Although the greater part of my working life has been concerned with aviation—and particularly with aircraft propulsion—I have never really regarded myself as a dyed-in-the-wool aeronautical pioneer. It has been my good fortune to collaborate with many whose names will long live in the history of aviation, and to have been able to play some part in the development of powerplant engineering over the past half century. I feel honoured, therefore, by being invited to contribute some personal anecdotes and views to the Centenary Issue of the Society's Journal.

When one is young a century seems almost an aeon, mythical in its earlier days, peopled with men whose names are forgotten, or remembered only as seen on mouldering tomb stones in village churchyards. But to me, although only in the earlier seventies, the hundred years spanned by the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain (as it was originally called) is little more than “an evening gone”.

P. Y. Alexander, an engine enthusiast, was one of its early members, and a close friend of an uncle of mine, and I met him in his later years.

My First active acquaintance with the Schneider Trophy Contests came in 1927 when I was chief experimental engineer to Peter Hooker Ltd of Walthamstow, generally known as the British Gnôme and Le Rhône engine company—since they had taken the licence for Gnôme engines as early as 1913. I was asked by H. C. Tryon, that grand experimental engineer of Napier, if I would come over to Acton and give them some advice on the high compression racing Lion engines they were preparing for the first official, British Government, participation in the Schneider Contest at Venice that year.

It makes me somewhat pensive to reflect that the whole era of powered flight has taken place in my lifetime—even though I was too young when the Wright brothers first flew to realise what it would mean to the world in general and myself in particular. Nor could I have dreamt that I should one day have the privilege, in 1938, of meeting Mr. Orville Wright at his home in Dayton and hearing his views on the astonishing development of the art which he and his brother pioneered.

The key to an understanding of the National Gas Turbine Establishment at Pyestock lies, perhaps, in the large engineering bias of the professional scientific and technical staff of this advanced research and development organisation, of whom over eighty per cent are engineers by training, so that in every direction the thirst for knowledge and the pursuit of novel techniques is tempered by engineering judgment. For example, even among the specialists, materials science is not narrowly equated with crystallography, chemistry or metallurgy, but is considered largely as the art of exploiting all likely materials to maximum advantage in air breathing propulsion systems.

Little Attention was paid to the characteristics of the fuel for the early aircraft engines. They had available to them a gasoline primarily intended for automobile engines, the earliest of which used wick carburettors. These carburettors required a fuel of extremely high volatility and with the straight run gasolines available at the time, volatility could be related to specific gravity. The lower the specific gravity, the better the volatility and the requirement for low specific gravity endured for about the first twenty years of the life of the aircraft engine.

Those who have taken an untried aeroplane into the air for its first flight will know there is a quality about that moment which goes far beyond the coldly scientific assessment of which it is part. Here is a new creation which feels as though imbued with life, and one becomes its very heart and brain. It is a joint endeavour and a double proving—an embarkation into a beckoning unknown, however familiar the sky has become through previous flights in other aircraft.

In 1965 we see a world around us seemingly inharmonious and suffering from uncertainty in the regions of religions, politics, economics and culture. How different away back in 1908! Most people in those far off days had convictions and held them to be first principles.

They really did believe in the verity of the words of the hymn from which this phrase is quoted—“God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate.” People in 1908 saw nothing peculiar in holding such beliefs. This was the atmosphere in which the activities of the Society were being conducted and was largely the matrix of the thinking of its illustrious and inspired membership.

On 1st March 1911, the four officers, including myself, selected for the first flying course, assembled at Eastchurch in Isle of Sheppey. The others were Lieutenants Samson and Gregory, RN, and Lieutenant Gerrard of the Royal Marines. Samson had been in the Persian Gulf with the naval small boats trying to stop the slave trade, flourishing at that time along the Trucial and Arabian coasts. He turned out to be a first class pilot and in the 1914-18 War a very brave one. He was an individualist and difficult to work with but a popular leader with his juniors in any enterprise.

The Royal Air Force came into being towards the end of the 1914–18 War. In the time and space available it is impossible to write anything approaching a full history of it from its inception to the present day. I shall, therefore, only attempt to mention those events which have impressed themselves on my mind as landmarks in the history of the Service.

I shall also endeavour to outline briefly some of the achievements of some of our pilots between the Wars as they illustrate the development of aeroplane performance, followed by a few reminiscences and digressions in an attempt to illustrate the post-War trend.