Under the railway arch

In the summer of 1909, a former ship’s engineer was renting space under a railway arch on the Walthamstow Marshes in east London, coaxing a flimsy triplane into the air. Alliott Verdon Roe had watched albatrosses soar behind the ships of the West Africa run and decided that men could do the same. After rows with the management at Brooklands he had moved his experiments here. In July 1909 his triplane flew, and Roe became officially the first Englishman to fly an all-British machine. The arch still stands in the Lee Valley Park, with a blue plaque, and the triplane he called the Avroplane hangs in London’s Science Museum.

Kept up by Bullseye Braces

Money came from his younger brother. Humphrey Verdon Roe, a Boer War officer, had taken over the family webbing business in Manchester, Everard & Co., whose best-selling product was Bullseye Braces. The aircraft firm was founded on 1 January 1910 at Brownsfield Mill on Great Ancoats Street, funded from the braces money, and the stock joke went that Avro biplanes were kept up by Bullseye Braces. Humphrey was managing director until 1917, when the brothers fell out and he left. He later married the birth-control campaigner Marie Stopes and was, often unacknowledged, co-founder of Britain’s first birth-control clinic. In 1911 a young draughtsman joined the firm: Roy Chadwick.

The 504 and the trainer century

Avro’s first real hit flew in September 1913. The 504 was a wood-and-fabric biplane that saw some front-line action in 1914 — four naval 504s were formed into a special flight to bomb the Zeppelin works at Friedrichshafen — but its true calling was teaching. Pilots of the Royal Flying Corps, the RAF and a dozen foreign air arms learned on it, and the RAF kept it as a trainer until 1933. Production ran for some 20 years and estimates of the total vary, from Avro’s 8,340 to more than 10,000, from works at Hamble, Failsworth, Miles Platting and Newton Heath. Few aircraft have taught so many people to fly.

Crossley, Siddeley and the Saunders-Roe exit

Peace was brutal. With wartime orders gone, Crossley Motors bought 68.5 per cent of Avro in 1920 for factory space to build car bodies; Avro even tried cars of its own. In 1924 flight testing moved to New Hall Farm at Woodford in Cheshire, a site that would build aircraft until 2011. In 1928 Crossley sold Avro to Armstrong Siddeley Holdings, and A.V. Roe walked out of the company bearing his initials to buy into S.E. Saunders on the Isle of Wight and form Saunders-Roe. He was knighted the next year. In 1935 Avro became part of the new Hawker Siddeley group, and Chadwick’s Anson flew from Woodford.

The Lancaster

Chadwick’s Manchester bomber was a failure, its Rolls-Royce Vulture engines notoriously unreliable; 202 were built. So Avro gave it a longer wing and four Merlins. The result, first flown on 9 January 1941, was the Lancaster. It carried the heaviest bomb loads of the war, including the 22,000 lb Grand Slam, and 617 Squadron flew modified Lancasters with Barnes Wallis’s bouncing bombs against the Ruhr dams in 1943. Lancasters flew 156,000 sorties. 7,377 were built, about 700 of them at the Yeadon shadow factory near Leeds, whose 17,500 workers outnumbered the town’s 10,000 people and whose roof was camouflaged with fake fields and hedges.

The man who died in his own airliner

The bomber begat a family: the Lancastrian, the York transport, the Lincoln, the long-lived Shackleton and the Tudor, Britain’s first pressurised airliner. The Tudor was Avro’s tragedy. On 23 August 1947, the prototype Tudor 2 crashed on take-off at Woodford and killed Roy Chadwick, who was on board; investigators found the aileron controls had been incorrectly assembled. Two British South American Airways Tudor IVs, Star Tiger in 1948 and Star Ariel in 1949, vanished without trace over the Atlantic, and in 1950 a Tudor V crashed at Llandow in Wales, killing 80. Only 34 Tudors were completed. Yorks and Tudors redeemed themselves in the Berlin Airlift.

The white delta

Chadwick’s last great idea outlived him. The Vulcan, a vast delta-winged nuclear bomber, first flew on 30 August 1952, painted gloss white and flown solo by Roly Falk; 134 production aircraft were assembled at Woodford. It carried Britain’s deterrent, including Avro’s own Blue Steel stand-off missile, and in 1982 flew the long-range Black Buck raids on the Falklands. Avro’s last design, the 748 turboprop, flew in 1960. By then the 1957 Defence White Paper had doomed independent manufacturers, and in July 1963 Avro was absorbed into Hawker Siddeley Aviation. The name came back once more, on British Aerospace’s Avro RJ regional jets of 1994 to 2001.

Továrny

• Brownsfield Mill · Great Ancoats Street, Manchester — Birthplace of the company, 1910
• Woodford Aerodrome · Woodford, Cheshire (Greater Manchester) — Flight test and assembly from 1924; Anson and Vulcan; used by BAE Systems until 2011
• Chadderton · Chadderton, Oldham — Main Lancaster production with Woodford; home of Avro F.C.
• Yeadon shadow factory · next to Leeds Bradford Airport — About 700 Lancasters; 17,500 workers; roof camouflaged as fields
• Hamble · Hampshire — One of the 504 production sites

Lidé

• Sir Alliott Verdon Roe · co-founder — First Englishman to fly an all-British machine, 1909; left 1928 to form Saunders-Roe; knighted 1929
• Humphrey Verdon Roe · co-founder, managing director to 1917 — Financed Avro from the Bullseye Braces business; husband of Marie Stopes
• Roy Chadwick · chief designer from 1918 — Designed the Anson, Lancaster and York, conceived the Vulcan; killed in the Tudor 2 crash, 1947
• Roly Falk · test pilot — Flew the Vulcan prototype on its first flight, 1952

Rekordy a prvenství

• First all-British powered flight, A.V. Roe, Walthamstow Marshes, July 1909
• World’s first aircraft with enclosed crew accommodation, Avro Type F and Type G, 1912
• Lancaster carried the heaviest bomb loads of the Second World War, including the 22,000 lb Grand Slam
• Shackleton held the record for longest active RAF service, 39 years, until 1998
• Bert Hinkler’s solo flight from England to Australia in an Avro Avian, 15½ days