Nevil Shute

Nevil Shute Norway was an English novelist and aeronautical engineer who spent his later years in Australia. He used his full name in his engineering career and Nevil Shute as his pen name in order to protect his engineering career from inferences by his employers (Vickers) or from fellow engineers that he was '"not a serious person" or from potentially adverse publicity in connection with his novels, which included On the Beach and A Town Like Alice.

Shute was born in Somerset Road, Ealing (which was then in Middlesex), in the house described in his novel Trustee from the Toolroom. He was educated at the Dragon School, Shrewsbury School, and Balliol College, Oxford; he graduated from Oxford in 1922 with a third-class degree in engineering science. Shute's father, Arthur Hamilton Norway, became head of the Post Office in Ireland before the First World War and was based at the General Post Office, Dublin, in 1916 at the time of the Easter Rising. Shute himself was later commended for his role as a stretcher-bearer during the rising.

Shute attended the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and trained as a gunner. He could not take up a commission in the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War, which he believed was because of his stammer. He served as a soldier in the Suffolk Regiment, enlisting in the ranks in August 1918. He guarded the Isle of Grain in the Thames Estuary and served in military funeral parties in Kent during the 1918 flu pandemic.

Shute began his engineering career with the de Havilland Aircraft Company as an aeronautical engineer and a pilot. He used his pen name as an author to protect his engineering career from any potentially adverse publicity concerning his novels. Dissatisfied with the lack of opportunities for advancement, he took a position in 1924 with Vickers Ltd., where he was involved with developing airships, working as Chief Calculator (stress engineer) on the R100 airship project for the Vickers subsidiary Airship Guarantee Company. 

In 1929, he was promoted to deputy chief engineer of the R100 project under Barnes Wallis. When Wallis left the project, Shute became the chief engineer. The R100 was a prototype for passenger-carrying airships that would serve the needs of Britain's empire. The government-funded but privately developed R100 made a successful 1930 round trip to Canada. While in Canada, it made trips from Montreal to Ottawa, Toronto, and Niagara Falls. The fatal 1930 crash near Beauvais, France, of its government-developed counterpart R101 ended British interest in dirigibles. The R100 was immediately grounded and subsequently scrapped.

Shute gives a detailed account of the development of the two airships in his 1954 autobiographical work, Slide Rule. When he started, he wrote that he was shocked to find that before building the R38, the civil servants concerned '" had made no attempt to calculate the aerodynamic forces acting on the ship"' but had just copied the size of girders in German airships. The calculations for just one transverse frame of the R100 could take two or three months, and the solution '" almost amounted to a religious experience." 

But later, he wrote that '"the disaster was the product of the system rather than the men at Cardington"; the one thing that was proved is that "government officials are totally ineffective in engineering development" and any weapons (they develop) will be bad weapons. The R101 made one short test flight in perfect weather and was given an airworthiness certificate for her flight to India to meet the minister’s deadline. Norway thought a new outer cover for the R101 was probably taped on with rubber adhesive, which reacted with the dope. 

His account is very critical of the R101 design and management team and strongly hints that senior team members were complicit in concealing flaws in the airship's design and construction. In The Tender Ship, Manhattan Project engineer and Virginia Tech professor Arthur Squires used Shute's account of the R100 and R101 as a primary illustration of his thesis that governments are usually incompetent managers of technology projects.

In 1931, with the cancellation of the R100 project, Shute teamed up with the talented de Havilland-trained designer A. Hessell Tiltman to found the aircraft construction company Airspeed Ltd. A site was available in a former trolleybus garage on Piccadilly, York. Despite setbacks, including the usual problems of a new business, Airspeed Limited eventually gained recognition when its Envoy aircraft was chosen for the King's Flight. 

With the approach of the Second World War, a military version of the Envoy was developed, to be called the Airspeed Oxford. The Oxford became the standard advanced multi-engined trainer for the RAF and British Commonwealth, with over 8,500 being built. For the innovation of developing a hydraulic retractable undercarriage for the Airspeed Courier and his work on R100, Shute was made a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society. On 7 March 1931, Shute married Frances Mary Heaton, a 28-year-old medical practitioner. They had two daughters, (Heather), Felicity, and Shirley.