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Slide Rule
Nevil Shute was a power and a pioneer in the world of flying long before he began to write the stories that made him a bestselling novelist. This autobiography charts Shute’s path to his career. The inspiration for many of the themes and concerns of his novels can be identified in this memoir.
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1954
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549 people want to read
About the author
Nevil Shute
85 books1,282 followersNevil Shute Norway was a popular British novelist and a successful aeronautical engineer.
He used Nevil Shute as his pen name, and his full name in his engineering career, in order to protect his engineering career from any potential negative publicity in connection with his novels.
He lived in Australia for the ten years before his death.
He used Nevil Shute as his pen name, and his full name in his engineering career, in order to protect his engineering career from any potential negative publicity in connection with his novels.
He lived in Australia for the ten years before his death.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 77 reviews
August 10, 2021
I first read Slide Rule years ago after enjoying many of Shute’s other books, and it shaped my life in many ways. He’d overcome so much from being a child with a bad stammer. He was lucky in that he had wonderful parents. He was made fun of at his school in Hammersmith, not only by his school mates, but by his teachers, too. Life was an unbearable misery and he could not take it. So, he played truant, rode the trains or sat on railways stations observing the hubbub. Later, he rode into Kensington and spent hours in the British Museum studying the engineering exhibits like trains and planes. Maybe Fate was smiling upon him.
In 1915, Nevil and his family were sent to Ireland. His father was to be the Post Master for the British Postal Service. Nevil described how happy he and his brother, Fred, had been. But this was short-lived. Nevil happened to be standing on Sackville Street in Dublin, near the post office, when all hell broke loose; the armed Irish uprising had begun. The rebels rushed into the post office and took it over. The Irish didn’t much like an Englishman being sent to run their postal system! Luckily, Nevil’s dad was in another building at the time or he may have been a casualty. As a young lad of seventeen, Nevil acted as a stretcher bearer during those dangerous hours. He later received a commendation for his bravery.
Two years on, his brother, who Nevil said was the real literary one, was dying from shell wounds and gangrene inflicted at the Front in France. His mother and father had rushed to his bedside. Nevil knew it was just a matter of time before he, too, was sent to France to die—it was the fate of all young men. They expected it. After being called up and trained for combat, he was sent to the Isle of Grain for a time and, fortunately for him (and for us), the war ended and he was spared.
In Slide Rule, Nevil described going to Oxford and studying engineering at Balliol College. He said it was a pleasant experience, but his vacation time was even better, since he went to work for DeHavillands (for no pay!). There, he met important people who would shape his life and teach him about aeroplane design and flying.
Later, he was hired by Barnes Wallis as Chief Calculator at Vickers Aircraft to work on the design of Airship R100. He was based at first in Crayford, Kent, where he put his team together and worked on initial design calculations. He used to ride horses in Petts Wood in the early mornings on the common before going to work. I know that beautiful area—I once lived there with my own family.
As part of his research (bear in mind he knew nothing about airship design), Nevil studied the spectacular Airship R38 disaster of 1921 which occurred over the River Humber and killed most of the American and British crewmen aboard as that ship broke in two. His thoughts and writings on this tragic event were vital for my own book.
R38’s midair breakup had severe ramifications effecting airship design as well as the final outcome of the airship program. Cardington was desperate not to repeat previous mistakes. As a consequence and understandably, they designed for strength, but this tended to make their creation heavier. It was a delicate balance and maddening.
Nevil was scathing in his criticism relating to the R38 in those early days—just as he would be nine years later after R101’s demise—not so much of the characters involved as with the system that caused it to occur, or perhaps I should say, that failed to prevent it occurring. He highlighted what happens when government gets into the mix in aviation development and experimental flight. The Challenger Disaster might be pointed to as a modern day example.
Nevil describes how in 1924, Lord Thomson set up the new British Airship Programme, whereby two teams, one private and one government, would work in competition. Thomson thought that he’d show once and for all that ‘government enterprise’ could out do ‘private enterprise’. Thomson believed the two systems were motivated by different underlying forces—the government by ‘the public good’, the private sector by ‘profit’—or as some called them: money-hungry profiteers!
When the private enterprise ship, R100, was ready and tested, it only remained for her to make a return flight to Canada. Later, the government ship, R101, was to make a voyage to India with Thomson on board. It was found that R101 was too heavy, while R100 adequately met contract requirements. The government team at Cardington made backdoor representations to the private team at Vickers to postpone their voyage. This was high stakes now. After being treated so badly by the government team for four years, Nevil and his bosses, Barnes Wallis and Dennis Burney, refused. They could hardly be expected to bail the other team out. So, in July of 1930, they slipped from the mast and set off for Canada.
The private Vickers team was lucky and made it to Canada and back while R101 was being cut in half so that an extra gas bag could be inserted to get her precious extra lift. On October 4th, 1930, R101 took off in a storm bound for India. Thomson had his schedule, which could not be delayed. She crashed on a hillside in Beauvais, the ignition of six million cubic feet of hydrogen lighting up the French countryside for miles. All but six were killed, including Thomson himself. There’s a lot more to this story in terms of human drama, making it an epic on a par with Titanic.
After that disaster, there was an inquiry of course. And like most government inquiries, no one was found guilty of anything. The airship program was abandoned and Nevil’s beloved Airship R100 was destroyed. The only people left in Britain qualified enough to testify were members of the Vickers team. The government did not ask them to testify, or even to attend the massive state funeral in London. Many of Nevil’s friends were among the dead.
In 2010, I was traveling from Heathrow to Dulles and I was reading Slide Rule again on my Kindle. I wanted to learn more about Nevil Shute’s life as an airshipman when he was Deputy Chief Engineer building Airship R100 in that monster shed in Howden, Yorkshire. Eyes tired, I put the book aside and looked out the window. We were flying along the St. Lawrence Seaway, Canada. I peered down at the Laurentian Mountains in the province of Quebec and marveled at the thought of how brave those men were when they flew just above the water down there on that Thursday, July 31, of 1930. They had flown over the majestic steamships Duchess of Bedford and Empress of Scotland, with their stately dark blue hulls and white topsides—with thousands cheering wildly up at them from their decks.
They had beat against a headwind making way at about 36 knots. During this leg of the voyage they experienced two severe problems, although Nevil seems to rather play it down in his stiff-upper-lip account. The first was due to turbulent air flowing down from the Saguenay River Valley that ran between 4,000 foot mountains into the St. Lawrence. It caused R100 to roll wildly and made for panicked moments on board. The crewmen in their engine cars signaled to say they had spotted severe damage to the cover on the tail sections. The ship was maneuvered to a calm area near an island on the opposite shore where the riggers precariously clambered around on the tail fins, high above the water, making repairs. After patching her up temporarily, they set off again.
The second incident occurred quite unnecessarily, through poor judgement, according to Nevil. While crawling around on the roof, the second officer and some riggers eyed a dangerous thunderstorm looming on the horizon. Major Scott, the most senior officer, ordered them to fly directly through it, despite the protestations of the captain. Scott had decided time was of the essence—suicide for an airship! As they entered the swirling black mass, the ship went from 1000 feet up to 5000 feet in a matter of seconds. To her credit, and the engineering genius of Barnes Wallis, the ship remained in one piece.
Peering down over the St. Lawrence that day helped somehow in my writing about these life-threatening, fist-biting events included in The Airshipmen. I had to wonder what Nevil would have thought if he’d been able to look up and see our Boeing 777 careering along at 600 mph at 40,000 feet. He probably would have thought we were the crazy ones!
In Slide Rule, Nevil also tells of his business dealings with Airspeed. I hadn’t appreciated his entrepreneurial brilliance. He built an aircraft company rivaling De Havillands. His decency comes out in that text, his concerns for his employees (800 of them), if they went bust—which always appeared to be looming on the horizon. That was the core of Nevil’s personality: decency, goodness and modesty. I enjoyed this autobiography and seeing more than I’d seen in earlier readings over the years.
