Men of Power: The Lives of Rolls-Royce Chief Test Pilots Harvey & Jim Heyworth

By Robert Jackson

Robert Jackson’s Men of Power delves into the lives of RAF flyers and Rolls-Royce chief test pilots, brothers Harvey and Jim Heyworth.

The story begins in 1940 when Harvey Heyworth was leading No. 79 Squadron RAF, defending north-eastern England from Luftwaffe raids made by bombers based in Norway and Denmark and then later in the Battle of Britain when the unit moved south. During late 1940 and up to June 1941, Heyworth led his squadron in defense of Bristol and Swansea operating by night and day. By 1942 he had amassed 4,000 flying hours and then joined Rolls-Royce, test flying early British jet aircraft including the famous Gloster-Whittle and test-bed Wellington bombers powered by the new jet engines.

In 1944, Harvey’s brother Jim also joined Rolls, having flown with No. 12 Squadron in Bomber Command. The story then unfolds into the development of the Trent turboprop and the Avon jet engines. Development work on a variety of test-bed aircraft was ongoing and included some weird combinations of airframe and engine. Jim succeeded his brother as chief test pilot in 1958 and flew eighty-two different aircraft types. He recounts his experiences of piloting the Vulcan bomber, Lightning and the “Flying Bedstead” VTOL test rig.

Men of Power is the story of two war heroes and adventurers who put their lives on the line willing to test the technology that would keep humanity soaring through the skies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 28, 2007
• ISBN: 9781783409426

Robert Jackson

A native of St. Louis, Robert Jackson is the great-grandson of a carpenter who helped build the palaces in Forest Park for the 1904 World's Fair. He has trained for two marathons on the park's restored grounds. Although he has since lived in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City, he remains a loyal St. Louisan, especially during baseball season when the Cardinals are playing. Robert Jackson studied American literature and culture at New York University, where he received his Ph.D. This is his first book.

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INTRODUCTION

In the years before the Second World War, the imagination of many a schoolboy was fired by the names of the company test pilots who took the RAF’s latest combat aircraft into the air; men like John ‘Mutt’ Summers and Jeffrey Quill of Supermarine, who put the graceful Spitfire through its initial paces, and P.W.S. ‘George’ Bulman of Hawkers, the first to fly the Hurricane. After the war, a new generation of company test pilots nudged at and then broke what the popular press called the sound barrier; their names – John Cunningham and John Derry, Neville Duke, Mike Lithgow, Roland Beamont, Bill Waterton, Peter Twiss, Hedley Hazelden, Roly Falk – becoming synonymous with the annual Society of British Aircraft Constructors (SBAC) Show at Farnborough, where they demonstrated British aviation technology that matched or surpassed any in the world.

Yet behind the headline-catching company test pilots were many others whose names and deeds, for the most part, went unrecorded. They were the test pilots of the aero-engine companies.

This is the story of two remarkable brothers, Harvey and Jim Heyworth. Both saw distinguished service in the Royal Air Force; both went on to make a massive contribution to aviation in general, and to the development of the turbojet engine in particular. Their birthplace was Belper in Derbyshire, and they were of the breed of English folk who, in the words of the poet Francis Brett Young, were

...the seed of the mild, unadventurous Middle Class: plain-sailing folk, who neither knew the need that stunts the body nor the wealth that cankers the spirit, moderate in dream and deed: the sons of parsons, lawyers, doctors, bankers, shopkeepers, merchants, chemists, engineers, whose loftiest endeavour was to live within their calculable means, and give these lads at least as good a life as theirs, a better schooling, and the chance to rise above their native station...

The Heyworths’ father, George Alexander Frederick Heyworth, died on the hockey field on 29 September, 1934, aged only fifty-three. The local newspaper recorded his passing:

Belper heard with profound regret on Saturday night of the fatal collapse of Dr G.A.F. Heyworth, while playing hockey for Belper against Beeston, at Nottingham, during the afternoon. It would be difficult, probably impossible, to find a man in Belper and district more deeply loved than Dr Heyworth, and his tragic end is mourned by all sections of the community.

