Munitions, flying boats and a football team

On Boxing Day 1920 a crowd of 53,000 packed Goodison Park in Liverpool to watch a women’s football match. The star side was Dick, Kerr Ladies, a works team formed in 1917 by munitions girls at a Preston engineering plant. That plant had spent the First World War making shells and aeroplanes — 62 Short Type 184 seaplanes and six Short Bombers among them, alongside Felixstowe flying boats. By the time the footballers drew their record crowd, their employer had been folded into something new. In December 1918 the owners of five wartime businesses — Dick, Kerr of Preston, Phoenix Dynamo of Bradford, Coventry Ordnance Works, United Electric Car and Willans & Robinson of Rugby — merged them to turn munitions plants to peaceful work. They called it The English Electric Company.

The Wren, the Kingston and a closed door

Aircraft were not the plan. English Electric was a heavy engineering business: motors, transformers, trams, locomotives, turbines. But Phoenix brought two prototype P.5 Cork flying boats into the merger, and designer W. O. Manning stayed on. His tiny Wren of 1921 weighed just 232 lb empty and shared first prize at the 1923 Lympne light aircraft trials after covering 87.5 miles on a single gallon of fuel. His M.3 Ayr flying boat refused to leave the water at all. His P.5 Kingston sank on its first take-off from the Ribble estuary in May 1924 after hitting flotsam. On the very day the last Kingston left Lytham for Felixstowe in 1926, the company closed its aircraft department.

The shadow factory at Samlesbury

The doors reopened because of rearmament. From 1935 English Electric was brought into the scheme to build airframes alongside Handley Page, and the Air Ministry told it to put up a shadow factory at Samlesbury in Lancashire. Its first Hampden flew on 22 February 1940; by 1942 the company had delivered 770, more than half of all the Hampdens ever built. A second factory followed for the four-engined Halifax, and by the end of 1945 Samlesbury had produced 2,145 of them. Then came the de Havilland Vampire jet fighter, built under licence at Preston and Samlesbury from 1944 — more than 1,300 of them. In 1942 the company also bought the aero-engine maker D. Napier & Son, whose Sabre powered the Typhoon and Tempest.

A designer walks in from Westland

Chairman Sir George Nelson did not want to stay a subcontractor. In 1944 he hired W. E. W. “Teddy” Petter, the brilliant and difficult technical director of Westland, and gave him a blank sheet. Petter recruited his own young team: Frederick Page from Hawker, aerodynamicists Dai Ellis and Ray Creasey, and in May 1947 a former Typhoon and Tempest pilot named Roland Beamont as chief test pilot. The design office moved to the old RAF Warton near Preston. Petter’s style left scars — by 1950 he had walked out over a feud with the Preston works — and in January 1960 he quit aviation altogether for a religious commune in Switzerland. He died in France in 1968. Novelist C. P. Snow, meanwhile, served as the company’s director of scientific personnel from 1944.

The Canberra takes the records

Petter’s bomber, the A.1, first flew on 13 May 1949 with Beamont at the controls. Nelson named it Canberra in 1950 after the Australian capital, because Australia was its first export customer. It entered RAF service with No. 101 Squadron in 1951 as the service’s first jet bomber, and it rewrote the record book. In February 1951 a Canberra made the first non-stop transatlantic crossing by a jet. In 1953 one won the London–Christchurch air race in 23 hours 51 minutes. In August 1957 another, boosted by a Napier rocket motor, climbed to 70,310 ft. Some 1,352 were built in Britain, Australia and the United States, where Martin built 403 as the B-57, and the RAF flew its last in June 2006.

Mach 2 from Lancashire

The other design was wilder. Petter had sketched a supersonic fighter as early as 1946, with two engines stacked one above the other to keep the frontal area small. The P.1A first flew from Boscombe Down on 4 August 1954, again with Beamont, and went supersonic on its first flight without anyone noticing — the Mach meter read 0.95, and engineers spotted the truth in the data days later. On 25 November 1958 the P.1B took Beamont to Mach 2, the first British aircraft to get there. As the Lightning it joined RAF front-line service in 1960 and flew until 30 April 1988. It remains the only all-British Mach 2 aircraft; 337 were built, all at Samlesbury.

Into BAC, then into GEC

English Electric never got to design a third. In 1958 the aircraft division became English Electric Aviation Ltd, and in 1960 the government’s push to consolidate the industry folded it into the new British Aircraft Corporation, with English Electric holding 40 per cent alongside Vickers and Bristol. The guided-weapons division, maker of the Thunderbird missile, followed in 1963. Warton’s team went on to the TSR-2 and, through BAC and its successors, the Jaguar, Tornado and Typhoon — and Samlesbury still builds Typhoon and F-35 parts for BAE Systems. The parent company ran on, building computers and nearly 1,000 locomotives for British Rail, until GEC absorbed it in 1968 and the English Electric name disappeared.

Factories

• Strand Road works · Preston, Lancashire — Former Dick, Kerr plant; trams, locomotives and wartime aircraft assembly
• Samlesbury Aerodrome · Balderstone, Lancashire — Shadow factory from 1939; built Hampdens, Halifaxes, Vampires, Canberras and every Lightning; now BAE Systems
• Warton Aerodrome · Warton, near Preston, Lancashire — Design and flight-test centre from 1947–48
• Stafford works · Stafford, Staffordshire — Bought from Siemens Brothers in 1919; company centre from 1931
• Lytham slipway · Lytham St Annes, Lancashire — Flying-boat trials in the 1920s

People

• Sir George Nelson · managing director from 1930, chairman from 1933 — Insisted the company design its own aircraft after the war and named the Canberra
• W. E. W. “Teddy” Petter · chief designer 1944–1950 — Created the Canberra and the stacked-engine layout of the Lightning
• Frederick Page · Petter’s first recruit and successor as chief engineer — Took over the Warton team in February 1950
• Roland Beamont · chief test pilot from 1947 — First flights of the Canberra, P.1A and P.1B; first Briton to Mach 2
• W. O. Manning · designer, 1920s — Designed the Wren, Ayr and Kingston
• C. P. Snow · director of scientific personnel from 1944 — Novelist; later physicist-director until 1964

Records and firsts

• First non-stop transatlantic crossing by a jet, Canberra, February 1951
• First double transatlantic crossing by a jet, Canberra prototype B.5, 26 August 1952
• Winner of the 1953 London–Christchurch air race, 12,270 miles in 23 hr 51 min
• World altitude records of 63,668 ft (1953), 65,889 ft (1955) and 70,310 ft (1957), all by Canberras
• First British aircraft to reach Mach 2, Lightning P.1B, 25 November 1958
• Lightning: the only all-British Mach 2 aircraft