Slide Rule (23 page)

By May the overdraft had risen to £5,303. Cobham was paying for his aircraft at the rate of £400 a week from the profits of National Aviation Day Ltd, but these payments were swallowed up as soon as they came in by the ever increasing costs of the company as we built up two more
Ferries as a speculation and proceeded with the design of the monoplane six-seater, soon to be christened the Courier. In the midst of his engagements all over the country with National Aviation Day Ltd, Sir Alan Cobham was working up a novel project, for those days, which would enable him to place an order with us for the new machine.

This project was for the refuelling of aeroplanes in flight. In general, the limitation to the load that an aeroplane can carry is set by its ability to get off the ground with a reasonable length of run and a sufficient rate of climb to clear the obstacles surrounding the aerodrome. Once off the ground and up at its cruising altitude, however, an aeroplane can normally carry a considerably greater load than it can take off the ground. Accordingly, if a bomber or a passenger aircraft could take on board most of its fuel in flight by transferring the liquid to it by a hose from another aeroplane, it could carry a greater load of passengers or bombs off the ground than would be the case if it had to take off with fuel for the whole journey.

Refuelling of one aircraft from another had been carried out before this time in the case of small personal aeroplanes attempting long endurance records; the technique in this case had been to lower two-gallon cans on the end of a rope from one aeroplane to the other. Sir Alan now proposed a serious programme of research and experiment in to this matter which would culminate in a nonstop flight from England to India in our Airspeed Courier, refuelling in the air at three points on the way.

For this purpose he formed a new company, Flight Refuelling Ltd, which is still in existence as a great and powerful research concern. The late Lord Wakefield, who had made a fortune out of lubricating oils, was at that time a generous sponsor of all forms of aviation enterprise, and
in the summer of 1932 Cobham was endeavouring to secure support from Lord Wakefield for Flight Refuelling Ltd while he moved National Aviation Day Ltd from town to town and piloted joyriders himself for much of the time. On my side, I was endeavouring to secure the order for the Courier from Cobham.

A great deal of this many sided negotiation took place in fields in the surroundings of the air circus. At Lincoln and Liverpool, at Oxford and at Plymouth, I used to visit Cobham to correct the minor troubles of the Ferries and to try to close the Courier order. While a girl looped and spun a glider over the aerodrome or a clown in a Moth bombed a couple escaping to Gretna Green in a Model T Ford with rolls of toilet paper, Cobham would drink a cup of tea with me in his tent or caravan and discuss the teething troubles of the Ferry, or the Courier order, or the new location for the company. Gradually I was eliminating all the towns but one, and by July our choice had fallen upon Portsmouth for the permanent establishment of the company.

Portsmouth had everything to offer us. It had a new municipal aerodrome upon the outskirts of the town, immediately adjacent to good seaplane water in Langstone harbour. At that time the flying boat was in the ascendant and most of the services of Imperial Airways were about to turn to operation by flying boats. There was a proposal to develop Langstone harbour as a great terminal flying boat base for services throughout the Commonwealth. Portsmouth was a town with a good reserve of engineering labour normally working in the dockyard. Moreover, Portsmouth was anxious to have us there.

In July 1932 negotiations with Portsmouth were in quite an advanced state, and justified a visit by Lord Grimthorpe to the Lord Mayor. This luncheon and the subsequent negotiations went off well, and we left the Guildhall and
went to have tea in a small café while we waited for a train to London. Here my chairman raised a point with me which had been troubling him, and which I think deserves a record.

He had a general arrangement drawing of the Courier which we proposed to build, showing the retractable undercarriage. Already by that time he had a very serious financial commitment in the company, and quite prudently he had shown this drawing to a knowledgeable friend in the aircraft industry to get his opinion on it. This friend had shown the drawing to a great and famous designer.

