Derry and Richards’s Farnborough crash made a deep impression on me at the time. I was nearly eleven years old and obsessed with anything to do with aviation and plane-spotting. My fascination with aircraft was obviously rooted in the war. I was born in 1941, the year after the Battle of Britain, within a mile of Bentley Priory in Stanmore (then Middlesex, now Greater London), Headquarters of RAF Fighter Command from where the Battle and all Britain’s air defence were directed. The skies of my infancy were full of portents and aircraft. In those days one was never very far from an airfield, and my mother used to tell a story of my being so terrified one day by the sudden roar above our garden of a low-flying aircraft coming in to land that I bounced myself hysterically out of my pram into some rose bushes. That was her account, fossilised in the way of such things into the holy writ of a family tale. But I have long wondered whether in fact I might have been excited rather than terrified: impatient to leave my pram in order to see where the aircraft went behind the hedge.

Growing up in post-war Britain there were constant reminders of the scope and inventiveness of our immense aviation industry. By the early fifties our perception as schoolboys was that Britain and aircraft were indissolubly linked, much as the French were with garlic and the Italians with opera. Hadn’t the Battle of Britain a mere ten or twelve years ago marked the first time in history that a purely aerial engagement had saved a nation and helped decide the outcome of a war? Certainly my grandmother always told me that whoever controlled the airspace above a country controlled that country, too (a comparatively recent shift in the strategy of warfare). At infrequent intervals in our childhood my sister and I were taken up to town to visit this lady: our mother’s mother, an invalid badly crippled by rheumatoid arthritis. This was immediately after the war, when London was grimy and pockmarked with bomb sites where groundsel and buddleia were already well established. On the walls at street level were fading arrows pointing to the nearest air-raid shelters. Granny Sal was transplanted through a grim series of nursing homes in the Earls Court area, the last of which was demolished decades later when the Cromwell Road was drastically widened. She always sat in a high-backed chair, swathed in shawls, one foot on a footstool, the small table in front of her piled with books and newspapers as well as the clock from a Spitfire that I coveted.

A woman of acute intelligence and quickness of mind, she bore her enforced and painful immobility with great stoicism. She had worked in the Censorship in the First World War and proved disappointingly loyal to the Official Secrets Act she had signed, referring tantalisingly to things that were still too ‘hush-hush’ to talk about. She maintained a razor-sharp interest in politics, as befitted the widow of Donald im Thurn, the sometime MI5 agent who had played a none-too-creditable role in the Zinoviev Letter affair, a conspiracy hatched by White Russians and high Tories to scare the British electorate with the communist bogeyman in the run-up to the 1924 general election, which the first Labour government duly lost. Like my grandfather Donald, Granny Sal was a firm Tory, a devout patriot, an unquestioning admirer of Winston Churchill and deeply suspicious of American motives. Like most Britons who had lived through the Battle of Britain she unhesitatingly put the Royal Air Force jointly with Churchill at the top of her list of the nation’s saviours. She had an extensive collection of Stationery Office publications about the RAF as well as numerous cuttings of poems by airmen that had found their way into newspapers.

I have an abiding memory of one visit to Granny Sal when she read a poem to us. Although I remembered nothing else about it, one particular phrase stuck with me for the rest of my life: ‘the conquer’d air’. Later, at university, I tried half-heartedly to track it down but without success. It wasn’t until our mother died and my sister and I inherited her books that I found it. It came in some lines that Granny Sal had copied onto the flyleaf of a wartime Faber collection, Verses of a Fighter Pilot by Flying Officer A. N. C. Weir, DFC, who was killed in action in 1940. It went:

A note at the bottom that her distorted hand with its bunched knuckles had carefully made with her silver Waterman pen correctly identified this as the free translation of a passage from Thomas Gray’s Latin poem Luna habitabilis, written in 1737.

I can see exactly why these lines appealed to her, both as remarkably visionary and as predicting a future in which England would maintain its superiority in the air. Was it not foreseen? In the late nineteen-forties this would perhaps not have appeared an outlandish prophecy. Hardly a day passed without some announcement that a British aircraft had broken yet another record – whether of speed or altitude or distance – and my young mind absorbed like a sponge my grandmother’s fervent belief in Britain’s enduring greatness and its dependence on an unrivalled prowess in aviation. High above her Blitz-cracked ceiling the skies were full of wailing Gloster Meteors and de Havilland Vampires, as well as the streaking prototypes of what would hopefully become the next generation of world-beating (and export-achieving) aircraft. No matter what disillusionments the next two decades were to bring, and no matter how soon Gray’s fond eighteenth-century vision was to be betrayed by twentieth-century political reality, my grandmother’s emotional reading of his lines had an indelible effect on me. Just as the zoologist Konrad Lorenz induced his motherless baby geese to imprint on him, so my crippled grandmother imprinted on me her private version of Britain: a brave new Jet Age in which we were sovereigns of the conquer’d air.

