so I

had a couple of uncles who were rather similar and they used to play cards at

Christmas, taught me to play cards at Christmas. And they played bridge and solo and

anything – brag, anything for a bit of fun.

[0:10:57]

You talked about some of the sporty activities you enjoyed. I was wondering if you

had any other hobbies.

Erm, well, I used to make model aeroplanes. I had a production line of Spitfires

during the war and my father used to – used to flog them for me to his friends. And

he used to take the train from the west side of Cardiff down to Cardiff Docks. He

worked at the Cardiff Docks in the Coal Exchange there and he had a lot of friends on

the trains. And he used to get me, I think, half a crown or five bob for a Spitfire.

What did you make Spitfires out of in the war?

Balsa wood. But of course the Mosquito, you know, was made of balsa wood. It was

made of balsa sandwich, birch, ply and balsa, which I – we’ll probably come onto

later.

Where did you actually get balsa wood from? I thought it was in short supply.

I think it must have been – it must have come as packing, a lot of it. There used to be

great big chunks of it – there was plenty of balsa wood around during the war. There

were – all the small boys were making model aeroplanes. I used to make flying

models as well, yes. That was a – something that attracted most small boys, I think,

after the Battle of Britain and all that.

When you start off designing a model aeroplane, or making a model aeroplane, do

you actually design it from scratch or were you using …?


9

I have designed flying models from scratch, but of course, if you’re making solid

models, which is what one did a lot of the time, then you made them from plans.

They were representing specific aeroplanes. And I used to go to the Empire Air Days

that they held, where they’d have flying displays, and just prior to the war last, but

from – I remember them from about 1935 onwards. And I got taken down to Pengam

Moors Airfield near Cardiff. So you had all – the new aeroplanes came and visited

the airport. And I joined the ATC. And we had a school squadron – well, it was in

conjunction with a couple of schools actually in Cardiff and I ended up being the

senior NCO for the ATC.

Do you remember any planes in particular from the Empire?

The Empire?

The Empire flying days.

Oh, the Empire flying days? Well, Puss Moths and things like that, where ladies, one

or two ladies, went across the world to Australia. What was her name?

Amy Johnson.

Amy Johnson, Amy Johnson. I think she used to fly a Puss Moth. I built a flying

Puss Moth actually, yes.

What does one actually do as a member of the ATC at this time?

Ooh, well, they used to try and teach us how to navigate an aeroplane and how to fire

a rifle. What else? Yes, how to read maps. And we were also taught Morse code,

and – some of that. And I was sent to – on a short course to Cranwell, the Officers

Training College in the RAF, and I was there – I think I was there ten days. I enjoyed

that.

And what did you do on it?


10

Ooh, all these sort of things, learning Morse, being taken for rides in aeroplanes and

various other things, yes.

Did you actually want to join the air force or …?

That – yes, I was torn between the desire to be working on aeroplanes and to be flying

them and I was never quite sure which one I wanted to do. I ended up – I did end up

flying after the war and I soloed in an old army Auster aeroplane. And I flew from

Whitchurch Airport at Bristol. Bristol Aeroplane Company had a flying club, which

they subsidised, which was a great help [laughs], ‘cause it was four pounds an hour

and you were paid eight pounds a week, when I started.

How do you actually afford to fly on that sort of …?

Well, you couldn’t. We had so many hours at about one or two pounds an hour, I

think, from what I recall. I think I soloed after six hours in an Auster.

Why do you think you had that attraction to aeroplanes as a child?

Ah, I think it was something to do with the atmosphere of the time. I mean,

aeroplanes were something new, just as after World War II it was the – it was solid

state electronics and computers that were the thing. And my eldest son is – well, he’s

gone into the computing business. But it’s something to do with the atmosphere in

which you live as well as whether you’re minded to be an engineer. But I think I’ve

always been – had a bent for engineering.

Why do you say you’ve always had a bent for engineering?

Well, I used to make things when I was young. I had production lines of model

aeroplanes and all sorts of – I used to cast sold... cast … lead – lead models and try

and make plaster casts and then the lead models. Yeah, I did quite a lot of woodwork.

I enjoyed woodwork at school as well as all the other subjects. I was pretty academic

in school. We – at school we were divided up into arts and science, but that only

happened in the fifth year. We all mucked in together for four years and then the fifth


11

year, before you did your school certificate or what was called a Central Welsh Board

examination, they split us up into science and classics, fifth classical and fifth science.

[0:18:23]

What sort of school was Canton High School?

Canton High School? Well, looking back on it, I’d say it was a very nice, very good

school. And the teachers in those days, they were guys who’d done very well at

university and I think there weren’t many roles for graduates before World War II. In

fact, the chap I worked for in my first assignment in the Ministry, he told me that

when he – he had a degree and when he went to work for Armstrong Whitworth, I

think it was, he didn’t declare that he had a degree because the boss man didn’t have a

degree and he wasn’t very keen on graduates. And this was to some extent true before

the war. It was only after the war that they realised that, you know, everybody in the

scientific side had to have a degree of some sort.

Are there any teachers you remember in particular from Canton?

Teachers? Oh yes, there were several. There was a chap called Whizzer. He used to

– he would give you a caning at the slightest opportunity. I think he enjoyed it. And

the chemistry master, he used to throw bits of chalk at you if you were going to sleep.

I once saw him throw a board rubber at somebody [laughs]. They were pretty rough

guys in those days, teachers. They – they’re pretty soft today with kids. I think a bit

of discipline, enforced by a bit of, well, hard practice and with the cane or that, is not

a bad idea. It has some advantages. And I think a lot of our problems today are due

to the fact that teachers can’t enforce discipline ‘cause they’ve got no means of doing

it.

What did you think about the discipline when you were actually in school though?

Our discipline was pretty good. I mean, we used to do all sorts of terrible things but

we expected to get a good hiding for it.


12

What sorts of terrible things?

Oh, I remember we went round the ink wells in the classroom and put acetylene in,

which – if you put it into the ink you get a gas off, ethylene. What is the gas? Is it

acetylene, like an acetylene lamp. And the ink all turned brown. They never found

out who did it. But during the war we – kids had access to guns in the Cadet Corps.

And we had a guy in school who shot a policeman, killed a policeman, and he

committed suicide in the field behind our house. It was all a lot more – it was raw in

the war. Something of the brutality of war, I think, leaked over into society and

certainly kids did things that you wouldn’t dream of doing today.

[0:22:02]

Did you see much of the war in Cardiff?

Much of the war? I could shin up a lamppost and see Bristol burning. And that used

to happen fairly regularly in 1940, ‘cause Bristol got a hell of a hammering. Cardiff

didn’t have as much. They bombed the docks and there were a few odd bombs

dropped near us. We were a little bit beyond range, I think of the massive heavy

bombers, though they did get up to – over to Swansea. Swansea had quite heavy

bombing. Our house was knocked about a bit by a bomb that they couldn’t – they had

to detonate ‘cause it was too dangerous to try to diffuse it. And it knocked a hole in

our roof, blew in all our windows and made a hell of a mess of the place.

What was your home like?

What was my home like? It was a modern – I mean, sort of modern house, built after

World War II [Interviewee correction: ‘built after World War I], 1924, the year my

parents married. They bought it and, yes, it was a three bedroomed house, or two and

a half bedrooms really, with a small garden, on the outskirts of Cardiff.

What sort of amenities did you have?

Amenities?


13

Technologies around the home.

Er, well we had tennis courts in Victoria Park in Cardiff. We used to go there. I

always remember there was a World War I tank there on a pedestal. I think they took

it away during the war and melted it down. There were lots of tennis courts where we

could go and practise our art.

I wonder about, you know, growing up as the war was happening around you, does it

have much influence and impact on you as a person or is it not something you think

about?

Well, it – I mean, undoubtedly small boys were very excited about it all, as long as the

bombs didn’t get too close to you. And I used to go on holiday down to a place called

Kenfig, which were small sand hills, and occasionally a magnetic mine would get

washed up on the beach or the rocks would all get coated in oil. And you could –

swimming was a bit hazardous. You came out looking like a chap who’d been

greasing an engine [laughs]. But, yes, I used to – I enjoyed, I think. All small boys

tend to enjoy these sort of things. I don’t think my mother enjoyed it very much

[laughs].

Why do you say that?

Well, her house was badly damaged. Her sister’s house was also badly damaged in

Cardiff. And I should think the older you get, the less you like having the bricks and

mortar around you knocked down. Small children, unless they’re hurt, don’t worry

very much about that.

I was wondering if you could give me an idea of – you’ve talked about building these

things yourself, you know, working with your hands. Why do you think that sort of

activity actually appealed?

Well, I was interested in woodworking and certainly that led onto building aeroplanes,

I think, and then flying them. I wasn’t an aerodynamicist in those days but I learnt the


14

rudiments of making an aeroplane fly and getting the right – the position of the centre

of gravity in the wing. And stood me in good stead, I suppose, as a start anyway.

What did your parents make of you building things?

Oh, I think they put up with it [laughs]. I was always doing something a bit strange,

like heating something in a test tube over a fire, I remember, once. And what was in it

suddenly went bang and out it came, sprayed my father, who was asleep in a chair by

the fire. I never heard him swear before [laughs].

[0:27:30]

Did your parents have any hobbies and activities of their own apart from the sport

you’ve already mentioned?

My father was – well, he watched football, and rugby. He played rugby more than he

played football but he watched football more than he watched rugby. And he played

tennis and that sort of thing. During the war he had an allotment.

You mentioned that your mother painted.

My mother painted.

What sort of things?

Oh, flowers mainly and – a couple of pictures just outside the door here of hers. And

I’ve gone in for painting. I’ve painted quite a lot of pictures. But, you know, the

maximum I’ve ever had for a painting, I think, was about sixty quid.

Did your parents go to church?

Yes, yes. And they made me go to church too. I was a bit … bit of a laggard getting

out of bed to go to church. Since I’ve grown up and been in Bristol, I’ve been a bit of


15

a philosopher and I’ve tended to become a sort of agnostic. I find it difficult to

reconcile science and religion.

Well, what’s the nub of the confliction for you?

What’s the nub of …?

The confliction between science and religion.

Er, well, you know, if you look at religion, all the ages they thought everything went

round the earth until the scientists came along and told them the earth went round the

sun. Then you’ve got people – you find you have people who think that the earth

started 4,000 years ago, which I find difficult to believe. And then it all builds up into

an idea that so many of the religions are not … are not rational. I expect a certain

amount of rationality, even about religion. I mean, if evidence from history tells you

that the earth was formed umpteen million years ago, I don’t think you should think

that the world started in 4,000BC. And I have difficulty – I have difficulty

reconciling myself to going to any sort of church that thinks things like that.

What sort of church did you go to as a child?

Well, I was actually christened in Llandaff Cathedral and I was confirmed in Llandaff

Cathedral, and then a bomb dropped on it about six weeks later, so I thought perhaps

there was a message there somewhere [laughs].

Did you have these, you know, philosophical thoughts when you were younger or is it

something you’ve arrived at later?

Oh, I was reading cosmology, if you like, when I was in school. I found the physics

so easy that I could spend my time reading Eddington. Everybody read Eddington

before World War II. And after World War II I used to go to evening classes in

Bristol. There was a professor of philosophy there and I did a lot of philosophy with

him. He used to have sort of seminars in the evening in his office there. I don’t think

many professors would do it today. And me and a friend of mine used to be quite


16

friendly with him and we used to argue with him, and he would bring his publications

along and try them out on us. He didn’t do it with his students ‘cause he had to

conform to the syllabus, I think, but he thought with us he could open our minds a

little bit to something new.

What was the professor’s name?

Körner, Stephan Körner. He was a Czech and he came to this country before World

War II.

I’m interesting in Eddington. I’ve read things about Eddington but I wonder, what

did you make of Eddington when you were actually reading him in the 1930s?

I don’t remember a lot about what he stood for now. I’ve still got one of his books

somewhere. But I mean, things I picked up from him were the redshift and things like

that. I found that quite interesting. I’ve always been a bit puzzled by Einstein. I

never really got round to understanding what E equals MC squared really means. But

my daughter went to Durham and did cosmology, one of my daughters, but I haven’t

been able to get much out of her [laughs]. But, yes, I found it convenient to use just

Newtonian physics as far as aeronautical engineering’s concerned. I don’t think you

need to use Einstein, not very often anyway.

[0:33:26]

As far as aeronautical engineering is concerned as well, making model aeroplanes

and flying them, how much do you actually need to know about how an aeroplane

works to do that?

How much do you need to know? Oh, I mean, I started off as a steam turbine man in

college. The professor had been working for C&A Parsons, so he taught us about

steam turbines ‘cause that’s all he knew. I then go to London and I’m immediately

thrown into the aerodynamics of aeroplanes. And after all the other things that

happened, which I presume we might talk about later, I went back to college and tried

to do a bit of aeronautics there. And then I did a swap and went and did engines,


17

worked on engines with Stanley Hooker at Bristol. And I was able to bring a lot of

interesting experience on new projects for jet aeroplanes and that into industry from

the Ministry and I also was able to keep in contact with my friends, which was useful

to the company. I would think you’d call it lobbying today, wouldn’t you? [Laughs]

To move on from when we were talking about Eddington, I was thinking, what were

your favourite subjects at school?

Favourite subjects? Erm … oh, I think mathematics, physics, not so much chemistry.

Woodwork. But science generally. I wasn’t interested in art at the time but in my

retirement I’ve gone in for a it of painting, watercolours, oil paints, acrylics, I’ve tried

them all. I’ve got a – if you look in the dining room, it’s full of my paintings. That’s

one of them up there, one on the left.

The view of the – is it the townhouse? The house in the street?

Well, it’s the Gargantua Hotel in Chinon, back of it. And that acrylic down there is

the road in front of the Gargantua Hotel, going through the middle of Chinon, just

below the chateau of Chinon.

What were your school science lessons actually like?

School science lessons? Oh, they were – I enjoyed them, particularly when the

science master – when they couldn’t explain geometry proof. And he would stand in

front of the blackboard trying to give us the – draw the solution for geometry or for a

geometrical problem and we would all help him. He didn’t seem to mind [laughs].

But, yeah, I didn’t have any problems with school, with learning at school. And I

found that you had to do a little bit more when you went to university. You couldn’t

just sit back and do the paper in about a quarter of an hour and then do a bit of

doodling after that.

Are there any other school science lessons you remember?


18

Yes, biology. The biology master, he’s not around anymore, I’m pretty certain of it,

he was a bit of a devil. He would catch hold of your ear and twist it until you yelled.

So we used to put oxalic gases in his tadpoles in the biology lab. And he had a

clinostat, I think it was, which turns a plant round so that it grows up straight, and the

other beside it grows over, so we used to swap the plants around. We led him a bit of

a dance [laughs]. But we led all our masters on a bit of a dance. It was – most of

them didn’t mind too much.

I was thinking as well, school science, was it much of a practical activity or all taught

through books?

Oh, we did a lot of work in the chemistry lab when I got into the sixth form. We were

doing – what do you call it? We had pots of stuff and we had to analyse them to say

what they were. Yeah, I don’t know whether you would allow kids to do what we

were doing then, ‘cause we were boiling things up and occasionally they’d shoot all

over the place. But today everything’s a bit – health and safety is a terrible thing, I

think, in many ways. It – it stunts you education, health and safety, if you’re careful.

Did you ever think that what you were doing was dangerous?

Yes, oh, it was dangerous. We used to make nitro iodine, which – you get iodine and

you dissolve it in ammonia and it crystallises out as nitro iodine, which, when it dries

off on a blotting paper, will explode. And we used to put it on the floor where the

masters used to walk and they’d walk along and as they hit it with their boot, it would

explode, only little explosions. But, oh yes, we used to get away with all sorts of

things [laughs].

[0:39:54]

Had you had much thought about what you wanted to do after school?

Erm, no, I hadn’t. I hadn’t really made my mind up. But I went – I was one of the – I

had top marks in science and the headmaster decided to send us or to recommend us

to go to university, to do a short course. And so a lot of people came out of school


19

and then had a year or so to wait before they went into the services, so we went to

university to do a two year course in – mechanical engineering was my course. And

then you – they were not allowed to say where you were going to go. They reserved

the right to send you anywhere, either into the forces or into industry or into

government or down the pits or something like that. Mind you, that happened

anyway, you know. I always thought that the people who were sent down the pits, if

they didn’t really like – if they were a bit claustrophobic or didn’t like going – doing a

messy job, it must have been an awful thing to be sent down to be a miner.

Where did you actually go to university?

I went to Cardiff University. There wasn’t much travelling around during the war.

You tended to go to your local university. It was quite a good university. It’s a lot

better now, I think.

Could you describe what the actual sort of physical set up of it was?

Say again?

Could you describe what the actual physical set up of Cardiff University was? What’s

it like to actually visit?

Oh, it was a mixture of – the buildings – there were some old buildings in one part of

the city and then there was the new campus in the city centre. The city centre of

Cardiff was built on the coal trade by the Marquis of Bute. He poured a lot of money

into the buildings, civic buildings, in Cardiff and included in the civic buildings was

the university, the new part of the university. And as engineers, we were in the old

part of the university, wooden drawing offices. And the medical school next to us

was an old – used to be a leper hospital. But it was very old. It’s all been knocked

down now.

Did you get any say at all in what you were going to do at university?


20

Oh, you were only allowed to do courses which were going to lead to jobs in the

Royal Engineers and perhaps in industry, and governments and … they were fairly

careful, these short engineering courses – they didn’t do an honours degree during the

war in some universities. Half the professors weren’t there and so we did a two year

wartime degree, pass degree.

How did you feel about going to university instead of being drafted into the military?

Well, it seemed an interesting thing to do in the time between finishing in school and

being called up. Other friends of mine went into jobs and then got called up, but I

thought I might as well go to the university and do a short course and be an engineer

of some sort or another perhaps.

So on a mechanical engineering course, what sort of things do they actually teach you

on that?

Well, you’ve got stress, you know, stressing structures and steam – we had all sorts of

steam engines. There was a – it even had a wartime – I think it was a Rolls Royce

Falcon engine in the workshop there, but we didn’t – that didn’t run or anything. But

– and they had great machines for testing the strength of materials and that sort of

thing, yeah. Oh, it was – I enjoyed it. There was a lot of it that I found superfluous to

my needs later on, but you can’t have everything. In fact, you don’t know what

you’re going to do when you first go to university usually.

Were there any parts of the course that appealed to you more than others?

Er … no, I don’t think – oh, fluid mechanics, fluid mechanics, mainly

hydromechanics. We didn’t do much aerodynamics. But when I came back, the chap

who did fluid mechanics did a bit of aeronautics with me and we had a small wind

tunnel.

[0:45:49]


21

I was wondering as well, stresses and structures, how did they actually teach you that

sort of thing? What was actually involved? Bearing in mind I’m not an engineer and

have no idea about any of this.

Difficult to remember now. There would be about fifty students. And they used to

write it all down on the blackboard. You spent most of your time writing down notes.

They didn’t give you printed notes, not in those days, World War II. Perhaps they

didn’t have enough paper, I don’t know. So you spent all your time writing. I found

that I didn’t take it in until after I’d gone back and looked at what I’d written. Even

then it was a bit difficult sometimes [laughs]. But I don’t think it’s the right way to

teach people, make them spend their time actually getting writer’s cramp. ‘Cause

some of these lecturers used to write like mad across the board and it was as much as

you could do to keep up with them.

Did you have to do much work outside the lecture?

I didn’t do a lot. I – when I was in school I did homework but it was – you know, I

used to get it done in about half an hour and then I’d go out and play somewhere

[laughs]. But, yeah, university was more difficult. If you weren’t careful, if you

didn’t do what you were supposed to do, you would find it very much more difficult

in the examinations. Never had – I never had any problems with examinations at

school.

You mentioned there were sort of workshops there and Rolls Royce Falcon engines

and things like that, so what were you actually doing with all that stuff?

Well, we used to run steam engines and make diagrams, steam pressure diagrams, and

check the – check the efficiency of engines and things like that, do stress – we had

these stress machines for stretching materials until they bust. It was interesting. It

wasn’t my – my forte though. I never wanted to be a stress man.

Why?


22

I don’t know. It seemed a bit of a dull activity. And I think you had to have a certain

mentality to be a stress man.

Stressing wasn’t your forte.

Not my forte, no.

Did you have any thoughts about what might be your forte?

Erm, I think at the time, no, I hadn’t decided. When I came out of college after two

years, I – we were told that we didn’t have a choice what we were going to do, we

would be told. But they did take some notice of, I think, what were your interests. I

suddenly got a call to go to London for an interview. I went up there to Thames

House, a place that is now – Thames House South, Thames House North and ICI

House, they were then. I don’t know what it is now. But I mean, Thames House

South, I think, is MI6 [Interviewee correction: MI5] now.

[0:49:50]

Hmm. I’ve got one or two questions I’d like to ask you about your time at university

as well before we move on to MAP. I was wondering if there were any teachers or

lecturers that you remember in particular from your time at university.

And what?

Are there any teachers or lecturers you remember at university in particular?

Erm [sighs], only their bad habits, I remember. But the old professor – first of all, the

Professor of Engineering had gone off to do war work at the Home Office on air raid

shelters. He was a civil engineer. So we were left with a chap who’d done his

apprenticeship with C&A Parsons and he was a steam turbine man. So I learnt an

awful lot about steam turbines, which was absolutely useless, or not quite but it didn’t

fit in with aeronautics.


23

I’m slightly surprised at that. I was thinking, you know, gas turbines, steam turbines,

are there not similarities?

There is a certain similarity but I never – designing gas turbines was not one of my –

one of my jobs. I was more free field aerodynamics and performance of engines. I

didn’t really get down to the design of individual blading on turbines. That’s a

separate activity, doing the detailed design of blades in engines. I did the

aerodynamics of power plants and propellers and – you name it.

What was student life like at Cardiff University?

Well, we enjoyed ourselves.

Doing what?

Visiting the School of Domestic Science and having parties with the ladies there

[laughs].

School of Domestic Science?

Yes, or domestic arts. Sometimes it was called domestic arts and sometimes science.

I don’t think it was either really [laughs]. And, yes, we had a good student union

there. I enjoyed that. And there were – I enjoyed drinking in pubs.

Any pubs in particular?

Gosh, I can’t remember the names of them now. There was one near the university

that was a special meeting place for the ladies and gents students. [Interviewee

addition: ‘The Woodville’].

Did you have any good friends at university?

What’s that?


24

Did you have any good friends?

Yes, I had lots of friends who I kept up with until they died and most of them are dead

now. There are one or two chaps still but a lot of them have popped their clogs. Yes,

and I joined the Cardiff University Old Engineering Society, past engineering

students, and we used to go regularly to a place called Gregynog up in Mid North

Wales, not far from Newtown and Welshpool. And we would have a weekend

lecturing each other there.

Lecturing each other?

Yes. Oh, we used to have a theme, which nobody stuck to, and you’d just go along

and tell them what you’d been doing, you know. Yeah, we had an enjoyable time.

But unfortunately, as we got older and older, people fell out of the system and there

are not many of us left, not enough left now to run a past students association.

Are there any friends you remember in particular from your time at university?

Quite a few. A chap who lived next door to me went to university with me. I met

various people in the industry who’ve done very well. I think I mentioned to you

earlier, David Omri Davies was a friend of mine in school and at university. And then

he moves to Derby, works at Derby, and I go to Bristol and we end up – not punching

each other but, you know, competing against each other. But in the end we actually

worked together.

Were you a member of any other societies at university at the time?

Erm [sighs], no, no. I wasn’t a debater, I don’t think. A good debating society there

but it was wartime, I don’t think we did very much of that.

What does a student union actually do? What did you do at the student union? I’ve

never had much contact with them.


25

We had dances and we had squash courts. And we used to get our lunches there.

That’s about it [both laugh].

Did aeroplanes feature much in the syllabus?

No, no. No, there weren’t many people lecturing – in fact, this is one of the things

that the boss at Bristol, Sir Roy Fedden, worked on after the war. He was involved in

setting up Cranfield University. And all the technology that we found out in Germany

was available to him and was sent on to Cranfield, as well as onto RAE Bedford and

RAE Farnborough. But … yeah.

Shall we take a short break, as we’ve just done about an hour?

Yeah.

[End of Track 1]


26

Track 2

Were you an only child?

No, I had a sister.

What was her name?

Christine.

What was she like?

Oh, girls were a bit of – you know, a nuisance, but, no, she was a very gentle creature,

like my mother. She’s no longer with us. She died about – oh, about eight years ago.

Younger or older sister?

No, no. Oh, older sister’s are bossy, I think, usually. I did break a couple of my

sister’s dolls so she probably thought I was bossy too [laughs].

I was wondering if you could give me a little insight into what family life was like

when you were growing up.

Erm, well, it was so different from today. We didn’t have – we made our own

amusements. We made our own toys. We did get toys at Christmas but I think I got

more satisfaction out of casting model aeroplanes or building something out of wood

and strip balsa and tissue and elastic and flying it. I think today kids have so much

readymade amusement it must stunt their capability of thinking about how to amuse

themselves.

What were family gatherings like?

Oh marvellous. My aunts always provided large amounts of food and my uncles and

my father provided all the gaming. We used to play darts. Everybody played darts


27

before and during World War II. And they had cards, we played cards. I hardly ever

play cards and I certainly don’t play darts these days. I think I got to a point where I –

I still work a little bit on aeronautical problems and write odd papers, but I don’t play

cards anymore. I read quite a bit. I garden when I can. Unfortunately my

osteoarthritis has been very painful the last few years and I’ve really given up doing a

lot of the gardening. Got a gardener to come and help me, which is very sad because I

like gardening. I like walking.

It sounded like you had quite an outdoorsy sort of childhood, would that be correct?

Oh yes, yes, very outdoors. I used to spend my time birds nesting and catching

lizards, chopping down trees, building bonfires, flying model aeroplanes.

What’s birds nesting?

What’s birds nesting? Pinching eggs from birds’ nests. In my day, when we were

kids, that was standard practice for kids. You used to have a collection of them,

different sorts of birds. Nowadays you’d be put in prison for doing that, I think. It’s

incredibly different from – from my youth in the 1930s or ‘40s.

How much notice did your parents take about what you were up to?

Well, I kept pretty dark about what I was up to. I don’t know whether they knew

what I was doing, but I had a fair amount of freedom. I used to go around with a

hatchet, cut a tree down – we’d cut quite big trees down when we were only about ten

or eleven. And we used to build a huge bonfire on Bonfire Night with these trees.

Get three poles and put them together and then pile all the rubbish on them and burn

them. But today, you know, you’d have the police after you for doing things like that.

The police really were quite good in the ‘30s. I mean, they – well, if you were caught

scrumping they’d probably give you a cuff over the ear, whereas today – you know,

stealing apples, terrible.

Did you ever get in trouble for anything?


28

Well, yes. I was a member of the Llandaff Cathedral social club and we were putting

on a play. And I was dressed up for the part of the butler in this, so I had a false

moustache on and evening dress and that sort of thing. And I was cycling home after

we’d had a practise before and I suddenly felt a hand on my saddle holding me back.

And it was a policeman, who leapt out of the shadows and shone his light on me and

asked me my name and where I lived, and like a fool I gave it to him. And he let me

go and then about – I went home and about half an hour, three quarters of an hour

later there was a knock on the door. And my father went to the door and he said, ‘Can

I see Mr Denning please?’ And my father said, ‘Well, I’m Mr Denning.’ And he

said, ‘Oh no, a chap with a moustache.’ [Laughs] So my father produced me and by

this time I’d cleaned it all off and he looked a bit disconcerted when I was a small boy

– not all the small, but – and anyway, I got – I still have the summons I had for riding

a bicycle without a front light or a rear light, two separate summons.

One for each light?

Yes, because they were under different laws apparently. You can have a – you had to

have a front light once, at first, and then they insisted you had a rear light as well

after. So I was fined five bob and seven and six, I think, on these charges. And I had

to ask the chemistry master for permission to go to attend court. I can actually show

you them, I’ve got them in a folder back there, after [laughs].

Was it a long trial?

No, no, I pleaded guilty [laughs], riding a bicycle without a front or a rear light, yes.

[0:07:15]

Did you see much of your extended family when you were growing up? You

mentioned uncles and aunts?

Oh yes, we used to all go on holiday together. And I remember going – we used to

sometimes go take the Campbell’s steamer from Cardiff down to Ilfracombe and to


29

Clevedon and Bristol. We would go all round various ports in the Bristol Channel.

And we would go – I was quite familiar with Bideford and Bude in those days.

What do you do when you get there?

Oh, we made sandcastles, as far as I remember. I’m talking about early on in my

career. And of course they used to entertain us with various devices. And, yeah. And

I remember once down at Weston Super Mare – going to Weston Super Mare. We

went down on the beach and they were digging out a motorcar. They’d driven onto

the beach and onto the mud of Weston Super Mare and it had gone right down and

they had to dig the hole thing out and haul it out with a tractor. It’s funny how things

stick in your mind but that’s definitely stuck in my mind, don’t drive your car down

on Weston Super Mare beach [laughs].

What do you think are the images that stick in your mind most from your childhood?

Oh, I think fishing with my uncle, catching – we used to catch salmon bass and trout

down at Kenfig, where we’d all go on holiday. The whole family used to go on

holiday together.

Where did you stay?

Where did we stay? Oh, in a bungalow on Pyle and Kenfig golf course. And my

aunts had a bungalow – two aunts had a bungalow that they shared. And we all set off

for Margam Beach or Sker Rocks, and I used to go out mushrooming at four o’clock

in the morning, wake my uncle up. He would look a bit strange and swear a bit about

being pulled out of bed at four o’clock in the morning and we’d go out in the sun rise

and pick the mushrooms.

Why do you have to pick mushrooms at four o’clock in the morning?

I don’t know. We went out early for some reason, I think to get ahead of the market.

Yes. And they used to take me to the local pub and drinking in the tap room when I

was under age. And I remember being in there one night and a runner came along to


30

say that the village policeman was on his way down, would we all drink up and get

out, ‘cause it was after eleven o’clock at night [both laugh].

Were you allowed to drink at home in Cardiff or …?

A little bit, yes, yes. Not an awful lot.

What did your parents think about you going to university?

Erm, well, I think they encouraged me. My mother was a teacher and she – she got a

teaching diploma at Fishponds Diocesan Training College [??] in Bristol, I think

partly because the Bristol side of the family knew the ins and outs of it. All my aunts

went teaching. Teaching was, in Wales, one of the few jobs that was open to women.

A hell of a lot of Welsh people went into teaching, like the Scots. That’s why the

Welsh and Scottish education systems were much better in those days than the

English ones. At least that’s what I’m told.

[0:11:51]

To return to the university part of this, how was it decided what you would actually do

next?

It wasn’t. After university? Well, it wasn’t decided by us, it was decided by the

Ministry of Labour. If you went and did a short university course you committed

yourself to going where you were sent. If you – if you went along to the recruiting

offices when you were sixteen or seventeen you could pick and choose where you

wanted to go, provided you passed the medical examinations. But if you went off on

a short course you were told where to go. And I was sent to – well, obviously they

thought I was heading for aeroplanes because in my – in my holidays in 1943 I was

sent to Hatfield – no, sorry, 1944, 1944. I was sent to Hatfield to de Havillands. And

two of us went up to London with our bicycles and a – a great big suitcase to go and

work at the factory at Hatfield.

Can you describe what the actual Hatfield site was like?


31

Yeah. It was on the main road going through to the west of Hatfield. And it had

production lines, several production lines, Mosquitoes – it was mainly Mosquitoes

they were building then. And I was involved, with my vocational work, on a

Mosquito production line. We used to install the Merlins. I was with a corporal from

the RAF who’d been seconded to de Havilland because they didn’t have enough

people to install these Merlins. And so the two of us used to work together and I got

quite good at it. And in the end he came along to me, he said, ‘Would you like to

kindly slow up because you’re killing the job?’ We were – he was paid by – he was

paid with a bonus for the number of engines that he’d installed. I came along and of

course I was very keen and I increased his work rate to a point where he had to come

and tell me to slow up. You wouldn’t believe it but that’s true.

What did you make of that?

What did I make of it? Well, it suddenly occurred to me that, you know, there were

practices on the shop floor I hadn’t realised [laughs]. And then after that I went into

the – I left him and for the latter half of my stay at Hatfield I went into the wood detail

shop. And there we were making bomb doors and using these glues that they’d

invented, synthetic glues. ‘Cause the Mosquito couldn’t have been made without

synthetic glues, I don’t think. It was like toffee. And they had colour coding and you

could only use the pots of glue when the colour coding on the glue coincided with the

colour coding up on the notice board, ‘cause it would harden.

So it was a sort of batch number sort of thing.

Batch number, yes, if you like, yes.

How do you actually make a bomb door for a Mosquito?

Well, it’s made out of birch ply and balsa wood, with metal strips along the edge.

And we used to screw the metal strips on. Yes, the whole aeroplane was practically

made of wood except for near the engines and the control runs and things like that.

They used to build the fuselage in two halves and they would then fit all the control


32

runs and all the equipment in each half of the thing and then glue it together, the two

halves together. And then they would dope it on, the fabric – put fabric and dope on

it. And it was a very smooth aeroplane. In fact it was the best aeroplane in the war I

think. I have a soft spot for the Mosquito.

Did you actually get to see the whole thing being built or just the bomb doors?

Oh well, I was on the production line seeing the engines being put in and then I – a lot

of the bits were made in furniture factories and brought to Hatfield. So I didn’t see an

awful lot of the woodworking but I did see quite a bit on the bomb doors.

How does one actually install a mill and engine on a Mosquito anyway?

What …?

How do you actually install an engine?

Well, they come in crates and you’ve got to lift them out on a hoist. And you’d move

it along on the overhead tracks and get it into position. And it’s fixed onto – there are

mounted plates on the wooden structure of the – the macelle, which you would attach

the – what do you call it? Oh … the bearers, the engine bearers. And then you have

to install all the pipes and connect everything up and in the end you put the propeller

on.

Is it difficult?

No, dead easy actually, especially when you’re young. You pick things up very

quickly and you remember things. And as far as I know, they never came along to me

and said, you’ve done that wrong.

[0:18:42]

Did they give you much training at Hatfield?


33

No. I just followed what this corporal was doing. He was an RAF corporal who’d

been seconded to de Havilland ‘cause they didn’t have enough people to do the job.

You mentioned the RAF corporal’s reactions to your building things quickly, but what

sort of – how are you treated by the longer serving engineers there?

Oh, they were very, very kind to us, no problem at all. They were – the wood detail

shop was half women and half men. And I enjoyed the wood detail. In fact, I bought

lots of tools, ‘cause I didn’t have a tool kit when I went there, and I’ve still got them.

And I’ve still got a few rivets and a few nuts and bolts. I used to pick them up off the

floor and pocket them.

Was it a problem getting tools during the war?

No, no, no, plenty of tools around.

Where did you get them from?

From the local tool shops, shops where you could buy a hammer and pliers and, you

know, you name it. Well, I mean, today you have to go and look for a tool shop,

don’t you, I suppose? Yes, you’re right. But in those days there were lots of places

where you could buy tools. Today you’ve got to ferret around in Bristol to find a tool

shop.

I’m just surprised that they didn’t actually provide you with tools there.

Yeah, I suppose so, but then if you’re a student they would expect you to probably

borrow the other chaps’ tools, but the other chaps used to say go out and buy yourself

a tack hammer and buy one of these and one of those.

What do you think you actually learnt from your time there at Hatfield?

I don’t know. I think – specifically not an awful lot, but the idea of putting an

aeroplane together I think was what I learnt. Of course I’ve never been on the


34

production side, worked on the production side, so – I’ve always been on the

performance, new project side. I spent an awful lot of time as a new projects man. I

was chief engineer of new projects at Bristol for twenty years, which is quite wrong, I

think. You need to change people on new projects otherwise you get a bit stultified,

yeah. One chap has certain ideas and you need to mingle a few other ideas.

[0:22:09]

I was wondering, you know, talking about buying tools, who was actually paying for

your university education?

Who was paying for it? Erm, well, we used to get bursaries in those days. And I

lived at home and – yeah, I can’t remember how much we – or whether I had to pay

for the course. Certainly when I was in school in Cardiff my father paid fees, ‘cause

if you were earning over a certain amount, even going to a grammar school, you were

paying fees. It wasn’t – it was called a high school in Cardiff. But I do remember

there was a certain amount of fee paying going on in the high schools.

[0:23:02]

I was just wondering as well, you mentioned that at the end of your university course

that you were told to go to London to this interview. What happened at the interview?

Well, about four of us went up by train and we disappeared to various places in

London. And I went to Millbank and I was shown up to the place where I was going

to be interviewed. And the boss man, a chap called Clifford Moore, handed me a

brochure and he said, ‘There’s an aeroplane,’ he said, ‘Would you like to assess the

performance of that sort of – an aeroplane like that?’ So I said, ‘Yes,’ like a shot.

And so I started work about a month later, I think it was. It was about 2nd August

1945, because the war in Europe had been over for a few months and the war in Japan

looked like going on for a long time until suddenly two atomic bombs were dropped

and that was it.

[0:24:21]


35

And we settled down then to looking at bombers, nuclear bombers. The first job I had

was the Canberra. I was working with a chap and the two of us were doing the

performance of the Canberra and trying to re-optimise it, but having a lot of trouble

with the chap – who’s the chap now? Petter, WE Petter. He had certain strong views

on how to make a jet bomber. And this was in the beginning of August 1945, before

the full significance of what had been going on in Germany had filtered through to

Farnborough and to Headquarters, certainly toHeadquarters. And the Canberra of

course was a straight winged aeroplane. And oh, well we had views on what ought to

be done but Petter had his own way and he built it with a very low aspect ratio, which

is good from a structural point of view, structural efficiency point of view. But it was

limited to a Mach number of 0.72 because it was a straight wing, twelve percent thick

straight wing, and that – that fixed that. And I think if that design had been put in a

year later, would never have been a straight winged aeroplane, yet it was the epitome

of bomber performance in its day, subsonic bomber performance. And after – all the

bombers that were built in the first ten years after the war were subsonic bombers.

They were looking at supersonic bombers in the early 1950s. But that – the Canberra

had a critical Mach number of about 0.72 to 0.75, somewhere in that region, and that’s

pretty low speed today, though even the highly swept transport aeroplanes don’t do

much more than 0.8 Mach number.

Hmm.

And … of course, we had arguments. We had arguments with the various aircraft

companies as to whether they were doing the right thing. We didn’t just accept what

they were proposing. In fact, something in that document there, I was told by my boss

that in the immediate pre war years, de Havilland came along to the Ministry and said,

here’s an unarmed bomber, just like the DH9, I think it was, in World War I, which

gets away with it by being faster than the fighters. And so it was examined by that

department I was about to join and they concluded that it would be faster than the

Spitfire with the same engines. And a chap called Wilfred Freeman was the Air Chief

Marshal. He was the power behind the throne in – well, I say behind the throne, I

mean, behind the air staff. He was the really important man. Lord Portal was made

Chief of Air Staff but it should have been Freeman. But Freeman had a messy


36

divorce and if you had a messy divorce in the ‘30s, the King wouldn’t sign up for

your appointment. Being Chief of Air Staff, that was an appointment that had to be

approved by the King. And of course, as he’d had a brother who’d had a messy

marriage to a divorcee, it was a thing that – it wasn’t done. So he had to stay in the

background and advise the Air Council while Portal became the Chief of Air Staff.