Some say the most important thing about a book is whether it changes the way you view life. Well, Nevil Shute’s novels certainly had an effect on me as a teenager. After reading his autobiography and novels, I wanted to build a company, to travel, to sail and to fly and yes, to write. I came close to accomplishing the first and managed the rest. I even ended up including Nevil in my own book. He was a thoroughly decent English chap, modest and underestimated. He was the type of man you’d want as a friend—a standup guy. I hope I’ve done him justice. I portrayed him as the most lovable character of them all.
In 1915, Nevil and his family were sent to Ireland. His father was to be the Post Master for the British Postal Service. Nevil described how happy he and his brother, Fred, had been. But this was short-lived. Nevil happened to be standing on Sackville Street in Dublin, near the post office, when all hell broke loose; the armed Irish uprising had begun. The rebels rushed into the post office and took it over. The Irish didn’t much like an Englishman being sent to run their postal system! Luckily, Nevil’s dad was in another building at the time or he may have been a casualty. As a young lad of seventeen, Nevil acted as a stretcher bearer during those dangerous hours. He later received a commendation for his bravery.
Two years on, his brother, who Nevil said was the real literary one, was dying from shell wounds and gangrene inflicted at the Front in France. His mother and father had rushed to his bedside. Nevil knew it was just a matter of time before he, too, was sent to France to die—it was the fate of all young men. They expected it. After being called up and trained for combat, he was sent to the Isle of Grain for a time and, fortunately for him (and for us), the war ended and he was spared.
In Slide Rule, Nevil described going to Oxford and studying engineering at Balliol College. He said it was a pleasant experience, but his vacation time was even better, since he went to work for DeHavillands (for no pay!). There, he met important people who would shape his life and teach him about aeroplane design and flying.
Later, he was hired by Barnes Wallis as Chief Calculator at Vickers Aircraft to work on the design of Airship R100. He was based at first in Crayford, Kent, where he put his team together and worked on initial design calculations. He used to ride horses in Petts Wood in the early mornings on the common before going to work. I know that beautiful area—I once lived there with my own family.
As part of his research (bear in mind he knew nothing about airship design), Nevil studied the spectacular Airship R38 disaster of 1921 which occurred over the River Humber and killed most of the American and British crewmen aboard as that ship broke in two. His thoughts and writings on this tragic event were vital for my own book.
R38’s midair breakup had severe ramifications effecting airship design as well as the final outcome of the airship program. Cardington was desperate not to repeat previous mistakes. As a consequence and understandably, they designed for strength, but this tended to make their creation heavier. It was a delicate balance and maddening.
Nevil was scathing in his criticism relating to the R38 in those early days—just as he would be nine years later after R101’s demise—not so much of the characters involved as with the system that caused it to occur, or perhaps I should say, that failed to prevent it occurring. He highlighted what happens when government gets into the mix in aviation development and experimental flight. The Challenger Disaster might be pointed to as a modern day example.
Nevil describes how in 1924, Lord Thomson set up the new British Airship Programme, whereby two teams, one private and one government, would work in competition. Thomson thought that he’d show once and for all that ‘government enterprise’ could out do ‘private enterprise’. Thomson believed the two systems were motivated by different underlying forces—the government by ‘the public good’, the private sector by ‘profit’—or as some called them: money-hungry profiteers!
When the private enterprise ship, R100, was ready and tested, it only remained for her to make a return flight to Canada. Later, the government ship, R101, was to make a voyage to India with Thomson on board. It was found that R101 was too heavy, while R100 adequately met contract requirements. The government team at Cardington made backdoor representations to the private team at Vickers to postpone their voyage. This was high stakes now. After being treated so badly by the government team for four years, Nevil and his bosses, Barnes Wallis and Dennis Burney, refused. They could hardly be expected to bail the other team out. So, in July of 1930, they slipped from the mast and set off for Canada.
The private Vickers team was lucky and made it to Canada and back while R101 was being cut in half so that an extra gas bag could be inserted to get her precious extra lift. On October 4th, 1930, R101 took off in a storm bound for India. Thomson had his schedule, which could not be delayed. She crashed on a hillside in Beauvais, the ignition of six million cubic feet of hydrogen lighting up the French countryside for miles. All but six were killed, including Thomson himself. There’s a lot more to this story in terms of human drama, making it an epic on a par with Titanic.
After that disaster, there was an inquiry of course. And like most government inquiries, no one was found guilty of anything. The airship program was abandoned and Nevil’s beloved Airship R100 was destroyed. The only people left in Britain qualified enough to testify were members of the Vickers team. The government did not ask them to testify, or even to attend the massive state funeral in London. Many of Nevil’s friends were among the dead.
In 2010, I was traveling from Heathrow to Dulles and I was reading Slide Rule again on my Kindle. I wanted to learn more about Nevil Shute’s life as an airshipman when he was Deputy Chief Engineer building Airship R100 in that monster shed in Howden, Yorkshire. Eyes tired, I put the book aside and looked out the window. We were flying along the St. Lawrence Seaway, Canada. I peered down at the Laurentian Mountains in the province of Quebec and marveled at the thought of how brave those men were when they flew just above the water down there on that Thursday, July 31, of 1930. They had flown over the majestic steamships Duchess of Bedford and Empress of Scotland, with their stately dark blue hulls and white topsides—with thousands cheering wildly up at them from their decks.
They had beat against a headwind making way at about 36 knots. During this leg of the voyage they experienced two severe problems, although Nevil seems to rather play it down in his stiff-upper-lip account. The first was due to turbulent air flowing down from the Saguenay River Valley that ran between 4,000 foot mountains into the St. Lawrence. It caused R100 to roll wildly and made for panicked moments on board. The crewmen in their engine cars signaled to say they had spotted severe damage to the cover on the tail sections. The ship was maneuvered to a calm area near an island on the opposite shore where the riggers precariously clambered around on the tail fins, high above the water, making repairs. After patching her up temporarily, they set off again.
The second incident occurred quite unnecessarily, through poor judgement, according to Nevil. While crawling around on the roof, the second officer and some riggers eyed a dangerous thunderstorm looming on the horizon. Major Scott, the most senior officer, ordered them to fly directly through it, despite the protestations of the captain. Scott had decided time was of the essence—suicide for an airship! As they entered the swirling black mass, the ship went from 1000 feet up to 5000 feet in a matter of seconds. To her credit, and the engineering genius of Barnes Wallis, the ship remained in one piece.
Peering down over the St. Lawrence that day helped somehow in my writing about these life-threatening, fist-biting events included in The Airshipmen. I had to wonder what Nevil would have thought if he’d been able to look up and see our Boeing 777 careering along at 600 mph at 40,000 feet. He probably would have thought we were the crazy ones!
In Slide Rule, Nevil also tells of his business dealings with Airspeed. I hadn’t appreciated his entrepreneurial brilliance. He built an aircraft company rivaling De Havillands. His decency comes out in that text, his concerns for his employees (800 of them), if they went bust—which always appeared to be looming on the horizon. That was the core of Nevil’s personality: decency, goodness and modesty. I enjoyed this autobiography and seeing more than I’d seen in earlier readings over the years.
Some say the most important thing about a book is whether it changes the way you view life. Well, Nevil Shute’s novels certainly had an effect on me as a teenager. After reading his autobiography and novels, I wanted to build a company, to travel, to sail and to fly and yes, to write. I came close to accomplishing the first and managed the rest. I even ended up including Nevil in my own book. He was a thoroughly decent English chap, modest and underestimated. He was the type of man you’d want as a friend—a standup guy. I hope I’ve done him justice. I portrayed him as the most lovable character of them all.
October 23, 2022
I was a little disappointed by this. There is nothing wrong with what I have been given but I wanted more, much more. The title tells us that what stands before us is an autobiography. The book does not cover his whole life, only a small portion of it. It doesn’t cover enough. We are told the year he was born, that his surname was Norway, where he studied and when he got married. The information given to us about his wife is a good example--the woman’s name and that she was a doctor. That’s about it. Later we are told he has two kids. This is not enough for me. I want more personal information! A number of his earliest books are mentioned, but he doesn’t discuss them. If you know his books you do understand without being told that he writes of actual events in his life. He writes teeny bits about this and that—for example a snippet about Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia and the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin and his father’s job as a postmaster in Ireland.
