Not Much of an Engineer

Chapter 1

The Professional Student

It was a damp, cold day in January 1938 when I garaged my car at the junction with the Osmaston Road and began to walk up Nightingale Road towards the great Rolls-Royce works in Derby.

The dreariness of the street, with its terrace of redbrick workers' houses on the left, interspersed with the odd conversion to a general grocer's or tobacconist, and on the right a small open lot used as a works car park, matched the foreboding in my mind. Not a soul was in sight, nor was there any noise, because the workshops were set back from the road behind the front facade of offices.

With each step I took, my heart sank further. Why had I left my comfortable and interesting job in the Scientific Research Department of the Admiralty? And what was I going to do in the formidable Rolls-Royce company, which represented the very pinnacle of engineering excellence?

I was no engineer. I had been trained in Applied Mathematics, so how could I hope to compete with, or even to help, the semi-Godlike engineers with which, I was convinced, Rolls-Royce must be stocked - doubtless trained by the legendary Sir Henry Royce himself?

The apprehension grew as I approached the main entrance on my right. It stood back a few yards from the pavement, with an oval drive in and out in front. At the door stood a very smart uniformed commissionaire. I approached him with caution.

'Yes, sir, you will find Mr Elliott's office in the next block. Take the next gate on the right, and then the entrance to the Engineering Offices is on your left'.

I found my way easily enough, and stumbled along the corridor until I reached the office marked A. G. ELLIOTT, Chief Engineer. I knocked and was told to enter. It was not a large office, and very sparsely furnished. Mr Elliott sat at his desk, back to the windows and facing the door. In the further corner sat his personal assistant, A. Livesey.

Elliott clearly had not the foggiest idea who I was, and had forgotten that he was to interview me. He spoke very quietly and enquired about my business. I explained that I was the new man joining the firm, by name Hooker. He smiled as the memory came back and said, 'Of course, welcome to Rolls-Royce. We have prepared an office for you, and Mr Livesey will show you to it'.

The interview was over that quickly, and it was not at all what I had expected. Livesey led me around the corridor, and at a junction he opened a door, and said 'This is your office, cheerio'. The walls were painted metal for the first four feet from the floor, and frosted glass above. It was about eight feet square and contained a desk, a chair, an empty bookcase and a telephone, and nothing more. I sank bewildered into the hard chair and gazed at the nothingness of the wall.

All around me there was a hive of industry. I could hear telephones ringing, the clacking of typewriters, and the hum of conversation. Mostly the offices were much larger open spaces with similar dividing walls, but housing groups of men working with intense concentration. A very large area was clearly devoted to design, and full of towering drawing-boards.

Later I learned that rumour and curiosity was rife about the new so-called 'mathematical whizz kid' who had been granted the rare privilege of a private office. At the time I was just ignored, completely.

And so the day wore slowly on. I had anticipated that I would have been put into the charge of some awe-inspiring engineer, who would have allocated me some simple tasks while instructing me in the mysteries of the super aero engines that Rolls-Royce was designing and producing. But it was not so. I, who had never seen an aero engine at close range, and who only had a schoolboy's knowledge of its inside, did not even know the names of the engines Rolls-Royce was producing.

At 5.00 pm there was a general exodus, and I departed with the rest, thoroughly dispirited at the emptiness of my first day. However, after my evening meal, I cheered up a bit when it occurred to me that the only possible explanation must be that the powers that be were still debating my ultimate fate, and had not yet reached any conclusion about the job I was to do.

On the next day I arrived promptly at 8.30 am with the rest of the staff, but I had with me The Times, and my pipe and tobacco. In those days I only smoked occasionally in the evenings, but I felt the need of a comforter. Never was The Times read more completely and carefully, as the second day proved to be a replica of the first. Nobody came near me.

Things being thus, I had plenty of time to cogitate on the curious chain of events which had led me, at the age of 31 years, to be seated in an office in the Engineering Department of the great Rolls-Royce company doing nothing - especially as I had had no previous aspirations to be an engineer.

