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 A
brief account of the
Engineer and Novelist
- Nevil Shute (Norway)
from
G.
A. Michael Sims (A Book
for all Reasons)
Nevil Shute Norway was born 17th January
1899 at Ealing, London, the youngest of
two brothers and the son of a senior
civil servant in the General Post
Office. At an early stage it was obvious
that his interests lay not in things
academic but in things practical, having
been caught playing truant from school
only to spend his time studying the
mechanical exhibits in the Science
Museum in South Kensington.
The family moved from London to Dublin
in 1912 when his father was appointed
Secretary to the Post Office in Ireland.
Nevil Shute had attended various schools
in England including Shrewsbury and it
was whilst on holiday from there that he
was in Dublin during the Easter uprising
in 1916, and acted as a stretcher
bearer.
In June, 1915, his older brother Fred
had died of wounds in Flanders during
WW1. He was quite philosophic about his
future at this stage having seen a
number of his seniors at school killed
in the fighting in Flanders as well as
his brother. His stammer, from which he
was to suffer to some extent throughout
his life, probably saved him from this
fate as it prevented his earlier
attempts to obtain a commision in the
army and then the new Royal Air Force.
After enlisting in the ranks of the
Suffolk Regiment he was posted to the
Isle of Grain in the Thames Estuary for
the last three months of the war. After
the war he was demobilised and secured a
place at Balliol, Oxford, where he
studied Engineering, graduating in the
summer of 1922.
During the vacations he became
acquainted with boats by acting as crew
on a sailing cruiser and had already
started his connection with the aircraft
industry, working unpaid at De
Havillands and it was Geoffrey de
Havilland himself who gave Nevil Shute
his first experience of flying. His
first full time work was at De
Havillands near Edgware in January 1923
where he was employed as a performance
calculator.
He started writing in his spare time in
the evenings, first poetry and then a
novel, and in the spring he learned to
fly. Finishing his first novel later in
1923 he sent it to three publishers and
was turned down by them all. A second
attempt followed in 1924 with the same
result. Later that year he left De
Havillands to join the Airship Guarantee
Co. at Howden, Yorkshire, a subsidiary
of Vickers, as chief calculator on the
R100 airship project.
 This was the private enterprise project
while the Air Ministry would build state project
R101
in competition. (Chief Engineer at the
Airship Guarantee Co. was Barnes Wallis,
later to become well known as the
designer of the Wellington bomber and
the 'bouncing bomb' used on the dams
raid). Nevil Shute's next writing attempt,
'Marazan', an aerial drug smuggling story,
was accepted and published in
1926. At this stage he decided on his
peseuodonym of Nevil Shute, not wanting
his writing to undermine his credibility
as an engineer.
 As the R100 project continued he carried
on with another novel, 'So Disdained', an
aerial spying story,
published 1928 (in US as 'The Mysterious
Aviator'). By November 1929 the airship
R100 was complete and ready for trials
in 1930. Shute was by this time Deputy
Chief Engineer under Barnes Wallis and
effectively in charge of the project.
The trials were successful as was a
proving flight to Canada and back and
the airship was then hangared whilst the
testing of the competing government R101
was supposed to be carried out. In the
event there was very little testing and
R101, en route to India on a proving
flight, crashed in France killing 48 of
the 54 passengers and crew, ending all
development of airship travel in
England.
Nevil Shute had become engaged to be married
to Frances Heaton, a doctor at York
Hospital and at the end of the R100
project, when he found himself
unemployed and newly married, he decided
to start an aeroplane manufacturing
company (as one does!). Aviation was booming and with a
senior designer  recruited from De
Havillands and the backing of aviation pioneer
and entrepreneur Sir Alan
Cobham, the firm of Airspeed Ltd. was formed.
Based at first in Yorkshire
it held its first board meeting in 1931
with Shute as Joint Managing Director.
'Lonely Road', a novel of gun-running and
political revolution,
was published in 1932 and
selling the film rights brought an
additional welcome income but the next
novel, 'Ruined City' about the depression
in the shipping industry, did not appear
until 1938, a reflection of his
concentration on the fledgling company.
Producing gliders under licence to earn
some quick income, eventual success for
the company came with multiple orders
and a move to a new factory at
Portsmouth but still little, if any,
profit.
 The Airspeed Oxford, a twin engined
trainer, was used to train most Bomber
Command pilots and 8751 were built (most under
licence by other manufacturers). The
peak for Shute was selling one of their
aircraft, an Airspeed Envoy (left), to the
King's Flight in 1937 but this had been
at the cost of little home life with his
wife and two daughters except for
occasional weekend cruising in their
yacht, Skerdmore.
In 1938, with war brewing and orders for
aircraft for the RAF in the hundreds,
the Board of the company dispensed with
Nevil Shute's services, an action which
he says in his autobiography 'Slide Rule' (1954)
was probably
quite right - his forte was as a starter
of companies and not a runner. With a
generous settlement from Airspeed Nevil
Shute could now reassess his future.
 Prior
to the outbreak of WW2
in 1939 saw the publication of 'What
Happened to the Corbetts', his account of
Britain under aerial bombing attack and which
his publishers, Heinemann, had issued in
a special paper covered boards limited presentation edition (illustrated
right) for the personnel
of the newly formed
ARP. By 1940, deciding to give up
engineering research to take part in the
war, he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer
Reserve.
Within two weeks Sub. Lt. Norway was
seconded from his training ship, still
in civilian clothes, by the Admiralty's
Department of Miscellaneous Weapons
Development where they wanted someone
with aircraft experience to work on
combatting air attacks on shipping. The DMWD
(nicknamed the Wheezers
and Dodgers) were a
group of highly qualified
scientists and technicians who evaluated
numerous proposals for aiding the war
effort, some highly successful and
others less so.
Amongst them was a project inititiated
by the Petroleum Warfare team of a large
flame thower firing a mixture of diesel
oil and tar as a shipboard defensive
weapon - an idea familiar to those who
have read his novel 'Most Secret', 1945. He
wrote the foreword to
the history of the work
of the department, 'The
Secret War 1939-45'
by Gerald Pawle.
His
novel, 'No Highway',
1948, covered the problems
of metal fatigue and
sudden in-flight failure
of structures in aircraft,
almost as if he had
prior knowledge of the
Comet disasters of the
1950's. Prior knowledge
and second sight were
themes that recurred
and he also uses them
to effect in 'An Old
Captivity, 1940, and
'In the Wet', 1953,
set in the rainy season
in Australia. 'Round
the Bend', 1951, a story
of diligent aero engineer
is set against the background
of the development of
a commercial air freight
company.
 After the war,
disillusioned with political
changes and the financial
restraints of post-war
Britain, Nevil Shute
had settled in Australia and his later novels
reflect this change of domicile.
Probably his most famous was 'A Town like
Alice', 1950, a love
story set firstly during
the Japanese occupation
of Burma and the East
Indies and later in
Australia.
Throughout all of his books
you find him drawing on his personal
experiences, whether in the aircraft industry,
wartime or his sailing
but, authentic as they
are, these are only
the background settings.
He had a natural ability
to tell a story, to
build characters that
are sympathetic and
to write in such a way
that grips the reader.
One
gathers from his autobiography
that he spent his life
as if each day were
of 30 hours instead
24, in his engineering
days doing a full days
work before starting
his writing in the evenings.
Such a pace would wear
down even a physically
fit man but he had a long history of heart problems
which finally caught up with him and he
died 12th January 1961 at the age of 61 years.
Click
for the full Bibliography
of all Nevil Shute's
works and for far more
information see the
Nevil
Shute Norway Foundation.
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