What the book is really about, that which Shute focuses upon, is his involvement in aviation when it was young, when it was new and exciting. He speaks in full length about the airplane company he established, how best to attain risk capital, what it is like to be a managing director and the unpleasant task of firing those employees no longer capable of doing what their job requires of them as the company transforms and expands. The era of budding aviation was becoming a thing of the past. He views this as inevitable but also with regret. We learn of the different airplanes his company made—their names, construction, motors and testing procedures. The technical details are many. I am quite simply not enthralled by these technical details. He compares private versus state aeronautical enterprises, analyzing which produces the safest planes. That which is discussed in relation to the aviation industry is clear but not really my cup of tea.
When we are told we are to be given an autobiography, I was expecting more about his personal life! The book covers only the time up to and through the thirties. Historical events are discussed to the extent they affected his company.
I have told you what the book includes and what it doesn’t include. I have explained its central focus. I hope I have been sufficiently clear.
I’ve never heard Nevil Shute speak, but in my imagination, it is exactly how the audiobook narrator, James Faulkner, has him speak. Shute is talking to us, his readers. He speaks slowly and distinctly. His honorable character is reflected in the manner of his speech. I kept thinking this IS Shute talking to us. But of course, it isn’t. Five stars for the narration.
*****************
*A Town Like Alice 4 stars
*The Chequer Board 4 stars
*No Highway 4 stars
*The Far Country 4 stars
*Landfall 4 stars
*Most Secret 4 stars
*Beyond The Black Stump 4 stars
*Slide Rule: The Autobiography of an Engineer 3 stars
*Pied Piper 3 stars
*Ruined City 3 stars
*Trustee from the Toolroom 3 stars
*The Rainbow and the Rose 3 stars
*Requiem for a Wren 2 stars
*So Distained 2 stars
*Pastoral 1 star
*An Old Captivity TBR
*Marazan TBR
*What Happened to the Corbetts TBR
*On the Beach maybe
What the book is really about, that which Shute focuses upon, is his involvement in aviation when it was young, when it was new and exciting. He speaks in full length about the airplane company he established, how best to attain risk capital, what it is like to be a managing director and the unpleasant task of firing those employees no longer capable of doing what their job requires of them as the company transforms and expands. The era of budding aviation was becoming a thing of the past. He views this as inevitable but also with regret. We learn of the different airplanes his company made—their names, construction, motors and testing procedures. The technical details are many. I am quite simply not enthralled by these technical details. He compares private versus state aeronautical enterprises, analyzing which produces the safest planes. That which is discussed in relation to the aviation industry is clear but not really my cup of tea.
When we are told we are to be given an autobiography, I was expecting more about his personal life! The book covers only the time up to and through the thirties. Historical events are discussed to the extent they affected his company.
I have told you what the book includes and what it doesn’t include. I have explained its central focus. I hope I have been sufficiently clear.
I’ve never heard Nevil Shute speak, but in my imagination, it is exactly how the audiobook narrator, James Faulkner, has him speak. Shute is talking to us, his readers. He speaks slowly and distinctly. His honorable character is reflected in the manner of his speech. I kept thinking this IS Shute talking to us. But of course, it isn’t. Five stars for the narration.
*****************
*A Town Like Alice 4 stars
*The Chequer Board 4 stars
*No Highway 4 stars
*The Far Country 4 stars
*Landfall 4 stars
*Most Secret 4 stars
*Beyond The Black Stump 4 stars
*Slide Rule: The Autobiography of an Engineer 3 stars
*Pied Piper 3 stars
*Ruined City 3 stars
*Trustee from the Toolroom 3 stars
*The Rainbow and the Rose 3 stars
*Requiem for a Wren 2 stars
*So Distained 2 stars
*Pastoral 1 star
*An Old Captivity TBR
*Marazan TBR
*What Happened to the Corbetts TBR
*On the Beach maybe
January 21, 2008
This is an autobiography of Nevil Shute, one of my favorite authors. It focuses on his engineering career in the early aerospace industry in the U.K. Individuals interested in the early history of the airplane (and airship/blimp) manufacturing industry would find this interesting. It touches on the author's career as a writer, but does not go into that aspect of his life in great depth. I would recommend it as a good read only based on very specific interests--engineering, aircraft, aircraft design and manufacture.
April 20, 2017
Detailed book into the authors life designing planes and airships but sadly wasnt my cup of tea
Read
October 21, 2007http://nhw.livejournal.com/978094.html[return][return]It's a book in three parts: the first couple of chapters describe Shute's boyhood and youth, where the most exciting part is his close observation of the Easter Rising of 1916 - his father, as it happens, was the Secretary of the Irish Post Office, so there is a certain immediacy to Shute's account, from an angle one doesn't often get - that of a middle-class English teenager pressed into service as a stretcher-bearer.[return][return]Then a bit over half the book is devoted to a fascinating account of Shute's involvement with the R100, the private sector counterpart to the doomed state-funded R101 British airship. This was at the cutting edge of technology, a prestige engineering project every bit as important in its way as the moon landings, which was to open up mass travel between the continents at a time when it was thought that aeroplanes would never be able to be big enough or fast enough to satisfy the commercial demand. Shute clearly loved his own creation (he was deputy to Barnes Wallis but ended up de facto in charge) and goes into fascinating detail about the problems they faced, both technical and political; and looming over the narrative, of course, is the eventual R101 disaster, which he blames on the failings of senior civil servants as technical managers and on the general policy of having any state-run industry (and specifically the ego of Lord Thomson, the Air Minister, who paid for it with his life and the lives of dozens of others).[return][return]The final chunk of the book, a bit over a third of it, is Shute's account of setting up his own aircraft company, and the difficulties of running a hi-tech startup in the context of the Great Depression. Again, an interesting human tale of innovation, struggle against the odds, the difficulties of balancing the books and the personalities, the intimate involvement of people and capital; I think it ought to be required reading for anyone thinking of setting up their own business. On top of that, the looming clouds of war - in Spain, China and Ethiopia, and coming up close to home - were crucial in making the company break even by the time he was eased out with a golden handshake in 1938.[return][return]Shute isn't shy about his politics, which are certainly to the right: I guess that being caught on the wrong side of a revolution at 17, and then seeing your professional colleagues killed by the hubris of a Labour government minister, may well be formative experiences, but he also argues for the retention of the moneyed aristocracy as a source of start-up finance for innovation. I'm not in huge sympathy with him on these points, but I like his clear and occasionally self-deprecating prose; the two books of his that I have read, Pied Piper and Trustee from the Toolroom, are both rather enchanting tales of older men who accidentally go on long journeys to do good deeds, and it's interesting to see where this comes from.
June 1, 2009
Mr Norway was at the heart of many of the dramatic events of the early 20th Century. Before he gave up to become a renowned novelist he served as a stretcher bearer during the Easter rising, observing the rebels shooting horses from the Dublin Post Office, lost his older brother in the first world war, worked on the successful Airship R100 and travelled to Canada upon it, learned to fly and founded his own aircraft company which was eventually folded into de Havilland.
He is good and interesting company, especially before his personal life becomes entirely taken up with the history of Airspeed Ltd.
We think today perhaps that technology is advancing apace with the progress of communication technologies, think how much vaster were the changes in transportation in their impact, from Bicycles to motorbikes and cars, from nothing to aircraft.
He is good and interesting company, especially before his personal life becomes entirely taken up with the history of Airspeed Ltd.
We think today perhaps that technology is advancing apace with the progress of communication technologies, think how much vaster were the changes in transportation in their impact, from Bicycles to motorbikes and cars, from nothing to aircraft.
November 29, 2012
Let there be no mistake: this is an old book, out of print, the life story of Nevil Shute. If you can find it in a library or on a second-hand book rack, by all means, get it.
