I was born on 6 June 1902, in Handsworth, a borough in Staffordshire, which in 1911 became part of Greater Birmingham. Handsworth, in those Edwardian days, could be described as a dormitory suburb of Birmingham. Its character is now vastly changed and today it houses large numbers of our immigrant population.

My father, William John Roxbee Cox, is described on his marriage certificate as a master jeweller and indeed was, at the time of his wedding, working with his father, Samuel James Cox, a reasonably prosperous manufacturing jeweller in Birmingham. Samuel had married an American lady, Emily Power Jones, who was, I believe, distantly related to him, and my father was their only child.

My mother was Amelia Stern, the third child of Henry Stern, a Pole who became a naturalised Englishman. My memory of him is vague but pleasant. I think he must have been a nice man. He was an engraver on glass. He died of pneumonia in 1904 at the age of 54. His brother Louis became a Church of England parson, but did not achieve major preferment.

Prior to his departure from the Royal Aircraft Establishment in 1938, Roxbee Cox published an impressive range of specialist papers relevant to the design and analysis of airships and aircraft.

His earliest published paper (Refs are on p 227), on the external forces on an airship structure, was based on his work on the R101 at the Royal Airship Works, Cardington. This comprehensive monograph, which was awarded the R38 Memorial Prize by the Royal Aeronautical Society, addresses, in turn, the range of loading conditions that needs to be considered, safety factors to be used in design, calculation of individual load components, and estimation of stresses within the structure (this consisted of longitudinal and transverse members braced with wires).

A system of external forces on the structure of a rigid airship can be analysed into two or more of the component systems due to

1. W. The Weights of the members of the structure and the weights of the masses carried by it;

2. L. The Lift and pressure of the gas;

3. A. The Aerodynamic forces consequent on the relative motion of the airship and the air;

4. T. The Thrusts of the airscrews;

5. R. The Reactions due to either the mooring arrangements, the hauling-in guys, the supports used in the shed, or handling on the ground.

As these component systems, though restricted by their interdependence, are individually variable, a very large number of complete systems is represented by the possible combinations and variations that can occur. It becomes necessary, therefore, for the purposes of design, to attempt to limit the number of combinations to be considered, and to restrict the variations of the components, but in such a way that the structure designed to carry the resulting systems with adequate factors of safety, shall be able to carry any other possible system with an appropriate factor of safety.

The performance of German airships during the war, and the double crossing of the Atlantic by the airship R34 in 1919, sufficiently impressed the Air Ministry that it embarked on a British airship programme which produced R38 and R80. The Ministry was undoubtedly deterred by the appalling R38 disaster in 1921 but, presumably as a result of Professor Bairstow’s demonstration of the inexcusable inadequacy of the R38 design, they did not abandon their plans. After all R80, to the design of B.N. Wallis, the great engineer who became famous as Sir Barnes Wallis after the 1939-45 war, had been a success.

So in 1924 the Air Ministry decided to order two airships, each of five million cubic feet capacity. One, to be called R100, was ordered from the Airship Guarantee Company, a Vickers subsidiary headed by Sir Denniston Burney. It was to be built at Howden. The other, to be called R101, was to be built by the Air Ministry itself, at the Royal Airship Works, Cardington. At the head of the Burney design team was B.N. Wallis. At the head of the Air Ministry design team was V.C. Richmond.

An aircraft may reasonably be said to be structurally safe if it is known that during the manoeuvres which it is likely to perform

• (i) The stress in no part of the essential structure approaches the failing stress of the material,

• (ii) It does not become unstable or uncontrollable on account of structural distortion.

I intend to discuss in this context the wing structure of the aeroplane.

For many years it was felt both in the design and airworthiness approval of the majority of aeroplane wing structures that the main responsibility for attempting to secure the former desideratum could rest upon the determination of the stresses induced in the wing structural material by load systems appropriate to a rigid aeroplane in certain conditions denned by specified combinations of flight attitude, acceleration, and factor of safety. These combinations — familiarly referred to as the C.P. forward, C.P. back, nose-diving and inverted flight cases—are designed to produce for a particular aeroplane a range of steady load systems which is more severe on the structure than the range of load systems corresponding to the manoeuvres contemplated for the aeroplane.

