In June 2009 I stood beside Bill Waterton’s austere and harmonious headstone in the little cemetery of Oxenden, Ontario. I was too late by three years to have met my boyhood hero, which was probably better for both of us. He had wished to be buried by Georgian Bay, and the water was close by. Even closer was the end of the runway of Wiarton’s small airport. It was not difficult to imagine the old instructor lying beneath my feet in his coffin, head pillowed on the very flying jacket he had been issued when he had first joined the RAF, critically monitoring the approaches and take-offs of the mainly light aircraft that occasionally flew low above him. For most of the time, though, the place would be one of deep silence.

Silence, too, had attended his passing. The Owen Sound Sun Times had interviewed its once-celebrated local resident back in 2003 to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first flight but, at Waterton’s own request, printed no notice of his death in 2006. The Toronto Globe and Mail did give him an obituary, but not until four months after he had died. Three thousand miles away in England, where virtually all his true professional career and achievements had taken place, there was not a mention of him, not even in the aviation press. It was as if Bill Waterton had never been. Yet this was surely no deliberate snub born of rancour, the afterglow of a fifty-year-old vendetta. The outrage must long since have evaporated that once was felt by a beleaguered aero industry now changed beyond recognition, and by bruised and slighted executives who departed the scene decades ago. Curiously, Waterton himself went on to the end of his life speaking almost with relish of being persona non grata in both Britain and Canada. I wondered whether even as a youngster he might have abandoned hope of getting on easily with people and instead had cultivated a perverse satisfaction in the idea of being universally blackballed, persisting in this conviction long after most people could even remember why. Surely the reason Waterton’s name has never been rehabilitated and his legacy re-examined is simply because to all intents and purposes he vanished into thin air back in 1956. He was forty when his book was published and he was sacked by the Daily Express, and he was ninety when he died. In that intervening half-century he became invisible to his former world: to ex-colleagues and his readership alike. From their point of view it was as if his life had ended in 1956. For pure want of revision, their image of him as aviation’s black sheep gradually fossilised before crumbling into forgetfulness, even as it lingered on here and there in half-remembered tales in both Britain and Canada.

After leaving the Express he, Marjorie and their young son Willy spent three gipsy years wandering around southern Europe and North Africa in a Volkswagen van (‘the smartest thing we ever did’). It was a decade before such a thing became fashionably hippie and it seems likely that Waterton, always curious, had acquired a taste for exotic travel during his trips to Turkey and the Middle East while demonstrating and selling Meteors for Gloster. After that, he claimed, Marjorie persuaded him against his better judgement to return to Canada. ‘They don’t like me in this country,’ he confided to Jim Algie, the local Sun Times reporter who interviewed him in December 2003, adding with his usual tactless candour: ‘I think the biggest mistake I ever made was coming back to this country in November ’59. People said, “Oh, you live in Canada,” and I said, “No, we exist here. We lived in Europe.”’1

They went back to where his Waterton forebears had farmed near Owen Sound (‘A deadbeat place. Very backward compared to the little city I grew up in [Camrose, Alberta]. But we liked the countryside.’) Three years after his death Marjorie spoke of Bill’s lasting love of England; but it must have been a complex affection since he left Algie in no doubt as to why he had given up all further hope of a flying career in the British aircraft industry. ‘I got so pissed off with the people involved there. They were such bloody liars and crooks. And they were cutting corners, money, everything. As a test pilot you were sure as hell used. And they didn’t pay much.’ There was a strange moment in this interview when, given that Waterton seemed to regret having lived in Canada for the past half-century, Algie quite sensibly asked him: ‘So why did you stay?’ The answer was the single bleak phrase: ‘In a rut.’

A second son, John, was born in 1960 even though his father later confessed, ‘I’m not much of a family man.’ Waterton took a job as a warehouseman and on the side taught the local politician and businessman Eddie Sargent to fly. Sargent was Mayor of Owen Sound and the warehouse’s owner. For three years Bill flew him around to meetings in a succession of Cessnas. His log books tell the erratic tale. With the exception of two aerobatic flights in a Bücker Jungmeister biplane in 1958 (which must have taken him back pleasurably to his Gladiator days), Gloster’s erstwhile chief test pilot didn’t fly at all between 1956 and 1961. In that year he touchingly headed the page of his log book ‘The Resurection’ [sic] and for the next three years kept quite busy flying light aircraft as a pilot for hire. But after 1964 the man who had tamed the Javelin never flew again. ‘I didn’t let myself miss it,’ he said. ‘I would dearly have liked to have an aeroplane to fiddle around with but it just wasn’t [financially] possible. It’s no use hankering after something, is it? Once your cock stops working there’s no point in worrying about women, is there?’

So for most purposes in a rut summed up the last half-century of his life. His tone of voice in the Algie interview is not bitter or recriminatory. It seems to look back on neither great pleasure nor great anguish. Rather, it reflects a kind of acceptance. Until 1956 he had done that, and since then he had been doing this – whatever it was, including growing older. In the face of such stoicism a biographer simply draws a blank for well over half his subject’s lifetime, except to note that for a short period Waterton joined a welding class and left behind in Willy’s shed some very strange sculptures he had made from black iron. They consist largely of jagged triangles set at all angles that might or might not represent swept-back or delta wings. It would probably be merely vulgar to read into them anything expressive of flight, let alone aspiration.