Nevil Shute was a British writer, and in the year after World War II some of his novels became well-known the world over. Most famous was "On the Beach," an end-of-the-world story set in Australia, after a nuclear holocaust that had destroyed Europe and America, a gloomy book and not Shute's best. "No Highway" tells about a nerdy British scientist ("boffin") who tries desperately to stop the production of a new airliner, having discovered in his lab that metal fatigue might cause its wings to drop off. It proved to be prophetic, because shortly after its appearance, the De Haviland Comet, the world's first jetliner, began losing wings in mid-air for what later turned out to be exactly the same reason. "A Town like Alice," which became a well-known film, is a love story starting in Japanese-occupied Malaya and ending in the Australian outback. And many other gentle, upbeat books--"The Trustee from the Toolroom", "Around the Bend" and over a dozen more, some published before the war.
For an appreciable part of his career, this author led a double life. As Nevil Shute Norway (his full name), his main occupation for twenty years was aeronautical engineering, as builder and designer of airplanes and airships. It is no coincidence that airplanes figure prominently in many of his novels! "Slide Rule" tells of that other career, from his early years to the approach of World War II.
Two stories form the core of the book. The more vivid one is about the R-100 airship, commissioned by the British government in 1924 as the first of what was hoped would become a fleet of swift airships linking the British empire. The task was given to Vickers which had built airships during WW I. However, before the contract could be signed, the Labor Party took power and decreed that two competing airships would be built, the "capitalist" R-100 and the R-101, designed and constructed by the government itself.
The R-100 was entrusted to Barnes Wallis, a gifted and inspired engineer (later, in WW-II, the designer of bombs that destroyed German dams and fortifications, as detailed in "The Dam Busters", book and film). With a small crew (including Shute) and under austere conditions, he designed and built a great airship, within cost and schedule, and flew it in 1930 from England to Montreal and back. Shute was aboard and the book describes that flight, including some harrowing moments above the St. Lawrence River, when (for a few minutes) the R-100 was sucked helplessly upwards by a thunderstorm, the nemesis of airships.
The builders of the R-101, meanwhile, enjoyed generous support and much better facilities. But there was a down side, too, because bureaucrats meddled with the specifications, and government managers proved sloppy in the design and all too lax with tests and inspections. The engineers at the bottom of the pyramid (whom Shute occasionally met) had no say, and the schedule was pushed from above even when it became known that a poor choice of materials had weakened the canvas cover of the airship to where parts could be easily torn by hand. The end was a tragedy: an inadequately tested R-101 took off towards India, crossed the English channel and went down in France, with no survivors. That ended Britain's love affair with the airship: the R-100 never flew again but was broken up for scrap.
With some partners Shute next formed "Airspeed", dedicated to the production of airplanes. That is the second long story, and readers who speak lightly of "entrepeneurship" can learn here a few lessons. The timing was bad for any new venture, the beginning of the great depression, and Airspeed struggled constantly to make ends meet, to keep creditors at bay, and above all, to find buyers for its airplanes: only in 1938, when Shute left it, did it show its first small profit. Its airplanes were quite good--among other things, they pioneered the folding landing gear--but finding buyers was hard, until the clouds of a new world war began gathering over Ethiopia and Spain, and shady purchasers appeared, ready to pay cash as long as no questions were asked. Then Britain itself began arming and Airspeed could stop worrying about sales; it built bombers during the war and was ultimately swallowed up by its competitor De Haviland.
By that time Shute was well into his other career, the one the world knew about. It is a rare individual indeed who can make his mark so well in two so different spheres!
Nevil Shute was a British writer, and in the year after World War II some of his novels became well-known the world over. Most famous was "On the Beach," an end-of-the-world story set in Australia, after a nuclear holocaust that had destroyed Europe and America, a gloomy book and not Shute's best. "No Highway" tells about a nerdy British scientist ("boffin") who tries desperately to stop the production of a new airliner, having discovered in his lab that metal fatigue might cause its wings to drop off. It proved to be prophetic, because shortly after its appearance, the De Haviland Comet, the world's first jetliner, began losing wings in mid-air for what later turned out to be exactly the same reason. "A Town like Alice," which became a well-known film, is a love story starting in Japanese-occupied Malaya and ending in the Australian outback. And many other gentle, upbeat books--"The Trustee from the Toolroom", "Around the Bend" and over a dozen more, some published before the war.
For an appreciable part of his career, this author led a double life. As Nevil Shute Norway (his full name), his main occupation for twenty years was aeronautical engineering, as builder and designer of airplanes and airships. It is no coincidence that airplanes figure prominently in many of his novels! "Slide Rule" tells of that other career, from his early years to the approach of World War II.
Two stories form the core of the book. The more vivid one is about the R-100 airship, commissioned by the British government in 1924 as the first of what was hoped would become a fleet of swift airships linking the British empire. The task was given to Vickers which had built airships during WW I. However, before the contract could be signed, the Labor Party took power and decreed that two competing airships would be built, the "capitalist" R-100 and the R-101, designed and constructed by the government itself.
The R-100 was entrusted to Barnes Wallis, a gifted and inspired engineer (later, in WW-II, the designer of bombs that destroyed German dams and fortifications, as detailed in "The Dam Busters", book and film). With a small crew (including Shute) and under austere conditions, he designed and built a great airship, within cost and schedule, and flew it in 1930 from England to Montreal and back. Shute was aboard and the book describes that flight, including some harrowing moments above the St. Lawrence River, when (for a few minutes) the R-100 was sucked helplessly upwards by a thunderstorm, the nemesis of airships.
The builders of the R-101, meanwhile, enjoyed generous support and much better facilities. But there was a down side, too, because bureaucrats meddled with the specifications, and government managers proved sloppy in the design and all too lax with tests and inspections. The engineers at the bottom of the pyramid (whom Shute occasionally met) had no say, and the schedule was pushed from above even when it became known that a poor choice of materials had weakened the canvas cover of the airship to where parts could be easily torn by hand. The end was a tragedy: an inadequately tested R-101 took off towards India, crossed the English channel and went down in France, with no survivors. That ended Britain's love affair with the airship: the R-100 never flew again but was broken up for scrap.
With some partners Shute next formed "Airspeed", dedicated to the production of airplanes. That is the second long story, and readers who speak lightly of "entrepeneurship" can learn here a few lessons. The timing was bad for any new venture, the beginning of the great depression, and Airspeed struggled constantly to make ends meet, to keep creditors at bay, and above all, to find buyers for its airplanes: only in 1938, when Shute left it, did it show its first small profit. Its airplanes were quite good--among other things, they pioneered the folding landing gear--but finding buyers was hard, until the clouds of a new world war began gathering over Ethiopia and Spain, and shady purchasers appeared, ready to pay cash as long as no questions were asked. Then Britain itself began arming and Airspeed could stop worrying about sales; it built bombers during the war and was ultimately swallowed up by its competitor De Haviland.
By that time Shute was well into his other career, the one the world knew about. It is a rare individual indeed who can make his mark so well in two so different spheres!
March 5, 2011
‘Most of my adult life ... has been spent messing about with aeroplanes.’
Slide Rule is Nevil Shute’s autobiography from his childhood until 1940, and was published in 1954.
Nevil Shute Norway (1899-1960) is best known to me as Nevil Shute, the author of novels including: ‘No Highway’; ‘A Town Like Alice’; and ‘On the Beach’. He wrote 24 novels –many of which I’ve yet to read – as well as this autobiography. But there’s another side to Nevil Shute Norway: he was involved in the early years of British aviation, including the competition to build a commercial airship between 1924 and 1930.
Nevil Shute Norway was educated at Shrewsbury School and Baliol College, Oxford. After a brief period at the Royal Military Academy, he worked for the De Havilland Company from 1920 to 1924. His work in the design and drafting of aircraft led to his being appointed to the Airship Guarantee Company where he rose to be the Chief of Engineering. During this period, there was a competition to build an airship which could be used for regular commercial traffic across the Atlantic.
‘It was generally agreed in 1924 that the aeroplane would never be a very suitable vehicle for carrying passengers across the oceans, and that airships would operate all the long distance routes of the future.’
A competition was established, between Vickers Limited (which then established the Aircraft Guarantee Company (AGC) as a subsidiary wholly responsible for the airship construction) and the Air Ministry. Nevil Shute was on the AGC team. The government airship was the R101; the AGC airship was the R100. R100 successfully completed a return trip to Canada in July/August 1930. On the 4th of October 1930, R101 en route to India, crashed killing 48 people. Nevil Shute blames bureaucrats and bad engineers for a series of events which led to the crash. The crash of R101 effectively ended the airship program.
