A crash at Seven Barrows

In December 1909, on a field at Seven Barrows in Hampshire, a 27-year-old engineer opened the throttle of an aeroplane he had spent two years building with money borrowed from his grandfather. It flew for a moment and smashed. Geoffrey de Havilland simply built another, taught himself to fly in it near Newbury in September 1910, and sold it to the Army’s balloon factory at Farnborough for £400. It became the F.E.1, the first aircraft to carry an official Royal Aircraft Factory designation. By 1914 he was chief designer at Airco in Hendon, where every type he drew carried his initials. The letters DH would stay on British aircraft for half a century.

Fifty thousand pounds and a shed at Stag Lane

Peace killed Airco. The Birmingham Small Arms Company bought it in January 1920 for its factories, found it worthless and shut it down that July. With help from Airco’s founder George Holt Thomas, de Havilland formed his own company, incorporated on 26 September 1920 with nominal capital of £50,000, and took modest sheds at Stag Lane Aerodrome on the edge of north London. He brought his Airco team with him. A wealthy customer, Alan Butler, ordered an aeroplane, liked it, and invested heavily; he became chairman. The first year’s turnover was £32,782 and the profit £2,387. In 1922 the company bought the aerodrome itself for £20,000.

The Moth that taught a nation to fly

Salvation came on 22 February 1925, when the DH.60 Moth first flew. It was small, cheap, forgiving and soon powered by de Havilland’s own Gipsy engines. Flying clubs across the Empire bought it, and so did adventurers: in 1930 Amy Johnson flew solo from England to Australia in a Gipsy Moth. The family grew into the Tiger Moth trainer, 8,868 of which were built, and the twin-engined Dragon and Dragon Rapide airliners. In October 1934 the slim DH.88 Comet racer Grosvenor House won the MacRobertson race from Mildenhall to Melbourne in 71 hours. The company floated in 1928 and moved to Hatfield around 1930.

Freeman’s Folly

De Havilland’s strangest idea was also its greatest. As war loomed, the company proposed an unarmed bomber built of wood, so fast it would need no guns. The Air Ministry was unconvinced; Lord Beaverbrook called it Freeman’s Folly, after the air marshal who kept it alive. The design team hid away at Salisbury Hall in Hertfordshire, and on 25 November 1940 Geoffrey de Havilland Jr. flew the prototype Mosquito. Its fuselage was a sandwich of birch ply and Ecuadorean balsa, built in part by furniture makers. It reached 392 mph. 7,781 were built, as bombers, night fighters, pathfinders and photo-reconnaissance aircraft.

Two sons, two crashes

The Mosquito carried a terrible price for the de Havilland family. The founder’s youngest son, John, died in a collision between two Mosquitoes near St Albans in 1943. His eldest test-pilot son, Geoffrey Jr., who had first flown both the Mosquito and the Vampire jet, was killed in September 1946 when the tailless DH.108 Swallow broke up over the Thames Estuary while diving at or near the speed of sound. Six years later, at the 1952 Farnborough show, chief test pilot John Derry’s DH.110 disintegrated in front of the crowd; 29 spectators died with Derry and his observer, and British airshow safety rules were rewritten.

The first jet airliner

On 27 July 1949 John Cunningham lifted the DH.106 Comet off Hatfield, and on 2 May 1952 G-ALYP flew BOAC’s first fare-paying jet service from London to Johannesburg. The Comet cruised at around 500 mph and 40,000 ft, halving journey times, and Britain led the world. Then G-ALYP fell into the sea off Elba on 10 January 1954, and a South African Airways Comet went down off Naples on 8 April. The fleet was grounded. A fuselage tested to destruction in a water tank at Farnborough failed after 3,057 cycles, the fatigue crack starting at a rivet hole by a window corner. The Comet 4 returned and flew the first regular transatlantic jet services in October 1958, but Boeing’s 707 had arrived.

Into Hawker Siddeley

The government wanted fewer, bigger aircraft companies, and in 1960 Hawker Siddeley bought de Havilland. In 1963 the name disappeared: the DH.121 became the Hawker Siddeley Trident and the DH.125 business jet the HS.125. Only 117 Tridents were built. The little 125, though, ran to 1,720 aircraft over half a century. The Hatfield factory closed in 1993 and part of it is now a University of Hertfordshire campus, its streets called Comet Way and Dragon Road. Sir Geoffrey, knighted in 1944, died in 1965. The de Havilland name lives on in Canada, where a subsidiary founded in 1928 became a company in its own right.

Factories

• Stag Lane Aerodrome · Edgware, north London — First home, 1920; aerodrome bought in 1922
• Hatfield Aerodrome · Hatfield, Hertfordshire — Main works from about 1930 until closure in 1993
• Salisbury Hall · London Colney, Hertfordshire — Where the Mosquito was designed, from October 1939; now the de Havilland Aircraft Museum
• Leavesden · Hertfordshire — Wartime factory
• Hawarden (Broughton) · near Chester — Acquired 1948 to supplement Hatfield
• Lostock propeller works · near Bolton, Lancashire — Built variable-pitch propellers from 1937

People

• Sir Geoffrey de Havilland · founder, designer, test pilot — 1882–1965; knighted 1944; Order of Merit 1962
• George Holt Thomas · Airco founder and backer — Put up £10,000 of the founding capital
• Alan Butler · chairman — Customer turned investor; chairman until 1950
• Frank Halford · engine designer — Designed the Gipsy, Goblin and Ghost; his firm became de Havilland Engines in 1944
• Geoffrey de Havilland Jr. · chief test pilot — First flew the Mosquito and Vampire; killed in the DH.108 in 1946
• John Cunningham · test pilot — First flew the Comet; set a world altitude record of 59,446 ft in a Vampire in 1948
• John Derry · chief test pilot — Killed with 29 spectators in the 1952 Farnborough crash
• R. E. Bishop · aircraft designer

Records and firsts

• Winner of the 1934 MacRobertson England–Australia race, 71 hours, DH.88 Comet
• World altitude record, 59,446 ft, Vampire with Ghost engine, 23 March 1948
• First pure jet to land on and take off from an aircraft carrier, Sea Vampire, 3 December 1945
• First jet aircraft to fly across the Atlantic, six RAF Vampires, July 1948
• First jet airliner in scheduled passenger service, Comet, 2 May 1952
• First regular transatlantic jet services, Comet 4, 4 October 1958