Another of the pilots who had left the RAF to join the Gloster Aircraft Company was Roland Beamont. A high-profile war hero for having downed so many incoming V-1s with his Hawker Tempest, Beamont acquired his first experience of jet aircraft when he flew a Meteor in 1944. Next year at Gloster he helped with the test flying of the Meteor Mk IV in which Group Captain ‘Willie’ Wilson broke the world air-speed record at Herne Bay. He then had a brief stint at Hatfield with de Havilland as a demonstration pilot, flying a Vampire in the first post-war SBAC show at Radlett. He made a sensational impression by throwing the little fighter about the sky with unprecedented panache. As a remarkable pilot he would anyway have been a notable acquisition for Gloster, but inevitably he lacked Bill Waterton’s glamour as a member of the prestigious High Speed Flight. This had made Waterton a prime target for Gloster’s headhunters, just as his colleague Neville Duke had been for Hawker’s. Beamont must soon have realised he was unlikely to become Gloster’s chief test pilot in the near future, and he was ambitious. Within months, English Electric offered him exactly that top job, so in 1947 he left to go to Preston. He had first made contact with this company while at de Havilland, who had had to farm out the manufacture of some of their Vampires to English Electric to keep up with a flourishing export order book.

It turned out to be an inspired move on Beamont’s part, although at the time it must have looked to many like career suicide. English Electric, a major manufacturer of electrical equipment as well as of trams, buses and diesel locomotives, had not designed an aircraft since the Kingston flying boat in 1924. Although it had acted as a ‘shadow factory’ during the war, building bombers for Handley Page (first Hampdens, then Halifaxes), its own aircraft division had been closed for over twenty years. After the war the company decided to go back to designing aircraft again and appointed a new chief designer, W. E. W. ‘Teddy’ Petter. Petter’s family not only made engines under their own name but had founded Westland Aircraft, where ‘Teddy’ had already designed three aircraft including the Lysander, a rugged, high-winged light utility plane that gave sterling service during the war and had been built in considerable numbers. After the war Westland decided to concentrate on helicopters and Petter was lured to English Electric to reopen their aircraft division. When Beamont arrived at their design offices in Preston to be interviewed for the job of chief test pilot he found a wooden mock-up of their first aircraft, the A.1 twin-jet light bomber, ready and waiting. This was the future Canberra. His appointment marked the continuation of his run of luck (he had already had the good fortune to survive the war). Two years later it would fall to Beamont to test the Canberra from the beginning; but before that he was sent to the United States to acquire experience in flying jet aircraft larger than the Meteor, particularly bombers. As we know, his luck held with the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become the first Briton to fly faster than sound, which he achieved at Muroc in the only flight he was allowed in the new F-86 Sabre. Returning to the UK, he took the Canberra up for its maiden flight in 1949 and immediately recognised it as a quite exceptional aircraft.

The Attlee government’s short-sighted conviction that neither the RAF nor the navy would need new fighters much before 1957 was emphatically not shared by the respective service chiefs or the Ministry of Defence. Nor was it by the industry, whose untidy abundance of private companies had never really paused in their output of novel designs, only a tiny fraction of which were destined to be built and an even tinier fraction of that number to become production aircraft. No matter: the government was paying. What was more, the companies knew that governments came and went, usually in far less time than it took to get a design off the drawing board and into the air. They also had the lucrative foreign market to aim for. Since Britain was in the forefront of the new jet technology, the industry was perfectly placed to supply many of the world’s air forces as they began shedding their old conventional warplanes. The English Electric Co., eager to make a good impression on its return to designing aircraft, had responded to a 1945 Air Ministry specification for a light bomber to replace de Havilland’s brilliantly successful but ageing Mosquito. Like the original Mosquitos, Petter’s projected bomber was unarmed, relying for its own protection on sheer speed and altitude and making for great savings in weight. Against stiff competition, the design won.

The Canberra, like the Meteor, was a twin-jet straight-winged aircraft, but there the resemblance ended. Not only was it much bigger than the fighter but proportionally it had an altogether lower, sleeker profile. The wings were roughly diamond-shaped and big: exactly what was needed for dealing with the thin atmosphere of high altitude. In fact, the Canberra’s wing area was nearly three times that of the Meteor’s. Beamont first took the prototype, VN 799, up from Warton’s runway 26 on Friday, 13 May 1949. Despite the date, the day could hardly have been luckier. ‘I very soon became aware that this was no humdrum conventional aeroplane with merely increased performance over its predecessors, but an altogether new and different experience … It virtually flew itself.’1 Over the next thirty-six flights some minor problems surfaced and were dealt with: an overbalanced rudder; modifications to the elevators; a simple fairing added to cure turbulence behind the cockpit canopy that had led to a slight ‘snaking’ from side to side. But by August it was clear the new bomber was fit to be flown in public at Farnborough in September. It was outstandingly manoeuvrable at any altitude, thanks to good reserves of power and very low wing loading. (‘Wing loading’ is calculated as the laden weight of the aircraft divided by the area of the wing. Thus a large wing area relative to the aircraft’s mass will produce more lift at a given speed. An aircraft with low wing loading will be able to land and take off at a lower speed than one with high wing loading, and will also be able to turn faster.) Beamont was determined to make an indelible impression with the Canberra.

