GROUPS AND SINGLE DECORATIONS FOR GALLANTRY
He departed Ark Royal in the following year after suffering from a disabling form of arthritis but, having been cured by an emergency appendectomy, was posted as a Test Pilot to Boscombe Down, where he served until March 1942. Next appointed Commander (Air) in the old carrier Argus on the Malta run in the Mediterranean, he was disappointed to be recalled home to work on the Blackburn Company’s Firebrand aircraft later in the year but, notwithstanding the recent demise of two similarly employed pilots, lent valuable service in attempting to deal with the ill-fated aircraft’s many shortcomings and carried out its first ever deck landings. His final wartime appointment was as Senior Naval Representative for the British Air Commission in Washington D.C.
Post-war, after a year or two at the Admiralty, Cambell returned to sea as Commander (Air) in the carrier Glory in the Far East, and, after advancement to Captain, received his first seagoing command, the corvette Tintagel Castle, in 1948-49. He then returned to an appointment as Deputy Chief Naval Representative (Air) at the Ministry of Supply, in which capacity he transformed aircraft carrier operations with his angled flight deck invention. His obituary in the Daily Telegraph takes up the story:
‘The high landing speeds and greatly increased weights of post-war aircraft made obsolescent - and dangerous - the traditional Second World War method of working a flight deck, with arrester wires and crash barriers and the forward half in use as a deck park.
The solution, devised by Cambell and refined by Lewis Boddington of the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, was so staggeringly simple that everybody else kicked themselves for not thinking of it. It was to slew the direction of approach and landing a little out to port, so that if an aircraft missed the wires it could simply take off and go round again. The idea came to Cambell in August 1951, when he was Deputy Chief Naval Representative (Air) at the Ministry of Supply. He broached the subject at a meeting he was chairing on future aircraft design. But the suggestion was received by the Admiralty, as Cambell said, ‘with an indifference amounting almost to derision.’
However, at the Farnborough Air Show that year Cambell met some U.S. Navy officers who showed immediate interest. Thus, although the first experiments, in the carrier Triumph in 1952, were made by painting new lines on the flight deck, the first true angled deck was fitted for trials on an American carrier, the U.S.S. Antietam.
Between December 1952 and July 1953, Antietam carried out over 4,000 launches and landings, with no accidents attributable to the angled deck. In May 1953 Antietam came for trials in the Channel, and British pilots were able to try out a British invention - on board an American ship. As eventually fitted in British carriers, first with the intermediate five degrees and then the full ten, the angled deck was a success in every way, needing fewer arrester wires and crash barriers, making deck handling much easier and faster, and greatly reducing deaths and injuries to aircrew and deck handlers.’
But for the inventor of the most radical change in post-war carrier design, Their Lordships appear to have had no reward - unlike the Americans who appointed Cambell an Officer of the Legion of Merit. He was, however, given command of the newly commissioned Ark Royal - the fourth ship of that name - in 1955-56, in his view the high point of his long and distinguished career.
Advanced to Rear-Admiral in January 1958, he served latterly as Director of Naval Air Warfare and as Flag Officer Flying Training and, on his retirement in 1960, was appointed C.B. The Admiral, who closed his farewell address to Yeovilton with the words “This is Yeovil, turning finals, three greens, out”, died in Petersfield, Hampshire, in April 2000, aged 92 years, having established a travel agency specialising in Turkish holidays.
Also see Lot 1692 for the Honours & Awards of his brother, Commander Neville Cambell, M.B.E., D.S.C.
www.dnw.co.uk
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