I was born on 30 September 1907, at Sheerness, Kent. After various vicissitudes through World War I, I was sent to Borden Grammar School, near Sittingbourne, in 1919.

For the first four years, I had an uninspiring career, because I soon found that I could maintain an 'invisible' position, about mid-form, with the minimum of effort on my part. I was, however, quite interested in physics and mathematics, and in the examinations at the end of each year usually managed to acquire the prize awarded jointly for these subjects.

At the end of the fourth year, in June 1923, I knew that I, with the rest of the fifth form, was required to take the Matriculation Examination for London University. Since there was no escape, I decided to try a little harder, and unnoticed I put in a couple of terms' good work. To the immense surprise of masters, boys and myself, I did very well indeed in the examination; so well, in fact, that the school was granted a half-day's holiday in celebration.

This was a turning point, because it was then decided that I must try for London University by way of three more years at school, and by taking a Royal Scholarship in Physics. There were six such scholarships given annually, and they had to be won in open competition. They were tenable for three years at Imperial College, London, and were worth £150 per annum, of which the college took £62.10s (£62.50) for fees.

In 1926 I won such a scholarship, and also, in the Entrance Examination for Imperial College, I was awarded a free place, so that the whole of the £150 was mine. This was a princely sum for a young student in those days.

When I went up to Imperial in 1926 I elected to take the course in Honours Mathematics. The Professor of Mathematics was Sydney Chapman, whose main interest was geophysics. I found him a very cold and distant man, and I had no interest in his subject. Much more to my liking was his Assistant Professor, who was a volatile jew, Hyman Levy. His interest was hydrodynamics, and so I elected to specialise in that subject.

It was Levy who introduced me to the Kármán Vortex Street, which is the series of eddies which are shed alternately from each side of a body moving through a fluid such as air or water. These eddies produce the drag of the body, and are spaced in a particular manner which was first evaluated by Professor von Kármán at Göttingen.

Under Levy's guidance, I produced two papers - one published by the Philosophical Magazine and the other by the Royal Society - slightly extending von Kármán's theory. In this manner I came to know, and become friends with, the great man himself. Years later this was to prove an enormous advantage to me and of great benefit to the British aero industry.

At the end of my third year at Imperial College, I was awarded the Governors' Prize for Mathematics (£5 worth of books!), and I began vaguely to think of an academic career as a lecturer and, hopefully, later as a professor. But in September 1928 I was awarded The Busk Studentship in Aeronautics. This had been instituted by the Busk family in memory of Edward Busk who was killed as a pioneer aviator. I still remember with gratitude and affection the personal letters which came from either his mother or his widow at the beginning of each term, with a cheque for £50.

The Aeronautics Department was situated in the basement of the Huxley Building in Exhibition Road, South Kensington. This also housed the Mathematics Department, so I did not move far, but fell under the tuition of Professor Leonard Bairstow, W. S. Farren, and H. Roxbee Cox (now Lord Kings Norton), who respectively initiated me into the mysteries of the lift and drag of wings, the design of aircraft structures, and the design of airships. I suppose this was my first tentative step in the direction of engineering, but, because of Levy's influence in directing me towards hydrodynamics (the flow of fluids), I found that the most interesting part of the Aeronautics course was the aerodynamic flow of air around the wings of aircraft, thus producing the lift and the drag.

The department had a small wind tunnel, and I was able to make experiments on the flow of air and found, somewhat to my surprise, how much I enjoyed such work. In fact, the appreciation, liking and knowledge of aerodynamics which I gained at that time have been a great strength to me throughout my career, especially when I was moved into the field of gas turbines.

In 1929 an income of £150 per year was an enviable one, particularly as I was living quite cheaply with my sister and her husband in a flat in Battersea. The economy of the country was very depressed, and jobs were hard to come by, and so it seemed quite reasonable to carry on as a student while I could get such funds to support me. In fact the student life, with its long vacations during which I did no work...