10 February (Part 2) - Made in Erith
Generally speaking I only use Twitter to announce the more significant
Bonkers’ posts and for countering the lies told by @bexleynews. Following that rule I very nearly didn’t Tweet about
yesterday’s blog which had nothing to do with
Bexley and it was on line for several hours before I changed my mind.
I was wrong about there being little interest in a brief life history but it bumped
the number of web hits considerably and provoked more emails than blogs usually do.
I was also wrong about it having nothing to do with Bexley because I have
been told that the air blowers shown in the engine test facility photo (white things on left) were made
in Erith. I walked around those motors several times as a teenager and remember
my father speaking of both the GEC and Parsons engineering companies and
visiting their HQs. I did not realise that they were really one and the same
company because Parsons took over GEC, or at least the bit of it that made the compressors.
Here’s another view of ‘Made in Erith’.
As my knowledgeable reader, an apprentice with GEC Erith when the various bits and
pieces were made, correctly says, the steam turbine was used to spin eight
synchronous electric motors up to speed and the combined half million horse
power was the force behind the Mach 3 wind tunnel.
if you were wondering a month ago why
I lived in a town that still had gas lighting well into the 1960’s you have
your answer. There was no spare electricity, in fact when those motors were
switched on our TV pictures would shrink as the voltage went down.
My father always refused to speak of what he did while with Special Operations
Executive and the Halifax to Cairo story was only got out of him during his
final months. He wouldn’t speak of the Liberator to Casablanca trip at all and
merely listened while his sister - the old lady in East Ham - related what he
had told her, and presumably shouldn’t have done, many years before. The only bit
of the story that came directly from my father was the bit about getting
airborne within 30 minutes.
Since it appears to be of some interest here are the notes I made back in 1987
suitably sanitized and slightly modified for publication.
In 1987 Dad was dying and I took him out by car at weekends
if he was well enough. One day we called in at the aviation museum at Tangmere which was little more than a couple of corrugated iron
sheds filled with a variety of aircraft artefacts and memorabilia. One of
them was a badly broken Rolls Royce Merlin engine that had been dug from the
ground after a Spitfire crash.
Dad had worked on Merlin engines
and I recall him, bragging almost, that it was the first engine to develop more horsepower than it weighed
in pounds. On the side of the damaged Merlin engine was a panel inscribed with a notice to the effect that only Rolls Royce authorized
personnel were to remove it. Dad muttered something about there being times
when such things had to be ignored.
In early November 1942, towards the end of Montgomery’s campaign in North
Africa, he said that there was an urgent need for small arms and ammunition
to be ferried to Egypt. Six Halifaxes were suitably loaded and flew from Tempsford,
Bedfordshire in two groups of three. Each group had the normal flight crew and because the
flight was to be such an unusual one each group carried an engineering
officer and a munitions expert. Dad was the
engineer for his group of three ’planes.
They flew directly over France to Malta where they stopped for at least one
night. Dad said the crew thought it easiest to sleep on board
the Halifaxes but the local authorities forbade it because of the danger
posed by Luftwaffe attacks.
Next day they flew on to Cairo where their load was safely delivered. For the return
journey they loaded with forces’ mail and took off bound for Gibraltar. At some
point in the journey the flight crew called Dad forward to look at the
instrumentation of one engine and he instructed them to shut it down. They
continued on their journey but another engine failed and all the mail had to
be thrown into the sea while they struggled to keep aloft long enough to
reach the north African coast.
Finding themselves stuck in a desert with two failed and two failing
engines, with little food and no defences was something of a predicament.
A day or two later an army appeared on the horizon and very fortunately it was
American and not German. They were in awe of such a large aeroplane stuck in the
desert but perhaps unsurprising given that they were army and not U.S.A.F. They had
plenty of food and fuel and oil.
Given hope of survival Dad began to dismantle the Merlin engines and discovered
they had sucked in a great deal of sand. After a lengthy strip down and clean the Polish
crew took off and headed off around the Bay of Biscay and home.
The pilot was ecstatic about getting airborne again and as Land’s End came into view
he dived at it and continued the flight back to Bedfordshire at tree top height.
When they got near to their base he circled the nearby village of Potton where Mum was staying
and she added to the story by saying that she was in the garden hanging out the
washing when the Halifax circled around at low level and she knew it had to be
Dad’s after an absence of more than three weeks.
Dad went on to say that he didn’t think any of the other five Halifaxes returned but
two crews managed to get home by overland routes.
He got home just before Christmas which was a good one because the Americans had
stocked the Halifax with food and fruit which wasn’t easily available back in wartime Britain.
There are records on line of Halifaxes being lost over the Mediterranean at the appropriate time but
nothing about exactly how many and whether some got home.