CHAPTER FOUR
The Engine Repair Shops at Pont de l'Arche
By Rudston Fell
Reprinted from the Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, January 1966
Rudston rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Royal Flying Corps, automatically becoming a Wing Commander in the new Royal Air Force. He retired from the peacetime air force in 1919, with his old rank, to take on a job of vital importance to the future of the country.
The importance of the engine repair shops behind the lines in the Great War cannot be overstated. In 1914, aircraft were unreliable contraptions of string and wire, regarded by the army (and probably rightly) as of use only for possible reconnaissance purposes. By 1918, we had a new and fully-armed fighting unit - the Royal Air Force. One of the engines that drove this incredible pace of development was undoubtedly Pont de l'Arche.
It must be remembered that the army of 1914 still lived in the tradition of the cavalry. Wars were fought on land, by traditional means. Against this backdrop, Rudston Fell created a repair and development unit structured on the principles of industry, which greatly increased the power-to-weight ratios as well as the reliability of the aircraft engines of the time and, in reality, brought aerial warfare into being. He paid homage all his life to the foresightedness of his commander, Brigadier Brooke Popham, who had the vision to trust Rudston and let him get on with the job.
Throughout his article, and indeed the rest of this book, Rudston stressed the importance of squeezing the last ounce of power out of an aircraft engine without increasing its weight. Pont de'l Arche taught him that lack of power was not an academic matter, but was directly measured in men's lives. In the duel between fighter aircraft, victory goes to the man who can out-manoeuvre his opponent by climbing faster and higher to come at the enemy from above and out of the sun. There was a dreadful time when Messerschmitt fighters had the advantage, until urgent work on British engines at Pont de l'Arche restored the balance. The cruel lessons learnt at Pont de l'Arche undoubtedly won us the Battle of Britain just over twenty years later.
The story of the extraordinary men and women who, in three hectic years, turned a French village into a thriving repair, manufacturing and engine development factory is the very stuff of wartime history. But it is doubtful that Pont de l'Arche could have achieved as much as it did without its highly able base camp, the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough, and in particular its go-between, the maverick and brilliant Major Frank Halford, who kept the technical and material needs of Pont de l'Arche constantly before the eyes of those in England who had the time and resource to ensure they were met. Halford was to become an aero engine designer, working his way through many advanced piston engines until he designed his own jet engine which, as the Ghost, powered many de Havilland aircraft, typically rejecting Whittle's basic compressor design.
There are aspects to his story that Rudston fails to mention. During and soon after the war, Rudston was four times mentioned in despatches, on 4th January and 15th May 1917, on 31st December 1918 and 11th July 1919. He received his DSO on 4th June 1917 for gallantry under fire, and his OBE on 1st January 1919 for his services to his country throughout the war. It was at Pont de l'Arche that he met my mother, the vivacious Mollie Walker. He met Mary Dolores Maude Walker some time in 1916 in inauspicious circumstances and, I am sure, more often than he would have liked. At their meetings, she was invariably smartly dressed, cap-less and rigidly to attention. She was a WAAC private; he was her commanding officer. The beautiful, slim eighteen-year-old, with the huge brown eyes bearing witness to her Italian ancestry, was often in his sights, on a charge again for her habit of being caught slipping under the wire at night to seek out the bright lights of Pont de l'Arche and nearby Rouen.
Mollie was a driver; her charge was a Crossley tender with a 20hp engine and no starter motor. She was responsible for hand-starting as well as driving the beast, with its four-speed crash gearbox and great side-mounted transmission handbrake, so a pretty fair pair of shoulders must have been concealed within her slender, 5ft 1in. frame. She was, in fact, one of the best drivers I have ever known, capable of sustaining a continuous conversation in all traffic conditions, and I can never remember her once using her brakes in anger. Every road situation seemed to have been anticipated. However, it was a bit disconcerting when she referred to the handbrake of a Mini as the 'side brake' in an echo of her Crossley days.
One other point Rudston fails to mention is that he came back to England to visit the Rolls-Royce works in Derby in 1915, to see the new Eagle engine on the test beds. It is not likely that he would have met Royce at this time, though he would have met the other men who are to become so significant in his story.
This article by Rudston was published in the month of his 74th birthday. There is an interesting footnote. It was read by a man who was then restoring a Sopwith aircraft of 1915 vintage and fitted with a Gnome engine. He was working from the maker's original drawings. He had a seemingly incurable problem with the propeller coming loose. Rudston was able to help; the problem was caused by torsional vibration in the engine's crankshaft, which broke the taper securing the propeller, and the solution, discovered at Pont de l'Arche, was simply to counterbore the shaft.