Now he was given the assessment by RDT1, which was the department I was going to

work in, and they said, this aeroplane will be faster than the conventional fighters.

And of course a lot of people in the Ministry of Aircraft production, as it was then –

no, that hadn’t arrived yet, but in the Air Ministry there were people who said, oh, you

must have a turret on a bomber to defend itself. And there was a big tussle went on

but Freeman gave the order for the unarmed bomber, but he couldn’t stop them

putting a turret on it as a trial. And they did a trial installation with a turret and it

reduced the speed from being faster than the Spitfire to being a lot slower than the

Spitfire, so it never had a turret thereafter.

What was the bomber?

The Mosquito. And it was called the DH90, I think. It was a private venture, the

Mosquito, by de Havilland. They offered it to the Ministry and said, here’s a bomber,

it’s going to be very fast. And by fitting the later marks of Merlin, the thing went up

to 40,000 feet and flew at 420, 420, 430 miles an hour. And it had a pressure cabin in

the end, it flew so high.

So this was ultimately the same aircraft that you were actually building down at

Hatfield?

That’s right, yes. So my career was to some extent interwoven with the Mosquito.

And I’ve always had a soft spot for the Mosquito.

[0:30:54]

Ah. Did you come across Wilfred Freeman while you were actually working for

MAP?


37

No, I didn’t, no. There were lots of people in the Thames House. There was Henry

Tizard in there. I heard the name and I had him pointed out to me. Henry Tizard was

the chap who single-handedly really organised the radar system. He didn’t invent

radar but he invented operational research. And so he set up a system for intercepting

the civil airliners coming in from Paris with Hawker Fury and Hawker Hart

aeroplanes and combined – and using the radar. And that is one reason why we won

the Battle of Britain, because we had used the radar to keep the aeroplanes on the

ground rather than on combat air patrol. And Tizard was the Dean of Science, I think,

at Imperial College and he remained employed by Imperial College throughout the

war and he never accepted a penny from the – except expenses, I think, from the

Ministry, much to the chagrin of the other civil servants, ‘cause they didn’t have much

of a hold over him, I think. And he masterminded the air staff activities throughout

the war and he would sit on one side of the table with the Air Ministry men and

Churchill would sit on the other side with Lindemann, his personal advisor. And

Lindemann and what’s his name …

Churchill?

No, the other chap, the chap I was talking about.

Tizard.

Tizard, Tizard. Lindemann and Tizard would sort of be doing that [clicks fingers].

And Lindemann was a bit of an eccentric and he had all sorts of strange ideas whereas

Tizard was a down to earth chap who advised the – he was advising the Air Ministry

and Lindemann was advising Churchill. And they had a lot of stand up rows, I think.

And Tizard was in Millbank. He had an office in Millbank.

As someone who’s, you know, quite junior in this whole structure, how much do you

actually talk about people like Tizard and your other bosses?

How do I talk about them? Well, I didn’t realise at the time – I knew the names, but it

was only after I’d got to know the business very clearly and read the books – I read

Teddet’s biography, autobiography. I read Tizard’s biography. And you put two and


38

two together. And you look at Churchill and the Prof, there’s a book called Churchill

and the Prof, which is Lindemann, and he was full of crazy crackpot schemes,

whereas Tizard was a down to earth chap.

[0:34:16]

Where were you actually based?

Where was I based? What, this period of time?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I lived off Clapham Common and I worked in Central London.

What building?

Thames House South.

What was it like in 1945?

It was like a mausoleum actually from the outside but it was a very comfortable place.

We were up on the fifth floor. It was a huge building made of Portland stone, I think,

and built before the war by ICI as a – I don’t know whether it was an investment in

office accomodation. ‘Cause ICI House was part of the same complex and there was

a bridge over the road, in Horseferry Road, between the two buildings.

Could you describe what your office is actually like up on that fifth floor?

I can remember it. There were about six of us in it and it had a long table and we sat

on either side of the table. And next door to us were the people – we were doing

bombers and transports and flying boats and civil airliners, the lot. And the people

next door were doing fighters. And the boss of that was a chap called Handel Davies.

Handel Davies was a Welshman. He was an aerodynamicist from Farnborough

originally and he eventually ended up as a director of British Aerospace.


39

Did you see much of him?

Yes, I – the strange thing is that, you know, I’d just come out of university, just come

out of school almost, and I was sitting next door to a chap who’d been a scientist at

Farnborough and well known in the business, right in the heart of the procurement

system.

What was he like?

What was he like? Oh, he was very pleasant. There was no side to him. I remember

I met him at an open air theatre near Chippenham and, you know, we greeted each

other as long lost friends. This is years after, when I was down at Bristol, working

with either Rolls Royce or Bristol. I don’t know whether we’d linked up. But yes, he

was a very well known character in the business. And there were lots of other ones

around as well. There was a chap called N E Roe, who was the Director of Technical

Development, DTD, and he was Nero, N E Roe. And he was a temporary civil

servant and everybody used to say he was only an acting engineering officer or

something really. But he’d come in from industry during the war.

So who was your boss?

My boss was a chap called Liptrot and he was known as ‘Loopy.’

Why?

Because he was a captain in the First World War and I don’t know whether he used to

loop the loop or what or whether he was just a bit daft. But he was a very intelligent

chap actually. And when I arrived he’d just gone off to study helicopters, so he left

the administration of the department to Clifford Moore and he went off, finding what

was going on in America and places like that. ‘Cause the helicopter didn’t really take

much part in the war. It was a German – the Germans had a helicopter or two. I don’t

think we did. We had an autogyro, cievra autogyro, where the rotor isn’t powered.

But you – and you have an engine driving a propeller at the front and that sets the


40

thing going. But autogyros have gone out of business now. They weren’t as flexible

as helicopters.

[0:39:01]

Who were the other five or six people round this long table you’re all sat at?

Who were the five or six people? Well, there was a teacher who’d been at – well,

he’d been a teacher before he came into the business, called CP O’Dowd. He was

obviously an Irishman of some sort. And there was a chap called Nayler who spent

all his time sniffing – what are those things they used to sniff?

Snuff?

Not snuff, no, it was – I forget what you call it. It’s some sort of drug, I think. There

was a chap I worked with closely, who was a chap – we didn’t – there was no sort of

hierarchy in the department. We just came in and you took help from senior guys

without necessarily actually being responsible for them, but of course you did what

they said. Andrew Mitchell this was. He was a lecturer in mathematics from St

Andrews University. He’d been in Farnborough working in structures before he came

up to work in the performance office. ‘Cause we were doing the performance of all

the aeroplanes that the RAF was dealing with and he used to – he was a very nice

chap. And he used to tell me about the people in the Structures Department. There

was a chap called AR Collar, who became a professor at Bristol, and there was

another chap called Tye, so you had sitting next to each other Collar and Tie. And

Tye – I’ve forgotten his Christian name now. He became the head of the certification

business for aeroplanes after the war.

When you said you were doing the performance for British aircraft, what does doing

the performance actually mean?

It means that you had to be able to make estimates of the drag of the aeroplane, the

weight of the aeroplane and from that you deduced the performance of the aeroplane,

and against the specification that they were trying to meet. And you may have


41

different views on what was right or wrong with the aeroplanes and sometimes they

would – people would come from the companies and we would discuss it and they

might make changes. But on the Canberra, with Petter as the Chief Designer, I don’t

think he would stand any changes. He thought – he’d already made aeroplanes with

very high aspect ratio wings and they’d been flops, like the Welkin. And he wasn’t

going to do that again, so he made it with a very low aspect ratio.

What are those – you know, considering that you did it in the room in question, what

do you mean by an aspect ratio?

Aspect ratio is the wingspan divided by the mean cord of the wing. In other words, a

high aspect ratio wing is one – the long thin one going out a long way. A low aspect

ratio one is like a Delta where the ratio of the cord to the span of the wing is a much

smaller number.

Hmm. Did you actually meet Petter himself?

I think I saw him once, but we used to see his underlings, who eventually came to

control British – Warton and British Aerospace. Oh gosh, I’ve forgotten their names

now. Page, Petter and Creasy. Ray Creasy was the aerodynamicist, Page was the sort

of overall design man, I think. And his son actually I met at Bristol. He became one

of our commercial men. And then he went to Cobhams to the air refuelling people.

It’s funny, it’s a very small world, aviation, the top of aviation.

I was interested in – what was the difference between what MAP thinks the Canberra

should look like and what Petter thinks the Canberra should look like?

Well, we weren’t arguing with him whether it should be a straight wing or a swept

wing at that time. I think the specification was put out before the war ended and he’d

replied – he’d offered a solution to the specification and it was a straight wing

solution. If it had – if the Americans had been doing it I think they would have

stopped and said, hey, you can sweep the wings of this aeroplane. But we didn’t, and

it was a very useful aeroplane, a very efficient aeroplane, and for many – well, it


42

stayed in service longer than some of the V bombers because it was so – so efficient.

But it wasn’t a supersonic aeroplane.

Well, what was the advantage of sweeping the wing?

The advantage of sweeping the wing is to reduce the transonic drag and the

supersonic drag.

Meaning?

Hm?

What does that result in?

It means a faster aeroplane. And if you’re faster you can – you get more lift and you

can fly higher. This had dawned in Germany many years before it dawned in this

country and America was even further behind. And the ideal way of exploiting a jet

engine is to send it – is to fly it fast, or certainly faster than the, really than the

Canberra went. But then you come up against the transonic drag and you’ve got to

find a way of reducing transonic drag. And this is what Busemann did in Germany

and he – I mean, I think he’s – he was out on his own in proposing the swept wing.

Certainly nobody noticed it in this country and I think it was partly due to the fact that

we were changing over the Chief Aerodynamicist at Farnborough at the time.

Glavert, I think, was the Chief Aerodynamicist and he was – I think he died and he

was replaced by a chap – I think it was Douglas was his name. Anyway, he was

replaced by another chap and in the handover they must have ignored the papers at the

Volta Congress of 1935. But the Americans didn’t pick it up either.

[0:46:37]

I was wondering as well, could you give me an idea of what a day at the office is

actually like, working at MAP?


43

Well, if you were a temporary civil servant at the end of the war, you came in at eight

o’clock, I think, or 8:15. I think there was a cut off time about 8:15. If you were a

long term professional civil servant you arrived at nine o’clock and you went at four

thirty, whereas the temporary civil servants came in at eight to 8:15 and went at five

o’clock or six – no, six o’clock, six o’clock, I think. I mean, it’s incredible when you

think back on it. The permanent civil servants often lived down on the south coast

and they’d come up by train every day and so they had a long time travelling. So they

used to be off at four thirty in the afternoon or four o’clock in the afternoon.

Which were you?

I was a temporary civil servant.

How did you get to work?

By bus. First of all I lived at Clapham Common and I – I mean, I was – I think I was

earning £205 a year, which is what – £4 a week, is it? Divide by fifty. Yeah, £4 a

week, I think. And out of that I had to pay thirty bob for my digs and then my bus

fares and things like that. I didn’t have an awful lot left over after. And I got

accommodation in Clapham Common and it was a very interesting – very interesting

lodging house, if you like. Sitting round the table you had an engine driver, a

newsreader from the Daily Telegraph, a lady teacher, a Roman Catholic priest in

training, about three or four guys from Imperial College and me and one or two other

– I forget where they came from, but they were a strange lot. And they used to have

lots of arguments over the meals. We each had our own pat of butter or margarine

and our own pot of marmalade, ‘cause it was all on the ration, you know. I found that

quite fascinating. One of that chaps there, who was at Imperial College, was a chap

called – oh hell, what’s his name? Roe, Frank Roe, R-O-E, and he became Managing

Director of Warton, the Warton branch of British Aerospace. When he first went

there he was a wind tunnel man. So I met him in these digs. And then when I go to

Bristol I’m sent up to Warton to find out about the Canberra, which I’d been dealing

with in its specification stage at London, and we then acquired an aeroplane, a test bed

aeroplane, for putting the Olympus in, to test the Olympus. And so I was the one who

was set up to do the performance of the Olympus in the Canberra. And I discovered


44

that it would go up to about 68,000 feet. And we took the – so I was given the job of

calculating how high we were going to go and what we ought to do and, you know, I

recommended they flew in their underpants and socks and left the flight test observer

out of the aeroplane. In fact, they almost did that. And Walter Gibb was our Chief est

pilot and he got the aeroplane up to about 68,000 feet, where it was poised between

stalling the aeroplane and the mach number limit of 0.72, which the aeroplane had.

And so it was called Coffin Corner, I think, I seem to remember. So you’re struggling

there to make sure that he didn’t stall the aeroplane or get into – into a compressibility

stall. And, well, I think that was about as high as they’d go. The Americans, as a

result, I think, of the altitude attempts, bought the aeroplane and used it for high flying

reconnaissance. I don’t know where, probably over Europe somewhere, but they did

put a bigger wing on it, extended the wing and gave it more altitude. But that was

where – I’d gone to Bristol after coming out of the university for the second time and

was working for Stanley Hooker.

[0:52:20]

What was it actually like living in the lodging house when you met this guy from

Imperial?

Living in a boarding house? Oh, it was a new experience. We used to have a bit of a

time. I remember for some reason or another we were scrummaging down in one of

the bedrooms and somebody got his shoulder under the fireplace and the fireplace

came away from the wall, so we had to hastily put it back and try and stick it to the

wall. But yes, it was a strange existence. 15 Lavender Gardens, it was, I remember.

It sticks in my mind. Funny, the places you go to visit. When I worked at Hatfield,

after I – I went first to Salisbury Hall and we were there on the first night of the V1s

bombing London and we were up and down all night with these – every time a flying

bomb came over they sounded the air raid sirens. And we were being told stories by

the inmates there, that Nell Gwyn used to haunt this place. Yeah. And this is the

place where they designed the Mosquito. And they sent me – when I went – when I’d

been up there during the war they’d sent me to a – first of all I went to Salisbury Hall

till they could find me lodgings. The lodgings I went to – it was a Mrs Ashby and the


45

name of her house was de la Zouch [laughs]. It’s funny, the things that stick in your

mind.

[0:54:14]

What was it actually like inside the lodging house? What sort of furnishings?

Oh, in wartime it was, you know, pretty, well, bare and – what’s the word I’m

thinking of? I mean, it wasn’t the luxury you have today.

You talked about sort of being at the office from eight fifteen till six. Could you

actually talk me through what you do in that day at the office?

Well, you came in at – you tried to get in before eight fifteen ‘cause the man used to

come and draw a line across the book where you used to sign your name, so if you got

beyond the line too often you’d get ticked off. And we would work until mid morning

and then we would all troop out to Horseferry Road to the Lyons Corner House and

have a coffee and cakes. They didn’t bring stuff round the office. The only thing they

brought round were soap and towels for the permanent civil servants. Temporary

civil servants didn’t get a soap and towel [laughs]. And we used to go out and have a

bun and a cup of tea. And then in the afternoon – oh, and at lunchtime we would then

go out and try all the canteens in Westminster. So we got – [whistling] she’s

whistling the dog. The various canteens, there must have been dozens of them and we

became experts on the cooking in British restaurants and in canteens around

Westminster.

What was the best and worst of that?

Well, some of the Ministry canteens weren’t very good. There were a few British

restaurants that weren’t bad. And yeah, you could barge your way into any Ministry.

I don’t know whether the people could get into a Thames House ‘cause you had to

have a pass to get into a Thames House, but we used to go into the other canteens.

And we used to walk around Westminster at lunchtime for quite a while. We made up

for having to come in early and go late [laughs]. And Strutton Ground off Victoria


46

Street, if you know London, we used to go there at lunchtime and there would be guys

selling all sorts of things. I always remember one chap, he used to sell glass cutters.

And he was an absolute artist at cutting glass. He could cut it like that, like S shaped

cuts, and do that and it would break like that, and then he’d sell it to you for half a

crown, I think it was. And then you’d take it home and try to do it and, you know,

you couldn’t do it [laughs]. And then there was another chap who used to tear up

telephone books.

Why?

Oh, just to show how strong he was. I think he would wait until he’d collected a bit of

money before he tore up a telephone book. But these things were about that thick.

So what do you do after lunch?

After lunch? Well, we’d wander around Strutton Ground and into – we could walk

through Deans Yard and get into St James Park, and we used to wander round there

for quite a while. We had a long lunch hour. Then about the middle of the afternoon

we’d go off to the Lyons Corner House again. But we worked hard. We still worked

hard. And then we went at six o’clock. And we worked Saturday mornings then.

What sort of things were you actually working on? By working on I mean the sorts of

activities you’re doing, so I’m writing at the moment, when I’m at home I’m checking

out email, I might be typing out documents.

We certainly weren’t checking emails.

But yeah, what’s the equivalent sort of office activities you had to do?

Well, we had to make – I remember great big tabulations of all the aeroplanes, ‘cause

you’d get about half a dozen aeroplanes sometimes to a specification so we had to

compare them all. And the Brabazons, the Brabazon committee, produced

specifications for about six or seven aeroplanes, I think. It wasn’t just the Brabazon.

The Brabazon was at Bristol. Everybody thought the Brabazon was one aeroplane but


47

it was the Brabazon 1. And then there was the Brab 2 and the Brab 3. The Brab 3, I

think, was an Avro jet airliner. And I forget what the – I think the Comet had a Brab

number to it. The Brabazon committee was set up before the end of the war to decide

what we were going to do in the peace. And so we had all these aeroplanes coming in

at different times. There was the Apollo airliner, which is – I think – I can’t

remember, was that the Brab 5A? Oh, that was the Dove, I think. Anyway, I’ve

forgotten all these now. But the Apollo airliner was an Armstrong Whitworth

aeroplane with Armstrong-Siddeley Mamba engines. And it won the competition but

it was then beaten to the post by the Viscount, which was a private venture scheme

put in by Vickers with Rolls Royce Dart engines. And the poor old Apollo, which did

quite well, was just relegated. But that’s the power of Lord Hives at the time. He was

known as Lord Hives of Industry down at Bristol [laughs]. He was the boss of Derby.

You mentioned a few different aeroplane projects there. I was just wondering, what

sort of things did you actually have to do with them?

We estimated the performance of the whole aeroplane, how far it would go or what it

would carry, how fast it would go.

[End of Track 2]


48

Track 3

How do you actually do performance calculations?

Well, it depends what age you’re talking about.

How do you do performance calculations in 1945?

We did it with slide rules. I came back from Germany and I brought back a fifty

centimetre slide rule, about that long. I’ve still got it. And I used to use that.

How does one actually use a slide rule?

How do you use a slide rule? Oh, well it turns multiplications into additions or

subtractions or … by having a logarithmic scale on the top. Haven’t you ever used a

slide rule? Good God.

What does one look like?

Well, do you want me to get you one?

I’d just like you to describe it for the tape, if you would please.

Oh right.

Because a person listening to this may not have a slide rule to look at, so [laughs].

Well, I mean, it’s logarithms put on a scale, so that if you – and you have different

scales on the fixed part of the slide rule and the moving part of the slide rule. And so

you can do square roots by – by just dividing by two. I think so. I’ve almost

forgotten how to use a slide rule myself now.

How easy is it to use one?


49

Oh, very easy once you get the idea, yes. I mean, I’ve got one. Are you sure you

wouldn’t like to see one? I’ll show it to you some other time, yes. But yes, we used

slide rules. That’s about it. I don’t think we had any of these … machines that were

sort of like winding a handle. I’ve forgotten the name of the machine now.

Is it Brunsviga?

Brunsviga’s one of them, yes. But we didn’t have any of those. We had slide rules

just about, and I spent all day long using my slide rule.

How many calculations do you have to do to estimate the performance of an aircraft?

Gosh, I don’t know. I’ve never counted them. Quite a lot, ‘cause we used to estimate

the structure weight. We would have to – we would tabulate all the Mach numbers

and the speeds and that and we would have to make assumptions about the drag

coefficients. We used to drag assess a drawing by taking planimeters and finding the

surface areas of bodies. And we would have – there were aerodynamic datasheets, in

which you could read off the drag of a body as a function of Reynolds number, and

that was all done fairly carefully and we got pretty good at it. I mean, even before the

war they were doing a very good job with the aerodynamic datasheets. Those were

produced by the Royal Aeronautical Society, I seem to remember, but with the help of

Farnborough. And so we were equipped with means of estimating drags of wings and

bodies separately, then we had to put interference factors on. And subsonically it

wasn’t too difficult. Of course with the interference once you get to supersonics are

quite difficult ‘cause you can have positive interference and you have negative

interference. You have a swept wing and you can put bodies – I forget what they call

them now, but area distribution, which you can affect by putting lumps on bodies.

[Interviewee correction: ‘Whitcomb Bodies’]. And so supersonic drag estimation is

different from subsonic drag estimation.

How much of your working day is taking up by using a slide rule, doing these

calculations?


50

I should think about – it must have been about twenty or thirty percent of it, if not

more. And it was all done by hand, not by machine.

Did it ever get boring?

Not for the time I was there. I went there in 1945. In 1946 I went to Germany. In

1947 I came back from Germany and I worked for half of 1947, then went back to

college. And then when I came from there I went to Bristol and worked on engines.

And … well, by the time I got to Bristol we had various Curta machines, do you

remember the Curta? It had like a lot of drills, metal drills, in a pot and you turn a

handle and move things around – I’ve forgotten how to use them now. And then we

had the Brunsvigas and various other machines.

[0:05:42]

What was it actually like working in that office? What was the working atmosphere

like amongst your …?

Well, it depends what office you’re talking about. In Millbank it was good. And you

could open the windows and have nice fresh air way above the traffic and that. In –

when I came to Bristol we were – the technical office was situated in a manufacturing

hanger, a manufacturing factory. It was called Number 2 Shadow, because it was a

Shadow factory erected by the government before the war to encourage people to

increase their production. But unfortunately it had a corrugated iron roof, I think, and

a few skylights and on a hot summer afternoon it was terrible. People used to fall

asleep left, right and centre. And, yeah, it wasn’t very comfortable in the summer.

But then they built a new building, ‘cause it really was needed at Bristol, and Frank

Whittle came along and it’s called Whittle House.

[0:06:56]

Well, when you were working at Millbank, was there much secrecy to your work?

Oh yes. I mean, everything was secret. I mean, you didn’t really talk about it.


51

What did you tell people about what you did?

Oh, I told them that I estimated the performance of aeroplanes. I didn’t tell them what

the results were [laughs].

What sort of reactions did you get when you told people that you estimated the

performance of aeroplanes?

Well, they were quite surprised because they didn’t understand how it was that I got

parachuted into the middle of the procurement system. This is the heart of the

decision making for the civil and military aeroplanes, ‘cause the government was

really paying for everything from 1945 until about 1970. And all the aeroplanes had

to be agreed with the Ministry and with the Nationalised Airline Companies, BEA and

BOAC. And therein lies the tragedy of our procurement system because we built the

wrong aeroplanes. I mean, we built a Brabazon, which was – Brabazon 1, at Filton

which was supposed to fly 150 passengers with beds and that across the Atlantic at

260 miles an hour, and it just wasn’t what the airlines wanted. And BOAC at the time

didn’t have much of a say in that, I don’t think. It was a civil servants aeroplane for

carrying civil servants across the Atlantic with a bed to sleep on. They’d been flying

in Lancastrians, where you were sleeping in the bomb bay or something like that,

before. Anyway, and then the Britannia, which followed on the Brabazon here,

because the Brabazon clearly wasn’t going to go anywhere – the Britannia was called

the medium range empire aeroplane and it was designed to land at Nairobi and at – I

forget what the height of Nairobi Airport is, but it was hot and high. And it was not

designed to cross the Atlantic. And then as soon as BOAC got into the business they

realised that the Americans were coming along with the Strato cruiser and the Super

Constellation and the DC7C and they didn’t want the Britannia, though it had been

designed specifically for them, which is one of the things that’s bedevilled

procurement in this country for donkey’s years. They didn’t design it for the

international market or for as many customers as you could possibly get, you designed

it for BEA or BOAC.


52

That’s a view now, looking back, but sitting there in that chair in the office in 1945,

how do these sort of matters seem from that point of view?

Well, we used to tear our hair out when we realised that we were making an aeroplane

that BOAC had signed up for, which they then didn’t want. They wanted something

different. They wanted the Strato cruiser, ‘cause they hadn’t thought about it. It was

a – the history of procurement in post World War II is dreadful. We were making

hundreds of aeroplanes but they were all prototypes and we were keeping too many

aircraft companies going to produce these prototypes and we didn’t have any money

to make production aeroplanes. And then we made the wrong production aeroplanes.

[0:10:55]

Did these problems actually concern you much when you were working in aircraft

production?

I realised what was going on but, I mean, I wasn’t in a position to make my presence

felt. I really – I wasn’t all that keen on Concorde, because I was in charge of noise –

one of my jobs was noise of Concorde. It was the sonic boom as well as the jet noise

and it was a – you know, I had to negotiate with NGTE on what the noise of Concorde

was going to be, because there were no international rules and nobody bothering

about it in the Ministry, so we – there was a chap at NGTE and he and I negotiated

that it wouldn’t be noisier than a VC10, which was the noisiest civil airliner at the

time. And we signed up for that and that’s the way Concorde went. But my goodness

me, looking back on it – at the time I realised that the procurement system in this

country was bedevilled by the nationalised industries and the government working

together to – the government was financing BOAC to design aeroplanes that in the

end BOAC didn’t want. And the government was carrying out the process of issuing

the specifications, not the airlines.

Was it ever anything you talked about at MAP with your colleagues?

Say that again.


53

Was it ever something you talked about with your colleagues at MAP, this

discrepancy?

No. At the time it seemed the only way for this country. The airlines didn’t have any

money and they were nationalised. There were hardly – I mean, British Eagle, I think,

was the first airline to really buy aeroplanes that it wanted and ask for aeroplanes that

it wanted. Remember British Eagle? You don’t? I forget the name of the chap who

ran British Eagle. He was a well known figure in the industry. But it was a charter

airline and it bought Britannias and used them on ski tripping in Europe and the like.

I’ve seen the affects of government and nationalised industries on the procurement of

aeroplanes and it just appalled me. The guys from government often went into the

nationalised airlines and they had a malign influence, I think, on the whole process.

As a temporary civil servant, did you ever consider becoming a permanent civil

servant?

Yes. When I came back from Germany I was thinking around what I should do. And

they gave me various jobs which made me think that, you know, I could make my

way in the Ministry. I was made Secretary of the Weight Control Committee between

the government and industry. I was asked to write a report on civil airliners in

America and Britain, compare them. And I thought, this looks like a good job, so I

applied for a permanent civil service post. And I got the post – I got interviews for a

permanent civil service, and was offered a job, then I found they were going to send

me to the Watford Road Research Establishment.

Which one was that?

Well, at the time it was at Watford and it was studying how to design roads.

Oh, the Road Research Laboratory?

The Road Research Department, yes. And I said, well, blow that, you know, that’s

not what I want to do. So I left and went back to Cardiff [University]. And then

when I left university again I went into Bristol.


54

That seems a good point to stop for the day.

[End of Track 3]


55

Track 4

I was wondering if you could tell me how you came to be sent to Germany.

Well, it’s a bit unusual really. I had only been there in Millbank for less than a year, I

think it was about eight, nine months. And the – the war had ended in August, just as

I arrived. I arrived on 2nd August and I think the atomic bombs were dropped in the –

about the 12th of the month, something like that. Then of course that changed the

outlook altogether then. What was wanted then was a quick – the idea there was

going to be a long struggle in the Far East was gone and it was now end of the war

completely. And so they were looking for ways of cutting down on all the ministries

of aircraft production, ministry supplies and War Office, cutting them back to size a

bit. So that meant that last in would be first out and I was the last one in [laughs].

And I – in about six months I’d been doing a job and I’d got – you know, I’d lapped it

up. It was a job I liked doing, estimating the performance of aeroplanes, calculating

what they ought to be doing and the way they ought to be designed, alongside about

four other guys, who were well versed in it. And I learnt an awful lot in the first six

months. And so the boss man, a chap called Clifford Moore – he was my immediate

big superior and he called me in one day and he said, ‘We’re having a big redundancy

as a result of the war ending. We would like you back. Would you like to go to

Germany and stay out of the way for a while?’ So I said, ‘Yes, love it.’ And so they

sent me off to the various places in Whitehall which ran the operation. And this was a

fairly secret operation, as I think I mentioned. And they kitted me out and gave me

the equivalent rank of lieutenant and sent me off to Germany, I think it was in May

1946, either May or June. And I was flown out there from Farnborough. I nearly

missed the aeroplane actually. I got on the tube at Victoria, not knowing very much

about where the tubes went, and I found I was going around in a circle, coming back

to Victoria. And I got off and then managed to get to the – I think we actually had

[to] stop at Blackbushe for customs control, so – they were very hot, the customs, in

those days. They didn’t like you bringing cameras back and bottles of booze and

things like that. It wasn’t like it is today. Anyway, I flew out in a Lockheed Hudson

to Germany.

[0:03:50]


56

Where did you actually go in Germany?

Well, we went straight – we flew straight from Blackbushe, I think it was the first

time, to Volkenrode, which is Brunswick. If you look at the map, Volkenrode is on

the outskirts of Brunswick. The road from the establishment at Volkenrode [is]

actually very close to the north-west corner of Brunswick and very near the autobahn,

very near the Mittelland Canal. But as I think I said before, it was practically

invisible from the air, what was going on. All the research facilities were being built

or had been built in the wood and then after they’d been built they then covered the

tops of the buildings with artificial tree branches. And you may have seen in that

PowerPoint presentation there, some of the pictures of the wind tunnels with grass

over the top of them. They were photographed by the RAF several times during the

war and they just said, well, it’s a very small grass airfield, nothing very much going

on, a few aeroplanes around occasionally. And then they photographed it in 1943 or

’44 and said, no change. And I’ve got one of the photographs, aerial photographs, in

there.

What was it like on the ground?

On the ground? It was very – well, I arrived in the beginning of summer. It was very

hot. There were lots of flies around. We used to go hunting on the airfield, shooting

rabbits and hares. I don’t think I want to do that anymore but young guys are – you

know, they’re very trigger happy. We used to ride around in a Humber staff car with

the roof open and shotguns and air rifles at the ready. And then the Mess would

produce potted – what do you call it, jugged hare and rabbit and things like that. But

everything was in the wood. And the German scientists, we learnt, when they first

came there, they used to get lost in the woods. And there were these various

establishments, three establishments, aerodynamics, engines and missiles, projectiles,

and they were all separate, separate controls, and they hardly talked to each other.

And the scientists were boarded in the forest in the building, the V2 building, which

we actually occupied. All the scientists from the UK occupied that building. And one

or two of us got lost in the forest on occasion.


57

Actually to stand there and look around, what would you see?

In the forest? Just trees. There were odd tracks through the forest. They were hard

roads and we used to ride cars along them. We had an enormous collection of

motorcars shipped out there for us, military vehicles and civil vehicles. I think I – did

I mention that we had the German Ambassador’s Mercedes Tourer from the London

embassy with a British registration? And there were no – nothing was spared, no cash

spared. We had everything we wanted and we had the ability to get everything.

When you’re in – I think I – Operation Surgeon, then everybody reacts to you. That

was what it was. It’s not been highly publicised as an operation. I don’t think there is

a write up on it, I’ve never seen one, but it is mentioned.

What was the operation called again, sorry?

‘Operation Surgeon’, cutting out the interesting bits of technology and sending them

back to the UK, to Farnborough, to the newly established Bedford part of RAE and to

the – there was a civilian outfit in Bedford as well. I’ve forgotten the name of it now.

It’s still there, that one. I think RAE Bedford has closed down now. [Interviewee

correction: Aircraft Research Association – A.R.A]

Did you think about the prospect of going out to Germany?

I jumped at it. When you’re young, anything interesting like that is – I don’t know

whether my parents were all that interested in it, ‘cause it was a pretty wild place at

the time. There were displaced persons wandering around all over the place. They

didn’t know whether there was going to be a German underground. And the Russians

were menacingly near on the – they were within twenty five miles of Volkenrode.

[0:09:50]

And we used to go up to Berlin, with permission of the Russians, and they used to

salute us as we went through their checkpoints all the way up to Berlin.

Why did you have to go to Berlin?


58

Ah, good question, yes. We used to collect interesting bits of information from

various factories and equipment from various factories in Berlin. And this was my

boss, WJ Stern. I don’t – I can’t tell you what WJ Stern’s real job was. I suspect it

was something he didn’t talk about. And he took me along to map read and drive

him, I think, rather than anything else, because I wasn’t a very experienced guy,

having only been in the business out of university for about six months or so. And we

used to tour around Berlin. You could travel into the Russian zone at the time. All

this – when the iron curtain came down, that was a few years later.

What was it actually like in post war Berlin?

Ah well, the amount of destruction was enormous. It was quite difficult to navigate

your way there because there were no street signs where the whole place had been

knocked down and you couldn’t see what the buildings were like, they were just heaps

of rubble either side of the road. And the Reich Chancellery when we went was very

much the same as when Hitler committed suicide. His body was – I think the two of

them, their bodies were burnt in the garden of the Chancellery, which we went to have

a look at. It was still in a state of disrepair.

How did the Russians actually treat you at this very early point after the war?

Very formally at the checkpoints. We didn’t have any contact with them. No, I think

the – you had to be a bit careful ‘cause they – at the time trains were allowed to go

through to Berlin and you could drive up the autobahn, but when the Berlin Airlift had

to be instituted then they closed off the autobahn and I think they closed off the trains

as well. All the food and coal and you name it had to be flown into Berlin, by RAF

planes, by civil planes, even flying boats, I think they were using, landing on the lakes

in Berlin.

Were you actually in Germany during the airlift?

No, no, no.


59

What was WJ Stern like?

Oh, he was an old man, ‘cause he was a well pre war civil servant. He was there after

World War II [Interviewee correction: World War I] in the Air Ministry, so he must

have been one of the founding fathers of the scientific part of the air force. And he’s

reputed by – I think some senior guy writing about the history of the jet engines said

that he’d written a paper saying, using steam turbine technology, you couldn’t make

an aeroplane. Well, I think anybody now, looking back on that, will realise that steam

turbines are not designed for low weight.

What sort of chap was he to meet?

He was a big chap. Erm … yes, he was quite tall, but I would put his age at about

fifty-five, sixty. He didn’t talk very much about himself. And he took me to some

strange odd places in Berlin.

What sort of odd places?

Well, I don’t really want to talk about those [laughs].

[0:14:28]

What did you actually – what sort of facilities did you actually encounter at the

German research centre?

Well, it was a self contained research establishment. It had its own workshops. And

we had the RAF workshops as well. The RAF provided us with all the transport and

all the support that we needed. And of course they controlled the flights in and out of

Volkenrode. They ran the Mess and we were members of the Mess. We got on very

well with them. Though I remember on one occasion some – some rather drunken

scientist stole his brass plate. In the Mess he [Interviewee correction: the Station

Commander] had a brass plate with his name and decorations and all that, wing

commander – what was his name now? [Interviewee correction: Wing Commander

Mann DFC Erm … oh, I forget [laughs].


60

What sort of research facilities were actually there? Can you describe some of the

things you saw?

Well, there were low speed wind tunnels. They had plenty of low speed wind tunnels.

But they had a high Mach number wind tunnel, which could get to very high subsonic

speeds. It could also test small motors in the tunnel and they were able to – they were

able to take some of the air out of the tunnel and replace it with fresh air in order to

keep the temperature of the tunnel down. And quite a few of the installations – there

was a big eight metre tunnel, which is, you know, about twenty-five, twenty-six feet,

and that could be run at 300 feet a second, quite high for a big tunnel. It was a huge,

huge tunnel run by electric motors in a power egg … installation. And that was the

one where they used to run V1s in the operating conditions, the impulse jet,

intermittent V1 with shutters at the front which closed off when the charge ignited and

then opened up to let more air in and then there another charge. And it was tuned to

run at a certain frequency. And they tried that out in the A3 wind tunnel there and it

nearly wrecked the construction of the wind tunnel, the reinforced concrete. There

was so much acoustic power in the exhaust system. And of course, that was its

characteristic when it was flying over, it went pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. Anyway, they

quickly stopped doing that, I think. But they tested lots of other missiles. They even

tested submarines in the wind tunnel. And I think I [Interviewee correction: ‘they’]

made them of the appropriate weight so that the Froude number of the submarine was

achieved in the wind tunnel, which is quite difficult.

The what number, sorry?

Froude number, it’s like Reynold’s number. It’s a characteristic of the – it tells you

what type of flow you’ll get.

What was your personal impression of the German facilities? What did you think of

them?

Well, it’s difficult to answer that question. I hadn’t seen very much. I’d been

working in London and that’s about all I’d done. I’d been to Farnborough a few times


61

during the initial part of my work in London and I’d seen one or two of the wind

tunnels, but I think I realised then that this was something and order different in … in

standard of the tunnels and the speed of the tunnels and size of the tunnels. And we

were hopelessly behind. And of course we hadn’t realised that you could fly beyond

the speed of sound. At the start of the war we were still becoming great experts on

piston engines and we continued throughout the war to do most of that. And by

looking at the first Whittle jet, the first Meteor and the first Whittle prototype

[aircraft] demonstrator, you realised that it was designed by subsonic aerodynamicists.

And in the meanwhile the Germans had been working on swept wings and delta

wings, which we hadn’t even dreamt of till we saw what was going on there. And we

quickly absorbed it. And the Americans were even faster at absorbing these things.

By the end of – they first interviewed the German scientists in May 1945, at the end

of the war, just before the end of the war, and by the end of 1945 the Americans had

done drop body tests on swept and unswept wings using a cylindrical body with the

wings at the tail. And they had proved to their own satisfaction that sweeping a wing

back made an enormous difference to the Mach number you could travel at, even

subsonically. And I – when I arrived back in the UK I was presented with the first

test results that the Americans had done, ‘cause these – we had a complete

interchange of technical documents with the Americans at the end of the war. And it

was quite obvious that the Germans were miles ahead of us.

[0:21:15]

Could we talk a little bit more about the actual – the purpose of Operation Surgeon?

Yes. Well, Operation Surgeon was really the result of a visit by Sir Roy Fedden to

Germany. Now he was the chap who was the chief engineer at Bristol Engines in the

interwar years and for the early part of the war. And then he fell out with the directors

of Bristol Aeroplane Company, though he’d been actually providing most of the profit

for Bristol Aeroplane Company in the interwar years ‘cause he had seventeen licenses

to produce the Jupiter engine in different parts of the world, including Sweden and – I

don’t know about Germany. But Germany actually acquired Bristol Engines via

Sweden and a Sweden manufactured – I think it was the JU86K. And anyway,

Fedden – there was a bit of bad feeling over him being awarded a knighthood but not


62

to the company’s asking. The Ministry put his name forward. And he was then

rescued when he was – he fell out and parted with the Bristol Aeroplane Company,

I’m not quite sure what the terms were, and the minister, Sir Stafford Cripps at the

time, made him what he called STAM, S-T-A-M, and that was Special Technical

Advisor to the Minister, STAM. And so throughout the war Fedden was advising

MAP on various things. At the end of the war they said to him, you’d better go out to

Germany and see what’s been going on there. So he led a mission out there in June

1945. And as a result of that mission Operation Surgeon was set up with the authority

of the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshall Sir Charles Portal. And it was run by

the intelligence services. In fact, I think they kept a control of it throughout its

operation. And I remember there being talk of a crackdown on the scientists out there

who had been smuggling cameras back [laughs].

