CHAPTER EIGHT
Belper, Hucknall and The War
They always told me that Hucknall was the graveyard of careers!
Through the summer of 1939, while his family enjoyed an extended holiday in Buck Mills (a holiday that proved to be the last for six years), Rudston prepared a new home for us on the southern outskirts of the city of Derby. He really did us proud. Number 28 Moorway Lane was a massive double-fronted Victorian house with five bedrooms, set at the north end of a 4-acre site that included a 2-acre paddock, a formal garden, a hard tennis court and an octagonal summer house with stained glass windows that could be revolved to optimize available sunlight. We also had massive kitchen gardens, screened from the house by a fine yew hedge, and a magnificent orchard. The previous owners, appropriately named the Horsefall sisters, kept several horses so there was extensive and rather tumbledown stabling as well as a truly magnificent heated conservatory. The house, in the village of Littleover and literally the last in the conurbation of Derby, overlooked farmland that fell gently away to the Trent valley, giving magnificent views. Unlike Strathfield, which was rented, Rudston owned Number 28. It cost him £1,800. At the same time, he bought a little stone cottage, Hazelbrow Cottage, in the foothills of the pennines just north of Duffield, and moved Mollie's elderly parents up from Micheldever in Hampshire so that they could be close at hand.
I was four years old when war broke out, so my memory was beginning to function, though my childhood memories are not at all like my memories of what happened yesterday. They are more of a series of scenes of cinematic intensity, with nothing much to link the scenes into a coherent picture. For example, I remember Mollie driving my 10-year-old brother and me the 250 miles to our new home in the Ford Prefect after that last holiday in Bucks Mills. We found Rudston on his knees in the drawing room, fixing heavy black-out paper to wooden frames he had made to fit the great bay window. It was the day after war had been declared - September 4th, 1939.
In fact, Rudston had been extremely busy. As well as setting up the new family home, moving the two old Walkers up from Hampshire and arranging the moving of two lots of furniture, he had taken up his post as chief power plant engineer of a new design facility which was originally based in the little pennine town of Belper but subsequently moved to the nearby Hucknall aerodrome. Rudston had around 100 employees, and his brief was to oversee all modification work carried out at Hucknall. Ray Dorey retained his title of manager of the Hucknall facility, so Rudston was effectively his superior.
Hucknall is a small mining village in Nottinghamshire, sixteen miles north-east of Derby. In 1939 it was also an operational air base, half owned by the RAF and half by Rolls-Royce, whose staff were based in a fully-equipped factory with draughtsmen and machine shops of all kinds.
Hucknall was unique in the field of aviation. It was born of necessity, and, like so much of worth in Rolls-Royce, was the brainchild of Ernest Hives. Hucknall was needed because, just as Rolls-Royce was the only engine manufacturer without commercial customers, it was also the only engine manufacturer who did not also manufacture airframes. Aircraft to be used as flying test beds were therefore needed, and indeed one was purchased as early as 1927, in the form of a world war 1 de Havilland DH9. This flew from de Havilland's Stag Lane factory and formed the test bed for the Kestrel engine. In May 1928, however, the aircraft was judged to be too old and the project was scrapped. In view of the miserable happenings at Conduit Street at the time, when the board was trying to abandon aviation, this poor decision was hardly surprising.
The value of the information gained from these tests was not lost on Hives, but Stag Lane was regarded as being rather a long way from Derby, so he established a facility at the Nottingham Flying Club's field at Tollerton in 1931, with a Rolls-Royce team of about six engineers. The test beds were old open-cockpit biplanes, a Hawker Horsley, a Fairey 111F and a Hawker Hart, used for testing the Buzzard and Kestrel engines.
Tollerton proved beyond question the need for, and value of, Rolls-Royce owned aircraft to provide flight testing facilities. At the end of the day, though, it was a public aerodrome and not, therefore a suitable site for service aircraft on the secret list. In December 1934, Hives transferred everything from Tollerton to two Belfast-trussed hangers at RAF Hucknall in Nottinghamshire. Captain R.T.Shepherd was made Roll-s-Royce test pilot, and the small team of ground staff engineers and technical staff became Rolls-Royce employees. Cyril Lovesey was placed in charge of the changeover during the initial months until control of Hucknall moved to Ray Dorey.
With Hives' backing, Dorey created a state-of-the-art facility at Hucknall. The old biplanes were scrapped, and replaced by, of all choices, a Heinkel He70, an all-metal civilian airliner with enclosed cockpit, retractable undercarriage and superb streamlining. Engine testing became very advanced, and the Heinkel was in use for nearly four years, up to the outbreak of war in 1939. There is some irony, perhaps, in the fact that the use of this German aircraft played a major role in defeating the Luftwaffe in 1940.
When Rudston joined Rolls-Royce as chief power plant engineer in 1939, Hucknall was not only a very advanced engineering and test facility, but a also very flexible one. The Merlin-powered bombers and fighters based at RAF Hucknall served a dual role - they also served as test beds for the new engine, not only to speed the rectification of any design faults but also to enable it to be modified, tested and, if necessary, remodified to fit it for the many roles it had to play during the war.
It would be nice, but very dishonest, to be able to comment on the Merlin's unfailing reliability. This was an engine for which the aim was a continual increase in performance without increase in weight, and inevitably there were many failures, some involving major structural work and massive redesign. Everything had to be done very quickly and not always on site. Frequently, teams worked in squadron workshops to keep ground time as short as was humanly (or indeed superhumanly) possible.