The twentieth century has seen man’s mastery of the air, and fundamental to that achievement has been the provision of power to sustain the process of flight. For the first forty years the piston engine reigned supreme, yet for even longer now the power to fly has been provided by the gas turbine. In the conception and development of this prime mover Britain can justly claim to have led the world.

Two servants of the Crown quite independently had the vision and that amalgam of creative and analytical powers to see what might lie beyond the piston engine — one a scientific civil servant working at the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) and the other, remarkably, a young RAF officer already distinguishing himself as a pilot. But the birth of the jet engine proved to be a painful process. While early aircraft designers had embraced the piston engine, neither Government nor the aircraft or aero engine industry showed interest initially in the gas turbine. The change in attitude began when war approached in 1939 and thereafter accelerated in the effort to move from bench demonstrator status to a full-production engine capable of contributing to the outcome of the war. It was in this difficult and complex process of transition that Dr Harold Roxbee Cox — Lord Kings Norton — was to play such a vital role. To appreciate his achievements it is appropriate to remind ourselves of the progress — or lack of it — on the gas turbine prior to his becoming involved.

The chairman: I know that everyone here shares with me our pleasure in welcoming as our lecturer one of the most distinguished and one of the most erudite and delightful people of all those who over the years have made their mark on British aeronautics. Lord Kings Norton has been Chancellor of Cranfield Institute of Technology since 1969. He began his career in aviation sixty-one years ago at Cardington, as a young engineer working on the design and construction of that much maligned major project, the airship R101, and then subsequently as Dr. Harold Roxbee Cox (as many of us still remember him) he was the head of the Air Defence Department of the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. Next he was Chief Technical Officer of the newly formed Air Registration Board before he returned to the RAE in 1939 as Superintendent of Scientific Research.

Whittle is one of the great engineers of the century, perhaps the greatest if judged by the scale of the consequences of his invention. Only the discoverer of the properties of the silicon chip could claim comparable importance.

Jet propulsion was first demonstrated by Hero of Alexandria in AD 60. The gas turbine was patented by Barber of Nuneaton in 1791. Whittle patented a design for an aircraft engine in 1930 in which propulsion was to be achieved by a jet produced by a gas turbine. By combining the thoughts of two men separated in time by over 1,700 years he made an engine which revolutionised world air transport.

The association of Harold Roxbee Cox with the Air Registration Board began in 1938 (the year following its formation) with his appointment as its first chief technical officer — a post to which he was eminently suited by virtue of his experience and already formidable reputation in a wide range of technical aspects of aviation. Interrupted by the war, his service to the ARB was renewed first as consultant and member of the board, later (as Sir Harold Roxbee Cox) as its vice chairman and finally (as Lord Kings Norton) as its chairman.

The Air Registration Board came into being as a result of the work of the Gorell Committee. It was incorporated in February 1937 and started work on April 1 of that year. The chairman of the board was Sir Maurice Denny, and there was a very small staff— reflecting the limited duties given to it initially. By early 1938 these had grown somewhat — so, for example, the board was authorised to recommend changes to regulations and requirements and it also started to investigate the design of prototype aircraft (cautiously, the Air Ministry limited it to investigations of aircraft weighing less than 10,000lb.).

In 1936 the Air Registration Board was created by the government and given the task of recommending to the secretary of state for air the granting and renewal of certificates of airworthiness for certain classes of civil aircraft, a duty previously performed by the Air Ministry. It was understood that as time went on and the board gained experience certifying the airworthiness of more and more classes of civil aircraft would become the responsibility of the board.

Lord Kings Norton’s contribution to Cranfield University was immense. He was quite literally the father of the university, having personally conceived the idea of creating what became the university. His involvement began in early 1943 when, as vice president of the Royal Aeronautical Society, he began to consider how best to create an environment in which to educate the practical young men and women who would be needed to take the aeronautical industry forward in the post-war years. Being barely a year old at this time, I personally find it hard to comprehend the degree of optimism reflected in even considering such issues, for although the Battle of Britain had been won, the Battle of the Atlantic was far from won and D-Day was still a year and a half away. But optimism, realistic achievable optimism, was a hallmark of Lord Kings Norton.