In the Battle of Britain, eight years later, the brunt of the battle was borne by the Hawker Hurricane and the Supermarine Spitfire fighters, both, of course, with retractable undercarriages. The designer in question designed one of them, and wild horses will not drag from me which. In 1932, however, he held different views. The drawing came back from him with the message that the Courier was a very good design and should fill a place in the commercial market and do well, provided that the designers would forget about the retractable undercarriage and fit a normal undercarriage to the machine. He, the designer, had been attracted by the retractable undercarriage at one time and had gone into it very carefully. It was no good. The device could not be made to work reliably and if it could it would be of little value in an aeroplane design. Over the teacups in that shabby little café Lord Grimthorpe presented this report to me.

I had to think and talk quite hard. To think quite hard, because it was essential that so good a friend to the company should not lose his money by a technical error of our own. If we were wrong and the great designer were right, he would probably do so. To talk quite hard, to convince my chairman of things that he already had vaguely in the back of his mind, that a policy of caution,
of doing what everybody else was doing, could never bring us through to an established position in the industry. If we did only what the large, conservative firms of the industry were capable of doing we should inevitably lose to them, for with their greater manufacturing capacity they could sell for lower prices than our infant company could hope to manufacture for. Our only hope was to lead the way, to put out something technically ahead of them and so monopolise the market till they had time to catch up.

Lord Grimthorpe thought about it, and decided to allow us to go on with the retractable undercarriage.

The negotiations with the Portsmouth Corporation were brought to a satisfactory conclusion in July; I think the terms that they gave us deserve a record as a model of the sort of encouragement that can be given by an enterprising city to an infant industry. They would build us a factory building on the aerodrome to our own requirements, only stipulating that it should be capable of being used as a hangar if our company were to fail. This building, about 14,000 sq.ft. in floor area, would cost about £4000; the Corporation wanted a down payment of £1000 and the balance on hire purchase spread over ten years with 5% interest on the outstanding loan. For the use of the aerodrome we would pay a rent of 1% of our sales turnover up to a turnover of £60,000, ½% from £60,000 to £200,000, and ¼% thereafter. In addition there was a rental of, I think, £50 per acre for the land we occupied. These were generous terms, which resulted in the establishment of a very considerable industry on Portsmouth aerodrome.

In August the order for the Courier was confirmed by Cobham, the move to Portsmouth was definitely decided on as soon as the factory could be built, and further bank guarantees were entered in to by Lord Grimthorpe and Hewitt. An extra shareholding was taken up by Sir Alan
Cobham. As the autumn drew on I was chiefly occupied, I think, in progressing the design and construction of the factory at Portsmouth and in trying to sell the two Ferries we were building as a speculation. It was essential, of course, that we should keep on building something to retain our men, yet we had little capital to spare for locking up in stock and no room for storing any completed aircraft.

That autumn, as Cobham had forecast, some interest began to awaken in the formation of small private airlines in the British Isles. It came not from the private owners of aeroplanes, as we had thought it would, but from the bus operators. In England the late Mr. Hillman was beginning to consider an airline to Paris from his elementary aerodrome at Romford, and in Scotland Mr. John Sword was making plans for a network of lines joining up Glasgow with Belfast, Edinburgh, Inverness, and the Western Islands.

I visited Mr. Sword several times and found him a hard-headed business man, but generous and helpful personally. He had worked up from a modest start after the first war to a wealthy and a powerful position in the motor bus world in Scotland; like many such men he was expert in getting value for his money. He was, however, keenly interested in Airspeed Ltd and very sympathetic to the company; having trod the hard way upwards himself so recently he could understand our many difficulties. He bought the third Ferry that autumn and incorporated it in the name of his new company, Midland and Scottish Air Ferries Ltd.

We made no progress with Mr. Hillman, for a reason which caused us a good deal of concern. De Havillands were after him. Up till that time the small commercial machine had not attracted this company very much; they had built small machines for the private owner in great
numbers and they had built large machines for Imperial Airways. When we had bought engines from them for the Ferries they had indicated verbally that they were not very likely to compete with us. However, necessity knows no law. The continuing depression was playing havoc with the sales of aeroplanes for the private owner, and we were pointing the way to a new market. Early in 1933 de Havillands produced the twin engined Dragon to the order of Mr. Hillman, a machine that was a good deal faster than the Ferry and a good deal cheaper, though not, perhaps, quite so safe. In the design of aircraft a designer studies and analyses the machines that are already flying and then goes one better; the Dragon was produced a year later than the Ferry and was a better aircraft for the job, and was sold for a price which in our smaller works we could not hope to equal. From the day the Dragon appeared we had little hope of selling Ferries.

