The Design Office, with Spud Boorer in the left foreground
shaping Viscount stainless steel exhaust pipes where the noise of the hammering was horrendous. Enrolling for the engineering course at
the Brooklands Technical College, I noticed the queue divided into two and asked why. The answer was: ‘Mechanicals to the left and Electricals and Electronics to the right’. I had no idea of this distinction and as those who I was chatting to turned left, I went with them and became a mechanical engineer. A mistake as electronics were to be the big future.
At this time, my friend and fellow
I applied to Avro, De Havilland and Vickers- Armstrong (Aircraft). The first two required my father to pay them for the privilege of being an indentured apprentice, whereas the last one offered £3 per week, so it was no contest.
A Starting in the autumn of 1955, my
apprenticeship commenced in the newly- built apprentice training school situated near the Campbell gate. The first task was to make my tool box in aluminium, which I still have. After a few months, I was introduced to the fitting shop making and riveting together small airframe sub-assemblies. Then it was into the ‘tin bashers’ assisting the very skilled men
s you make model aeroplanes, you should enter the aircraft industry’. Following this guidance from a careers advisor,
apprentice Mike Walker and I had digs in a small hotel that was a watering hole for pre-war Brooklands drivers. It was where the Multi-Union and a Bugatti Type 23 were stored. Particularly memorable was meeting Charles Brackenbury and have a ride in his Jaguar XK140. I also met Dudley Gahagan, owner of a Bugatti Type 37 and ERA R7B. After a year at college, I went on a
three year ‘sandwich’ mechanical and aerodynamics-aerostructures course at Kingston Technical College. During this time, I attended a Weybridge branch meeting of the Royal Aeronautical Society. This was a Question and Answer forum, chaired by Vickers-Armstrong’s Managing Director, George Edwards, later Sir George. When asked if the company was going to produce helicopters, his characteristic wry answer was: ‘We have enough trouble keeping wings on, let alone them going round!’
This was in the aftermath of the Valiant wing-spar fatigue issue created by the late requirement to include low level operations. Working on Valiant bombers, my job was to assist a ‘mate’ with wing assembly. This was labour intensive work by teams of two men inserting thousands of rivets. With this aircraft, the rivet material was unusual because they were ‘age-hardened’. The process involved storing them in a fridge to maintain their softness to avoid cracking during the actual riveting and they were issued at the beginning of every morning and afternoon. The rivet cans were colour coded to prevent the use of old rivets and it was one of the apprentices’ jobs to collect these coloured cans. The end results were completed airworthy aircraft. Every week, a Valiant with minimal fuel load took off over the gap in the Byfleet banking and landed almost immediately at Wisley airfield for flight testing. Then there was the Viscount. Initially, it was wing assembly again, but across the airfield near the New Haw gate were the twin assembly lines for BEA, KLM and another for Howard Hughes, which he never collected. As with the Valiants, the wings were assembled in a jig at 90-degrees to the normal flight position to give the riveting teams good working access. Later, I was transferred to airframe assembly for two jobs in parallel. The first was installing the special clips that held the cabin window glass panels in place
SEPTEMBER – OCTOBER 2019 | BROOKLANDS BULLETIN 35
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