This he certainly did. In fact, his display went down in the air show’s annals because no one had ever seen a bomber flown like it. This was only the second Farnborough show after the SBAC had moved their displays from Radlett and there was plenty of competition for the spectators’ attention. The weather was hot and clear and the string of new British prototypes being shown off included the very first public appearance of de Havilland’s new Comet. John Cunningham flew it gracefully, its highly polished bare metal finish sparkling in the sunshine. There can have been few in the crowd who were not moved by its elegance and the sense that they were watching a historic occasion on which the future of air travel was being premiered. The Canberra, meanwhile, was rolling along the taxiway. It looked splendid. Spectators accustomed to seeing wartime aircraft in camouflage or drab colours were enchanted that this bomber had been painted a high-gloss sky blue with a cursive ‘Canberra’ in white script on the port side of the nose. (It had been given the name in recognition that Australia was to be its first buyer.) Something about the aircraft promised to be different, and it was. Beamont took off, made some immediate steep turns and came back low along the runway at full power before pulling up vertically into a half-loop. That was merely the start of an amazing six-minute sequence of aerobatics performed so tightly that the aircraft was almost never outside the aerodrome perimeter. It left the crowds ‘gasping’ (as one newspaper had it). They gasped still more when Beamont opened the bomb doors for a low pass and things were seen to fall out. In the cockpit the co-pilot Dave Walker announced laconically, ‘My instrumentation has gone.’ ‘So have my starboard engine instruments,’ agreed Beamont, and at that moment the control tower radioed: ‘Canberra, you’re dropping pieces.’ Beamont turned and descended cautiously, lining up for a single-engine landing but then finding that the starboard engine was fine and only its instruments were dead. They made a smooth touchdown and taxied out of sight of the crowds before stopping to investigate. There were wires trailing from the bomb bay and the test instrumentation pack that had been mounted there was missing. No harm done.

The display had caused a sensation and next morning Beamont was hauled in front of the display control committee and told to ‘tone down’ his flying from now on. He asked what that meant exactly and when they failed to be specific he inquired if they thought it had been dangerous. They said no, not dangerous exactly, but, well, just tone it down. It was the same reaction that was accorded Roly Falk a few years later when he rolled the Vulcan. In the minds of the committee there was evidently a right and a wrong way of flying a bomber, and the right way was sedately. But sedate doesn’t necessarily win orders. Twenty-three years later Bob Hotz, who edited Aviation Week, the leading US aviation journal, reminisced:

The Canberra was the first genuinely great British post-war aircraft. It is not necessarily one of the qualifications for greatness that the United States should buy it for its own forces (although it helps). The Canberra, which was duly built under licence for the USAF as the Martin B-57, shared this distinction with only the Harrier jump-jet. One qualification for greatness in an aircraft is its ability to be constantly updated and modified for different roles and to be effective in all of them. This inherent flexibility the Canberra had in abundance. The B. Mk 2 Canberra entered RAF service in May 1951 and eventually went through twenty-seven versions, being exported to fifteen countries. In fact, English Electric couldn’t keep up with the demand and the task of building Canberras had to be farmed out to Handley Page and Short Brothers, who turned them out under licence. The basic design’s success was duly reflected in its longevity. India retired its last squadron of Canberras in 2007 after half a century, and it would be no surprise to hear that a Canberra is still occasionally pressed into service somewhere in the world even today. In 2006, sixty years after ‘Teddy’ Petter had first sketched the design, the RAF still had the odd Canberra flying: its only aircraft ever to serve continuously for over half a century. We schoolboy plane-spotters also remember that remarkable aircraft as being regularly in the news in the fifties for its record-setting: in 1951 the first non-stop unrefuelled Atlantic crossing by a jet; in 1952 the first double Atlantic crossing by a jet; in 1953, 1955 and 1957 new altitude records, including one of over 70,000 ft.

Still, back in 1951 when the Canberra entered squadron service with the RAF not everyone shared Beamont’s view that it was almost beyond criticism, even taking into account that he was employed by English Electric as their chief test pilot – a role that inevitably overflowed into that of chief salesman as well as of chief demonstrator. Like the Meteor it had an engine out on each wing and similarly suffered from problems of dangerous asymmetry if one failed. Worse, the early version had an unreliable electric motor that governed the trim tabs on the tailplane. These were small tabs fitted into the elevators themselves that made it possible for the pilot to make tiny alterations to the aircraft’s attitude – to ‘trim’ it for level flight (for example) in a way that would have been difficult using the coarser control of the whole elevator. Unfortunately, the early Canberra’s trim motor would sometimes run away unstoppably, deflecting the tab to its limit and sending the aircraft nose-down in a vicious bunt that proved beyond the strength of pilots to correct. The ensuing vertical dive accounted for several fatal crashes before it was rectified. But in those days that sort of technical problem was expected with a new aircraft.