From outside, those fifty grounded years in rural Ontario might sound like a recipe for chronic boredom, coming as they did after two decades of varied, frantic, often life-threatening activity. Yet the idea that he might have been bored is firmly rejected by Richard Bentham, who was probably Bill Waterton’s sole close friend for the last seven years of his life. Bentham is himself a retired test pilot who served for years in the Royal Canadian Air Force. While in the RCAF he flew the Avro Canada CF-100, the type that Waterton had test flown throughout its prototype’s difficult and dangerous teething stages and which Bentham describes as the best operational all-weather fighter in North America in the late fifties. And he did mean all-weather. ‘On the Canadian Pacific coast we would take off night after night into wild winter storms with nothing but angry ocean and mountains beneath. We hung on to the thin thread of radar coverage to get home. A few of our mates disappeared without trace off the face of the earth. Now that’s lonely.’2 In 1963 Bentham went to England to join the prestigious ETPS course, then at Farnborough, where at his very first lecture his tutor, Squadron Leader Eddie Rigg, declared: ‘Gentlemen, you must never, ever forget that all aircraft manufacturers are thieves and rogues.’ Waterton had not been mistaken.

One day in the late nineties Richard Bentham was at home some thirty miles south of Owen Sound when an elderly Oldsmobile rolled into his drive and an equally elderly driver emerged. It was Bill Waterton, who had learned from a mutual acquaintance that a former test pilot was living in the neighbourhood and had turned up out of the blue to talk. And talk he did, immediately and at length, Bentham recalls:

By the time Waterton died in 2006 Richard Bentham had become a considerable admirer, although not blinded to his friend’s faults.

There is no mistaking Bentham’s admiration and fondness, and he was to write a lengthy appreciation of Waterton after his death for a British aviation magazine that in the event never published it. The belated Globe and Mail obituary quoted Bentham pointing out that Waterton was Canada’s most internationally famous and accomplished test pilot and adding: ‘No one else even approached his record of achievement. To this day, he remains virtually unrecognised in this country.’3 When Waterton died there was at his request no funeral service, no notice and no religious observances. Richard Bentham gave a graveside oration in which he called his friend ‘stalwart’: sturdy and resolute, a man who would have been at home in a Victorian world of empire, honour, duty and courage. I suspect few who loved Bill would have quibbled with that, even though one can almost hear the gruff word ‘Balls!’ coming from beneath the freshly laid turf.

Maybe the praise that would have given him most satisfaction came from the British test pilot John Farley, who had been a classmate of Richard Bentham at ETPS in 1963 before going on to join Hawker Siddeley and spending nineteen years on the Harrier programme, to become that aircraft’s acknowledged master demonstrator. In response to a posting on an internet forum in early 2003, Farley wrote that Bill Waterton had recently been made a member of the ETPS Association. He added: ‘He was considered a bad trouble-maker back in the fifties because of his insistence on telling the truth about the aeroplanes he tested. Jeffrey Quill was his biggest fan – which says it all, really.§ The Quick and the Dead was my bible when I was in the business and I still read the preface a couple of times a year – lest I forget what being a test pilot is actually about.’4 When he heard of Waterton’s death Farley wrote to Bentham, saying, ‘I still use the preface to his book as an example to students of honesty and professional integrity (even if not combined with tact).’

*

If the exact half-century between Bill Waterton’s disappearance from England and his death in Ontario in 2006 constitutes something of an enigmatic gap for a biographer, what is one to make of the steeply descending glide path described by British aviation over the same period? Looking away from the fallow skies of the twenty-first century and back to those crowded heavens of the fifties, the gloomy analyses of Bill Waterton and many of his informed contemporaries lose their immediacy and edge. Instead, pure nostalgia wells up to take their place: nostalgia for the many extraordinary aircraft the period produced. Of course, the latter-day invention of a post-war ‘golden era’ of British aviation is fraught with the charisma of longing, caught up as we are today in the paralysing romance of our own national failure. There is a double irony here. First, enough time has elapsed to halo the lens of hindsight. Even though it might not seem possible to some of us, the early Jet Age is in temporal terms already much further removed from the present day than it was from the Wright Brothers. This is deceptive, for Britain’s many striking and original aircraft designs of the fifties (the English Electric Lightning, for example) still seem infinitely more modern to us than a Cody British Army Aeroplane No. 1 of 1907 would have done to someone at the end of the Second World War. The other irony is the implication that we are casting our gaze back to a time of much greater national strength and purpose. The reality, though, is that in many ways Britain in 1945 resembled an invalid who had miraculously survived mortal illness but who would never again regain her former strength.

Even so, for the next two decades the country maintained a vigorous, if grossly mismanaged, output of aircraft. If we now view those as ‘golden years’ (and many who were professionally involved at the time viewed them as no such thing) it is at least partly because Britain today lacks the political initiative, as well as the money and know-how, to support a thoroughgoing aviation industry. Once you have elected to get off a technological express train there is probably no way of ever catching it again. It has gone; and you are left behind, watching it recede while bravely consoling yourself with thoughts of your astuteness at having saved yourself the higher fare. The beautiful Swallows, Comets, Hunters, Vulcans, Lightnings (and yes, even the elegant Viscount) now stand as shining monuments to a former Britain. True, it was a Britain already in political decline; but the war’s heroic afterglow still back-lit the indigenous aircraft that crossed our skies and impacted our fields in such gloriously uneconomic profusion.