Hucknall's work, though, went far beyond engine modification. For prototype aircraft, they were responsible for manufacturing the so-called 'engine pod' in which all components forward of the pilot's bulkhead were Hucknall's responsibility. The engine pod was an example of Hives' brilliant foresight, and turned a perceived marketing disadvantage into a major benefit. As we have seen, most aero engine manufacturers also built aircraft. Rolls-Royce did not, and the installation of Merlins into airframes by customers' airframe fitters was proving to be difficult and unsatisfactory. Apparently, they never made a good enough job of the plumbing to the coolant radiators. The engine pod, in which all components were supplied pre-assembled, wired and plumbed to Rolls-Royce standards, solved the problem completely. Rudston's work on the Interchangeable Power Plant Committee before the war must have proved highly relevant to this work.
Rudston's teams could, in fact, assemble an operational aircraft from an incomplete airframe, and one of their successes in this field is legendary. Barnes Wallis, of dam-buster fame, had designed a super-bomb capable of penetrating the reinforced concrete of U-boat pens and exploding inside the structures. The only trouble was that the bombs had to be dropped from at least 16,000 feet - in those days a very great height - and were extremely heavy. Avro came up with a new airframe capable of doing the job, which was to be powered by two new engines - the massive Rolls-Royce Vultures. The plane was to be called the Manchester. The engines, it was said, could not be prepared in time, and Rudston's team at Hucknall were called on to modify the airframe and fit four modified Merlins. In peacetime, the work of modifying fighter engines for bomber duty at high altitude could take years. Rudston's team completed the work in a matter of months. The aircraft was renamed the Lancaster.
This was an almost miraculous achievement. In a letter to The Times following the publication of Rudston's obituary, Rudston's friend consultant Frank Nixon recalls:
In 1941, Avro were informed by Rolls-Royce that work on the Vulture engine intended for their large Manchester bomber would have to be discontinued to allow more active development of the Merlin engine. It was suggested that four Merlins should be used instead of the two Vultures. Avro could make the necessary changes to the wing, and to help them Fell's new department undertook the design and supply of complete engine installations. So the Lancaster came into existence, with power plants made by a number of car firms and a host of ancillary companies, whose efforts were guided and co-ordinated by a design, development and production office of barely 100 people.
Without this action, which reminded Fell of his days at Pont de l'Arche, there would have been no Lancasters which, despite the hurried redesign and extemporised manufacture, proved to be one of the successes of the war.
There is a bit of Rolls-Royce spin-doctoring in Nixon's version of events. Whatever they may have told Avro at the time, we know today that the reason for the withdrawal of the Vulture was the Rolls-Royce failure to make the complicated 24-cylinder goliath work properly! It had a habit of breaking its connecting-rod bolts, and indeed an aircraft and its pilot were actually lost at Hucknall due to the fault. The problem was overcome to a degree, but Hives knew that the Vulture design had reached its limit, and that further development would be impossible. He made the wise decision to scrap it. It is said that when Hives announced his intention of discontinuing work on the Vulture, everybody at Derby heaved a sigh of relief.
During Rudston's time at Hucknall, the Spitfire was developed from the Mark 1 to the Mark 22, each change involving some development work on the Merlin. By 1940, the engine was driving de Havilland's constant-speed, variable-pitch propeller which gave fast take-off and good high-altitude performance. This involved an entirely new Merlin gearbox, and produced the aircraft that won the Battle of Britain for us. By the end of the war, the Mark 22 Spitfire, powered by the Merlin's big brother, the Griffon, could fly at speeds well over 400mph and perform at altitudes of 35,000 feet. It is rumoured that the Mark 22 could exceed the speed of sound in a dive, but it is unlikely that we shall find any pilots prepared to testify to this reprehensible behaviour. The Mark 22 was in service with the RAF until 1952, when it was finally replaced by the modern jet fighter.
The success of Hucknall's operations can be seen in the stream of modified Merlins, and later Griffons, for arctic conditions in the North of Norway, desert conditions in Africa, Wellington bombers as well as the Hurricane and Spitfire for which it was originally intended, and even marine versions of the Merlin which, in teams of four, propelled motor torpedo boats at speeds up to fifty miles an hour. The Merlin also found its way into Handley Page's Halifax bomber and the remarkable little Mosquito high-altitude fighter-bomber. For Rudston, the wheel of history must have turned full circle when Hucknall began installing engine pods in the Whitley bomber!
One major excitement for Hucknall was the arrival in 1942 of a US Mustang fighter, already known as a superb fighting machine but with indifferent full throttle performance. They fitted a Merlin 61 - and created what some believe to be the greatest piston-engined fighter aircraft of all time. Another was the arrival of the remains of a crashed Messersmicht 109. Hucknall rebuilt it completely, its engine was calibrated on the test beds - and it was flown by Rolls-Royce test pilots to yield the secrets of its handling and performance.
But perhaps most exciting of all was the arrival as early as August 1942 of a Wellington bomber with a very strange tail where the gun turret should have been. It was top secret and nobody was allowed near it. The tail housed a very special engine, known only as the B23. It logged nine hours flying time, and must have sounded very strange to ears accustomed to the roar of the Merlin. The jet age had begun.
Two more Wellingtons, fitted with B37 jet engines, arrived in 1943 but Hucknall's involvement in the birth of the jet age ended that October. Hucknall was a grass field, and the new aircraft needed concrete. The B23 was to become the Derwent, the B37 the Welland, both power plants chosen for the RAF's famous Gloster Meteors.
A recent picture of a surviving Meteor on the hardstanding outside Duxford museum. Powered either by Rolls-Royce Wellands or Derwents, descendants of the engines Rudston had worked on in 1942, the Meteor was the only jet fighter to become operational during the war. It could achieve 550mph, and scored successes shooting down V2 rockets in 1944.