Less excusable were the defects that seemed merely thoughtless and added unnecessarily to the crew’s stress. Pilots like ‘Robby’ Robinson, who quickly graduated from the Meteor to the much larger and more potent Canberra, loved its stability and the powerful performance afforded by its twin Rolls-Royce Avons but were outspoken about its discomforts. Certainly Ralph Swift was when he was posted to 527 Squadron at RAF Watton in Norfolk. ‘I was not designed by nature for the Canberra. I could never see adequately out of the thing. Even with the seat raised to its maximum height I was doomed to be flying mostly by instruments or looking sideways out of the cockpit bubble. The constant stretching to try and see over the cowling resulted in a very painful backache.’3 Robinson endorsed this view. ‘The aircraft was a lady,’ he readily conceded, ‘but the view out of the canopy was awful … I found the seat height lever and raised it until my head touched the canopy. That was marginally better, but the restricted view over the glare shield was one aspect of the aircraft that I hated throughout my association with it over the next twenty-five years.’4 Even when you could see out, the Canberra could sometimes offer a very rough ride. The PR. [Photo Reconnaissance] Mk 3 version was designed for high-altitude photography, which was destined to be one of the Canberra’s most valued roles, not least in the hands of Australian pilots during the Vietnam War. At low altitude, however, it could be a bitch. ‘I learnt that high-speed, low-level photography in a Canberra was exactly like riding a bicycle with flat tyres over never-ending and badly set cobblestones,’ one squadron leader was to remember.5 The reason for this quirk was simple: the Canberra’s big wings were rigid. Aifcraft larger than the Canberra anyway tended to be more comfortable at low level, but something like the Victor bomber was all the more so because it had long, comparatively narrow wings that flexed and could absorb the shocks of lumpy air.

Just as wearing were the potentially life-threatening discomforts symptomatic of the rough-and-ready attitude that seemed to infect so much British aviation technology of the period. It was partly a hangover from wartime expediency, but apparently now coupled with the equally home-grown maxim that runs, ‘If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing cheaply.’

Evidently equipment standards had been allowed to drop rather drastically since pre-war days. The late Sir Peter Masefield, ex-chairman of the British Airports Authority, once recalled a job he had been given at Fairey in the mid-thirties as a junior draughtsman, designing a holder for a brass handbell and an ultrasonic whistle to fit into the cockpit of the Fleet Air Arm’s Fairey Seal bombers. ‘The handbell was to be rung after alighting in fog. The whistle was to frighten off flamingos and similar hazards before taking off from (for example) the Nile at Khartoum.’7 In those days they thought of everything. No aids were too much for their pilots. It would be nice to think that Fairey’s thoughtfulness was the origin of the modern businessman’s phrase ‘bells and whistles’ to describe top-of-the-range gadgetry, instead of the more likely fairground organs.

 *

To a schoolboy on the ground in the early fifties, of course, these defects in our jet fighters were invisible, and in any case military secrecy was such that few civilians could ever have learned about them. Adults like my parents still automatically used the wartime phrase ‘hush-hush’ with a slightly lowered voice to denote a conversational no-go area, which had the natural effect of making me want to know more. I had to learn from what I could see and hear, which mostly meant at air shows. Since mainly British aircraft were exhibited (exclusively so at Farnborough), these inevitably had about them a self-congratulatory, even chauvinistic atmosphere. After a day spent being battered by noise and thrilled by sights it was easy to forget that we were not the only nation on earth building aircraft, and that our erstwhile lead was even then being eroded and overtaken abroad. As it was, we plane-spotters were hard pushed to keep up with our own country’s output. Our I-Spy Aircraft books were soon a mass of pencil ticks and we had to start proper log books to keep up with the bewildering assortment of aircraft we saw.

Those early fifties air shows belong to an era when people yearned for spectacle and entertainment after the wartime years and their drawn-out aftermath. TV sets were still uncommon and the viewing choice severely limited to evening programmes of unremitting blandness transmitted in black and white and ending with the National Anthem at 10.30 p.m. In one’s memory, air displays such as those at Farnborough and Biggin Hill tend to run into each other in a stream of excited images. The hot smell of canvas in the exhibition tents and the ammoniac stench of primitive toilet facilities were the incense behind the commentators’ voices over the scratchy tannoy system, now suddenly loud and then multi-tracked as the echoes bounced off hangars, often drowned completely by aero engines or the double thunderclap of a supersonic low pass. ‘If you l-look towards the east, ladies and gentlemen, you’ll see B-Bill P-Pegg-egg arriving in the new Type 170 Bristol Freighter-ter with the specially lengthened fuselage for Silver City-ity Airways’ cross-Channel car-ferry service-ervice-ervice …’ Meanwhile there were fairground treats on offer at a few festive stalls: Wall’s ice creams that came in flattened yellowish cylinders like Price’s night lights with bands of paper around them, all the more welcome since sugar was still rationed. Candyfloss, however, was banned in my medical family because of the polio scare, it being deemed even more risky than unwashed fruit. But anyway, sixpence a week pocket money didn’t go far and needed to be hoarded for Jetex fuse and other vital aero-modelling necessities. ‘ … And of course we are all waiting for the arrival of Neville Duke in the Hawker Hunter, but while we do so Tom Brooke-Smith will be bringing the Short S. B.5 over-over-over …’

I think it was at Biggin Hill that we were treated to the most sensational new aerobatic stunt of the day: the so-called ‘Zurabatic cartwheel’. Jan Zurakowski had invented it while working for Gloster. No doubt while he was testing the endless stream of new Meteors at the behest of Bill Waterton, and possibly under the goad of slight boredom, ‘Zura’ did something that had assuredly occurred to nobody else on the grounds that it was madly dangerous. This was deliberately to exploit the Meteor’s potentially lethal asymmetric behaviour on one engine. The manoeuvre he invented required the pilot to zoom his aircraft into a precisely vertical climb to 4,000 ft on both engines until it had slowed to about 80 mph, standing on its tail. Then he would chop one throttle, causing the aircraft to pinwheel under the remaining power of the outside engine. As the nose swung downwards towards six o’clock he would then chop that throttle too, allowing the Meteor’s rotational momentum to carry its nose back up to the vertical again, by which time the air speed was zero. The nose would fall around once more towards six o’clock, the Meteor by then having spun through one and a half revolutions while virtually stationary in the sky, and all in the vertical plane. From the spectator’s point of view it was truly astounding to watch an aircraft apparently stop in the sky and pinwheel. It was a spectacular display of control, made all the more impressive because it is very difficult for a pilot to keep an aircraft exactly perpendicular to the ground while on his back, staring up into the sky. Nor did we realise how much skill lay in recovering from the manoeuvre because once it was finished the aircraft had effectively stalled, and if the nose went even slightly beyond the vertical it would flick into an inverted spin, and no Meteor had ever been known to recover from one of those, no matter who was flying it.

