CHAPTER SEVEN
The Wilderness Years
A prophet is not without honour save in his own country
Rudston left Rolls-Royce to join Armstrong Siddeley in Coventry in the same year that Adolf Hitler gained total control of the German Reichtag and therefore established his dictatorship. The effect that this had on Rudston's career is perhaps better understood after a brief look at events on the world stage, at Rolls-Royce in Rudston's absence and at Supermarine, makers of the airframe that won the Schneider Trophy.
Much is made of the harm caused to German morale by the swingeing cash reparations demanded by the victors under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, but in fact these in themselves caused no cash shortage in the German economy. Up to 1929, Germany was receiving far more by way of loans from the allies, particularly from the USA (£1.5 billion), than she paid in reparations (£1 billion). The brash, fast-moving Wall Street economy depended on growth for survival - and what better investment than a shattered but efficient Germany, a country for which the only way was up?
In 1928, the President of the Wall Street stock exchange reassured the world by telling us that Wall Street had finally overcome the bogey of market fluctuations. In 1929, the market collapsed completely. Churchill, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer during the boom years, ascribes the collapse to total loss of confidence caused by massive indebtedness unsupported by material assets.
The effect of the Wall Street crash on Europe as a whole was very serious. In the UK, we went off the gold standard and were placed under new political pressures to cut military expenditure. With its credit line severed, the German economy collapsed completely in runaway inflation. Quite quickly, millions of marks were needed to buy a loaf of bread. The savings of the prudent middle classes were therefore wiped out, and they became very angry indeed. It is now accepted that it was the disillusionment of the middle classes that placed Hitler in total control of the Reichtag.
The effect of the Wall Street crash on politics in Germany can be seen in the statistics of the time. In 1928, Hitler's National Socialists had only 12 seats in the Reichtag. In 1930, he had 107. In 1932, he had 230 seats and by 1933 Hitler had control of the Reichtag. By 1934, Hitler had established his dictatorship and was in a strong enough position to tear up all treaties by effectively saying that henceforth Germany would do anything it felt like doing.
Churchill was (and is) branded as a warmonger by some, but I find difficulty reconciling this with his unremitting efforts for peace right to the point where he saw war with Germany as inevitable, and turned his efforts into doing what was necessary to win it for us. There is no doubt that senior personnel from the armed services, as well as Great Britain's industrialists, supported Churchill's views throughout the period between the wars. The point is that, without the support of their political masters, they were rendered impotent. It could be argued that Rudston's obligations, once he had agreed to serve the board of Roll-Royce in 1928, lay in implementing Rolls-Royce policies. That he found himself unable to do so surely shows enormous strength of character. Like Churchill, therefore, he found himself in a political wilderness of his own for some years.
A monumental event occurred in 1936 that shocked Great Britain out of her complacency, just as the loss of the 'unsinkable' Titanic had done in 1912, and its significance cannot be over-stated. The cornerstone of our monarchy, the King himself, abdicated his throne, and did so for reasons that the country found dishonourable and unacceptable. Love for Edward VIII turned to contempt, shown by such remarks as: 'He could have been master of the greatest ship in the world, but chose to be third mate to a Yankee drifter'. His brother Albert was a nervous man with a speech impediment, more associated with the Scout movement than running an empire, and Albert's wife was a commoner, totally without training in the duties and obligations of a Queen. However, Bertie was the only possible choice as the next in line was both a drug addict and a homosexual. The devastation of a total collapse of our monarchy, and therefore our ruling classes, seemed a real possibility at the time.
These fears, though very real at the time, proved to be unfounded. George VI, despite his afflictions, never once failed us in his duties as a King, and, with his consort Queen Elizabeth, successfully rebuilt his country's faith in its monarchy. Meanwhile, his brother the ex-King began a flirtation with Germany, a country that we were now beginning to perceive as a dangerous potential enemy. This was the last straw to our shocked and betrayed nation, and public opinion, followed by political thinking, began to swing back to that of Churchill, Rudston and his kind.