After the airship program ended, Nevil Shute formed a venture capital company called Airspeed Limited which built first gliders and then commercial aircraft. Between 1932 and 1938 (when Shute left the company) he describes the challenges of developing a new company in what was then a new industry. It makes for fascinating reading.
The book finishes two years after Nevil Shute left Airspeed Limited, and I wish that he’d written a second volume covering the next period of his life. Now that I’ve read this book, I’m keen to read more of Nevil Shute’s fiction. Many of his novels draw on his experiences in the aviation industry.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
Slide Rule is Nevil Shute’s autobiography from his childhood until 1940, and was published in 1954.
Nevil Shute Norway (1899-1960) is best known to me as Nevil Shute, the author of novels including: ‘No Highway’; ‘A Town Like Alice’; and ‘On the Beach’. He wrote 24 novels –many of which I’ve yet to read – as well as this autobiography. But there’s another side to Nevil Shute Norway: he was involved in the early years of British aviation, including the competition to build a commercial airship between 1924 and 1930.
Nevil Shute Norway was educated at Shrewsbury School and Baliol College, Oxford. After a brief period at the Royal Military Academy, he worked for the De Havilland Company from 1920 to 1924. His work in the design and drafting of aircraft led to his being appointed to the Airship Guarantee Company where he rose to be the Chief of Engineering. During this period, there was a competition to build an airship which could be used for regular commercial traffic across the Atlantic.
‘It was generally agreed in 1924 that the aeroplane would never be a very suitable vehicle for carrying passengers across the oceans, and that airships would operate all the long distance routes of the future.’
A competition was established, between Vickers Limited (which then established the Aircraft Guarantee Company (AGC) as a subsidiary wholly responsible for the airship construction) and the Air Ministry. Nevil Shute was on the AGC team. The government airship was the R101; the AGC airship was the R100. R100 successfully completed a return trip to Canada in July/August 1930. On the 4th of October 1930, R101 en route to India, crashed killing 48 people. Nevil Shute blames bureaucrats and bad engineers for a series of events which led to the crash. The crash of R101 effectively ended the airship program.
After the airship program ended, Nevil Shute formed a venture capital company called Airspeed Limited which built first gliders and then commercial aircraft. Between 1932 and 1938 (when Shute left the company) he describes the challenges of developing a new company in what was then a new industry. It makes for fascinating reading.
The book finishes two years after Nevil Shute left Airspeed Limited, and I wish that he’d written a second volume covering the next period of his life. Now that I’ve read this book, I’m keen to read more of Nevil Shute’s fiction. Many of his novels draw on his experiences in the aviation industry.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
April 13, 2008
Part one of Shute’s sadly incomplete autobiography, this book tells the story of his early years as an aviation engineer, his love of flying, his incurable writing habit, and his role in Britain’s R-100 dirigible project between the World Wars. An absolutely ripping memoir. Too bad he never finished (or published) part 2, where he did classified work for the Crown during WW2, or (better still) part 3, in which he immigrated to Australia and became a Buddhist.
August 23, 2007
Most readers are familiar with Nevil Shute, author of numerous novels, many with aviation themes. Few however have probably read this book, his autobiography. Nevil Shute Norway grew up in the early part of the twentieth century, just a bit too young to have participated in World War I. His description of the almost fatalistic approach he took towards becoming a soldier and, he was very sure, dying in the trenches, is very surprising.
After the war he drifted into the nascent commercial aviation business. The story is interesting, although if you are not familiar with the firms of the Twenties like Airspeed the book may not be something you could get into. He writes of his life and friends and surprisingly, hardly mentions his writing career. It's a good look into life in the 1920's in Britain.
The later part of the book details his involvement with the engineering of the British airship R100, and at this point unless you are pretty much an aviation enthusiast (I am) you might be looking to put down the book for something else, but he does tell the story well, including the development of the government financed and designed R101. This latter airship crashed on it maiden international flight, generating much bad press for airships in general and dooming the R100 which, according to Shute, was a far better designed and built ship. His discussions of the politics of the R101 crash and the grounding and eventual breakup of the R100 are illuminating stuff.
Shute ends his story at this point, where he transitioned from engineer to writer. I would recommend this book for fans of his writing, or those who have an interest in aviation history of this period.
After the war he drifted into the nascent commercial aviation business. The story is interesting, although if you are not familiar with the firms of the Twenties like Airspeed the book may not be something you could get into. He writes of his life and friends and surprisingly, hardly mentions his writing career. It's a good look into life in the 1920's in Britain.
The later part of the book details his involvement with the engineering of the British airship R100, and at this point unless you are pretty much an aviation enthusiast (I am) you might be looking to put down the book for something else, but he does tell the story well, including the development of the government financed and designed R101. This latter airship crashed on it maiden international flight, generating much bad press for airships in general and dooming the R100 which, according to Shute, was a far better designed and built ship. His discussions of the politics of the R101 crash and the grounding and eventual breakup of the R100 are illuminating stuff.
Shute ends his story at this point, where he transitioned from engineer to writer. I would recommend this book for fans of his writing, or those who have an interest in aviation history of this period.
December 22, 2010
I started reading this book because of the wrecked dirigible on the cover of my edition. I have always been fascinated with them as a means of transport of heavy materials. I did not know that Mr. Shute was Norwegian nor that he worked on one of the only two English dirigibles. Thus, only the first half of the book did I find really interesting. I was more interested in the specifics of the dirigible than in Mr. Shute.
September 6, 2014
I read everything I could find by Nevil Shute when I first discovered him, and I really enjoyed his fiction, so it was disappointing to discover that I would not have liked this man one little bit!
August 17, 2011
What a good book. I'm surprised it hasn't been done as a movie. A look back at when airships were the future of travel.
February 23, 2022
When I started this - I was slightly unsure about how how interesting an autobiography about an engineer could be (said as an engineer myself). But of course I had no need to worry. Neville Shute had a real way with words and the early book was fascinating. The section about his brother really got me emotional.
The guy was from one of those privileged backgrounds of a certain type of old British authors - wealthy parents, private school connections etc. but he obviously put this all to good use.
Later on it got a bit bogged down in his business. I would've liked to hear more about the research work he did in WW2, or how he came to move to Australia.
The guy was from one of those privileged backgrounds of a certain type of old British authors - wealthy parents, private school connections etc. but he obviously put this all to good use.
Later on it got a bit bogged down in his business. I would've liked to hear more about the research work he did in WW2, or how he came to move to Australia.
February 19, 2023
An autobiography of an engineer engaged in the newly developing field of aviation. In England, one of the key innovators and leaders involved in the lighter than air competition in the beginning of the depression. Eventually, the reader learns much about Nevil Shute Norway's thought process, background and life. Definitely written from the perspective of a successful businessman in a time of major transition. Highy recommend.
July 28, 2023
Mostly about his career regarding building aircraft. You can see where some of his plots came from.
He needed a good editor on this book. There were too many long sentences that I had to read twice (or even 3 times)in order to understand.
He needed a good editor on this book. There were too many long sentences that I had to read twice (or even 3 times)in order to understand.
August 9, 2024
Very interesting in places - especially the bits about Shute’s role in the airship competition and the flight from the UK to Montreal in an airship - almost seems unbelievable!
Can’t say I was as interested in his airplane company / shareholders etc - lots of business talk. He writes like we’re both sitting in a male-only club, drinking whiskey and smoking cigars, while discussing our various innovative ideas and accrued fortunes. Can’t say I related to all that.
Can’t say I was as interested in his airplane company / shareholders etc - lots of business talk. He writes like we’re both sitting in a male-only club, drinking whiskey and smoking cigars, while discussing our various innovative ideas and accrued fortunes. Can’t say I related to all that.
January 29, 2022
The author's account of his involvement with the building of the R100 was interesting and informative but going on to describe his time starting and running Airspeed was very dull.
