George Edwards' name is synonymous with the Vickers Viscount, the world's first turboprop airliner; the controversial TSR2 project and the legendary Anglo-French Concorde. During the Second World War, it was Edwards who made the Dam Busters' bouncing bombs bounce.
George Edwards' name is synonymous with the Vickers Viscount, the world's first turboprop airliner; the controversial TSR2 project and the legendary Anglo-French Concorde. During the Second World War, it was Edwards who made the Dam Busters' bouncing bombs bounce.
From Bouncing Bombs to Concorde: The Authorised Biography of Aviation Pioneer Sir George Edwards OM
352
From Bouncing Bombs to Concorde: The Authorised Biography of Aviation Pioneer Sir George Edwards OM
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Overview
George Edwards' name is synonymous with the Vickers Viscount, the world's first turboprop airliner; the controversial TSR2 project and the legendary Anglo-French Concorde. During the Second World War, it was Edwards who made the Dam Busters' bouncing bombs bounce.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780752496030 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 06/22/2006 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 517 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
From Bouncing Bombs to Concorde
The Authorised Biography of Aviation Pioneer Sir George Edwards OM
By Robert Gardner
The History Press
Copyright © 2013 Robert GardnerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9603-0
CHAPTER 1
In the Beginning
In January 1935 George Edwards, then 27 years old and working as a junior structural engineer in London's docks, travelled from his home in Highams Park, Essex, for a job interview at the Vickers Aviation company at Weybridge in Surrey. It was his second visit to the famous Vickers factory built alongside the Brooklands motor circuit, now described as the birthplace of aviation and motor racing in England. On the first occasion he had applied for a job as an aircraft stressman, and had been interviewed by the head of the stress office, Mr Pratt. But Pratt could only offer £5 a week, the same as George was already getting in the docks. 'Pratt was a decent bloke, but had been given some pretty rigid rules and regulations about pay,' Edwards remembers, adding with a grin: 'I wasn't going to go to a slum like Weybridge for no extra money!'
Shortly afterwards, Vickers wrote to him, suggesting the company might be able 'to do a bit better' if he applied for a job as a draughtsman in the drawing office. So once again young George set out for the Weybridge factory, but this time he was interviewed by Paul Wyand, the chief draughtsman. Wyand offered 5s a week more, bringing his weekly wage packet to a princely 5 guineas. Edwards needed the extra money, as he planned to marry Dinah Thurgood, his sweetheart from college days, later that year. This time he accepted the offer, which he later described as 'not extravagant'.
George Edwards had headed towards the aircraft industry and Vickers after being tipped off by a colleague in the docks, named Watts. Watts knew Barnes Wallis, who had already established a reputation as the designer of the successful R100 airship and was now designing aircraft at Weybridge. Wallis had told Watts that Vickers was cranking up against the threatening war with Nazi Germany and was recruiting people, particularly structural engineers, from outside the aircraft industry. Watts suggested to Edwards that there was not much future in the docks. 'The place is not big enough for you,' he told him, and said that if he could get a job at Vickers, or somewhere like it, he stood a good chance of 'going places'.
So, in February 1935, George Edwards went to work as a draughtsman in the drawing office at Vickers Aviation at Weybridge. His section leader was the experienced George Stannard, and his senior mentors were the gifted Barnes Wallis himself, with whom he was to have an uneasy but respectful relationship, and the less volatile but equally distinguished designer Rex Pierson.
'I had the great fortune to join Vickers at Weybridge under two very remarkable men – Barnes Wallis and Rex Pierson – and I learned a lot from both of them,' he said many years later. He added: 'They were two different people with quite different characters and approaches. Wallis was determined to achieve quality at almost any cost; Pierson was equally determined that an aeroplane should be a properly balanced product, with each specialist demand getting its fair share and no more. Rex Pierson, in my view, was a much underrated man, overshadowed as he was by Wallis's strong personality, but he was a first -class aeroplane designer.'