The engine repair shops at Pont de l'Arche
By Rudston Fell
There can be little doubt that the rate of progress in the development of aviation which was achieved in the years between 1915 and 1918 has never been exceeded in any period since that time.
The few 'flying machines' with which the Royal Flying Corps went to war in 1914 were of many types, of primitive design and unreliable, having little relevance to war with the possible exception of reconnaissance duties. In 1914 there was no aircraft industry worthy of the name. The potential value of aircraft was only beginning to be fully realised by the middle of 1915. Yet little more than two years later reliable four-engined bombers with specialised cameras, bomb sights and release gear, fitted with wireless were operational in quite large numbers. Well-armed fighters were in mass production. Engines, notably the Rolls-Royce Eagle and Falcon, were running over 100 hours between overhauls and maintaining a high standard of reliability. It is significant that engines of these types were still in operation in some parts of the world at the outbreak of the Second World War. By 1916 a powerful aviation industry was in being.
Looking back half a century, the most striking feature of those days was the youth of the men who were responsible for these great achievements. Few of them were over thirty and most of them were of an age when they would in these days have still been at the University.
The RFC technical services which had to be brought into being with such urgency owed their existence to these young technicians, not long out of their apprenticeship, who were drafted into the forces from civil life. Whatever ability these young men manifested was not due to any training they received from the army. I well remember my earliest experience of the army in the beginning of 1915 when I was accepted as an 'Assistant Equipment Officer' in the RFC at an interview in the War Office. The interviewing officer was obviously unimpressed and I had made up my mind that I was 'out' when a brother officer leant over towards him and said: 'Did you say that chap's name is Fell? Don't waste time on him; we've already written to him and told him to join up at Farnborough.' So I was 'in'. The letter instructing me to report to Farnborough made it clear that I was to be commissioned as 2nd Lieutenant (temporary) as my permanent rank throughout the hostilities. With this encouragement I installed myself at the Ash Vale hotel and bicycled hopefully to the RFC depot at Farnborough. There I found there was a tiny workshop in which I learned how to splice a wire cable. Nobody took the least interest in me until I failed to turn up as Orderly Officer, because no-one had told me about routine orders. That was how I came to meet the Adjutant.
After walking about for nearly two months it so happened that the man in charge of the little Farnborough workshop asked me to make a mechanical sketch for him. As I was then fresh from the drawing office of civil life I managed to complete this with some distinction. The next thing I knew was that I had been provided with a drawing board and was making coloured drawings of aircraft for instructional purposes. A few days later I was drafted overseas as the first fully-trained Assistant Equipment Officer. I was armed with a Colt revolver and 24 rounds of ammunition. Nobody thought to ask me if I knew how to fire it.
In April 1915 I arrived at the Engine Repair Shops in France. When I joined there were 70 men and 3 officers. The CO was Captain G.B.Hynes, a regular gunner officer aged 25, Captain Verney, regular ASC, was 27 years old, and Lieutenant and Quartermaster Starling, always known by his brother officers as the old man on account of his great age, was 47. At that date I was 23.
In the summer of 1915 the ERS was inspected by General Henderson, C in C of the RFC. He told us that he did not propose to expand our unit any further as it was expected that it would be able to meet all foreseeable demands of the RFC. At that date the ERS turned out a total of four repaired engines per week of two types, Renault and Gnome. Not very long afterwards, General Henderson was replaced by General Trenchard, who brought with him Brigadier-General Brooke Popham. After taking up his post at GHQ, Brooke Popham soon ordered us to double our establishment and then to double it again until, by the end of 1917, our strength was 5,000 service men and women and over 100 officers. I was then Chief Engineer and 25 years old. In 1918 our weekly output was 120 engines of eight different types. In considering these figures it must be remembered that the ERS camp was a self-contained town administered by the RFC, having to provide its own feeding, water and electricity supplies, sanitation, health service, transport, etc. These services absorbed quite a large proportion of the total establishment.
