Stephen Morris (14 page)

Stenning considered a little. He was by no means sure that Morris would like his affairs discussed in this manner, yet he couldn’t very well refuse to say what he knew.

‘I don’t really know,’ he said. ‘Riley told me just before – before the accident, that Rawdon thought a lot of him. I suppose he’s getting seven pounds a week or so. He’s got some money of his own, too. He’ll get on pretty
well, I should think, and end up in partnership with some designer. Then I expect the flying brings him in a couple of hundred a year or so, in addition. Of course, I don’t know at all what terms he’s on – it’s only guesswork. I haven’t seen him since we broke up.’

‘He always was pretty bright in his own line,’ said Lechlane absently. He roused himself. ‘Did you ever hear anything of Malcolm’s business with the Phillips Company?’

Benjamin sat up with a sigh of relief.

Early in the summer, the Rawdon two-seater fighter with the Stoat engine had been completed and flown away to Martlesham by an Air Force pilot. She was a good machine, a great advance on anything the Air Force had, both in performance and manœuvrability. Rawdon had high hopes for her; she had been an expensive machine to build experimentally – in fact he had built her at a loss. That did not matter; there would be a big contract coming along for her in a little time. That was certain.

The torpedo carrier, too, was in the workshops approaching completion. She was a good straightforward design, nothing very startling or original about her, rather like an enlarged edition of the fighter in appearance. Indeed, it was becoming increasingly difficult to design any military machine that had any pretence to novelty or aerodynamic advance. The design of every such machine had to pass stringent, if ill-informed, critics at the Air Ministry; what had not been done before was looked upon with grave suspicion, if not met with an absolute veto. A reliable machine must be produced for the taxpayers’ money – that was the one consideration governing all experimental contracts. Hence it came to pass that any innovations in design were
applied first to commercial machines as a general rule.

This was the case of the Sesquiplane. During the previous year the French had coined that word and applied it to a racing machine that, they alleged, was neither monoplane nor biplane, but a combination of the two. Unimaginative people would have called it a strutted monoplane with a faired undercarriage axle; the French chose to call it a ‘one-and-a-half-plane’ and coined a new term for it. The scheme had occurred to Rawdon before as a possibility for a light commercial machine. It was purely experimental, though he had obtained an order for it. It was to be quite small; a three-passenger machine to be used on the air taxi service that Riley had been chief pilot for. Rawdon expected to be able to turn out a stiffer structure altogether than by the usual arrangements of struts and wires.

A model was made and Morris took it down to the National Physical Laboratory to be tested, staying to watch the tests and to assist. In two days he returned, bringing with him the model and a little booklet of ciphers. An examination of these revealed a better state of affairs than Rawdon had even hoped for; by some chance he had evidently hit upon a peculiarly happy combination of body and wing. There were mysterious features about this aerodynamics. Sometimes the air liked a model and flowed smoothly over it at any speed. Make a small alteration in some detail and the whole thing was upset; eddies evidently formed far away from the alteration, where no eddies had been before, and the resistance of the model might be half as much again. That meant less speed for a given horse-power, less load for a given speed. In fact, an inferior machine.

Rawdon leaned over Morris’s desk and studied his figures, his great brows knitted in a frown.

‘We must go easy with that strut fairing,’ he observed, ‘or we’ll be getting too much dihedral effect.’

‘It’s rather a pity we didn’t have a look at that when it was in the tunnel,’ said Morris.

The designer nodded. ‘We must manage to get a tunnel of our own,’ he said, ‘even if it’s only a little one. Simply can’t get on without it. We ought to have made a dozen comparative tests with this model – different arrangements of wing and body. We don’t know enough about it – not nearly enough.’

But there was little chance of finding the money for a wind channel just yet.

Indeed, as the winter drew on, the difficulty of finding money for many things became more acute. The orders for the two-seater fighter, so confidently expected, had not materialised; instead there came a rumour round the office that another experimental machine was to be designed. But this did not materialise, and work was concentrated on the design of the Sesquiplane. Presently the torpedo carrier was ready, and the question arose as to who was to fly it.

‘You’d better take it off,’ said Rawdon to Morris one day. ‘I’ll get that through with the Air Ministry. You were on Handley Pages in the war, weren’t you? That will make it all right with them.’

But it did not, for the Air Ministry, for reasons best known to themselves, flatly refused to allow Mr Morris to touch their torpedo carrier, ordered and paid for with the country’s money. If Captain Rawdon could produce no better pilot than Mr Morris for this important and delicate work, then they would provide a pilot from the Royal Air Force … To which Captain Rawdon regretted that he knew of no pilot at present in the country, whether in the Air Force or out of it, to whom he would more readily entrust this work, but would be pleased to give any information about the machine to any pilot they cared to send down. The machine, completed but never flown, lay in the erecting-shop for
several months, accumulating a rich coating of dust, till everybody had lost all interest in it, and hated the sight of it. Then the pilot was selected, arrived, and flew the machine away. Six weeks elapsed between its first and second flights. It never made a third, for they crashed it in an ill-advised attempt to land at a slower speed than that for which the machine was designed.

‘If only one could design for some country that knew nothing at all about aeroplanes – say the Argentine Republic,’ said Rawdon wistfully, ‘I believe one could turn out a really good machine.’

The non-technical side of the Air Ministry, however, admirably fulfilled its role of godfather to the industry. Provided with a tiny sum to spend annually on new aeroplanes, it distributed its favours in such a way that while every firm in the industry was on the verge of bankruptcy, the crash was somehow staved off from month to month. At this time it was admitted that if one firm had gone, the rest would have followed suit. But the one firm did not go. Somehow the industry was struggling along through the bad times, plaintively bemoaning the old days when there was a war on, fed with rare commercial orders, constantly saved from extinction by timely orders for military machines and, at all times, bitterly bickering with the Air Ministry. That was, perhaps, the healthiest sign of all.