What was the actual stated purpose of Surgeon?

To acquire prototype aeroplanes perhaps, if they could, to possibly complete

prototype aeroplanes, to get the German scientists to write their monographs, to

translate the documents and send them back to the UK, to dismantle as many of the

tunnels as they could in the short – it was likely to be a short time available when they

were going to destroy all German military equipment after the war, and I think that

came in about 1948, but we were already considering blowing up some of the wind

tunnels. So they had to get out there quickly and a lot of electric motors, big electric

motors, and big compressors were taken back – and tunnels, they were taken back to

Bedford. And there was one paper written by a chap who went out there quite early

on and it was in the Royal Aeronautical Journal, the only paper I know of on stuff

that was found in Germany after World War II.

[0:25:43]

We talked a little bit about the sorts of things that the mission was set up for, but I was

wondering, at a practical level, as someone who’s part of that mission, who’s out

there, what are you actually doing on a daily basis?


63

Well, I was doing all sorts of odd things. I was editing the Germans – the Germans

did a rough translation of their [work]– if they could and then we had to put it in

reasonable English. And there were – I [have] got a record of 1,037 documents that

were treated that way. These were either monographs or they were the key reports on

swept wings and the like and the various technologies associated with aeroplanes and

engines. And the other things – we would collect – I used to go round, as I said, with

… Stern and visiting various companies in Berlin, collecting odd things from them. I

was never quite sure quite what we were collecting but – not being very high up in the

hierarchy at the time – but we took back to Cranfield quite a lot of interesting engines,

the Wankel engine, for example, that the Japanese went and developed, rotary

engines. I think it was – who was it in Japan who made a Wankel engine? Erm …

Mitsubishi, I think, Mitsubishi. Yes, I think it’s Mitsubishi. And then there was one

engine which just was a hot gas generator and you had to turn it around just to make it

work and it produced power. But it wasn’t – it produced it as hot gas. And that was

the Lutz engine, L-U-T-Z. I’ve got a – there’s a picture of it in that – in the

PowerPoint presentation I showed you. And I think there were about half a dozen of

these sort of strange engines, which they’d – the scientists had been given their [head]

– under Hitler there was not an awful lot of high level technical direction. The high

level direction was done by the scientists themselves. And if they could prove that

they were going to get something operating in a reasonable time, in time to influence

the outcome of the war, they got the money. And the amount of work on gas turbines

is quite remarkable. We tend to think only of the Junkers Jumo engines in the

Messerschmitt 262 and the BMW engines in the Arado. Those are two of the

aeroplanes that were actually used during the war. The Arado – what number, 234 I

think it was, that was used in the final stages of the war. And of course the 262 could

have been ready a lot earlier if it hadn’t been messed about with by Hitler, who

wanted to use it as a bomber, not a fighter. But if he’d produced fighters, their ability

to shoot up through the American bomber formations in daylight would have made

life very difficult for us. But luckily Hitler was inadvertently on our side on a number

of occasions, doing stupid things.

Did you see any German aircraft there, or just bits of them?


64

Bits? Well, there were about half a dozen wrecks on the aerodrome. There was a

JU88 and one or two others. Yes, I saw quite a few of them.

Did you actually test any of the German equipment, like the engines and the wind

tunnels, when you were out there?

Not personally, but we did run the – a BMW 003 engine at Volkenrode. There was

the Engine Institute and they had a wind tunnel which would test piston engines up to

36,000 feet or so, which we didn’t have. But they only had a ground test organisation

for testing jet engines. In Munich there was a BMW high altitude test plant, which

the Americans dismantled and took back to America and rebuilt in America,

Tullahoma, called Tullahoma. And the Americans took a hell of a lot of – more stuff

from Germany, I think, than we did. I mean, they got all the rocket work and they

were busy seeking out rocket scientists rather than aerodynamicists, but they still got

quite a lot of aerodynamicists and jet engine pioneers. The head of GE, Newman, was

Gerhard Neumann at one time. He became something Newman, I don’t know what

his Christian name turned to, but – and the chap who was the father of the German jet

engine, Ohain, Hans von Ohain, he became the boss of NASA Lewis. And I think we

would have done better to have put Whittle into a technical post in the Ministry rather

than try to make him the boss of all the jet engine production in this country, ‘cause

that was what Whittle really wanted.

Did you actually know Whittle?

Yes, I met him on a number of occasions. He used to come to Bristol to meet his old

pal Stanley Hooker, who I worked for. And so when Stanley Hooker had other things

on his mind he used to park him off on me. And since I was doing new projects at the

time, he was very interested and suggesting various things, which we had great

difficulty in avoiding doing [laughs]. But I met him out in America afterwards ‘cause

he got divorced and he married this nurse, I think, and I met them both out in one of

the meetings of the AIAA, I think it was. And I actually had to take his place at a

symposium run by the NASA Lewis people, where they have all – I was supposed to

be standing in for Whittle. So I got a commendation plaque and things like that. At

the time I did the talk on jet lift.


65

[0:33:46]

What sort of chap was Whittle to actually meet? What was he like as a person?

Lovely chap, he was a great chap. I enjoyed meeting him. And I can understand his

frustration because he would have liked to have gone on and controlled the British jet

engine industry but I think he was – he would have found himself like a fish out of

water because he was very keen to retain the centrifugal compressors. Now, on any

decent sized engine the centrifugal compressor went out years ago and the only use

we make of centrifugal compressors these days is on very small engines where

Reynolds number effects on axial flow compressors mean that the efficiencies are

reasonable on centrifugals.

Did he ever talk to you about that at the time?

Yes, yes, he tried – I was doing an – I had the job of trying to make a Spey

replacement engine and he wanted to put a centrifugal compressor in the middle of

this engine. And we wanted to make it about thirty to one pressure ratio, twenty or

thirty to one pressure ratio, and the temperatures that arise there would have made

designing a centrifugal compressor very difficult.

Did he ever say why he was so keen on the centrifugal compressor?

No, he didn’t, but you can see why, because it was something that a small

organisation could do. To do an axial flow compressor requires a lot of design

ingenuity and design method. The centrifugal compressor is relatively simple. I

mean, it’s a single stage. You can use two stages, of course, if you want to, but –

anyway, I think they used two stages on the Dart. But basically you can make a

decent engine with about 4 to 5:1 pressure ratio from a centrifugal compressor and

that’s the way we started. And that is one reason why we had buried engines on the

Comet, because they were using single sided centrifugal compressors, which were

very big in diameter and if you tried to put them into pods they would look ridiculous.

So they tried to bury most of it in the wing and then they had a bump sticking out of


66

the wing to completely encase the engine. But it was soon – this is one thing that’s a

pity about Whittle, that he kept on about the centrifugal compressor for too long. And

Farnborough did an awful lot of their work on buried installations as a result of

starting off with the Comet.

[End of Track 4]


67

Track 5

You mentioned that you were working with German scientists to help them produce

their technical papers. Who did you actually work with?

Oh, it’s difficult to remember their names now, but there were … gosh. Küchemann.

There was Küchemann, but he came from Göttingen. And there were various people

– I’ve forgotten their names now. I could find them on the – there’s a picture in there

with their names on them and I could find it now. It’ll take me too much time to do

that. Yes, there were about four or five. There was a chap – the swept wing man.

Was it Busemann you mentioned?

Busemann, there was Busemann. He was at Volkenrode and he was, I think, the

brains behind all the big wind tunnels. He was certainly anxious to push the theory of

swept wings forward. And that’s where a lot of the work was done. And we had

about fifty of them, forty or fifty of them, rounded up in the end and shipped across to

the UK. They came of their own accord, I think. They could have said, no, I don’t

want to go. And Busemann didn’t stay very long in the UK. He went to – I think he

went to Sweden and designed the thing [fighter aircraft] that was called the Flying

Barrel.

The Tunnan?

This is a jet swept wing fighter. And the Swedes started off with that and then they

went onto the Draken and there’s a model of the Draken on the windowsill there. But

he probably found the state of the tunnels in the UK so – well, so behind what he’d

left in Germany that he just decided to go and become an expert consultant to the

Swedes.

How did the German scientists actually get on with you British personnel?

Strangely enough it was – I didn’t see any animosity whatsoever. I think a lot of them

were – you know, lived for aerodynamics, not for Nazism. But – no.


68

Why do you say they lived for aerodynamics?

Because there were so many interesting problems being examined in Germany

compared with the UK and they had so much freedom to do what they wanted to do,

provided they produced results. And they certainly did [it] in amazingly short time

really, when you look at the – I mean, Hitler was only in power for twelve years and

they didn’t start – well, they started the 262 Focke-Wulf – not Focke-Wulf, the

Messerschmitt 262 aeroplane in 1936 or ’37, I think, they issued the spec. And the

engine they started work on in 1934, which is, you know, at least contemporary with

Whittle. And it had so many interesting things going on there. They were trying gas

turbines for practically every conceivable objective. They even had – they had

ramjets as well, which we only picked up on in the last stages of the war when we

suddenly realised what was going on there. There’s a picture on that presentation

there of a ramjet in one of the tunnels in Volkenrode. And we were really only

starting on the theoretical study side of things. And, oh, so many different projects

going on. There was a project for attacking the USA with what was in effect a

supersonic bomber, unmanned supersonic bomber, swept wing. It was called the

Trommsdorff something or other. And that was going to be carried under an

aeroplane, they would fly out over the Atlantic and drop it from the aeroplane, then it

would fire up. Then it had about a 3,000 mile range. And they took it out far enough

to get to New York and the eastern sea border of America. And they also had on the

drawing board a two stage rocket, which would do [teach] the eastern sea border of

the United States. And, you know, masses of work going on, gas turbines for tanks,

all the paraphernalia for submarines. They were even testing submarines in the wind

tunnel. Erm …

[0:06:17]

What do you think were the most interesting things you saw personally when you were

out there?

Well, I hadn’t seen much of the actual hardware of jet engines till I got there. I mean,

I’d seen the brochures on jet engines and I’d worked on installing them in different


69

aeroplanes and new concepts, but I saw more jet engine hardware out there than I had

seen in the UK. And that’s not surprising really because there was a hell of a lot more

work going on.

Did you take away any sort of single clear impression of German developments

compared to British ones out of it?

I don’t know. I mean, I think getting concepts started with small groups of people in

this country is quite good. The trouble is the top management of the company often is

not good enough and certainly the civil service isn’t good enough. And my

experience of the civil service in the post war years leads me to think that, you know,

half the time we don’t know what we’re doing. Even when I look at the current

disarmament or the rationalisation of the Ministry of Defence, it drives me up the wall

to see what they’re doing. I mean, they’ve sold off the Harriers to the US Marine

Corps. The Marine Corps know they’re on a good thing because they’re the ones who

really made the most of the Harrier, not the RAF and the Navy.

How did you actually think that German development compared with British, just to

summarise?

Well, they tried an enormous number of things in a very short time. They made some

mistakes. But I would say the speed with which they did their research – once they

decided that the jet was the thing to do – and they actually stopped the development of

piston engined aeroplanes in around about 1941. I mean, they thought they’d won the

war. They thought they’d defeated the Russians. So they stopped the piston engine

development and then put all their efforts into jets and rockets. And by gum, they

certainly did that on a big scale, perhaps too big a scale in that they squandered their

efforts over too many projects.

[0:09:18]

Other than helping Germans to write papers and visiting the factory in Berlin, what

sort of other things were you actually doing? Are there any incidents or examples

that stick in your mind?


70

Erm … well, not – those were the two things – I didn’t do much outside Volkenrode.

We were more or less – we were living – like the German scientists did before the end

of the war, living in the forest, doing a specific job and enjoying ourselves at

weekends.

And what sort of things did you do for fun then, entertainment?

For entertainment? Well, we used to spend the evenings at the Officers Club in

Brunswick. And they had very good singers and conjurors and – you name it. And

the booze was cheap. So we had a pretty enjoyable time. And then we just to go to

Bad Harzburg at the weekends and Gozlar and places like that, near the Harz

Mountains. I have a desire to return there. I’ve been back once but I would like to go

again, but – there’s a place called Gozlar, just on the approaches to the Harz

Mountains, and that is built on – it’s mining, I think, silver mines and lead mines and

so on. And, well, if you want to go skiing you can go skiing in that area and gliding

as well. Yes, it was quite a nice part of the world to be in.

Did you have much to do with the German population in general?

No [laughs]. Some people might have but I didn’t. I was a bit young and innocent in

those days.

I was wondering whether there are any German scientists you remember working

with in particular?

Erm … we didn’t actually work very closely with them. Some of the wind tunnels –

the people who were running the wind tunnels – I wasn’t running wind tunnels. I was

preparing these reports. As I say, we produced, I think it was 1,037 reports in a

relatively short time. That was enough to keep you occupied.

What were the working arrangements like then?


71

The working arrangements? Well, we had palatial offices. I think I shared an office

with one person. And this place had been built from 1938, I think they started

building it, and it was completed in the early part of the war, and it was like a hotel

accommodation. Even the Americans thought it was like hotel accommodation.

George Schairer, when he wrote back to his colleagues in Boeing, said, drop

everything, make the B47 a swept wing bomber. He said, we’re living in luxury here

in the middle of a forest in palatial accommodation with showers and en suite

bathrooms and all that sort of thing.

Who was George Schairer, sorry?

George Schairer? He was the aerodynamicist, chief aerodynamicist, at Boeing at the

end of the war, and he was following up behind the US ninth army, General Bill

Simpson’s ninth army, which overran Volkenrode. They didn’t know it was there,

they had no advanced warning, ‘cause the allies didn’t know it existed. But he had

George Schairer with him and Von Kármán, the great Von Kármán, who was an

international renowned scientist. They got into Volkenrode, interviewed various

people, including Busemann, and he wrote from Volkenrode – this is – I’m talking

about mid 1945, before we actually took over the British zone of occupation. And

they were with the troops, following up behind the troops. And they interviewed as

many scientists and they could and wrote back and said, stop everything, make them

swept wings. And that happened to the B47 and the F86.

Were there many Americans there as well?

We didn’t have any Americans stationed there. They’d got enough to do in their own

sector. We used to get visits from Americans, occasional visits, and we used to have a

lot of visits from UNRRA, the United Nations relief organisation. They lived fairly

close and they used to come and be entertained at weekend and we’d go off to Bad

Harzburg. But … yeah, I’ve got lots of pictures of – I’ve got one picture on the zonal

boundary where it says Soviet Unions Gebiet [both laugh]. It was quite informal, the

boundaries between the British and Russian zones at that time. You could walk

across into Russia or into the Russian zone.


72

[0:15:25]

Did having the Russians so close ever cause any problems?

Well, I don’t know whether I said this before, but we were trying to avoid straying

into Soviet airspace, because we were twenty five miles from the zonal border at

Helmstedt and it wouldn’t have been a good idea – I mean, you could have had a

trigger happy Russian shoot you down, I should think, if you weren’t careful. They

weren’t all that friendly. And so when we were flying out, if it was bad weather, we

were flying at treetop height because then we could follow the Mittelland Canal. And

the Mittelland Canal ran close to the north of the forest at Volkenrode and we knew

when to turn in onto the runway. But when you’re twenty five miles away from the

frontier you’ve got to be a bit careful in an aeroplane.

Did having the Russians so close again ever cause any security problems?

No, not really. There were roaming bands of investigators with the US army, the

British army and the Russians, and occasionally they would stray off into each other’s

territory at that period. And I think I – did I tell you that they sent me out one night to

pick up a chap who was a guidance expert on missile guidance? And he was living

quite close to the zonal border. And they got – somebody had got news that the

Russians were interested in him, so I was told to go out and bring him back. And I

had a Humber staff car and a German driver and we went off and when we got there

to his house the German driver looked a bit miserable and his front tyre was flat. So

he said, ‘Well, you can run flat on it for a little while.’ So I said, ‘Alright, we’ll run

flat on it.’ So we picked this bloke up quickly, put him in the vehicle and brought him

back to Volkenrode. But I didn’t know – I’d only been told, you know, to pick him

up ‘cause the Russians might be coming for him, so I thought it better to get out of the

way.

Do you have to take any precautions over the secrecy of your work?

At the time, yes, at the time, yes. I don’t think I told my parents what I was up to.


73

Did they not know you were going to Germany?

They knew I was going to Germany, yes, yes. And I would appear with odd cameras

and things [laughs]. Still got one or two of them.

Why odd cameras?

Well, cameras were part of the barter system. Brunswick had Rolleiflex and

Voigtländer manufacturing. They turned to manufacturing cameras very quickly, as

soon as the war ended, so you could get a new Voigtländer Bessa or a Rolleiflex or a

Rolleicord and they were very smart cameras. I’ve still got an old Rolleicord. I like

the Rolleicord or the Rolleiflex. But that used to cause a bit of trouble because people

used to smuggle back a few of them. I only had one for myself and one for my uncle

[laughs].

What was the barter system you mentioned?

Well, you bartered – if you were doing deals with Germany, with Germans, you –

cigarettes were the barter. We had a – I don’t know how many cigarettes a week we

had. We were allowed about 200 a week, I think. And every few weeks you’d get a

great big bag of cigarettes, plus some chewing gum from the Americans. And of

course the amount of booze that was supplied to the messes in Germany was

enormous and there was some of the best champagne and liquor, various liqueurs and

that. We used to be able to take a few bottles home.

What’s life actually like in the mess? What did you actually do there?

Well, for a young chap who’d been living on British rations, it wasn’t bad. I enjoyed

it. But I suppose now I’d be a bit more particular, but – ‘cause we used to have dried

carrots and dried potato, powdered potato, you know. But by and large, you know –

we were able to shoot rabbits and have jugged hares. They didn’t mind doing that in

the kitchen.

Are there any entertainments actually on site as well?


74

No, no, no. Oh, except we’d have a party occasionally ourselves. But it did get a bit

dangerous there. We had a game playing with – I mean, we had a hell of a lot of

champagne, playing with champagne bottles, see how far you could lean over with

champagne bottles. And one of the guys broke the champagne bottle and it went

through his hand. That was frowned upon after a while.

You mentioned hundreds of cigarettes in your rations. Did you actually smoke?

I didn’t smoke.

What did you do with all your cigarettes?

I bought a slide rule and various cameras. A good camera would cost you about 8,000

cigarettes so you took your time to save up for a good camera.

Who were you actually buying the cameras off?

Well, there were guys came into – the German drivers, they drove you around. They

knew where everything was. Yes. Oh, there was a – that was the only method really

of buying things early on. They then introduced a new currency. It was called the –

what’s it called, the Deutschmark? I forget. It was the Reichsmark before. Anyway,

we – I’ve got a set of the control commission stamps for Germany somewhere. But

yeah, life was pretty grim for the average person in Germany at that time and the

whole place was – there were crowds of displaced persons journeying -they’d actually

got into the research establishment and were looking around for things and made a

hell of a mess there. I’ve looked at some of the films of what happened in Germany

and seen crowds of people wandering along with their possessions. It was still

happening in ’46. People were trying to return displaced persons to their habitats.

[0:23:46]

Who were actually your British colleagues when you were out there? Who were you

working with?


75

Well, I was working with people I got to know quite well. There was a chap called –

oh hell, I’m getting terrible for names these days. There was a chap at RAE, NGTE

and he came and lived across the Severn here in Chepstow. Martin Cox. But he died

a couple of years ago. And he married the secretary of the German guy in charge of

the LFA at Volkenrode and she’s still living over the other side of the bridge. I see

her occasionally. And there were a couple of guys at Farnborough, they’ve now died.

I’m terrible for names, as I said. Ralph Maltby, Ralph Maltby was the guy who ran

some of the tunnels at – we were running tunnels at Volkenrode and doing work –

because we didn’t have anything like these tunnels in the UK. And he had come from

the twenty-four foot tunnel, I think, at Farnborough and he was running – there were

spinning tunnels and supersonic tunnels and subsonic tunnels and low speed tunnels,

you name it. And quite a lot of the photographs I’ve got came from him actually.

The others, various names now, it’s such a long time ago, you’re talking about sixty

years ago.

[0:25:57]

How did you all actually see the work you were actually doing in Germany, do you

think?

Did I see it?

How did you see it?

How did I see it? Well, I didn’t appreciate what I was seeing at the time, I’d say. It’s

only after fifty years, you know, that a lot of these things come out. And I mean, I

realised that something enormous was on show here to us, no doubt about that. The

finds that we made were enormously useful to the aviation industry. Practically

everything that the Germans were doing has become part of aeronautics, the missiles.

They had controlled missiles. They had wired controlled missiles. They had

unguided missiles. They had several sorts of guided missiles. And we didn’t have

anything like that. And, well, the V2 rocket became the scud missiles. The V2 was

going to be turned into a two stage – it was going to be the top stage of a two stage


76

missile to attack the American east coast. And all these things have become part and

parcel of what we’ve done since the war. I don’t – there’s very little that we’ve done

that hasn’t been – can’t be laid straight back to the German research. I mean, I think

the big thing that’s happened since the war is solid state electronics. That’s made

everything smaller and more capable of being installed in missiles and aircraft. I

mean, if you look at the TSR2 and you look at the instrument – or you look at the

avionics that you put in the TSR2, well, it’s just gigantic. And the aeroplane’s big

because it had to carry all these electronic devices. Now you can do them like a

handheld calculator, which previously – you had to have a room through of

thermionic valves. I mean, it’s just extraordinary, I think, the revolution in avionics.

Did you have much to do on the avionics front when you were actually out in

Germany at this time?

No, no, no. I was aeronautical, aerodynamics, performance aerodynamics. And then

when I went back I went into the engine business.

Well, when did you actually return from Germany?

I think it was about March 1946. (Interviewee correction: March 1947]

What did you do next?

I went back to MAP at Millbank. It was then called MOS(A). And that was when I

applied to join the permanent civil service. And I got fed up with that because they

wanted to send me to the road research place. We discussed this before. And so I

went back to – I decided to go back to complete my degree at university.

What sort of things did you actually do at MAP in that short period you were actually

back?

Well, before I left we were doing the Canberra. A lot of my work was on the

Canberra. And that was a hangover from the non swept back wing business. And it

was just filtering through when the Canberra – had to make the decision to go ahead


77

with the Canberra or either scrap it and start from scratch again. They decided to go

on with the Canberra. But by the time I came back we were getting brochures in on

the Valiant and the Victor and the Vulcan and the Short ‘Insurance’ bomber, which

was a straight winged huge bulky – it looked like a Short Stirling turned into a jet

aeroplane, a hopeless aeroplane really. But it was called the Insurance bomber

because it was to insure against the failure of the swept wings, which – now we’d got

to the point where we pretty well understood swept wings about a year later. But a lot

of the people in the Ministry still were a bit – feeling a bit uneasy about committing

themselves to delta wings and crescent wings and swept wings and so on. So we

produced – how many did we produce? There was the Valiant, the Victor, the

Vulcan, the Short Insurance bomber, oh, just to name four. And those were

programmes, huge programmes, and they were set in motion in 1946, ’47, before I left

the Ministry.

What did you have to do with them at the Ministry?

What did I have to do with them? Oh, I had to take part as a member of a team,

calculating the weight of the aeroplane, the performance of the aeroplane, whether

they had the right sort of aeroplane, you know, could you make it better. And then

you had to choose between the various options that were offered by industry. And a

lot of the choice was carried out by that particular department, RDT1, RD Projects it

became, but it was an old Air Ministry department.

[0:32:30]

Is there anything in particular you remember about any of the V bombers, for

instance, that you were actually doing calculations for?

Erm, well, you know, I was amazed at the Vulcan. It was just a – it was an enormous

step away from where we’d been. The Valiant and the Victor were more – were sort

of variants of the straight wing bombers, but the Vulcan was a new beast. And it was

quite a remarkable aeroplane. It was faster, much faster, and it could fly much higher

than the Victor and the Valiant. They were – the Victor was quite a good aeroplane

and I think the Avro aeroplane was the best. It’s the one that lasted the longest. It had


78

– they even converted it to do a low level role towards the end of its life. And the

Victor had been turned into a tanker.

What was it about the Vulcan design in particular that impressed you?

What impressed me was the higher altitude it could achieve. And it was a low wing

loading aeroplane and you could fly it below its minimum drag speed. That’s difficult

to explain to you, but there’s a curve – normally you fly twenty percent above the

minimum drag speed. On the Vulcan you could fly way below the minimum drag

speed ‘cause it had – that meant you were flying at a higher lift coefficient. But they

had plenty of lift co-efficient in hand. And the Mark 2 Vulcan was modified by one

of the German scientists, a chap called Küchemann, who then went on to do the major

work on the Concorde. He and another chap called Barry Haines, they modified the

wing of the Vulcan so instead of being a simple delta it had a bump in the leading

edge of the wing. And if you look at a Mark 2 Vulcan picture you’ll see the

difference. And that gave it a much higher lift coefficient in cruise, which meant that

it could fly below the minimum drag speed.

As one of those people who’s doing the early calculations for these things …

Yes, we did. And at the time we did – I had left the Ministry by the time they did

that.

I just wondered though, you know, do you ever talk about the planes you were

actually helping to design?

Oh yes, yes. And I’ve kept in touch with the chap who did a lot of that work, a chap

called Barry Haines, who was a very good solid aerodynamicist. And he ended up as

the boss of ARA, the Aeronautical Research Association, which was set up by British

industry. And that was alongside RAF Bedford. But he and I were quite good

friends.

Compared to the Canberra that you’d actually been designing before, what did you

think of these new designs? How much of an advance were they?


79

Well, the Canberra wasn’t all that advanced except that it was clean. It was one of the

cleanest aeroplanes. It really took – Petter was the chap who designed it. He came

from Westlands and he’d designed the Welkin and the Whirlwind and they had very

high aspect ratio wings. And they suffered from a surfeit of wing weight, ‘cause they

had these high aspect ratio jobs. And they must have – they weren’t very successful.

And I think this sort of gave him a bias view about it, so he goes to the other extreme

and he makes the Canberra, a very low aspect ratio aeroplane. And it did in fact come

out with a very good structure weight, which meant it could fly high just because of

that. And I had a very good understanding of the Canberra. When I came to Bristol

we’d just acquired a Canberra to test the Olympus engine for the Vulcan. And we had

to take the existing engines off and put two Olympus engines in their place. And so

they got me to do the calculations ‘cause I knew so much about it. I told them, this

aeroplane’ll get to 67,000 feet, 68,000 feet. And so they decided to have a try for the

world record. And we broke the world record twice with that aeroplane, with the

higher powered Olympus engines. And that led to an order from America, I think, for

Canberras.

Compared to the Canberra then, how much of an advance were things like the Vulcan

and the Victor?

Compared to the Canberra? Well, the Canberra was a straight wing and we knew all

about straight wings. And it was a twelve percent thick wing and it had a critical

Mach number of 0.75. And it was designed to attack Berlin, ‘cause it was – the

specification was set before the end of the war. So you had a – its range was 1,200

miles, 600 there and 600 back. And they let it go on in spite of the war finishing.

And in fact it was a very good aeroplane for all sorts of reasons. It did a lot of high

altitude reconnaissance work for the Americans particularly. And it did – it lasted in

service beyond the Victor and the Vulcan.

[0:38:51]


80

On the subject of the Victor, the Vulcan, the Short Insurance bomber, did anyone

actually ever mention the fact that these planes were designed to carry the atom bomb

in the office?

Ooh, we knew we had to carry it in the end, yes. I’m not quite sure when it was

decided, because of course we made a decision, I think in 1948 or ’49, that we were

going to produce atom bombs, when the Americans said to us, we are not going to

give you any of the secrets of the atom bomb, in spite of the fact that we had sent all

the scientists over there with the know how to make it and they worked with the

Americans. And of course then there was the – there was a famous spy …

Fuchs.

Fuchs, Klaus Fuchs, and he rather soured the reputation of British science and their

trustworthiness. So of course the Americans, who thought they’d invented

everything, decided they weren’t going to let out any of the secrets.

Did you actually know that things like the Vulcan were going to be used to carry the

atom bomb when you were doing the early work on them?

No, no. That was a little bit too early because we – I mean, we realised that

something like that might happen but we didn’t have an atom bomb in 1947.

Did you ever …

We had the scientists who’d done a hell of a lot of work in America on it.

Do you mean the British scientists who’d worked on the atom bomb?

British scientists working in America, yes.

Did you ever worry about – did you have any moral qualms about working on

military aircraft?


81

[Sighs] No, I didn’t. I was a young enthusiastic engineer and when I started we had –

the atom bomb hadn’t been dropped when I started. But having said that, the idea of

the atom bomb is that it’s – it’s MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, and I always

assumed that it wouldn’t be used. But, you know, when I see what’s going on in the

Middle East I now have certain doubts. You know, if we’re not careful the Middle

East could blow up.

You mentioned last time how you actually came to leave MAP after almost ending up

at the Road Research Laboratory in Watford.

Yeah.

How do you decide what to do next?

I – I hadn’t thought very much about it and I got a letter out of the blue from Stanley

Hooker. He’d been talking to two friends of mine who’d joined Bristol and he was

saying, do you know anybody who can contribute to jet engine design. One of them

was a friend of mine so he gave me a good write up. And I had a letter from Stanley

Hooker saying would I like to come for interview for a job.

Who was the friend?

Who was the friend? It was a chap called David Needs. I was his best man. And he

was working for the Ramjet department at Bristol, which had been set up after the war

to produce missiles using ramjets, which again – most of the background to that was

in Germany. They’d already been running ramjets before the war ended.

[0:42:45]

So did you go straight to Bristol or did you mention you went to university first?

I went back to university to finish my degree, because they were – staff were very thin

on the ground in the war and they wanted to produce as many engineers as possible

for the services. So I went on a short course.


82

Where?

Hm?

Where did you go back to …?

Cardiff.

Had it changed much since you were there during the war, the university?

The university? Yes, it’s changed an awful lot. I mean, I was in the engineering

building. The engineering building was in Newport Road, not far from Cardiff Royal

Infirmary, and there were wooden drawing offices. And we used to share rooms,

lecture rooms, with the medical people in the physiology building. And there was a –

an old hospital, I think it was a leper hospital, had been turned into the medical

department at Newport Road. It’s now got new facilities. But we used to – during the

war – this is during the war now, we used to fire watch there, just towards the end of

the war. So you slept overnight and we used to go trooping round the anatomy

department when it was dark just to frighten the other firewatchers, ‘cause we were –

they had all the bodies on tables. We used to wander round and have a look and see

what they were doing. The thought appals me now.

What did you actually do when you returned to university? What was in the course?

What was in the course? Oh, it was … mechanical engineering but you did a bit of

electrical and a bit of civil. Many of the subjects at the time were done together. You

were sitting with civils and electricals and mechanicals.

What were your favourite parts of the …?

My favourite what?

Favourite parts of the course.


83

I think mathematics. There wasn’t much aeronautics, which worried me, but I wasn’t

really interested in the rest of it. I’d already, you know, decided what I wanted to do.

And the professor was a steam engine man. He’d worked for C&A Parsons. And so

his lectures were all about steam engines. But I enjoyed it .

How did Bristol actually take to you going back to university?

Well, Bristol didn’t know about me until I was nearing the end of my course. And

some of the people I’d – this chap, who mentioned my name to Hooker, he had been –

he’d come after me in the wartime and he’d just finished his course at the end of the

war and he’d gone to Bristol. So that’s – and it was through him that I went to

Bristol.

Did you enjoy being back at university?

Yeah, from the point of view of the nightlife and all that sort of thing, yes. But I was

a bit anxious to get back to work in aviation. And I wasn’t all that interested in some

of the subjects. Mechanical engineering was a mixture of metallurgy and electrical

engineering and civil engineering as well. We were all mixed up together.

What do you think you actually got out of the course then after going back that second

time?

Erm, I got a better understanding of mathematics, I think. The course was pretty

strong on mathematics. And in fact, some of the ideas that I picked up have actually

stuck with me ever since. I’m interested in aeronautics still and I still have a few

ideas I want to get off my chest, but whether I will or not I don’t know. I find I start –

I make lots of plans of what I’m going to do and then people come along and say, I

want to interview you, so, you know, that stops you going on with the things you want

to do [laughs].

Shall we take a short break? That seems a good point to stop.

Well, it’s a the end. You can always cut that out [laughs].


84

I’ve been told worse things [laughs].

[End of Track 5]


85

Track 6

When did you actually start work at Bristol?

Erm … that would be – I think it was September 12th, something like that, 1947 – no,

’49, sorry, ’49.

What were your first days actually like there, do you remember?

Er … well, I was finding my way around and somebody was deputed to take me to

lunch. And he became a great friend of mine. He died about two or three months

ago.

Who was that?

A chap called Reg Gray. And his – he came from a large family of boys in … in

Bath, Upper Odd Down in Bath. And his brother was a VC. And it was a bit like

Saving Private Ryan, because he had about four or five brothers in the air force and

the army and about – I think about three or four of them were killed. So I think he

was taken off flying duties, ‘cause they’d all been Halton apprentices, or a lot of them

had been Halton apprentices. One of them was in the army. And one of them was

lost on the Courageous, HMS Courageous, in the first few months of the war.

Another one was a Spitfire pilot. And another chap, his brother, Tom Gray, was

killed in the attack on the Maastricht Bridge when the Germans invaded Holland.

And they were flying Fairey Battles and he – they were disabled in the attack on the

bridge and they crashed on the bridge and destroyed the bridge. And he and the pilot

got VCs posthumously. But I was his best man and, well, as I say, he only died a few

months ago, about age ninety three.

What sort of chap was he?

He was a great jovial chap with no malicious intent whatsoever in him, which is more

than you can say for a lot of the guys [laughs]. But we were great friends.

What did you actually – what did Bristol actually hire you to do?


86

Erm, they didn’t tell me. I said I wanted to work – I’d like to work on gas turbines

and so they said, oh, come and join us, we can use you first of all in the installation

development department, which was installing engines and getting engines, jet

engines, into service with aircraft companies, the sort of design liaison work and that

sort of thing. And so I enjoyed that at first. It was – and they took advantage – I

don’t know whether I told you this before. They took advantage of my experience on

the Canberra to take the altitude record with the Canberra.

[0:03:40]

And I did lots of work on trying to sell the Proteus gas turbine, propeller gas turbine,

in re-engining American aeroplanes. So I spent a lot of time in America. But I

discovered something about the commerce, aviation commerce, which was you don’t

– you buy a cheap second hand aeroplane which is going out of use, out of service,

because it’s been overtaken by jets. And the people who buy them haven’t got much

money and they haven’t got the sort of money you need to re-engine them with a

radically different power plant. And we were trying to sell the Proteus propeller

turbine, which was in the Britannia, into various American aeroplanes. I mean, there

weren’t many British aeroplanes that we could put it into but there were a lot of

American aeroplanes. But we dismally failed there because it didn’t make sense

commercially.

Can I just adjust your mike a second? What sort of engine was the Proteus?

The Proteus was – the first – no, it was the second, the second engine that Bristol

made. The first engine that Bristol made was the Theseus and the Theseus was one of

these reverse flow engines, where you took the air in, took it to the back of the engine,

brought it forward through the compressor and then turned it around again and put it

through the turbine. And this was done for probably the wrong reason, but they didn’t

want – they wanted to avoid shaft whirling and tried to make the engine as short as

possible. Now that was a mistake because it introduced all sorts of problems,

mechanical and aerodynamic and icing problems. The Britannia had an icing

problem, which was due to the fact that the air went round through 360 degrees. And


87

as it turned the corner the ice got deposited on the intake. But when I arrived that was

already ‘set in concrete’, that engine. And originally the Britannia was going to have

four Centaurus piston engines. They found that they could take the piston engines out

and put the Proteus in very easily into the Britannia. The only trouble was they put

the jet pipe up over the wing and scarfed it off on top of the wing so the jet went up at

an angle. And this caused the flow on the back of the wing to separate. And that had

to be put right. They called a lot of the engine guys together and we went up in the

aeroplane and checked out what was happening, ‘cause we’d put wool tufts all over

the back of the aeroplane. And then that resulted in the work coming down to

Patchway. And so we then redesigned the back end of the nacelle for them – or at

least they had to redesign the nacelle, we redesigned the jet pipes so it went down to

the trailing edge of the wing. And that was – this is a case where the first real jet

aeroplane that they’d made was being designed by people who’d been making piston

engine installations. And they decided that they would turn the job over to the engine

company to do the – complete the design, which we did.

What do you mean by wool tufts? Sorry.

Oh well, you stick a wool tuft onto the skin of the aeroplane, and it’s probably about

two inches long, and if the flow is going streamlined over the back of the nacelle the

wool tuft lays along the wing surface. If it’s disturbed, they breakaway and the wool

tuft is up in the air doing that. [demonstrates]

Could you describe what that …?

Going round in circles but sticking upwards. And disturbed flow and that means –

that’s bad news; it’s drag. So that was put right. That was one of the first things I

came across.

[0:08:23]

And then I had a – I had my own ideas about how to do various things in the

installation and I persuaded them to put a conical spinner on the engine, ‘cause I

discovered from RAE work which showed that if you had a conical spinner and you


88

put the propeller on the conical part of the spinner, instead of having an elliptic

spinner you got a much better pressure gradient along the spinner so that you didn’t

get breakaway behind the propeller. And it was worth something like about fifty

percent in intake efficiency. And so we did that. It took me a long time to persuade

them, but – and we had trouble with the design of the conical spinner. But after that I

think practically all propeller turbines with annular intakes had conical spinners. The

Vanguard certainly did and I think that some of the American ones did.

Why did you think the conical spinner was a good idea?

Why did I think it was a good idea? Because it gave – I had a report from a chap who

became a friend of mine, a chap called John Seddon at RAE Farnborough, and he was

in charge of intakes. And he’d done a series of wind tunnel tests with different sorts

of spinners and discovered that there was a – that if you had a conical spinner and the

blade roots on the conical spinner, that you gained – efficiency went up from about

twenty eight percent to about eighty percent, because of course these big thick blade

roots just sticking out of the spinner were pretty destructive of the flow going into the

intake. So that was one of the first things that happened to me.

How did you know Seddon?

How did I? Because I’d met him – I’m not sure whether I’d met him before I left the

Ministry, but I certainly met him almost immediately after I arrived at Bristol. And

we became friends. He – you know, we used to visit each other. But he was a very

good aerodynamicist.

I was interested – the installation development department, was that …?

Well, that’s the – really it’s the liaison with the aircraft company to make sure that our

engine is in the right environment on an aeroplane, right? And it’s quite important to

get that right ‘cause so many of the problems are interface problems.

What sort of things could go wrong?


89

What sort of things can go wrong? Well, for instance, you could have the thrust lying

in the wrong place. That was a problem with the Halifax during the war. But you

could have interference with the [wing] on a jet engine. If you had the pod too near

the wing of a swept wing aeroplane then it affects the flow over the swept wing, so

you had to understand all that sort of thing. And you had to understand the efficiency

requirements of the intake. And it was up to us to play a big part in that because if we

got the intake wrong and you’ve got separation of the flow from the lips of the intake,

you could knock blades off and you have fast [high cycle] fatigue problems. And that

was a big problem.