Zurakowski first publicly performed his cartwheel in 1951 in a Meteor F.Mk 8 fully loaded with rockets at the Farnborough air show, provoking an announcer’s involuntary exclamation ‘Impossible!’ over the loudspeaker system. ‘Zura’ became famous overnight – a fame whose lustre was only increased when within weeks five Meteors were lost through ordinary RAF pilots trying to imitate him. A year or two later, though, several had mastered the technique and it was probably one of these ‘Zura’ imitators rather than the man himself whom we watched cartwheel a Meteor in the summer-blue skies above Biggin Hill. As already mentioned, ‘The Great Zura’ later joined Avro Canada to complete the testing of the CF-100 Canuck that Waterton had begun, surviving several near-death experiences when canopies failed and fuel lines ruptured. He then went on to test the Avro CF-105 Arrow. This was the fabulously advanced delta fighter whose abrupt cancellation in 1959 by government decree on ‘Black Friday’ is as much a part of Canadian aviation enthusiasts’ collective memory as the identical fate of the TSR.2 in 1965 was to become part of Britain’s. ‘Zura’ retired from test flying in 1958 in fulfilment of a promise to his wife Anna. He died in Ontario in 2004 at the age of 89. No one who saw his flying ever forgot it.

Details blur after more than half a century but I retain a clear, generic airfield memory of that period. It includes the exhilarating scent of burnt kerosene, the glitter of the aircraft on static display, the dance of thermals over tarmac and hangar roofs, the lashing grass’s sheen as it was blown flat by prop-wash, and the background roar of jet engines that came in waves, intensifying and then shutting off suddenly as though a door had closed. I remember that the hangars as well as many of the brick admin buildings still wore fading stripes of wartime camouflage paint. And I remember a Lincoln bomber overflying the crowd so low that its slipstream and wing-tip vortices dragged hats and programmes into the air in a swirl as the raving bellow of the four Merlins only thirty feet away brought us out in gooseflesh. I hadn’t seen it coming; and when suddenly this monstrous noise and huge dark shape pounced from behind my hair bristled and I went cold. Long afterwards I wondered whether this reaction was due to an atavistic memory dating back millions of years when some ancestral creature had emerged from the sea and tried to scuttle up an exposed beach before a winged, predatory shadow overtook it from behind.

Occasionally I come across a photograph of air-show crowds all those years ago. I turn the thin, already slightly brittle pages of Flight International or The Aeroplane and think how oddly innocent we all looked. Not just our obedience in standing so demurely behind a single sagging rope, which was often all that stopped us from walking a few yards onto a live taxiway or runway. There was something equally trusting in the artless austerity of our clothes: men still wearing their demob coats or old service raincoats, boys in shorts and Clarks sandals or plimsolls with the occasional Brownie box camera, faces thin and eager and all upturned as though we had been promised a sign from the heavens. We had, of course; and it came, too. The deafening waves of sound, the sparkling array of fabulous machinery that droned or sped past and over us, rolling and banking and blasting upwards: these were home-grown patriotic marvels we were shown. Nobody could have walked back to his coach with its smell of sun-baked Rexine upholstery and packed lunches without feeling proud and reassured. Elsewhere, cynical journalists might (and did) cast doubts on all this expenditure, and pinstriped men in Westminster seemed eager to cancel everything at a stroke even as worried service chiefs tried to match tomorrow’s needs with today’s intelligence reports of what the Soviets were doing. But we the air-show public were largely oblivious. What we wanted was spectacle, and it was given us in heaping measure. We went home knowing that Britain was still a world leader in technology and feeling in our bones our place in the international order. The sheer gusto and energy of aviation in those days felt not only right, but endless. It didn’t matter that ordinary life was austere, that motorcycles with sidecars were almost as numerous as cars in the muddy parking areas. Our political docility was as much a part of being British as were the displays of military and commercial power we were treated to.

And who could be cynical for long when the proof of our superiority was so regularly proclaimed in news of yet another record broken, whether of speed or altitude or distance, or else of an aviation first? My contemporaries and I grew up to these announcements and took them for granted. In 1945 and 1946 the Meteor broke the world air-speed record. In 1946 Martin-Baker made the world’s first ejector seat. Britain broke the 100 km closed-circuit record in 1947 and again in 1948. When a Boulton Paul Balliol trainer was fitted with an Armstrong Siddeley Mamba engine it became the world’s first single-engined turboprop aircraft in 1948, the same year that the Fairey Gyrodyne gained the world speed record for helicopters. When the prototype de Havilland Comet airliner began flying in 1949 it was the world’s first jet airliner; and since it could fly twice as high and twice as fast as any other commercial airliner it began to break records in a constant stream. In 1950 Supermarine’s Type 510 became the first swept-wing jet to land on an aircraft carrier, and that year British European Airways inaugurated the world’s first-ever scheduled helicopter service. A couple of years later the de Havilland 110 became the first two-seat, twin-engined aircraft ever to exceed Mach 1. But far more impressive in late August 1952 was the Canberra’s double Atlantic crossing from Aldergrove to Gander and back in ten hours and three minutes (including a two-hour stop in Newfoundland). VX 185, piloted by Roland Aldergrovehimself, became the first aircraft ever to make the double crossing in a day. The ecstatic British press quoted The New York Times saying that it marked a new triumph for the Canberra. ‘The British jet plane industry appears to be assuming the lead in the Western World in both military and commercial aircraft – and it is a comfort that it is on our side.’8 The Canberra’s point-to-point flight records alone were soon legion, but the ones I remember were its altitude records. In 1953 Walter Gibb took it to 63,668 ft and two years later flew the same aircraft to 65,890 ft. In 1957 a rocket-assisted Canberra achieved 70,310 ft.