One way of viewing the period might be as a grand swansong or coda to the process we Britons had ourselves started with the Industrial Revolution. The long, frequently brilliant chapter of mechanical inventiveness and manufacture that began with steam finally itself ran out of steam. This was not through any waning of either ingenuity or enthusiasm on the part of individuals, or even of the nation’s aviation industry as a whole. It happened because, however unconsciously and blunderingly it was done, it became the policy of successive British governments to eradicate that industry as though it were an unruly wasps’ nest by employing the slow cyanide of contradictory policies, the withholding of support and funds, and the progressive poisoning of morale. In fact, although not even the politicians themselves quite realised it – and certainly not at the time of the upbeat Festival of Britain in 1951 – this turned out to be merely part of a historic policy change to do away with all Britain’s capacity as a serious industrial nation, abolishing not just a century of making its own cars but a thousand years of building its own ships. I suspect this policy was more unconscious than deliberately willed, and it is one whose consequences for the nation are still not fully apparent. It sounds improbable; yet there is surely no other interpretation to be made of the steady, decades-long demolition of the country’s manufacturing capacity – including its most charismatic industry – other than that at some level it was absolutely intentional, no matter what lengths politicians went to in order to conceal this fact from both the electorate and themselves. What remains of Britain’s aero industry today (essentially that near-unaccountable armaments multinational, BAE Systems – the ‘monstrous octopus’ de nos jours – plus Rolls-Royce and a handful of private defence contractors like QinetiQ) has nothing to do with Britain at the level of domestic patriotism, still less of defending the White Cliffs, and everything to do with trade. ‘Of course!’ one can hear today’s young Elizabethans saying. ‘What else?’

A realistic way to view this development would be to make the entirely reasonable point that aircraft have steadily become too complex and costly. No one but a superpower or the most dedicated nation can afford the ruinous expense of designing and building them on their own. For anybody else it is a matter of forming consortiums and sharing work and costs in joint projects. Even so, the sneaking thought remains that if it matters enough to a country in terms of its independence and the prestige of its national image, it can still keep the whole process in-house, albeit at enormous cost. (In Europe one thinks primarily of France and Sweden. Outside Europe diverse nations including Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, China, India and of course Israel maintain innovative and lively indigenous aircraft industries.) But ditheringly and in piecemeal fashion over the years, the UK decided it lacked the money and the will to support a self-sufficient aircraft industry to meet its defence needs and the export market. Yet if France still can, Britain probably could have, too. We chose not to, either because we had more urgent political priorities or because motives such as national prestige were deemed too weak or laughably outmoded. It might also be because enough people in Whitehall and Downing Street were in sympathy with the view expressed by Sir W. G. Nicholson, Chief of Imperial Staff (1908–12), earlier in the twentieth century when he delivered his notorious verdict: ‘Aviation is a useless and expensive fad advocated by a few individuals whose ideas are unworthy of attention.’

Whatever the explanation, the fact remains that in the early twenty-first century the UK is no longer capable of producing an entire military aircraft or helicopter without help from abroad. Of that imposing and multi-talented – if chaotic – assortment of competing aircraft companies fifty years ago there remains virtually nothing today. One single BAE Systems factory at Warton puts together Eurofighters for an order that in any case may well dry up after 2014 and lead to its final closure. When it comes to manufacturing large aircraft, Britain’s remaining expertise is in making the wings for Airbus airliners and for the projected A400M military transport. Here Britain can cheer itself with the thought that, according to the aviation journalist Richard Gardner, we are still ‘the world leader in wing manufacturing’5 – whatever that could possibly mean, given that foreign-built wings seem to hold the world’s huge fleet of Boeings quite adequately aloft. But even such limited and dubious ‘world leadership’ has its price. ‘If the UK aerospace manufacturing sector becomes totally dependent on work packages off programmes dictated by others then it will have no control over its destiny,’ Gardner goes on to point out, adding with masterly understatement, ‘Aerospace in the UK, unlike in most other major aerospace nations, does not enjoy a high political priority.’6 If it did, one might guess that an effort would have been made to retain more than a faint echo of our former skill. Out of a mere handful of remaining small aircraft companies, Britten-Norman (part of B-N Group Ltd) is probably the largest, still producing and selling in limited numbers its outstanding Islander, Trislander and Defender series of rugged twin-engined aircraft. But they are no longer made in England. The airframes are built in Romania and shipped to Bembridge on the Isle of Wight for assembly. Of the great names in British aircraft components, most are either defunct or have been swallowed up by conglomerates, usually foreign-owned. Almost the sole exception is Martin-Baker, the world’s longest-established manufacturer of ejector seats. The company is still managed by the sons of its founder out of its original headquarters at Denham, Bucks., and claims to supply ejector seats to over seventy per cent of Western air forces. A counter on the company’s website is labelled ‘Lives Saved So Far’, and as of writing this figure stands at 7,321.

Apart from such rare exceptions, and seemingly in belated fulfilment of Duncan Sandys’s predictions, the sole indigenous aviation niche that shows much serious potential for growth is that of UAVs: the unmanned aerial vehicles increasingly used for reconnaissance and air strikes on ground targets. No doubt in terms of avionics they are massively high-tech, built as they are for remote operation, stealth and endurance rather than speed. Still, they utterly lack glamour. To an old New Elizabethan an aircraft without a pilot is not a proper aircraft at all, merely a radio-controlled model for grown-ups in uniform. It’s no longer about flying, such as the twentieth century invented and revelled in. Such drones belong to an entirely grimmer, robotic age in which machines will increasingly be used to spy on, control and kill people (‘interdiction’ in Military Speak), even while flying thousands of miles away from their desktop controllers. Future air wars will involve neither gallantry nor heroism, just mouse-clicks at a safe distance.

