Balloons under the Battersea arches

Short Brothers began with a second-hand balloon. In 1897 Eustace Short bought one filled with coal gas and, with his brother Oswald, started making balloons, first above their brother Horace’s laboratory in Hove and then in railway arches at Battersea, handily next to the gasworks. Charles Rolls ordered one for the 1906 Gordon Bennett race. Then in 1908 Aero Club members came back from Le Mans with stories of the Wright brothers. Oswald is reported to have told Eustace that it was the finish of ballooning and that they must build aeroplanes at once, and could not do it without Horace. In November 1908 the three registered their partnership.

The first aircraft factory in the world

They had bought the British rights to the Wright design, and in February 1909 began building a workshop on marshland at Leysdown on the Isle of Sheppey. An initial batch of six Wright Flyers was laid down there at once, making Shorts the first company in the world to put an aeroplane into series production. Moving to Eastchurch in 1910, Shorts trained the first naval pilots and became the Admiralty’s favourite supplier of floatplanes. On 15 August 1915, at Gallipoli, a Short 184 flown from HMS Ben-my-Chree became the first aircraft to sink a ship with an air-launched torpedo; 936 were built.

Empire boats and the Sunderland

From its seaplane works on the Medway at Rochester, Shorts became the master of the British flying boat. The Calcutta and Kent took Imperial Airways around the Mediterranean, and the Empire boat of 1936 carried the airmail across the Empire. In 1938 the Short Mayo Composite, a small floatplane launched from the back of a larger flying boat, made the first commercial non-stop east-west Atlantic crossing by an aeroplane and then flew 6,045 miles from Dundee to South Africa, still the seaplane distance record. The Empire’s military sister, the Sunderland, hunted U-boats throughout the Second World War, and 749 were built.

Nationalised and moved to Belfast

The war years were less happy for the company itself. Its Stirling, the first of the RAF’s four-engine heavy bombers, was hamstrung by a short wing and a bomb bay that could not take larger bombs, and the government grew uneasy about Oswald Short’s leadership. In 1943 it nationalised Shorts under Defence Regulation 78. The Rochester works had already been bombed, and the Belfast factory, opened in 1936 as Short & Harland with the shipbuilder Harland and Wolff, became the centre of gravity. By 1948 the whole company had moved to Belfast, where it built the experimental SC.1 vertical take-off jet, Canberras and Britannias under contract, and the Seacat, Blowpipe and Starstreak missiles.

Skyvans, Tucanos and three owners in five years

Its own designs grew boxy and practical. The 1963 Skyvan, a slab-sided utility freighter, begat the Shorts 330 and 360 commuter airliners and the C-23 Sherpa for the US forces, and the Shorts Tucano, a re-engineered Embraer design, trained RAF pilots for 30 years. The firm also bore Northern Ireland’s divisions, from loyalist flag disputes on the shop floor to the 1993 murder of a Catholic sub-contractor. Bombardier bought it for £30 million in 1989, after the government wrote off £390 million of losses. Spirit AeroSystems took over in 2020, and on 8 December 2025 Boeing revived the old name: Short Brothers – A Boeing Company.

Továrny

• Leysdown and Eastchurch · Isle of Sheppey, Kent — World’s first aircraft production works, 1909; Eastchurch closed 1934
• Seaplane Works · Borstal, Rochester, Kent — Flying-boat works on the Medway from 1915; closed after the war
• Cardington · Cardington, Bedfordshire — Airship works from 1916; Shortstown housing estate; nationalised 1919 as the Royal Airship Works
• Queen’s Island · Belfast, Northern Ireland — Opened 1936 as Short & Harland; home of the whole company from 1948

Lidé

• Horace Short · co-founder and designer — 1872–1917
• Eustace Short · co-founder — 1875–1932; bought the first balloon in 1897
• Oswald Short · co-founder and chairman — Resigned as chairman in January 1943; honorary life president
• John Lankester Parker · chief test pilot 1918–1945
• Francis McClean · first customer and honorary test pilot

Rekordy a prvenství

• First company in the world to undertake series production of an aeroplane, 1909
• Short 184: first aircraft to sink a ship with an air-launched torpedo, Dardanelles, 15 August 1915
• Short Mayo Composite: first commercial non-stop east-west Atlantic crossing by an aeroplane, July 1938
• Mercury: seaplane distance record of 6,045 miles, October 1938
• Short Triple Twin of 1911: one of the world’s first successful twin-engine aircraft