As for absolute speed records, they became a little thinner on the ground as American aircraft took the lead. But on 7 September 1953 Neville Duke broke the F-86 Sabre’s existing world airspeed record with a run of 727 mph in an all-red Hawker Hunter off Littlehampton. Later that same month Mike Lithgow raised it to 736 mph in a Supermarine Swift in Libya – a record that lasted all of two days before a Douglas Skyray took it back for the US at 753 mph (itself beaten within the month by two miles per hour by the then accident-prone F-100 Super Sabre). It was a competitive year, and all mixed up in my memory with the climbing of Everest and the Coronation. The last air-speed record I remember is the one gained by Peter Twiss in 1956 flying the beautiful Fairey Delta 2 over Chichester. I heard the announcement with my parents on the radio news at teatime one Sunday. ‘Golly!’ I remember my mother exclaiming, the teapot frozen in her hand. ‘One thousand, one hundred and thirty-two miles an hour!’ When she was born in 1908, Blériot had yet to fly the Channel.

Meanwhile, behind these fifties scenes some classic British aircraft were taking shape on drawing boards up and down the country, some of which even flew after a long wait. A certain amount of what the air-show public saw was perhaps misleading, in that it consisted of prototypes that never went into production (like Hawker’s P.1081 or Supermarine’s Type 529 with the butterfly tail), or else they were purely experimental aircraft designed for nothing more than testing a particular configuration (like Avro’s little 707 deltas mentioned in Chapter 1). In any well-run air show the appearances of these often futuristic and even odd-looking aircraft were mixed in with displays by familiar old favourites and by less dramatic transport, civil and light aircraft. And in 1953 we all saw newspaper pictures of an odd-looking thrust-measuring rig that was soon universally known as the ‘Flying Bedstead’, the first step on the long road that led to Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) aircraft like the Short S. C.1, the Hawker P.1127 and ultimately to the Harrier itself. The overall impression was of infinite variety and fertility and it was all lent further spice by the secrecy issue. ‘We’re not allowed to tell you just what the top speed is,’ the commentators’ voices told us confidentially from a thousand loudspeakers, ‘as I’m sure you’ll understand-and.’ Then some rakish flake of metal blasted past and our hearts soared as one. In our boyhood bibles such as the Observer’s Book of Aircraft or my own favourite, Green and Pollinger’s The Aircraft of the World (1953), it was equally titillating to find, amid the usual data for a particular aircraft, the italic phrase No details available for publication.

Over half a century later I stare at this phrase in my worn copy of Green and Pollinger as it hides a Hawker Hunter’s weight and all the Avro Vulcan’s performance figures, still as dutifully obedient to an ancient pact of secrecy as my grandmother was to the one she had sworn in the First World War. Even today in a certain mood I find a ghost of that former secrecy can still hang a faint aura of mystique around these aircraft, now so venerable that appeals have to be made to save the last airworthy specimens and their rare appearances still guarantee large turnouts at air shows. I well remember the first photograph of the Handley Page Victor bomber in The Times that my father cut out and sent me at school. It was a shot of it parked, taken from the side because, as the caption noted, the exact shape of its wings was still a closely guarded secret (they were merely progressively less swept, in a style soon known as ‘crescent’). How this official secret was supposed to be kept from the hundreds of ordinary citizens or Russian spies who were bound to see it whenever the Victor flew in and out of Handley Page’s airfield, God alone knew. In any case the Russians had themselves tried a similar planform for their MiG-17 fighter in 1950, so the concept was already somewhat old hat.

But anyone interested in aircraft in those days necessarily came up against a wall of secrecy. Of all the major democracies Britain has always been the least open, which is presumably why unnatural emphasis is laid on the hallowed national platitude ‘freedom of speech’ rather than on freedom of information. I always assumed this had to do with the country’s peculiar caste system whereby ‘the powers that be’ retain those powers precisely by not allowing the unempowered to know what is going on. Even today, ‘security’ is still the magic catch-all behind which the powers protect themselves from the horrid implications of real democracy, just as it was during the depths of the Cold War.