As Britain’s wartime saviour and home-based defender the RAF was not like the Royal Navy, whose warships could be sent far around the world and had anyway proved vulnerable to attack from the air, endowing them with a faint but distinct aura of obsolescence. Once the army had been rescued from Dunkirk in 1940, the last fall-back of the nation’s defence was the RAF’s Fighter Command. Despite great losses it had proved heroically up to the task of preventing the invasion of England’s green and pleasant land by armed foreigners intent on polluting it with Nazism. As a boy, therefore, I always associated it quite specifically with the gallant defence of the realm: a friendly, domestic sort of guardian enabling us all to sleep soundly at night. I think most of my school friends imagined that RAF pilots were pretty much exclusively ‘chaps like us’: white, middle-class, ex-public-school boys. My grandmother, though, always emphasised the RAF’s sheer heterogeneity: that its pilots were black and white and brown, Indians and South Africans and Australians and Poles and Free French and, yes, even Americans. According to her they represented a spontaneous closing of civilised ranks everywhere against Nazi barbarism. Where better to make their heroic stand than in the last European outpost of freedom, the Empire’s motherland? It was some years before I discovered that the test pilot I most admired as a boy was not English at all, but Canadian.

The names of one’s childhood heroes have a habit of ringing on faintly in the background of adult life, gradually acquiring a mythic quality so that when heard again they can trigger a burst of affectionate nostalgia as for a vanished brand or a row of cottages long since laid waste by the wrecker’s ball. That former household names are unknown to later generations is banal enough in itself; but there is the sadder implication that their achievements themselves are forgotten, as though they have no relevance for a later age. In the case of the test pilots who flew their way into Britain’s headlines in those seemingly magical ten years after the Second World War this is not merely unjust but plain wrong. The Jet Age with its heroic challenging of those great unknowns, transonic flight (the speed at which the vagaries of the airflow over certain parts of an airframe make them go supersonic before the aircraft as a whole does) and the sound barrier, is indeed a vanished era. But the pilots who tested those temperamental early jets with such methodical and selfless daring left a legacy that daily benefits every modern air traveller, whether flying first class to New York or cattle class to Ibiza. The sheer safety of flying now is rooted in the deadly precariousness of flying then. For that, if for no other reason, one rejects the facile parallel sometimes drawn between the fame of those post-war pilots and that of contemporary Formula 1 drivers. Britain’s post-war test pilots in their cloth helmets and ratty overalls often took home as little as £800 or £1,000 at the end of a year of living with imminent death on a daily basis. Far from being a weekend spectator sport, their daily work built gradually into a new knowledge of aerodynamics that today determines every aircraft design, military or civil.

As boys, we aircraft maniacs back in the fifties were as familiar with the names and careers of newsworthy test pilots as any sports fiends were with their cricketing or soccer heroes, and the daily newspapers accorded them at least as much attention when they achieved a new record or other memorable feat (such as cheating death by inches). In any year our Eagle or Schoolboy’s diaries might well have contained one or more photographs of such aviation heroes as Roland Beamont, John Cunningham, John Derry, Neville Duke, Roland Falk, Mike Lithgow, ‘Bill’ Pegg or Peter Twiss. We were even aware of some older-generation test pilots such as ‘Mutt’ Summers and Jeffrey Quill. Most of us had a particular idol. The pilot to whom I accorded my special loyalty was W. A. ‘Bill’ Waterton, I think because he was chief test pilot at Gloster and held records in the Meteor – an aircraft for which I felt affection because it was so familiar from its daily appearances over our house. In addition, Waterton was famously testing the prototype Javelin, the top secret twin-engined delta interceptor eagerly awaited by the RAF and rival to de Havilland’s DH.110. (It was the dicey Javelin that he had taken up at Farnborough in 1952 in the immediate aftermath of Derry and Richards’s crash, following Neville Duke’s Hunter into the air to demonstrate that the show must go on.) Over the intervening decades my interest in him, politically innocent as it was in my aero-spotting preteens, proved to be perceptive. Bill Waterton can now be seen not only as one of the most heroically capable test pilots of the period, but as a remarkable prophet. St Matthew remarked with some acerbity that a prophet was not without honour, save in his own country. In his ornery way, Canadian-born Waterton went one better and became a prophet without honour in both his own and his adopted country. His crime was effectively to have foreseen the degradation of the British aviation industry by identifying the canker at its roots, and this at a time when we the public thought it most gloriously flourishing. For this he was eventually sacked and vilified. To judge from the Soviet-style oblivion to which he has been consigned for over fifty years on both sides of the Atlantic, it appears that he still has not been forgiven.

