The blacksmith’s son from Moorabbin

Harry Hawker was the son of a blacksmith in Moorabbin, Victoria. At 11 he was helping to build engines in a Melbourne garage for five shillings a week; in 1910 he watched the first public demonstrations of powered flight in Australia and decided to go to England. He arrived in May 1911, and by June 1912 was a mechanic for Tom Sopwith at Brooklands. He talked Sopwith into teaching him to fly, went solo after three lessons, and that October stayed aloft for 8 hours 23 minutes to win the Michelin Cup. In 1914 he became, it appears, the first pilot to spin an aeroplane on purpose and recover — at a time when spins were killing airmen.

Lost in the Atlantic

On 18 May 1919 Hawker and navigator Kenneth Mackenzie Grieve took off from Newfoundland in the Sopwith Atlantic, chasing the Daily Mail’s £10,000 prize for the first transatlantic flight. After fourteen and a half hours the engine overheated. They turned for the shipping lanes and ditched beside a Danish freighter, the Mary, which picked them up. The Mary had no working radio. For six days Britain believed them dead, until the ship reached the Butt of Lewis and the news broke. The Daily Mail paid them a £5,000 consolation prize. Hawker named his second daughter Mary, after the ship.

Sopwith goes under

Sopwith had built more than 16,000 aircraft in the First World War, but peace turned the business upside down. A venture making ABC motorcycles under licence swallowed £100,000 of new machinery and failed, and the taxman claimed excess wartime profits: of liabilities of £705,430 in 1920, £583,510 was excess profits duty. In September 1920 the company went into voluntary liquidation. Sopwith, Hawker, Fred Sigrist and Bill Eyre each put in £5,000 and formed a new firm to buy the assets. To keep it clear of claims against the old one, they gave it the test pilot’s name: H. G. Hawker Engineering. For its first years it built motorcycles as well as aircraft.

Sydney Camm arrives

Harry Hawker did not live to see what his name became. On 12 July 1921, practising for the Aerial Derby, his Nieuport Goshawk crashed while climbing away from Hendon; doctors believed he had suffered a haemorrhage in the air. He was 32. The company’s first prototype, the Duiker, flew in July 1923, and that November a former carpenter from Windsor named Sydney Camm joined as a senior draughtsman. His first design was the Cygnet, and by 1925 he was chief designer. With Sigrist, Camm devised a cheap form of metal construction from jointed tubes, and from it came the Hart, the Fury and their many relatives. At one point in the 1930s, 84 per cent of RAF aircraft were Camm designs.

The thousand-fighter gamble

Hawker grew rich in the Depression. In 1933 it became Hawker Aircraft Ltd, in 1934 it bought Gloster for its room to expand, and in 1935 it took over Armstrong Siddeley, Armstrong Whitworth and Avro to form Hawker Siddeley Aircraft. Camm’s new monoplane fighter, the Hurricane, first flew on 6 November 1935 with George Bulman at the controls. Early in 1936, without an official order and at its own expense, the Hawker board decided to tool up for 1,000 of them. That gamble put Hurricanes in squadrons when it mattered. In the Battle of Britain they outnumbered all other British fighters combined and, by Fighter Command’s count, accounted for 55 per cent of the 2,739 German losses.

Typhoon, Tempest, Fury

The Hurricane’s successors were heavier hitters. The Typhoon, plagued at first by flutter and buffeting, became a feared ground-attack aircraft over Normandy, where it devastated the German armies in the Falaise Pocket; 3,317 were built. The Tempest, refined from it, proved deadly against the V-1 flying bomb, its squadrons destroying 638 of the 1,846 shot down by aircraft. The last of the line, the Sea Fury, reached 460 mph, the fastest of all Hawker piston fighters, and in August 1952 a Royal Navy Sea Fury over Korea was credited with shooting down a MiG-15 jet. Today a dozen or so race at Reno.

Hunters, hovering and the end of a name

Neville Duke first flew the Hunter on 20 July 1951, and on 7 September 1953 he took a modified one to a world airspeed record of 727.63 mph over Littlehampton. The RAF’s Black Arrows looped 22 Hunters in formation; 1,972 were built and 21 overseas air forces flew them. Then came the radical P.1127, which first hovered in October 1960 and led to the Harrier. In 1963 Hawker Siddeley dropped its founding names, and the P.1127 was the last aircraft to carry the Hawker badge. Sir Sydney Camm, credited with 52 types and some 26,000 aircraft, died on a golf course in 1966. Hawker’s name outlived it all, revived by Raytheon in 1993 for a family of business jets.

Factories

• Canbury Park Road · Kingston upon Thames, Surrey — Sopwith’s wartime works and Hawker’s first head office
• Ham works, Richmond Road · Kingston upon Thames, Surrey — Taken over in 1948 as the main factory; closed 1993
• Brooklands · Weybridge, Surrey — Final assembly and flight test; Hurricane assembly 1937–1942
• Langley · near Slough — Factory and airfield, Hurricane production 1939–1944
• Dunsfold · Surrey — Flight test airfield from 1951 until 1998
• Hucclecote · Gloucestershire — Gloster factory, acquired with Gloster in 1934

People

• Harry Hawker · co-founder, test pilot — 1889–1921; killed at Hendon a year after the company was formed
• Sir Thomas Sopwith · co-founder, chairman
• Fred Sigrist · co-founder, managing director — Developed Hawker’s tubular metal construction with Camm
• Sir Sydney Camm · chief designer 1925–1965 — Hart, Fury, Hurricane, Typhoon, Tempest, Hunter, P.1127
• George Bulman · chief test pilot — First flew the Hurricane in 1935
• Neville Duke · chief test pilot — First flew the Hunter; world airspeed record 1953
• Bill Bedford · chief test pilot
• Roy Chaplin · designer — Chief designer from 1957

Records and firsts

• World airspeed record, 727.63 mph, Hunter, Neville Duke, 7 September 1953 (h7)
• Formation loop of 22 Hunters by the RAF Black Arrows (h7)
• Only Victoria Cross to a Fighter Command pilot in WWII, Flt Lt James Nicolson, Hurricane, 16 August 1940 (h6)
• Michelin Cup endurance flight of 8 hours 23 minutes by Harry Hawker, October 1912 (h2)