An airplane is designed by a lot of
people and made by a lot of people not
ever by one man. It maybe one man who gets
the credit, but it demands a very large
number of people.
When the war came, I was
still at school of course, and we were
evacuated to a village about 30 miles
away from Hull. There was rationing - all sorts
of excitements - clothes rationing, food
rationing, just about anything you could
want to do was rationed. I was too
young to be called up, of course, and I
persuaded my parents (I think) that I
would least be doing something for the
war effort if I went and worked as
an apprentice. At Blackburns, they were
making military airplanes, they were
building Blackburn Bothas when I went there
When we first got there there was
nothing to write on or anything like
that; so you either stood and did your work
on the windowsill, or
people got bits of wood and put them on the
bed and they work there. We were worked
very hard, I thought. Working away through
the design of the jet engine is very
difficult if you're working only by
hand. You have to work your way down the
engine, making an assumption at each end to start with, see if you get the
answer you want at the end, if you don't,
back to the beginning and do it all over
again. Each student had  to do a
thesis and most of these were practical -
there was the hangar full of old aeroplanes and they were
gradually accumulating wind tunnels and
laboratory equipment and so on. One
learnt a lot, of course, from different
students - they'd all got different
backgrounds by then in various aspects of aviation. There was a  number of service people there
as well. I think it was a good
competitive spirit amongst the students.
Well it was excellent, I mean it widened
your vision of the world and aviation in
particular and there was always somebody
who knew more than you did about any
particular topic, either amongst the
students or amongst the staff. There was
great get-together of students and staff
and we have the menu here - a copy of
the menu  - which has been signed by as
many of the people present who could
still hold a pen and it serves to
remember all these good people
Well I'd developed a strong interest in
gliding while I was at Cranfield. The most
promising gliding club at that time were
Vickers at Weybridge and Hawkers at
Kingston. I was offered to drawing officer
job at Kingston, we had a marvellous
bunch of people to work with. They were, I can't
tell you how many of them, at one time or
other, had said that they would have
worked for nothing if they could stay
alive that way, you know. And I thoroughly
enjoyed it. The company was looking for a
aeroplane to follow on the Hunter, I was
looking for way as to amuse myself. A
brochure on the BE53 engine came. I was
the only person who you could say took
it seriously. We proved it was
mechanically possible on the 1127
prototypes and then these further
development of the aeroplane called the
Kestrel was subject to this three nation
trial and they concluded that it was
military useful and it was then given the name Harrier
If you have the engineering
instinct then you will enjoy making
things. Curiosity about materials, a
pleasure in seeing a problem that needs
something made to fix it. I think you
should start each job with the fresh perspective and say -you know-
"this problem that's never a reason before how are
we going to do it this time?"