April 17, 2015
Nevil Norway (he wrote under his middle name Shute to keep his writing career and his engineering career apart) was born in 1899 to a senior English civil servant. In a society as unequal as England before World War I, life was nice if you were near the top: his father had 3 servants, a gardener and a gardener's boy, while putting his two sons through private schools. Nevil was interested in flight and engineering from an early age. During World War I, Nevil's older brother was wounded and died of an infection, penicillin not having been invented yet; Nevil failed to get an officer's commission and was drafted as a private; fortunately, the war ended before his unit saw action. After he was discharged from the army, Nevil studied engineering at Oxford (frankly, I did not know that this university has a department of engineering), but was a mediocre student: internships at de Havilland Aircraft Company suited him better. After graduation, Shute spent 5 years doing stress analysis computations for the R100, a Zeppelin-class airship built for travel through the British Empire. At the same time as a private company was building the R100, a government-owned company was building the R101, an airship of the same class with a different design. The two engineering teams were fierce rivals, working in secrecy from each other. Shute says that the R100 was a better design because a private company is accountable to its shareholders, and a government-owned company is not accountable to anybody, but the materials I found on the Internet say that it is unclear, which design was better. The R100 was 720 feet long and had the top speed 81 mph (in contrast, a Boeing 747-400 is 232 feet long and has the top speed 614 mph). In the final acceptance test in 1930, it flew from Cardington, Bedfordshire, to Montreal in a 79-hour flight. The acceptance test for the R101 involved a flight to Karachi; unfortunately, when the airship was over France, it crashed and exploded, killing 48 people. This ended the British airship building program. Afterwards, Shute was a cofounder of a startup aircraft manufacturer, which was not unlike software startups 70 years later: they raised the seed capital by searching for people who have recently sold land and didn't know, what to do with the money; paid highly skilled workers partly in stock; had troubles with creditors. The Great Depression was not the best time to manufacture civil aircraft; what saved the company was the re-militarization of the world in the late 1930s. Both sides of the Spanish Civil War wanted all the aircraft they could get their hands on; the Emperor of Abyssinia wanted something European soldiers of fortune could fly and bomb the Italian fuel depots from; the RAF wanted trainers for its bomber crews. Although the company has grown large, it was still unprofitable; eventually, the board of directors forced Shute out. Writing novels has been Shute's hobby since the airship days, but after one of his novels was filmed in Hollywood, he became a popular writer, so he decided to have a second career as a professional novelist rather than an engineer.
September 4, 2021
Excellent, especially if you have any interest in aviation as it covers his career in the manufacture of the R100 airship and aircraft. With poignant reflections, it ends before he had written his most famous books.
February 16, 2020
A very dry autobiography but with excellent audio narration. I read it to understand Shute's perplexing semi-autobiographical novel "Round the Bend" in which a global religion starts based on airplane engine repair. Slide Rule explains a lot. As a child, little Nevil skips school to spend the day in the science and technology museum. When he grows up, he's an engineer. The title refers to a point in the book where he is working with other engineers on calculations for an airship design problem, and he describes this as an "almost religious experience." There's very little in the book about human relationships. Given that the most sublime thing in Shute's life is aeronautical engineering, it makes sense that he could imagine a religion coming out of it
There are other interesting things that resonate today from a historical/economic/political perspective: a CEO who risks his finances and reputation to avoid firing his employees because he considers that part of his responsibilities; the reluctance of airlines or other purchasers of planes to pay for safety; the importance of truth/math/science/testing.
There are other interesting things that resonate today from a historical/economic/political perspective: a CEO who risks his finances and reputation to avoid firing his employees because he considers that part of his responsibilities; the reluctance of airlines or other purchasers of planes to pay for safety; the importance of truth/math/science/testing.
April 4, 2019
To describe this book as a autobiography is a little misleading. It is more the story of the birth of mass aviation between the wars, through the impressive input by the author in establishing an aircraft design and manufacturing business.
If this sounds a bit dry, then you have to allow for the writing style of Nevil Shute. He can spend two pages describing how a bolt is inserted and still make it fascinating. A fair part of the book chronicles the abortive attempt by the British government to establish airships as a commercial transport medium. This part is engrossing.
I would have liked to have a longer book that detailed the author's life in total, including more of his personal life, and for that I have deducted a star.
If this sounds a bit dry, then you have to allow for the writing style of Nevil Shute. He can spend two pages describing how a bolt is inserted and still make it fascinating. A fair part of the book chronicles the abortive attempt by the British government to establish airships as a commercial transport medium. This part is engrossing.
I would have liked to have a longer book that detailed the author's life in total, including more of his personal life, and for that I have deducted a star.
June 24, 2015
Reading this book was a peculiar experience. I was aware of Shute only as a writer, especially of "On the Beach", so I had expected to read the story of a writers life. However, it is the story of Shute's initial career as an aeronautical engineer, initially as a key player in the team building Britain's R100 airship, and then as one of the founders of Airspeed, a player in the British aircraft industry during the evolution from the heroic age of aviation into the beginnings of commercial aviation. Quite readable, despite a few discussions of his rather right-wing views on inherited wealth.
May 25, 2010
Amazing that Nevil Shute was so much prouder of his achievements as an engineer than of the fiction he wrote. A pity this autobiography ends when he is aged 54; I would have liked to know if his ideas changed at all before he died. He certainly believed in private enterprise, and in a rather naive way, but his heart was in the right place.
May 16, 2016
Delicious: "Years afterwards, when I was listening to the bombers overhead during the London blitz, I used to wonder which of them was Magersuppe, and I would wish him luck and think it served us bloody well right. He might have been flying for us."
March 5, 2009
In the first half of this book, Shute writes of his early life and his family. Then he switches to writing about his business.
September 21, 2020
Slide Rule- an autobiography of an Engineer, appealed to me, because I have read many of Mr Shute's novels and relished an autobiography. At last, the man behind those absorbing stories!
I'm not much into engineering, but that, as I read on, was his real love. I kept reading and have to say I learnt much.
His story opens up in the 1950's when Neville Shute is driving to the Mornington Peninsular, Victoria, Australia, to return an unwanted kitten. I was impressed, not about the kitten, but the fact that my grandparents had lived on the Mornington Peninsular and I had spent many holidays with them as I grew up in the 1960's. this part of his autobiography serves as an introduction to Neville's early years in England where he describes the halcyon period of his youth after 1910 when his love of planes began.
Neville Shute loved his work over the 20 years between the wars. His novels reflected his work. He wrote his early novels at night while during the day he did what he loved. First he learned to sail, in the aftermath of WWI. Then he volunteered with DE Havilland a new aviation company, where Shute absorbed all he could about aircraft testing and design. He also learned to fly. It was also during this time in the 1920's that he wrote his first novel to be published: Marazan, basing characters upon those he worked with.
After learning a great deal about aircraft design he moved on to a private company that was to design an airship: the R.100. This rigid airship, to be built over 5 years was in a competition with the R101 sponsored by the Air Ministry. This part of his autobiography is quite involved and lengthy, but it was a formative period in his life and although much of the technicality went over my head, I was captivated by this ground breaking endeavour. Several times Shute hinted at the catastrophe that would occur to their competitor with much loss of life. Air balloon flight was not the way of the future and never took off again in England.
By 1930, Neville Shute turned again to the aircraft industry, this time to start up his own industry called Airspeed. He employed good people and the company designed some wonderful planes, but staying afloat was always the problem. As the second war approached and orders increased from the government, there was not the money to finance the building. The British government made 'after pay' a hurdle too high and Airspeed was absorbed into a the larger De Havilland Company.
During 1936 before his company was absorbed Neville Shute wrote Ruined City, one of my favourites.
By 1938 Shute left his company. In his own words he states why. "At Airspeed the time for starters was over and it was now for the runners to start the company. I was a starter and useless as a runner."
So I left Neville Shute's autobiography in 1940. He lived another 20 years, of which I know only what the internet tells me. However knowing his novels reflect his life in many ways, I am content to read these.
I'm not much into engineering, but that, as I read on, was his real love. I kept reading and have to say I learnt much.
