Slide Rule (11 page)

While all this was going on, I was writing my second published novel in the evenings,
So Disdained
. Again I seem to have taken considerable pains over it; it took me two years to write and all of it was written through twice over, some of it three times. I used to find that the story became fixed in the first writing; I do not think that I ever altered a scene or the essentials of a piece of dialogue in a subsequent writing. A re-writing increased the length by about ten per cent; awkward phrases and sentences were eliminated, and the general style of the writing was improved. Since the first writing probably took a year, one came to the chapter fresh in the re-writing, a year older, with a year past in which one had forgotten much of the detail; this undoubtedly helped in putting the thing in to a better style. This great amount of re-writing does not seem to be necessary to me now; with increasing experience I find that I can say pretty well what I want to
say the first time. Perhaps thirty per cent of my later books have been re-written; I re-write the first chapter always as a matter of principle since it is seldom in tune with the rest of the book. I do not seem to get into my stride till the first chapter is over.

We built R.100 hanging from the roof of the shed without the use of any trestles or staging; each transverse frame was built horizontally upon the floor, lifted up with a pyramid of wires to the corners, slung by the sides to the roof railways, and the centre was then lowered till the frame hung vertically. It was then slid along into position and the longitudinal girders were put in to attach it to the next frame. The ship remained hanging from the roof of the shed until she was inflated with gas; the slings were only removed a few days before she was ready for flight. This method of erection gave us a clear floor and other advantages, but it brought its own responsibilities. Howden shed was getting old and the roof had been neglected for years; it stood in an exposed position and in heavy gales it was clear that parts of the seven and a half acres of corrugated iron were not too secure. The roof never blew off but with every gale we thought that it was going to, and in bad weather we had to keep a standing watch of riggers ready for the first sign of trouble.

By the early summer of 1929 the ship was getting on towards completion, and the time had come to inflate her gasbags with hydrogen. Her volume was a little over five million cubic feet, giving her a gross lift of about a hundred and fifty-six tons; her tare weight was about a hundred and two tons, so that she had about fifty-four tons available for fuel and oil, ballast, crew, and passengers.

The gas plant was just outside the shed and here the hydrogen was made, not without some danger. The gas was conveyed in a gas main which ran beneath the ground to points immediately beneath the ship; to these points
each gasbag in turn was connected for inflation. Each empty gasbag hung like a curtain from the axial girder that ran through the centre of the ship; as the gas was filled into it the top of the bag bellied out and rose slowly till it reached the upper netting, and spread down the sides till it filled the whole section of the ship. There were fourteen gasbags in R.100.

To guide these gasbags accurately into place was no mean task. We had no foremen who were experienced in this sort of work, and the financial responsibility was very large indeed. The bags were made of light fabric lined with goldbeaters-skin, easily torn by careless handling; the largest of them weighed half a ton and cost about six thousand pounds. If the bag were wrongly positioned at the first inflation it was necessary to let the gas out again till it could be shifted. The cost of the gas to fill the largest bag was about eight hundred pounds, so that mistakes cost a good deal of money.

Because of this responsibility the gasbags were inflated and hung in position by the design staff. I took one squad of riggers on to the girders of the ship—we had lost all fear of heights by then—and the chief draughtsman took another squad; the operation was directed by B. N. Wallis talking to us through a megaphone. This unconventional teamwork answered admirably and was much admired by a representative of the Zeppelin company who happened to be with us at the time, and to whom an office worker was an office worker, and a foreman a foreman. He had never seen anything like that in Germany. Neither had we in England, but it worked. All fourteen gasbags were positioned in the ship after a fortnight’s sweat and toil with only one small tear.

Throughout the summer of 1929 the gasbags were inflated, the manufacture of the gas itself taking a considerable time. Finally came the day when the ship floated
in the shed; the roof suspensions became slack and the ship swung from trays of balance weights upon the ground. The completion of the outer cover now that the gasbags were in place took some time, and there was an immense amount of final detail work to be carried out before the ship could fly. Perhaps the most important feature was the engine trials.

These trials were a very grave responsibility. R.100 had three power cars slung outside the contour of the hull, each housing two Rolls Royce Condor engines developing between them 1400 horsepower, and one six-cylinder motor car engine driving a dynamo. Each power car had to pass a test of running for two hours ahead at cruising power and half an hour astern; these tests had to be carried out in the shed before the ship could fly. I have been connected with a great number of first flights of aeroplanes as well as all the flights that R.100 made, but I have never seen a test more dangerous or terrifying than these power car trials. The clearance of the great wooden propellers from the concrete floor was no more than fifteen inches, and whatever precautions we took it was impossible to keep the hull of the ship from surging up and down in the fierce air currents generated by the thrust of the propellers in the shed. The noise of these engines running with open exhausts within the corrugated iron shed made ear defenders necessary and it was impossible to communicate except by writing. Wallis or I stood by the car throughout each trial watching the pointers that we had arranged to indicate the ship’s movement and the propeller clearance; we had a system of signalling to stop all engines if the surging of the ship grew dangerously large. All my life I shall remember the sight of those engine cars leaping and straining at their cable drag wires with terrific force, suspended from a hull that was completely full of hydrogen, each car with smiling men
gesticulating with thumbs up out of the window in the deafening clamour, myself gesticulating back thumbs up to them with a cheerfulness I could not feel. If a propeller had hit the floor or if a suspension cable had parted under that test the issue could only have been sheer disaster and the loss of many lives. We had made no mistakes, however, and nothing happened, and at last these engine trials came to an end; but it is my firm conviction, looking back upon those days, that if it is possible to compare dangers R.100 was never in so great danger as she was three months before she flew. I do not think that anything the ship did in her flights was so dangerous to her as those engine trials. We were restricted in this matter by the Airworthiness authorities, which meant, in practice, by our competitors at Cardington; if we had had our way we should have done things differently.