Hucknall and its relatively tiny team of top-grade engineers was far more than just a research establishment. Through the war, many hundreds of fighter aircraft incorporating the latest engine modifications were supplied by Hucknall directly to operational air bases throughout the UK. Its significance to the war effort simply cannot be over-stated. Though Rudston and Dorey moved to other work after the war, Hucknall's importance as the provider of Rolls-Royce flying test beds remained until the financial crash of 1971, when the airfield was finally closed.
Rudston's most noticeable characteristic throughout the war was his boundless energy. Throughout the war, winter and summer, snow or fog, he left his house in Littleover, Derby at 7.30 to drive to Hucknall in the 10hp Ford Prefect with, of course, no lights at all to speak of. Because of Rolls-Royce, Derby was regarded as a prime target and the blackout was absolute. It mattered not that there was an array of anti-aircraft searchlights sweeping the sky within a hundred yards of the house - lights must not be shown. He would rarely be home before 7.30 at night - and that was never the end of his day. He was a member of the ARP (air raid precautions team) and was called out most nights, when the sirens sounded. It is a complete mystery to me how he managed to keep going at all, let alone doing so with unflagging enthusiasm.
Industry remembers the war years for the incredible speed with which major engineering tasks had to be accomplished. While men like Rudston were achieving the near-impossible at places like Hucknall, Ernest Hives at Derby was creating and maintaining the climate in which they could do so. Hives was a squat, balding man with a charisma that made him dominant in any environment. I think his executives regarded him with deep respect, mingled with a healthy fear. They lived on the first floor of the two wings on either side of the chairman's central suite at Nightingale road. Here there was a strict pecking order; the nearer your office was to the connecting door to the central suite and board room, the more important you were in the hierarchy of the company. As an eleven-year-old on my first visit to Nightingale Road after the war, I was disappointed to find that Rudston's office door, newly occupied by him after his return from Hucknall, was less than halfway along the landing.
His executives seemed to have had good reason to fear him. With Hives, your face had to fit - and Hives made sure that you never quite knew whether it did or not. He did this with a system of flexible personal boundaries; possibly, as his biographer Alec Harvey-Bailey suggests, he learned this trick as a survival mechanism against a rather autocratic father and numerous big brothers! Hives made sure nobody could get really close to him. People would try, and initially be received with a joke and a smile. If they moved even a little too close, Hives' demeanour changed instantly, and the unfortunate executive would find himself in a dangerous position - he would, in effect, be frozen out.
Once or twice a month, the whole executive team would be summoned to Duffield Bank House, the company's country seat at the foot of the Pennines, for a brainstorming session that could last far into the night. They were all treated to a meal, and Hives expected them to play a little snooker with him at some stage of the evenings. According to Alec Harvey-Bailey, it was not a good thing to be a duffer at the game.
Rudston cordially hated the evenings he had to spend at Duffield Bank House. He never was one for the 'all boys together' atmosphere and, though he had the odd knockabout with his grandson Hugh during his retirement at Worlaby, I don't believe he had touched a snooker cue before in his life.
Rolls-Royce's 30,000 wartime employees, in the factories behind the office block at Nightingale Road, a mile away at the Sinfin plant and at various outposts such as Hucknall, Glasgow and Crewe, undoubtedly also respected Ernest Hives, though he left them in no doubt as to who was the boss. Though he was happy to co-operate with the Amalgamated Engineering Union, he was ruthless in weeding out troublemakers, particularly communists in the Hillington factory near Glasgow, and he dealt in summary fashion with an attempt to establish a closed shop at Derby by sending a quite extraordinarily strong memorandum to the whole workforce. In précis, it said there would never be a closed shop at Derby while he was alive, and if people didn't like the working conditions, they had better look elsewhere for employment.
Hives' executives were not on their own in suffering if they failed to meet his standards. He could hardly be accused of sycophancy in his dealings with his only customer during the war years, which was the Ministry of Aircraft Production. On the subject of constructive meetings, he told MAP:- 'The success of this meeting will be whether decisions can be made. I have never yet attended a meeting at MAP that I have not left with the stomach ache, and with the feeling that it has been a waste of time'. He dealt with a delay on final approval for the new factory at Hillington, urgently needed for Merlin production, in similar summary fashion:- '…we get all these irritating delays that are totally unnecessary. We have a saying here that Hitler goes halfway across Europe while we are trying to get one contract through the MAP'.
Hives could be like a monstrous battering ram, bludgeoning problems and excuses into non-existence. Many of these were external to the company. For example, the new factories that were springing up at Hillington and Crewe would have been totally useless if the large work-forces had nowhere to live. This was a matter for the local councils. Both were wildly enthusiastic at the prospect of having Rolls-Royce in their domain, and made pledges for the building of the necessary new houses. Both let Hives down completely, pleading difficulties in obtaining supplies due to the war. This was not at all the right approach to take with Hives, who was no stranger to procurement problems himself, but always got round them. His correspondence on the matter is an education in non-ambiguous downright rudeness - but it got the job done. Someone should really assemble a book of Hives' memoranda and letters as a stand-alone publication!
Unlike Basil Johnson, who very nearly lost Rolls-Royce its military aviation business in 1929 by refusing to entertain the idea of sub-contracting Rolls-Royce designs, Hives had no problem whatever with the principle of sub-contracting, providing the workmanship was up to Rolls-Royce standards. This led to an amusing incident with Ford UK, who had been looked on with some suspicion as a potential manufacturer of Merlin engines, and which confirms Rudston's view, stated in the last chapter, that mass-produced motor cars represent the highest standards of engineering. Ford returned the Merlin drawings, complaining that the manufacturing tolerances called for were far too wide for them! In the end, Ford themselves redrew the Rolls-Royce drawings, set up dedicated production lines in their Manchester factory of the type to which they were accustomed, and thereafter produced 400 perfect Merlins a week. Ford UK is not always credited with the enormous contribution they made to the war effort. (Mind you, Ford Germany also made its contribution to the war effort - but unfortunately, not our war effort).