If only it weren’t so bafflingly inconsistent. One can see why it was a good idea to keep details of the Vulcan bomber’s performance from the Soviets in 1953 – even though from its shape, size and known limits of engine technology any competent aerodynamicist or even plane-spotter could have supplied pretty accurate guesses. But why was the news of Roland Beamont’s supersonic flight in the USA in 1948 withheld? And if ‘national security’ is to be the sacred consideration, then what on earth is to be made of that extraordinary request by Rolls-Royce in 1945 that they be allowed to sell Derwent and Nene jet engines to the Russians, despite warnings by eminent engineers like Rod Banks that it would be equivalent to ‘selling our birthright’? Yet the new President of the Board of Trade, Sir Stafford Cripps, expressly gave Rolls-Royce the go-ahead. The great Russian aircraft designer Alexander Yakovlev recorded that when someone in the Kremlin hopefully suggested trying to make this purchase Stalin had called it ‘naive’, adding, ‘What kind of fools would sell their secrets?’9 Answer: Rolls-Royce and Stafford Cripps, aka the powers that be, who will do anything for money. So it was that the German engineers working for Soviet Russia after the war could produce no jet engine powerful enough, and the Klimov-built Nene duly became the heart of the highly able and successful MiG-15. It can hardly have endeared Rolls-Royce to American pilots over Korea.

Yet despite the official secrecy shrouding so many of the aviation industry’s activities, and despite all the frantic activity visible at air shows, the fact was that by the early fifties the RAF could see a horrid gap opening up in Britain’s air defences. The first-generation jet fighters in squadron service – the Meteor and the Vampire – were already beginning to show their age. Neither could have held its own in aerial combat against the F-86 Sabre, let alone against a really well-flown MiG-15. The outbreak of the Korean War had caused near-panic among British service chiefs. Thanks to the Labour government’s lack of a modern aerial defence policy the RAF was without a competitive frontline interceptor. In 1952 it was obliged to shop abroad and import 428 Canadian-built Sabre Mk 4s that served with eleven squadrons until 1956, by which time they had been replaced with home-grown Hawker Hunters. This was something of a national humiliation, given the size of Britain’s sprawling and still unreconstructed aero industry. All those companies, yet the lead already lost. Even so, those Sabres were by no means a case of faute de mieux. The F-86 was a great aircraft, especially in its Canadian-built version; and since we had so stupidly dallied there was not a hope that we could have produced anything to match it in the requisite time. Towards the end of a long career Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown summed up the Sabre quite simply as ‘the finest jet aircraft I ever flew, from a handling standpoint. The Spitfire of the jet age.’10

The real problem was that successive governments failed to give any clear lead. They never managed to thrash out with the often warring service chiefs exactly what Britain’s military commitments to NATO and the remaining Empire would require in terms of aircraft, and then to fund and support them. This failure was all the more pronounced against the background of those semi-private aviation companies who were already working with supersonic wind tunnels and thinking many years ahead. In the best of these there was no lack of radical ideas, and many designs were astonishingly forward-looking. Several should have become great aircraft; and if only they had been properly backed from the first by steady funding the whole post-war story of Britain’s aero industry might have been very different. But so many of the projects were, like Miles’s M.52, destined to be capriciously scrapped at the last moment. Many others were to be handicapped from the start by delays that meant that by the time the aircraft had been fully tested and debugged and in production they had missed their opportunity for real commercial success.

Some, like the Supermarine Swift, simply never lived up to their promise: a common enough occurrence in aircraft industries everywhere. For all that, a Swift did briefly take the official world air-speed record in 1953. The FIA ruling on speed records now specified that they had to be the best of four three-kilometre runs below 100 metres, so Mike Lithgow took the Swift to the Libyan desert where the high temperature made the air less dense. By such means it scraped into the record books for two days. Subsequently, the aircraft was never a success in RAF service, being too full of faults that were solved and sorted only after it was already obsolete. It was all deeply ironic, given its starring role in The Sound Barrier as the Prometheus, when Lithgow himself flew the proto type Swift in impressive and deafening high-speed passes for David Lean’s camera to suggest a future of unstoppable British technological progress (Ad astra! To the stars!). Unfortunately, even in those days a fighter aircraft that air forces wanted to buy and fly needed to have a lot more than the mere ability to make fast low passes in a straight line. It had to have combat manoeuvrability, for one thing. By now level-flight supersonic capability was also pretty much a prerequisite; yet no British aircraft had it until Fairey’s experimental delta in 1956, and the RAF had to wait for their first truly supersonic fighter until 1960, when deliveries of the Lightning began. Britain had fallen that far behind.

While watching the infinite variety at those fifties air shows, some adult taxpayers might briefly have reflected on the infinite amounts of money this sort of hit-and-miss approach to aviation was costing the nation. And this without any of them being privy to the AIB’s crash records or having glimpsed those heaps of broken Meteors lurking out of sight in squadron dumps. They probably couldn’t have guessed quite how much the monthly wastage in accidents alone was costing. But then it might not have mattered to them any more than it did to me. How could such dreary accounting be matched against the tingling expectation aroused by hearing the windswept tannoys announcing ‘Neville Duke-uke is just approaching from the west-est in the Hawker Hunter’ while we all tensed ourselves for the bang?

Certain test pilots, such as Roland Beamont, were associated with several different aircraft. Others, no matter how many types they flew, became identified with only one. In the early fifties Neville Duke’s public linking with the Hawker Hunter was absolute, cemented on 7 September 1953, the year of the Coronation, when he took the world air-speed record away from America with his run of 727 mph in the red Hunter WB 188. He had nearly come to grief a week earlier on his first attempt. ‘One undercarriage leg was sucked out with a big bang as I ran in over Bognor Pier, passing at about 300 ft with the speed building up to 700 mph. The Hunter whipped over the vertical and I was nearly into the sea. Such was the strength of the Hunter that it held together in extremis. I landed her back at Dunsfold on two wheels without too much further damage.’11 (What a way to earn a living, we may think.) Neville Duke DSO, DFC**, AFC had had a spectacularly successful war as a fighter pilot in both Europe and North Africa, with twenty-eight confirmed combat ‘kills’. Once out of uniform he had been associated with Hawker’s new jet fighter from its beginnings in the late forties and took the first prototype – painted a pretty duck-egg green – up on its maiden flight in July 1951. So well did it fly and so few were the details needing attention that it was ready for the Farnborough air show in September, where it made a great impression. Here at last was the proper swept-wing jet fighter the RAF badly needed and had ordered straight off the drawing board. Unfortunately, it was a further three years until the Hunter began to enter squadron service. This was partly owing to a familiar British dilatoriness, but mainly due to the discovery that when it was finally armed and flown as a fighter rather than as a prototype, all sorts of snags arose that needed to be dealt with.