What sort of interaction did you actually have with an aeroplane company then to sort

out that sort of issue?

Well, you get to know your opposite numbers in the aircraft companies. I was lucky

in some ways in that, when I first went to London I was in digs on Clapham Common

with some guys from Imperial College. And low and behold, when I went up to

Warton I found one of the guys who I’d been in digs with was in charge of the wind

tunnel at Warton. He became the managing director afterwards. And we were

considerable friends. You had to be a little bit careful, you didn’t want to get too

close to an aircraft company if you had to deal with half a dozen aircraft companies

who might be in competition. But anyway, that was one of the things you had to

watch.

[0:13:40]

Which aircraft companies were you actually working with?

Erm … well, the various branches of what became British Aircraft Corporation,

which was English Electric, Bristol itself, Supermarines … Vickers, they weren’t –

there was a fighter – Vickers Supermarine Fighters was a separate design organisation

from Vickers of Weybridge. Brough, there was Blackburns. And one of the guys that

I worked with in the Ministry of Aircraft Production became the chief designer of

Blackburn Aircraft on the Buccaneer. So, you know, it’s wheels within wheels. It’s

quite a small world. And, well, de Havilland, I knew quite a few people at de


90

Havilland. Then when we started to do international collaboration these problems got

even bigger, I think, ‘cause the interface problems on the Concorde were an order

different from those on the old V bombers and that. It was an incredibly difficult

technical problem. Amazing how complicated it was.

Why so complicated?

Because you had a very thin wing for supersonics. You had a huge nacelle hung

under the wing. If you look at the Concorde nacelle, it spans the – on a delta wing

with a very big cord, the nacelle is almost as long as the wing cord. And of course it’s

– being supersonic, the flow – where you put the engine is very important. In the

early days of the SST they were going to put the engines on top of the wing at the

back of the wing. And that was a very good place for engines but the only thing that I

had overlooked at the time when they started thinking about that was that the speed on

top of the wing is higher than the speed on the bottom of the wing. So you had to

design it for a – it was a Mach 2.2 aeroplane and it had to be about Mach 2.5 on the

middle of the top of the wing compared with Mach 2 underneath it. And if you’re

interested in safety and all that sort of thing, I think it’s better to have the engine

under the wing.

[0:16:46]

You talked about visiting assorted aircraft companies. How different actually are

they from your point of view of someone who’s working with them?

Oh, they’re all different. I mean, some of them have a lot of high grade engineers you

meet. Others you only see the chief designer and he calls them in, especially the

smaller companies. Like the Italian companies, Macchi and – ouch, cramp. I’ve got

cramp in my leg.

I’ll put this on pause for a second.

Are there any aircraft companies you remember visiting in particular?


91

Well, I visited most of the European companies in Italy and in Germany and Spain, in

Sweden, in Holland. A lot of them have disappeared now. Fokkers in Holland used

to be one of our big customers. Are you still recording?

Back on now.

Gone back now. Okay. And America, of course, they’re even bigger, a lot of big

organisations compared with – the ones in Europe, a lot of them were very small

organisations. Macchi is not a very big organisation. It still exists. And then there

was Piaggio and in France you had Sud Aviation and Marcel Dassault, various others,

Breguet.

Are there any visits to aircraft companies you remember in particular, sort of

particular instances where you went along?

Well, Boeing was a favourite of mine. I had a lot of friends at Boeing. Douglas, I

knew them but they were overtaken and bought by Boeing in the 1970s. But, yeah,

Boeing was one of my favourite companies.

Why?

Ah, I had a friend, a great friend, there. He used to come and stay here, one of the

Boeing people.

Who’s that?

Walter Swan. He was in charge of the Boeing SST and of course he was always

interested in the problems of the Anglo French SST. But you had to be careful what

you said to him [laughs]. But he and I were great friends and he used to stay with us.

You mentioned as well that amongst your earliest jobs was going to sell Proteus to the

US market …


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Well, we were trying to sell Proteus to put it in the Stratocruiser and various smaller

aeroplanes, twin engine aeroplanes. Yes.

What do you actually have to do to sell an engine to the Americans at that time?

You’ve got to try and understand the aeroplane and try and produce the performance

of the aeroplane. So we had to, again, using my experience in the Ministry, estimate

the drag of the aeroplane. We didn’t always get the drag coefficients right but we got

pretty near them at times. And that was early on we were doing that, in the late ‘50s,

early ‘60s. Then we gave it up in the end. It wasn’t a – I don’t think there are many

examples where they’ve taken piston engines out and put gas turbines in. There are

one or two. As I say, people bought those aeroplanes for knockdown prices and then

they didn’t have the money to put new engines in.

Did you actually visit the United States yourself in the ‘50s?

Oh yes. I started visiting – I should think – I joined them at Bristol in 1949 and I was

over there in 1955, ’56. I met my wife there.

[0:21:25]

When?

1956. She was working in the International Aviation Building in Montreal for the

Bristol Aeroplane Company of Canada. And, well, I – I used to go around with her

boss and he said to me, he said, ‘If you want to get to know a company, go and sit of

the desk of the boss’s secretary. Get to know her and then you’re in.’ And so that’s

how we met [laughs]. I sat on the desk with the chap who was going around America

with me trying to sell Bristol engines [laughs]. Don’t tell her I said so though

[laughs].

Well, what did you like about your future wife?

What did I like about …?


93

Back in 1956.

Difficult to remember now. It’s an awful long time ago. She was a good looking girl

and seemed to know her job. Then I discovered – when we were married I discovered

I was joining a family of military men. Her father was – I didn’t know this at the

time. It was only when she came back and I went down and visited her family. Her

father was the regimental colonel of the 14th Lancers, Bengal Lancers. And my

brother in laws that I acquired, one was the surveyor general of India, Brigadier

Heaney, and another was – what’s he now? Another was a colonel in the Royal

Engineers. I think it was the Indian Army. And then there was another one who was

a member of Churchill’s War Cabinet, military secretary of Churchill’s War Cabinet,

Brigadier Cornwall Jones. So I quickly got transferred into a very military family. I

mean, I haven’t got a lot of time for the military men in between the wars. I think

they did a dreadful job in the army, left us with no tanks and pretty poor morale until

people like Montgomery came along. But anyway, he was – one of them was a

British representative on the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee in Washington. And he

eventually ended up setting up staff colleges round the world, how to train high

officials.

How do you think they took to the prospect of their daughter marrying a jet engineer?

A jet engineer, yes. I think there was a bit of tutting [laughs]. I don’t know [laughs].

I get on with them reasonably well.

[0:24:53]

What were your impressions of the USA when you were out there early in the ‘50s?

I used to think the breakfasts were marvellous, having corned beef hash and, you

know, two eggs Benedict and things like that. I think the breakfast in America is the

best part of the day.

How did life in America seem to you compared to life in Britain?


94

It was a refreshing new world, I think. And of course, in the 1950s we were still in

the age of austerity, going over the end, seeing the way everything went and people

ate and drank and that over there. It was an eye opener.

Did you ever think about joining the brain drain and leaving?

I thought about it but I quickly rejected the idea.

Why?

Well, I don’t know. I mean, I’m not quite sure why. But I mean, America has a lot of

interesting aspects but I still think this country is a better place to be.

I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about …

I could have gone to America and got a job in America quite easily if I’d wanted to.

Did anyone ever offer you one?

I have been offered jobs in America, yes.

[0:26:40]

I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about what it’s actually like working at

Bristol in the 1950s. Where actually are you working? Describe what the

environment is like around you?

Well, when I joined Bristol Engines, the engine division of Bristol Aeroplane

Company, in 1949, the technical office was in a factory. And there were offices

round the outside of the factory. The windows are – it had no windows except in the

roof of the technical office. And in the warm weather it used to get unbearable.

People used to just nod off after lunch. They couldn’t keep awake. And I was very


95

glad when they built a new factory, called Whittle House, in another part of the site.

And we had palatial offices then.

What was it actually like in one of those technical offices in the 1950s? As I come in

through the door what do I actually see?

Well, you’d – it was split into about four different sections. You’d got stress office,

you’d got the technical office, you know, the aerodynamic design, the gas turbine

design, all that sort of thing. And then there was a big drawing office. And then there

were other offices for installation engineers and so on. I was in the technical office

and that led off onto the front corridor and the front corridor was occupied by all the

big chief engineers, a lot of whom at the time, when I went there, were piston engine

men, didn’t really know what – you know, they were too old to learn new tricks, I

think, most of them. So it was quite a while before the people running the place were

well versed in gas turbine technology. That was one reason why Hooker was looking

for people like me.

If I was to go into the technical office what would I actually see in there?

Well, you’d see a lot of desks piled high with paper. There used to be one or two

guys who – you couldn’t see them, they had such big piles of paper on their desks that

they were hidden from sight. And you’d go along to them and say, have you got that

report that was issued last year, and he’d delve down into the pile on his desk and

produce the report. I mean, the idea of properly indexing and compartmentising your

work wasn’t at all the norm in those days. And of course we hadn’t got – we were

just about to get computers when I joined. 1949 was – I think the solid state

electronics was just starting in America. The first computers we got were thermionic

valve computers and they took a few big offices round the building and put them

together and put a thermionic valve computer in. And it got so hot they had to – there

was so many valves, all producing enormous amounts of heat, that you had to take

great pains to cool the place down.

Did you actually use the first computer there yourself?


96

No, I didn’t, no. I used a twenty inch slide rule and a Curta machine and the other –

the other mechanical devices. And then came the mainframe computer. The

mainframe computer came along in the ‘60s, mid ‘60s I suppose it would be. And

that meant that you – what you did, you had a guy who took his work down to the

computing office, computing building, late at night and picked themselves up in the

morning. Most of the stuff was run overnight. And then the – the PCs didn’t come in

until the 1980s. And they said to me, ‘You don’t really need a PC, do you? You’ve

got dogs, you don’t want to bark yourself.’ And so I didn’t get a PC and I didn’t

really know what a PC was, to be quite honest, originally. [0:32:00 – sneeze] ‘Scuse

me.

Had you had to use computers earlier on in your career at all?

Erm, no, and this is the funny thing. I was the chief engineer of new projects but I

was then given various additional jobs, one of which was engineering computing.

And I was administratively responsible for these guys and I had never seen a

computer. And I only took up computing when I retired in 1987. But in the

meanwhile, I mean, I knew what was going on and I had – as I say, you don’t bark

yourself if you’ve got a lot of dogs doing all the donkey work [laughs], to mix my

metaphors.

Does actually having, you know, people around who are using the computer, can

harness its power, actually make any difference to the work you’re actually doing?

Oh yes, but they weren’t actually working around me, working with the computer.

The mainframe computers were run by a team of specialists whose sole duty was to

the mainframe computer and you just took the programme sheets down to them and

they laboured away all night and came back with the answers in the morning.

What difference does actually having that facility make though for the work that

you’re doing?

Oh, it made an enormous difference because now we could produce brochures in next

to no time.


97

[0:33:44]

And we then applied ourselves to doing our own programming. I still didn’t do it

myself ‘cause, you know, I was spending my time in America or Europe and I had all

my guys doing – and I took part in decisions as to what we were going to do and we

actually set up a preliminary design process. And this would be about 1970, where

we decided we were going to have a bottom up process. In other words, it wasn’t

going to be a statistical programme, because there were some designs which could

produce engines by comparing other engines on a broad brush basis, but we were

going to start from scratch and do it the same way as the experts in the stress

department and the turbine department, the compressor department. Try and get their

rules down. And they were quite cooperative, even though they were doing

themselves out of a job in some instances. And so we eventually could do a bottom

up design, which was more or less the way you would have done it if you’d had the

time. And we could do a parametric study of engines overnight. And I think Bristol

was the first company to do that, ‘cause Derby didn’t do it, Rolls Royce itself. In fact,

you were up against the old guard, who believed that the only way to design an

aeroplane was to stand in front of a drawing – design an engine, was to stand in front

of a drawing board and bite the stump of your pencil. And what we used to do is to

send the data and the various assumptions, broad assumptions, that we would make

and do a parametric study of the various assumptions and see which came out the

lightest. ‘Cause not only could we design the engine but we could weigh it and cost it

and even get a development programme done for it. But basically it was to design the

engine to be an optimum right from the start, get it somewhere near the optimum.

And then you took the design – the computer would draw the engine, a broad outline

of the scantlings of the engine, and we would take that back to the drawing board and

then that was our starting point. And then we put in all the filigree work. And it was

so successful that we were able to cope with a large number of different projects. And

the strange thing was that my opposite number at Derby was one of the old guys who

thought that designing was, you know, getting your pencil out and drawing lines on a

drawing board, and so here’s I [me] knowing nothing about computers, who is using

the computer the way it probably should have been used. And we used to get requests

from various people, even the Ministry were requesting copies of the programme, and


98

it was very difficult to fob them off, to keep them at bay, because it contained all our

assumptions from all the engines we’d made, which had been analysed and – you

understand regression analysis? You don’t. Oh, well it’s a way of finding out how –

the laws of weight components and the design – and how to design the components.

And you put in a lot of assumptions in an equation, say to get the weight of a

component, and you then run through all the examples you’ve got in the company of

blade weights or disc weights or casing weights and come up with a power law

equation which best fits all the results you’ve got. And we had some very good guys

in the project office who did this for nearly twenty – well, I should think about ten or

fifteen years we were on our own and we were able to produce a range of engines. If

the customer wanted to examine a range of engines with good solid performance,

good solid weight estimates, cost estimates and so on, we could do it.

[0:38:53]

And in fact, one of the things we did was to lay the grounds for the design of the

Boeing 737 development from the original engine to the bypass engine. They

wouldn’t admit it today but I suppose – in fact the people who did it are dead now.

One of my friends, the chap I was telling you about, was there. And so we had a first

class option we could give to the aircraft company and we got ourselves into pole

position on the 737, but unfortunately, due to the bankruptcy of Rolls Royce in 1971,

we had no money to develop the engine. So here was I, working away, trying to –

trying to find opportunities and there was no money to develop them. And, well, we –

first of all we tried to – we thought of funding it ourselves. And the – and the guys at

the top of Rolls Royce wanted all the money for the 211, RB211. So we had to go

and scratch around and find – see if there was anybody who would collaborate with

us. And Stanley Hooker and I went to Japan and we sold the idea of a development

for an engine like the 737 engine. It was called a – it was replacing the Spay, which

was now out of date. And we persuaded the Japanese to form a consortium with us.

And there were about four engine companies, or four companies, conglomerate

companies in Japan, who became part of Japanese Aero Engines, and they joined up

with us and we built an engine called the RJ500, Rolls and Japan. And we actually

got the money to run it as a demonstrator and it ran very well. And it was based on a


99

design that we’d already run for a bizjet engine, but much improved in component

efficiencies and size, because of the size increase [core efficiencies increase].

Did it enter production?

It didn’t enter production because when it came to the – when push came to shove,

Rolls Royce couldn’t produce the money for it. We were still knackered by the

bankruptcy. And so we then decided that we would try and sell an improved version

to Airbus for the A320. And we were getting on very well there and we made the

engine that they wanted. And the opposition was Pratt & Whitney. And so Pratt &

Whitney came along and said, join us and we’ll make the engine together. This was

an offer that the hierarchy of Rolls Royce couldn’t refuse really ‘cause it meant that if

they refused this they’d have been out of the business for the medium sized

aeroplanes. And so I spent a lot of time in East Hartford at Pratt & Whitney’s,

negotiating the specification of the engine. And it was called the VJ – oh god … The

RJ – no, not the RJ500, the V20500 [interviewee correction: V2500], that’s right. It

was a combination of the Pratt & Whitney 2000 engine and our RJ500, so it was a

V20500 [V2500]. And that engine – we negotiated the specification for it and almost

immediately after we’d negotiated it, a decision was made to split Bristol and Derby

into military and civil, so we were going to do the military engines and Derby so the

civil engines. So the whole engine design was then moved up to Derby and I was left

with doing the engines for vertical takeoff and for the European fighter aircraft, what

has become the Typhoon.

[0:44:04]

You mentioned Stanley Hooker a few times there in passing today. I was just

wondering if you could give me an impression of what he was like when you knew him

earlier on in his career in the 1950s?

Well, I knew him from – oh, when I joined in 1949 until I [he] died in 1984, I think it

was. And he was one of the – I mean, one of the reasons why I stayed at Bristol and

didn’t bother to look for anything else was I enjoyed working with him. He was one

of the nicest chaps I’ve ever come across in the industry. And I mean, there are a lot


100

of pretty ruthless individuals in the business. Technically he was ruthless but when it

came to his staff he was all smiles and straightforwardness. He was very

straightforward. You could work with him. You could say what you liked to him, as

long as you were accurate [laughs]. If you said something silly to him too often you

probably wouldn’t get very far. But he was a nice chap. I can’t think I know of a

better chap to work for, looking round the industry. He had a following in Bristol,

you know, that thought the – well, that he was the bee’s knees as far as a boss was

concerned. He lived not far away from us, up the road here. I used to know him quite

well on a social side.

As well as Hooker, who else did you actually work with earlier on?

Well, I worked very much with Pierre Young, who was the – he was half French, half

English. His father was secretary to Gulbenkian, the oil magnet, Mr Five Percent, he

was called. And he was a – you know, he had perfect French and perfect English.

And he was the guy who became the engine director of the Concorde programme.

And not only that but he was able to hold together the British contingent of the

aircraft guys and the French guys, ‘cause he had perfect French. And I would say he

was the guy who contributed most to the success of the programme. Some might

disagree with me but I think without him it wouldn’t have been a programme.

What sort of person was he to …?

Erm … He was a hard nut to – you know, when it came to technical argument, very

hard nut. But as a companion, I used to travel around Europe with him, he was pretty

good. And I was always very – I shared a flat with him for a time, when we were

both bachelors. It was quite an experience [laughs].

Well, why do you say that?

Well, he was a bit bohemian. I mean, his half French character, as such. We used to

hold wild parties and – visiting Paris, we always stayed at the George V or the Prince

de Galles, the best hotels in Paris. In those days people who travelled abroad travelled

like lords for the company. If you were could enough to send by air to America you


101

were good enough to go first class, was the argument. And so we used to go on the

Stratocruiser Monarch Service to Montreal. We had a bed as well as dinner served

with silver service. And in Paris – the George V hotel is the swankiest hotel in Paris,

just about. There are one or two others, the La Perouse and the George V.

[0:48:53]

Who else as well?

Hm?

Who else as well as Pierre and Hooker?

Gordon Lewis. Gordon Lewis was – he was the compressor man. He was the guy

who did the first – was largely responsible for the aerodynamics of the first Bristol gas

turbine. And then he did the Proteus. He wasn’t responsible so much for the layout.

That was – he was still a young guy, but he did all the compressor blading for the

Proteus and for the Theseus. The Theseus was the first engine that we made. That

was a propeller turbine, so was the Proteus. Then they decided we wanted to make a

jet engine. It was the preliminary designs that led to the Olympus. And he was

responsible for them, very much so for the Olympus engine at the start.

What was he like?

Oh, very nice chap, yeah. We got on pretty well. I think he would have liked to have

stayed a project engineer all his life. I managed to stay a project engineer, new

projects engineer, all my life, not because I – well, I liked it and I would have

regretted giving up project engineering, but, you know, you have to move on in a

company. To stay too long in a new projects job is stamping your image too – too

strongly on the company and you need to change. Well, I did twenty years nearly of

new projects work and, looking back on it – I think it was because of the … problems

with integrating Derby and Bristol that – they kept two project offices going, one at

Derby and one at Bristol. Well, they had three at the end, another one at Leavesden.

And this meant that, you know, they didn’t open the channels up to promotion, so I


102

spent the last twenty years of my life in one particular job, though they loaded me up

with about half a dozen other jobs as well.

[0:51:30]

If we can finish today perhaps by just talking a little bit about what it’s actually like

working in that office you actually described, with the piles of paper on the desks.

Well, not on my desk [laughs], I hasten to add. But of course I …

What’s your desk like?

Well, it was pretty clean at night, yes. But the thing about my job was that I seemed

to be the one they sent out to visit other companies, so I spent an awful lot of time in

the air. And on a Stratocruiser flight to America it took sixteen hours and sometimes

longer, ‘cause you had to stop off at Greenland or Shannon or Newfoundland. The

thing could hardly get across the Atlantic. And if there were strong headwinds on the

west east crossing you often had to divert to – well, to Greenland. But it was living

like a – you lived like a lord on a Stratocruiser. And in those days only people like

the aircraft industry, the civil servants and the hierarchy of companies travelled by

Monarch Services, BOAC. Today, I mean, everybody travels by air now. But we had

individual bunks at the back of the aeroplane on the Stratocruiser. It really was living

it up. And there was a circular staircase down to the bar underneath, ‘cause it was a

double bubble fuselage, if you’ve ever seen a Stratocruiser, two circles but with a

floor across the middle. The top circle was bigger than the bottom circle. Are you

with me? And it – of course the Stratocruiser was based on the Super Fortress. They

just took the wing of the Super Fortress, I think, and put a new fuselage on it.

Did anybody ever question the fact that they were flying you first class everywhere,

the expenses and that sort of thing?

Well, that was a rule at Bristol Aeroplane Company, as I understand it, in the ‘50s and

the early ‘60s, that if you were good enough to be sent abroad you were good enough


103

to fly first class. And not many people travelled abroad. It was only relatively few

people.

Were there first class facilities at Bristol itself, canteens and things like that?

Not in the performance office when I first started. It wasn’t until 1962, I think it was,

that Whittle House was built and then we did have good facilities. But prior to that it

was pretty rough and ready. We were working in a factory that had been a shadow

factory during the war.

At that first point in your career, you know, you’ve got a job at Bristol, where do you

see yourself going in the future?

I didn’t – I don’t think I thought about that. I was more interested in the job I was

doing than the job I might do. And I – promotions seemed to come.

What about the job actually interested you?

The job? I mean, I wouldn’t have wanted to do any other job. I suppose if I were

around today I’d be doing something different but I’m not sure, ‘cause in those days

aviation was the thing. When my family was growing up it was computing was the

thing. My eldest son is a Cambridge mathematician and he’s a computer nerd, if

that’s the right word [laughs]. And my second son is a financial wizard out in

Australia. And my third son is – he’s an oil and gas man with BG Exploration. He

travels the world. He’s been looking for oil and gas in New Guinea and Canada and –

you name it, Venezuela.

But for you it was aeroplanes.

For me it was aeroplanes.

What’s the attraction to aeroplanes? I don’t share it.


104

Well, if you’d been brought up in the 1930s as a small boy, the aeroplane business

was expanding and changing rapidly and every small boy, I think, had a feeling about

making model aeroplanes and flying model aeroplanes and so on. And I wasn’t very

different. And I had a bent for mathematics as well, so that’s the line I inevitably

followed then.

[End of Track 6]


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Track 7

Well, I’m not quite au fait with where we’ve got to. I hear you but it sounds as

though we’ve been bobbing all over the place.

Yes, we did talk about a few different topics last time. Perhaps we should sort of think

about working through your career in chronological order, as it were. So we talked a

little bit about some of the early work at Bristol involving trying to sell the Proteus to

the Americans. I was wondering what other projects did you get involved in in the

1950s?

Trying to sell the Olympus, civil version of the Olympus called the Olympus 551, to

the Americans. And we were in competition of course with our rivals in the UK,

Rolls Royce, at the time. This is before we amalgamated. And the whole thing was –

was involved with the military, because to get the funding for an engine for a civil

aeroplane you really had to get some official government funding to back it. Because

it was rather too big for a company at that time anyway to fund its own civil

programmes because civil programmes were very much more expensive than military

programmes. And, so we were trying to sell the Olympus into the Boeing 707 and the

Douglas DC8 and I think we had a go at a Convair 880.

Who do you talk to to sell an engine?

Well, you talk to – I always talk to the engineers but there were always a few

commercial guys sitting around at these meetings. We usually had to address fairly

big meetings at Boeing and Douglas and Convair. And they were all situated on the

west coast, Douglas being at Long Beach, Convair being in – south of Los Angeles,

and Boeing being up in Seattle. So I spent a lot of time – which I also used at

weekends to go and see my uncle, who emigrated to America in the early part of the

twentieth century. I think it was 1906 he went over there. I don’t know whether

we’ve talked about him before. But he ended up as a colonel in the US army. And he

was a friend of Douglas McArthur and the two of them went out to the Philippines in

the 1930s to train the Philippine army. And he had quite an interesting career one


106

way or another. He actually went back with McArthur when they retook the

Philippines towards the end of the war with Japan.

What sort of chap was he to meet and talk to?

He was a very nice chap, very – my mother is his sister and my aunts were very fond

of him. He used to tease them a bit. But he came back once – I’ve got a photograph

of him sitting outside in our garden there. But he didn’t come back to this country

very much. Well, I don’t know – I think the – I don’t know what the reason was, but I

think his ancestry was in question, because to become an officer in the US army at

that time I think you had to be American born. Well, he wasn’t American born but he

faked his birth certificate, I think, or something. But he was a bit loathe to show too

much contact with the UK. But he’s dead now so it doesn’t matter [laughs].

Quick pause.

Yes, I was – a fair old noise, isn’t it?

What sort of attitudes did you meet in the US towards the idea of buying a British

engine rather than an American one?

Well, at that time Britain was regarded as being ahead of America in engine design.

We had provided Pratt & Whitney and General Electric with their first engines, jet

engines. There was the Whittle W20, I think, the Whittle engine went to GE and I

think the first Rolls Royce engine – either the first or the second Rolls Royce engine

went to Pratt & Whitney, and they actually produced a lot of what we used to call the

Nene. And so we were always welcomed because they wanted to know what we were

up to. And of course Boeing and Douglas both wanted to sell engines to Europe and

therefore they had the idea that you should have a British alternative engine

installation in their aeroplanes. So we were in a good position to sell the engines.

Most of that went to Derby because they had a bigger presence in the civil market

than we did.

[0:06:11]


107

Did you ever have any dealings with American engine companies?

Yes, yes. I had dealings with Pratt & Whitney on many occasions. I didn’t have any

dealings with General Electric. General Electric were regarded more as an enemy, I

think than a collaborator. We did nearly get tied up with – or when we joined Rolls

Royce there was a period when it looked like we were going to join with GE in

making big engines, but the trouble was we had the RB211 in various installations and

we wanted to improve those installations. That involved us building new versions of

the 211 and I think that caused the relationship to break up. But then we had a

relationship with Pratt & Whitney to build a Spey replacement engine.

Was this the …?

V20500. [Interviewee correction: V2500]

Yes, I think you mentioned this last time. Did you have any dealings with engine

companies early on in your career in the 1950s in the United States?

Yes, I had a lot of activity with SNECMA on the Concorde engine. And at the time I

was looking after noise and intakes and nozzles and so on, not on the basic engine.

This is before I went into new projects work. So I had about – from about 1962, I

think, up until 1968 I spent an awful lot of time in France, very enjoyable. The food

was good [laughs]. And SNECMA really were fighting for a place in the jet engine

world because they finished World War II with an engine company … what was the

name of it now? Erm … oh, it escapes my mind. [interviewee correction: the Gnome

Rhone] But it made engines for the German aircraft industry in World War II and it

wasn’t very popular with the French government after the war so they changed the

name and nationalised it and called it SNECMA. And of course there were

arrangements with Turbomeca as well but they were largely – they were [with] Derby

originally and then we acquired them because we took over the work with the

helicopter engines, which were made with Turbomeca down in Pau in Southern

France.


108

Early on in your career as well, I was thinking – talking about the Olympus sales, or

the attempted Olympus sales, to the Americans. Did you meet any success?

Well, there was – we were tied up with the old Curtis Wright company who made

piston engines and they thought they knew how to design jet engines and they’d

signed an agreement to license the Olympus engine. And the engine that they

produced was not very good and it didn’t really survive for very long in the US Air

Force. I think it was a J67. And then Curtis Wright more or less dropped out of the

business. But this was a case where they acquired an engine design which had been –

a lot of hard work had been put into it, and then they modified it and ended up in a lot

of mechanical trouble. But they had very good piston engines and the Wright Turbo

compunds and that were in a lot of the civil air transports around after the war and the

Lockheed Super Constellation and so on.

[0:10:36]

That does bring me onto a question I was wondering about. You hinted last time at

the older generation of engineers not understanding jets as well as newer engineers.

I was wondering, what sort of attitude did the jet actually meet in your experience at

Bristol early on?

Well, I think there was a sort of hiatus after Roy Fedden departed during the war. He

had a disagreement with the hierarchy at Bristol Aeroplane Company. He was in

charge of the engine division at Bristol Aeroplane Company. So he went off to work

for Sir Stafford Cripps at the Ministry and then he left behind a lot of guys who were

very good at taking his orders and not so good at being the leader, the basic leader, a

man who looked ahead. And it wasn’t till Stanley Hooker arrived in 1949, very soon

after – or just before I arrived, that the place really got a grip on jet engines. Because

the design office and the development engineers, they were all piston engine men, and

there’s a very big difference between developing piston engines and developing jet

engines. So we had to learn quite a lot. And Stanley Hooker brought quite a lot of

people from Derby, asked them if, you know, they wanted a promotion they could

come to Bristol and join Bristol. And so we had about – ooh, I should think about ten

guys, senior guys, who came down and joined Bristol. The two leading members


109

were – well, let’s see now. Lionel Hawarth, who became the Chief Designer, and Bob

Plumb, who became the Chief Development Engineer at Bristol. And they were both

very senior guys in Derby.

[0:13:04]

I was wondering as well, we talked a little bit about the start of Bristol’s jet engine

development when we were talking last time. I think we discussed the first two

engines, Theseus …

Theseus and the Proteus. There was a Phoebus engine, which didn’t come to

anything, which was – I think it was a little gas chamber [interviewee correction:

turbine] with a – might have been turned into a propeller turbine or a power turbine or

a power generator system. And they were – the Proteus was a bit unfortunate in that

Bristol were trying to do something different and they were trying to keep the engine

short and they thought to keep the engine short they should take the air in, take it

through the back, take it to the back of the engine, have the compressor facing

backwards, and then the air went through the compressor and went through another

180 degrees turn. And this is the design that caused Bristol to have a lot of trouble

with icing, especially in tropical thunderclouds. And ice used to accumulate on these

bends as the flow went down the engine, turns around 180 degrees into the

compressor, it collected on the walls of the bend and then when it got to a certain size

it would fall off and a great big chunk of mush, snow or ice, a mixture of snow and

ice, would go into the engine and douse the combustion. So this only appeared when

we went to Africa. Because the first Britannias that were built which had this engine

were intended for – they were called the Empire Routes. In fact when I was at the

Ministry in 1946, ’45, ’46, it was called the Medium Range Empire Airliner. And in

the end we sorted the problem out and it became a very, very reliable engine. And it

was used in motor torpedo boats and also in peak lopping electrical generation

systems, and I did quite a lot of work on those. In fact, the design of the Vosper

Thornycroft fast patrol boats – they were called … what were they called? I can’t

remember the name of them now. Anyway, they had Proteus engines in them and we

– they were having terrible trouble because they were taking in – they pointed the

intakes forward on these boats, not thinking that waves break over launches and a lot


110

of sea would have gone into the engine room. So what we persuaded them to do is to

point the intakes back because there was not much energy in the forward speed, the

kinetic energy of the air at forward speed conditions, we threw that away, it hardly –

hardly mattered, and took the air in backwards. And then we had a series of vanes in

the intake which caught the water. Any water that then managed to get in, we drained

it off what we call the splitters. And then it discharged into the engine room, not

straight into the engines, so any spare water that remained after all that would land on

the engine room floor and could be pumped away. And the engines themselves then

just sucked from the engine room.

So in the case of Vosper Thornycroft …

Brave – they were called the Brave boats, Borderer and …

In the case of the Brave class boats then, what was your own sort of personal

involvement in solving that problem?

What was my first …?

Your personal involvement in solving that.

Personal? I was involved in designing the intake system and how we would feed it

and what size the intake had to be and how you turned the corners and collected the –

we actually set up an intake for the Brave boats at Patchway, our design headquarters,

and tested it on a – oh, that’s funny, what was it? Oh, my hearing aid – tested it on a

rig, outdoor rig, where we had all these splitters. I mean, we got the fire brigade to

pour water into them and see if we could catch it all. And in the end we got an

installation which probably was the first of its type for boats with gas turbines and

which actually worked. And the Brave boats were a quite successful design, done by

Thornycroft at the time, Vosper Thornycroft.

[0:18:45]


111

Now bearing in mind, you know, I’m not an engineer by training at all, how do you

actually go about designing that sort of installation from scratch?

Well, you have to have knowledge of gas dynamics really. That’s the essential thing.

When I say gas dynamics I mean the dynamics of airflow. And you’ve got to

understand losses that you get in bends and losses you get with intakes, whether you

need a sharp lipped or a rounded intake, lip intake. And, well, all – and then you have

to take account of the losses of the splitters in the intake and how to drain the water

off and all that sort of thing. I mean, it was something quite new to me but I had a

knowledge of aeronautics, aerodynamics and it wasn’t very difficult to pick it up.

And we also did the installations for the first gas turbine peak lopping system down at

Princeton on Exmoor.

Peak lopping, sorry?

Peak lopping is when the local people have not enough power coming from the grid to

meet their demand locally. Instead of trying to get more out of the central system you

have an engine which was run remotely. It started up and was controlled by

telephone. And this – I’m going back now to the 1950s, I suppose. But we did a lot

of strange jobs. We put Olympus engines into Hams Hall in Birmingham. The

Olympus engines were driving – they had an extra power turbine on the back which

drove a generator, an alternator, for the CGB and then what was decided to be done

was to put the exhaust of the Olympus – after we’d taken all the power out we could,

put it into the boiler system, into the furnace system. And this was about the – though

we didn’t realise it at the time, this was the first combined cycle gas turbine. And I’ve

since seen gas turbines which are designed specifically to extract all the power you

can from the airstream through the gas turbine and then put the exhaust into a boiler

system and raise steam, which is very similar to what we were doing with the Hams

Hall set up.

To take the Proteus example to begin with, what sort of things do you actually have to

do to adapt, you know, a gas turbine engine that’s built for use in jet aircraft to be

used as a power station?


112

Oh, I mean, that’s a very simple job. You put a bell mouth intake on it, a big bell

mouth intake. The problem with intakes normally is the external flow and the – when

you vary the airflow, actually throttle the engine back and forth, you have different

regimes in the intake and you have to decide whether you can get away with a sharp

lipped intake and perhaps some auxiliary doors, as we did on Concorde, or whether

you need a rounded intake and that’s good enough, or whether you need a rounded

intake and auxiliary doors like we did on the Harrier. If you look at the Harrier, the

Harrier has a very short intake. And it was quite a new situation we faced. And in the

end we ended up – we had as big a lip as we could put on and we had a series of

auxiliary doors which opened up on the ground. When you’re flying along you – it’s

much easier to get a clean intake airflow because you’re not trying to drag air in from

all directions. It’s coming straight at you. So the problem with the Harrier is the

recovery in the intake, the intake recovery, in the static condition or near static

condition. And in order to overcome that we put in all these doors, suck in doors,

around the periphery of the intake duct. And it was the shortest intake I think we’ve

ever dealt with. But we sorted it out, well, in conjunction with Hawkers of course.

And this means that you’ve got a – your aerodynamic people in the engine company

have to be fairly close to the aerodynamic people in the aircraft company to make sure

that the combined job of getting a good external installation with minimum drag and a

good recovery at the intake face are achieved. And that was always a problem, which

we all had a hand in but I had particularly at that job in the ‘50s and the ‘60s.

The design of intakes?

Of intakes and nozzles. The nozzle was another problem. On the Concorde we had a

problem ‘cause it was – a very highly supersonic flow came out of the nozzle. But the

faster you flew the more supersonic the jet was because of the increased pressure at

the front of the engine. So we had to use a convergent divergent nozzle on the

Concorde. And in the end we – this is because, as you expand the speed of the jet,

when you come to the speed of sound the airflow is at a minimum cross sectional

area. And then a subsonic, as you approach the speed of sound you contract the

intake to make the – because the flow is going faster, but as it goes faster the density

decreases and the flow starts to increase in volume. And therefore you get a

convergent divergent nozzle and you go from low aerodynamic speeds to supersonic


113

speeds. And on the Concorde the speed would have been about three times the speed

of sound at the exit of the nozzle, something like that. I can’t remember exactly. But

then you had to get rid of the divergence when you’re cruising subsonically and what

we did there was to have what we call an ejector nozzle. And this means that you take

secondary air from the intake and put it into the throat of the convergent divergent

nozzle and there’s a gap, so there’s no mechanical connection between the throat of

the nozzle and the divergence of the nozzle. And the flow expands against the colder

air. And we managed to get nozzles which were 99.5 percent efficient. I mean, there

were some arguments as to whether they were greater than 100 percent efficiency,

because we were sucking in additional air and you can get more thrust sometimes

with an ejector than the theoretical thrust of the jet alone.

[0:27:08]

But that was a great big joint effort between SNECMA, BAC, Sud Aviation, the

French Air Ministry and the British NGTE people. It was – Concorde was an

incredible exercise in intake design and nozzle design. No other aeroplane that I’ve

been involved with was such a complicated device, but in the end we got the highest –

almost the highest efficiency you could expect and certainly the highest nozzle

efficiencies that you’d expect.

How did you first actually become involved in designing air intakes and nozzles?

Because I – my first job when I went to Bristol was installation of engines, the

aerodynamics of installations of engines. And also aircraft performance, ‘cause what

I’d been doing in the Ministry was aircraft performance, but I was also doing part of

the work on the intake design of – check that the intakes worked.

We talked a little bit about the installation problems generally but you mentioned

quite a few different aeroplanes last time and visiting them. I just wonder, you know,

where in the process of designing and fitting a jet engine to an aeroplane does an

installation engineer actually come in and what do you contribute to that process

then?


114

Well, you have to make sure that the intake is suitable for the engine and they have to

make sure that the engine is suitable for the aeroplane in the joint effort. And then of

course you have to cool the engine. And a lot of our time with jet engines particularly

was involved in the cooling of the installation, because the jet pipes used to get red

hot. And the nozzle of the engine and all the – if there were any auxiliary intakes

required by engine accessories, we – first of all oil coolers, I used to do the oil cooler

designs for the Britannia and the follow on to the Britannia, which never ever came to

anything.

And how do you actually cool an engine installation in the 1950s?

Well, we used to use an ejector nozzle often. An ejector nozzle is where you fire a jet

into a cylindrical tube and so that there’s no – the nozzle of the jet is not attached to

the nozzle of the aeroplane really. You fire it into this cylindrical tube which is about

one diameter long probably and that then induces the flow due to the friction of the

two flows and sucks flow from somewhere at the front engine to the exhaust nozzle,

keeps the back end cool and also keeps the installation cool. And there are other

things you can do like putting – you can put some blankets on the jet pipe, ‘cause the

old jet engines were very, very hot and they needed great attention to cooling. So it’s

not just a matter of what goes on inside the engine. You’ve got to be right with what

goes on outside the engine, ‘cause all the accessories are mounted on the engine and

you don’t want to cook them.

So by accessories …?

