Stephen Morris (7 page)

Morris did not answer the question. ‘Don’t know if you call delivering Rabbits and Ratcatchers test flying,’ he said sourly. ‘Nothing to test.’

‘No satisfying some people,’ said Stenning.

Morris picked up his boots and went to put them in a corner, treading delicately in his stockinged feet. He turned and spoke bitterly over his shoulder to Stenning.

‘Never seen such a ragtime show in all my life as that. I told you that the hall porter was a little girl eating an apple, didn’t I?’

‘Very nice too,’ said Riley. ‘Symbol of innocence. Besides, it’s aviation.’

Morris laughed. ‘It’s aviation all over,’ he said.

That week the receipts dropped sharply, though there was still a slight surplus to divide. Things the week after were better again, and worse the following week, when there was not sufficient to cover the statutory limit for depreciation and spares.

Then the crowning blow fell, with dramatic suddenness. One morning they became aware of strangers in the land, odd people wandering about the aerodrome. The caretaker announced that they were workmen from the Air Ministry, come to see about the buildings. A brief reconnaissance revealed the fact that they had commenced to remove the roof, door, and window-frames from one of the hangars; that they were proposing to treat every building in the place in a similar manner, and that the material was to be re-erected in an Air Force station on the other side of the Solent, where it was needed more urgently.

‘We’re done,’ said Riley when this was reported to
him. ‘This is the end of us. We’ve got no legal tenure here – we’ve only had this place on sufferance.’

They decided not to dispute the edict, but to shut up shop and go. Riley had heard from his firm at Brooklands, who regretted that they had nothing to offer him at the moment, but in the near future they hoped to be making an attempt on some long distance records, when they would be glad to avail themselves of his services if he was still free. This was as good as could be expected. Stenning alone had nothing to go to, but hoped to pick up a piloting job if he hung about the London Terminal Aerodrome at Croydon long enough.

There was little preparation to be done. They sold most of their spares as junk to a speculative garage-keeper in Ryde and made the mechanic a present of what was left. The clerks were dismissed with a week’s wages, and a hangar was secured at Croydon for the housing of the machines till they were sold; there was more chance of selling them near London.

So one bleak morning in early October the three machines were pushed out of the hangars for the last time, and luggage loaded into them instead of trippers. The engines were started and one by one they moved out on to the aerodrome, spun over the grass, and circled for height above the hangars. Riley was the last to leave; he taxied out on to the aerodrome and waited a moment before taking off to join the others circling above his head. He sat in the machine idly for a little, and took a long look out over the wide grassy field, the derelict hangars. Once he had had bright visions for this place. He had hoped to make it a base for a sound taxi business about the south of England, to buy up the place bit by bit as he made money, and to run a big fleet of low-powered aeroplanes for hire.

Well, he had failed. He supposed he ought to have known better than to think that aviation would catch
on … just yet. But it would come one day. He had failed and lost a lot of money on it. One day, in two or three years’ time, he would try again with more money behind him, when money was a little easier to get and the bank rate had come down.

He opened out his engine and began to move over the grass. The tail came up and he began to spin swiftly across the field; the uneven motion ceased and his castles in the air dropped away beneath him. Soon he was on a level with Stenning and Morris; in company they headed for Croydon.

An hour and a half later they arrived flying in formation of a sort, waited till an incoming Goliath from Paris had moved its unwieldy bulk from the centre of the aerodrome, and landed in quick succession one after another. They taxied to the side of the aerodrome, over the road to their hangar, and stowed the machines.

In an hour’s time their attentions to the machines were at an end; they collected their belongings in a little heap at the door of the hangar.

‘Nothing more to be done, is there?’ asked Morris.

‘Come and have lunch,’ said Riley. ‘There’s a Trust House here somewhere.’

In the restaurant Stenning and Riley found one or two acquaintances. There was a tone of optimistic anxiety about all their news and greetings; the advent of a ‘broke’ joy-riding concern had pointed the lesson to be learned from the diminishing number of passengers on the air lines. Aviation had ceased to attract as a novelty and was not yet accepted as a serious means of transport. The bulk of the passenger traffic was still represented by American tourists; still at the end of every trip the pilot was photographed in front of the machine with Sadie and Momma by his side. This was not the procedure adopted on the railways … and air transport must become as matter of fact as railway
transport before it became a dividend paying business.

They lunched well, getting a little amusement by prophesying the gloomiest future for the regular air lines to the regular pilots. There was just sufficient uneasiness about for some attention to be given to them; they finished the meal and retired to the lounge in a perfect blaze of unpopularity. Riley paused in the door and fired the parting shot.

‘Well, of course, it’s nothing to do with me. But you can’t get away from those facts. I know, if I was on an air line now, I’d be looking out for something else, just in case.… There’ll be a glut of pilots on the market pretty soon. Still, it’s none of my business.’

They settled up the last financial details in the lounge and drank a round to their next merry meeting. Then they separated, Morris going up to London, Stenning and Riley to get rooms in the neighbourhood and to see if there was any chance of selling the machines. There was none.

Two days later Morris started work in the design office of the Rawdon Aircraft Company (1919) Ltd.