The conventional question for a Briton to ask is: ‘What went wrong?’ The equally conventional response has been given in a thousand learned books and articles listing the UK aero industry’s manifold faults and blunders. All they do is confirm in ever-greater scholarly detail the criticisms Bill Waterton made with such passion from ill-designed cockpits and in newspaper columns over half a century ago. A year after Waterton vanished from Britain Sir Roy Fedden published a book that delivered a scathing attack on how muddled government policy had now critically weakened the country’s air power.7 Fedden was one of the great names in aero engine development. He had founded the Bristol Aeroplane Co. in 1920 and was the firm’s chief engineer for twenty-two years before serving as a special technical adviser to the Ministry of Aircraft Production during the war, for which he was knighted. He later took various government posts, eventually becoming a technical adviser to NATO. He was thus able to view the industry from a threefold perspective of engineering, politics and military strategy. His book with its unwelcome verdict was published (by a coincidence that could only have given it added force) in 1957 at the exact moment when it was announced, mere months after Duncan Sandys’s White Paper, that the Fireflash, the guided missile in which Britain had invested high hopes, would never now be used. It had cost the taxpayer £15 million.

Fedden was widely quoted in the press, and anyone who read a newspaper soon learned that since the war Britain had ‘dabbled’ in fifty-one different military and civil aircraft projects but without enough of the trained technicians who might have built them before they became obsolete. It was a saga of reckless squandering. Merely between 1952 and 1955, Fedden wrote, ‘there was a criminal waste of technical manpower caused by eight [aero] firms being asked to tender for the same Operational Requirement, only to find, after eighteen months of concentrated work, that it was considered obsolete’. Still more recently, he said, the country had been working simultaneously on thirteen different fighter projects and eight different guided missiles, all of which was far beyond our capacity for R & D. We hadn’t the technicians, the wind tunnels, the test equipment or computer resources. He cited the way we had embarked on four different V-bombers (counting the Short Sperrin) as a particular example of duplicated work that tied up our severely limited manpower, not to mention financial resources. As an engineer, Fedden saw Britain’s future threatened by a chronic lack of engineers. ‘We have the finest technicians in the world but … there is not a single occupied chair of production engineering in any of this country’s universities. Our fatal mistake has been to clutter up our industry and to attempt to compete on level terms with the other two great powers in military aircraft. We are suffering from delusions of grandeur.’ Little change there in the last half-century, then. Still the nuclear pretensions and lack of engineers. No shortage of bankers, though.

So there it was: whatever else, a complete vindication of Bill Waterton’s main charges against both the aviation industry and government policy that had been contained in his own book a year earlier. It is worth noting that after publishing his book Sir Roy was not hounded in his retirement or blackballed by his clubs. A distinguished Knight of the Realm with exalted political and military connections, he could air his opinion with impunity. A mere Canadian airman could not. Pilots, the Establishment evidently felt, should stick to flying aircraft and content themselves with aerobatics and glamour. As mere drivers they were distinctly ‘other ranks’ and ought not to have the temerity to take the officer class to task. It made no difference that Waterton had been a civilian since 1946. He had been testing military aircraft and was bound by the Official Secrets Act. He should have known his place and kept his mouth shut … One’s admiration for the old boy’s nerve goes up still further, and all the more so in comparison with his other test pilot colleagues who were to publish their memoirs – mostly much later and, with few exceptions, carefully steering clear of the political minefield.

As already mentioned, the ‘Junior Service’, as well as British aviation as a whole, has often exhibited a tendency towards conservatism, up to and including remarkably right-wing politics. Since this has been equally true of the country’s executive echelons it is not easy to separate out how each played against the other when it came to reforming the aircraft industry. One should not underestimate the difficulty faced by the various British post-war governments, whether Conservative or Labour, when dealing with it. By the seventies, long after rationalisation and amalgamation had been forcibly imposed on the old aircraft companies and when it must have been obvious to even the densest aero executives that their entire sector’s very existence was now under threat, old attitudes and behaviour patterns persisted to an extraordinary degree. Even ten years after Harold Wilson had conjured up his image of the white heat of technology, the mindset of a leisured business class could still effortlessly douse it in cold water.

Richard Bentham remembers a telling example of this. In late October 1970 he was in the UK test-flying a version of Short’s twin turboprop Skyvan 300, an excellent light utility transport that is still flying in moderate numbers in the less accessible parts of the world. As before any test flight, he and the engineers had compiled a schedule of the different tests they needed to get through before coming down again. These things are planned methodically: time is of the essence. Flight-testing schedules usually have so many dependent financial ties and contracts attached that nothing – except possibly weather and safety issues – is allowed to stand in the way of getting the job done. On this particular morning Bentham was surprised when Short’s man in the right-hand seat suddenly called a halt to the testing when they were little more than halfway through the schedule. ‘Look at the time,’ he said, tapping the Smith’s clock on the instrument panel. ‘If we’re not careful we’ll be late for lunch. That wouldn’t do at all.’