Accessories? Well, electrical generators, hydraulic pumps, you name it, fuel pumps.

Engines are covered like Christmas trees with the various accessories.

How different is the installation of the same jet engine on one aeroplane compared to

another?

Oh, they have to be fairly similar because if you’re wanting to change ability

[interviewee correction: ‘wanting ability to change’] particularly then you take one


115

engine out and install your own. Sometimes there were about three engines available

on some of the airliners, certainly often two.

I wanted to ask as well, dealing with all these really high temperatures, do you have

to use any special materials?

Yes, you have to use – well, there were things called Refrasil blankets and they were

very thin stainless steel sandwich with some wool – what do you call it, rock wool

lining. And that was used to keep the jet pipe cool. But, you know, these are things

that can cause quite a lot of trouble. I mean, we had – on TSR2 there was one chap –

in fact, it was the son of Barnes Wallace, and he was in charge of cooling the back

end of the aeroplane. And he was very worried about fires starting, ‘cause you have

fuel drains – you had to make sure the fuel drains all went overboard and didn’t go

into the aircraft tunnel in which the engine was mounted. So we used to have a lot of,

what do you call them, engine ground rigs mocking up the bit of the aeroplane they

went through. Now when – nowadays most of the installations are pods, so the pod

design can be tested by the aircraft man. And usually he is mainly responsible for it

in conjunction with the aircraft manufacturer. But in the old days where you had

buried engines, you were right in contact with the whole structure of the aeroplane. I

mean, I don’t know if you knew that on the Comet, for example, there were four

engines buried in the wing at the wing root and there were people sitting within about

two, two feet of them with turbines going around at enormous speeds with enormous

energy. The thought of it is enough to frighten anybody silly [laughs]. But that’s the

way we started. It was the wrong way because in the end we – this country followed a

buried engine philosophy for quite a long time before we went to podded engines, the

Comet being the first of the buried engines. And then there was a Vickers aeroplane,

Vickers 1,000 I think it was, and that looked like a bigger Comet. And then you had

the Vulcan and the Victor, they were all buried engines. The Valiant was a buried

engine. But the Americans went for pods.

[0:35:36]

Why did Britain actually stay using buried engines?


116

It’s a good question. I think it’s an unfortunate by product of the centrifugal

compressor, which was favoured so much by Whittle. He believed that the centrifugal

compressor was the simplest way to do the job and that’s the – you know, simplicity

is a great thing with an engineering set up. But the frontal area of the centrifugal

compressors was so much greater, particularly where you had single sided

compressors, as you did for the Goblin and the Ghost, Major Halford’s designs. And

if you tried to put those in a pod you came out with a ridiculously big pod with a high

drag. So they tried – the Ghost was buried in the wing root of the Comet and the

Goblin was put behind the pilot in the Vampire. And it so happened that you didn’t

have any significant penalty by putting the Goblin behind the pilot. But if you try to

put them in pods you’re in trouble.

Did you ever sort of consider the buried engine versus pod thing in the 1950s?

Yes, this is the 1950s we’re talking about now. And it took an awful long time for it

to sink in, particularly in the UK, that the right thing to do was to go for axial flow

compressors and the centrifugal compressor was for small helicopter engines and little

power units on small aeroplanes maybe. But for big aeroplanes the centrifugal

compressor is a no-no. But it took a long time to sink in.

Do you remember it being discussed in the 1950s?

Yes, I do. In fact, I had a lot to do with Whittle and Whittle was still pressing for

centrifugal compressors in airliners in the – when would it be? Ooh, up to 1970. But

by that time we’d realised that that was not the right way to go. But, you know, he

was a great man. He was a man who demonstrated a principle, but it’s usually – often

true that the people who do the first design using a new principle don’t get it right

quite and the people who come along next do a lot better. And that’s – if you look at

all sorts of industries, that has happened.

How did people like you actually regard Whittle in the 1950s?

Well, we regarded him as a great guy, a great man, a great pioneer. And I hesitate to

say anything against his work, but I have to say that I had a lot to do with him in the


117

1960s. He used to come to Bristol to see Stanley Hooker, and when Stanley Hooker

had a problem with his meetings he used to park him with me to look at new projects.

And he was still trying to propagate the idea of centrifugal compressor engines. Now

we’ve got centrifugal compressors on quite a lot of our helicopter engines but that

doesn’t matter. When they’re small they’re easy, but they don’t scale up very well,

and neither are they very good when the compressor pressure ratio is very high and

the temperatures are very high in the compressor.

[0:40:04]

I was thinking of a hypothetical situation, say I’ve just designed an aeroplane in the

1950s and I come to you at Bristol and I say I’d like you to fit one of your engines to

my plane. How do you actually make that happen, you know, what are the steps

involved for the aircraft installation people like yourself?

Well, we had what was called power plant design in the engine company and we

would take on the job. In fact, the first occasion in which I remember us doing it was

when the Britannia got into a certain amount of trouble, where they – the old piston

engine designers hadn’t realised that there were still a lot of problems disposing of the

jet thrust on a propeller turbine engine. And we – well, we had a lot to do with

putting right problems that appeared on the early Britannias because of the location of

the jet pipe, coming out on top of the wing.

Where do you actually start the process of fitting an engine to an aeroplane?

Well, first of all the performance has to be acceptable to the aircraft company. It has

to do something for them. And having decided that then it depends. If the aeroplane

is, as I said, a podded engine then the engine man is – certainly in the UK the engine

man came along and designed the pod. In America there was a policy in Pratt &

Whitney particularly that they delivered an engine in a box and said the air comes in

here and comes out there and the rest of it’s up to the aircraft man. Now that didn’t

work very well in some instances. And we always said that we wanted to be

absolutely sure that we were happy and the aircraft man was happy, and so there is a

sort of no mans land which has to be rigorously designed.


118

How closely do you have to work with the aircraft company in that no mans land?

Oh, very closely. And of course you tend to build up friendships with the aircraft

men. I was very friendly, as I mentioned, with Walter Swan of Boeing, who was the

chief engineer for their supersonic transport, which didn’t come to anything. He used

to come here and look out into the garden the way you’re looking out now. So, yes,

you get quite friendly, but on the other hand you have to maintain a certain degree of

detachment so that you can go and deal with his competitor.

What sort of interactions do you have with aircraft designers then? Could you give

me maybe one or two examples of when you sort of had that meeting with them and

discussed whatever it is you’re discussing to fit an aeroplane engine to an aeroplane.

The way in which we would approach it?

Yes.

Excuse me.

Sorry.

[End of Track 7]


119

Track 8

… director of politics and aircraft procurement, because … we were designing a

supersonic military – am I on the air now? We were designing a supersonic military

aeroplane, the P1154, which was – this is around about the early ‘60s. After we’d

demonstrated the Harrier they said, oh, that’s a good demonstration, now we want it to

be supersonic and have a long range and do everything. And the Navy wanted it even

more supersonic. So the Navy had a different aeroplane from the RAF but they were

both supersonic, supposed to be supersonic aeroplanes. And then along came – along

came Harold Wilson and Dennis Healey and Dennis Healey said, we can’t afford

Carriers so we’ll scrap all the Carriers. I think he probably left one small one, the

Hermes, I think it was. And so we were given a – we scrapped the – first of all the

work at Hawkers was cut right back and then Harold Wilson had a – decided that for

electoral reasons, for electing the local MPs, he ought to give some work to Hawkers.

So he said, make a – make a subsonic aeroplane based on the Harrier now we’ve

cancelled all the supersonic aeroplanes. So they redesigned the Harrier and we were

closely involved with the redesign. And we’re talking now about the mid ‘60s. And a

friend of mine, who I’d worked with in the government, in service at Millbank in

MAP in 1945 to ’47, he was sent down to Kingston to agree the specification for the

aeroplane, which had to be got underway fairly quickly to keep the workforce going.

And so he wrote the specification for the Harrier as we – more or less as we see it

today, round the brochure that had been prepared by Hawkers for submission to the

Ministry. Now that’s an almost unheard of situation. The civil servants need to get in

and change everything if they can, particularly their particular pet bit of equipment

they want in the aeroplane. So he went down there, signed up for this. This was in

1966. Well, in 1969, three and a bit years later, nearly four years later, the aeroplane

was cleared for service. And this is unheard of in peace time. The Typhoon took

twenty years, the current Typhoon that we’ve got. And so he made the RAF buy a

load of these aeroplanes. But in the meanwhile the US marines had seen the

aeroplane and got very interested in it, ‘cause the marines have their own problems in

the US navy, that the admirals in the navy don’t really want the Marines to have big

carriers and aeroplanes. That’s for the Navy to have. But they were prepared to let

them have small carriers. I don’t know what you call them, assault carriers, and an

aeroplane which could take off vertically or take off with a short run and land


120

vertically. So the [US] marines became the predominant customer for the Harrier. I

think they bought significantly more than the RAF did. And then while this was

going on the Navy were worried that they weren’t going to have a fleet air arm. So

they then decided to take the Harrier and have it marinised. We had lots of

magnesium castings which had to be replaced with aluminium castings because

magnesium and seawater don’t mix. Or at least the trouble is they do mix and before

you know where you are it’s grown all sorts of peculiar powders all over the

magnesium castings. So we marinised the Harrier for the Royal Navy and they said,

well, we’ll use the assault carriers but we’ll call them through deck cruisers. And this

was to appease Dennis Healey, who said we’re having no more aircraft carriers. And

this was all going on around about 1970. And so then they get an order for the

through deck cruisers, which are really small aircraft carriers in the region of 25,000

to 30,000 tonnes. And these are the aircraft carriers that went down to the Falklands.

So we wouldn’t have been able to retake the Falklands without the Harrier.

[0:06:01]

I guess the Harrier’s Pegasus engine is something that is going to come up in your

own story, isn’t it, that – well, it might be a good moment, if we could maybe – maybe

if you could just give me an idea of the projects you were involved in over the course

of your career, as a sort of career summary, if you like, of the things you were

involved in. And then maybe we can pick up on each of those in a bit more detail.

Yes, do you want me to go right back to the beginning?

Yeah, why not, as we’ve – yeah.

Well, I mean, let’s summarise it. I was sent into the Ministry of Aircraft Production

in 1945. I was given the job of helping a chap to assess the performance of bombers,

transports, flying boats and so on. And I lived next door to the people who were

doing fighters. And in that period you had all the Brabazon aeroplanes, you had all

the V bombers in the process of being launched. And I did the two years intensive

work there, but nine months of that I was out in Germany. But I still got through

more work in two years than I would have in – I don’t know. Later on my career, you


121

know, when you settle down, you’re not quite as eager. Well, I must have been a very

eager beaver because I worked like a dingbat because I was interested. And so then I

went back to college after deciding not to become a permanent civil servant, for which

I’m sincerely thankful. And came out of college, went to work for Bristol Aeroplane

Company, engine division of Bristol Aeroplane Company. And they were doing the

Proteus engine for the Britannia. They were doing the Brabazon 1, which still had

piston engines. And then there were all the – there were a lot of other activities going

on. On the military side we were designing an Orpheus. Now the Orpheus was an

engine which went into half a dozen aeroplanes and we don’t hear very much of them.

The G91 and there was an Indian aeroplane, whose name escapes me at the moment,

and there was the Folland Gnat and various other projects. So I arrived at Bristol

when Stanley Hooker was setting up what was in effect a competitor to his old Rolls

Royce colleagues. And so we had – almost immediately we had contracts for the

Olympus and the Vulcan and the G91, the Folland Gnat. We were going to do a

development of the – or a new engine for the Britannia, to carry it on to become a

much faster aeroplane. And the Canadians were going to build a thing called the

CL44, which was going to have the later engines, and the short Belfast was on the

horizon. And, well, we’re talking now about the mid ‘50s. And then you had Wibault

in France coming along with the idea for the vertical takeoff Harrier, or what became

the Harrier, the P1127. And we were working on that as well. So that took us up to

the end of the ‘50s. And we’d just run – we ran the first Pegasus, I think in – when

would it be? Was it ’59? 1959. And it went into – it actually flew in the P1127 in

1960.

[0:10:55]

And from there we had lots of attempts to sell the Pegasus, but it looked to us in the

end as though – there was only one aeroplane you can build around the Pegasus, with

four rotating nozzles, unless you turned it into a – you could have turned the Pegasus

into a bypass turbo fan for transport. But I think we decided that that would be a

major redesign for civil activity and we didn’t want to get mixed up in that at the time.

But it would have made quite a good civil engine. It was a much higher bypass ratio

than the Spey. It was more like the Pratt & Whitney J75s and J57s. And, hmm, let’s

see, what happened then? Oh, throughout the ‘60s we were developing the ideas for


122

Concorde. It started off with the STAC, Supersonic Transport Aircraft Committee in

Farnborough in 1956, and from there it grew into a study of whether it should have a z

wing or whether it should be a delta wing. And the z wing aeroplane was a Mach 1.2

transport and that was right in the middle of the transonic regime, which is the most

difficult regime to design for. So in the end it was decided to go for Mach 2.2. And

the design of the Concorde was really sorted out by Farnborough and the German

scientists who we had collected in Germany in 1946, ’47. The – let’s see now. The

… the Concorde occupied an enormous amount of my time in the 1960s as it was

really an era of the P1127 and the Concorde. And they both ground their way through

the 1960s in their design phases. And in 1969 of course was the first flight of the

Concorde. And 1969 was the first – the introduction to service of the P1127 RAF, or

the Harrier – by which time it was called the Harrier. And then in addition to that we

were collaborating with the French on a civil aeroplane and an engine called the M45.

And that was a joint design with SNECMA. And it arose out of a … an aeroplane

called the AFVG. That was a variable sweep aeroplane.

Is this the one the French dropped out of?

And that was cancelled in favour of the Jaguar. And then – what happened then?

Yes, we decided that we had to do something with the M45 so we turned it into a little

civil engine. And it flew in the V … 614 [interviewee correction: VFW 614]– no,

gosh, so many different aeroplanes. Anyway, a German aeroplane, twin engine

German aeroplane, the VFW – that’s right, VFW 614, with engines put on top of the

wings. Now this was an alternative to putting them on the tail and keeping a low

winged aeroplane, whereas of course most of the aeroplanes, small aeroplanes, tended

to be tail mounted engines. The bigger aeroplanes tended to be under wing pod

aeroplanes. And the 614 was a – it was quite an interesting experience, putting it on

top of the wing, but it had quite a lot of problems and in the end it was decided – the

German government didn’t want to fund it. So we were left with an engine which the

German government had paid for and they didn’t want to go on with it. We tried to

get other applications for it but I think the attraction of the German government

paying the sort of – what do you call it? Not damages put paying for the wind up of

the programme, where we’d spent a lot of money, that was too much to turn down.

And, well, we – where did we go from there?


123

[0:16:57]

Well yes, by that – then we had the amalgamation of Rolls Royce in Bristol, and that

of course was a complete change of attitudes. We had to work with the people we’d

been competing against for the last twenty odd years. And it certainly caused an

awful lot of heartaches. We had two project offices, a separate one at Bristol, a

separate one at Derby, competing against each other. And it wasn’t – then we had the

bankruptcy of Rolls Royce in 1971. And a lot of the money that came into the

company came in through the military business in those days, partly our military

business and partly Rolls Royce’s military business. And all through the ‘70s we had

a situation where we were not given enough money – there was not enough money in

the company, because it had been nationalised after the bankruptcy, and any money

that was available went on the development of the 211. And I had the unenviable task

of being Chief Project Engineer who came up with quite a few interesting

propositions but which never went anywhere because there was no money. And we

developed – I think we’ve gone into this. We developed an engine for bizjets called

the RB401. Now that engine was a complete breakaway from the jet engines that had

been used in business jets. And it was rather like a scaled down big fan engine. And

it ran first time successfully, we delivered its brochure performance on the first run,

and it was still – there was no money to finance it. We then went further and tried to

– instead of doing that we tried to make a Spey replacement engine, which ended up

with us collaborating with the Japanese. And that was called the RJ500, the J being

Japan and R being the first half of Rolls Royce. So the RJ500 was a 20,000 lb thrust

engine, which was intended for the smaller airliners. That didn’t materialise again

because of lack of money. And so – and we had a good chance of selling it to Boeing.

They regarded it as the lead engine – we provided them with an enormous amount of

information to enable them to optimise their aeroplane and we were really the lead

engine, but in the end the company said, there’s not enough money to do this. So

again we were stuck. We then went on to talk to Airbus about what they wanted and

they wanted a better engine than Boeing were putting into the 737, ‘cause they were

competing with the 737 with a brand new engine and aeroplane. And this became the

A320. And we got to the point where I think we were in head on conflict with Pratt &

Whitney. This is the Japanese and Rolls Royce company, up against Pratt & Whitney.


124

Now Pratt & Whitney obviously realised that we had a proposition which would be

useful for a collaborative project. And we’d been developing it with Airbus. So in –

when would it be? 1982, ’83, we went out to East Hartford and signed up for a new

engine called the V20 500 [V2500]. And this resulted in … Rolls Royce finding the

money, but in doing so they decided that they would make all civil engines at Derby

and all military engines at Bristol. So we had to relinquish that engine design and it

was carried on by Derby. And it’s been one of the most successful engines that we’ve

built. I don’t know – I forget how many we’ve built now but it’s quite a large

number. And I think that we’re still in association with Pratt & Whitney but I think

they’ve taken over our share of the business. And of course they’re now looking at

engines for – for short range operation, which spend their time climbing and

descending. And it so happens that that sort of engine needs a very high bypass fan

and which calls for a geared engine. So we’re back – almost back to square one,

looking like a piston engine with a gearbox. And we actually ran such an engine in

the ‘70s called the M45 SDO2. And that engine had a gearbox and a variable pitch

fan. And it had a fan pressure ratio much lower than the fan pressure ratio of the big

airline, long range airliners, simply because it was designed for climbing to

operational height and then descending. It hardly cruised at all. And that’s the name

of the game for … civil aeroplanes on short ranges, particularly in Europe and

America, city pair operation.

What happens to you once the civil work goes from Bristol?

Well, that happened very close to the end of my career. We had a policy in the

company, retirement at sixty-two for senior staff. This was done I think because it

was thought that the top echelons of the company were too full of older guys and they

ought to find some way of getting rid of them. So retirement at sixty-two – and this

took up – this occurred because in 1945 there was a wholesale changeover to jet

engines from piston engines and the people who came to the top rapidly were young

guys and they all retired at about the same age. So the way to get out of this was to

retire people early.

[End of Track 8]


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Track 9

So that was close to the end of my career and the last job I did – one of the last jobs I

did was to put together the technical specification for the Typhoon engine, for the

collaborative programme in Europe for the Typhoon.

Right, thank you. That’s a brilliant overview. What I would like to do now is to pick

up one or two of the things that you’ve talked about in summary and discuss them in a

bit more depth. And I thought perhaps the Pegasus would be a good place to start.

[0:00:39]

When did you first hear about the Pegasus?

Oh, about 1956, I should think. We suddenly realised that the NATO people were

calling for a vertical or short take off aeroplane, which could be hidden away in

woods in Europe, away from main bases which could be wiped out by Soviet

airstrikes and rockets and the like. And there was a Frenchman called Wibault, who

turned up at Bristol with a – got in touch with us and he wanted to have four

centrifugal compressors. And he was going to rotate the compressors so that the

scroll – the scroll with the nozzles from each compressor either point down or point

back. And he left that with us and one or two of the guys. I wasn’t involved at this

stage. A chap called Gordon Lewis, who sadly died recently, he decided that the best

thing to do was to have a big compressor and take the flow out of the compressor and

have rotating nozzles to rotate it rather than rotate some great big centrifugal blowers.

You know, like a snail, the centrifugal blower, so if you – and you can have a nozzle

taking the flow straight out of it. And if you rotate the whole casing then you in effect

rotate the nozzle. It’s a terrible way to rotate nozzles. It wouldn’t – the idea was right

but the execution would have been hopeless, doing it that way. Anyway, we came up

with the proposition for rotating the front nozzles and the first designs were with

aircraft with just the front nozzles rotating from horizontal to vertical. But then

somebody said, oh no – there was a bit of an argument about who actually invented it,

but it was patented by Bristol, in which we rotated the rear nozzles as well. And

Ralph Hooper [of Hawkers] had come to the same conclusion. And there is a little bit


126

of discussion as to who did it first but I don’t want to go into that now. We had a very

good relationship with Hawker Aircraft. And we set about then making an aeroplane

out of that idea. And that took us from – oh, took us a couple of years to do that. And

we came up with the precursor to the Harrier, which was the Kestrel. And NATO of

course was keen on this idea. Why they were so keen on it nobody’s ever quite

explained, but there were wheels within wheels. And I think the American

government was putting money into a thing called MWDP, Mutual Weapons

Development, and they decided to back the idea of the Harrier. And it was not the

British government that backed it first. It was this offshoot of the American

government in Europe called MWDP, which was run by a couple of colonels and a

couple of generals, US guys with a sack load of money for encouraging the Europeans

to do aeronautical activity. And so Sydney Camm and Stanley Hooker and their

minions, of whom I was one, got down to work on it and we had all sorts of problems,

like the intake had to be very short. This was for reasons you didn’t – well, the longer

the intake the bigger the – there was a problem – if the aircraft when it was static was

rotating it could get into trouble if you had too long an intake. So we were ending up

with an intake which was less than one diameter in length, I think.

What problem does that actually cause?

Well, we had to slow the air down and turn it through quite a considerable angle to get

it into the engine. And you had two halves, two side intakes, and you had to make

sure that the intake performed – and nobody had ever built an intake as short as that.

And then you had to – you had problems with the jets when they were pointing at the

ground. They used to run along the ground, meet each other and then climb up under

the fuselage. And so you could have hot air, if you’re not careful, going into the

intake. But the – we kept the exhaust system, the exhaust nozzles, away from the

situation. We splayed out the nozzles so that they tended to move outwards. And the

front code nozzles stopped the hot nozzle along the ground from rising up anywhere

the intake. It rose up under the middle of the aeroplane.

What’s the problem with hot air going into the intake?


127

It means that the whole cycle of the engine alters and that the temperatures in the

turbine go up enormously. But even the amount of heat that is put into the

compressor in the front nozzle flow is enough to cause the temperatures in the

combustion system to go up. So we had to have special ratings, water injection, to

cope with that. We’ve now – I mean, the engine as it is today copes with it by having

better cooling in the turbine blades and so on.

[0:08:01]

But there was an enormous number of problems of this sort. One of the things I was

involved in was what happened – you could put water injection in at takeoff or you

could have bleed on demand – instead of having a high pressure bleed from the

compressor to nozzles at the tips of the wings and the nose and tail with flow running

through them all the time and just closing one down and opening one up to make it

roll or pitch, what we decided to do was have bleed on demand, so you only opened

the nozzles when you wanted a pitch moment or a rolling moment. And we patented

that. These sort of problems were all overcome in quite a short space of time because

of the very good relationship with had with the aircraft company, because this was a

joint design. It’s very difficult to separate the engine from the air frame.

When you say you had a very good relationship with them, can you give me some sort

of examples?

Well, we – I mean, sometimes in – when you’re selling a product to a guy you say,

well, our job ends there. Here’s an engine in a box. And you can – and here’s the

performance if you have a reasonable entry flow into the engine. It’s all yours, mate.

We took the view that it was in our interests to make sure that everything went well,

we had a good intake efficiency, we had a good nozzle efficiency and that we tried to

solve the aircraft men’s problems as well as ours. And that’s why I think that the

Harrier came along so quickly, because we almost had an integrated design team.

They lived apart but they talked to each other all the time.

Where do you fit into this? When do you become involved with the Pegasus?


128

Well, I fitted into it as an installation man initially. And then by the end of the ‘60s I

had been involved in the engine designs and all that sort of thing and then I became

the Head of New Projects. So I changed my job dramatically. The 1960s was the age

of the Concorde design and the P1127, two incredibly difficult design problems. And

they were – most of the problems were sorted out in the 1960s for both those

aeroplanes. At the end of the 1960s they wanted somebody to do new projects so they

asked me to do them.

[11:39]

Could you – let’s assume for a moment I have never seen a Harrier Jump Jet, I’ve

never seen a Pegasus. What’s a Pegasus? What does it look like, for instance?

Well, the Pegasus is what’s called a ducted fan. It has a gas generator, power

generator, which is also supercharged by the fan, so some of the fan flow goes into the

gas generator but they are separate. They’re coaxial but they’re separate spools. And

so we split the flow, air flow, from the front compressor into three parts in effect, two

nozzle flows and intake to the gas generator. And the nozzle flow could be vectored

from the horizontal, vertical. And the exit flow from the gas generator also could be

vectored from horizontal to vertical. And it had to be – the engine had to be designed

so that roughly the split of thrust was about the same for front nozzles and rear

nozzles. It could be varied a bit. But that was a fundamental feature of the aeroplane.

It had to balance. And it balanced itself by having the nozzles in the right place and

with the right split of thrust between the front and the rear, so that the thrust centre of

the engine in the vertical plane was the same as the lift centre on the aeroplane.

How many nozzles are there?

Four.

So two at the front …

Two at the front, two at the back. And they were one of the most difficult problems

of the lot ‘cause we had to turn the flow through ninety degrees. We had to collect it


129

from the back of the compressor and put it into the two front nozzles without

disturbing the compressor too much and without losing too much pressure in the

system, very difficult problem. And the rear nozzle was a bit easier in that we just

split it in two in what we called the trouser piece, ‘cause it looked like a pair of short

trousers.

Could you – I kind of see this but could you talk me through what happens to air as it

sort of flows through the engine from the start?

Yes. Well, on a – if we take the Pegasus, for example, it’s an axial flow fan and an

axial flow compressor. That means that you have a lot of blades, stators and rotors,

which compress the air at the front and at the back you have the air that’s gone

through the gas generator, which has created the power to drive the fan. And then you

have turbines to drive the – coaxial turbines, which drive the gas generator, and then

the resulting exhaust drives the front fan, so that you have two separate shafts for the

fan and for the gas generator. And you had to be able to switch the nozzles down

without modifying the areas the turbine sees at the back of the engine significantly.

I’m still sort of trying just to visualise this. I’m still not quite seeing how it all works,

if that makes sense, how …

Yeah, well – well, you keep – the compressor delivers flow, some of which goes to

the – sorry, the front fan delivers flow, some of which goes into the gas generator.

And the bypass ratio is about one to one. In other words, one unit of flow goes out

through the front nozzles. One unit of flow goes into the gas generator. And then in

the gas generator you have your combustion system, your very high temperature

turbines, and then followed by the low pressure turbines, which are on a coaxial shaft,

which comes back through the engine and drives the fan.

I think I can see that.

[0:16:47]


130

And our problem was that we were trying to get as much thrust as we could for the

minimum weight. So this meant that we wanted to use the highest possible

temperatures. And you wanted to use the highest possible temperatures in the landing

and takeoff phase, where you had to support the whole weight of the aeroplane in the

landing case, vertical landing or vertical takeoff, on the four – thrust of the four

nozzles.

Why is it difficult to get the air to move round inside the nozzles?

Well, air going round corners is always difficult. There are corner losses. And we

used – in some cases we used veins in the nozzles to help the air go round the corner,

like a cascade. A cascade being rather like a blind, a variable blind on a window.

You mentioned Michael Wibault as well. Is he around …?

Michele Wibault.

Oh sorry, Michele Wibault. Was he around when you were working on this?

Yes. I didn’t have much to do with him. He tended to deal with Stanley Hooker and

Gordon Lewis.

Do you remember what sort of chap he was?

I think he was crippled. I don’t know if he had – what’s the disease? Anyway, he – I

think he was definitely crippled. But I mean, he used to come and visit us and we

used to see him in Paris. He was a Frenchman. And strange this is that the French

didn’t take up the idea. They took up the idea that was being propagated by Derby,

which was to have multiple lift engines, separate multiple lift engines and separate

propulsion engines. And Dassault built an aeroplane which I think had six lift engines

and two propulsion engines, or one propulsion engine. And that was called the

Mirage 3V, V being for vertical. But it was a complicated design and the fact that it

had so many engines, lift engines, meant that there were multiple cases, safety cases,

where one engine cut out, failed and you had to keep the balance of the aeroplane


131

otherwise it would roll over. So for vertical flight one engine is far superior to six

because you’ve got a – first of all you’ve got sixth of a chance of the engine failing, or

one engine failing, compared with multiple lift engines.

[0:20:18]

Could you talk me through some of the things that you as an installation engineer did

involving the P1127 and the Pegasus?

Mm-hmm.

I’m just sort of thinking of, you know, the sorts of day to day activities you have to do

in that sort of job in this case.

Well, a lot of the day to day activities were model testing. We had our own facilities.

And I in fact got a wind tunnel built at Bristol. It actually came from Armstrong-

Siddeley and we re-erected it at Bristol to do tests on jet patterns, because if you could

arrange the nozzles in a certain way you could get favourable lift when the aeroplane

was landing when it came into ground effect. You can get unfavourable

characteristics as well if you’re not careful. So there was a design problem of getting

the maximum retardation just as you settled on the ground. You didn’t want to get

sucked down like that. And we used this wind tunnel to do those sort of tests. And in

conjunction – we used to do them in conjunction with NGTE at Pyestock near

Farnborough. And of course there was some – we had a slight problem in developing

the first engine in that the money was being paid directly to Bristol to develop the

engine from MWDP. But this was really not the way the Ministry of Supply saw it.

They thought they ought to be in charge of anything going on in the UK like that. So

in the end they came to an arrangement that they would supervise the spending of the

money. And they also of course did a lot of testing themselves. In fact there was one

guy who I’d been out in Germany with who was my opposite number in NGTE doing

these tests.

Who was that?


132

Pardon?

Who was that, sorry?

Martin Cox. He’s a guy whose picture I’ve shown you out in Central Germany.

How do you actually use a wind tunnel to do these sorts of tests?

How do you use a wind tunnel? Well, you want to get forward speed effects of the

aeroplane approaching to land and you’ve got to get – depending on the sort of intakes

you’ve got you’ve got the get the air going into the intake in this situation, nothing

unusual happening, because it’s quite a delicate phase where you’re balancing –

changing from being balanced by the lift on the wing to being balanced by the lift

from the jets. And there are things like do you deflect the jets outwards or inwards. If

you turn the nozzles inwards you get a very much stronger fountain under the

aeroplane, rising up under the aeroplane, where the two jet flows meet on the ground.

And of course, according to angle, that defines – as you approach the ground that

defines where the two jets meet on the ground and a fountain arises under the

aeroplane. So there were lots of things like that. And also of course the aircraft guys

had to do a lot of wind tunnel tests of this sort because there are things that happen

when you’re hovering – say there’s a crosswind. If you’re not very careful that can

upset the whole aeroplane because it’s – it is in such a delicate balance situation.

[0:25:00]

What sort of things does the wind tunnel actually tell you?

Well, for a start it’ll tell you how much hot air you’re ingesting, ‘cause you can put

the two rear nozzles – get some heated air, put it into the rear nozzles and the cold

front nozzles do give you some protection to the intake. And you then measure the

temperature rise in the intake caused by the hot flow and by the – and of course by the

rising temperature in the front nozzles due to the compressor. The work you do on the

compressor leads to a rise of something in the order of sixty degrees, I think it is, in

the front nozzle, temperatures.


133

Are these models you’re testing or full sized engines in the wind tunnel?

Sorry?

Are these models or full sized engines you’re testing in the wind tunnel?

Models, oh yes, all done by models. And an enormous amount of work was done at

Kingston and at NGTE and at Bristol. And there were problems we encountered

which we hadn’t even dreamed about, like the question – the aircraft has to be headed

into wind when it’s hovering and the pilot has a little flag in front of the windscreen

and he’s got to keep the aircraft heading into any headwind, otherwise he’s in danger

of upsetting the aeroplane.

What did you think the prospects were for an aeroplane that was designed to go, you

know, straight up and down rather than the normal conventional takeoff route of the

1950s?

Well, it struck me that it’s going to be a hell of a sight more difficult for the pilot.

And it certainly proved it so in the early days of the flying of the aeroplanes. They –

it’s a neutrally stable situation. In other words you’ve got to be playing with the

control system all the time to keep the thing steady. It isn’t stable like it is in normal

flight. And that causes all sorts of problems. But those have all been overcome.

There is a stability system in the aeroplane now in that situation and it’s amazing what

the aeroplane can do. At Farnborough they used to have an aeroplane come up to the

President’s tent and hover in front of it and dip its nose down to acknowledge the

President of the SBAC show.

What did your colleagues make of, you know, this new way of powering a plane?

Well, there were a lot of people who said, you know, what are you going to do with it.

And of course when Sydney Camm was asked this question he said, ‘Oh, I want to

take a camera 200 miles.’ That was sort of reconnaissance – like a reconnaissance

part [interviewee correction: ‘role’]. But in fact in the end the Harrier was loaded up


134

with all sorts of missiles and fuel tanks and so on as we developed more and more

thrust for the engine. And it did things in the end that certainly the other forms of

VTOL couldn’t do, because it used all its thrust in conventional flight and the same

thrust for vertical flight. And in fact, if you wanted to make it more manoeuvrable in

flight, you could pull the nozzles down in flight. And that proved to be a – to some of

the naval pilots and particularly the Marine Corps pilots, to be a very good way of

fighting low altitude combat. It was called V.I.F.F.I.N.G, thrust variation

[interviewee correction: ‘vectoring’] in forward flight. It wasn’t something we

thought of originally but it was something that happened. Somebody tried it out and

decided it was a good thing, ‘cause you could turn a corner like that, in a flash.

We talked a little bit about the sort of close interaction you had with Hawkers and so

on. I’m just sort of thinking, on a practical level, what does that interaction actually

involve? Are you going round there? Are they coming round to see you?

Oh, both, but in the early days it was the engine man visiting the aircraft man. We

were a vendor. We were – you know, if you were going to America companies, it’s a

vendor’s lobby [laughs]. But as time went on we got more and more easy about our

relationships and they would come to Bristol and we would go there and we became

almost a combined team.

Did you do many visits to Hawkers yourself?

Pardon?

Did you do many visits to Kingston yourself?

Yes, I used to go there, oh, about once a fortnight, I should think.

To see who?

Ralph Hooper, John Hammond [Interviewee correction: John Allen], Sydney Camm

sometimes with Stanley Hooker, and the various chief designers whose names I forget

now. I’m having to think back fifty years [laughs].


135

[0:31:20]

What was your impression of, you know, Hawkers as a company from that point of

view?

Hawkers under Sydney Camm were a very livewire inventive company. I had great

respect for them. They – they weren’t all that big. They were big enough just to cope

with a problem but not to get in each other’s way, if you know what I mean. You can

have too big an organisation sometimes. I think the Ministry of Defence is too big an

organisation [laughs].

At these meetings what sort of things would you discuss?

In meetings? Oh … tests on various models, questions of control power, questions of

intake efficiency, yes. We all had a hand in it really. It was surprising, the amount of

interchange of ideas between the aircraft company and the engine company and

between the people back in the companies themselves.

Are there any of these meetings you remember in particular?

Which meetings do I …?

Are there any meetings you remember in particular?

Erm … yes, I think the ones I do remember were ones with Sydney Camm, ‘cause he

was a great character and he would – we’d arrive – we would arrive in his office and

he’d look around and he’d say, ‘Why are all these chaps coming? Why aren’t they

back at Bristol getting me more thrust?’ In the end Stanley Hooker would have to

explain that he had to bring various experts with him ‘cause he couldn’t carry

everything in his head [laughs]. But I do remember those meetings. But he was a

great character.

Did you see much of Ralph Hooper as well?


136

Yes, yes. And various other guys around him. He all – whenever I came to there, if

he was there he would join the meetings, it’s a sort of – your opposite numbers

usually attend meetings when you’re going there. Sometimes I went to see other

people but most of the time Ralph Hooper would be there.

Bear in mind that I’ve met Ralph in his eighties. I’m wondering, what was he like

back in the 1950s?

Much the same, I think, as he is today, a slightly whimsical character, yes. Yes, he

was a very intelligent man and he knew what he wanted. We used to let our hair

down and try and solve the problems together. That was one of the great things that

struck me about dealing with Hawkers; that we tried to solve each other’s problems,

‘cause sometimes it was better to solve it by a mod to the engine rather than a mod to

the aeroplane. And that’s where close collaboration in the design phases, where the

engine is being designed alongside the aeroplane, then that sort of situation is a very

valuable way of working.

Are these problems things you’ve already discussed, such as, you know, the short

intakes, or were there other things as well?

Er … yes, I’m just trying to think of them. Well we used things like water injection

on the engine. When you reached the maximum thrust at lift off, on a hot day we

used to spray water into the intake to cool the charge, cool the air. And that used to

go through the compressor and get in as far as the combustion system. Then it would

turn into steam. But in the early days, when we were short of thrust, that’s what we

used to do.

[0:36:14]

From your point of view, how has the Pegasus actually, you know, improved from that

early point?


137

Well, the first Pegasus I think had 9,000 pounds of thrust. Then by the time we were

flying the Kestrels it was about 15,000 pounds of thrust. But we designed it actually

for 18,000 pounds of thrust. And when the contract for the P1127 RAF was let in

1966, was it, we were getting somewhere near 19,000, then 20,000. And I think today

you can get about 24,000, 25,000 pounds of thrust out of the engine. I’m not actually

certain of the maximum they got in the end, ‘cause it’s – you have to remember, it’s

about twenty five years since I retired.

Did you actually see the P1127 fly?

Have I seen it – oh yes, many times, yes.

Did you see it fly back in the early days of testing?

Yes. We used to go to Farnborough. That’s usually where we saw it. Or Hawkers

had an aerodrome near them, what was the name of it? I forget now. But we’d go

there and we also – of course some of our people went on these trials that the

Tripartite Squadron, which was formed in the mid ‘60s to test the Kestrel – this was a

joint squadron of RAF, German Air Force, the American Marine Corps. I forget who

else was in it. But it was formed and flew in the UK. And it was the success of the

Tripartite Squadron with the Kestrel which led to the Marine Corps wanting it and the

Brits wanting it. And I think the French actually joined in it but they decided not to

go with the – with the Kestrel. They were still thinking that there was an aeroplane

with separate lift engines, but in fact it turned out that, you know, this is a diabolical

arrangement really, just added more safety problems and more difficulties. It wasn’t

as flexible. With the Harrier you can be flying along at 0.8 Mach number and you can

slam the nozzles down and it’s like putting your foot on the brakes. And you slow up

with about 2Gs I think.

Looking at the sort of – you know, the completed Pegasus, are there any bits you can

sort of look at and say, I did that bit?

Erm … well, I did a lot of nozzle testing. At least I didn’t do it. People who were

responsible to me did a lot of the nozzle testing. I did quite a lot of work on the


138

control system. In fact the patents on the control system are in my name and one

other guy’s name, how to vary – we had to vary the engine RPM when we selected

intermittent bleed and that sort of thing. And we were – we also – we almost got a

new system going with what’s called a fifth nozzle. We were going to – if we used

the – what was called plenum chamber burning, which was burning fuel in the front

nozzles for the – that was for the supersonic aeroplane, then we had trouble with

guarding and protecting the intake from the hot air of the front nozzles. And we had

patents on our fifth nozzle arrangement, which was a cold nozzle put ahead of the

front nozzles, so some of the flow from the intake – some of the flow from the fan

went forward to this fifth nozzle and that was directed to the ground and protected to

some extent the intake. We actually did some work with a German professor in

Berlin on that.