Rudston was to return to Rolls-Royce in 1939, so it is relevant to record what was happening in the company during his absence. Arthur Sidgreaves came from relative obscurity to take what may have been seen as a caretaker role as managing director. Like Ernest Hives, he had joined Rolls-Royce from Napier, but only eight years before, in 1926. He had an excellent track record as export manager for the cars, but this must have kept him away from Conduit Street and Derby for most of the time. He seems to have been a modest, self-effacing man, with commercial rather than engineering qualifications, but nevertheless he was to prove himself to be an impressive chief executive. In his tenure, until he handed over the reins to Hives at the beginning of the war, he not only acquired and successfully badge-engineered the Bentley for the benefit of top buyers with a sporting bent, but also completed the development of the Merlin. It is hardly surprising , though, that Sidgreaves was not highly regarded by Napier executives of the time, who nicknamed him 'Slippery Sid'
In 1936, only two years after Rudston's departure, Ernest Hives was elected to full membership of the Rolls-Royce main board. In 1938, he commissioned and partly dictated a book whose title is the firm's slogan, The Magic of a Name. It was written by Harold Nockolds (and certainly beautifully illustrated by his brother Roy) as an independent look at the workings of Rolls-Royce, at a time when the Schneider Trophy victory was still in everyone's mind as recent history. It was first published (by Foulis) in 1938 and reprinted in 1945. It has absolutely no connection with Peter Pugh's excellent book of the same name, which covers the first forty years of Rolls-Royce history in some depth and was published in 2000, though Pugh quotes from it occasionally. It is a surprisingly thin little book to be cataloguing the pre-war history of such a great company, particularly when compared with Max Pemberton's massive tome on the life of Sir Henry Royce. I have it before me as I write. I can speak a little about the provenance of this book, as I was actually in Rudston's office at Nightingale Road, Derby when he received his complimentary copy from Ernest Hives early in 1946.
I seized on it, as an eleven-year-old would, to see my famous father's name in print. Well, it wasn't there. Rudston told me then that the book was actually no more than a public relations exercise. Even so, it seemed strange that Rudston, who had been associated with Rolls-Royce since 1916 and had played such a key role in instigating the development of the Eagle and the Merlin, should not have been deemed worthy of a single mention. Half a century later, researching for my own book, I noticed another curious omission from Nockolds' The Magic of a Name. Basil Johnson, managing director from 1926 when his brother Claude died until he was sacked in 1930, is not there either! Indeed, the book is overtly dishonest in this respect, telling its readers that Arthur Sidgreaves took over the reigns directly from the great CJ. The entire episode that led to the birth of the Merlin, and the men who played such a key role at the time, have been quietly removed from the pages of Rolls-Royce history. My slim little red book has given events a bit of a spin. I believe that Hives did what he did simply to ensure that the Name did not lose its magic because of a less than impressive period in this great firm's history.
Hives totally restructured Rolls-Royce, moving the power base to where it belonged, in Derby, and restoring profitability to the car division by introducing proper cost control, component rationalisation across the range and sourcing from outside suppliers when they could prove capable of producing less expensive components without sacrificing quality. After the war, Rolls-Royce motor cars were in healthy profit. However, his biggest achievement was in the aero division, which quickly equalled the car division in profitability, and was to go on to provide no less than six times the profit obtained from cars.
Meanwhile, Supermarine had also suffered what appeared at the time to be a major setback. The brilliant young designer of the S6 seaplane which won the Schneider Trophy for Great Britain, Reginald Mitchell, had been taken ill with tuberculosis. Following a lung operation, he visited Germany in 1933 for protracted recuperation - and returned early, appalled at what he had seen. Germany had gone aviation mad, and actually had more civil aircraft on internal flights than the rest of the world put together. Moreover, Hitler was making no secret of his ambitions, and operated an 'open-door' policy on his military developments. His thinking was that if other military powers saw just how far German aviation technology had advanced, they would not dare to take Germany on in any potential conflict. Mitchell shared a feeling that war was inevitable sooner or later, and made it his business to see as much of the German aviation industry as he could. He returned to find that the British Air Ministry had rejected monoplane fighting aircraft in favour of the biplane Gloster Gladiator, an excellent little aircraft but, in reality, a descendent of the fighters of the first war. It was an agile little thing, but not really very fast. Mitchell believed that in aerial combat against the advanced monoplanes he had seen in Germany, Gladiators would simply be knocked out of the sky. The future must lie with a monoplane aircraft similar to the S6, with low-profile wings to reduce drag and massive strength at the wing roots to withstand the enormous 'g' forces of the dog-fight against the monoplane Messersmicht. He returned to his drawing board, against all medical advice, and began work on what was to become a legend.