In Bentham’s experience it was unheard-of to interrupt a test schedule in order to eat lunch. Once a flight was over, grabbing a sandwich and a coffee was usually about as much as a test pilot could expect before he had to go up again or spend the afternoon writing his report. He landed the Skyvan with just enough time to change before being ushered into the directors’ dining room for a long liquid lunch (unfortunately dry for working pilots): a full silver-service affair complete with several courses and wine waiters, port and brandy following afterwards. Around mid-afternoon the directors shuffled off, presumably for a nap. Somewhat incredulously, Bentham learned that this was no special occasion but simply how they habitually lunched at Short. As for the rest of the company, it ate in two separate dining rooms, the managerial ‘officers’ segregated from the blue-collar ‘other ranks’ who had their own canteen. That such a practice still existed at a time when British aviation was supposed finally to have become lean, mean and hungry for business came as a shock to Bentham. Still, he was Canadian and this was England, where they did things differently. To his amazement he later learned that a similar system of formal meals in three separate dining rooms still prevailed at that time even across the Atlantic at Avro Canada and de Havilland Canada. His surprise was identical to Stanley Hooker’s over the ‘Bristol lunches’ that had so taken their toll of the working day back in the mid-fifties. The upshot for Bentham that afternoon in 1970 was that it took two flights and an extra day to do what could easily have been done in one. Despite this antique Top Table approach to management, Short, which was the world’s oldest proper aircraft company (founded in 1908), survived until 1989 when it was acquired by the Canadian giant Bombardier Aerospace. It now makes aircraft components for its parent company and others at its Belfast factory.

Not that in those days a British aircraft company’s fortunes could be held to ransom solely by its directors’ dining traditions. At the other end of the social scale lurked the unions. In August 1977 Richard Bentham made three test flights from Hatfield with John Cunningham in the Hawker Siddeley (BAe/de Havilland) HS.125-700B (‘a decent business jet, but the French Dassault Falcons were superior in every respect’). By this period in his career Cunningham had become something of a Grand Old Man among British test pilots, his wartime ‘Cat’s Eyes’ image having been successfully trumped by his celebrated work for de Havilland on the Comet and latterly on the Trident. Only three years from retirement, Cunningham somewhat resembled a grog-blossomed choirboy, albeit an extremely affable and gentlemanly one. His speech and mannerisms struck Bentham the Canadian as ‘typically English upper-class’, none of which detracted from the man’s skill and long experience as a chief test pilot.

‘I recall John Cunningham’s real concern about getting back on the ground half an hour before quitting time so that the day shift could get the airplane safely tucked into the hangar. Otherwise, as I remember it, for even a few minutes past the magic quitting time they would all get a full shift of overtime. Even the illustrious John Cunningham had no power here. I was amused – he was not. I never saw such a thing anywhere else in the world.’8

 *

One ought always to be suspicious of those virtues on which nations most pride themselves. I grew up to inherit the ubiquitous popular wisdom that the one thing we British were good at was management and organisation which, together with our famous imperturbability, was how we Got Things Done even when we had our backs to the wall. This, of course, was by contrast with hysterical foreigners who – in a favourite unlovely metaphor – ‘couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery’. All too sober, we can now look back on the last sixty years as an awful demonstration of a leading industrial nation’s absolute inability to organise an aviation industry: a failure we achieved with managerial skills that would have disgraced Noah, let alone a nineteenth-century mill owner. A notorious recent example of these same skills was afforded by the opening of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 in early 2008. The short-lived scenes of chaos, with 500 flights cancelled and 23,000 passengers taking off without their luggage, were televised around the world.

That such criticisms of British managerial competence are not misplaced has been forcefully borne out recently by John Edgley, the chairman of AeroElvira. Edgley describes his entire career as one of continuous effort to further the cause of making light aircraft in the UK. He was the man behind the highly original Optica project: a radical design in the early eighties for a slow-flying observation light aircraft that was far ahead of its time when launched. The test pilot for the EA-7 Optica was Neville Duke (who, despite his back injury, went on test flying until 1994, when he was seventy-four). Today, a handful of EA-7s are flying in the UK, the US and Australia. In a letter to The Aerospace Professional in 2010 Edgley gave as the principal reason for the Optica’s failure to generate big sales: ‘lack of manufacturing expertise, particularly in management. We simply seem to have no national system for training people in the necessary management skills.’ He went on to admit that all the interest in setting up production of an updated version of the Optica was now coming from overseas. ‘The interest from UK manufacturing is zero …’9 Such official indifference surely lies at the heart of the country’s waning economic power.

For a New Elizabethan who as a near-teenager saw the great Coronation fly-pasts of 1953 and can remember them as though it were yesterday, it is sometimes hard to get a grip on the slippery years between then and now. The gulf between that era’s promise of national rebirth and the present-day reality is too great. Sometimes, in mulish mood, the New Elizabethan-turned-pensioner ponders whether, in terms of deciding where it wants to go and planning accordingly, his country may not have good claims to be consistently the worst-governed of any advanced industrial nation since the Second World War. There seems to have been so little shape or direction to any of it that one probably shouldn’t single out the aviation industry for special lament. It all goes back to the question posed the day after VE day in 1945: Now what was Britain’s role in the world to be? In the ensuing sixty years of Westminster debates and newspaper editorials this has never been satisfactorily answered. What ought we to be doing, militarily speaking? Should we be on our own? Are we just members of NATO? Are we part of Europe? Are we in league with the United States (even if the US patently couldn’t care if we sank beneath the North Atlantic tomorrow)? Why do we need nuclear weapons? Just what on earth do we think we’re doing in Afghanistan (of all places, given British history), fighting with our traditional gallantry on our traditional shoestring with shamefully inadequate back-up and equipment? Replies to all these are given in Parliament with equally traditional bluster and rhetoric, but the true answers remain unknown. Nothing further ahead than the next general election is ever envisaged. Still, the present dire lack of money means that the next Strategic Defence Review may have to go further towards clarifying matters than any of its numerous predecessors did.