Our nostalgia for the mid twentieth century has spawned successful and successive TV sagas of wartime families, invariably middle-class, dressed a la mode and meeting their loved ones at stations in carefully-restored prewar motor cars of make and model appropriate to their status. The only problem with this is that it is not historically accurate. During the war, cars went nowhere because there was no fuel. Petrol was strictly allocated for essential purposes only, and those who procured fuel on the black market were dealt with extremely severely, regardless of status. For example, impresario Ivor Novello was gaoled for 'fiddling' petrol for his Rolls-Royce. Petrol fiddles were regarded as highly unpatriotic, because the cost of fuel was measured in men's lives. Our wartime fuel mainly came across the Atlantic in tanker convoys that, at the peak of our shipping losses, were floating bombs. A few cars and buses were converted to run (very badly) on coal gas, but were easily recognised, either by the huge gas bag on the roof or the smoking and dangerous converter on the trailer behind.
Rudston therefore couldn't really use the Ford as a family car until after the war. It served its country by carrying him on the round trip to Hucknall every day, for which he had a petrol allocation of six gallons of dreadful, low-octane fuel a week. Every mile he travelled had to be scrupulously logged in a book that also recorded exactly when he had filled up. Even so, he managed to save a little fuel at the expense of his brake linings, by coasting whenever he could, which he used in taking us over to Duffield to see my grandparents from time to time, and down into Derby for our Saturday cinema jaunt.
He had a fairly spectacular breakdown during the war. He'd had the big-end bearings remetalled, and the garage cracked a badly-machined bearing cap on assembly. New parts being unobtainable, they attempted to repair it by brazing. The braze gave way, and the number three piston and connecting-rod came through the side of the engine, taking the rear of the camshaft with them. Amazingly, the engine was still running on the front two cylinders when he stopped. A reconditioned engine was £15, but the garage refused to accept the old one, pointing out (not unreasonably) that there was nothing to recondition. In the end, a rather cross father had to stump up £35 for a brand new engine.
The war was also to re-create the excitement and purpose of her Pont de l'Arche days for Mollie, though only after an incident that must have caused Rudston great pain. Our nannie had been faithfully performing her duties for our family for twelve years. She was Norland-trained, and by tradition, her job with us was for life, as the companions the Misses Digby and Jefferson could have testified. One dreadful morning early in 1940, when I was just five, my brother, nanny and I were interrupted at our breakfast when Mollie came into the dining room rather the worse for wear, and sacked her with immediate effect. She was simply told to pack her things and go. Rudston had already left for work. The nanny was heart-broken and with very good reason. She was no longer young, and a sacked Norlands nannie would find it virtually impossible to get another job. Maybe the close presence of a dour Scottish lady with impeccable standards of behaviour shamed Mollie beyond endurance. But whatever the reason, it presented Rudston with a major problem regarding the day-to-day care of a five-year-old. My brother Henry was less of a problem - he was a senior boy at a preparatory school in a nearby village, Mickleover, and was quite capable of taking care of himself. I know Rudston tried to persuade the nannie to come back to us, but to no avail - understandable Scottish pride had kicked in.
His sister Rose came to the rescue, and my next memory is of a long car trip with Rudston. I recall green leather upholstery so it must have been the Vauxhall. For the best part of a year, until 1941, I was to live with my Aunt Bunny (Rose) in the pretty village of Staxton, nestling in a vale at the foot of the North York moors and only a few miles away from Scarborough.
But this was before the terrible night of November 14th 1940, when the City of Coventry was destroyed by the Luftwaffe. Henry told me that the flames of the burning city could be seen from the house in Moorway Lane - and Coventry is 50 miles away from Derby. Until that night, I don't think anybody had any idea of the immense damage a blanket bombing raid could cause. Derby was well within range of the German bombers - and Derby was the home of the Merlin engine. Derby could well be next. Rudston decided that Henry must be evacuated as well, and he came to join me, to start at Staxton's village school. I cannot say that I was overjoyed to see him. There was more than a degree of sibling rivalry as I saw myself as the lynch pin of the Staxton household and feared he might topple me from my perch. In the event, the Derby factory was only once nicked in a raid, and that was probably a stray bomb. A decoy factory had been built in fields near Derby, and the Germans seemed to be content with pulverising that. Hucknall was never hit at all, as far as I am aware.
We returned home in 1941 to find our mother with more of a sense of purpose. She was a bright, vivacious and extremely hard-working member of the WVS. She ran a food van, delivering dinners to state schools in heated containers which she collected from a central kitchen. Occasionally I was allowed to help with my seven or eight-year-old muscles. After the war, she was replaced by two men who went on strike almost immediately, saying the work was too heavy for them. Rudston had bought her a little two-seater Austin 7 tourer, MG 3533, which served her faithfully through the war on her allocation of two gallons a week, deemed sufficient to carry her into Derby where she picked up her Ford 10 food van. It was a cute, scruffy little car with canvas hood and talc sidescreens, and she drove it with great aplomb. Only once did it fail her; she complained that it had taken over the task of steering itself, and Rudston found that the tie rods that located the front axle had fallen off the chassis altogether. Brakes and generator were always dubious; it was a task of some magnitude to keep a charge in the battery. In 1949, Rudston had the little car beautifully restored and gave it to my brother as a 21st birthday present. It served my brother and his wife until 1955, when it passed to me.
Quite soon after we came back from Staxton, Henry and Rudston made a most adventurous trip to visit Rose and Elspeth. They took a train to York, and then biked the remaining fifty miles over the Yorkshire wolds and the edge of the moors. Henry would have been about thirteen; a tough little boy who survived the trip without incident. Rudston was pretty tough too, but his backside must have been softened by his somewhat sedentary lifestyle. He certainly couldn't sit down for a week!