Bill Waterton was born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1916 and brought up in nearby Camrose, where his father was chief of police. The family had originally come from near Owen Sound in Ontario, where they had farmed in conditions of pioneering hardship and where there is still a Waterton Creek and Waterton headstones to be found in local cemeteries. In later years Bill liked to trace his lineage back through the magnificently eccentric English naturalist and explorer, Charles Waterton (1782–1865): evidence perhaps of his pride in taking an individualist’s path as well as of a lifelong Anglophilia. Young Bill’s upbringing no doubt made for a character that combined belligerence with probity. It was likely that a police chief’s son would be challenged by other boys, and certain that his father instilled in him an ethos of strict self-reliance and a refusal to back down from a fight. It was equally likely that such a lad might go on to Canada’s Royal Military College (where he won a gold cup for boxing) and to serve briefly in the 19th Alberta Dragoons, when he appears in a contemporary photograph sitting his horse in full cavalry fig, complete with long sword, an incipient moustache and a somewhat wooden ‘They shall not pass!’ expression. He had already acquired a taste for flying when at the age of fifteen he and a friend had pooled their pocket money for the two dollars apiece required by a visiting barnstormer, Ernie Kubacek, to take them up in his red Alexander Eaglerock biplane. The former German First World War pilot treated the boys to a series of barrel rolls, loops and stall turns and in Bill’s case, at least, the experience must have proved formative. ‘You felt free! You saw things from the air that you never saw on the ground. It was also like riding: there was this physical aspect to it.’1 In 1938, at the age of twenty-two and responding to the likelihood of war in Europe, he applied for a commission in both the Canadian army and the Royal Canadian Air Force, though without eliciting a positive enough response. At this time the RAF, also foreseeing war and a shortfall of pilots, was recruiting from all over the Empire by advertising short-service commissions in local newspapers. Bill answered one of these, duly passed a medical examination and an interview and in March 1939 was one of eight Canadian RAF applicants who sailed for Liverpool aboard Canadian Pacific’s Duchess of Richmond.

For their basic training Waterton and his colleagues were first sent to No. 5 EFTS (Elementary Flying Training School) at Hanworth in Middlesex. This was a civilian school operated by Flying Training Ltd, a company run by Blackburn Aircraft Ltd using their own B-2 biplanes, similar to the de Havilland Tiger Moth. Bill achieved high marks and after fifty-one hours’ flying went on as an acting (probationary) pilot officer to RAF Uxbridge for full basic training. This he finished with a posting to Gloucestershire, for whose countryside he was always to express great fondness and which became the setting for his future career as a test pilot. On the outbreak of war and with 144 hours in his log book he was sent to 242 Squadron, an all-Canadian outfit at Church Fenton, not far from York, where he signed up for a six-year short-service commission. After some months the squadron was sent some Hawker Hurricane Mk 1s and it was as a Hurricane pilot that Waterton was posted south to Kent. In the build-up to the Battle of Britain he began flying combat sorties from Biggin Hill and Manston. One day late in May 1940, high above France while providing air cover for the Dunkirk evacuation in Hurricane L 1852, he ‘felt a bump’ and passed out. He was seen spiralling down but managed to regain consciousness intermittently, somehow setting a course back across the Channel where he crash-landed. His terse log book entry reads: ‘Hit – out of control near Dunkirk at 19,000 ft. Engine bad vibration. Crash-landed near Dover – concusion [sic] – head injuries. Oxygen loss.’ Bill was taken to the Royal Masonic Hospital in London with back and head injuries that took him off the active list for nearly three months.

In mid-August 1940 he returned to 242 Squadron, which had meanwhile sustained heavy losses among his Canadian comrades. It was now based at Coltishall in Norfolk under the irritable command of Douglas Bader, the celebrated pilot who flew with artificial legs. Bader promptly sent him to No. 6 OTU (Operational Training Unit) to get his hand back in: a move which probably determined the future course of Bill Waterton’s flying career. For he turned out to be an exceptionally good flying instructor – perhaps surprisingly, given his forthright nature. But his former skill as a champion boxer had taught him how to master his emotions, and where flying was concerned he was invariably patient and methodical. The Battle of Britain was then nearing its climax and the RAF’s critical shortage was less of aircraft than of properly trained pilots. A man of Bill Waterton’s skills was rated more valuable as an instructor than as a combat pilot, and he was destined to spend the next two years instructing, both in the UK and back in Canada (where he spent the whole of 1942). In wartime you go where you’re sent. Being a flying instructor is notably less glamorous than being a fighter pilot, and there must have been times when he chafed at the lack of action. On the other hand it is rewarding to do something you’re good at, and to be recognised for it. While in Canada his wing commander wrote in Waterton’s log book: ‘You are setting a most excellent example and doing a first class job of work for which I am very grateful. Keep it up.’ His squadron leader added a schoolmasterly note: ‘An above-average instructor who gives excellent demonstrations. Aerobatics are very smooth. Instrument flying requires practice.’ Having successfully taught 509 pupils without a single serious accident, let alone a fatality, Waterton was awarded the first of his two Air Force Crosses.