We sold the fourth Ferry, quite unexpectedly, one day to Mr. Sword, who had expertly concealed the fact that he wanted another. He made us take his 6½ litre Bentley in for £700 as part of the price of the fourth Ferry; in his first affluence he had bought a fleet of seven very expensive motor cars but he was now coming to the view that a wise man could do with rather fewer vehicles. I drove this magnificent thing from Ayr to London to sell it, the best car that I have ever driven or am ever likely to drive, but in the depression there was no sale for a car like that and we could not afford to keep it till the times improved. I think we only got about £400 for it; even at that price we could none of us afford to buy it in for our own use.

The advent of the Dragon raised a point of policy which was to trouble us throughout the life of the company, till Air Ministry orders were to swamp and obliterate commercial work. We were using de Havilland engines in the Ferry, and were therefore buying engines from our competitors
in the same market. However friendly to that company we might be, and our relations with de Havillands were very good throughout, there were obvious commercial dangers in using their engines. We were far too small to think of manufacturing engines for ourselves, besides being inexperienced in such a business, and we began to shape our developments to use, if possible, engines manufactured by an organisation that did not make aeroplanes.

In the British aircraft industry at that time such engines were not very easy to find. Lord Nuffield, however, was turning his attention to aero engines and Wolseley Motors had produced a very attractive little radial engine of about two hundred horsepower which was technically very promising. From that time onwards we began to shape our design policies around the Wolseley engine wherever possible, and as time went on we were to get a good deal of co-operation from that company. Their engines, however, in the winter of 1932/33 were in an early stage of development.

The company’s accounts for the first year of working showed a loss, the first of many. I forget the amount of this loss, but I know that it was reached after capitalising everything that could possibly be capitalised in the accounts, so that the true position of the company was a good deal worse than the stated loss. This result was no surprise to anybody; on the other side was the considerable degree of technical success that had already been achieved. I do not remember that anybody was particularly depressed, though by the end of the year 1932 the position of the company was serious. The issued share capital by that time was £11,800, and the overdraft about £6,000; for the first time we were getting behind in paying the monthly trade invoices. It must have been about this time that I began to defer paying our own monthly salaries, too—a default
that was to occur a number of times within the next two years. It did not seem to me quite fair to defer paying our bills for materials and yet to take our salaries in full on the first of each month; if any creditor turned nasty and threatened us with a writ it would add strength to the position if one could say, “Look, old boy, I’m in this as well as you. If we go in to liquidation you and I are both in the same boat. We’re both creditors.” And then one could follow up with the story about the business man in the West Riding who went in to see his bank manager about the overdraft, and asked the manager if he had ever been in the wool trade. The bank manager said, no. The man said, “Well, you’re in it now,” and walked out. Our trade creditors were soon to find themselves involuntarily in the position of debenture holders, and I must say that they were all extraordinarily good about it. In this, of course, they were influenced by the good technical reputation that we were building up.

That winter we built a small monoplane two-seater designed by W. S. Shackleton and Lee Murray, both firm friends of mine still though rather surprisingly in view of the disputes that we had over what constituted good workmanship. I had taken this job on at a fixed price and in view of the financial situation of the company I well remember the grief and mental anguish that I went through when they called on us to remake a thoroughly bad piece of cowling. The machine was low powered and slow but very delightful to fly in, for it was a parasol monoplane with the pusher engine in the centre section; the fuselage was very low on the ground and the pilot and passenger were out in front ahead of the engine and the wing with a perfect view. Only one machine was ever built, for it came out at a time when the private owner market was dying in England, but it was a good design for club use.