Machine tools came from England but all special tools, jigs and fixtures were designed and made in our own works. We built our own light alloy foundry where, among other parts, we cast high-compression pistons with which we equipped all Hispano engines. We also had an iron foundry for castings for jigs and so on. We 'invented', designed and built our own universal variable air-brake torque-reaction test beds. We erected a gas works in which we cracked scrap lubricating oil from the test beds and used the gas in the sheet metal departments and foundries. There was a well-equipped metallurgical laboratory. Our blacksmith's shop contained power-driven hammers. Worn parts were reclaimed by iron deposition on a highly commercial basis. A quay was built on the banks of the river Seine so that all engines could be received or delivered by water from and to the depot in Rouen. This quay was connected to all departments by a narrow-gauge railway operated by petrol-driven locomotives. We designed and built our own rolling stock consisting of bogie wagons. All this expansion had to go on without interfering with production as by 1917 the RFC was becoming dependent upon us for engine supplies and it was a matter of life or death that we should not suffer any hold-up in production.
With the exception of the regular soldiers (other ranks) who were in the RFC before the war and who were well-trained mechanics, the largest part of our new entry was composed of untrained men who had no previous experience of mechanical engineering. All trained men were by then in reserved occupations at home in Britain. We had therefore to train our labour as we went along. We were pleasantly surprised to find that the women of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps who were sent to us after specialised training on lathe work and welding were extremely efficient, but their numbers were small. To meet the problem of training men, we divided the operations in the repair of an engine into unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled, the latter including crankshaft and connecting rod fitting. We then fed the trainees into the unskilled end of the job and carefully watched for those with special aptitude and promoted them to more important work. One of our best Sergeant Fitters was a carpenter in civil life. Every officer had to take part in the work in the shops and an industrial white coat was compulsory uniform for those below the rank of Major. Junior officers were given schedules of inspections for which they were held personally responsible and they had to sign the engine card as having been properly carried out. Rigid inspection counteracted trouble which might have resulted from the inexperience of our labour.
There was, of course, no financial incentive which we could offer to our workers except that which came as a result of service promotion to NCO rank. Our camp was in sound of the guns but there were no signs of war visible in our area. Boredom and consequent loss of morale was therefore the most dangerous enemy which we had to fight and conquer. As it turned out, there was almost a complete absence of trouble with either the men or the women. In large measure this was to the credit of the CO. Although he took no part in the technical direction of the unit, Colonel Hynes was a man of wisdom and sympathetic to human frailties. He was an outstanding contradiction of the belief that these qualities only come with advancing age for he was only 27 when we were at the height of our achievement. For Administration the personnel were divided into six groups, each under the command of a Major. Intense rivalry was created between these groups by the encouragement of inter-group games and sports. Although we often called on people to work all night and all Sunday, Wednesday afternoon was sacred for sports fixtures and always kept free of work. The competition between the groups extended to the work in the shops. Output figures were posted and the competitive spirit was aroused to such an extent that men would work overtime without being ordered if it seemed likely that their section was going to hold up the output of the group. This is all the more remarkable when it is remembered that labour troubles were acute at home at that time.
Our village, Pont de l'Arche, had a population of only 500, so provided little entertainment for a community as large as our unit. We had, therefore, to make our own amusements. A camp of the size of the Engine Repair Shops was allowed one building for recreation. We equipped this building, which was a steel structure, as a cinema, charging for admission. We found that one of our fitters had been a stage carpenter and he was installed fulltime to fit up and look after our theatre, which was called the Pontodrome. Several of our electricians had worked in the theatre at home and one of our officers had experience of show business management. Among 5,000 people, as one would expect, there was professional and good amateur talent so that we were able to produce plays, pantomimes and concerts, besides regular film shows. We had our own concert party, military band, orchestra and dramatic society. The fact that all these activities were countenanced and supported by the CO is a great tribute to the flexibility of his judgement which his training as a regular peacetime soldier had done nothing to impair. He recognised that we were all civilians at heart and managed to preserve that perfect balance between necessary discipline and keeping us happy, which incited us all to give of our very best. We were all tremendously proud of our unit and there was certainly nothing quite like it anywhere else. In work and play we had to excel.
It must not be overlooked that we had no opposition from anyone in authority. Brigadier-General Brooke Popham did everything he could to encourage us and made sure that if we asked for anything it was provided without question and with an absolute minimum of delay. Some of our machine tool demands were formidable, such as six crankshaft grinders and about eight Heald cylinder grinders for delivery in a few months. If we needed anything and it could be purchased locally we went ahead and bought it on the sole authority of the CO.
Brigadier-General Brooke-Popham's faith in the ERS was fully vindicated in March 1918 when supplies of engines from Great Britain stopped during the retreat and the Royal Air Force, holding the broken line, was kept in the air with engines supplied solely by the Engine Repair Shops at Pont de l'Arche.
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