Rudston's first act after buying the Littleover house was to bridge the wash outside the stables with a brick-and-timber structure, creating a vast double garage with a music room above; the first time his beloved organ had had a proper home of its own. Its timber front was fitted with an electric clock that had to be kept right as it became a source of reference for the entire neighbourhood. For part of the war, this garage became home for a civil defence ambulance with a canvas body on the chassis of a 22hp Ford V8 car. The body had to be shortened considerably to fit the garage and was rather a cramped affair by the time the necessary inches had been lopped off. Rudston turned the tack room into his workshop, the stables being used only to store odd bits of junk.
In 1941, when I was six, I joined my brother at the school he had attended before we went to Staxton. Mickleover Manor was a rather second-rate preparatory school, sending pupils into the public school system at 12 - Henry's age that year. Rather than making arrangements for his secondary education, Rudston persuaded the Manor to keep him for an extra year, and the gap between his thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays was subsequently bridged by a private tutor. I believe that Rudston's bad memories of Tonbridge and his distrust of the public school system were factors in this decision.
In my eyes, Henry's fourteenth year marked his transition from boyhood to manhood. Staxton is only minutes away from Willerby Lodge, the estate then owned by our Uncle Francis, the husband of Rudston's sister Elspeth, and Francis had taught Henry to shoot. Francis later told me how Henry leapt from cover when he winged his first bird, shouting, 'I got it! I got it!' On those acres of the Yorkshire Moors, Henry developed his love for the land. When he returned to Derby, he somehow found himself employment on nearby Moorway Farm, where he spent his afternoons. (Mornings, of course, were spent with his tutor). Rudston and he enclosed part of the paddock with chain link fencing and Rudston built him a magnificent hen house, where he kept Rhode Island Red chickens. The air went extremely blue during the fencing operation, when a crow bar hit Rudston's foot rather than the hole it was supposed to be digging. His anger was well focused on the crow bar, which travelled a surprising distance horizontally across the paddock. Henry even had a go at the kitchen garden behind the house. The fact is that he worked incredibly hard for a lad of only thirteen, and his efforts with the chickens made a very significant contribution to our life style during the war. At the end of the war, when he was sixteen, he left for Cirencester, to become their youngest ever student to gain an NDA.
Sadly, the rest of the gardens at Moorway Lane succumbed to neglect. Part of the vast conservatory rotted and collapsed, the tennis court and summer house were damaged beyond repair by me and my friends and, after old Ward the gardener died soon after we moved in, the formal flower beds more or less disappeared. Rudston lent the large garden rent-free to a neighbour who was also a keen gardener. He could grow what he liked, providing he kept the land in good shape. The orchard needed no more than harvesting and an annual scything. Our paddock, of course, needed no maintenance. Our farmer neighbour put cows in to graze occasionally, to keep it down.
Rudston's most ambitious - and disastrous - attempt at land management was undoubtedly the felling of the elm trees. We had a line of these giants between our sunken lawn and the eastern boundary separating us from our quiet little lane, which wandered through pretty countryside and over a little brook to the village of Findern. There was little down it except Moorway Farm and a small Royal Engineer's base, on land requisitioned from the farm and on which the army operated a searchlight battery.
Rudston had decided that three of our elms had become dangerous and must go, and had worked out exactly how to ensure they fell safely onto the sunken lawn. He explained to me that if you sawed three quarters of the way across a trunk, and then used an axe to cut down into the saw cut, the tree was bound to fall into the triangle you created. He worked out his cut carefully, and Henry and he took turns crafting the precision triangle. As an engineer, he knew the importance of tolerance, and that the tree might fall a few inches either side of its planned landing zone. Consequently, I was banished from the lawn, but was allowed to watch these interesting events from the drive at the front of the house.
To make absolutely sure that everything went well, Rudston attached a rope near the top of the tree, and gave the other end to Henry, who was (forgive me) quite a well-built lad in those days. His instructions were that Henry should pull on the rope as hard as he could until the tree started to fall, and then run like hell. Rudston then delivered the final death strokes with the axe.
The picture in my mind is still vivid. First, I hear the creaking as the tree began to topple. Next, I see my brother travelling down the lawn at about thirty miles an hour until he had the sense to let go of the rope. Finally, there is the crash of the giant falling in precisely the opposite direction to that intended, landing across the lane and taking with it the telephone lines to the army base, with, for visual effect, a look of puzzled dismay on Rudston's face. The army arrived in record time and were very affable and helpful, moving the tree from the lane, which it was blocking, onto the verge and quickly restoring their lost communications.
A fortnight later, Rudston decided to tackle the second elm, but this time there were to be no mistakes. Henry's efforts on the rope were reinforced by a very sturdy farm worker, and Rudston cut his triangle out of the tree with extra care. I watched events from the same vantage point. In fact, only two things were different this time. Henry and the farm worker had the good sense to let go of the rope immediately, and the army was far less affable. Rudston had a visit from an officer of the army base, who enquired rather tartly if he had many more trees to fell. His point was that, although repairing telephone lines was good practice for his men, there was, in fact, a war on and they really had more important things to do.
Rudston had made a very basic engineering mistake. In place of hard data, he had substituted the assumption that the centre of gravity of the trees lay within their bases. In fact, the prevailing wind being westerly, they leaned slightly to the east. Still, he did achieve his prime objective, which was to get rid of them.