Thus, overseen by two of the greatest aircraft designers of their time, George Edwards began a career which, from such humble beginnings, was soon to blossom along a path of accelerated promotion. Within five years he became experimental manager, working on some of the most secret and ingenious wartime inventions. Within ten years he was chief designer, introducing the world to gas-turbine-powered aircraft. By 1953 he was managing director, and ten years later he took command of the most powerful aerospace company in Europe.
* * *
George Robert Freeman Edwards was born above his father's toyshop at 12 The Parade, Highams Park, Essex, on 9 July 1908. His start in life was poor; in fact it could not have been worse. A twin sister died at childbirth, and his mother died two weeks later from childbirth fever. His father was unable to cope on his own, and baby George was placed in the care of his mother's sister and husband, Bill and Sal Medlock. They lived 'round the corner' in a small terraced house in Handsworth Avenue, in which George was to spend all of his formative years.
Highams Park is a small suburb of Walthamstow on the north-eastern fringes of London. Through its centre runs what was the Great Eastern Railway, between Chingford and London Liverpool Street, with its level crossing, signal box (still standing) and station. The neighbourhood is full of rows of small Victorian and Edwardian terraces, and in such a building, a three-storey Edwardian house with ground-floor shop, George was born. The building is still there, now numbered 499 Hale End Road; the toy shop has gone, replaced by a solicitor's office. On the wall above is placed a blue oval Waltham Forest Heritage plaque commemorating Edwards's birth and achievements. George's paternal family were true cockneys, having been born and bred in the East End of London for generations, within the sound of Bow bells. His grandfather and great-grandfather were cabinetmakers, and it was not until 1900 that his father and uncle Charles moved into Highams Park. George Edwards has always been proud of his cockney roots, and says: 'We were proper working class, and I was born among a lot of cockneys. I talked the same language and I still do.'
His father, Edwin, was one of three brothers, and appears to have been the most enterprising of the three. From a job as a chemist's packer he went on to join industrial chemist Burroughs Wellcome as a salesman, and was sent to South Africa as a sales representative. He returned to England in 1907 and married Mary Freeman, one of ten children whose father came originally from Northamptonshire but was now working as a gardener at the Church of Holy Trinity in Roehampton, Middlesex. Her mother's family were from Cambridgeshire.
After his marriage, and with money saved while abroad, Edwin, with his brother Charles, acquired the shop in Hale End Road together with a second shop opposite. One was a newsagent and tobacconists, which Edwin ran himself, while across the road the toy and fancy goods shop, above which George was born, was looked after by his brother. The third brother was not involved and ran a bookmaker's business in Clapton, later described by his nephew as 'a bit of a racket'.
Despite the difficulties after his mother's death, George Edwards's childhood was comfortable and caring. His 'beloved' aunt had worked as a cook in a nearby big house, Beech Hill Park. His uncle was the local policeman. 'They were proper working class, and had been brought up in the country. He came from Huntingdonshire and was a copper while I was growing up. But their main job was to keep me fed and going,' he says. His cousin was Bob Gregory, a famous Surrey cricketer who toured with England and taught him to play and love the game, a passion he retained for the rest of his life.
Although Edwin was somewhat removed from his young son's upbringing, he kept a fatherly eye on him. 'My father was no fool. He wasn't well, that was his trouble, he suffered from curvature of the spine,' says George. 'He was pretty bright, and I talked to him quite a bit. That is where I probably got it from. He eventually killed himself because, being a tobacconist, he had just to put his hand out and there was another cigarette.' In later years he remarried, but both he and his new wife remained remote.
George's earliest childhood memories include a series of German air raids over London during the First World War. His home was beneath the Zeppelins' route from Germany, the airships making landfall at Harwich, then flying on to the east of London and the docks. He remembers going out to watch, and stood 'marvelling' at the great airships lit up by searchlights, and ack-ack guns going off. A scrap of metal from a Zeppelin shot down by a Royal Flying Corps pilot landed in his garden, and was retrieved by him, becoming a treasured possession. 'People talk about the barrage in the last war, but it was absolute peanuts to the one I listened to in the First War,' Edwards says.