There must indeed have been something exceptional about his flying. Once back in England in 1943 he was assessed ‘Above the average’ (a rare accolade in the nit-picking RAF) and was returned to Fighter Command. Here he test-flew a variety of experimentally equipped Spitfires at extreme altitudes and carried out meteorological sorties high above occupied Europe during which he was required to make a careful record of instrument readings. In May 1944 he was sent to AFDU (Air Fighting Development Unit) at RAF Wittering near Peterborough. This was a coveted posting because the unit was known to be reserved for the very best pilots. It was also a combat unit where you couldn’t be shot down. Fighter Command had set up the AFDU to evaluate captured enemy aircraft, putting them up in mock combat against every variety of Allied aircraft. High above Lincolnshire Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs and Junkers 88s, all wearing RAF roundels, fought it out against an assortment of Hurricanes, Spitfires and Typhoons, using gun cameras in place of live ammunition. From then until the end of the war Waterton flew sundry types of British, German and American aircraft. Apart from being wonderful flying experience it produced vital information. Methodical testing revealed the strengths and weaknesses of the different types and as a result armaments, propellers, fuel systems, instrumentation and airframes were modified accordingly, as well as fighting techniques and tactics (never try to out-dive a Focke-Wulf 190 and never try to reverse a turn when one is on your tail).

The war in Europe ended in May 1945 and in August Waterton, now a squadron leader, flew a jet aircraft for the first time: an underpowered Meteor I. Three months later he flew the more advanced Meteor III and realised that the day of the piston-engined fighter was finally over. It is doubtful that he could have suspected his own peacetime career was about to take off. The ending of the war had thrown everything into confusion, especially for a serviceman whose short-term commission was nearing expiry. The RAF was suddenly characterised by an atmosphere of demoralisation. As Waterton wrote later: ‘The vast wartime expansion of the RAF seemed to have left it without any overall peacetime policy. No one knew where he stood. Those like myself who hoped for permanent commissions were disheartened to see themselves overlooked in favour of younger, end-of-the-war recruits. Discipline was dreadfully lax…’2 Someone might have tipped him the wink that it would be worth his while to hang on for a bit, however, for in spring 1946 came the news that he had been selected to fly a Meteor in the High Speed Flight unit based at Tangmere, Sussex.

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By the end of the war it was becoming clear to pilots everywhere that the new jet engine represented the future. The need for speed was paramount in interceptors hoping to meet incoming bombers before they could reach their targets, and there were limits – both theoretical and practical – to how fast a piston-engined aircraft could fly. Beyond a certain speed the propeller’s whirling disc caused more drag than propulsion. Nor could that be overcome by making an engine powerful enough to turn the airscrew still faster. At a certain point the tips of the blades began to go supersonic, greatly reducing their efficiency as well as setting up potentially disastrous vibrations. In fact, anyone like Waterton who had flown the faster fighters in dives – Spitfires, Focke-Wulf 190s, Mustangs and so on – had long discovered that when the aircraft as a whole began approaching supersonic speeds strange and frequently fatal things could happen.

In the opening sequence of David Lean’s 1952 film The Sound Barrier a lone Spitfire performs joyful aerobatics in the sky above the white cliffs of Britain’s south coast. It must be late in the war because the pilot is paying no attention to the possibility of being surprised by enemy aircraft, while the anti-aircraft gun crews down below are lounging at their ease on the grass, idly watching the tiny aircraft high above them. We join the pilot in his cockpit as, in an access of youthful exuberance, he noses the aircraft over into a steep power dive as though to see how fast it might go. After a few seconds of rapidly increasing speed with the engine note rising to a wail, the cockpit and wings suddenly begin to judder and shake violently and there are snatched glimpses between the clouds below of the ground coming closer. In a panic the pilot hauls back on the stick with both hands, and such is the physical strength required to bring the aircraft out of its dive that he ends up slumped deep in his seat before he can level out and skim low over the fields.

The pilot was played by John Justin, who had actually been a Spitfire test pilot and flying instructor during the war. Back on base after this sequence, reminiscing to his squadron buddy (played by Nigel Patrick), Justin muses on the difficulties he has just encountered. ‘The harder I pulled, the more the nose went down. It felt for a moment as if the controls were reversed … There was a lot of buffeting, too. It was almost as if I’d run into a … a solid sheet of water or something.’

This sequence perfectly fixes the sound barrier’s mythic status in the decade following the war. The episode was almost certainly based on a famous incident in 1944 when Squadron Leader Tony Martindale had dived a Spitfire XI from 40,500 ft to 27,000 ft and reached Mach 0.91 (equivalent to 620 mph at that altitude). The dive was part of a Farnborough research project and the aircraft was very accurately instrumented. The pilot blacked out under the 11g recovery, the propeller and part of the engine were torn off and the wings deformed. Yet the aircraft did not break up and Martindale recovered consciousness in time to glide it in for a dead-stick landing (i.e. one made with no power): a tribute to both the Spitfire and its pilot. Calculations later showed that the massive Rolls-Royce Merlin engine had contributed a mere one per cent to his speed: virtually all the rest was down to simple gravity. It was this dive that proved the theoreticians correct: that the drag of its propeller would always prevent any piston-engined aircraft from going supersonic.