In 1943, with the world still at war, a great discussion on the future of aeronautical education was held by the Royal Aeronautical Society. Not only would the war years, however many were still to come, demand more well-qualified aeronautical engineers, but the longed for peace years, with engineers turning swords into ploughshares, would want more. The discussion was in two parts. One took place on 25 June and the other on 23 July. Many of the leading figures in British aeronautics took part and in the chair on both occasions was Dr Roxbee Cox, a vice-president of the society. The discussion culminated in a resolution based on a proposal by Marcus Langley. That resolution and the discussion which led to it resulted in the recommendation by the Aeronautical Research Committee that a post-graduate college of aeronautical science should be established. This was followed by governmental action. Sir Stafford Cripps, then the minister responsible for aircraft production, set up a committee presided over by Sir Roy Fedden to make specific proposals, and the committee recommended in its 1944 report that such a college should be a new and independent establishment. In 1945 the government created the College of Aeronautics board of governors under the chairmanship of Air Chief Marshal Sir Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt to bring the college into existence and govern it. The first meeting of this board took place on 28 June 1945 and there were present:

Sir Edgar Ludlow Hewitt, Dr W. Abbot, Mr Hugh Burroughs, Sir Roy Fedden, Mr J. Ferguson, Sir Harold Hartley, Sir William Hil-dred, Sir Melvill Jones, Dr E.B. Moullin, Mr J.D. North, Sir Frederick Handley Page, Mr E.F. Relf, Dr H. Roxbee Cox, Air Marshal Sir Ralph Sovley, Rear Admiral S.H. Troubridge and Mr W.E.P. Ward. Sir William Stanier, who had been appointed, was not present.

I am not quite sure when I became old, but I think I must date it in my seventies when I retired from a variety of activities and settled into a more sedentary style of life. I retired from Dowty Rotol and Bergers (and so Hoechst UK) in 1975, from the Royal Institution in 1976, from Ricardo’s and British Printing Corporation in 1977 and sold Withers Estates, very profitably for the Withers family, in 1981.

I was left with the chairmanships of two tiny companies, Land-speed and Cotswold Research. While Landspeed has not served its purpose, Cotswold Research has its place in history. Both companies are concerned with the inventions of Professor Eric Laithwaite, who demonstrated in model and prototype form tracked hovercraft powered by the linear motor. Landspeed failed to develop this, through lack of funds, to a commercially viable transport system, though the Japanese appear to have done so. Cotswold Research, however, made a success of an adaptation of the linear motors to the separation of aluminium from scrap material and for their work, which ended in profitable industrial apparatus and a big saving in manpower, Mr A.P. Bird and I received the Prince of Wales Award in 1986.

When I look back, as I occasionally do, on the pattern of my long life, I see it dominated by three great projects — the design and construction of the airship R101, the development of the jet propulsion gas turbine, and Cranfield University. These are, so to speak, the high hills in a plain of diversified scenery.

Of these great projects, I have included essays on R101 and on Cranfield, but I have confined my reference to the jet propulsion story to my opinion, long ago first expressed, of a great man, Frank Whittle. I have not expressed myself at any length on the controversies which mar the Whittle story and those who are interested — and who is not? — should read Whittle’s own book Jet and Mr Folley’s biography. Of the two men who I believe had the greatest influence on my career, Sir Henry Tizard and Sir Harry Jephcott, I will have something to say later on.

We, his family and friends, are gathered here today in the heart of London to remember and to give thanks for the life and work of one of the truly great men of our time — the Lord Kings Norton of Wotton Underwood, ‘Roxbee’ to the legion of his friends and colleagues.

Through the many years of his active life, there were hardly any avenues of the aeronautical sciences to which he had not made (and enjoyed the making of) inspired contributions.

He was, indeed, “A Happy Warrior”.

If the question was to be asked — “What, among all Lord Kings Norton’s many achievements, were those most to be acclaimed?”, the answer, among such a galaxy, could, perhaps, be four.