It is evident from the story of this post-war period that, nostalgia apart, it would be pure self-delusion to look back on it as a ‘golden age’ for British aviation, given that it marked the effective dissolution of the nation’s aircraft industry. However, there were very definitely golden moments gleaming throughout, with golden men and golden machines that unquestionably blazed amid the dispiriting muddle. It was still an era of shirt-sleeved competence. The heroism of the pilots, the risk-taking bravery of the various companies and designers as well as the daring of the engineers: all deserve recognition. They stand in glorious contrast to the loss of nerve, vacillation and incompetence that characterised so many successive governments in their pretence of deciding whether Britain should continue to build aircraft even as they prolonged the charade of acting as though Britain were still a first-rate power. It scarcely matters now whether the decision to dismantle British aviation was actually taken or whether it was simply allowed to go by default. There is no going back. Just as there remains only a handful of Britons who still know how to make a beer barrel out of oak staves or lay a hedge properly, so there is virtually nobody left who knows how to design and build even a light aircraft from scratch. This may or may not matter in the long run – only time or some unimaginable national emergency will tell. But in the short run it feels like pure loss: the casual draining of a painfully acquired reservoir of national know-how that amounts to a form of treason.

If one were looking for a physical monument to that whole period when Britain possessed world-calibre industrial skills, one could do worse than consider the old National Gas Turbine Establishment at Pyestock, Farnborough. It is a 108-acre site of gigantic derelict industrial architecture: silent, dignified and redolent of past achievement. It was the outcome of the wartime Gas Turbine Collaboration Committee that was set up to co-ordinate information from all the companies and engineers working on Frank Whittle’s W.2 jet engine as well as on other gas turbine projects. Whittle himself worked there; Concorde’s engines were tested there; and in between, every jet aircraft the British aircraft industry ever built was a direct beneficiary of the research, knowledge and skill amassed at NGTE. No longer wanted by the government, the site was privatised in 2002 as part of QinetiQ, since when it has fallen steadily into the decay of abandonment. As someone who worked there in its heyday reminisced sadly, ‘Those were the days when you could be proud of something.’*

 *

Back in 1968 matters of pride were also central to a private gesture that had public impact when it hit the headlines. Although it was intended as a protest, it could also have stood as an unofficial and heartfelt farewell to British aviation and to the old spirit of the RAF it was bound up with. Ever since the Sandys White Paper morale in all the services had declined, but nowhere had it slumped lower than in the RAF. The first of April 1968 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the forming of the RAF from the old Royal Flying Corps. The RAF began making preparations for a fly-past over London to commemorate the day. Although in terms of age it was the Junior Service, ever since the Battle of Britain it had been the most dramatically visible of the three: the country’s premier quick-reaction fighting force that even in peacetime continued to suffer a heavy toll of casualties. As the day approached, however, it became clear that Harold Wilson’s Labour government was planning no such fly-past and mur-murs of disquiet were heard in RAF stations across the land. What made 1 April even more poignant was the announcement that on that day Fighter Command would cease to exist. It and Bomber Command would be subsumed into something called Strike Command – a dim title that in an era of mounting industrial unrest also had all the wrong overtones. No more Fighter Command? My grandmother would have had a fit.

At No. 1 (Fighter) Squadron, West Raynham, Flight Lieutenant Alan Pollock was senior operational flight commander. This was the RAF’s (and the world’s) oldest military air squadron, and Pollock felt passionately that the service’s fiftieth birthday ought to be marked by something more memorable than a royal anniversary dinner and a few parades. Accordingly, he and his colleagues organised several celebratory leaflet raids on various RAF stations to be carried out using the Squadron’s Hawker Hunters. Pollock had seen action in the Middle East and was no stranger to skip bombing runs, so this would be a combination of professional skill and old-fashioned RAF exuberance, no doubt including a traditional ‘beat-up’ of the airfields. On 4 April they were all invited to a party at No. 1 Squadron’s pre-war home in West Sussex – Tangmere. The party itself was excellent and included notables such as Air Vice-Marshal ‘Mickey’ Martin, who had flown his Lancaster (P for ‘Popsie’) to bomb the Möhne Dam in the Dambusters raid. Still, at the back of everybody’s mind was the melancholy awareness that Tangmere was scheduled to close as an RAF station (which it did in October 1970). Of all the airfields made famous in the defence of London during the Battle of Britain, Tangmere was perhaps the most numinous, more so even than Biggin Hill, Kenley, West Malling, Hornchurch, North Weald or Northolt. ‘Teddy’ Donaldson had been stationed there in 1940 when in command of 151 Squadron. So had Douglas Bader in 1941, flying as a wing leader with 616 Squadron when he was shot down over France and taken prisoner for the duration. The immensely dangerous secret SOE (Special Operations Executive) flights had been based there, ferrying agents to and from Occupied France by night in ‘Teddy’ Petter’s black Lysanders. After the war, Tangmere was home to the Fighter Leaders School and the High Speed Flight in which Bill Waterton and Neville Duke had assisted Group Captain Donaldson in setting the world airspeed record. Later still, in the year of the Coronation, it was the base from which Duke had captured the new world record in his red Hawker Hunter. (Unknown to all in 1968, Donaldson would even be buried at Tangmere in 1992 when he died at the ripe age – for a pilot of that era – of eighty.) To many of the revellers on the night of the party – and especially those who had overdone the champagne – it was hallowed ground. To them, Tangmere was the RAF; and its impending closure had about it an air of finality that went beyond the mere redeployment of a squadron.