The gremlins that lay in wait for the high-speed pilot – the intense shaking, the unexpected nose-down tendency and the flutter of control surfaces (ailerons, elevators, rudder, etc.) that could lead to their complete disintegration within seconds – were well known by then and had been experienced by scores of pilots flying high-performance fighters. A great many of them did not survive to sit on a friend’s bed and muse about what had happened. Their aircraft were either seen to disintegrate in mid-air in a glittering cloud of aluminium alloy or else they never pulled out of their dive. There was nothing to be learned from a deep crater in a field after an aircraft had slammed into it at 500 mph; searchers did well if they could identify a small rag of scalp. Typical of this sort of accident was the one that befell Squadron Leader E.B.Gale, a Canadian test pilot with RAE Farnborough, on 25 May 1946. He took off in a North American Mustang Mk III intending to dive from 40,000 ft in order to provide data that would reveal how various parts of the wings behaved when nearing the speed of sound. ‘The aircraft was seen diving vertically at extremely high speed before impacting a crop field. Most of the wreckage was so deeply embedded as to be irrecoverable.’3

The phenomenon that pilots like Squadron Leader Gale encountered was known to aeronautical science at the time as ‘compressibility’. The buffeting came about because at a certain speed – and it is a different speed for each aircraft design and even for individual aircraft – the flow of air over its wings changes from being smooth or ‘laminar’, hugging the surfaces, to becoming turbulent and breaking away. It was recognised that this process was related to the speed of sound in air. Until a certain speed is reached the airflow can find its way around an airframe’s various curved surfaces; but beyond that speed it no longer has time to do so and instead builds up in front of the surfaces in the form of a shock wave, causing sudden drag that can have disastrous effects on the aircraft’s handling. Compressibility effects on airflow had been known about since at least the mid-thirties but perhaps were not well understood by enough people outside Germany, where the phenomenon had been intensively studied. In 1935 a German aeronautics professor named Adolf Busemann had given an open lecture at one of the international Alessandro Volta science conferences in Rome. One topic that year was high velocities in aviation and Busemann read a paper about supersonic airflows, his data based on experiments he had been carrying out in Germany in the world’s only supersonic wind tunnel. In this landmark lecture he proposed a swept-wing design for high-speed flight since he had discovered that sweepback was a way of delaying the effects of compressibility.

Despite his paper being heard by international scientists, including some from Britain and the United States, it was largely treated as being of merely academic interest. In 1935 few aircraft in general service were capable of 300 mph, let alone 500–600 mph. Even so, the last Italian and British Schneider Trophy aircraft – racing floatplanes with enormous supercharged engines – had exceeded 400 mph and such machines were clearly forerunners of a much faster generation of aircraft still on the designers’ drawing boards. The upshot of the Volta conference was that Busemann went home somewhat unsung, his work having aroused respect but little excitement abroad. During the war he became director of the secret Hermann Goering Aeronautical Research Institute in Volkenröde, near Brunswick. This was something akin to a German version of RAE Farnborough but with vastly superior wind-tunnel and other facilities. There was nothing string-and-sealing-wax about Volkenröde; and using its several supersonic wind tunnels throughout the war German scientists like Busemann and Alexander Lippisch were able to experiment at leisure with different wing designs: swept-back, swept-forward, thin, thick, delta, diamond and even asymmetric. Just how advanced this research was can be seen by the way many of these shapes were destined to be hailed decades later as the very latest British or American top-secret designs, including those for modern ‘stealth’ aircraft and NASA’s asymmetric ‘slew-winged’ Ames AD-1.

The line usually adopted by historians is that no Allied aircraft designers took the effects of compressibility seriously into account until at least 1945, presumably since almost no one was envisaging speeds above 500 mph and consequently didn’t bother with questions of sweepback. Yet this is simply not borne out by the facts. To show that in Britain even ‘the powers that be’ (in the ubiquitous biblical phrase of the times) kept abreast of modern aerodynamics, in 1942 the Ministry of Supply asked Armstrong Whitworth’s chief designer to produce a wing that the National Physical Laboratory could test for its laminar flow characteristics. Inspired by the results, Armstrong Whitworth projected a swept-back tailless ‘flying wing’ bomber with four Metro-Vick (Metropolitan-Vickers) turbojets, and a third-scale glider version was built to test the idea. Nothing came of it during the war but it led directly to the company’s twin-jet A. W. 52 ‘Flying Wing’ that first flew in late 1947. The truth is that aircraft designers everywhere had been toying with just such revolutionary wing designs almost since the beginnings of aviation itself; but in Britain during the Second World War the absolute priority was to produce overwhelming numbers of conventional aircraft. It therefore remains ironic that Germany’s advanced aerodynamic research, which encompassed the world’s first jet aircraft as well as rocketry, was largely spurred on by the necessity of finding a defence against the huge waves of conventional Allied bombers that so greatly outnumbered the Germans’ own air forces. German strategists soon realised that their only hope lay in being able to fly faster than the Allied fighters escorting the bombers, and this in turn encouraged them to design aircraft capable of speeds as high as 600 mph and even faster (as in the case of the jet-powered Messerschmitt 262).