The Germans also mounted many daylight raids, bomber aircraft sweeping low over the area in large arrowhead formations. On one occasion his aunt dragged George from school to the safety of their home, where he saw them fly right across Highams Park. 'For a small boy of eight years old this was moderately spectacular,' he recalls. But such experience of the new flying machines was not the inspiration for a future career; that came later, as a practical response to his mathematical and logical mind. At that time he and other people thought only about the war and their hatred of the Germans. 'There was no European "let's all be friends together" in those days,' he says.
As a toddler, George had been sent to a small private school which had written on a board outside: 'The Warner College for Ladies – Little Boys accepted'. Young George was one of the little boys accepted. 'It was run by two old ducks who were really brilliant. I could speak French when I was ten, which is more than I could do since,' he says. But money was short, and at 11 years old he was 'shovelled off' to the local elementary school in Selwyn Avenue. The school, which continues to enjoy a high reputation, remains today very much as it did in George's time. He was a bright boy who did well at his lessons, and his name was put down by his father for a scholarship to the local Sir George Monoux's grammar school. Applications were sent off, but to his lasting dismay he was then told his birthday was three days too late for him to sit the exam.
In later years George looked back on this rejection with profound regret. It probably had the greatest impact on his life, though conversely it was to be the spur to his future career and achievements. 'They wrote to me and said they were sorry I was too old, and I went back to the staff and said this is what had come in the post; they don't want me. I remember vividly. I was surrounded by three or four teachers who said "What are we going to do with young George? He's pretty bright." Then somebody said, "There's always the Tech."'
So to the 'Tech' he went, having won a scholarship to what was then the Walthamstow Technical Institute Engineering and Trade School (later called the Junior Technical School and subsequently the South West Essex Technical College). Since then he has often wondered what would have become of him had he gone to grammar school. 'I could have been a barrister, or something like that,' he says.
By some act of providence George Edwards had the 'great good fortune' of having two inspired maths teachers: Harry Brown, with whom he kept in touch for many years, and later an Irishman called Graham, a brilliant mathematician. 'We used to go in for a maths session and old man Graham used to say: "Well now Mister Edwards, what would you like us to do today?" I used to look bright and sparkling and say I enjoyed identities [a mathematical term, defined as 'statements of equality between known or unknown quantities, which hold true for all values of the unknown quantities'], and so identities it was,' he remembers. 'The rest of the lads went on doing their football pools or something while there was I having a private lesson.'
By buttoning on first to Brown and then to Graham, young Edwards emerged as being 'pretty capable' in maths. He also received a good grounding in basic design, physics and chemistry, all the ingredients for an engineering career. 'I was spurred on, as far as I could understand the words, to go into engineering,' he says. 'For most of the chaps I knocked about with, their great ambition was to become a bank clerk or something like that. I could see that had no future. What I had to do in life was manageable because I knew, roughly speaking, how to get the numbers right.' He adds: 'The Lord had given me the right mixture of molecules to start with, and I have seen young chaps who had not got the right mixture flogging their guts out trying to cope with identities and the rest of it. They hadn't got a prayer.'
His technical college reports reflect his progress, and from the autumn of 1922 to the summer of 1926 he finished either top or, at worst, third in his form, excelling in maths and the sciences. The principal of the college, Mr James Edwards, described his overall performance as 'excellent' and in 1925 appointed him school captain. Encouraged by this and by Mr Graham, George Edwards realised the 'smart thing' to do was gain a higher academic qualification. 'There was dangled before me this great mysterious thing of London University,' he says. 'I was told I could have a go at an external degree if I worked as I never worked before, because the standard was so high. So I put my head down and went nearly mad until the small hours of the morning. I duly got it [a BSc (Eng)], and it opened the door to all sorts of places and people who didn't care what you had got until you said you had a London degree, particularly an external one, which said you had worked.'