Still, from the first people were ravished by the aircraft’s looks. In a world of military aviation still dominated by clunky old Meteors, the Hunter seemed like an envoy from the future. Now at last the RAF could have a jet fighter that looked fast. The mid-mounted wings were swept back at a thirty-five-degree angle and the fin and tailplanes were also swept. Behind the cockpit’s bubble canopy a low fairing continued along the aircraft’s spine, blending into the fin’s upwardly curving line. The single Avon’s intakes were narrow triangles at the wings’ roots. Somehow, this made all the difference to the Hunter’s superbly trim and elegant lines. The North American F-86 Sabre (which had held the speed record Duke broke) was also neat and clean, but its jet intake was a hole in the nose: a common feature of the time, shared by the somewhat similar-looking MiG-15 and giving both aircraft a blunt, stubby appearance. The Sabre was perpetually open- mouthed like a bemused fish, which definitely detracted from its looks. (The English Electric Lightning, then still some years in the future and also a mouth-breather, had a large intake with a shock cone for slowing down the airstream feeding its two engines. It always looked as though it was choking on an ice cream cornet.) The Hunter, by contrast, could debatably be regarded as perhaps the most graceful jet fighter of all time. It was designed by Sydney Camm, who had also designed the Hurricane, and he had unquestionably produced an aircraft that was lovely to look at. Certainly I lavished more time and care on my balsa-wood model of it than I did on any other, for once making the boring effort of sanding the wings enough to get the right varying thickness or chord. I finished it in the duck-egg green of the first two prototypes and quite wish I still had it. I blew it up one night, as boys do, in an experiment involving cordite filched from a.303 cartridge, Jetex fuse and underwing pods of dope thinners. At the time the spectacle was well worth it.

The Hunter looked so good and flew so well it was perhaps easy to overlook that it could only go supersonic in a shallow dive. However, the aerodynamic problems surrounding compressibility had by then been largely solved or were being overcome, and it would go past Mach 1 without fuss or cockpit drama. ‘You can take up the Hunter any time you like and put it through the sound barrier, knowing that it will perform perfectly,’ Duke enthused.12 The sonic bangs it was called upon to produce at air shows from 1952 onwards became the Hunter’s expected party piece, like Barney Gumble’s explosive belches in The Simpsons. In his autobiography, originally published in 1953, Neville Duke was rhapsodic about flying the aircraft that had become so firmly identified with him:

One of the thrills of flying is to take up the Hunter to over 40,000 feet, up into the clear, deep sapphire blue … Now … at full throttle you half-roll over and pull through. The nose of the Hunter is pointing straight down at the earth and you are hanging forward in the straps, feeling as though you may slip out of them and fall forward at any moment. Now you are really beginning to move. The indicated speed begins to build up and so does the Mach number. Soon you are going straight down at the earth at supersonic speed. You can see the earth rushing up towards you. The needle on the altimeter is whirling madly round, reeling off thousands of feet as you go down, straight as an arrow. It’s a wonderful thrill. When the Hunter is going down flat out you are falling at much more than 50,000 feet a minute … For me there is no greater satisfaction than sitting in the cockpit of the Hunter, beautiful in design and construction, representing the thought and skill of so many people, and feeling it respond to the slightest movement of your fingers. It lives and is obedient to your slightest wish. You have the sky to play in – a great limitless expanse.13

Ironically, it was a Hunter that put an end to Duke’s career as a test pilot. One day in August 1955 he was scheduled for some gun-firing tests off the Sussex coast. He had just taken off from Tangmere in WT 561 and was at about 1,000 ft with Chichester harbour directly beneath him when he suddenly found he was only getting idling thrust from the engine. Nothing he could do made any difference. At that altitude and with no power to speak of a pilot is left with very few options. One of them is to bale out, but Duke noticed that RAF Thorney Island was coming up below him and he decided to try and get the aircraft down. As he came up in a high-speed glide his dilemma was that he was travelling too fast for a safe touchdown but not fast enough to go around and land on the main runway. He was out of options and realised he would have to put down diagonally across the airfield at about 200 mph, and on rough grass at that. As soon as his wheels touched the turf the Hunter leapt into a series of bounces that became higher and higher. In order to avoid a stall off the top of one of these, which would probably have been fatal, Duke selected ‘wheels up’ but only a single green light came on, showing that one leg was still locked down. WT 561 crashed to the ground lopsidedly and began swerving madly.

After recuperation Duke found his flying was unimpaired but that any appreciable g force produced excruciating pain. So that was that where test piloting was concerned.