Apart from that continual sign of life, however, things were not hopeful in the Rawdon Company. As the winter ran on its course, it became a matter of considerable doubt whether the firm would be able to keep going at all. It seemed inconceivable that such a firm should be allowed to break up, in the very interests of the country. Yet the facts were becoming obvious to everyone from Rawdon to the little girl. By Christmas, the design of the Sesquiplane was near its end; already it was beginning to come together in the shops. No more design work
appeared, only a monotonous succession of odd jobs. There was a racing motor-car to be fitted with a streamline body, a privately-owned aeroplane to be fitted with a monstrous excrescence of a cabin, two or three Rabbits to be completed for the Dutch Government. In the workshops more than half the men had been sacked; it looked as if they would very shortly start on the office.

By the beginning of January they had already done so. It began with three draughtsmen who, instead of receiving their pay in a little envelope on Friday evening, were told to go and get it at the office. They returned with glum faces and instructions to take a short holiday – unpaid.

There was no more work done in the drawing-office that evening. It did not matter much; the work was of little importance. The men stood about in little groups beside each others’ desks, ostensibly in search of data, really in gloomy speculation as to where the blow would fall next.

‘Someone said that Pilling-Henries were taking on men,’ said James, the engine draughtsman, to one of the discharged men. ‘I’d have a shot there, if I were you, old man.’

The other looked a little pinched. He had no illusions about Pilling-Henries, though he would try it, with every other firm that he could think of. He would start tomorrow, walking and omnibusing all over London, calling at various firms, only to be turned away. The evening he would spend talking cheerily about his chances to his wife, and in writing letters to provincial firms. The first three hours of the night he would spend in sleep, and the remaining five in thought. Then the round would start all over again.

Morris was concerned about all this, uneasy as to how it would affect him. He did not think he would be sacked; he thought he would be kept on as the firm’s
pilot, till the Sesquiplane was flown, anyway. He believed he was to fly it. After that it was difficult to say. If the firm went on, he might go on with it. But if the firm bust?

He did not know what he would do if the firm bust. He had no qualifications, no engineering degree or status whatever. He had saved a good bit during the last fifteen months; latterly he had been making something like six hundred a year, all told. It was on the strength of that that he had bought Riley’s car. He could not afford to get married, because the majority of his income came from piloting, and he did not regard that as a certainty. But he could afford to buy Riley’s little car.

More draughtsmen were put on that euphemistic holiday, till only a bare skeleton of the staff remained. So far the technical staff, consisting of Nichols, Pocock, and Morris, had been inviolate. Then, one black day, they were sent for one after another.

Morris entered Rawdon’s office and found him by himself, if anything a trifle calmer, a trifle more self-possessed than usual.

‘Sit down, Mr Morris.’ Morris obeyed.

The designer caressed his chin with one hand. ‘As you see,’ he said, ‘this firm is in a serious state. We’ve had to cut down our staff very much, and we’ve got to reduce it still further. I hoped to get through without touching any of you technical men. Then I thought that if I’d got to cut any of you, I’d better have you all in and tell you just how things stand.’

‘I see,’ said Morris.

‘We ought to have got a biggish contract for the fighter. It hasn’t come, and it won’t come for some time now, perhaps with the next budget, perhaps longer. We’re going to build another torpedo carrier in place of the one they crashed – there may or may not be a contract for that later. In any case, it won’t be for some
months, because they crashed the other one before getting any tests done on it, so that nobody knows what its performance is. Then there’s the Sesquiplane. I expect that to be out in March, or late in February. If it’s a success, we’ll probably get an order to build half a dozen for the summer traffic – that will be a rush job if it comes.’

He paused a little.

‘So you see the position is that we ought to be all right in three months’ time – if these things come off. I think we can hang on till then, but only by cutting the staff down to a skeleton. Now I want you to stay on and fly the Sesquiplane – I want that flown by someone who knows it inside out. I don’t want another repetition of that torpedo-carrier business.’

Morris smiled.

‘Well, Mr Morris,’ said the designer, ‘it comes to this. Things are pretty bad, but I think we’ll get through all right. I don’t want you to go off and take another job in a hurry, thinking you’re going to be sacked. You’re all right till the Sesquiplane has flown. After that, or by that time, I hope we shall be in a stronger position.’

He rose from his desk. ‘That’s all I wanted to say.’

Morris returned thoughtfully to the drawing-office. There he found that Rawdon had said substantially the same to each of them – with this difference. Pocock and Nichols were to go ‘on holiday’.

At the end of an hour’s desultory discussion, Pocock looked up with a queer smile.

‘I’ve been in some odd shows in my time,’ he said, ‘but this is the first time I’ve ever been on a sinking ship.’

By the end of February the drawing-office, once numbering over twenty, had been reduced to five members. There were Morris, Baker the chief draughtsman, James the engine draughtsman, and two others. Corresponding reductions had been made on the business
side. Thus the staff became dispersed, that highly-trained staff that had worked together on the design of aeroplanes since 1916, in the days of the Rat. Pocock had gone north, and was reported to be working in a steel works. Nichols, who had been in aviation for eleven years, had found a safe, well-paid job in a biscuit factory; a permanency which at his age he was unlikely ever to abandon to return to the work in which he was of value to the country. He had children to educate. Of the draughtsmen, some had found other work outside the industry, some had taken to manual labour, and some were simply out of work, pathetically visiting the firm once a week in the hope of finding some improvement in the position, some chance of being taken on again. But no improvement was in sight.