John Justin’s late-model Spitfire performing aerobatics above Britain’s south coast at the end of the Second World War can now be seen as celebratory of an era passing. Aesthetically beautiful and iconic though they might have been, such aircraft were by then dead tech. The RAF felt this acutely. From now on the future lay with the jet engine and radical wing shapes that would open up a completely new world of flying. That is why there is nothing elegiac about The Sound Barrier’s opening sequence. Indeed, Malcolm Arnold’s score – a confident C-major march with unmistakable Elgarian overtones – is clearly meant to announce the beginning of a glorious new chapter in British aviation. This is confirmed immediately after the titles by a list crediting the aircraft that would be starring in the film: the de Havilland Comet, the Vickers-Supermarine Attacker, the de Havilland Vampire 113 and the Vickers-Supermarine Swift (‘with Rolls-Royce “Avon” engine’). At this level it is a shameless plug for the nation’s aircraft industry and must have gone down very well with the Central Office of Information.

At the end of the war Britain had a head start in the Jet Age. With one fighter (the Gloster Meteor) already in service and a second (the de Havilland Vampire) about to become operational, it might be imagined this would have sparked an enthusiastic upswing in RAF morale, with the promise of new aircraft and heady new capabilities. This was no doubt true for the newest intake of young pilots. Yet contemporary evidence, including Bill Waterton’s own account, suggests that the passing of the old wartime order was also too much bound up with deep and inchoate emotions, as well as political misgivings, for the service as a whole to give way overnight to a simplistic optimism. Aviators tend to be a conservative lot anyway, and the RAF appeared to have limited faith in the new political order. It has been shown that Battle of Britain pilots overwhelmingly voted Conservative in the 1945 general election. John Collins, the later Canon Collins who co-founded CND, was an RAF chaplain during the war and was radicalised by the experience. ‘He recalled the undisguised horror he encountered in many officers’ messes following the news that Labour had won a landslide victory: “Was it for this, they seemed to be saying to themselves, that the war had been fought and won?”’4

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It was inevitable that once the emergency of war was over the RAF would have to move decisively to adapt itself to new technologies and a new world order. It could not for ever rest on its special status as laurelled defender of the British Isles. To combat the demoralisation that was affecting the service and to show the world that Britain was fully in command of the new jet technology, it was decided in 1946 to launch a fresh attempt on the world air-speed record with the Meteor 4. The High Speed Flight had been formed at Tangmere the previous year for Group Captain ‘Willie’ Wilson’s successful attempt and it was clearly felt that national prestige was at stake. Although Britain already held the record since Wilson had raised it to 606 mph in a Meteor 4, the ‘powers that be’ must have calculated that an exhausted nation – not to mention an RAF suffering from post-war depression – could do with a further boost to morale. Besides, it must have seemed prudent to capitalise on Britain’s lead in jet technology while the going was good. The Americans were known to be making excellent progress with their own jet-powered Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star and might soon make an attempt of their own. The High Speed Flight was commanded by Group Captain Edward ‘Teddy’ Donaldson, himself an exceptional and bemedalled pilot who had commanded 151 Squadron in France from the beginning of the war and then at Tangmere during the Battle of Britain. He scored several victories and was twice shot down. The two other pilots were Bill Waterton and Neville Duke, then a flight lieutenant with a remarkable wartime combat record. For Donaldson to have chosen Waterton as his number two in this elite group meant that Bill must have acquired unimpeachable credibility and be very highly thought of in all the right places – for after the wartime glamorisation accorded it, the RAF was a service in which envious backbiting had lately reached the status of an art form. It might also have helped that Donaldson had spent three years at McGill University in Montreal and had a soft spot for Canadians, although he would never have let that outweigh matters of technical competence.5

For his part Waterton considered the publicity surrounding the new record attempt premature and ill advised. At the time he probably kept this contrary thought to himself, even though such tact would have been quite uncharacteristic of him. Some ten years later he recalled: ‘In an understandable effort to bolster Britain’s post-war prestige, the press had built the High Speed Flight into something approaching the super-colossal – hyperbole encouraged by official quarters which should have known better. My own feelings were to do it first and trumpet afterwards.’6 In fact, stimulated by the resoundingly patriotic media coverage, thousands of people poured into Bognor Regis each day to watch the three Meteors practising. In order to qualify under FIA (Fédération Internationale Aéronautique) rules, the course was three kilometres long; it lay just offshore between Rustington and Angmering: in jet aircraft terms, just down the road from Tangmere. The timed runs had to be made below seventy-five metres (246 ft), two in each direction so as to negate any effects of wind. In fact, though, the Meteors were flying as low as eighty feet above the sea at over 600 mph, which provided the enthusiastic crowds with the additional thrill of knowing that the least miscalculation or mechanical failure would give them ringside seats for a spectacular disaster.

