From Bouncing Bombs to Concorde by Gardner Robert

Author:Gardner, Robert
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752496030
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-03-27T04:00:00+00:00

Fifteen months after the formation of BAC, Sir George Edwards was elevated to the top job: managing director with executive authority for all company affairs. Lord Caldecote became his deputy, but retained responsibility for the guided weapons divisions. ‘We started off with a triumvirate running the shop, with a financial director, an aircraft director and a guided weapons director. Then I was seduced into taking on the managing director’s job,’ was how Sir George describes it. ‘But the most important appointment was Lord Portal as chairman, because we needed a great figure, a man of humanity and understanding, who we could all look up to, and before whom the internecine strife that had existed before was puny,’ he says.

His new appointment was predictable. Sir George’s growing relationship with Portal, his firm but even-handed treatment of the aircraft divisions, together with his responsibility for the king-pin TSR.2 contract, all pointed that way. ‘It was a job-and-a-half, and I needed to learn about other things so as not to have my leg pulled,’ was all he would say on reflection. His more immediate and much-quoted response was: ‘I am now the wearer of the labelled pants which the Minister of Aviation can kick!’

Although the groups ‘settled down’ after the merger, George Edwards, as day-to-day boss, inherited all the residual ‘internecine strife’, as he called it. To the rumbling but ‘manageable’ problems between Weybridge, Warton and Preston, was added growing resentment of the guided weapons divisions, as expressed by Lord Caldecote. Although Sir George rated Robin Caldecote ‘a decent bloke’, he soon became aware that Caldecote was becoming increasingly frustrated about his (Sir George’s) influence on the chairman and the importance of the guided weapons programmes. ‘Portal seemed to have no interest in the guided weapons. He was very interested in the aircraft,’ Caldecote stated, adding: ‘George Edwards had regular conversations with him, and I felt Portal was getting a wrong picture of the balance.’

Lord Caldecote also offered an explanation for Portal’s apparent ambivalence. ‘It must have been a function of age: difficult to embrace entirely new concepts. I was rather sad and disappointed. My chaps were doing a terrific job, and their efforts then were not properly appreciated. There were no outward signs, but he was not really interested . . .’ Furthermore, he did not feel Portal put as much effort into defending guided weapons programmes as he put into defending TSR.2. In his book, in which Caldecote’s remarks are quoted, Denis Richards suggests that Portal himself ‘felt that he had for some time underestimated the potentialities of guided weapons’.

Portal was not alone. For although Edwards had established a small but very effective guided weapons group at Weybridge some years before, he, by his own admission, ‘knew nothing about the techniques you needed . . . electronics hadn’t been heard of at that time. People knew about electrics but they didn’t know about electronics.’ That was not to say he was dismissive of their contribution or potential, but just that ‘as

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.