That summer
So Disdained
was published in England, and Watt succeeded in negotiating an American publication for it under a title that I disliked very much but had to accept,
The Mysterious Aviator
. This was the start of title troubles which have pursued me throughout my writing career; I seldom seem to see eye to eye with my publishers on what constitutes a good title for one of my books. I have now reached the stage when I can generally get my own way by putting on a display of bad temper, but young authors can’t play it that way, and I had to take
The Mysterious Aviator
or give up publication in the United States. I took it, needless to say, and tried to forget about it on the principle of taking the cash and letting the credit go; I had, moreover, many more important things to think about that summer.

R.101 flew before we did, making her first flight on October the 14th 1929; from that point we started to learn details about her, mostly from the newspapers. It was quite true that she was carrying an engine as a
passenger for astern running only; it was quite true that she had servo motors to work her rudders. Details of her weights gradually leaked out to us; she had a gross lift of only 148 tons and a tare weight of 113 tons, so that she had only 35 tons useful load as compared with our 54 tons. The Air Ministry press department, of course, was in full blast telling the world what a marvellous ship she was; in our offices at Howden a faint sense of impending disaster was stirring in us, I think, even in those early days. An airship is safe in proportion to its useful lift, in proportion to the weights that it can jettison in an emergency, and by that standard R.101 was definitely dangerous. In our view, also, she was considerably underpowered.

By this time the crew of R.100 were at Howden. The captain and first officer, Squadron Leader Booth and Captain Meager, proved to be most helpful in the later stages of the construction and soon became great friends; we had our troubles with R.100 but they were obviously pleased right from the start that they had not been allocated to the other ship. The other members of the crew were as mixed a crowd as it would be possible to find. About one third of them were old, experienced airship hands, mostly of naval origin. Another section of them were premium apprentices from Rolls Royce, young men from good public schools and with influential connections. The remainder were fitters and riggers from our own workshops, recruited on account of their competence and intimate knowledge of the ship. There was no discipline among this airship crew in the normally accepted sense. Each man had been carefully picked, and taken as a whole they were a very good crew indeed. About twenty-five men constituted a full crew for the ship, excluding officers, wireless operators, and stewards, but we had over forty men as crew members, I think for
training; when we flew to Canada we sent a spare crew over to meet us in Montreal.

In the air their work was above reproach; each man was capable of thinking for himself and taking intelligent action on his own initiative in an emergency. It was possible to go to any man in the ship and get a reasoned and coherent statement of what he had observed, and every man knew every part of the ship intimately. Without exception they were cool and fearless men, and I saw no sign of quarrelling or any trouble in their mess. In times when there was no flying they did not present so good a picture. They had no incentive to perform routine work, and they needed a lot of keeping up to the collar.

This was the chief defect of the airship flying organisation. The officers and men were neither members of the Royal Air Force nor civilians; they were not subject to service discipline, nor were they subject to the discipline of the workshops. There was, in fact, no discipline at all other than that imposed by the good sense of the men themselves. As time went on the discipline upon the ground deteriorated badly.

In these last months my own position in the Airship Guarantee Company underwent a change. During the construction of the ship I had gravitated towards the top of the organisation. My chief was B. N. Wallis, whose title was Chief Engineer. To my mind Wallis was the greatest engineer in England at that time and for twenty years afterwards. It was an education and a privilege to work under him, and I count myself lucky to have done so. Sir Dennis Burney, our Managing Director, was equally outstanding; he had the keenest engineering imagination of anyone that I have ever met, coupled with a great commercial sense. He had the ability to stand back and take a birdseye view of an entire industry and say—‘
This
is the commercial problem. We want to devise a
means of doing
this
. My idea is that we could do
this.’
And here he would put forward some entirely novel scheme such as nobody had ever thought of before, grandiose perhaps, but based upon the soundest engineering principles.

These two men were complementary and the success of R.100 was due to their combined abilities; my own part in it was small. It was deplorable that they could not agree better, but temperamentally they were poles apart. Perhaps two genuises in one company would always find it difficult to work together. In those years I conceived the greatest affection and respect for both of them which endures to the present day, and I mention their differences as shortly as possible and only because they affected my own position to a great extent.

Perhaps Wallis was more interested in the straight problems of design than in the flying of the airship, and by the beginning of 1929 the straight design of R.100 was over. Certainly in that year he began working at Howden upon the geodetic wing design of aeroplanes which later was to reach its full perfection in the design of the Wellington bomber, and his absences at the Vickers aircraft works at Weybridge became frequent. My own abilities were essentially practical; although I was the mathematician in charge of the calculations I was the only man in the party with any personal experience of flying an aeroplane, and as the mathematics eased and the practical problems of finishing the ship and getting her in to the air became paramount I found that people turned to me more and more, and that I could give quick decisions on most subjects if Wallis was away, reporting to him or to Burney as opportunity offered. By the autumn of 1929 the Works Manager was coming to me so frequently that I was virtually in charge of the whole outfit. This position was finally regularised by making me Deputy Chief Engineer
under Wallis, and when he finally left the company after the first flight of the airship I carried on in technical charge and saw the ship through her trials. ‘In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is King’, and that was me. My promotion brought me a comfortable salary for a bachelor with no very extravagant tastes; I moved to York, where I lived in the St. Leonards Club, motoring twenty miles to Howden every day, and began to take part in a few modest social activities. Although nominally I was in charge of the whole staff at Howden it was understood that if we should get another airship to build Wallis would come back, and I should have welcomed that; I had no illusions about my abilities as a designer, while he was magnificent.