Who was the German?

Hmm?

Who was the German, sorry?

I’ve forgotten his name now [laughs].

[41:44]

You mentioned assistants a moment ago. I was wondering, you know, what sort of

support did you have in doing your job?

Erm … well, I think we had a department. I’ve forgotten the exact number now but

about ten men and an odd woman or two. Weren’t many women engineers in those

days but we did have some women engineers. And when I went into new projects, the

staff of new projects was about thirty people.

What sort of things were these other engineers doing?


139

Designing intake – helping to design intakes, nozzles, running tests. We had quite a

few test engineers.

Where do you actually fit into the big sort of design scheme at Bristol, looking at it as

an organisation?

Where did I fit in? Well, I suppose, if you take Stanley Hooker, first of all there was

one guy between me and Stanley Hooker. And then when I became chief project

engineer I reported directly to him.

Was that one guy your boss then?

Hm?

Who was the one guy between you and Hooker?

Erm, well, it was Pierre Young – Freddie Pitts, a chap called Freddie Pitts in the

installation phase. It was Pierre Young when I was Assistant Chief Performance

Engineer under him, when Pierre Young was Chief Performance Engineer.

What does an assistant chief performance engineer do?

An Assistant Chief Performance Engineer? Well, you look after various teams that

are looking – responsible for the performance of each engine, ‘cause each engine has

its own chief development engineer, chief performance engineer and then of course

there’s a chief designer for the engine separate. But in the technical office you have –

or every engine has its own Chief Performance Engineer.

You mentioned as well that there were some women engineers around. How many?

How many engineers? It’s hard to remember now. I should think there – oh, the

performance office had I should think about fifty or sixty engineers. Then the stress

office had quite a large number and then the development organisation again had a

large number, similar to the performance, stress office and so on. And the


140

development engineers were under the Chief Development Engineer for the whole of

the company’s products and he had an engineer for each engine. And the technical

office was – well, you had a performance engineer in charge of each engine. It was a

fair number of people involved. Offhand I can’t remember the total now.

[0:46:20]

How many women worked there?

Pardon?

How many women worked there?

Er, not many, but we did have about four, I think, in the office at any one time.

Were they engineers like you or in other roles?

Well, they were usually mathematicians. There were quite a lot of mathematicians

who took to engine performance. And of course when the time came for the computer

to do all the work, the mathematicians tended to take on the computer performance

systems. We’d model the engine on the computer so that we could predict its

performance at the drop of a hat just about in the end. We used to do – we had design

systems and performance systems. We could design an engine, optimise an engine,

on the computer, which was something that we actually took the lead in. I think we

were the first engine organisation to have a computerised project design, engine

design system.

I think you mentioned that last time, yeah.

I’ve mentioned that before, yes.

Thinking about mathematicians, I was just wondering, what sort of things do you need

a mathematician for in your job, if any?


141

Well, in the performance office you need a chap who understands thermodynamics

and aerodynamics and the engine – the guys who look after engine performance are

basically thermodynamics men. They’re interested in the theory of gas dynamics as

opposed to aerodynamics, which is slightly – there’s a difference, a fundamental

difference. Gas dynamics is very much to do with adding heat and taking away heat

and travelling [interviewee correction: ‘motion’] – and processes which take place at

supersonic speeds or sonic speeds. And aerodynamics is more a question of what

happens in the atmosphere when an aeroplane is travelling through it. And it’s a – the

two aren’t the same, gas dynamics and aerodynamics.

Shall we take a short …

I had a bit of both.

Shall we talk a short break?

Short break? Yes, sure.

[End of Track 9]


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Track 10

I think that the formative years of my life were particularly my being in London,

being in Germany and then coming to Bristol and the early years of the jet engine

under Stanley Hooker. And so you say from 1945 to 1960 was an incredibly

formative time when you – if you were young you soaked it up like a sponge. And I

don’t think the old men of the piston engine era could cope with that. It had to be

young people. And in fact, of course, all the senior – ultimately the people who

became the senior staff were all taken on at the same time after the war.

Back then at the start of, you know, jets, did you actually see the jet as taking over

from the piston engine?

Yes, yes. I mean, piston engines lasted for quite a while after the war. We were

supplying Hercules engines for transport aeroplanes, civil and military. There was the

Hastings and the Bristol Freighter. There was the – oh, it was a French aeroplane, the

Hercules, a twin boomed aeroplane. I’ve forgotten the name of it. And we went on

selling them well into the ‘50s. Oh, and the Centaurus engined Blackburn Beverley.

But these jobs were done by the old guys, or who’d become the old guys, of the piston

engine era and very few of them played leading parts in the jet engine business. It

was an ideal time to come into a new – a new era of engineering. And undoubtedly

World War II and its aftermath – it was a watershed in aeronautics.

[0:02:34]

I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about what it was actually like

working at Bristol in the 1960s period.

Yeah. I found it very enjoyable. And when I visited some other firms I found that the

reason why it was enjoyable was that the boss was so good, ‘cause some bosses can

be very … what’s the word? Very hard on their personnel. They don’t form a good

relationship. With Stanley Hooker everybody had his say. He wouldn’t necessarily

want to have everybody at his meetings but he would listen to anybody who wanted to

say something. And he was a brilliant mathematician and he worked under GI Taylor


143

at Oxford University. He was one of the gas dynamics guys of the 1930s. So he was

the ideal chap to come into the aircraft engine industry where we were suddenly going

from piston engines, where you’d take air in, suck it in and burn it and that, to where

you had to take air in in a highly … a highly defined way that needed a knowledge of

gas dynamics, which wasn’t available to the piston engine people. In fact in 1945 we

had to set up a new science almost and provide ourselves with all the charts of gas

dynamics. I’ve still got them, I’ve still got them upstairs. We used to do a lot of it

ourselves. And in the end I suppose it’s all codified into books now but in those days

we built our own science.

What were the big challenges in actually designing and making a jet engine in the

‘50s and ‘60s?

Er, well, the challenges have changed now. In those days we were trying to decide

what was the best way to do a particular engine, and, you know, as I’ve said, you can

use centrifugal compressors on very small engines. They don’t – they don’t perform

well when you extrapolate the size of the engine. The square cube law is a famous

law in engine design, that the weight of a component goes up as the cube of the

dimension and the size of the – the actual size of the component goes up as the square

of the dimension. And square cube law hits centrifugal compressors particularly and

various others – you’re fighting it all the time of course with big aeroplanes and big

engines. The bigger they get the more – if they were all just scaled up engines they

would get incredibly heavy, so in building an A380 or a Dreamliner 787 you have to

find ways of making the weight not rise as the cube of the dimension of the aeroplane.

And that is where we are today, that – the reason why we’re getting airliners like the

787, the Boeing 787, and the coming A350 in the Airbus range, which are made with

plastic materials, that is to beat the square cube law. And more than beat it, I mean,

beat it by a considerable margin, ‘cause some of these aeroplanes, their structure

weights are very much lower than the old aeroplanes. And so the science has changed

a little bit. It’s like the railways. There was a period of great invention and then it

plateaued. Well, I think ordinary – I mean, engineering has to some extent plateaued

in the manufacturer of aeroengines and we’re having to look at plastics and we’re

having to look at ways of lightening structures and so on as the engines have got

bigger. I mean, you realise that we were talking about 5,000 pound thrust engines or


144

10,000, 20,000 pound thrust engines. We’re now talking about over 100,000 pound

of thrust in an engine. And when you see the size of some of these big fan engines

you realise that there’s a new problem, which is just sheer size. And of course with

the size comes the problem of containment of blades and things like that and the way

you have to – if you have a failure of your engine you have to contain the blades

inside the engine.

[0:08:54]

So talking about jet engine design now, I suppose one of the things that people

occasionally point out to me is that, you know, it’s all about fuel efficiency these days

to a large extent. If there was a sort of, you know, big problem in designing earlier

jet engines in the 1950s and the 1960s, was there any sort of single thing you were

aiming at, more power, more efficiency?

In those days, I should say certainly with the Pegasus, for example, it was the thrust to

weight ratio. The weight of the engine was very important and in lots of other

aeroplanes it was important as well. And the fuel consumption of course was quite

important. Today the problems are the same but different, if you like. The problem is

increasing – how do you cope with the increase in size of the product without getting

an engine which is vastly overweight. Performance, performance is easier to get the

bigger the engine as well, in some ways, because things like clearances don’t scale.

So the performance of a compressor improves just by building a bigger compressor.

[0:10:19]

Could we go back to the question of what it was actually like working at Bristol? I

was wondering if you could talk me through perhaps what a typical day is like in the

1960s.

Erm, well, in the 1960s – it depends where you stood in the organisation what a

typical day was like.

For you.


145

For me, I was spending my time travelling, or coming back and writing up my visit

notes and sorting out the problems that had arisen while I was away. You tended to

build a bit of a bureaucracy almost. You had to have somebody to look after the

housekeeping, if you like. One of the big issues was what you paid people, ‘cause

everybody’s salary was reviewed – you didn’t pay a blanket salary to all the

engineers. You paid it according to what he was worth. And you had to consider and

interview him and decide – or her, and decide, you know, whether they were doing

the best thing that they could as far as the company was concerned. That took up

quite a bit of time. And towards the end of my career a lot of my time was spent in

the sort of man management role. And I got – I had additional duties imposed on me

which I didn’t really want. I would have preferred to have remained a project

engineer, or Chief Project Engineer, all my life. I think I stayed too long in the job,

but even so it was the job I liked doing. And the other chores were – hopefully you

could offload a lot of them, but it was still very important to keep the right guys happy

and in the right positions and so on.

So as someone sitting in on those interviews and pay reviews and things like that,

what sort of things are you looking for in a good employee?

Well, you’re looking for people who are consistently accurate and have – you’re

looking for people with ideas, not too many. You can have guys who go off at a

tangent pursuing some idea of their own if you’re not careful. And that happened on a

number of occasions and it’s very difficult to deal with that situation, especially in an

organisation which is dedicated to doing new things. But if a chap decides he’s going

to do something new but not what you want him to do, it’s a bit difficult. I mean,

maybe he was doing the right thing, I don’t know. Maybe I was wrong. But I don’t

think you can run an organisation where everybody’s allowed to do what they want to

do [laughs]. You know, it’s a difficult balance, isn’t it, in an entrepreneurial

organisation, how you direct people to look in the right direction and follow perhaps a

line that the company wants to follow, whereas there are occasions when you want to

change the direction in which the company’s going. But that was something which is

the prerogative of the higher echelons of the engineering organisation.


146

Other than things like interview panels and visiting, what other things are you doing

on a daily basis?

Well, there’s liaison for a start. I mean, we had to keep in touch with Derby and

Bristol, so Derby and Bristol engineers were spending their time travelling up and

down the motorway, either that or travelling by aeroplane from Bristol Filton to East

Midlands airport. And I suppose once a fortnight I would be up in Derby, if not more.

This is after the merger, I’m guessing?

After the merger I’m talking about now, yes. I mean, the more factories you have the

more chance it is you’d be off visiting them, I think. I don’t know how you get out of

that. You have to show your face. I mean, we had organisations in Canada, America,

Brazil, India, you name it. And you had to – senior people had to be there on

occasion, just to make sure things were going alright.

How about daily activities earlier on in your career, in the ‘60s?

In the ‘60s? Well, you had to make sure people behaved themselves and you had to

set a bit of an example. You know, you shouldn’t turn up late every morning. You

shouldn’t – we had a fairly relaxed atmosphere at Bristol. We allowed people to – if

they had a very important problem to deal with, perhaps at home or elsewhere, then,

you know, we were given a lot of freedom to allow people time off to cope with those

things on the basis that, you know, when they came back they worked a bit harder

perhaps.

It’s interesting that so many of the things that you’ve described have been sort of, you

know, personnel management issues.

Well, a lot of the personnel management was done by the engineers. If you go back to

the ‘50s and the early ‘60s, we recruited our own staff. We went out to universities

and did our own recruitment for our own departments. And I think we got better

people than later on when the – human relations, they call it today, or PIR, I think

they call it, personnel investor [interviewee correction: ‘personnel and industrial


147

relations’] relations, when they took over the job of recruiting from us we saw the

guys and had the final word as to whether we were prepared to take them, but by that

time they’d gone through various sieving processes. And I don’t know whether we

got the right people all the time or we could have had better people. But I recruited a

lot of guys in the early ‘50s and ‘60s who remained with the company and reached

high posts in the company.

Anybody you’d highlight in particular?

I’d prefer not to talk about that.

What about the more technical aspects of the job, where did they fit into the daily

routine?

You never know when you’re going to be called to a meeting. It could be, you know,

anytime. And then you’re trying to write maybe – part of the process of being a

senior staff member is that you write papers. So you’ve got to do those and where do

you do them? Do you do them – some of it has to be done in the office because it’s

technical as far as the company is concerned and a lot of it is done at home. I used to

spend a lot of my time writing papers at home, much to the family’s disgust.

[0:18:29]

I was going to ask as well, what is your life outside work like in, say, the 1960s?

Erm, well, I used to play squash and walk. We had a walking club in the flight test

department and I had friends in the flight test department ‘cause we’d shared flats

when I was a bachelor. And we used to go walking in the Welsh mountains and

Scotland and places like that. We played tennis and squash. We used to – in the early

days we used to have interdepartmental rugby and soccer. I certainly wouldn’t want

to do it today [laughs]. And even the bosses were young then, because we were a new

industry really effectively from the end of World War II. So we were all out playing

– all the bosses were playing football and rugby and tennis and squash.


148

I was interested in one of the things you mentioned a little while ago, talking about

work on the control system for the Pegasus. And I was just wondering what sort of

things were involved in that.

Well, I’m not a control system expert myself. And today control systems are not

mechanical. They’re solid state electronic systems. And of course we went through a

period of mechanical control systems, analogue – what we call analogue control

systems. And then we had control systems which were a mixture of analogue and

digital. Today, you know, most things are done digitally. And of course you get so

much more accurate control than you could in the old days. But again, as I say, I’m

not a control system expert.

What was involved in – I wasn’t quite sure what you meant by a control system either

for the Pegasus.

Well, you – for a start, a compressor has a working line which it – as you go up in

RPM you go through a certain steady state condition. When you open the throttle you

push more fuel into the combustion system than you would have in a steady state

condition, so the pressure goes up when you burn the fuel because you’ve got a

greater volume of hot air and if you’re not careful it goes up to a point where the

engine surges. So your control system – one of the things it has to do is to make sure

that the – if you slam the throttle, which a pilot will do on occasion, it doesn’t slam

the throttle on the engine. It takes it up as fast as it can. And, well, deceleration can

cause you problems as well so you have to – the fuel system has to do all sorts of

things to prevent over-temperaturing of the engine. And even, you know, you can

over-temperature it – if you get into a lock stall, for example, that used to be a tricky

thing in the old days. You had to do something drastic to get out of a locked stall

situation. But then you’d get into a sort of intermittent stall when you put too much

fuel into the engine so it went above the surge line, you know, a running line going

up. You have a series of characteristics of RPM and thrust and so on and you have to

guide the engine to go up a path of pressure ratio and RPM. You mustn’t exceed –

mustn’t go above a certain level otherwise it runs into surge. And surge is a very

destructive – can be a very destructive process in a jet engine. The flow is oscillating

between coming into the compressor and going out of the compressor.


149

What could happen?

What could happen? Well, it can bust blades, it can burn out the engine, do all sorts

of things. It’s not something to be recommended. And with the axial flow engines it

was a much more complicated problem than with the centrifugal engines. But, you

know, for complication read performance as well.

How did your control system that you mentioned earlier on actually stop things like

surge happening?

Well, you prevent the over fuelling, too much over fuelling of the engine. If you push

the throttle – if it was just a tap then you could put so much fuel in that the running

line moved into the surge line. So you have to prevent that happening. And then

you’ve got all sorts of controls for altitude. As you go up in altitude of course the

amount of fuel you put into the engine has to go down at a given RPM, because with –

the pressure at sea level is 14.7 pounds a square inch in the old imperial days and by

the time you get to 20,000 feet it’s five or six pounds a square inch. So there’s a – the

fuel has to go down pro rata more or less with the pressure and to keep the same fuel

air ratio.

And this is all a mechanical system then?

This was all mechanical systems in the early days, yes.

[0:25:19]

Who was the other chap you mentioned on the patent with you?

Which patent are you talking about?

The patent on the control system.


150

Oh, I think it was the performance chief of the – of the Pegasus engine, Ian Milne, a

chap called Ian Milne, yes. We used to try and patent as much as we could, ‘cause it’s

a protective device and often when you’re – you find that you’ve actually involved

yourself in an area where somebody has a patent you have to do a bit of negotiating

sometimes to allow each other to use each other’s patents or pay for, you know, use of

a patent. But they are a sort of protective mechanism to allow you to dispute with

somebody and negotiate with somebody.

How do they actually get taken out?

Well, we employed patent agents, members of the company. And they – you would

tell them roughly what it was. They would go away and write it in the form of a

patent. I think I had about thirty or forty patents altogether.

I was thinking about patent agents as well, are you sort of actively taking them things

to patent or are they coming to you and having a look to see what is around that could

be?

They come and talk to you occasionally but you should take the – when you think

you’ve done something which is new you have to take it to them. And you have to

realise you can’t patent natural phenomena. You’ve got to patent a way of doing

something. So you need expert advice when you’re – particularly in the new projects

area.

[0:27:34]

Since we’re sort of coming to a close for today, I thought as a closing question, I was

wondering, can you give me an idea about what about your job actually interested

you?

What about my job?

In the 1960s in particular.


151

In the 1960s. Well, I think it was, ooh, success in achieving something new. We

were pushing out the frontiers of knowledge on jet engines in those days. I mean, it

was exciting. The sort of – everybody held their breath a bit when you had a new

engine on the test bed and nobody knew whether it was going to start or blow up or

what [laughs]. And then you – the performance engineers would be plotting the

curves. And I remember the RB401, the little business jet engine, was the first new

engine that I did when I was Chief of New Projects. And the performance fell exactly

on the brochure line that we’d put out to people saying, you know, this is what’s

going to happen. I was amazed, so everybody was amazed, because I think this was

the first time we’d ever run an engine where practically every point on the curve from

low thrust to high thrust was on the curve, was on target. I mean, it was – the esprit

de corps of the company as well, everybody was behind the company and what it was

trying to do. I don’t know if that’s typical of all engineering organisations but it

certainly was of ours.

Good, thank you.

Alright, pleasure.

[End of Track 10]


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Track 11

I remember there was a big hoo-ha about the sonic boom on the Concorde and we

were invited – I think it was Wedgewood Benn was the Minister for Technology, so

we were invited to an exercise where they were setting off explosions which

mimicked the sound of the sonic boom, which is carried with the supersonic aeroplane

when it’s flying supersonically. It dies away as soon as it – as soon as it reduces in

strength. And we had all sorts of strange field exercises. And I remember the

conclusion we came to, if the sonic booms were going to be as loud as the ones they

were testing out on us then I didn’t think there was much chance of the Concorde

flying over land populated by guys who any political influence in the process. And it

was a difficult thing to tell your boss that the aeroplane we were involved in was

going to make such a noise if it flies at Mach 2 overland and I don’t think it will be

allowed. But that was the conclusion I came to. The other thing is we were very

worried that the noise of the Concorde, from the engine noise at takeoff, would be a

problem. And I think it’s – if you’re going to have a single engine without a lot of

variability, which does the job of flying takeoff subsonic and supersonic [flight]

efficiently, then you’re going to have a noisy engine. And the only way out of it

seemed to us to be to have what we call a duel cycle engine with a lot of contraptions

in it to turn it into a ducted fan when you’re subsonic and into a jet engine when

you’re going at Mach 2. And the only conclusion I came to from that was that it was

– put a big load of extra weight on the aeroplane to do that sort of thing and it was

unlikely that it would ever happen. And these were views that were difficult to put

over ‘cause they thought you were a bit negative, shall I say. But there were very – a

number of occasions in the Concorde saga where I tended to think that, you know, it

wasn’t the way to go. It was a tremendous piece of technical achievement to do what

we did, because everybody else had failed. Even the military aeroplanes were in

trouble. Supersonic bombers have never been very active in the American armament

business because they were so difficult to do. There was an aeroplane called the

Hustler, which used to fly to Paris for the air shows. I think they lost about three

aeroplanes flying them over to Paris. They certainly lost one or two. And you

wonder, as a new projects man, how far you should go in trying to influence your

bosses that what they’re doing is going to lead them into a noose, not necessarily a


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technology noose or a performance noose but into a social noose. And, well, that’s –

those are some of the thing that go with being a new project man, I think.

That sounds like a topic for next time.

Maybe, yes.

[End of Track 11]


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Track 12

I was wondering – we talked a little bit last time about international collaborations

coming up. How difficult were they to manage?

Well, it depends. Sometimes they were very difficult and other times we had good

relationships. It’s – well, I will tell you something about it. First of all, Concorde

was the big collaborative project of the ‘60s, no doubt about that. And I started on

supersonic transport in about 1956, on a committee called the Supersonic Transport

Aircraft Committee, which was a government, Farnborough led committee, which

was going to discuss what sort of supersonic transports we ought to go for. And you

have to bear in mind that the – almost the entire operation of the Concorde, I would

say, the government was in charge of it. There was a director Concorde, a chap called

James Hamilton in the Ministry, and the government led the programme really and

Farnborough was the centre of the technical activity in this country. They did a lot of

the work or they subcontracted it to us to do. And in 1956 they used to have meetings

and there were two basic aeroplanes that they were intending to look at. One was

what was called an M wing. In other words, the wing was arrow shaped on both sides

of the fuselage and where the – where the point of the arrow was there was an engine

mounted. So it had two engines, or maybe four engines, one above the other,

mounted in the junction of the arrow wing. And this was to fly at about 1.2 Mach

number, ‘cause they thought at that sort of Mach number the noise problems wouldn’t

be particularly severe. I don’t know whether they were right about that. I mean, I

don’t think we ever tried doing much noise testing at 1.2 Mach number. Anyway, we

realised that the testing problems around Mach 1.2, which is not very far off sonic –

just above sonic conditions, were going to be very difficult, because wind tunnels

don’t perform very well at sonic flow. So it was going to be quite important, I think,

to get the characteristics of the aeroplane over a fairly wide range of Mach numbers

around which it was going to operate. And it wasn’t very long before we realised that

aerodynamics at the speed of sound is quite a tricky thing because wind tunnels

misbehave. If you have a wind tunnel running at Mach 1, for example, which is quite

close to the 1.2 Mach number on that aeroplane, then you – the wind tunnel will – if

it’s a parallel working section, the wind tunnel will choke and no – you can’t increase

the speed. And they thought that, if you used a slotted tunnel where half of it was


155

open and the other half closed, that would give you a good approximation to free

flight conditions. I am extremely doubtful about that and I wrote a paper, which was

– it was rather frowned on by the wind tunnel merchants ‘cause I was trying to tell

people that you cannot test at Mach 1 in a wind tunnel. I had one or two people on

my side but the majority, I think, of the wind tunnelers – and let’s face it, most

aerodynamicists at Farnborough are wind tunnelers basically, and they depend on

representing free flight by – where an aeroplane is moving through the air by a

transformation where you put a – you make the air move and the aeroplane stays at

rest. That is the nub of the problem that I faced anyway. But in the end we gave up

on the Mach 1.2 aeroplane. It was obviously going to be very, very difficult and it

didn’t seem to offer very much in the way of speed advantage, not enough to put a

major international effort into it.

[0:05:02]

And so we then decided to look at the – use the results of the supersonic bomber

programme. And not many people in this country realise that in the early 1950s we

started using the German scientists, who I’d help collect in Germany, use them for

designing a supersonic bomber which was going to fly at Mach 2 two and a half or in

that sort of region, Mach 2, Mach 2 and a half, maybe even higher. And by 1956 it

was becoming quite obvious that the problems were immense and the cost would be

enormous and that – there were questions being raised about whether you could fly at

supersonic speeds at very high altitude and escape missiles. But at around about the

middle of the 1950s the government decided to stop the supersonic bomber

programme. Avro had a supersonic bomber, Bristol I think had one. Handley-Page

had one. Avro had one. And then they – when they started the SST, supersonic

transport civil aeroplane programme or studies, they used the people who had been on

the supersonic bomber to carry on and turn their knowledge into a supersonic

transport. And Bristol were right in the forefront of this and so were Handley-Page.

I’m trying to think whether Hatfield had a hand in it. But anyway, at RAE

Farnborough they had a chap called Dietrich Küchemann and Dietrich Küchemann

was one of the scientists we recruited from Göttingen just after World War II. And he

came to Farnborough and he became more like an English gentleman than the English

gentlemen [laughs]. And he played an enormous part in it ‘cause he brought all the


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German work on supersonics. And let’s face it, there wasn’t a decent supersonic

tunnel outside Germany at the end of World War II. We were just thinking about

supersonics. ‘Cause when we entered World War II we had piston engine biplanes

and we were only just bringing the Hurricane and the Spitfire into service as the war

started. But the Germans had already started building supersonic wind tunnels and

they started so early because of a chap called Busemann. Now Busemann was the

man who said, if you want to defeat the supersonic drag problem you want to sweep

the wings back or forward. That’s another subject in itself. Anyway, we had this

Supersonic Aircraft Committee and there were a lot of subcommittees and I was on

the sort of engine intake subcommittee. And so we did quite a lot of work on

government contracts, studying the nozzles and the intakes of supersonic transport.

And the amount of work we put in on that was enormous, especially on the nozzle.

And there are arguments about how to do it and they came to a head after we’d linked

up with SNECMA in France. So SNECMA and Bristol Aero Engines or Bristol-

Siddeley, as I think we were then – we changed to Bristol-Siddeley about the end of

the ‘50s. And we then started collaborating with SNECMA and they were given the

job of doing the nozzle, supersonic nozzle. Now a supersonic nozzle, to collect all –

to achieve the thrust at supersonic speeds – and it’s very important, this. We could

have easily had an aeroplane which was unusable on the Atlantic route if we hadn’t

made the – if the supersonic nozzle hadn’t been good, good performance. And

SNECMA bought a license from Pratt & Whitney for a nozzle, which was a round

nozzle, a round – it was a nozzle for the J57, I think, or 8. It was supersonic Pratt &

Whitney engine. And they were going to put this on the back of the Concorde. Well,

early in the early days we ran this engine on the test bed, outdoor test beds, and we

had to have a thrust reverser on the back end, which was part of the supersonic nozzle.

So we were using – we were having variable geometry in supersonic nozzles, where

instead of pointing backwards it would do that. [demonstrates]

What’s that, sorry?

It would turn into two buckets, which caught the flow coming out of the nozzle and

directed it backwards.

Why?


157

Because that’s the way to destroy thrust. The jet – the thrust of a jet is achieved by

forces in the nozzle and a free flow of the jet at the back of the aeroplane. Now if you

catch the jet and send it forward you get an enormous load on the buckets of the thrust

reverser because you’re having to stop the flow and then send it forward. So you’ve

got a very big force on the buckets.

[0:11:45]

And the design of a supersonic nozzle, which was efficient at supersonic speeds and

had to be reasonable efficient at subsonic speeds, when it had descended to a

supersonic cruise phase – sometimes you have to come down for subsonic cruising if

you’re going over land or if you’ve got an engine failure or something like that. And

so this problem of how to get – how to accomplish thrust reversal and very high

efficiency supersonic nozzles and variability to give you a good thrust performance at

subsonic speeds when you don’t want to use the supersonic nozzle part of the thing.

And this proved to be one of the most intractable problems of the Concorde. It wasn’t

entirely intractable ‘cause in the end we did solve it. But the first test on – static test

on the design that came from SNECMA showed that, when you went into thrust

reverse at zero or low speeds, not only did you send the flow forward on the outside

of the sail [interviewee correction: ‘nacelle’], you sent the flow back – sorry, you sent

the flow back up the tunnel in which the jet pipe was situated. So it cooked all the

wiring and everything like that. We had to have an emergency meeting to decide how

to do it. And this led to the aircraft guys saying, look, everybody has to join in this

process. All the aircraft men, aircraft aerodynamicists and the engine aerodynamicists

have to get together and mutually solve the problem. Now this was a bit of a bitter

blow to SNECMA because they had failed to achieve their objective of making their

type of nozzle, which they’d taken the license from Pratt & Whitney for, they’d failed

to make that work.

Sorry, could you just say that bit again? I was slightly distracted by the ... [both

talking at once].


158

We’d reached a situation where it was quite obvious that the nozzle design by

SNECMA, based on the Pratt & Whitney engine, supersonic engine nozzle, was not

going to work for the Concorde. It couldn’t do all the things that had to be done.

Perhaps I should repeat them. First of all you’ve got to get pretty nearly 100 percent

efficiency of your thrust coefficient at supersonic speeds, because it’s very sensitive to

losses of gross thrust. You have to be able to modify the nozzle so that the supersonic

divergences of the nozzle do not affect the subsonic performance of the engine

significantly. That’s a difficult problem, what do you do with the divergence that

you’ve got. You understand a convergent divergent nozzle, you have to have this

supersonic – well that’s a lecture in itself.

Briefly, what’s the …

Well, as you increase the speed of the – of the jet in a convergent nozzle, as it comes

to the exit, when it gets to the sonic conditions, instead of the volume of flow … the

volume of flow decreasing, it actually increases. Let me try and explain this. As the

flow speeds up, the total pressure stays the same but the static pressure drops. And

this drop in static pressure starts to fight the convergent effect of the primary nozzle.

And when it gets to a point where the volume flow is going up because the static

pressure is dropping, then the passage of the expansion changes from convergence to

divergence. And it makes quite a big difference to the exit area required of the

nozzle.

What’s the effect of that happening on aircraft in flight with this going on?

Well, if you do it properly then you get the full thrust of the fully expanded jet. And

of course you’ve got, oh, quite high nozzle pressure ratios at supersonic speeds. It’s a

long time since I calculated them, but you have low static pressures in the atmosphere

but you have high pressures in the intake ‘cause you’re recovering the kinetic energy

of the jet [air] coming into the aeroplane. So you have – oh, I should think you have

about ten to one pressure ratio in the back of the nozzle, fourteen to one pressure ratio

in some conditions. It depends what supersonic speed you’re travelling at. The faster

you go the greater the convergent divergent area ratio has to be.


159

[0:17:45]

And if you don’t do it properly on a supersonic transport you won’t get across the

Atlantic. And that was the great worry of a lot of the Ministry scientists, that if we

didn’t get this nozzle on the Concorde right, the aeroplane would not have enough

fuel to get across the Atlantic. And one percent loss of gross thrust was equivalent to

about two and a half percent loss of net thrust. It’s a magnifying effect on specific

fuel consumption, which is the important thing, fuel per pound of thrust per hour.

And the arguments that went on between the Ministry scientists and the company

were quite long erudite arguments about how best to make a supersonic nozzle. And

in the end what we did was we took advantage of the fact that there was a great big air

bleed from the throat of the intake at the front of the engine, which was used to cool

the engine. We took the surplus air from the throat bleed to cool the engine and we

then took it down to the back end and we used it as a sort of cushion to expand the

supersonic flow against. And that gave – in the end some people claimed we actually

had more than a hundred percent nozzle efficiency. There were lots of erudite

arguments about that, which went on for ages and ages. But we then decided to make

a nozzle which was nearer to square than round at the exit, to line up with the square

section of the nacelle, in which the engine was housed. And we had two shells like

that, which acted as thrust reversers. And you had to have the nozzle positioned

relative to these two shells correctly so that it didn’t – it got over the problem of

forcing air back up the nacelle, inside the nacelle, when you went into thrust reverse.

And we had a competition and the four of us, the two aircraft companies, that’s Sud

Aviation and Bristol Aeroplanes [Company] at Filton and what was first of all Bristol-

Siddeley and SNECMA and then became Rolls Royce and SNECMA. We each made

our own model and they were all tested actually in France at one of the French wind

tunnel facilities. And it was a very interesting problem ‘cause everybody was fighting

to get their ideas accepted. And in the end it was a pretty close run thing between us

in Bristol and the aircraft companies and I think the aircraft companies in the end had

quite a lot of say over the nozzle.

[0:21:08]


160

And of course they then had to make it, so they set up an arrangement with an outfit

called Stress Skin and they made the whole back end out of honeycomb material, so

that you had two layers separated by a honeycomb. And that’s all done in stainless

steel, very, very advanced. It was a very advanced system. And as far as I know, it

worked very well in the whole of the operation of the aeroplane. And we achieved

efficiencies on the nozzle which were very close to 100 percent. And if we’d been

one percent at gross thrust out that would have been two and a half percent of SFC, or

2.7 percent of SFC.

What’s SFC?

Specific fuel consumption. And two and a half percent of specific fuel consumption

would have wrecked the aeroplane. The aeroplane was forty percent by weight of fuel

at takeoff and the passenger was only about five percent of the weight of the

aeroplane. So you can see how soon you would have had no passengers. Two

percent of gross thrust loss at the back of the aeroplane would have destroyed all your

passengers, unless you pushed – it would have forced you into one of these situations

where you push the weight of the aeroplane up and then you have to get more thrust

and takeoff or you have to throw off passengers.

[0:22:58]

There are quite a few things I want to follow up with questions about, but as we spent

quite a bit of time talking about the nozzle, I’m interested in what was Bristol’s

approach?

To the nozzle?

Mm. And how did you guys come up with that?

Well, we went for a – of course the primary nozzle had to be round and it didn’t

connect with the supersonic expansion. It fired into an ejector in effect, which sucked

air from the throat bleed of the intake, over the engine to cool the engine and back in,


161

‘cause it was a jet engine that was running – well, if you’d seen it in the dark it would

have frightened you silly.

What did it look like?

It was either dull red or orange, the back end of the engine. And it did in fact frighten

– on one occasion an earlier version of the engine – we had a chap down from English

Electric and he was – we took him into the hanger, into the test cell to watch the

engine running, and we turned all the lights out. And we saw this engine, which was

rosy pink and orange at the back end and he said, ‘Good heavens, we can’t do that.

We can’t make structure to go around that.’ So in the end the engine company made

the back end of the TSR2. But you have to deal with – when you’re using jet engines

you had to deal with an external carcass of the engine which could get very hot and

we used to use Refrasil blankets round the engine, which are blankets made of

stainless steel sheet and rock wool, just to keep the other parts of the aeroplane cool.

Well, on the Concorde we had those sort of blankets and we had a large amount of air

bled off the intake going down over the engine and then into the nozzle and being

used as a basis for making the supersonic expansion smooth and so on. And of course

a mixing process was going on in the nozzle and a mixing process can give you a bit

more thrust, strangely. And this is one of the arguments why people thought they

might get more than 100 percent thrust with this system.

[0:25:47]

How do you actually go about designing this nozzle? Where do you personally fit in

this process? There’s sort of lots of things going on.

Well, I was looking after the installation and aerodynamics of the thing and we were

making models. And we had a great job designing thrust rigs to measure the thrust to

within 0.01 of a percent, or something like that. And we did it by very careful design

of these rigs, because you had to get the thrust measurement accurate, otherwise

you’re wasting your time. We were looking for a quarter of a percent, 0.1 of a percent

efficiency in lots of cases. And we did a lot of work, which was again part of the

government funded programme, for the Concorde. And in the end the shape of the


162

nozzle was very close to the sort of models we’d been using, ‘cause we gave all the

results of our tests to the government and they exchanged them of course with the

French, and the engine companies talked of course to the aircraft companies.

I’m interested in this supersonic – sorry, the SST aircraft committee that you

mentioned that you were in on from 1956?

Yes.

Where were the meetings actually held?

They were held mainly at Farnborough, before we linked up – we didn’t link up

formally with the French until – I think it was 1962, when I think the Conservative

government – Edward Heath, I think, was in charge of the negotiations for linking up

with – he had two things in mind, doing a joint aeroplane and also getting into the

common market. And I think there was a lot of – you know, the objectives got a bit

mixed up as far as the politicians were concerned.

Who else was in these meetings at Farnborough?

Oh, well the very senior people at Farnborough in aerodynamics. Gosh, it’s difficult

to remember their names now. And the government scientists from headquarters in

London. There were the people from aircraft [and] engine companies involved. In

the early stages there were quite lot of companies involved in that work.

I was wondering as well, at this very sort of early stage, in the late 1950s, how

realistic did you think the prospect of supersonic aircraft was – supersonic passenger

aircraft was?

Well, I thought there was a good chance of it coming off, but I realised, having been

working closely on the efficiencies of nozzles and intakes, that it had to be a lot better

than the bomber people had been doing. ‘Cause the American bombers and the

British bombers were using circular intakes. Now they were very difficult to control

off design, whereas the Concorde used a two dimensional ramp, a box where the ramp


163

moved up and down. And you could adjust it to the requirements of the shockwave

system at the various speeds you were flying at as you accelerated. And they fixed on

Mach 2.2, that’s 2.2 times the speed of sound, at altitude where it was flying because

the temperatures that you get there were enough to boil an egg. You could fry an egg

on the wing if you wanted to. But you could still use aluminium. It had to be high

grade aluminium. We used different alloys of aluminium to achieve Mach 2.2. But if

you went beyond 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, you were starting to get to a situation where you had to

use either titanium or stainless steel. And we actually built aeroplanes, we built the –

the188 aeroplane at Filton, which was made of stainless steel, and that caused a lot of

heartaches on how to manufacture stainless steel. It’s a lot more difficult than just

riveting aluminium. And in the end the decision was made to stay at the highest speed

you could use aluminium alloys.

[0:31:10]

And luckily that was the speed at which the intake cross sectional area and the nozzle

cross sectional area were almost the same as the engine cross sectional area. If you go

up to Mach 2.6, 2.7 or Mach 3 you get a – the intake grows in size and the nozzle

grows in size but you’ve got more expansion ratio in the nozzle and you’ve got more

contraction in the flow down to the intake, down to subsonic flow of the intake at the

front. And so you get a little engine in the middle with a big nozzle and a big intake.

And the drag of the big nozzle and the big intake at subsonic speeds then becomes a

terrible drag on the aeroplane. And the people who tried to make aeroplanes which

would fly – supersonic cruise across the Atlantic stay at 2.6, 2.7 Mach number, but

come down and cruise subsonically if they have problems or if they have to fly over

land – to make that aeroplane work was a very, very difficult technical problem. I

wouldn’t dare say that it’s impossible but I’m saying that you had a problem, a

technical problem there, which we hadn’t solved at the time.

So Mach 2.2 was sort of a good …?

Yes, and I still think 2.2 is probably the best Mach number to design those sort of

aeroplanes for.


164

Just briefly, why is it a sweet spot?

Why is it… sorry?

Why is it the sweet spot for the supersonic transport?

It’s because of the matching of the – of the intake size and the nozzle size, subsonic

and supersonic. They’re entirely different sizes. And at supersonic speeds, high

supersonic speeds, the flow as you come down to subsonic speeds going into the

engine gets smaller and smaller, the areas get smaller and smaller. So you have a big

intake contracting to a small engine. At the back end you have the opposite. You

have a small nozzle going out to a very big final nozzle, supersonic nozzle. And at

subsonic speeds, carrying those around with you would be very draggy. And at Mach

2 you get the best of all of it, or Mach 2.2. Concorde travels at anywhere between

Mach 1.8 and Mach 2.2, or it did travel.