The convention is to say that the Hunter was ‘a joy’ to fly – as indeed it could be. But the fact is that it wasn’t much of a joy at the beginning, being plagued by several faults, some of which were cured over time. The least curable was that it had ‘short legs’, in the parlance. By nursing his fuel a pilot could keep the Hunter usefully in the air for about an hour, but for precious little longer. (The same problem, only much more acute, was to dog the Lightning.) The incident of six out of a flight of eight Hunters running out of fuel simultaneously over East Anglia has already been alluded to (p. 96). That was merely an extreme case of a not uncommon event. When it finally entered restricted squadron service in 1954 the Hunter did so with firm limits set on its speed and manoeuvres. One such limited ‘manoeuvre’ was the quite basic one for an interceptor of firing its guns. It had been found that the Avon engine was anyway prone to surging owing to the design of the intakes. (‘Surging’ was a sudden reversal of the flow inside the compressor – a sort of jet engine backfire. It often resulted in a flame-out, or complete loss of power.) A redesign partially cured this but it was then discovered that when the 30 mm Aden cannon were fired their ingested gases could also trigger surging and flame-out in the engine. A good number of Hunters and their pilots were lost in this way. What was more, the ammunition belt links that were ejected when the cannon were fired would cause considerable damage to the underside of the fuselage until the problem was cured by collecting the links in a couple of bulgy fairings that became known as Sabrinas in honour of Norma Sykes, an outrageously pneumatic starlet of the day. (In some squadrons the aircraft themselves were known as Sabrinas.) Another of the Hunter’s foibles was its tendency to stall in high-g combat turns: not an ideal characteristic for a fighter. Over the years fixes were found for most of these glitches, but it all meant that the Hunter was yet another example of a British military aircraft that had been put into service before it was fully sorted. A giveaway is that Neville Duke should still have been carrying out cannon-firing tests when the aircraft had already been in squadron service for a year. Defects like that ought to have been fixed before ordinary pilots were expected to fly it. It was akin to marketing a car that stalled every time its fog lamps were turned on. A telling indication of how slow the Hunter was in becoming a fully capable warplane is that even in 1956, when Anthony Eden foolishly committed Britain to the invasion of Suez with Operation Musketeer in October, the AIB crash records show Hunters dropping from the sky like shot pigeons all over the UK as pilots of ordinary skill were faulted either by its demands, by fuel shortage or by mechanical failure of one sort or another.

Only in 1957, with the newly engined Hunter F. Mk 6 entering squadron service, did the RAF finally have an outstandingly capable fighter. Pilots found it a great improvement over their Canadair Sabres, which is hardly surprising given that the F-86 had been flying since 1948. In due course it became Britain’s second most successful post-war fighter aircraft in commercial terms after the old Gloster Meteor. Nearly 2,000 Hunters were built and the type served for decades in nineteen air forces around the world. It became one of the RAF’s mainstays until the end of the sixties, seeing action in Aden and Indonesia. Even before the fifties were out the F.Mk 6 became particularly famous as the choice of RAF aerobatic teams like the Black Arrows and, later, the Blue Diamonds. People lucky enough to have been at the 1958 Farnborough air show saw the Black Arrows’ sixteen all-black Hunters joined by six more F.Mk 6s from other units to perform a spectacular double loop of twenty-two aircraft, a record that still stands.

There is a school of thought that maintains the Hunter was never developed to its full potential, becoming blighted – like so much else in British aviation – by Duncan Sandys’s 1957 White Paper that mistakenly foresaw missiles taking over from fighter aircraft in the immediate future. It is a debatable viewpoint. But the fact remains that even by 1956, two years after the Lightning’s prototype had flown, the barely transonic Hunter was already an old generation fighter. The Lightning itself went into RAF service in 1960 and was capable of exceeding Mach 2, while no amount of upgrading could ever have made a Hunter fly much faster than Mach 1, not even with steeper sweepback and an uprated engine. Still, as it was, the aircraft became much loved in the RAF and also by the general public. It looked like the sort of competent warplane a country could be proud of and even non-enthusiasts could appreciate its aesthetic appeal, just as they could later with Concorde. It was also immensely popular in overseas air forces, where it frequently saw action and was prized for its toughness. It is still flying today. By 2008 the Hunter had been in service with the Lebanese Air Force for fifty years, and there are at least fifty privately owned Hunters still flying around the world. Neville Duke, who died in April 2007, would not have been at all surprised to be outlived by the aircraft he had long ago made his own.

Notes – Chapter 5: Canberras, Hunters and Patriotism

1 Roland Beamont, The Years Flew Past (Airlife, 2002), pp. 64–5.

2 Quoted in Roland Beamont, Fighter Test Pilot (Patrick Stephens, 1987), p. 68.

3 Ralph Swift, ‘Flying on 527 Squadron – Early 1950s’, www.rafwatton.info/.

4Wing Commander J. A. Robinson, Jet Bomber Pilot (Old Forge, 2006), p. 25.

5 D. Collier-Webb in Bernard Noble, Properly to Test, vol. 2 (Old Forge, 2004), p. 85.

6 Robinson, op. cit., pp. 25–8.

7 Peter Masefield and Bill Gunston, Flight Path (Airlife, 2002), p. 28.

8 Quoted in Beamont, The Years Flew Past, p. 85.

9 F. R. Banks, I Kept No Diary (Airlife, 1983), p. 198.

10 Eric Brown, Wings on My Sleeve (Phoenix, 2007), p. 215.

11 Neville Duke, Test Pilot (Grub Street, 2003), p. 180.

12 Ibid., p. 157.

13 Ibid., pp. 170, 171.

14 Ibid., p. 182.