Mitchell's design was to survive for twenty years, going through no less than 22 Mark numbers, before it was eventually superseded by the supersonic jet fighters of today. Somehow, it also contrived to be beautiful in its own right.
The prototype was demonstrated to the Air Ministry in a seven-day trial in 1936. An order reached Supermarine for 310 aircraft inside that week, before the trials were completed. This speed of action on the part of the Air Ministry was probably without precedent. The Spitfire was given a code, F3734, which specified its eight guns (four in each of the slim wings). It proved difficult to make, requiring totally new jigging procedures, but the problems were overcome, and the first delivery of Merlin-powered Spitfires was received by the RAF in August 1938, giving our pilots just one year to prepare for war.
Tragically, Reginald Mitchell did not live to see his triumph. He died in 1937, aged only 42. Some feel that he died from overwork, and effectively gave his life for his country.
It would be wrong to eulogise Mitchell's Spitfire without also mentioning the great Hawker Hurricane, which was also Merlin-powered. Indeed, in certain respects the Hurricane was a better aircraft than the Spitfire. Being of conventional design, it was very much easier to make, which is why there were more Hurricanes than Spitfires in the air at the outbreak of the second world war. Also, pilots said that it was less 'twitchy' than the Spit, and would fly in a dead straight line. This made it easier to keep its cannon trained on the enemy. The Spitfire's controls were so sensitive that it proved very difficult to prevent a slight weave. It is also said that the Hurricane's conventional metal, wood and fabric construction could survive exploding cannon better than the Spit.
But the Hurricane failed in one crucial respect. It was slightly slower than the Me109. The Spitfire was both faster and more manoeuvreable. And that made all the difference in the world. The Hurricane represented state-of-the-art aircraft construction for 1934. The Spitfire, with its tapered tubular aluminium frame and stressed aluminium skin, with panel thicknesses carefully selected in line with the duty they had to perform, was really the first of a new generation of fighter aircraft, with much in common with the supersonic jet fighters of today. Supermarine were not popular with the Air Ministry because of production delays. In fact, they should have been given a medal for learning how to make the aircraft at all in the timescale they were allowed. In equine terms, the Hurricane could perhaps be likened to a well-trained, reliable hunter. The Spitfire was a racing thoroughbred, introducing a totally new concept of aircraft manufacture.
State-of-the-art aircraft like the Spitfire and Hurricane opened the door to serious consideration of conventional engine layouts, and Hives at Rolls-Royce was not slow to charge through the door and play up the fairly minor drawbacks of radials. He began a ruthless sales campaign for the Merlin, backed by a powerful parliamentary lobby, which was to last through the war. He persuaded the Ministry of Aircraft Production that the Merlin was the right choice, not only for single-engined fighters but also for multi-engined bombers, commercial sense for Rolls-Royce since up to four Merlins would be needed for every heavy bomber built.
All these events happened without Rudston, who must have left Rolls-Royce with great sadness and even bitterness at what he would have perceived, as an engineer, to be very third-rate behaviour on the part of the board. The move, though a good one financially, was not part of his career plan, and he was also certainly grieving the death of his friend Sir Henry. He must have felt further despair when, that same year, there was talk of selling the Merlin design to Germany for their 'civilian' use, though thankfully this terrible idea came to nothing. I was touched when an ex-Napier man said to me recently:- 'I wish Rudston had come to us. We'd have loved to have him'.
I have been able to discover little about Rudston's day-to-day doings at Armstrongs. I am sure, though, that he did well enough. He joined the main board as engineering director, had a voluptuous Armstrong company car and was highly thought of by old man Siddeley as a talented and valuable member of the management team in his role as director and chief engineer. The family moved to a huge rented house, Strathfield, on the Kenilworth Road in Leamington. I was born in January 1935 into a very privileged environment. The house had five staircases and four servants including the Norlands nannie. Henry, now nearly six, started school at an exclusive day school, Emscott Lawn. The London house was rented out rather than sold; Rudston, as we have seen, had already seen an uncertain future for the country and maybe also for himself.
