From shop counters to biplanes

Parnall started out fitting shops. In 1916 the Bristol firm of Parnall & Sons began building aircraft at the Coliseum Works on Park Row, first to other companies’ designs and then to its own. Its key recruit was Harold Bolas, formerly of the Admiralty’s Air Department, whose carrier-borne Panther spotter of 1917 was ordered in quantity, though a contract dispute sent production to the Bristol Aeroplane Company. In 1919 the aircraft business became George Parnall and Company.

A seaplane in a submarine

Bolas specialised in the ingenious. The Plover naval fighter reached small-scale production, the Pixie flew in the 1923 Lympne light-aircraft trials, and the Possum triplane drove wing-mounted propellers by shafts from a central engine. Strangest of all was the Peto, a folding-wing seaplane designed to live in a hangar on the submarine HMS M2. It worked, but in 1932 the hangar flooded and the submarine sank with the Peto aboard.

Turrets, bombs and cookers

From the 1920s production centred at Yate, near an old Royal Flying Corps airfield. In 1935 Parnall merged with Hendy Aircraft and the turret makers Nash and Thompson to form Parnall Aircraft Ltd, and the works made bomber gun turrets; Luftwaffe raids on Yate killed more than fifty people in 1941. After the war the site turned to domestic appliances, becoming Parnall (Yate) Ltd in 1946, later part of Radiation Ltd and TI Group. An Elf survives with the Shuttleworth Collection.

Fabrieken

• Coliseum Works · Park Row, Bristol — First aircraft production, 1916
• Yate works · Yate, South Gloucestershire — Main site from the 1920s; bombed in 1941

Mensen

• George Parnall · oprichter
• Harold Bolas · chief designer — Ex-Admiralty Air Department; left for the USA after the Elf
• Basil B. Henderson · designer — Hendy Heck and Parnall 382