Both parents were working in the early years of the war, more or less fulltime; father at Hucknall and mother at her WVS food delivery service. Both belonged to the local ARP (air raid precautions) team, and therefore were frequently out at night as well. Mollie, finding herself with a useful role to play, seemed to thrive on this pressure. She had a great, though rather basic, sense of humour. The ARP team often met in our kitchen. One member was the family doctor, a rather pompous South African. One night she sat him in a basket chair that had a saturated sponge hidden under the seat cushion. The resulting cascade of water brought the house down. Another time, we were lucky enough to have acquired a maid (a Jewish lass whose family had fled nazi Germany), and mother pushed the poor girl fully-clothed into the enormous bath, which I had filled with cold water so that I could sail the family model schooner. All great fun and received with much giggling, but I am sure not to be recommended as a way to treat staff. How incredible that the lass and her family were subsequently interned because they were German. They were in England to escape the holocaust, and were caught up in our pathological hatred and distrust of all things foreign. It is hard to imagine a family less likely to have been spying for the third Reich. We were totally powerless to help them. The family was my first introduction to Jewish culture, and I remember the girl's mother giving me a bowl of the most excellent potato soup whenever I called at their house. I still feel sad when I remember what happened to this nice family.
I cannot say that the war was particularly a time of great hardship for us boys.
Rudston and Rolls-Royce managed to get themselves into a scheme which turned out to be illegal. Neighbours were allowed to band together and keep a pig, which was fed on scraps. When the pig was slaughtered, they were allowed to keep a small percentage of the meat. Rolls-Royce got wind of the idea and started a pig club that was virtually a pig farm, fed from their canteens with the scraps of more than 20,000 employees. Rudston was a member, and for quite a long time we had a magnificent joint of pork every other week. On the alternate weeks, we had a string of the best sausages I have ever had in my life. It was all closed down, of course, when the ministry of food found out what was going on.
There was, indeed, an atmosphere of gaiety during the war which was probably worn as a cloak to hide deep personal tragedies that touched most families in one way or another, and that could not be appropriately expressed at the time. Very few people had been untouched by the violent death of a loved one or friend. Our doctor, mentioned earlier as the butt of Mollie's practical joking, lost both sons. I lost a good friend; a much older boy who shared my interest in cine photography and gave of his time to be kind to me. All three were in their late teens. They enlisted in the RAF as rear gunners, and all died in the same terrible fortnight. The war was never very far away.
For war news, we were rather reliant on the radio. The reason for this was an extraordinarily taciturn paperboy who was only ever known as 'Shug'. Through Shug, Rudston had ordered the Telegraph for himself and the Mail for my mother, deeming these suitable breakfast reading for rather pale-pink conservatives. Shug decided that we would benefit more from the Mirror and the long-defunct Herald, the organ of the trades unions. Despite repeated requests, they were all he was prepared to deliver for years. I never made head nor tail of the Herald, but I always enjoyed the antics of Jane in the Mirror, though as a child I could never understand why she kept losing her outer clothing. I also enjoyed reading the answers of the Old Codgers to readers' letters. Thus was I educated into the affairs of the world. Actually, the Mirror was quite a good paper in those days. But I did also get my weekly Beano and Dandy.
Rudston worked on Saturday mornings through the war. In the afternoon, the ritual was either to visit Mollie's parents at Duffield or to go to the pictures. Derby had at least a dozen cinemas to choose from, and all had queues. The film was selected on the grounds of who was starring in it. After the pictures, we had tea out. The buffet at Oxford station, immortalised in the film of Noel Coward's tear-jerker Brief Encounter, became three-dimensional either in the Gaumont tea room or in a rather more upmarket balcony restaurant in the Picture House. The accoutrements were to pre-war standards, the service very much less so ('There's a war on, dear'). The food was diabolical.
These visits to the packed, smoky wartime cinemas; listening to the upbeat propaganda of the newsreels and then waiting for the lights to dim again to prepare us for the coming of the 'big picture', were the high point of excitement in what was quite a stimulating time in which to be growing up. Performances were continuous, so it didn't really matter when you turned up at the cinema; you simply left at the point in the performance at which you had come in. The war itself was exciting to two boys, and I cannot really say that we were deprived of entertainment. Rudston was always a skilful buyer of what are now called consumer durables, and one of his many successes was the HMV console radio which provided our diversion at home. It dated from the London days; he'd bought it in 1926, when it was at least ten years ahead of its time. It had been designed by the great Professor Lowboy and was the first production radio working on the superheterodyne principle, a development that removed the whistles, crackles and 'two-stations-at-once' syndrome associated with other radios of the time. It was a fine, sensitive radio with superb sound quality, and I spent many happy hours lying with my head under its polished splendour in the drawing room, listening to Uncle Mac on Children's Hour.
During the war, the drawing room and dining room were only used by the family for Christmas. I don't think this was really for austerity reasons. There was no central heating, and the drawing room was heated by an immense coal fire which was rather a sweat to keep going. The dining room had a very early wood-effect gas fire with asbestos logs, which was not only dreadfully inefficient but also quite lethal. The logs had to be removed for cleaning, and had to go back in exactly the right order. One error on assembly, and the thing blew up. And you couldn't easily see whether the cleaning lady had sabotaged the fire. The only way to find out was to turn on the gas, throw a lighted match in the general direction of the thing, and retire. The explosions produced by this dreadful artefact were spectacular.
So we lived in the great middle kitchen, which had a working coal range, and in the adjoining breakfast room. The range kept the kitchen nice and warm, and there was a gas fire in the breakfast room.