Did you think in the late 1950s when you were talking about this that supersonic

transport aircraft would become common?

Ah, good question. Now there were a lot of people in the industry thought the speed

was a – at that point speed was everything. It’s a case of don’t – be careful of

statisticians and people who … can you stop it a minute.

[End of Track 12]


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Track 13

I remember what the question was, we’re okay. Did you think that supersonic

transport aircraft would become common?

I had my doubts. First of all I didn’t believe that we would solve the – the sonic boom

problem, that it’s a major thing that comes with a body going through the air at more

than the speed of sound. And it’s very difficult to get of the – you may be able to

alleviate it in certain ways but I didn’t think we would ever solve it to the point where

people in a highly civilised society would be prepared to accept being boomed all the

time. I mean, it’s alright – you can get away with it perhaps with one aircraft coming

in in the morning from New York to London, but if every aeroplane that comes across

the Atlantic comes with a big boom, I don’t think it would have ever been acceptable.

And so I perhaps – as a Chief Project Engineer at Bristol, I was taking the view that

we were doing a project which was really a high class executive jet and not one that

was going to carry everybody at supersonic speeds. And I don’t believe that that’s

ever going to happen.

What were the opinions of the people you were working with on it?

Well, they didn’t like my opinion but – and it’s very different for a new projects

engineer to say you can’t do something. You must be very careful because that might

be a career limiting statement [laughs].

You mentioned before we switched off for a second about people who were interested

in speed more than anything else. Can you tell me a bit more about that?

Oh yes. When we – after World War II, when we went to pressurised aeroplanes and

turbo charged piston engines and then jet engines and propeller gas turbine, propeller

units, it seemed that the speed was the real magnet which attracted the customer. If he

could – in America, I remember that even in the piston engine days they used to fight

to get on an aeroplane which would arrive ten minutes earlier going across America.

And so speed was regarded as the essential for advancing aircraft transportation. And

it wasn’t until we realised the problems that went with supersonic transports that the


166

tide turned and then it became what’s the smallest amount of fuel you can use to

transport people from one place to another. And I think that’s where we are today and

if we don’t keep on reducing the energy used per passenger mile than air transport

will die.

You mentioned noise concerns and that it was an issue in the earlier discussions you

were involved in on the supersonic committee.

Yes. Well, there was no system for licensing aeroplanes on the basis of their noise

when we started Concorde. They’d been bringing in rules for subsonic aeroplanes but

they had no rules for supersonic aeroplanes. And if they had, of course, we would

have had great difficulty in meeting them. But what happened was that, because there

were no rules there were no senior civil servants responsible for noise. So the chap

who was responsible for noise, it was one of his jobs at NGTE. And he and I got

together and we decided that our best plan was to say we won’t be noisier than the

noisiest civil transport. And the noisiest civil transport was the VC10. So the VC10

set the standard for supersonic transport.

Who was the chap at NGTE?

I was just trying to think of his name. He was a Scotsman. Gosh. I’m sorry, I … my

memory isn’t as good as it was. It’ll come to me later on. If it comes to me I’ll let

you know [laughs]. But he was the man who actually became the head of NGTE for a

short time.

[0:05:22]

What were meetings of the supersonic aircraft committee actually like?

They were a bit political. I mean, you had to be careful what you said. This was a

time when civil servants were in charge of policy in civil aviation. This is because,

after World War II, the government sponsored all the new civil aviation projects. And

therefore the civil servants and the people in charge of the nationalised aircraft – a

transport people, BOAC, BEA and so on, they were the people who decided


167

everything. And so the civil servants had a very major say. Now in America it was

different because they didn’t stop making civil aeroplanes during the war. They

continued and a lot of them were turned into military transports, so they had a head

start. And the only way that civil aviation in Europe could get going was by the

government sponsoring everything. And when the government sponsors something

they want to be the people who choose. So I started out in RD projects, RDT1 as it

was originally, in MAP, Ministry of Aircraft Production. And we decided what

aeroplanes the nationalised corporations were going to have and what aeroplanes

would then be supported. These aeroplanes would be supported by government

finance. And that’s the way British aerospace companies lost the plot, because they

were continually trying to please the government and not the customer. When I say

the customer I mean the worldwide customer.

What sort of things do you have to be careful talking about, political matters, in these

meetings?

Yes. When you’re working for a company you ought not to say anything that, you

know, would embarrass your technical bosses. And I remember whispering to the

Chief Engineer, the chap who succeeded Stanley Hooker called Warlow Davies, Dr

Warlow Davies. I said to him, you know, ‘I have serious doubts about the viability of

supersonic transport to replace subsonic transport. I’m not saying you won’t have

something like an executive jet but there are lots of political problems.’ He didn’t

want to hear that.

[0:08:24]

Having been both a scientific civil servant and an industrial scientist, do you think

there’s any difference between the two?

Yes. Oh, I think there is. I mean, when you get into a company, you’re responsible

for producing something which has got to work properly and has got to be efficient

and have a market. Now when you’re a civil servant deciding what to advise the

minister to support, then it’s a slightly different proposition. You’ve got all sorts of

ideas being sent into you by companies, some small, some big, and you’ve got all the


168

political jiggery pokery that’s going on between the big companies and the

government and perhaps the smaller companies trying to get in there somewhere.

And it’s a – civil servants – I mean, I’m speaking as one who’s been a civil servant,

it’s a different world. And I don’t think the marketplace is well served by people who

follow their own ideas without thinking about, well, noise for example, can you sell it,

is it too expensive, does it look right [laughs], all that sort of thing. In the end,

aeroplanes are sold for all sorts of strange reasons, not necessarily those that we

would like to see them sold for. Government put pressure on people. Sometimes

there’s an election taking place in the constituency where the company actually

operates, that can have a big effect and did have a big effect in the interwar – or after

World War II.

Why?

Well, for instance, when the Labour government came to power in the early ‘60s, they

cancelled a lot of programmes, including the P1154 supersonic Harrier, which – the

RAF had said, we like the idea of the Harrier but what we want is supersonic. So they

set off on a trail, building a supersonic aeroplane. The Labour government came in

and cancelled it, cancelled all sorts of things, like the TSR2 and the HS – what was it,

the HS – anyway, there was a Hawker-Siddeley transport with four Pegasus engines,

I’ve forgotten the model of it now, and the – I’ve lost the thread of the argument. Erm

… What was I going to say? Oh, yes, political interference. They then – having

cancelled all these programmes, they suddenly say, well, you know, there’s a

constituency in Kingston that’s going to – we’re going to lose the seat if we’re not

careful. So the Harrier was set in motion for political reasons. And the RAF were

told, this is what you’re going to have. And a friend of mine I worked with in Thames

House was sent down to Kingston to write the specification for the aeroplane based on

the brochure that Kingston were putting in for what became the Harrier.

Who was the guy from Thames House?

Pardon?

Who was the guy who wrote the specification?


169

Who wrote the specification? Well, it was a chap called Jock Cohen, who was in an

RDT1. He was a permanent civil servant during the war and he stayed on – I don’t

know whether he’s alive today, but his job was to go down there, take the brochure

and write the specification round the brochure. Now that’s unheard of. And it cut out

all the time wasting that goes on with all the arguments between the different

branches of the Air Force and the different branches of the civil service and all the

other people who want to get their share of the work. And that was all cut out and the

aeroplane was agreed in – the project had the go ahead in 1966, I think it was, or ’65,

and in 1969 it entered service. I mean, it’s like a wartime operation.

[0:13:43]

Did you have much to do with the engine developments for the P1154 yourself?

Yes, yes.


Then I was on installation work – and this was the question of what you did about the

hot jets, ‘cause we now had – to make it supersonic we had to put a re-heater or

afterburner system in the front nozzles. And we had to have variable [area] front

nozzles. And this proved a very difficult thing to do and it was obviously going to

turn nasty on us, I thought. And so in a way I think we were glad – some of us were

glad to see the 1154 cancelled and the Harrier reinstated. So the aircraft that went

ahead was very similar in principle to the prototype that had flown in 1960. And not

only that but it was so attractive that the US marines cottoned onto it and the US

marines saved the aeroplane really. They bought the biggest bunch of aeroplanes.

And of course now we’ve cancelled the – finished with the Harrier, the US marines

have bought all the aeroplanes, ‘cause they know a good thing when they see it,

whereas our modern politicians don’t [laughs]. I mean, they’re in the hands of people

who have probably never designed an aeroplane in their lives and – well, I hesitate to

say any more about that but, you know, I think it’s a terrible thing we’ve done.


170

You mentioned TSR2 in passing as well. Did you have any involvement with the

installations on that?

Yes, yes.

Can you tell me a bit more about it? What was TSR2, to begin with?

TSR2? It was a low level interdiction aeroplane with multi – it was a multi role

aeroplane really, but it was intended to travel 1,000 miles at low level and have the

ability to go supersonic. It probably would have been travelling just around about

sonic speed at low level but at high altitude it would have been a Mach 2 aeroplane.

Ad of course the engines were ideally suited to be the basis for the Concorde.

Are there any particular problems in installing an Olympus engine in low level

supersonic aircraft?

Oh, there are always problems with new engines and new aeroplanes. I mean, the

temperatures are much higher. We had quite a few mechanical problems. We had

one where the – we had a shaft break on the engine and this shaft breaking was due to

vibration of the shaft in what was called a bell mode, where the shaft sort of crinkled

in and out. And of course it failed and it was – I’ve never heard of anything like it

before. And it was excited, as I understand it, by a cooling air jet, which played on

the shaft. And it just shows you, you know, how you can be hit by a complex

problem you’ve never met before, just because of a set of circumstances.

Did you feel that the TSR2 was, you know, a viable project when you were working on

it?

Erm, in retrospect I think we tried to take too big a step. We already had an aeroplane

called the Buccaneer and if we’d developed the Buccaneer it would have done the job

as well as – or better probably than the TSR2.

What did you think about it at the time?


171

What did I think about it at the time? Well, it was just another job really to me at the

time. I hadn’t got to the point where I was thinking strategically about what the

country needed in the way of aeroplanes, though I had come from the Ministry where

we were doing that. But I was now in a company where, you know, this was your

bread and butter.

What did you think about the decision to cancel it at the time?

Oh, we were all very, very sad about it. I mean, it was a blow. It took away a lot of

people’s livelihoods. Some went, some stayed and we found other jobs. And it was

very political.

How so?

Well, it was part – there was a struggle going on between Bristol Engines and Rolls

Royce. We were competing with each other very strongly, more so than we were

competing with overseas engine companies really. And the change of government

meant a total change of aircraft policy. Whether it was right or wrong I don’t know.

There are some things that perhaps should have been cancelled. There were other

things that shouldn’t have been cancelled.

[0:19:37]

I had a question and it’s just popped out of my mind. Ah, that was it. I guess I’m

aware that over the period we’ve been talking about in the 1960s, obviously Bristol

merges, gets taken over, I don’t know how best to describe it, by Rolls Royce.

Yes. Well, it was complicated ‘cause they bought the Bristol Aeroplane Company.

They sold off the aircraft company and kept the engine company.

When did you first learn about that happening?


172

I was up at a conference in London and somebody said, ‘I see you’re working for

Rolls Royce now’ [laughs], at ten o’clock in the morning. I was just about to give a

paper [laughs].

What do you say when someone says that?

What do you say? [Laughs] Very difficult. We’d been – you see, when Stanley

Hooker left Rolls Royce, he came to Bristol at the behest of Sir Reginald Verdon

Smith. And he’d already – Verdon Smith had great plans for expanding Bristol

engine division. And of course it had been in the doldrums since Sir Roy Fedden had

disappeared during the war up to London to become an advisor to the minister. And it

needed reconstituting really and Stanley Hooker was the chap to do that. And of

course Stanley Hooker was the mainspring of Derby’s jet engine business. And so we

– he transferred to Bristol and of course the centre of interest in all the projects tended

to go with him. And at one point we were getting all the orders and Derby weren’t.

And, well, there were lots of Labour seats round Derby and it – you know, the policy

changed and there were cancellations left, right and centre, some of which were

ridiculous. I mean, the re-engining of the F4 I think was a mistake. It worked but it

didn’t need to be done and I don’t think the aeroplane was any better due to the re-

engining. And so many other things got cancelled, we were lucky, you know, we

weren’t put right out of business at the time.

What sort of, you know, actual changes did being part of Rolls Royce make for …?

Well, at first not an awful lot. There was a period when there was competitive

activity on new projects going on and Bristol and Derby were putting forward

different ideas. For instance, the vertical lift VSTOL aeroplanes, we had the single

engine concept and Derby had the multi lift engine concept with a separate propulsion

engine. And this was the result of a chap called AA Griffith going from the Ministry

to Derby. I think he went probably after the war, soon after the war. And he wanted

to make a vertical takeoff transport to cross the Atlantic and it had a Delta wing. And

this is – we’re talking now about 1950, this sort of idea was going around. Well, we

couldn’t even make a – we couldn’t even – or we could just about make a supersonic

transport in the late ‘60s which could cross the Atlantic with normal engines, but if


173

you had to carry all the lift engines there would have been – there was no way you

could have done it. But that’s the thing that went on. And the idea that you could

make military aeroplanes with lots of lift engines and separate propulsion engines, I

think was doomed, but it was very difficult – once the idea was lodged in a company,

it was very difficult to get rid of it.

How did it feel to be working with your former rivals?

Well, it was difficult at times but, you know, in the end we got on. And a lot of

people got interchanged from one site to the other. I think today it’s – well, it’s

changed out of all recognition and it’s a very – I mean, it’s a very prosperous

company. And I think the prosperity of the company is largely due to the interchange

and the number of – you know, a lot of people went from Bristol and a lot of people

came down from Derby to Bristol, we interchanged and there was a cross fertilisation.

And our compressor technology at Bristol did a lot of good for the RB211 Trent

programmes and for the Spey replacement programmes.

Do you think there were any of those cross fertilisations that affected you personally?

Er, yes. Well, I had to operate in this cross fertilisation business with a – at one time I

had a boss at Derby and a boss at Bristol. So if I was talking civil transports, which –

we were doing civil and military at Bristol for quite a long time, until it was

rationalised, only in the late ‘80s or mid ‘80s. And so here I was wearing two or three

hats. And we spent our time flying back and forth between East Midlands airport and

Filton.

How did you feel about the merger at the time?

In the way that most people working for a company would feel if they’re taken over

by somebody … erm, yeah, I don’t think anybody likes a merger.

Can I readjust your mike ‘cause it’s now about to fall off?

Is it not working?


174

Oh no, it’s just pulled into a …

Alright.

Sorry, you were talking about mergers.

Yes. Yeah, I mean, I have friends at Derby and friends at Bristol. I think now it’s

history, but at the time it was very difficult.

[27:05]

We had the bankruptcy in 1971, which made life difficult for both ends, for Derby

particularly. They had no money to spend on anything other than the 211. We were

allowed a little bit more leeway. But every time we came to launch a big programme

we came up against lack of funds.

Do you think the merger was actually needed?

Difficult to say. I think probably this country can’t stand more than one big engine

company and if you want to be successful you’ve got to be big these days. I mean, to

compete with GE you can’t be small, or Pratt & Whitney in fact. And Pratt &

Whitney probably lost out in the end because we were one big company. Because I

think the Americans would have rolled over everybody in Europe. All the other

European engine companies were really – they were licensees of American

companies. SNECMA did a lot of building of American engines. MTU in Munich

and Volvo Fleet Motor, they all used Pratt & Whitney engines as the basis for their

work. So we were the – Rolls and Bristol were the only freestanding engine

companies in Europe, I think you could say. Turbomeca, well, they didn’t last long

on their own. They tied up with Rolls Royce, of course.

How did – I was interested, sort of thinking of Stanley Hooker sort of being part of

Rolls Royce, then coming to Bristol to escape Rolls Royce and then being part of Rolls

Royce again. How did he take it?


175

Well, I don’t know all the details of the in fighting because he left Derby because he’d

gone to Barnoldswick to build all the new jet engines, the Nenes and the – what’s the

other, Derwents, the Clyde and various other engines. And he was doing very well.

And then after the war of course business contracted enormously. The piston engine

business died out very rapidly and so he – they wanted him back at Derby and the old

– the piston engine people were fighting a battle for their existence. And the same

thing was happening at Bristol. But the piston engine people really – a lot of them

didn’t understand the gas dynamics of the jet engines and supersonic aeroplanes and

so on. And so there was – there was a lot of reorganisation required in Derby and in

Bristol. And we had a big piston engine activity going on for quite a long time after

World War II, ‘cause we were putting piston engines into the airspeed –

[Ambassador] what was the … well, certainly into one of the Brabazon airliners. I’ve

forgotten the name of it. Erm … dear, dear. Anyway and then there was the

Blackburn Beverley and there were Nord Noratlases and quite a lot of piston engined

work went on for, ooh, about ten years or so after the war. But it was quite obvious

that the jet was going to take over.

How did Hooker take the merger? What was his response?

Sorry?

What was Stanley Hooker’s response to the merger?

Well, Stanley Hooker wasn’t really interested in piston engines. He made his name as

a – as a gas dynamics man and when he went to Derby before World War II he was

the guy who redesigned the superchargers for the Spitfire. And the reason that we

won the – well, won the air war, I think you could say, was because of his type of

superchargers, which are much more efficient than the Americans’. I mean, for

instance, the Mustang was built with an Alison engine and it was a low level

aeroplane. If you put a two stage Merlin, a supercharged two stage Merlin into a

Mustang, you turned it into a high altitude fighter. And it was actually done at Rolls

Royce – the first initial modification to put a Merlin into a Mustang P51 was done by

Rolls Royce. And the Americans picked it up and they had a Packard Merlin factory


176

churning out more Merlins than we were, before you could say Jack Robinson. And

so you could say Stanley Hooker was the right guy to put into the first jet engines,

because effectively they were based on supercharger technology. And he went on

from there. Very soon – I mean, he was a mathematician, a gas dynamisist. He used

to work under GI Taylor at Oxford. And, well, he was one of the best guys in the

business. Everybody recognised that. And I think there was – in the end they tried to

control him by bringing him back from Barnoldswick to Derby and it didn’t really

work at the time. Piston engine people wanted to be in charge still.

How did he actually find the merger in ’66? Do you remember him saying anything

about it when it happened?

I don’t think he liked it very much. There were some people, I think, who still

regarded him as a renegade, you know, who’d left the company. But in fact of course

he was too big for that. He took a great part in rescuing the RB211 and he was able to

– not interfere but to motivate people to get the thing right, but he knew what he was

about. And I mean, that’s one of the things that – looking back on my career, it was a

marvellous time, working for him. I mean, one didn’t think about what one was paid

mostly. You usually were well paid but you didn’t think about that because it was the

– the work was the important thing.

I think we should take a very short break.

Right.

[End of Track 13]


177

Track 14

Did you look at any ways of reducing the noise levels on Concorde?

Yes. Stanley Hooker charged me with setting up a noise panel and I gathered together

various professors. There was Shôn Ffowcs Williams, who was – he was an old

Imperial College man who became a Professor of – I don’t know what he was,

Acoustics, was it, or something like that, but at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. And

a chap from Manchester, I’ve forgotten his name now, a chap from Southampton,

professors from Southampton. And we were mainly studying jet noise, because that

was the big problem on Concorde. Nowadays the noise of the fans in the engine and

the turbine noise are almost as bad as the jet noise, ‘cause the jet velocity has been

lowered so much on these fan engines that they don’t – it doesn’t intrude.

Why did you get in people from outside Rolls?

Good question, political question as well. I mean, if you’re going to be fighting

environmental lobbies and that, because I mean, nobody wants noisy aeroplanes on

their doorstep, then you’ve got to be able to answer them the right way. And we

needed advice. And they did sponsor – not sponsor, they thought up quite a number

of tests which we were able to do on our rigs, ‘cause we had an open air site at Aston

Down where we could test rotating – we had a rotating – old helicopter rotor, big one

from a Rotodyne, a Fairey Rotodyne, and we used to – it was driven by its own jet.

And by increasing the pressure ratio in the jet we could measure the effects of forward

speed on noise as it came round in a circle like that. And they – these professors took

part in these programmes. I mean, it was a hard theoretical practical attempt to solve

the noise. It was a – various things have happened which have reduced noise. I

mean, one way to reduce noise is to put two jets side by side, and you only see one on

the sideline. And so that saves you three decibels.

How did you actually go about recruiting your experts for your noise panel at all?

By reputation and by word of mouth and – these people were already experts on

noise, and it’s better to have them on the inside of the tent rather than the outside, if


178

you know what I mean [laughs]. But it was a worthwhile effort. We did produce

quite a few interesting ideas.


Oh, well, we got to understand the effect of the number of blades, whether you had,

you know, the same number of blades or an odd number of blades and spacings and

things like that on compressor noise. We had an acoustic facility at Coventry, Ansty

at Coventry.

When you say the same number of blades, do you mean …?

Rotor planes and stator blades. If you have the same number then of course they all

hit each other at the same time, so, you know, there are ways and means of – and the

spacing, the spacing between the rotors and the stators is important. And – it’s a long

time ago since I did any of that.

What did you actually – did you actually change anything on Concorde itself as a

result of this?

Erm … good question … I can’t put my finger on anything at the moment that we – I

mean, weren’t already doing, but at the end of it we understood the problems of

designing engines for low machinery noise and low jet noise and effects of forward

speed and that sort of thing, which we didn’t understand. They came out of that sort

of exercise. I think it was useful.

Did it have any sort of long term effects on engine design?

Oh yes, yes. Yes, and especially for – the modern engines are – their noise sources

are different from the Concorde. The Concorde’s noise source basically was the jet,

the high speed of the jet, because noise power is a function of the eighth power of the

velocity. And that’s a big amplification factor as you go up in speed [laughs].

[06:15]


179

I was wondering as well, what were your strongest memories of the whole Concorde

period?

Strongest memories of Concorde? Er, well, I suppose it was the aerodynamics of the

– thermodynamics of the nozzles and intakes, ‘cause I did spend most of my time on

that. The engine was a pure jet engine. The reason for that being that the faster you

go, the faster has to be the jet exhaust to give you thrust. You – you need to put a lot

of energy into the jet at high speeds, which you wouldn’t do at low speeds. Propellers

put very small increments of energy through large – into large amounts of air. The

thing about supersonic engines is that you don’t want to have to take in too much air

and therefore you have to put a higher velocity. In the end MV, the mass of the air

and the velocity of the air, are the things that count so in order to minimise the size of

power plants for a start. You want to keep the smallest amount of air with the highest

velocity. That goes against the noise. So that’s why it’s much more difficult to

silence a Concorde or supersonic transport than it is to silence a subsonic engine.

We’ve almost got to the point now where jet noise is in the background.

Could you tell me a little bit more about – thinking about the sorts of actual work you

have to do on something – less than the sort of physical concepts behind it but the

aerodynamics and thermodynamics of nozzles, how do you go about actually, well,

designing a nozzle from an aerodynamic point of view?

Well, you don’t have to – what you need to get is – you need to have as near as damn

it a jet pointing in the rearward direction. You don’t want jets going out at angles like

that [demonstrates?]. So you design the throat of the nozzle to do that. But it isn’t an

important factor really because that’s the way you would – when you’re accelerating

flow in a nozzle there’s no danger of separations because you have a fall in pressure

gradient and it … it’s relatively easy compared with designing the diffuser of an

intake. ‘Cause there you can have – because you have rising pressures as you reduce

velocity, the tendency for separations to occur in a diffuser is much greater than the

possibility of separations in a nozzle where you’re contracting the flow. So really a

primary nozzle itself is a simple thing. So is a convergent divergent nozzle. The


180

thing that matters is getting the amount of variability into the system and still keeping

good lines for the flow.

How do you know what flow is actually doing in a nozzle you’re designing?

Sorry?

How do you actually know what flow is doing in a nozzle that you’re designing?

You calculate it. You can examine the – you can pressure plot it, usually by putting in

a series of static pressure holes. But it isn’t a problem. Contracting flow isn’t a

problem. It’s – it’s diffusing the flow is a problem.

Why is it a problem?

Because you get separations. You get boundary layers building up and because there

are adverse pressure gradients due to slowing up the flow, if you’re not careful the

flow suddenly flips off. And on wings, you know, it can cause terrible trouble.

Stalling is a – stalling a wing is a flow of that type.

What sort of problems does it potentially cause in a jet engine?

Erm, well, the blading is – you can’t – blading isn’t flexible, at least not yet anyway,

and so you have to design a compressor which can work at all sorts of different

conditions and adverse gradients and so on.

[11:40]

I was wondering if you could give me an idea of how difficult all this work on

Concorde actually was?

Well, it was something that had never been done before. It was a different world from

subsonic engines, completely different problems. I mean, and supersonic flow itself

on the aeroplane is different. All supersonic flow is a matter of diffusion via shock


181

systems and so there’s – except when you have very small changes of direction. In

the supersonics you have expansion fans and things like that. There is always a small

amount of loss in a supersonic system, which doesn’t occur in subsonics. You turn

flow in a different way supersonically from subsonically. And it’s a different world.

It’s separated at Mach 1 – one side of it, you can have flow which is non – there’s no

fundamental loss in the flow. The other side, every time you turn a corner you sustain

a small loss supersonically. And so you’ve got two separate sort of gas dynamic

problems. And the slower you go the nearer you are to incompressible flow. The

faster you go the more you are – you come to highly compressible flow, ‘cause of the

pressure differences.

What’s the difference of those two things for the engine?

What’s the difference? Well, you tend to want to go for very sharp nosed aerofoils,

thin aerofoils, at supersonic speeds. You can have bulbous subsonic aerofoils.

Because the nature of supersonic flow and subsonic flow is different.

How much of your time does all this work on Concorde actually take up?

Did it take up? Oh, I suppose it was about fifty-fifty, I should think. I’m just

guessing really. I spent a lot of time travelling to Europe and having meetings with

the European companies. With the VSTOL programmes it was a case of talking to

Kingston most of the time and sometimes to Warton, the old English Electric

company, Warton.

Why Warton?

Warton? Well, that’s where English Electric were.

What did they have to do with VSTOL?

Well, they didn’t have much to do with VSTOL. They tried to find a VSTOL

solution, which was rather similar to one of the German solutions, VAK 191, I think it

was, [interviewee correction: EWR. VJ-IOIC] where they had rotating engines. And,


182

you know, you had a feeling there was something wrong with rotating engines, when

you could just rotate a nozzle – a piece of tin, a simple piece of tin, you could rotate a

nozzle and rotate the whole jet. They were putting them on the ends of the wing tips

and rotating them – you couldn’t rotate them all that quickly. They tried to do it

pretty fast, but it’s a great big lump of metal you’re turning.

So the fifty-fifty split between your work was half Concorde, half Harrier then?

About that, yes. There were other odd programmes going on but those were the two

main ones.

Is it difficult balancing your time between those two?

I don’t know. I never thought about it really. We just tackled the problems as best we

could. I mean, there were a lot of us and, you know, we didn’t have to all go

travelling, for a start. And so you needed to have people you could trust left behind to

do the spadework.

How different were they both as technical challenges from your point of view?

Different? Erm … well, one was a slow speed – probably the slowest speed problem

you could get in aviation, which is vertical takeoff. The other was the fastest situation

you could get. And where the faster you go the hotter is the air flow. Because when

you’re doing Mach 2, when you bring the flow to rest in the intake, or nearly, or you

slow it down to very low speeds, though the total temperature remains the same the

static temperature changes, rises, as the flow slows down. So you could fry an egg on

the wing of Concorde at cruising speed.

How about the Harrier?

Well, the Harrier – obviously the temperature does rise with forward speed but the

Harrier was limited to transonic Mach number [5]so there wasn’t an awful lot of high

temperature problems of that sort. Different problems altogether.


183

[18:22]

Are there any differences between working on a civil and a military programme in

this case?

I think safety becomes a much bigger question mark in a civil programme. I mean,

the idea – this is one of the problems with the Concorde, that we were so confined by

the rules of supersonic aerodynamics. You know, the wing was incredibly low

thickness cord ratio and the fuselage had to be narrow, ‘cause the fineness ratio of the

fuselage was important, so for a given length, you know, there was a width you can

have, whereas on a subsonic aeroplane those sort of things are more secondary.

Is there any difference in how you actually have to carry out the work on a military

and a civil project?

Yes, you’ve got different rules. You’ve got a different rules for military aeroplanes

and a book of rules for civil aeroplanes. And the civil rules were – I forget what the

organisation’s called now, it’s changed its name over the years, writes down a set of

rules which you have to obey. And if there’s something new then they have to be

involved in the discussion of how you do it beforehand and they will then formulate

the rules afterwards, hopefully.

Are there any sort of specific ways that military rules differ from civil ones?

I never really thought very much about that. I suppose there must be because you’ve

got gun firing. And if you have a gun located near an intake then there’s a discharge

of hot air and the gases of the explosion, which, if they go into the engine, can cause

you all sorts of problems, which you wouldn’t normally meet on a civil aeroplane

[laughs].

[20:48]

How long is your typical working day in, say, the 1960s when all this is going on?


184

Well, when I first joined, I – I worked Saturday mornings when I was in the Ministry.

This was wartime and wartime rules fed over into peacetime in 1945 and so on. And

you went in on a Saturday morning and worked till lunchtime and the rest of the

weekend was your own then. But that had gone, I think, by the time I came to Bristol

in 1949. We were onto a five day week then, I think, but I’m not absolutely sure,

because we used to work pretty hard in those days. And after all, we were in there at,

what was it, eight thirty in the morning and we left at five o’clock, something like

that. And up in London I had to be in there by quarter past eight and left at six

o’clock and work Saturday mornings as well. That was typical of wartime work

experience.

At Bristol did you work outside hours as well or just doing the nine to five, whatever it

…?

Oh no, when you’re travelling you forget about that. If you have to work all night to

prepare something for the morning you do that. And it depends how good – how

interested you are in your job whether you’re prepared to work all hours of the day

and night. And if you’re doing a repetitive job where there’s no necessity for meeting

a deadline then perhaps you don’t worry too much, but, well, when you’re travelling

particularly you’ve got no recognised hours of work.

What did your family think about your job?

You just think about how to get your job done as best you can and as quickly as you

can.

What did your family think about your job?

What did my family think about the job? Well, my father thought I was going to go

into the coal producing business. He thought I would welcome a job in South Wales

in Gueret, Llewellyn and Merrett or Powell Duffryn, as they were then, or the Coal

Board. But I’d always – having been brought up in the war, I was interested in

aeroplanes and like – my kids have been interested in computers.


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[24:01]

One of my – my eldest son is a – he’s one of these computer men. He runs a small

computer company. My – my number two son, he was a mining engineer, came out

in the middle of the Mining Strike in the 1980s, was it? He came out of university

and the firm that had been sponsoring him – I think it was [Gullick] Dobson, they

make – made mining equipment. And he wrote to them after they’d sponsored him

and they didn’t even answer his letter. I don’t know whether they were all on strike or

what. So he went up to the City and wrote to various bankers and got a job as a

mining analyst with a stockbroking company and he’s never looked back, of course

[laughs]. If he’d become a mining engineer in South Wales I don’t think he’d be there

now. My number three son, he became an apprentice at university, a Rolls Royce

apprentice, and he got put off by his mentor, the chap who was in charge of his

course, and he thought that because – I think there was a redundancy programme

going on at the time when he came out of college so he decided to go and try his hand

elsewhere. And he went to BP and is now working for British Gas. And I don’t think

he did a bad thing there. He’s in the right sort of business these days, energy. Mind

you, I don’t think the opportunities for getting around the world would have occurred

so much in Rolls Royce as they do in the energy companies.

Do you have any daughters as well?

Daughters, yes. I have two daughters. My eldest daughter, when she was at school

she was good at art and good at science, and of course she didn’t really know what to

do. So she’s goes to Durham University and does physics, atomic physics – no, not

atomic, cosmology. And I think that was a mistake. I think she was cut out to be an

artist. She’s a website manager and designer. And my youngest is – she went to

Loughborough University, intending to do physical training – what do they call it,

something – oh …

Sports science?

Sports science, that’s right, sports science. And she did a joint maths and sports

science. She dropped sports science and became a mathematician, rather like – my


186

eldest son is a Cambridge mathematician. And she’s now out in Hong Kong, has been

there for about twenty years. She manages a pensions asset management organisation

out there.

So three sons and two daughters?

Three sons, two daughters, yes.

[27:49]

How did you actually fit family life around work and travel and things like that?

I don’t know. Looking back on it, I don’t know how I did it. Today I can hardly

manage to dig over a potato in the garden. I’m crippled with arthritis. But in those

days I worked all hours and when I came home I worked all hours in my garden as

well. And it’s quite a lot of work to keep this place going. There were about thirty

odd fruit trees from when we came here. I’ve weeded out a few of them now. And an

acre of ground. It’s something I can’t manage now.

Do you have to make any sacrifices in your personal life, doing all those long trips

and long hours?

Yes, I suppose I did. I didn’t notice it – I mean, you can enjoy travelling up to a

point. I think it gets to a situation in the end, of course, where you’re in the air half

the time and you just can’t cope. But most of the time I coped.

What sort of things do you think you lost out on from all that travel, if anything?

I don’t – I may have lost out on a few things, but I think you gain enormously in other

ways, seeing how the other half of the world lives and meeting all sorts of interesting

people worldwide.

Did you have to do much travel as part of Concorde?


187

Yes, but it was European travel, most of it.

Where to?

Oh, to Turin, to Paris. We used to – at the same time as we were doing Concorde we

had a lot of collaboration with the other European engine companies, like MTU and

Volvo Fleet Motor [Interviewee correction: Volvo Flygmotor]. And there’s a Spanish

company. I’ve forgotten the name of the Spanish company now. Fiat in Northern

Italy, Turin.

What sort of things did you have meetings about to do with Concorde?

With them?

To do with Concorde?

We had – that was mainly SNECMA and Sud Aviation. We didn’t – we weren’t

doing – the collaborative programmes came later with the Tornado programme and

the Typhoon programme. There was an M45 engine programme. And of course then

there was the Spey replacement programme, which – I call it the Spey replacement. It

was for medium sized airliners and big business jets, that sort of thing.

What were the meetings with SNECMA like over Concorde? How are they to work

with?

They were pretty good to work with, especially after lunch, when you’ve been fed and

wined. And there wasn’t much time before your aeroplane was about to leave so you

had to make the decisions fairly quickly. I don’t know how much the long lunch hour

is an aid to decision making but it might well be [laughs].

What sort of decisions did you have to make with them?

Oh, well they were engineering decisions. I mean, commercial decisions were left to

other people. And the commercial implications of the decisions we made we had to


188

find out – always – I mean, there is a give and take in engineering. You’re not

signing on the dotted line in blood for every joint decision you make. If it goes

wrong, something goes wrong, then you have to do the best thing to get it right. It

may involve the other partner doing it or it may involve you doing it to help him.

Unless you work on that basis I don’t think you get successful collaborative

programmes. I’ve seen too much of where people have said, well, our demarcation

line is at this juncture of the engine here, everything else is your responsibility and

you’d better get it right. Well, that’s not a good way to run a joint programme. You

have to help each other.

What was the working language?

I’m afraid it was English mainly, though we did have programmes to teach people

French. But Dutch I could never handle and I couldn’t handle – I’m not a great

language man. I couldn’t handle Swedish and Norwegian.

Were the meetings with the French in French or in English?

They always wanted them to be in English. They were all desperately keep to learn

English because of course, don’t forget, the big market was in America and so, you

know, we had a head start in any talks with America. So they deliberately – I mean, I

think they still do have – English is probably the language which most aeronautical

things are conducted.

[0:34:25]

Were there any French engineers you remember in particular?

Yes. I don’t know whether you would know their names. There was a Monsieur

Devriese, who we knew as a French civil servant, and then he transferred to

SNECMA, because the French used to interchange – especially in their nationalised

industries, they used to interchange the civil servants between engineers who worked

on it and engineers who directed it from the Ministry. That’s not a bad idea. It’s

something we could do in this country. The trouble is in this country you’ve got a


189

civil service which is steeped in classics and the like and under them is a scientific

civil service. And they’ve tried to intermingle them in this country but it doesn’t

work. It hasn’t worked as far as I can see. But in France you’re – you have all the

École Polytechnique and the École Nationale, and then you have the interchange

between the major state industries and the government service. So you might one

year find a chap with a high rank in the civil service and the next year he’s running

SNECMA. And I think we haven’t got it right in this country. We have the

administrative civil service who think they know everything about everything and

they know nothing very much as far as I can see, except how to stay in business.

Another comparison then; I was thinking, what was your impression of SNECMA

compared to Bristol/Rolls Royce as a company at that time?

Well, they were learning. I mean, during the war SNECMA were called Gnome-

Rhone, and pre war, and before World War II they were licensed to build Jupiters and

the like and various other [Bristol] engines. And after the war they licensed to build

Hercules for the Noratlas and various other aeroplanes and they had German

designers to help them with their first [jet] engine, which is the Atar. There were

quite a few Germans who worked with the French. They had to really build their

industry from the ground up after the war because the Germans would just use them

as subcontractors, I think. They did use a few French engines on Gigant, a huge

glider that they put power into. I think they were powered by Gnome-Rhône.

Gnome-Rhône had a – I think had a – there was a bad smell about them after the war

because they had collaborated in a lot of the production and that’s why they changed

their name to SNECMA and nationalised it. [banging noise] Oh, he’s hammering

stones, I think, outside the window.

It might get a bit loud on this though. Let’s see if it goes away for a second. How

would you rate SNECMA compared to Bristol?

Difficult to say, difficult to say. They were good engineers. [banging noise] I don’t

quite know what he’s – he’s laying some stones outside the window.


190

It might get picked up by this. I’ll check in a second if it continues. Did you notice

any similarities and differences between the French company and the British ones?

Yes, I think in the management. As I say, there was an elite, engineering elite. They

were the École Polytechnique. And if you were a Polytechnician you could address

your superior by his Christian name, I think. It was a very strange thing. I mean, I’ve

never encountered it before, but the French do it in a different way. And they’re

pretty good engineers.

Were there any rivalries between you?

Any what?

Were there ever any rivalries between …?

Oh, there always are rivalries there, I mean, to beat somebody to getting the solution

to something. I think friendly rivalry’s alright. You can get – I mean, the rivalry

between American engine companies and the European engine companies can get a

bit nasty at times.

How effective do you think that collaboration with SNECMA was?

I think when we were collaborating it was very effective but I think it depended on the

fact that, you know, we had a background of jet engines, they had no background of

jet engines after the war, so they were very keen to learn everything they could from

us and from the Americans, and understandably. And once they knew, or thought

they knew, how to do it then it was more difficult and, you know, we had a few

arguments. But, you know, I enjoyed it.

[40:39]

Did you ever have any contact with the American supersonic transport programme?


191

Yes, I was very friendly with the Chief Engineer of the Boeing Supersonic Aircraft

Programme, a chap called Walton Swan. He often came and stayed in this house.