Those practice sessions in July 1946 were probably the greatest crowd-pleasers of their kind since the pre-war days of the Schneider Trophy races. Even so, dissenting voices wrote to the papers. ‘We didn’t mind the noise when the RAF was fighting the Luftwaffe,’ one local resident observed, ‘but the scream of jet planes flying at 250 feet is unbearable.’ From the depths of austerity Britain others quite reasonably wondered, ‘Is this speed bid worth while? What good is it going to do anybody even if the record IS put up to 625 mph or more?’ And at least one newspaper reported shameless profiteering: ‘Visitors to the “grand-stand coast” are being exploited! Twenty-eight guineas a week for bed and breakfast only [some £900 at today’s prices] was demanded from a couple who, with their two children, were seeking rooms to ensure they saw the speed bid.’7 Suddenly the question of Bill Waterton’s nationality arose when he was interviewed, despite his flying a British aircraft. ‘Even if S/L W. Waterton, one of the High Speed Flight, is the pilot to break the record, it will still be held by Great Britain. He said in a strong Canadian accent: “I am in the RAF and I am doing it for the RAF. I am a British subject according to my passport, born of Irish parentage and resident in Canada.”’8 It seems incredible today that a decorated and hand-picked white pilot from one of the Dominions who had come to the UK expressly to fight for Britain should have had his eligibility questioned on grounds of nationality, and not least that a Canadian born and bred should have had to hedge matters further by describing himself as merely ‘resident’ in Canada, as though for his first twenty-two years he had just been passing through the land of his birth. Yet as Martin Francis has recently documented, despite something like forty-six per cent of all the RAF’s aircrew having come from Australia, Canada, New Zealand or South Africa, discrimination and tensions between them and home-grown RAF personnel were often rife, even if less overtly racist than in the case of black or Indian aircrew.9 Not surprisingly, Bill Waterton felt the implied slur acutely. By this stage he had taken on a considerable degree of protective colouring, having long sported an RAF-style handle bar moustache and modified his Canadian accent to the point where, far from being ‘strong’ as the newspaper hack reported, it was often barely detectable.

The Gloster Meteor was only Britain’s second jet aircraft. The first, the experimental Gloster Whittle E.28/39, had flown in May 1941:a simple, single-jet design built to test Frank Whittle’s pioneering new jet engine, which had taken the little aircraft to a respectable 466 mph. The Meteor was much more ambitious and planned from the first as a fighter. It was a straight-winged design with an engine on each wing and with the tailplane halfway up the fin. The twin improved jets gave it a much better turn of speed than its predecessor. The three High Speed Flight pilots’ initial task was to determine whose Meteor was the fastest. That aircraft was duly commandeered by Group Captain Donaldson who, as the commanding officer, had first choice. Immediately, severe problems with the engines of all three aircraft were encountered, caused by the special Rolls-Royce Derwent Vs inhaling their own rivets which shattered the turbine blades. One engine also inhaled an incautious Donaldson as he was poking around his aircraft on the ground at Tangmere. As the Group Captain was disappearing into the starboard intake he was saved by a quick-thinking engineer officer, Squadron Leader George Porter, who rugger-tackled him as the engine was shut down. Donaldson was lucky. Unlike many before and after him he survived with nothing worse than heavy bruising and a temporarily off-the-scale heart rate. In August two brand-new, specially finished Meteors arrived from Gloster and Donaldson announced that he and only one other pilot would try for the record. For whatever reason, he picked Bill Waterton over Neville Duke, to Duke’s evident disappointment. And then at the last moment, as the pilots were waiting for the weather to clear, the Royal Aero Club – whose officials had to be present in order for a record to be ratified – resurrected the Blimpish issue of whether a colonial could compete in a British team. ‘With all civility,’ Waterton implausibly wrote later, ‘I pointed out that I regarded myself as British, a fact confirmed by my passport; and that if it had been good enough for a Canadian, Lord Beaverbrook, to get the UK its warplanes [he had been Minister of Supply, 1941–2], then it was good enough for me to fly the damn things.’10 A very Watertonian piece of repartee.