The next morning, Al Pollock and the others climbed into their Hunters to fly back to West Raynham. Overnight, Al had taken a decision he kept to himself. Since London lay directly on his course to Norfolk, he was determined to slip away from the others and carry out a solo defiant ‘celebration flag-wave’ of his own over the Houses of Parliament, Downing Street, the Ministry of Defence and – most particularly – the RAF Memorial on the Westminster Embankment. What his comrades didn’t know about it couldn’t harm their careers. Pollock was flying XF 442, a Hunter FGA.9, the ground-attack version of the type. The pan at Tangmere now became loud with the shrill hiss of Avpin starters and acrid with drifting gases as the five started their Avons. As their jet-pipe temperatures stabilised the men carried out the ritual pre-flight check: bang seat live and pins stowed, trim, fuel, flaps, instruments, oxygen, hood, harness and hydraulics. Then, having checked in on Tangmere’s local traffic radio frequency, brakes off and taxi out to turn on to the runway: ‘the last section of the last Hunters and fighters of the RAF to fly into and out of our nation’s historically greatest fighter airfield’, as Pollock later wrote in valediction.10

Immediately after take-off he gave the others the slip, quickly dropping to low level so his Hunter’s camouflage would render it invisible from above as he sped across the Sussex countryside. On the way to London he paused briefly to beat up Dunsfold airfield – the home of Hawker, who had designed and built so many great aircraft, including the one he was flying. Two minutes later he was over the reservoirs just to the south of Heathrow. He joined the Thames and flew eastwards along it, banking low to follow its sinuous curves. ‘The weather was one of those rare, perfect, 8/8 Gordon’s-crystal-gin-clear days when all the colours shout out brightly … I swept round over Wandsworth, Battersea and Chelsea bridges, keeping a special eye open for any helicopters.’

Within seconds he was over the Houses of Parliament and Whitehall. His approach so far had been discreet: slow and comparatively quiet. Now, though, in order to keep a good tight circle over Westminster, Pollock had to open the throttle and make a lot more noise. The roar of his Rolls-Royce jet at almost rooftop level ‘was perhaps what was really necessary at this juncture to wake up our MPs and remind other august figures, sitting chairbound at their ministerial desks below, that we still had a fighting Air Force, one small unit of which was celebrating its anniversary, despite the dead hand of government policy and the sickening cut-backs of previous years’. Three times he circled low, the noise interrupting a debate in the House of Commons. Then he levelled out over the Thames and dipped his wings past the RAF Memorial on the Embankment. Satisfied that he had made his point, Pollock glanced at the fuel gauge and decided to carry on eastwards along the river to Essex and then turn north to West Raynham. But as he crossed London Bridge, travelling at about 330 knots now the need for stealth was over, Tower Bridge suddenly loomed ahead through his windscreen.

‘Until this very instant I’d had absolutely no idea that, of course, Tower Bridge would be there. It was easy enough to fly over it, but the idea of flying through the spans suddenly struck me. I had just seconds to grapple with the seductive proposition which few ground attack pilots of any nationality could have resisted. Years of fast low-level strike flying made the decision simple.’ What else could any RAF pilot officially rated as ‘Exceptional’ be expected to do, flying a Hawker Hunter illegally low over central London on a sparkling morning in April? He had already burnt his boats: his career was almost certainly in tatters. He was thirty-two years old and the father of four, with the responsibilities of a breadwinning family man – but what the hell. There are moments when you just have to go for broke. ‘There was considerable road traffic I could now see, including a red double-decker bus slowly lumbering across the famous double-basculed bridge from north to south.’ Calculating his clearances with split-second accuracy, Al Pollock took his camouflaged Hunter through the bridge above the traffic in a blast of motion and sound that beat back from the iron girders and startled the living daylights out of a good few people. By the time they realised what they had seen, Pollock’s Hunter was a dwindling speck passing Rotherhithe in a shimmering blur of exhaust. He was not the first pilot to have flown through the bridge, but he was the first ever to do so in a jet aircraft.

On the way home Al Pollock beat up RAF stations Wattisham, Lakenheath and Marham. Finally, with less than 400 pounds of fuel left, he carried out ‘a rather hurried, inadequate, inverted run over the squadron hangars at RAF West Raynham before breaking downwind, punching down the gear and landing, with the brake parachute bobbing about contentedly behind …’ Within the hour all hell had broken loose. Pollock was formally placed under arrest on his station. Media reaction was split between two camps. ‘Hunter Ace – Hero or Hooligan?’ one newspaper asked, plainly unwilling to commit itself. There was a good deal of support from members of the public, like the lady who wrote to the Daily Express saying, ‘Please don’t condemn or punish the dare-devil pilot who swept across London. It did me – and a lot of other people – a world of good. I shall always remember the feeling of pride as I thought of that chap in control of so much power, and it revived memories of those wonderful fellows who during the war fought for our survival.’ For the other side, the ‘authorities’ made predictably unsmiling statements, like the Metropolitan Police spokesman who said, ‘We do not regard this as a joke. It could have had serious consequences. There were pedestrians and vehicles on the bridge.’ How frightful. Only, of course, it didn’t have serious consequences – except for Flight Lieutenant Pollock.