When I was about eight, I began to build small radios and to make odds and ends, initially in the playroom Rudston had created for Henry and me out of an outbuilding that might have once been a gun room. It housed a huge glass-fronted cabinet, a gas fire and Bunsen burner for Henry's chemistry experiments, and also his rocking horse, which legend has it rather frightened him as a child. At the end of his life, Rudston entertained a Worlaby dinner party with this anecdote. Henry was by then a very eminent farmer, and the students he was entertaining were rather nonplussed at the idea that the huge man could be frightened of anything. I had a little table and a soldering iron, heated on the Bunsen burner, for my work - but few radio components. Then one day, in amongst the toys in the cabinet, I found a little blue portable battery-operated radio. It contained just the valve I needed for a radio I was building. I removed the valve and the valve holder as well for good measure. In fact, I removed quite a lot of things, and jolly useful they were too. With a ready source of spares, I was away. This pillaging proved to be a very serious error of judgement, as I hadn't bothered to ask whose radio it was that I was destroying. It turned out to belong to my father, and had been bought for use on Bucks Mills holidays. He was less than pleased when he took it to a local radio shop for servicing before the 1945 holiday, and it was returned with the comment that there seemed to be little inside it to service.
Rudston had rigged up an extension speaker from the Lowboy, using a vast amount of twisted lighting flex to span the huge house, and it was from this speaker that we heard the wartime speeches of Winston Churchill, and laughed at the antics of Tommy Handley, Mrs. Mopp and Funf, the German spy. With the amount of anti-German propaganda we assimilated during our formative years, it is a wonder that we are not prejudiced against the race today.
For technical reasons that were completely beyond Rudston's comprehension, the extension speaker not only did not work very well, but also destroyed the sound quality of the Lowboy that fed it. I made a little battery-powered amplifier driving a larger speaker I had removed from an old radio someone had given me (I was not allowed to build mains-operated equipment at that time), and this transformed things. With its cruel load removed, the Lowboy was restored to its former glory, and powerful sounds were now also heard in the kitchen.
The embargo on using the mains electricity was lifted soon after. Rudston handled my promotion to full mains power, which was very important to me, with great common sense. For a short time, I had to show him my mains wiring before plugging in; then he left me to do my worst. Had he known that some of the equipment I was playing with generated nearly four times the voltage of the mains supply, and with lethal power capacity, he might not have been so complacent! Now, at last, I could build really powerful amplifiers.
Rudston never really understood electronics, nor comprehended my love for the sub-molecular happenings inside the thermionic valves I loved. But with the music they could make, I had found our common ground. In the twenties, he had built a record player for the Lowboy, by mounting a turntable and massively heavy pickup inside a magnificent oak bible box. It worked, but the results were faint and tinny, even through the Lowboy. I borrowed a piezo-electric crystal pickup from a friend and demonstrated its capabilities when connected to one of my amplifiers. Rudston was sold immediately, and elected me his agent to buy one. Fitted in the bible box, it was a transformation. Not only could Rudston hear the pedal passages of his beloved Henry Lee collection of organ music, but he could do so at ear-shattering volume.
I had inherited Rudston's singing voice, and won some prizes at my prep school, going on to become a soloist in the choir at Repton. Rudston had the full score of Mendelsohn's Elija, as well as red-label twelve-inchers of Master Ernest Lough singing the piece at Westminster, and we would perform a sort of upmarket karaoke to these records. He particularly loved a sing-along with the double treble aria 'I waited for the Lord', which is a most attractive work to sing.
The space I needed expanded with my hobby, and a dreadful period of infiltration into Rudston's workshop began. His time in there was limited and very precious to him, and he was finding it increasingly difficult to start work on a Sunday morning because I was already in occupation. He found a very acceptable solution. He cleared out the stable, and installed a picture window in the west wall, overlooking the paddock. Then he built me a workbench of my own, and gave it to me as a birthday present. It was a wonderful, solid affair, far superior to his own, and served me for nearly half a century. I still have its tool drawers in use. It had a nice little carpenter's vice, but this was replaced with a metal vice when my motoring days started. The benches were placed side-by-side under the picture window and, as my own contribution, I installed one of the first commercially-available fluorescent lights over them. This was luxury for us both, but was only partially successful in stopping the infiltration into Rudston's work area. My projects still overflowed to fill any space available for their completion.
The occupation of workspace alongside Rudston was an experience that could be described as different. He was a perfectionist, and obsessive about his projects, and therefore always failed to achieve the fun and satisfaction his hobby should have given him. He was ruthlessly self-critical; failure to reach his self-imposed standards produced a despair out of all proportion to the gravity of his error. A job was never 'good enough'. For example, a tiny error in register between the hole in a pipe rack and the sound board of his organ, which at the worst would have caused one of the pipes to stand at a slight angle, would cause the whole job to be thrown into a corner and work to be abandoned for the day in an atmosphere of Armageddon. The following weekend, the glue pot would be out, and Rudston would plug the offending hole and redrill. Consequently, his projects took an inordinate time to complete.
Doncaster's influence was very evident in Rudston when he was working. I had not inherited his patience, which he was certainly trying to teach me, so that each Sunday morning usually began with an Edwardian homily on the lines of 'There's a place for everything, and everything's in its place'. This usually deteriorated into 'There's a place for everything, and everything's all over the place'. A query on the possible location of a misplaced tool invariably provoked the singularly unhelpful remark: 'Well, I did see a dog with something poking out of its bum'.
Rudston kept his tools in immaculate condition, but the item which received total consideration was the workpiece. He gave no thought at all to the prime motivator, which was himself. Although he was more skilled in the use of hand tools than anybody I have ever known, his woodworking tools were razor-sharp and he inevitably cut himself from time to time. He would only stop for bandage repairs if the blood was in danger of spoiling the current project. Quite the worst example of his heedless attitude to his own well-being was when, many years later and hands coal black with oily filth, he pierced a blood vessel at the base of his thumb on a split pin in the engine of my Austin 7. The bleeding was spectacular but, of course, harmless to the engine and therefore provided no excuse to stop work. He overrode my protestations about the need for a plaster with a lecture on the marvellous antiseptic properties of engine oil. Maybe he was right. I doubt anything could have lived in that filth.
