Shute's autobiographical book begins with his Edwardian childhood during the time of the Great War, charts the occasion he was mixed up in the Easter rising in Dublin in 1916 and describes receiving the news of his brother's death in the trenches. This is all very interesting - especially the section where he describes going on holiday in France in 1915. Strangely enough, the war was so static one could still holiday forty or so miles behind the lines.
The book really shifts up a gear when the scene switches to Shute's association with the inter-war world of aircraft design and manufacture, when aircraft builders were changing from enthusiastic amateurs to hard-nosed businessman. Shute himself began in the aircraft industry in the early twenties, working for a spell as assistant stress calculator with the fledgling DeHavilland company before leaving to join Vickers on the R100 airship project with Barnes Wallis. This section of the book is quite unique as it describes first-hand the design and building techniques of the massive airship through from the early days to its momentous maiden flight to Montreal in 1929. Less happy but no less interesting is the more infamous R101 which was conceived, designed and built with such flagrant disregard for the normal routines of safety and testing that its well documented loss in a fiery ball in Beauvais reads like nothing short of the criminal negligence that it was.
After the scrapping of the far superior R100 and Wallis' return to Vickers, Shute put together some members of the R100 design team and formed Airspeed Ltd, a company he was to be managing director from 1930 to 1938. He saw the company through its shaky early years with such otherwise unnoteworthy aircraft as the 'Ferry' to the no less glamorous but far more marketable 'Envoy', later militarised into the 'Oxford' and became the standard trainer for bomber crews in World War 2. Shute's association with Airspeed finished at the outbreak of war. He touches upon the sometimes draconian system of payment for aircraft manufacturing by the air ministry, and comments at length upon the sometimes difficult decisions made by managing directors of aircraft companies when the balance of the company hangs only on the overstated value of the unsold aircraft's net worth - an optimism, he says, that sent many a director to prison. It is a thoughtful and honest book written by a man with a deep passion for aviation, and is peppered with anecdotes and reminiscences of aviation icons such as DeHavilland, Walker, Cobham and Wallis.
The book is now out of print but if you see a copy then jump at the chance - you will not find a more entertaining aviation read for many moons.