A short while later his squadron (which he should have been leading) was detached to North Africa for operational weapons training. Recovering from pneumonia and what he sensed were complications induced by the drug he had been prescribed, he felt increasingly isolated and abandoned. In the next six weeks his statutory right to see his Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief was twice denied before the Under-Secretary of State for Air formally announced to the press that Pollock would not be tried by court martial but instead would be invalided out of the RAF – and this before the medical board had even been convened. He was given no option in the matter. ‘I was told that if I did not accept the invaliding out, with the inducement of my small pension, my services could be dispensed with under a certain Queen’s Regulation without any formal disciplinary action or come-back.’ Naturally there was a subtext to all this. By not putting Pollock before a court martial, the authorities were ensuring that his reasons for the stunt would get no public airing or act as a focus for the support he was already getting from the public at large as well as from all three services.

The incident came at a particularly bad moment for the Wilson government, which anyway faced rebellion in the press. But in addition there was the so-called ‘Westminster Plot’. Within a month of Pollock’s exploit and even as he was still in limbo under arrest, the hugely influential owner of the Mirror Group Newspapers, Cecil King, instigated a meeting with Lord Mountbatten and Sir Solly Zuckerman, Harold Wilson’s chief scientific adviser, at which he suggested the time was now ripe to overthrow the government and replace it with a temporary administration headed by Lord Mountbatten. Zuckerman left the room, calling the idea ‘treason’, and the plot fizzled. But amid the atmosphere of paranoia at No. 10 Downing Street it is easy to see why the government was not keen to have Pollock take the stand at a court martial, explain exactly why the services were feeling so aggrieved, and cut a sympathetic – even heroic – figure.

In due course Al Pollock embarked on a new career and memories of the incident faded. But it is hard now not to see him as sharing a character trait with Bill Waterton. Both could be self-destructive when an issue of principle was involved. It is a quality that feels wholly admirable these days, when even disgraced public officials feel no compulsion to resign or even to apologise. One can certainly imagine Waterton applauding Pollock’s defiant gesture on behalf of the service they both loved. Indeed, it is slightly surprising that he never did something similar himself to draw attention to how the practices of the aero industry were failing the country. The man who was invited to beat up the centre of Paris in a Meteor could so easily have done the same to London under the spur of truculence, buzzing Whitehall before sailing through Tower Bridge inverted. But eventually he had no need to, because for two years as a journalist he had a public forum that Alan Pollock was denied, and could make his points forcefully enough in print.

Well, it was all a long time ago. In the last forty years Britain has changed out of all recognition. The majority of the population has no memories of war, and the gallantries of yesteryear have inevitably lost their immediacy. To many, the Battle of Britain might as well be Waterloo: no less (but no more) real than its digital simulation as a desktop game. We are left with the irony that Gloster’s name for Britain’s first jet fighter, the Meteor, should also describe the trajectory of the country’s postwar aero industry: a short-lived phenomenon that dazzled even as it was breaking up, leaving a trail seared across one’s mental retina and a fallout of dust. Out of that dust sift memories of the heart-stoppingly sleek and dangerous machines that once roared over the Home Counties, whose approaching moan or exhilarating thunder would cause us New Elizabethans to drop everything and dash outside, craning skyward.

Yet recalling those aircraft now – the Meteors and Hunters and Vulcans and Lightnings – is more than a mere essay in nostalgia. Some of the qualities of the Britons who made and flew them rubbed off on their younger aspirants who now, decades later, feel compelled to honour the deal before it is too late, and remind another generation of what they magnificently achieved. No one today should ever sit cocooned in the safety of an Airbus or a Boeing without being aware of the hundreds of gravestones that paved the way to that safety. Beneath those slabs lie the remains of mostly young men: the smashed, the charred, the decapitated, as well as the empty coffins of those who simply disappeared or were vaporised on impact. To us who once saw many of them fly they are still vivid. Until we ourselves are broken up for scrap or buried they will always be there, pummelling an inward sky with sonic booms and leaving it indelibly smudged with smoke and contrails.

Notes – Chapter 10: Not with a Bang

1 W. A. Waterton, interview with Jim Algie of the Owen Sound Sun Times, 11 December 2003, for this and the following quotations.

2 Richard Bentham, personal correspondence and interviews, 2009, for this and the following quotations.

3 Toronto Globe and Mail, 17 July 2006.

4 www.pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-80859.html.

5 Aerospace International, August 2009, p. 34.

6 Ibid., p. 32.

7 Roy Fedden, Britain’s Air Survival (Cassell, 1957).

8 Bentham, personal correspondence, 22 June 2009.

9 The Aerospace Professional, March 2010, p. 4.

10 See FlyPast magazine, September 1981, for this and the following quotations.

§ Jeffrey Quill (1913–96) succeeded ‘Mutt’ Summers as Vickers’s chief test pilot after test flying every single mark of the Spitfire, the aircraft with which he is famously associated.

* For a visual tour of this remarkable site, visit www.derelicte.co.uk/ngte.