It is quite possible that Rudston saw his move to Armstrongs in 1934 as a sensible career move at the time. The Gloster Gladiator, the Air Ministry's stated choice of front-line fighter, was powered by an 840hp Bristol Mercury air-cooled radial, and Armstrongs in the 1930's specialised in a range of excellent, proven radials for which, in the coming hostilities, there would surely be an immense market.
However, there was to be another disappointment. The Air Ministry decision in 1936 to commit to the Spitfire boosted sales of conventional engines such as the V12 Merlin or in-line engines operated inverted, so that the crankshaft was at the top. Conventional engines tend to have lower drag coefficients than radials, and also provide better visibility in the dog fight. Low-wing monoplanes such as the Spitfire provided their pilots with all-round visibility down to the horizon. Above them, there was nothing but the sky. When attacking straight ahead, they looked down the long nose of their aircraft and straight through the propeller. Large-diameter radials with their central crankshafts would have obstructed the pilot's all-round view in the area he needed it most - when he had out-manouevred the Messersmicht and was closing on it from behind.
Rudston, in fact, found that he had joined Armstrong Siddeley at a disappointing period in this excellent company's history. Its achievements, such as the magnificent double Mamba turbo prop and the Sapphire turbo jet, were still a very long way in the future. The birth of the Spitfire, which secured the future of the Merlin and led to Ernest Hives' successful sales drive, effectively much diminished the market for Armstrongs. Radial engines, it became clear, were to play a diminishing role in the future of military aviation in Great Britain. The ultimate disappointment must have come when the safe but rather stodgy Whitley bomber, ordered 'off the drawing board' of the sister company Armstrong Whitworth in 1935 and originally equipped with two Armstrong Siddeley Tiger IX 795hp radials, was changed to Rolls-Royce Merlins when it reached the Mark IV version in 1938.
(Left) The Gloster Gladiator - nimble but at 250mph rather slow, and (right\ the pretty Avro 626 trainer, powered by a 240hp Armstrong Siddeley Lynx engine. These pictures clearly show how the pilot's upward vision was restricted by the upper aerofoil, and how the large-diameter radial engines obstructed his straight-ahead line of sight. Both aircraft are contemporaries of the Spitfire!
Also, Rudston himself admitted that he had little empathy with radial aero engines. He had worked on them at Pont del'Arche, but things had come a very long way in radial technology by 1933, and Rudston had been left behind. His state-of-the-art expertise lay with engines like the Merlin. He told me once that he did not like radial engine technology because it was virtually impossible to achieve good carburation through the whole speed range - very probably a problem he had encountered at Pont de l'Arche. I am assured by radial engine experts that this problem (along with many others) had been sorted out years before Rudston joined Armstrongs. Also, the Merlin quickly became an extremely good engine, with superiority in power-to-weight ratio as well as reliability, and with considerable potential for development. Hives, in fact, had delivered on his promises.
But Rudston had to face a far bigger problem at home, when ominous signs of the alcoholism that was to destroy his wife Mollie's sanity, and ultimately nearly claim her life, began to appear. Curiously, the problem seemed to have been noticed by his boss Sidgreaves before Rudston noticed that there was anything amiss. Rudston told me that when he was negotiating the tenancy of Strathfield, Sidgreaves had advised him not to move to Leamington. 'There are women there who would be a very bad influence'.
Perhaps the problem was that Mollie, moving from a relatively small terraced house in Kensington to a fully-staffed mansion, lost all the jobs at which she was competent. For an experienced woman, the freedom from domestic work would have enabled her to move into the supporting role of a company director's wife, but unfortunately Mollie had absolutely no idea of how to do that. Because there was very little useful that she could do, she quickly moved from heavy drinking into alcoholism. A main board director's wife is frequently needed to be seen on display at company events, so Mollie's illness must have made life for Rudston very difficult indeed. I was only four years old when the family left Strathfield and mainly in the company of our nannie, so my mother's alcoholism had little affect on me at that time, though I did note that I seemed to have two mothers - a kind one and a silly one.
