Sydney Camm by John Sweetman

Author:John Sweetman [Sweetman, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Aviation & Nautical, History, Military, Aviation, Transportation
ISBN: 9781526756237
Google: zE8IEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2019-04-30T22:33:41+00:00

Chapter Eight

Into the Jet Age

Immediately post-war, the need for military aircraft dropped dramatically, with inevitable consequences for the size of the workforce and financial wellbeing of Hawker’s. Against a background of national austerity, the challenges of adapting to a jet, rather than piston-engine, age, a shrinking empire with reduced overseas defence responsibilities and a worrying nuclear threat as the Cold War escalated, the company competed for orders with twenty-six other British airframe firms. The Sea Hawk and Hawker Hunter would be Sydney Camm’s major successes.

Firstly, however, he faced a family crisis. Hilda was a talented amateur pianist and allowed their daughter to practise on her piano at home. In March 1941, Phyllis gained ‘the second highest distinction marks in any Practical Subject among candidates throughout Great Britain and Ireland successful in Grade VIII Final’ and became the silver medallist for this grade in the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music London examination. She was academically bright and ‘loved’ Rosslyn House School in Thames Ditton, where on one occasion her public performance as Rosalind in As You Like It was deemed ‘outstanding’, on another her piano playing at Speech Day attracted special praise. The Headmistress wanted Phyllis to try for Oxford or Cambridge. Hilda disagreed possibly, her granddaughter mused, because she considered higher academic qualifications unnecessary for a girl. Phyllis therefore attended Kingston upon Thames Technical College & School of Art, before gaining a place at the Royal Academy of Music.1

One day in June 1947, Phyllis and a friend at the Royal Academy debated whether, in view of threatening clouds, they should go for a walk after lunch. Phyllis decided to risk a drenching, Iris declined. When the downpour duly arrived, Phyllis took shelter in a doorway in Exhibition Road, where she was joined by a young music student. Lionel Alexander Dickson was the son of a Russian emigré, Aleksandr Dekterrev, whose marriage to Marguerit Osena Campbell had been dissolved in 1927. Lionel Alexander (known as Sacha, the Russian diminutive) had changed his surname to Dickson on his grandmother’s insistence ‘to avoid problems’ after his mother married John Home Dickson. Following wartime service as a Royal Artillery officer in India, Sacha undertook a teaching course in piano and flute at Trinity College School of Music in London.2

Phyllis and Sacha were married three weeks after their chance encounter by special licence at Friday lunchtime on 18 July 1947. No member of either family was present for neither had been told, let alone invited. The Camms’ ‘vivacious and attractive’ daughter felt that, at 25, she was ‘on the shelf’ and destined to remain an old maid looking after elderly parents. Despite being over 21, her mother ‘kept an incredibly close guard on her’, requiring Phyllis to be home by 10pm. The measure of her mother’s dominance may be judged by Phyllis’s outright refusal to let Dickson tell anybody, including his own mother and stepfather, about the planned nuptials for fear that Hilda would ‘stamp on it’, disapproving of Sacha, two years Phyllis’s junior and with no settled job.

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