And of course his job disappeared fairly rapidly when they decided that the Mach

number – I think they decided the Mach number they’d chosen, which was 2.6 or 2.7,

was too high and they ended up – what they did, in order to make an engine which

would work at Mach 2.6, they made a low pressure ratio turbojet. Now a low pressure

ratio turbojet is very poor at subsonic speeds for when you’re using your reserves up

and standing off and diverting and so on, whereas we were able to use – at Mach 2.2

we were able to use an Olympus, which had a pressure ratio and an engine cycle

which was not too – certainly not too bad at subsonic speeds, ‘cause it was used in the

Vulcan bomber.

What did Swan make of the Concorde programme?

What does one make of the Concorde?

What did Swan make of the Concorde programme?

I think the Americans were very – what’s the word? They were very interested and I

think they appreciated that we’d done better with the Concorde programme than they

had and also better than their bomber programme, ‘cause their supersonic bomber

programme came apart at the seams. The Hustler I think was a bit of a disaster.

Every time it flew to the Paris show they seemed to lose one on the way.

What did you and Swan actually talk about?

Er … we talked about – not our own secrets, I can assure you, but we did talk about

aviation in general. And there were various other things going on at the time. Most

of the time I knew him we were dealing with the Boeing civil people and making

subsonic aircraft, and we were working towards re-engining the 737. But

unfortunately, due to the lack of money in Rolls Royce, we couldn’t produce the

engine which they wanted. And we’d already designed it and run it through with their

aeroplanes and done a lot of collaboration with them and in the end we had to give up

because we didn’t have the funds to make the engine. And that was the state of Rolls


192

Royce in the 1970s and ‘80s, up until the early ‘80s. We had no – we were

government owned, of course, in the ‘70s, and even when we floated off on the

market again we still didn’t have the sort of resources that the American companies

had. So we were living from hand to mouth at that time.

I guess that seems a good moment to shift into talking about your role as future

projects, doesn’t it?

Mm.

Shall we take a short break first, just to end the chapter, as it were?

Yep.

[End of Track 14]


193

Track 15

When were you assigned as future project engineer?

Pardon?

When did you get the post of future project engineer?

It was 1968.

What was the exact title again, sorry?

Chief Engineer, Advanced Projects.

What does a Chief Engineer of Advanced Projects actually do?

Well, he has a performance office and a design office and a few ancillary

organisations attached. I had the noise department as part of it as well, because noise

was a new feature of designs when I took over. It was just becoming an

environmental problem.

What was the overall duty of the post?

The overall duty of the post? Well, it is to build a team that can – is not self contained

entirely but is standalone, capable of producing project designs which are not

necessarily put into production. They wouldn’t be put into production. When you

decided what the project design should look like then sometimes when you hand it

over you then have to hand it over to a new organisation, which is the main design

office and detail office and the development department, to produce the answer. And

they often will have their own ideas about how to do the particular thing you’ve –

they will take the specification that you’ve laid down to achieve the sale, if you like,

of the engine to a civil aircraft customer and they might decide they’re going to alter

it. Now I think some measure of how well you’ve done it is how much they alter it

[laughs].


194

[2:25]

The first real project that I did was a small turbofan for business jets. This was called

the RB401. And up until that time the business jets had been a mixture of jet engines,

which had originally been designer for military purposes, like the Viper, and there

were GE engines and Pratt & Whitney jet engines, and there were very few turbofan

engines at that stage. They were just thinking about them. And they tended to be

made with centrifugal compressors, because centrifugal compressors are easy when

you make them when they’re small but much more difficult as they get bigger and

bigger. Anyway, we decided that we were going to make a small high bypass engine.

Why do you decide to make one?

Because this is the way to get the efficiency. The efficiency of ducted fan engines is a

function of their bypass ratio, their fan pressure ratio really. The lower the fan

pressure ratio the bigger is the fan and the more air you take in and the lower the

velocity increment you give it and the higher the froude efficiency is. So thermal

efficiency is one thing and that’s the gas generator. That depends on the pressure

ratio, the efficiency, the compressors, the temperatures you run at, and that’s a power

producer, when you apply the power producer to a fan and the froude efficiency is a

function of the jet velocity and how much increment in velocity you give to the air

flow through the fan.

Why did you decide that the small business jet engine market was a good one to go

into at the time?

Because it was started by the Hawker-Siddeley or Hawker – or de Havilland, if you

like, 125. That was the first real business jet. And unfortunately, in all the

machinations that happened with British Aerospace, de Havilland disappeared. And

the aeroplane was then – the whole aeroplane was then sold to an American company.

It’s still in production. But we powered that with a Viper engine, which was a

military engine, not very efficient for that sort of purpose, a low pressure ratio jet

engine. So we wanted a higher pressure ratio turbo fan engine to get the specific fuel


195

consumption right. That means a bigger engine, bigger frontal area for the same

thrust, if you like.

Once you’ve decided to make that sort of engine for that sort of application, where do

you go next?

Where do you go next? Well, you go to the customer and find out what he wants in

the way of thrust and altitude and cruise, climb thrust and takeoff thrust. And what

he’s expecting from you for SFC, specific fuel consumption.

Once you’ve got that data, what do you do with it then?

Well, we – when I arrived on the scene computing was a tool rather like a big slide

rule and they used it for calculating engine performance. Well, we decided among

ourselves that we were going to do it differently. We were going to design engines –

we would still do the performance, of course, on the computer, but we would do the

initial project design and the variation in design to find out where the optimum lay –

we were going to do that on the computer, because you cannot – you haven’t got

enough people to go and design a hundred engines, you know. They take a hell of a

time to design one engine, let alone ten or a hundred.

[07:21]

And so we wanted a system which would give us the scantlings, that is the outline of

the engines, blades – number of blades, pressure ratios and so on, and using the

information we already had accumulated from all the designs we’d done in the

company we were able to produce a system which was what I call a bottom up design.

In other words, you start from a technical specification of what you want to do and

then you decide from the bottom up how many blades you have in the compressor,

how many stages you have in the compressor, what pressure ratios you use, what

efficiencies you’re going to get, and so on. And you can in fact – using what we call

regression analysis, you can take all the information you’ve collected from the engine

– and we had done quite a lot of engines, especially as we’d taken over Armstrong-

Siddeley, so we had all their engines to look at. And we were able to do this


196

regression analysis, which told us the right way to do it. And we put that all onto the

computer. And we did a lot of other things. We put the cost – the costing of engines

onto the computer and the development programmes of engines onto the computer.

And so we arrived at a point where we could – overnight we could design an engine

and design a series of engines, do what we call a parametric study. And we were the

first people, I think, to do it with a bottom up system. People used vague … statistical

systems to say, you know, roughly what an engine would weigh or cost or that, but

this was actually done down to the individual blades. And that system was called

Compass at Bristol. We had a funny situation arise where my opposite number at

Derby, who was a friend of mine, he thought it was a terrible thing to do, that the right

way to design an engine was to put a designer in front of a drawing board with a

pencil poised in his hand and let him draw it. Now what we used to do was produce

the scantlings of the engine, which the computer would optimise and say, look, here’s

the way you start. And then he would – he would then do the – the business of taking

what the computer had drawn and turning it into a mechanical design. Because after

all, that’s what the designer’s there for most of the time. He relies on all the other

experts for the best way to do a compressor, the right number of blades, the spacing of

the blades and things like that, so all the noise rules and all that sort of thing have to

be fed in. So a designer of a jet engine is not quite the same as a designer of a steam

engine, but he isn’t surrounded by thermodynamicists. But it’s different on gas

turbines.

Why did your opposite number at Derby actually disagree with you?

Well, he was an old fashioned designer. I mean, before the days of the computer that

was all you could do. And old habits die hard, you know.

Who actually was your opposite number at Derby?

Do I have to tell you?

I’m curious.

The following section is closed [00:11:46-00:12:24]


197

Do you think there’s any risk though in sort of having a computer programme that

spits out a design in sort of stifling innovation because it only allows you to do the

way the computer programme says?

Er … well, it – it’ll spew out all sorts of designs. You can tell it what assumptions to

make. You can then look at the weight of the engine. I mean, one of the things you

have to do is to choose a system which gives you the lightest weight for a given

performance. And I’ve no regrets at using the computer to take out the donkey work

which you couldn’t do anyway. There were not enough designers to design ten

engines at the same time and to common rules. So we were doing something that

hadn’t been done before.

[13:21]

How did all your assorted experts who were feeding into this system see this process?

There was a mixed reaction. Some thought they were having their jobs taken away

from them. Others thought, oh, here’s a good way of doing our job. For instance, we

worked out by regression analysis again the cost of blades and of different shapes and,

you know, aspect ratios and thickness cords and speeds, and we could produce a

costed engine programme overnight. Now these chaps did it all by hand, just like the

designers who stood in front of the drawing board with their pencils poised. And yet

they didn’t need to do that, they could choose from among a dozen different engines if

they wanted to and say, look, this one’s the cheapest. But if you haven’t got engines

designed to a common system you won’t get that answer. And if you had ten teams of

engineers standing in front of drawing boards drawing engines at the same time, they

would all be drawn to different rules, you know, or the different feelings of the

engineers as to what was right and what was wrong, because they would be stuck for

support from the stress men and the weights engineers and that sort of thing. You

couldn’t – we could do overnight what would take years to be done by hand. And we

kept it to ourselves for as long as we could but – the chap who rang me this morning

he …


198

Frank Armstrong?

Yes. He really wanted us to supply NGTE with the means to do this. Now I said to

him, ‘Well look, these are Bristol rules we’ve developed. They’re not necessarily

NGTE rules. And I don’t think the bosses would like it if I gave you the system.’

[Laughs] Also, I mean, we had a team of about five or six people who’d actually put

this system together and were running it, so it’s not something you’d undertake

lightly.

[15:54]

I think we got to this computer point ‘cause we were talking about the RB401 design.

Was the computer used as part of the RB401 development?

Yes, yes. And we – I think – I forget how long it took us to build the engine, about a

year or so. And it ran – so my first attempt at a brand new engine, it started up, it ran.

All its performance points were on the brochure curve. And I mean, it had

mechanical difficulties, all engines have mechanical difficulties at the start. You

don’t get everything right, even with a computer.

I’m interested in the process of how this works as well. So you’ve fed your numbers

into the computer and the computer has given you this – what does it give you?

Well, the computer – first of all you can get the performance. We’ve always been

able to get the performance. As long as we’ve had computers we were able to do that.

But it then ties it to a particular geometry of engine. And you’ve got lots of rules

from little groups of people who are stress men and weights men and vibration men

and you name it, and these are all fed into the system. It doesn’t mean to say you’re

doing them out of a job, ‘cause when you build the engine you need to get it right.

Development people need to know what’s right and what’s wrong.

What do you do with the rules once you’ve got them out of the computer?

We leave them in the computer.


199

Oh sorry, not the rules, the output, what your engine’s going to look like.

Oh, the computer draws it in outline. And then you give that outline to the designer

and he starts on it.

What does the designer do with it?

Oh, he looks at the question of seals and compressor design from a mechanical point

of view and the cooling of the turbine from the mechanical point of view. Cooling is

a subject on its own, which we don’t normally tackle on the computer, or at least we

didn’t in those days. I don’t know what they do now. But you – there are all – it

doesn’t – that’s the start of the process, but you get – if you haven’t got it right at the

start you won’t have it right at the finish unless you stop in the middle and change.

And that’s the last thing you want to do, you know, waste six months following one

particular route and then suddenly change to another. You want to get the

fundamentals of the design right. And that’s what this system enabled you to do.

And I think the fact that the first engine we ran – it’s unlike any other small engine

that’s been built before, it worked first time. And if you saw the curve you’d think

that the curve was drawn through the points that the performance engineers calculated

from the test bed. Then, having done that, you can then take it to the aircraft company

and say, look, is this the sort of engine that will suit you, has it got the right

characteristics. And they might say, well, this engine is going to be mounted under a

wing and there’s a limitation on the diameter of the fan, so can we have the best

engine with that sort of thing. And that was the question that Boeing asked us and

what we did, we produced a whole stack of brochures with different engines for them

and all turned out by this system. And they could then go ahead with this parametric

engine design, knowing that when they came to make a choice they had an engine

which would certainly have a good chance of working.

What’s the step in between having a finished engine at one end and, you know, your

design having spat out and had a designer look at it?


200

Well, you’d expect – I mean, the main – in the past the design office would draw

something. They would then send it out to the main design office and the main design

office would tear it up and start again. Well, I think we got over that problem, that

they realised that the computer was doing an awful lot of donkey work in sorting out

which was the right combination of components, right speeds for shafts and the right

speed for the units and all that sort of thing. And it became – it was no problem, as

far as I could see. And the individual specialists would ask us to run things for them.

For instance, the cost control people would come on and say, will you do this. Well,

first of all they thought, oh, my job’s on the line, but it wasn’t. It allowed them to do

other more important things.

[21:52]

How did you actually get the job in the first place?

How did I …?

How did you get the job as Chief New Projects in the first place?

Well, when I’d been working on Concorde and in the installation side of it, I had

applied the rules that I’d learnt in the Ministry for what was the best thing for a

particular aeroplane. And so I ended up doing quite a lot of engine design. In fact I

was looking at boundary layer sucking fans and things like that. So I was doing quite

a lot of what you might call new project work before I actually went into new

projects. But basically it was a fact that I could combine the knowledge I’d gained

from the Ministry on assessing new projects with the installation work that I’d done

when I first came to Bristol and then later with some unconventional work on engines.

Did the job suit you?

Did it suit me? Yes, yes, just what I wanted to do. In fact, my boss came up to me

one day and said, you know, ‘I envy you your job. I wish I could go back to doing it.’

‘Cause he’d been a Project Engineer as well.


201

What did you like about it?

What did I like about him or it?

No, it, the job.

It, the job? Doing something new, pushing the boundaries of knowledge out a bit.

And it didn’t stop us thinking about all sorts of other gas dynamic problems, which

turned up at various times. So I didn’t lose all my hold, my grip, on performance,

aircraft performance, and that sort of thing. Yeah.

What do you actually spend your time doing as chief project – I keep forgetting the

title of the job, is it chief engineer of projects?

Chief Engineer of Advanced Projects.

Chief Engineer of Advanced Projects.

They used to change it around occasionally but I got fed up with having my name

changed and the job remaining the same.

What do you actually spend your time doing?

Everything that a new project engineer has to cope with. I mean, that includes the

designing – the projecting of new engines. Finding out what the customer wants first,

projecting the new engines, prompting the customer to do things differently when you

knew perhaps a little bit more about the way the project was going to look because

you knew what the engine was going to look like. Seeing to the noise situation. What

else? Aircraft performance. We had an aircraft performance unit in the project office,

which did all the aircraft performance jobs for the whole of the engine design

organisation, but it was essentially part of new projects.

To balance those sorts of tasks though – I mean, what are you doing on a daily basis?


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Running an outfit with about fifty, sixty people, most of them engineers, qualified

engineers. Paying and feeding them. Checking their expense accounts [laughs], when

I wasn’t travelling.

How much of this is technical and how much is managerial?

Well, you’ve only got twenty four hours in a day and if you’ve got to do a lot of

technical work that comes first, I think. But that means you’ve got to have a chap

who looks after staff functions and I had a good couple of guys there. But I – looking

back on it, I mean, I was juggling about four or five different jobs all the time I was in

the office.

[27:00]

What sort of places were you actually travelling to?

What sort of bases?

Places were you travelling to.

Places? America mostly at the start, and Canada. Er … no, I didn’t do much in

Australia. Germany, Sweden, Italy, France, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, China.

Doing what sort of things?

Well, often doing the selling job. You see, if you’re dealing with an outfit which is

the project office, say, a big aeronautical company somewhere in the Far East or in

America or Canada, then a salesman, a pure and simple, is not what’s wanted. They

want somebody who can tell them what the options are and tell them whether what

they’re doing is right or not. And so the ideal party to go visiting a company is

usually a senior representative of some part of the organisation, somebody who is

good at marketing, carrying bags and things like that, and then a few engineers and –

of the various types. If you’re going on a specific job you might draw on an engineer


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from the noise department or the stress department to go with you. So – does that

answer your question?

Mm. Are there any trips you remember in particular?

Ah, well, I remember – I was into Boeing on a monthly basis almost at one time and

so I spent a lot of time preparing to go there and when I came back, carrying out the

actions that I’d picked up on the way. But … I think America was – the most active

place in the world with aviation in the ‘50s and the ‘60s and up to now really is

America. You had to [coughs] try to do the best you could there because that was the

important market at the time. Nowadays there are markets in China and in Brazil. I

mean, there’s a big aircraft construction organisation in Brazil. And there are reasons

– there are reasons for going to various smaller countries because you may be wanting

to sell them some new proposition that you’re working on, new training aeroplanes,

for instance. I mean, selling an air superior fighter is beyond my labour grade really,

but certainly you can go and talk to them about all the more mundane sides of aircraft

projecting and construction, see whether you – you often pick up ideas from the

smaller companies.

[30:57]

What were the other big projects of your time as Chief Engineer of Advanced

Projects?

Well, there was VSTOL – there was STOL transports. London and City Airport was

coming on the scene in the 1970s, 1980s and Vickers, for example, were trying to

make a STOL transport. And we – in the project office we designed a variable pitch

geared fan engine, which is only now – they’re now talking about geared fan engines

for the new A320. This is for short haul operations, ‘cause on short haul operations

you spend your time climbing to altitude and then descending, because, you know,

you’re only going 200 miles or even less within America and therefore you don’t

spend your time cruising. So the idea that you make the best engine for cruising may

not be right for the latest – or one particular type of aeroplane at least, and that is the

short, very short, ultra short haul aeroplane.


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What’s a geared fan?

A geared fan? Well, it means that you put a gear box like you put on a piston engine

to drive the fan at a lower speed, because you’re – and to produce a lower pressure

ratio, because that’s – the froude efficiency of a fan with a lower pressure ratio is

much higher, particularly on takeoff and climb. And if you’re spending most of your

time on climbing then there’s a different sort of engine is needed. London City

Airport is dealing with all the smaller – or with the local European airports. There are

a large number of them in the vicinity of London, you know, Schiphol and Charles de

Gaulle and Frankfurt and … and I’ve forgot, what’s Holland – Dutch?

Amsterdam.

Amsterdam, well yes.

Schiphol?

Schiphol, Schiphol, yes, Schiphol, yes. So there’s a big market, I think for short haul

aeroplanes, particularly where you’re flying across the water, if you’re going to

Ireland or even if you’re going to Scotland there are aeroplanes. And there are quite a

lot of them around these days but we’re always seeking to make something better.

And of course as the market grows you need the bigger aeroplanes as well and the

bigger aeroplanes may require new thoughts, new engines.

Did the work get anywhere on the geared fan at the time?

Well, we ran it and it performed exactly – or more or less to specification. But it

wasn’t an optimised engine. It was built from an existing gas generator, to which we

added a gearbox and then put a variable pitch fan on. It’s unique in the sense that – I

think it’s the first time a variable pitch fan has been designed for a jet. [gas turbine]

Why didn’t the work get any further?


205

Partly because the company was so busy doing the VSTOL – the STOL transport, not

V, no V, was closed down, Vickers-Armstrong at Weybridge. And they were going

great guns with it. And the idea was picked up by de Havilland and de Havilland had

been doing intercity VSTOL or V, VTOL, where they had banks of [lift] engines.

And they suddenly realised, I think, that this wasn’t the way to go and because

Vickers had closed down they picked up the Vickers idea. But then they said, oh,

now what’s the cheapest engine we can get, and they got an ALF502, which was an

engine made from a US helicopter engine. And they put that in the aeroplane. I think

it would have been more successful if we’d put our geared fan into it, quite frankly.

When abouts was that job?

When abouts?

Yeah.

Oh … that would be late ‘70s. That’s when London City Airport was being ‘thunk’

up.

[36:25]

What sort of effects did the Rolls Royce bankruptcy actually have on you?

Well, the effect of the bankruptcy lasted from 1971 until early ‘80s. And we were

still finding it very difficult to do anything new other than keep afloat – keep the Trent

and the RB211 afloat. But with the coming of the joint company with the Japanese

and then mating that up with Pratt & Whitney, we were able to produce the – what we

used to call the Spey replacement engine, which was for the smaller airliners, intercity

airliners. And these are ones that do longer trips, so they do 1,000 miles, 1,200 miles

trips to the Mediterranean and – yeah, and this engine was badly needed and it had not

been produced in quantity. SNECMA had linked up with GE and produced an

engine, which took advantage – they took advantage of the fact that we couldn’t get

the money for ours, so they made the most successful aeroplane, the Boeing 737. I

think they’ve sold more Boeing 737s than any other aeroplane. And we could have


206

had the lead place in that, I’m convinced, but because of financial restrictions we

didn’t.

Was that the V20500 [V2500] you mentioned before?

Well, then when we got into bed with Pratt & Whitney and the Japanese, we then

produced the V20500 [V2500] and that immediately took more than half the market

from GE. They still made I don’t know how many thousand engines, 12,000 engines,

something like that. And … so they’ve done very well out of it but we’ve done very

well as well. So that is quite a big market. I mean, the 737 market is – all the low

cost operators use that aeroplane.

[39:22]

Were there any other big projects you ended up working on?

Yes, the – I was working for a long time on a supersonic VSTOL project, the – what

was called AST396. And then 403 I think it was, became operational requirement.

And we were engaged with Hawkers in making a bid for this aeroplane. Now this

was a bit of a problem for British Aerospace because the people at Warton had made

the Tornado as a European project and they wanted to go on making European

projects and the Europeans didn’t seem to want the VSTOL, for some reason. I mean,

the Germans took part in the original VSTOL test programme using the Kestrel, a

squadron of Kestrels, which were the forerunner of the Harrier, but they sold all their

aeroplanes to the [US] Marines at the end of the programme and they decided to go in

for a conventional aeroplane. And at the time the Tornado was being designed, they

really wanted to do an air superiority aeroplane, but in the end the compromise was

that it should be a low level interdiction aeroplane. And we then tried to make the

best of that aeroplane by making an air defence variant of it. And that was an

aeroplane which was intended to attack bombers carrying atomic weapons. And the

Tornado was supposed to be an aeroplane which could carry atomic weapons at 200

feet into enemy territory. And, well, I think the need for that is not so great today,

though I don’t know. I mean, you never know what’s going to be around the next

corner, do you? And British Aerospace then had a dilemma, should they go for the


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advanced VSTOL, supersonic VSTOL, aeroplane, or should they go for an air

superiority fighter. And so you had a battle within British Aerospace between the

Kingston design team who wanted VSTOL, supersonic VSTOL, and the Warton team

that wanted the air superiority fighter, which incidentally we should have built twenty

years earlier. And the net result of that was that they went to the British government –

we hadn’t made an awful lot of progress towards supersonic VSTOL. We were a bit

at odds design wise on how to do it – this is Kingston. So we hadn’t got a design

which caught the eye, if you like, of the airmen. And in the meanwhile British

Aerospace came up with the European EAP, the European Aircraft Programme, which

was an air superiority fighter, which is now the Typhoon. And that really then put a

stop to our supersonic VSTOL because we couldn’t do two aeroplanes and two

engines, entirely different engines.

Was this the – is it the P1216 aeroplane?

That’s right, the P1216 was the Hawker preferred design. I – I must say, I wasn’t

very enthusiastic about it myself.

Why?

We still haven’t solved the problem of hot front jets. Because the Harrier protects its

intake from hot air ingestion by having two cold jets at the front, which create a wall,

if you like, between the hot jets and the cold jets. And we had to do something to do

that and I don’t think we did enough. Well, that’s my opinion. And in the meanwhile

the European fighter programme, the Eurofighter, went ahead and the government

said, well, we will sign up with the Americans for the VSTOL aeroplane and we’ll

buy a few from them. So we then became subcontractors in effect. They led the

competition. They led – the aeroplane which came out of that is a big aeroplane. It’s

twice as big as the Harrier and a lot bigger wing area because the Harrier is a

comparatively high wing loading aeroplane.

Is this the Joint Strike Fighter?


208

The Joint Strike Fighter. And of course, the result of that big aeroplane is that they

were [interviewee correction ‘want’ not ‘were’] big carriers. Now once you get big

carriers you have to ask yourself, do you really need a VSTOL aeroplane? But of

course the [JSF] aeroplane was being designed as a CTOL aeroplane and stealthy and

all that sort of thing, so it was a very attractive aeroplane for the seniors in the Air

Ministry or the Air Force or the Navy. And the Navy saw a chance of getting two big

carriers out of it. The carriers are now designed without – without catapults because

they were going to use the VSTOL, supersonic VSTOL, design. And now they’re

looking around and saying, well, do we really need a VSTOL aeroplane on a carrier

this big. Then they find that they have to use conventional aeroplanes – they can use

conventional aeroplanes of this kind. And so the whole reason for having the carriers

is now – you know, the bottom seemed to drop out of the whole project. And then

they find they can’t – they find it difficult to put the conventional aeroplane on the big

carrier. So it really is a muddle and I don’t quite know where it’s – how it’s going to

pan out. But it isn’t learning the lessons of the Harrier; that you can get a cheap

aeroplane to operate. In most of the wars, or brushfire wars that we’re likely to be

involved in, we don’t need a supersonic aeroplane, I think. And the Harrier is capable

of tackling the supersonic aeroplanes which came down to sea level and had to fight at

sea level.

What was the effect of that decision to go for Eurofighter rather than VSTOL fighter

for you?

Well, the decision was that Hawker-Siddeley at Kingston got shut down, which is a

shame really ‘cause they were a very fine aircraft design team. And the US Marines

now have all the RAF and Navy Harriers so they’re sitting pretty for the time being.

But I don’t think the US Marines want a big carrier ‘cause the US Navy probably

wouldn’t allow them to have one [laughs].

[0:48:34]

What effect did that change actually mean for you though?


209

For me? Well, it happened in the last couple of years of my – of my career. I retired

in 1987. And one of the last things I did before I retired was to go round Europe

setting up the – the technical basis for the EJ200 engine for the Eurofighter, which –

again we used all our capabilities in computerised design to get agreement on that

engine. And it was very useful having that computerised system. We could find

answers to all the questions more quickly than anybody else.

When you said you had to go all over Europe, doing what sort of things?

Well, it was Spain, Italy, Germany and originally France were in the programme. So

we had a four company programme. The French decided in the end they were going

to stick with their – [aircraft] because the European consortium wouldn’t accept the

French fighter or the engine as the basis for their aeroplane. They wanted to have

control of the whole thing in the joint company. Because of that the French then

departed from the consortium, so it was left with the Italians, the Spaniards, the

Germans and the English, or British. And that’s the way we are today. And it’s taken

twenty odd years to get the Typhoon into operation, which is an awful long time. And

when you consider that the Harrier was brought into operation from drawing the first

line in four years, you realise that international collaboration is a way of wasting an

awful lot of time.

Did you think it would take that long back in 1987?

No, we didn’t. I didn’t, no. I hadn’t really thought about it at the time, you know.

You get used to ideas that you can make a new engine in eighteen months and get it

into service in about three or four years, or even less in the case of the Harrier.

How did you find the attitudes of the various European partners you were working

with?

Well, we were – we maintained great friendships with them. What their governments

wanted was anybody’s guess because the way the orders have been placed and then

the way they’ve slipped – and people said, well, I’m reducing my order. The initial

orders give you a seat at the table and a share of the project and then when it comes to


210

actually fulfilling the orders you find that there’s quite a big slippage. People have let

them slip back in time and cut the numbers and all that sort of thing. But it makes you

wonder about collaborative aeroplanes. They are very much more tricky than

ordinary ones.

Back in 1987 what did you think the biggest challenges were going to be in

developing the J200?[Interviewee correction: EJ200]

Er, oh I should think the high temperature part of the engine, the cool turbine blades,

because we had an awful lot of trouble on the Tornado engine with the turbines and

that. And particularly out in the desert they used to – you have to guard against

ingesting sand and getting glass covered blades. But, yes, the hot part of the engine is

the tricky bit really. But … yeah, I don’t know. You’ve got to stop sometime. You

can’t go on forever.

[53:22]

What – how did you feel about the industry you were working in as you approached

retirement?

Well, I thought it was – up until about the end of the ‘60s or the end of the ‘70s, you

could make things quickly and get them working quickly. But the cost of military

programmes has escalated so much that governments find it necessary to cut back.

And usually they cut back on the numbers they’ve ordered and they cut [interviewee

correction: ‘push’ not’ cut’] back on the delivery times. And when you – when you

push the delivery times back you’re pushing up the cost of the programme. Time is

money. So I think, you know, what I’ve seen since I’ve been retired is that

programmes have slipped and overspent and I think there comes a point where you

can’t afford to have every – to design every item in your armoury. You have to buy

off the shelf sometimes. I think that’s what’s happening now.

When did you actually retire?

When did I retire? December 1987.


211

How did you feel about retirement?

I didn’t particularly want to retire. We were retired at sixty-two then and this was a

standard rule, because the people that went into the jet engine business were all the

same age and the – by the 1970s the top of the company was blocked up with people

of the same age. And that wasn’t a good idea, I think.

How did you feel about – why did you want to carry on?

Why did I – I’m not sure. I thought I wanted to carry on, but I did a few consultancy

jobs and I decided that I didn’t think it was anything like as exciting as actually the

real thing and I backed out by about the early ‘90s.

What have you done since retirement?

I’ve written a few papers. I’ve got – there are three of us, Frank Armstrong, the ex

boss of RAE Farnborough and John Allen, who used to be the Chief Project Engineer

at Hawkers at Kingston in the time of the Harrier, or at least the developments after

the Harrier. The three of us have written various papers. We haven’t done anything

for a few years now. I think we’re all getting too old, you have to give up sometime.

You can’t go on forever.

Papers on what?

New civil aeroplanes, whether to go for a thing like the A380 or whether to go for

something more like a Vulcan, which is capable of cruising at 0.9 Mach number if

you want to, or 0.92, 0.93 Mach number. And in fact the Concorde is a very good

example of a platform that can cruise at much closer to the speed of sound than the

swept wing aeroplanes. The swept wing aeroplanes are balanced on a knife edge

really. They can’t go much faster or they run into difficulties.

[57:53]


212

You mentioned one or two consultancy jobs as well. What sort of things?

I did a consultancy with Rolls at Bristol for a while, a short while, and one with

Ricardos in – they’re a company that specialises in motors, motorcar engines and all

sorts of propulsion systems. I don’t know what they do now. I’m not quite sure. But

I’d had enough of – I think I’d had enough by then and I decided to devote myself to

gardening and walking.

Have you taken up any new hobbies in retirement?

Pardon?

Have you taken up any new hobbies in retirement?

Yes. I did a bit of wood turning. I’ve got a lathe. They actually gave me a lathe

when I retired, not out of the manufacturing shops. It was a woodworking lathe.

I was thinking as well, painting.

Pardon?

Painting I was thinking as well.

Painting? Oh yes, painting. I took up painting. I haven’t done it for a year or so now

because of my state of health, but I enjoy painting.

What’s the attraction? It seems quite different from designing jet engines.

Er, well, I think engineering is – there’s a certain amount of art in engineering, you

know, as well as science. The old adage is if it looks right it is right. I think it has

something to do with the art of engineering.

I don’t think I’ve ever really thought of engineering as being an artistic subject.


213

Oh, haven’t you? I think some bridges look artistic, some aeroplanes look artistic.

Motorcars look artistic. I mean, the sales of motorcars I should think depend more on

the looks, especially if you’re selling to ladies [laughs]. Perhaps you’d better rub that

out [laughs]. It’s a sexist remark [laughs].

Is there any art in a jet engine?

Er … well, I think there is. I think the old adage, engineering adage, if it looks right it

is right, it’s not always true but it’s a good measure. If you understand the subject and

you then say it looks right then I think you’re on the way to getting a decent piece of

equipment.

What do you think the future prospects are for jet engines?

British prospects?

The future prospects?

Future prospects? Well, Rolls Royce has developed enormously since I retired. I

don’t know if there’s any relationship between the two facts. But the – I think the

grasp of the CEO of the engineering business has got to be good. Even if he isn’t an

engineer he’s got to have some understanding. And I think we were very fortunate in

being able to do that.

Are there any Rolls Royce heads you would highlight in particular as being good?

I’m just trying to think of their names. [Sir] Ralph Robins did a magnificent job, I

think, welding together two organisations and then …

Is that Bristol and …?

Bristol and Derby, yes, yes, and the remains of various other engine companies. But

it was mainly Bristol and Derby. I’m just trying to think. I’ve suddenly forgotten the

name of the previous – of the last CEO, Oh dear. But he did a magnificent job on the


214

company. And he’s broadened the scope of the company. We now make propulsion

systems for ships. I’m not talking about the nuclear propulsion. We’ve been doing

nuclear propulsion for a long time. And as I understand it, we’re going to go into the

civil business in some ways I don’t know of. [Sir] John Rose is the chap I was

thinking of. I mean, he’s left the company in a very good state. All I hope is that we

stay that way. And with naval propulsion, atomic energy, gas turbines, what more do

you want? Energy is bound to be, I think, the most important aspect of civilisation.

This is where all the problems lie in the future.

[1:04:09]

Are there any issues in current science and technology you find interesting?

Well yes. I wonder why we’re not spending more money and developing the idea of

thorium reactors, because all this business of Fukushima and the flooding of the

reactors and the knocking out of the emergency systems, seems to me to point the way

towards – if you can have a subcritical reactor rather than a supercritical reactor, it

would be so much easier to control the system in the event of natural catastrophes. I

mean, in the Bristol Channel here we’ve had a tsunami in the last 500 years, at least

one tsunami, and probably we’ve had a couple in the last 1,000 years. I don’t know

how Kenfig Dunes were formed but I’ve got a funny feeling that they were partly

formed by tsunamis, which – I mean, when you get a lot of sand swept ashore, it’s

evidence, I think, of a tsunami, not a wind surge. And it’s the tsunamis that are a

problem, I think. I wonder about the Bristol Channel. I mean, you never know, when

is the next one going to come.

I suppose with climate change, who knows.

Well, I’ve got views on climate change, which I don’t share with most other people. I

mean, I think the idea that CO2 is the big problem is wrong. I mean, the CO2

greenhouse is based on, I think, false statistics. I’m not saying that the statistics are

wrong. I think that the deductions made from them are wrong. For instance, the

annual temperature rise – the rise in average annual temperature in the last 200 years

is about 0.6 of a degree centigrade. Now if you look at that you find that the average


215

rise in summer temperatures is nil and the rise in winter temperatures is one – you

know, anything up to one and a half degrees. And the reason for that is the cloud

cover has changed. Now cloud cover is not a micro process whereas CO2 is a trace

element in the atmosphere. I mean, it’s only 0.03 of a percent. And yet it’s said to be

causing a greenhouse effect. Well, the greenhouse effect you’d expect to get in the

summer when the sun shines, but you’re getting it at the North Pole in the winter

because of the cloud formations. And those cloud formations are coming from

industrialised nations in other parts of the world, not – we’ve closed down our

producers of smog. I mean, I remember the 1952, I think it – or the – I can remember

working in London when you had pea soupers, green pea soupers. You never get

them now.

Green pea soupers?

Green pea souper fogs.

Was the fog actually green?

Yes, yes. In 1945 – in the winters of ’45, ’46, ’47, going home sometimes at night

you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face because it was a fog caused by the

coal fires of London. But, you know, that’s my view. I think they’ve made the most

colossal error, which is not just an academic thing, by introducing carbon trading, for

example. If they – the chap who produced the idea of global warming did so on the

basis that the average [annual] temperature was raising by 0.65 a degree per year.

Well, that’s certainly correct that it’s rising 0.65 but it’s not rising in the summer

when the greenhouse effect you’d expect to be – to be most active. It’s rising in the

winter. And you’ve only got to look – the farther north you go, often the more cloud

accumulates. So you get air coming up from the equator, which has probably got

industrial pollution in it, and you don’t see it until the mist settles out – fog settles out

on it as it reaches colder climates. So the nearer you get to the North Pole, the more

you get the claustrophobic effect of – of fog and cloud, particularly clouds. Clouds

stop the ground temperatures, the ground radiating to outer space. And I mean, in the

Sahara Desert you can go down to freezing at night quite easily. So there’s an

enormous heat transfer can take place in the night. And clouds form more in the night


216

than they do in the day because they get burned off in the day. You’ve only got to go

to Los Angeles and see the microclimate they have in Los Angeles, or they had it

many years ago. They had an even worse one in the ‘50s.

I guess that does bring us pretty much up to the present day, doesn’t it?

Yes it does, yes. Well, that’s my view. I think we’re making the most terrible

mistake. There are one or two people who are aware of this in this country. Lawson,

I think Lawson, the old Chancellor of the Exchequer, he doesn’t believe in it. But

what amazes me is that people don’t look out of the window and see what’s

happening, that in the winter it’s much warmer when the clouds are overhead. In the

summer it’s much cooler.

Do you think that perhaps now and again that science and technology – or technology

in engineering in particular needs some sort of technical challenge to actually set

itself against?

Probably, yes, but if we go charging off in the wrong direction, spending enormous

amounts of money, pushing up your electricity bills for no good reason – because

carbon trading, I think, is idiotic.

What about alternative fuel sources though?

Well –

There are developments in those which might result from this.

Well, you’re asking about the future of mankind, I think, then. I mean, if we go on

increasing the population by one or two percent a year and thereby increasing the

energy uses by something like that, then the inevitable will be that we can’t sustain

the human race, I don’t think. It’ll throttle itself.

[1:12:41]


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I think that seems an optimistic point at which we might leave this. But I have one

final question. I was wondering how you felt about doing this interview, which I

suppose in itself is something for the future really?

Well, I don’t know what people will think of what I’ve said, but I’m not too bothered

about that. But I personally think that … aviation has been a blessing and a curse. I

mean, it’s enabled people to go round the world in next to no time and it’s created,

you know, more – it’s used more of the natural resources of the world. It causes

trouble to people living round airports and that sort of thing. I mean, we’ve done our

best to minimise those. And I think probably one reason why I doubt if there’ll be

another supersonic transport is that I don’t think we could stand the noise.

How have you felt about doing these interviews?

Erm … well, I don’t know [laughs]. I like getting things off my chest. But I’ve got to

the age now where I feel, you know, there’s nothing I can do really about the way

mankind is going. I do [both talking at once] – that’s it, is it?

Unless you’ve got anything else to add before I press the stop button.

No, I don’t think so. I’m a bit of a history revisionist. I take a revisionist view of

history. I think history written at the time is – is generally pretty awful. It’s wrong.

You’ve got to sit back and let the dust settle and let – certain people have to die, I

think, before you can really say the right things about history.

What do you think people will make of what you’ve done here in, I don’t know, fifty, a

hundred years’ time?

I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m a bit pessimistic. I mean, when you think what

we’ve done in such a short time; we’ve overfished the oceans, we’ve polluted the

oceans. I mean, there’s a great big pile of rubbish in the Pacific which is

accumulating from civilisation and we don’t seem to be cleaning that up. But no, I

think we’ve taken too much of the earth’s resources. They’re finite. I’m not sure

what I think about fracking either [laughs].


218

How have you actually felt about taking part in this interview programme overall?

Well, I’m happy to do it. I’m not quite sure what good it’ll do to anybody. But my

views are not necessarily in agreement with everything that the government does and

that the industry does, for that matter. I have a bit of a contrarian view of it all.

I think that seems a good place to stop.

Alright.

[End of Track 15]

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