His story opens up in the 1950's when Neville Shute is driving to the Mornington Peninsular, Victoria, Australia, to return an unwanted kitten. I was impressed, not about the kitten, but the fact that my grandparents had lived on the Mornington Peninsular and I had spent many holidays with them as I grew up in the 1960's. this part of his autobiography serves as an introduction to Neville's early years in England where he describes the halcyon period of his youth after 1910 when his love of planes began.
Neville Shute loved his work over the 20 years between the wars. His novels reflected his work. He wrote his early novels at night while during the day he did what he loved. First he learned to sail, in the aftermath of WWI. Then he volunteered with DE Havilland a new aviation company, where Shute absorbed all he could about aircraft testing and design. He also learned to fly. It was also during this time in the 1920's that he wrote his first novel to be published: Marazan, basing characters upon those he worked with.
After learning a great deal about aircraft design he moved on to a private company that was to design an airship: the R.100. This rigid airship, to be built over 5 years was in a competition with the R101 sponsored by the Air Ministry. This part of his autobiography is quite involved and lengthy, but it was a formative period in his life and although much of the technicality went over my head, I was captivated by this ground breaking endeavour. Several times Shute hinted at the catastrophe that would occur to their competitor with much loss of life. Air balloon flight was not the way of the future and never took off again in England.
By 1930, Neville Shute turned again to the aircraft industry, this time to start up his own industry called Airspeed. He employed good people and the company designed some wonderful planes, but staying afloat was always the problem. As the second war approached and orders increased from the government, there was not the money to finance the building. The British government made 'after pay' a hurdle too high and Airspeed was absorbed into a the larger De Havilland Company.
During 1936 before his company was absorbed Neville Shute wrote Ruined City, one of my favourites.
By 1938 Shute left his company. In his own words he states why. "At Airspeed the time for starters was over and it was now for the runners to start the company. I was a starter and useless as a runner."
So I left Neville Shute's autobiography in 1940. He lived another 20 years, of which I know only what the internet tells me. However knowing his novels reflect his life in many ways, I am content to read these.
January 30, 2019
Nevil Shute Norway, author of two dozen novels including A Town Like Alice and On The Beach, dropped his surname as a writer to separate his private hobby (writing) from his professional life (engineering). Born in the next to last year of the 19th century, he recounts events from his childhood, education, early training, and exposure to aviation through his experience as an engineer building rigid airships and later aircraft until he left the industry to become a full time writer in 1940.
Nearly 40% of the book describes his involvement in Britain’s airship program. His commentary on the design, construction, testing, and flights of the R100 and ill-fated R101 include many pointed criticisms of the Air Ministry, the Air Minister, the design team, and the crew. In his view, government control implemented through civil servants lacking an appropriate background and influenced by political concerns is a recipe for disaster. He believed there were many chances to avert the accident if any member of the R101 team had expressed an honest reservation about the ship’s airworthiness.
His observations on the methods and difficulties of establishing a start-up company mirror some conditions entrepreneurs face today. He doesn’t sugar-coat his views of bankers, lawyers, and executives, and has a distinct opinion of what persons make the best investors. Shute details the struggle to keep the Airspeed firm going and the thrill he felt doing so. Married to a professional woman, having a literary income, and marketable engineering skills, he repeated expressed his concern over the fate of the workers and the small investors should the enterprise fail.
More business primer and opinion than biography, Slide Rule is of interest to those wanting to know more about the R100/R101 story and the development of Britain’s aviation industry from an insider.
Nearly 40% of the book describes his involvement in Britain’s airship program. His commentary on the design, construction, testing, and flights of the R100 and ill-fated R101 include many pointed criticisms of the Air Ministry, the Air Minister, the design team, and the crew. In his view, government control implemented through civil servants lacking an appropriate background and influenced by political concerns is a recipe for disaster. He believed there were many chances to avert the accident if any member of the R101 team had expressed an honest reservation about the ship’s airworthiness.
His observations on the methods and difficulties of establishing a start-up company mirror some conditions entrepreneurs face today. He doesn’t sugar-coat his views of bankers, lawyers, and executives, and has a distinct opinion of what persons make the best investors. Shute details the struggle to keep the Airspeed firm going and the thrill he felt doing so. Married to a professional woman, having a literary income, and marketable engineering skills, he repeated expressed his concern over the fate of the workers and the small investors should the enterprise fail.
More business primer and opinion than biography, Slide Rule is of interest to those wanting to know more about the R100/R101 story and the development of Britain’s aviation industry from an insider.
March 7, 2019
This is Nevil Shute's biography, concentrating on his career in aeronautical engineering. Along the way he mentions his efforts in writing fiction which he did largely as an avocation although he became a well known author.
Shute worked in increasingly senior positions on the R100 airship at the time that airships were anticipated to be viable vehicles for moving people quickly over long distances. The British government had set up two competing projects - the R100 to be built by Vickers subsidiary Airship Guarantee Company while the R101 which was built by a government team. As the R100 was built on a fixed price contract, engineering was important in delivering a cost effective airship that met the specifications. In contrast, the R101 was governed by politics so that while the cost was higher, it did not meet the specs. In the end, poor engineering resulted in a failure that caused it to crash in France on its first overseas trip. The R100 successfully travelled to Canada and back. The author is very critical of government in construction and engineering projects.
The government also built an earlier airship (1918), the R38, which was designed by simply copying the structure of a Zeppelin airship, without doing any loading calculations. It too crashed.
The British government stopped airship work after the loss of the R100. Shute feels that it was just as well as airplanes would have eventually displaced them anyhow.
In 1931, Shute and A. Hessell Tiltman formed the Airspeed company to build aircraft. The company was active during the period of wooden aircraft. Although it always struggled financially, it built a number of aircraft including the popular Airspeed Oxford trainer and the first British aircraft to use a retractable undercarriage - the Airspeed Courier.
A fascinating book with good engineering detail.
Shute worked in increasingly senior positions on the R100 airship at the time that airships were anticipated to be viable vehicles for moving people quickly over long distances. The British government had set up two competing projects - the R100 to be built by Vickers subsidiary Airship Guarantee Company while the R101 which was built by a government team. As the R100 was built on a fixed price contract, engineering was important in delivering a cost effective airship that met the specifications. In contrast, the R101 was governed by politics so that while the cost was higher, it did not meet the specs. In the end, poor engineering resulted in a failure that caused it to crash in France on its first overseas trip. The R100 successfully travelled to Canada and back. The author is very critical of government in construction and engineering projects.
The government also built an earlier airship (1918), the R38, which was designed by simply copying the structure of a Zeppelin airship, without doing any loading calculations. It too crashed.
The British government stopped airship work after the loss of the R100. Shute feels that it was just as well as airplanes would have eventually displaced them anyhow.
In 1931, Shute and A. Hessell Tiltman formed the Airspeed company to build aircraft. The company was active during the period of wooden aircraft. Although it always struggled financially, it built a number of aircraft including the popular Airspeed Oxford trainer and the first British aircraft to use a retractable undercarriage - the Airspeed Courier.
A fascinating book with good engineering detail.
June 16, 2024
It's interesting reading the Shute biography shortly after having read his two early 'suppressed' novels, of which he is very dismissive in "Slide Rule". It's evident there was clearly a fair degree of autobiographical experience in "Stephen Morris" and its semi-sequel, from the early days of the de Havilland company to the South Coast sailing which features so vividly at the start of the second book; the author claims that "I doubt very much, if any, of it was written twice", which is very likely the case for a first novel, but the result is not noticeably any worse than his early published books, save perhaps in the rather conventional handling of the romance.
It was a bit of a shock to make the connection between his father having been posted to Ireland as the civil servant in charge of the Post Office there during the Edwardian era, and the Easter uprising in Dublin, which took place in the actual building where his father's offices were located (and in which he would have been present at the time, had he not by chance been called away an hour earlier). And Shute writes vividly about the odd experience of being a public school adolescent during the First World War in the expectation that, according to all precedent, you were going to grow up, join the Army, and die, just as all the boys in the classes above you had done. His elder brother died in the trenches at nineteen; the younger boy's life was probably saved by a crippling stammer which led to various rejections over a period of almost two years, "though if the war had gone on I should certainly have been drafted to France".