Edwards left the technical school in 1926, carrying a glowing and highly perceptive testimonial from Mr Edwards, who wrote: 'His progress in all subjects of the curriculum has been exceedingly good. He is especially good at mathematics and his ability to reason and apply the same to practical problems has placed him far above the average youth in the form. His practical work in science and other subjects has been of a high standard. In fact, I have no hesitation in stating that he is one of the best boys we have ever had in the school.' He added: 'As school captain during his last year he showed tact and ability which was admired by both staff and scholars and showed him capable of organising and carrying out definite plans.' For any boy, however bright, the prospect of finding a good job in 1926, the year of the General Strike, was bleak. As a precautionary measure, young George sat and passed the examination as a probationer inspector in the engineering department of the General Post Office (GPO). Although he was subsequently offered a job, he chose not to take it, preferring to join the clerical staff of the Ocean Accident & Guarantee Corporation in Moorgate in March 1927. Again he was recognised as a bright lad, and within three months he was transferred to their engineering department, with responsibility for 'periodical inspection of all machinery under insurance'. A year later, having seen an advertisement in the Daily Telegraph, he applied for and got the job as a junior technical engineer at Hay's Wharf in the London docks. It was his first real step up the ladder.
In those days Dockland was still the commercial heart of the British Empire, teeming with river traffic of all kinds. The Pool of London, administered by the Port of London Authority, covered more than 2,500 acres and employed thousands of people. The new job involved what Edwards described as: 'a pretty clear spread of rough engineering'. This included checking, testing and certificating cranes, elevators and bridges; laying out engines for cold-storage depots or for diesel tugs; and many other things.
George Edwards remembers clearly those early days in the docks.
What I was landed with when I first went there was some new Act of Parliament, which required every piece of lifting tackle, be it a crane or a hoist, to be certificated by somebody to say it was properly stressed. The appropriate tests had to be carried out to ensure it was in good working order and didn't break when you put the stated load on it. I knew enough about strength and structures, and I used to be told to do the certification on a particular crane. That meant I had to collect the drawings and organise a testing programme, which was a fairly hairy operation. This involved climbing to the top of the jib of the crane about 150ft above sea level in the dark, often in the middle of winter with snow on the frame.
Edwards, having shown signs of 'moderate intelligence', soon became 'lumbered' with work of most interest to him: engineering and building cranes. He had been particularly impressed by the clever design and mechanisms of those built by the famous West Country firm of Stothart & Pitt. So when the Docks Authority decided to build their own, he volunteered for the job and was teamed with an experienced colleague. 'Bit by bit I began to find out what he was up to, and bit by bit I began to find out what I was up to; so after a time, I became a pretty hard-arsed engineer,' he says.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from From Bouncing Bombs to Concorde by Robert Gardner. Copyright © 2013 Robert Gardner. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword,Acknowledgements,
Author's Note,
1 In the Beginning,
2 A Job at Vickers,
3 Preparing for War,
4 'Down with 'Itler',
5 Working for Beaverbrook,
6 Bouncing Bombs,
7 Mission to Germany,
8 Chief Designer,
9 'The Heat and Burden of the Viscount',
10 'Falling in Love with the Viscount',
11 Britain's First V-bomber,
12 Managing Director,
13 Ethel Merman, Bob Six, but Mostly Howard Hughes,
14 'The Biggest Blunder of All',
15 Accolades, Worries and the Vanguard,
16 The VC10 – 'A Sorry Story',
17 Rationalisation,
18 TSR.2 and a New Partner,
19 British Aircraft Corporation,
20 TSR.2 – the Beginning of the End,
21 TSR.2 – the End,
22 Life After Death, but Only Just,
23 Concorde – the Beginnings,
24 'She Flies',
25 Trouble with the French,
26 Guided Weapons and Defence Contracts,
27 His Last Aircraft,
28 Enter the Wide-Bodies,
29 Changes at the Top,
30 'Merger-itis' and Nationalisation,
31 Into Retirement,
32 Pastimes, Painting and 'Cricket, Lovely Cricket',
33 The University of Surrey and a Personal Crusade,
34 'A Man of Absolute Rectitude',
35 Last Overs,
Envoi,
Appendix One: Abbreviations,
Appendix Two: Chronology,
Bibliography,