Because he was always out at work, Rudston was more of a shadowy figure to me, but I have two happy memories of him from the Leamington days. One was a November 5th firework party - I imagine I would have been nearly four - with Rudston lighting fire balloons in the garden. These were really little hot air balloons; they took off and flew, though they destroyed themselves in the process. I thought they were very pretty. The other was my fourth birthday, when Rudston took me to his workshop - previously a prohibited zone because of the sharp tools - to show me what he had done with my brother's disused pedal car. He had removed the body, and made me a beautiful steam tank engine, with a whistle that worked, out of plywood and redundant bits of his organ. It was painted green and black. As a present, it was a great success. 'Ooh - a choo-choo!' - and I played with it for ten years. Father had to keep raising the seat as my legs grew until at nearly fourteen I was sitting on top of the thing, and also had to keep making new wheels as I wore out the old ones. When I finally abandoned the toy, he simply took the raised seat out and gave choo-choo to his grandchildren.
In 1938, Rudston became chairman of the Interchangeable Power Plant Committee in the Society of British Aircraft Constructors, (the committee whose job it was to ensure, for example, that the Siddeley engines of the Whitley could be replaced by Merlins with the minimum of fuss), and he continued in this function after he returned to Rolls-Royce in 1939. The committee had great commercial power, as it could effectively direct manufacturers, and formed a natural bridge between Rudston's time at Armstrongs and his return to Rolls-Royce. Although representing Armstrong Siddeley on the committee, his loyalties as an engineer and senior member of the SBAC clearly lay with the Merlin engine. Rudston was not a man who would be comfortable if his loyalties were divided.
In 1939, Rudston abandoned his directorship at Armstrong Siddeley to return to Rolls-Royce where Hives was by now managing director. I believe, given the situation at Armstrongs, that his decision, though certainly courageous, was understandable. Hives was based at the Nightingale Road offices in Derby; Rudston, as chief power plant design engineer, was to head up the company's facilities the best part of an hours drive away at the Belper office (subsequently, the team moved to Hucknall aerodrome) so, although his old rival would now be his boss, at least they would not be under each other's feet. With hindsight, it can also be seen that the move was also the best possible way of pursuing a career without the support of his wife. Her social support would not be needed for the Hucknall job.
Rudston's move to head up the new design facilities at Belper must have come as a something of a bitter personal blow to Rolls-Royce man Ray Dorey, who had effectively set up the Hucknall operation and, as manager, controlled around 100 employees there before the war, reporting direct to Hives. Now, he was effectively under Rudston's control. Hucknall was a facility shared with the RAF, and Hives had correctly foreseen a dramatic increase in activities there. Hucknall could no longer be a sleepy outpost, reporting back to the Derby experimental facilities; it had to be a fully-equipped design and manufacturing facility in its own right. Hives was at that time engaged in desperate political battles with the Air Ministry to gain acceptance for the Merlin and its glycol-cooled variants for use in multi-engined bombers. Rudston's experience at Pont de l'Arche, coupled with his seniority on a crucial SBAC committee, were needed by Rolls-Royce to run Hucknall in war conditions. The appointment was no reflection on Dorey's abilities. He simply lacked the right experience and connections. If Hives' action in appointing Rudston over Dorey's head seems ruthless, he needs to be judged in the context of what was happening to our country at the time. Hives was ruthless because he had to be. Nevertheless, I know that relations between Rudston and Dorey remained very cool throughout the war.
There is a postscript to this story. I believe it to be true because Rudston told me of it.
Neville Chamberlain delivered his famous 'Peace in our time' speech on the tarmac at Croydon airport in 1938. Soon after, he went to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, where Rudston was working with a small team on some project (quite possibly the Whitley conversion) for the SBAC. What Chamberlain said to the team was: 'I've bought you boys one year at the outside. Make the very most of it'.
This is interesting historically, as it suggests that Chamberlain, certainly a pacifist with no stomach for war, was also a realist. He knew war was inevitable, and sacrificed our old ally, Czechoslovakia, to buy time to prepare for it. In fact, by the time Hitler was consolidated across the channel, and was ready to occupy Britain, Munich was eighteen months into history. What we lost was the trust, hopefully not for all time, of our former Czech allies. What we gained was Germany's ultimate defeat. Perhaps Neville Chamberlain, the peace-loving man, would have made an unsuitable wartime leader, but this story casts him in a very different light from the majority of the current history books. Without the time he bought us at Munich, it is very doubtful that we would have been prepared for the Battle of Britain.