On the day of the attempt his Meteor was still flying port wing low as a result of aileron trouble that Gloster claimed had been corrected. On his first run he found himself in serious trouble from the onset of compressibility at about 580 mph. The aircraft became barely controllable with a mere eighty feet of altitude in hand. Waterton found he needed all his considerable strength just to hold it level and avoid hitting Gertie and Ermintrude, two anti-aircraft balloons tethered to mark the course. At 600 mph ‘I stood on the starboard rudder pedal and pressed with all my fourteen stones … We skidded past the balloons and shot out to sea in a slight climb. Speed fell, and I was able to take one hand from the stick.’ He had only narrowly averted disaster but couldn’t call Tangmere or Donaldson to explain the problem because in order to achieve maximum streamlining of his aircraft the radio antennae had been removed and the holes blanked off. He flew back to the start of the course again and this time found that if he jammed his left forearm like a rod between the side of the cockpit and the control stick he could just hold the Meteor level, but at a cost. ‘At 605 mph it seemed as though every bone from the tip of my elbow to the palm of my hand was in the grip of a giant, remorseless nutcracker: this in addition to the spine-jarring bounce of the aircraft.’ He continued in this fashion for three more agonising runs and returned to base disconsolate, his mood made worse by an aching arm and the scepticism he met which was based on Gloster’s fiction that his Meteor was ‘in tip-top condition’. Next day the Press was exuberant: Donaldson had bumped up the record to 616 mph; Waterton had achieved 614 mph. Later, Neville Duke made an attempt in Bill’s Meteor but at first was unable even to get round the course in it. ‘This seemed to confirm that there was something wrong with the aileron and not with the piloting,’ was Waterton’s pointed observation.

In any case Britain had got a new world speed record and the High Speed Flight’s existence had been justified. Still, when all the ballyhoo was over the new record was only 10 mph faster than the previous one. The FIA’s system of categories also concealed the unwelcome fact that Donaldson’s best speed was a full 86 mph slower than the 702 mph that the German Heine Dittmar had achieved in 1944 in a rocket-powered aircraft. And in case one scorned rocket propulsion there was always Heinz Herlitzius’s 624 mph, also achieved in 1944 but in a Messerschmitt Me.262, as conventional a jet as the Meteor. Evidently records set by a defeated enemy could be blithely discounted. Donaldson’s official world speed record stood for a year until an American Douglas Skystreak achieved 640.67 mph over Muroc in California. The whole enterprise was anyway something of a vainglorious nationalistic charade, although of course the hidden agenda could be summed up in the single word ‘sales’. So, having achieved its purpose in 1946, the High Speed Flight at Tangmere was disbanded. The secondment had served Bill Waterton well: his stock was high and he had achieved public recognition even before the news came that all three pilots had been awarded the AFC for their efforts, which in Bill’s case meant a bar to his existing medal. On 4 October 1946 his log book records ‘Teddy’ Donaldson’s friendly assessment of him as ‘Exceptional. A very reliable and most accurate pilot. Has done invaluable experimental work on compressibility problems at speeds in excess of 600 mph.’

One might have thought that after a headmasterly encomium like this, and with the newspapers still buzzing with his achievement, the ambition of Squadron Leader Bill Waterton, AFC and bar, to make the RAF his profession would have been easily satisfied. It wasn’t. The RAF refused to give him the permanent commission he sought, fobbing him off with offers of another short-term commission while they ‘gave the matter their fullest consideration’. In fact, as he had already surmised, they were giving their fullest consideration to younger men with only a fraction of his experience. To have flown in the war was already to carry the taint of a veteran, which evidently sat uneasily with the ‘new’ RAF that was taking shape. Like many another pilot in his predicament, Waterton made his own decision. ‘“If the RAF can’t make up its mind after nearly nine years whether or not I’m going to be of use to them,” I said, “then it never will. Sorry chaps, but I’m off.”’11 The makers of the Meteor, the Gloster Aircraft Company, were on the look-out for a test pilot with suitable jet experience and Bill Waterton was the obvious choice. He duly accepted their offer and on 21 October 1946 became a civilian once again. Privately, he was upset at having to leave the RAF, which for all its faults he described as his ‘first love’. If he felt it had treated him unfairly, though, he never divulged it. He knew that the service he had known and loved had been shaped – even distorted – by the long emergency of war, and that from now on it would become a very different peacetime entity. It was probably a good moment to be getting out, after all.

Notes – Chapter 2: Bill Waterton and the World Air-Speed Record

1 W. A. Waterton, interview with Jim Algie of the Owen Sound Sun Times, 11 December 2003.

2 W. A. Waterton, The Quick and the Dead (Frederick Muller, 1956), p. 25.

3 The Test Flying Memorial Project,
www.testflyingmemorial.com.

4 John Collins, Faith Under Fire (Frewin, 1966), pp. 89–90, quoted in Martin Francis, The Flyer (Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 190–1.

5 Hugh A. Halliday, Not in the Face of the Enemy: Canadians Awarded the Air Force Cross and Air Force Medal, 1918–1966 (Robin Brass Studio, 2000).

6 Waterton, op. cit., pp. 33–4.

7This and the preceding two quotations are undated and unattributed. They are all from Waterton’s private scrapbooks but unfortunately cropped as to date and source.

8Ditto, though probably the Daily Telegraph, circa 8 August 1946.

9 See Francis, op. cit., pp. 57–62.

10 Waterton, op. cit., p. 33.

11 Ibid., p. 41.