Not Much of an Engineer by Stanley Hooker

Author:Stanley Hooker [Hooker, Stanley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Not Much of an Engineer
ISBN: 9781847973252
Publisher: Crowood
Published: 2011-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

The Proteus

I joined the Bristol Engine Division on 3 January 1949, full of optimism. The company was still producing large numbers of the excellent Hercules and Centaurus sleeve-valve aircooled radial engines designed by the great team under Sir Roy Fedden, who had left the company in 1942 in exactly the way I had left Rolls-Royce. Partly for this reason it had lagged behind in the development of turbine engines. It had started with the Theseus, a complex and heavy turboprop, from which it was painfully moving on to a later turboprop, the Proteus. On the drawing boards was a promising turbojet, the Olympus, but the company had yet to sell a single gas turbine. I considered there was a 10-year lag behind Rolls-Royce, a daunting prospect when one considered the power and speed of reaction of Rolls-Royce.

I was determined to provide Rolls-Royce with some serious competition, but in retrospect I think that this would have been very difficult to do had not the Korean war shaken the British government out of its complacency. Recognizing that the RAF was desperately short of new equipment, while the aircraft industry had years of leeway to make up through lack of orders, the Ministry of Supply ordered the Rolls-Royce Avon axial jet to be put into production by the Bristol company as well as by Napier and Standard Motors. Thus, by force majeure, the Bristol shops were equipped with the machine tools and techniques for mass-producing modern axial engines. Moreover Bristol established the links with the specialist suppliers of turbine materials, parts for fuel systems, combustion chambers and others parts that were new to their experience. Thus, just as did General Electric and Pratt & Whitney learn to compete with Britain by making British jet engines, so did producing a Rolls-Royce engine set Bristol on the road which, by 1960, saw them providing neck-and-neck competition with the giant at Derby.

My new colleagues, however, were an unknown quantity. Frank Owner, Chief Engineer, had set up what he considered the logical organization of his department. He had four senior engineers reporting directly to him. Stanley Mansell was the Design Engineer, responsible for drawings and instructions to the shops. Brother Harvey Mansell was Research Engineer. Roche Swinchatt was Development Engineer, responsible for all piston and turbine engines. Jimmie Fell was Procurement Engineer, responsible for progressing the shops and getting engines built and modified as specified by Design. My own job was still unspecified, but that did not bother me as I wanted to get to know the Proteus and as-yet unbuilt Olympus, as well as the engineers lower down the ladder.

The four senior engineers and I used to meet each morning at 10 o’clock for coffee in Frank’s office for a discussion for which there was no agenda and no minutes. After Frank, Swinchatt was by far the most powerful personality. The Mansells were retiring, and Harvey seldom uttered a word. A typical statement by Swinchatt would be, ‘We failed the con-rod on the Hercules on test yesterday.

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