He did not find the work very difficult after the first few days. The whole business of designing an aeroplane he found to run on certain very definite lines. First of all, certain broad considerations governing the design of the machine came to the designer. Thus if it were a passenger machine for an air line, the air line had certain definite ideas as to what they wanted; the carrying capacity, the speed, the landing speed, and the ‘ceiling’ or maximum height that it was possible for the machine to attain. Such considerations as these would be settled in conference with the designer, who would indicate tactfully where they were asking for technical impossibilities. If the machine were a military one for the Air
Force the procedure was, in general, much the same, with the difference that the purchaser had a habit of asking for technical impossibilities and refusing to discuss the matter. This made the design of military machines a very specialised business.

The conditions for the machine being determined, the chief draughtsman would draw a pretty picture of what he thought such a machine ought to look like, neatly indicating on this first layout the really important features of the machine, such as the way the door opened and the system of heating the cabin. This rough layout would be shown to the customer for approval; in the case of a commercial machine it would be passed without much question.

The procedure now depended very much upon the financial position of the firm. In war-time, when the firms were well to do, a model of the machine would be made at this point and tested in a wind channel. That is, it would be mounted on a special balance in a tunnel and air sucked over it at a known speed, the resulting ‘lift’ and forces on the model being accurately measured. From this date the performance of the machine, the speed and horse-power necessary could be easily determined and any alterations or improvements to the machine tried out.

This was the counsel of perfection, and a very expensive one. For firms that could not run to the expense of a wind channel – and this was the case with very many firms – there was another method, more laborious and less accurate. This consisted in keeping a careful record of every calculation that had ever been made in the firm since the early days of aviation, and digging in this turgid mass for figures and precedents which would assist in the estimation of the performance of the machine in question. In this the greatest help was given by the various government research departments, who
had collected and published a vast mass of aerodynamic data.

In the meantime, as soon as the main essentials of the machine had been decided, the span of the wings and the aerofoil section to be used, certain human calculating machines were let loose and proceeded to calculate the stresses and necessary size of every part of the machine in several different ways, from the main spars in the wings to the luggage racks in the cabin. And last of all, the results of their work were handed over to the draughtsmen, the really important people on whose work the detail design of the machine depended, and who got out the drawings upon which the men in the workshops were to act.

And over all brooded the designer, visiting each man’s desk once or twice a day, discussing and approving each man’s work with a faculty for switching his mind on to new subjects at a moment’s notice that gained Morris’s earnest respect. This seemed to be the true function of a designer, to criticise and advise his staff.

Time slipped quickly past; Morris found himself fairly competent to deal with the work that he was called upon to do; odd problems in research and experimentation. The design in hand was that of a torpedo carrier for the Air Ministry. A model was built and tested at the National Physical Laboratory at considerable expense, and was found to behave exactly as was expected. This was disappointing and a waste of money. Then came a galaxy of performance calculations, tangled by empirical allowances for imperfectly understood complications. By the time these difficulties were unravelled, the design of the machine was well on the way; they realised – as so often happened – that it was now too late to make any alteration even if they wanted to; there remained only to hope for the best.

In addition to this, Morris found that a certain
amount of piloting work came his way. Each reconditioned machine had to be taken up for a short flight before the Air Force officer who was to fly it away was allowed to risk his neck on it. This precaution was justified on one occasion, in the instance of a Ratcatcher, rigged by a mechanic who was under notice to quit. This gentleman, whether by accident or design, managed to confuse the wires of the lateral control so that the controls worked in opposite sense to normal. The mistake passed unnoticed by the foreman and by Morris. Attempting a gentle turn at a height of a hundred feet the machine, instead of banking over in a normal manner, shot outwards from the turn in a violent sideslip. Morris, with the fear of God in his heart, managed to prevent a stall and to land where he was, in a field about a mile from the aerodrome. How he managed it he could never quite tell, but he got down with no worse damage than a burst tyre and a damaged wing tip, left the machine and walked back to the aerodrome, meeting an ambulance party on the way. He expressed himself feelingly to these.

It seemed to him a good opportunity to discuss his future with Rawdon.

But Rawdon had already made up his mind. ‘I can’t give you much of a job,’ he said. ‘I’m told you’re worth about four pounds a week in the office. I can give you that, and flying pay as usual – what you’ve been getting.’

After this Morris led a quiet life for several months, keeping his eyes open to every piece of information in any way connected with his work, reading in the evenings. He did not see his way ahead at all; it was certainly no good attempting to get ahead quickly in that office – it was far too full of experienced men. Still, he trusted that chances of advancement would open out as soon as the industry got on its feet and began to expand a little.

But at this time the industry was far from expanding.
As the year drew to a close it became evident that there would be more disasters, this time among the air lines. A good attempt had been made to carry on unsubsidised in the face of competition from the subsidised French lines. The effort was foredoomed to failure. True, every reason of safety and common sense indicated the desirability of travelling by the English lines rather than the French, but financial considerations proved overwhelming; it was not to be expected that the traveller would pay ten pounds instead of six for the privilege of travelling upon an English line. The three English lines, themselves running in competition with one another, assisted the disaster; passengers fell away and the machines began to run practically empty.

Finally one of them, the line that had really proved aviation to be a commercial possibility, closed down, broken.

Morris from his niche watched these events without much concern. He did not believe in the least that aviation was a failure; on the contrary, the more he saw of the commercial side of it the more determined he became to stay in it. Things were bad and, in his opinion, would be worse; still, it was a good thing and worth staying in – the only thing he could get on in. He had decided that months before, and was not inclined by any of these disasters to change his mind once made up.