While we worked on Sunday mornings, Mollie would be cooking a full dinner, very often roast beef with her superb Yorkshire pudding, thin gravy (Rudston considered thick gravy to be rather declasse), roast potatoes and a variety of vegetables. She was a cook who was able to bring everything to perfection at the same time, which was one o'clock sharp. On top of that, she had lived with Rudston for long enough to know that he never came when called, but would only stop at a natural break in the work in hand, and would tell us that our meal was ready and on the table at least fifteen minutes before it actually was.
Despite these precautions, Rudston was always late for lunch. The reaction to Mollie's first call was never more than a half-hearted attempt to steer the work towards a natural break, with bitter grumbling about the inconvenience of early lunches. Her second, and sharper, request for our company did cause him to hurry, which usually meant a slip in his standards and grief at the production of second-class work. Then there were all the tools to put away (he always insisted on this) and endless washing of hands. When we did get to the table, Rudston had to go through a lengthy ritual of sharpening the carving knife to something approaching the standards of his wood chisels, while the food chilled on the table. Consequently, more often than not, Sunday lunch was eaten in something of a strained atmosphere. Rudston never went back into the workshop after lunch; he'd help wash up, change and sit down with the Sunday paper, or later, with his beloved television. Sunday afternoon was the only time he allowed himself for relaxation.
The hayloft above our workshop was reached by a vertical ladder next to the benches. Rudston had had the roofs repaired, but timbers had suffered from worm and dry rot, and the ladder was particularly unsafe. For that reason, I was forbidden to use it. But the hay loft was a child's paradise; a secret hideaway where, in the dirt and the warm light of the setting sun, I liked to spend hours hunting through the contents of a trunk that had belonged to my grandfather William. There was a sword, and many strange artefacts in leather that were considered essential equipment for a gentleman officer under canvas in South Africa. One was a sort of portable wardrobe that strapped to the tent pole. The purpose of many could not be deduced at all - but they were all beautifully made. These curios were so important to me that I interpreted Rudston's embargo as an instruction merely not to use the ladder when he was about.
Rudston also kept a 'stop' of his organ up there, on carpet felt; sixty-one pipes of spotted metal, that precise mix of tin and lead that refuses to amalgamate. The boundaries of the two metals form a fragile crystalline structure that gives the pipes a particularly sharp and beautiful string-like tone as well as their lovely mottled finish. They too were my playthings, though I was always gentle with them and none suffered damage.
In the end, it was Rudston himself who was caught out by that ladder. He was coming down it in a particularly dangerous way, facing outwards, and with an armful of these fragile pipes, on his way to install them in the organ in the music room. He was wearing his usual shabby flannel slacks, and a particularly gruesome suede jacket with frayed knitted khaki cuffs and collar, so it must have been at the back end of the year. The third rung of the diseased ladder gave way. The remaining rungs were unable to cope with his twelve-and-a-half stone plus the inertia of his freefall for at least five feet onto a stone floor, and collapsed the instant his size 9 feet touched them. Amazingly, he landed on his feet, still clutching his precious pipes. Apart from a badly-jarred back (his spine must have felt like a string of conkers) he was unhurt. The ladder was never repaired; we simply overlaid it with an ordinary builder's ladder at a safer angle.
Rudston had another little estate, of course, and that was my grandparents' home. The Duffield cottage was only piped for gas and water, and had about three acres of steeply-inclined paddock, which was glorious for sledging down in the winter. I remember Rudston, during the war, parting company with a pink sledge and completing the descent on his bottom, his feet still hooked in the foot bar of the sledge. My grandparents loved this cottage, basic though it was, and it was so near Derby that we were able to visit them about once a fortnight through the war. On these trips, Rudston always coasted down the hills out of gear, with the engine switched off to conserve precious petrol.
The little two-up, two-down stone cottage in the steep hills above Duffield had a kitchen annexe where my grandmother cooked fairy cakes, invariably with slightly burned bottoms. In fairness to her, she had to divide her attention between a geriatric cooker and a wheezing, sighing gas meter that she fed with one penny at a time from a pile she kept nearby, and then only when the flames of the cooker were near extinction. I wondered why she didn't save herself trouble and put more in at a time but then, at that time, I had no experience at all of poverty. I had wanted for nothing all my life. My grandparents, though, were no strangers to hardship. Grannie in particular, who certainly wore the trousers in that household, was devoted both to her cottage and to Rudston. Grandad felt nostalgia for Micheldever. I spent a lot of time with the gentle old man. He coach-painted a wooden toy of mine, a double decker bus, in full General livery with the correct logo in gold leaf. They were a happy old couple, though the family had known problems. They had brought up their grand-daughter Barbara, with whom their eldest son's second wife was unable to get on.
Soon after the war, Rudston took it upon himself to demolish the conservatory's centre section and east wing, which had succumbed to wood rot. He could never bear to throw anything away that might come in useful, and this habit was particularly frustrating when he was given a present. Instead of cutting the string like any normal person, he had to pick at every knot, and then neatly roll the remains onto a vast ball that he kept in his desk drawer. So it was with the conservatory. Every brick had to be cleaned and piled neatly against a wall of the house. I never found out what use he had in mind for them. My brother was helping him, and it was fortunate he was there, as Rudston contrived to pull the conservatory down on his head and knock himself out. Henry drove Rudston, who had come round and was laughing uproariously, to the Derbyshire Royal Infirmary, where he was stitched up. Henry, understandably worried, couldn't see the joke at all. Rudston subsequently patched up the west wing of the conservatory with sound timber and glass salvaged from the rest of the building to turn it into a useful little greenhouse.
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