There has been considerable historical debate over Munich. Was Chamberlain sincere in the belief that his piece of paper would guarantee peace in our time, or were his motives more Machiavellian? Almost alone, historian A.J.P.Taylor takes the latter view in his Oxford History of England, and Rudston's eye-witness account would seem to prove him correct. Chamberlain's gift of Czechoslovakia to Hitler prompted Jan Masaryk, Czech minister in London in 1938, to say bitterly:- 'If you have sacrificed my nation to preserve the peace of the world I will be the first to applaud you. But if not, God help your soul'. Happily, Czechoslovakia is now a sovereign nation again, though it has taken a long time and the collapse of the USSR for right to prevail.
Rudston lost his company car on leaving Armstrongs in 1939 and bought himself what was at the time considered to be a car of very high technology; the Vauxhall 10. It boasted independent front suspension, a design feature which overcame the tendency of the heavy beam axles fitted to most other cars of the period to tramp all over the road at speed, and also an extremely efficient overhead-valve engine with a lean burn feature. It was comically boxy, with an incredibly high bonnet, but in all other respects, with its chassis-less construction and hydraulic brakes, would not be out of place on today's roads. Like most successful cars, its design owed much to the front-wheel drive Citroen of 1934. Rudston told me it used a gallon less petrol between Leamington and Bucks Mills than the Ford and was 20mph faster.
When war was declared, Rudston disposed of his Vauxhall very quickly after two back-axle failures, and pinched mother's Ford Prefect. His engineer's nose had smelt a design fault in the Vauxhall, and he was perfectly right. The back axle was a weak point with them. This was wartime and he knew he was more likely to be able to get spares for the Ford. For Mollie he bought a 1934 two-seater Austin 7 tourer, which went on to serve my brother (father had it restored as Henry's wedding present) and then myself.
Rudston's Vauxhall was the first car he had had to buy for himself since the 1920's, when he sold his little JAP-engined Swift. He had been rather spoiled with a succession of 'pool' Rolls-Royces and then his voluptuous Armstrong Siddeley. However, Mollie always had her own car in the Leamington days; first a succession of Y-model Ford 8's and then the Prefect, which was brand new in 1939. For its day, the Prefect looked very smart, with its alligator bonnet and flowing lines. But underneath its finery, it was much the same as the old Y models, with the proven technology of only two transverse road springs, a lusty side-valve engine and three-speed gearbox - and those dreadful vacuum-operated windscreen wipers with their habit of stopping on a hill.
Rudston had great faith in mass-produced over hand-built cars, and it was not because he was in any way a cheapskate. The luxury cars he was used to were largely hand-assembled. If an engine part didn't fit very well or was a bit 'tight', a highly-skilled fitter was at hand to put things to rights. The products of the assembly line for the mass car market were a different matter altogether. Assembly lines are intolerant of delays. If something doesn't fit, the assembly line stops and hundreds of workers lie idle - a very expensive matter indeed. To avoid this happening, parts for mass-produced cars were (and are) produced to extremely high standards of accuracy - far higher than those needed for luxury cars. The result is predictable, reliable performance - and cheap repairs, as garages know that spare parts also bolt straight into place without the need for hand fitting.
Rudston also believed that anybody buying a new mass-produced car should wait until the design was in its second year of production. He probably learned this from his bad experience with his Vauxhall's back axle, though it has to be said that some manufacturers (notably Citroen) road-tested new models at the expense of their customers.
But he was wrong about one thing. It was commonly believed before the war that, although cheap and reliable (the Y model was £99.99; the Prefect £195), Fords were only good for 10,000 miles, after which they were designed to fall apart. The Prefect, CUE 159, was to go round its 100,000-mile clock while it served Rudston right through the war and beyond. He advertised it for £250 in 1950 and was inundated with cash buyers before the advertisement even appeared in the Derby Evening Telegraph. Cars were then in such short supply that typesetters were tipping off their mates before anything went to press. The Ford itself was in such bad condition that any attempt to wash it with a hosepipe simply blew holes in it.
Mass-produced cars, Rudston believed, therefore represented the very highest standards of engineering, at least as far as their components were concerned. He was proved to be right. The mass-manufacturers' expertise in working with extreme accuracy were destined to play an important part in the war effort, as we shall see in the next chapter.
<< Chapter 6 • End of Chapter 7 • Chapter 8 >>