As it was, he went up to Oxford, spent the vacations serving as unpaid yacht crew and aircraft design apprentice, and came away with a third-class degree and a job at the nascent de Havilland company... I think the book benefits from the subconscious tension of the reader's not knowing the outcome; most biographies of famous people lead up to the inevitable triumph of whatever it was that the person is well known for, but like C.S.Forester's "Long Before Forty", this is almost entirely the story of what the author did before he was a successful writer. And because we know (or are fairly sure) that he didn't end up as the director of a successful aircraft manufacturing concern, there's a certain air of impending disaster hanging over his account of the years he spent trying to keep afloat an innovative, constantly-impecunious company that nobody has ever heard of.
(In fact, that story has a much happier ending than I'd expected -- and I know I've read this book before, but I have absolutely zero recollection of it. They finally come up with a successful government contract and end up selling thousands of aircraft for the use of the RAF, but the author basically loses interest as soon as his creation is on a firm financial footing.)
I was curious as to whether the senior engineer mentioned in passing as "B.N.Wallis" might be any chance be the same as the famous Barnes Wallis of the 'bouncing bomb' -- a subsequent allusion to the Wellington bomber confirms that he evidently was. I had no idea that Shute had worked directly under Barnes Wallis, or that the latter had originally found success as an airship designer and been intimately involved in the R.101/R.100 project! It occurs to me that Shute's depiction of the civilian Professor Legge's involvement in weapons development in the novel "Landfall" is distinctly reminiscent of the description of Barnes Wallis's relationship to the risks the young pilots were taking in Paul Brickhill's "The Dam Busters", and in retrospect I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that the character was inspired by Wallis.
Of course I did remember that Nevil Shute himself had been involved in the airship project; in fact, I think this was probably my chief interest in the book at the time when I first read it, since that's the only part I recognised. And naturally there's an air of impending doom over that part of the book also, not just on account of the foreshadowing in the text (a lot of people Shute mentions are described as subsequently losing their lives) but because in this case the outcome is still notorious; the fate of the R.101 remains as cataclysmic as that of the Hindenburg, and in large part responsible for the dire image of airships over several succeeding generations.
Shute gives an insider's account, and (naturally) a biased one. But as a narrator he comes across out of it well, bending over backwards to acknowledge the pressures that virtually everyone on the rival team must have faced, from the civil servants who did not have the technical expertise to question committee decisions, to the design staff trapped by their own advance publicity, the engineers who had no source of peer review, since they themselves were critiquing their competitors' designs, and the aircrew who were expected to fly both their employers' 'official' airship and her commercial rival, and did, by Shute's account, an honourable job. And there is what must have been the longstanding survivors' guilt of the successful R.100 team: by insisting on carrying out the test flight to Canada according to the original schedule, "we drove the final stake into the palisade around them, blocking their one way out". He adds later that it was probably a good thing that none of his team were called to testify in the public enquiry into the disaster, since "the conclusions reached were almost certainly correct" and "we had said derogatory things about the competence of the government staff and we could hardly have gone back on those opinions at the enquiry"; they, too were trapped by "the bitterness of competition".
Here, as in many other places in the book, Shute makes it clear that he felt one thing (understandably) in the past and in the heat of the moment, and that with hindsight he thinks differently and perhaps more even-handedly now. His High Tory politics are self-evident throughout his autobiography, but despite the fact that I don't share his disdain for 'the dead hand of the State', he manages to come across as clear-eyed and humane, rather than just having a chip on his shoulder; indeed, in many ways the book is almost diffident. One can see exactly where Shute's own experiences have led to his personal dogmas.
"Slide Rule" is subtitled "The Autobiography of an Engineer", and is only peripherally about Shute's apprenticeship as a novelist, although he comments that "I have always liked to do two jobs at the same time; one helps you rest from the other"!
It was a bit of a shock to make the connection between his father having been posted to Ireland as the civil servant in charge of the Post Office there during the Edwardian era, and the Easter uprising in Dublin, which took place in the actual building where his father's offices were located (and in which he would have been present at the time, had he not by chance been called away an hour earlier). And Shute writes vividly about the odd experience of being a public school adolescent during the First World War in the expectation that, according to all precedent, you were going to grow up, join the Army, and die, just as all the boys in the classes above you had done. His elder brother died in the trenches at nineteen; the younger boy's life was probably saved by a crippling stammer which led to various rejections over a period of almost two years, "though if the war had gone on I should certainly have been drafted to France".
As it was, he went up to Oxford, spent the vacations serving as unpaid yacht crew and aircraft design apprentice, and came away with a third-class degree and a job at the nascent de Havilland company... I think the book benefits from the subconscious tension of the reader's not knowing the outcome; most biographies of famous people lead up to the inevitable triumph of whatever it was that the person is well known for, but like C.S.Forester's "Long Before Forty", this is almost entirely the story of what the author did before he was a successful writer. And because we know (or are fairly sure) that he didn't end up as the director of a successful aircraft manufacturing concern, there's a certain air of impending disaster hanging over his account of the years he spent trying to keep afloat an innovative, constantly-impecunious company that nobody has ever heard of.
(In fact, that story has a much happier ending than I'd expected -- and I know I've read this book before, but I have absolutely zero recollection of it. They finally come up with a successful government contract and end up selling thousands of aircraft for the use of the RAF, but the author basically loses interest as soon as his creation is on a firm financial footing.)
I was curious as to whether the senior engineer mentioned in passing as "B.N.Wallis" might be any chance be the same as the famous Barnes Wallis of the 'bouncing bomb' -- a subsequent allusion to the Wellington bomber confirms that he evidently was. I had no idea that Shute had worked directly under Barnes Wallis, or that the latter had originally found success as an airship designer and been intimately involved in the R.101/R.100 project! It occurs to me that Shute's depiction of the civilian Professor Legge's involvement in weapons development in the novel "Landfall" is distinctly reminiscent of the description of Barnes Wallis's relationship to the risks the young pilots were taking in Paul Brickhill's "The Dam Busters", and in retrospect I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that the character was inspired by Wallis.
Of course I did remember that Nevil Shute himself had been involved in the airship project; in fact, I think this was probably my chief interest in the book at the time when I first read it, since that's the only part I recognised. And naturally there's an air of impending doom over that part of the book also, not just on account of the foreshadowing in the text (a lot of people Shute mentions are described as subsequently losing their lives) but because in this case the outcome is still notorious; the fate of the R.101 remains as cataclysmic as that of the Hindenburg, and in large part responsible for the dire image of airships over several succeeding generations.
Shute gives an insider's account, and (naturally) a biased one. But as a narrator he comes across out of it well, bending over backwards to acknowledge the pressures that virtually everyone on the rival team must have faced, from the civil servants who did not have the technical expertise to question committee decisions, to the design staff trapped by their own advance publicity, the engineers who had no source of peer review, since they themselves were critiquing their competitors' designs, and the aircrew who were expected to fly both their employers' 'official' airship and her commercial rival, and did, by Shute's account, an honourable job. And there is what must have been the longstanding survivors' guilt of the successful R.100 team: by insisting on carrying out the test flight to Canada according to the original schedule, "we drove the final stake into the palisade around them, blocking their one way out". He adds later that it was probably a good thing that none of his team were called to testify in the public enquiry into the disaster, since "the conclusions reached were almost certainly correct" and "we had said derogatory things about the competence of the government staff and we could hardly have gone back on those opinions at the enquiry"; they, too were trapped by "the bitterness of competition".
Here, as in many other places in the book, Shute makes it clear that he felt one thing (understandably) in the past and in the heat of the moment, and that with hindsight he thinks differently and perhaps more even-handedly now. His High Tory politics are self-evident throughout his autobiography, but despite the fact that I don't share his disdain for 'the dead hand of the State', he manages to come across as clear-eyed and humane, rather than just having a chip on his shoulder; indeed, in many ways the book is almost diffident. One can see exactly where Shute's own experiences have led to his personal dogmas.
"Slide Rule" is subtitled "The Autobiography of an Engineer", and is only peripherally about Shute's apprenticeship as a novelist, although he comments that "I have always liked to do two jobs at the same time; one helps you rest from the other"!
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