The game which ended so tragically was Dr Heyworth’s first, apart from a short practice the previous Wednesday, since the end of the 1932 season, and it was Belper’s opening match of the new season. A breakdown in health kept Dr Heyworth out of the game the whole of last season, and he deplored his enforced absence from the field. He had been one of the club’s most consistent and regular players since he resumed hockey on his return from the Great War. The game was his principal hobby and sport, and he had looked forward with pleasurable anticipation to his return to the active list, although his friends had tried to persuade him to give up the game.

He thoroughly enjoyed the first half of the match at Beeston, and in the dressing-room at half-time he laughed and joked, and appeared to be as fresh as the youngest member of the team. He said he felt very fit, but his collapse followed five minutes after the resumption. A member of the team told our representative that Dr Heyworth was running for the ball when he was seen to drop his stick and fall face downwards. Members of the team ran up to him, and were horrified to find him unconscious. An ambulance was summoned by telephone, and in less than 20 minutes after his collapse Dr Heyworth arrived at the hospital, but died as he was being carried in, without regaining consciousness.

George Heyworth was the son of G.B. (George Bevan) Heyworth of West Derby, Liverpool, a director of the British and Foreign Marine Company, who outlived him. Educated at Rugby and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he obtained an honours degree (M.A. Cantab) he completed his medical training at the London General Hospital. His first appointment was senior house surgeon at the Children’s Hospital, Liverpool. He came to Belper in 1909, and in that year he married a London girl, Emilie Koop. He obtained his hockey blue at Cambridge, and played for Lancashire County. During the 1914-18 War he served in the RAMC, first in Belgium and then in Mesopotamia, reaching the rank of captain.

George Heyworth’s eldest son, John Harvey Heyworth, was born on 20 March 1910 at the family home, The Hollies, which today is the library in Belper. There were to be four other children: Dorothy, Peter, Connie and Jim, with a dozen years between the latter and Harvey. The second brother, Peter, was born on 25 March 1913. He followed the family tradition and went into general practice; suffering from poor eyesight, he served as a medical officer in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War and later settled in Guernsey, where he had practised for a time prior to the German occupation of the Channel islands in 1940.

Harvey Heyworth was educated at Rugby School, where – like many boys pitched headlong into the atmosphere of a public school – he was unhappy at first. Letters from home brought him great comfort, as did a deep inner faith that was to remain with him all his life, and sustain him through many crises. His passport to success at school was sport, especially rugby football and hockey, in which he excelled; but he was no slouch academically, as his letters indicate, and he took great delight in public debate – although his deep sense of morality sometimes placed him on the losing side, as an extract from one of his letters reveals:

This evening we had a House Debate. The motion before the House was ‘That this House condemns the cinema." I spoke for the motion but it was lost 6-27. I have enclosed my speech which you may read or throw away as you like.’ The same letter also shows that Harvey had a considerate nature:

Can I get a top hat at Woods, because if I don’t I shall not have anything to go home in as we are not allowed anything else. Please. I will buy the hat too big to last me a long time while I am here.

From Rugby, Harvey secured a place at Edinburgh University, where his skill as the University Hockey Club’s left back soon came to the fore. There was talk that he might be picked for an international trial, but this did not come about, although at a later date he played for Derbyshire County Hockey Association’s 1st XI.

It was confidently expected by Harvey’s family that, on graduating from University, he would follow in his father’s footsteps and enter the medical profession. It therefore came as a profound shock when he announced his intention to apply for a Short Service Commission in the Royal Air Force, and train as a pilot.

Harvey made his decision to join the Royal Air Force at a time when the Service was undergoing a period of profound change, in terms of both organisation and equipment. The four years of World War I had marked history’s greatest technological leap forward in terms of military hardware; and yet, almost before the guns had ceased firing, the victorious Allies had begun dismantling their respective military assets without much thought for the needs of tomorrow. In Britain’s case, powerful lobbies in the Admiralty and the War Office almost succeeded in engineering the demise of the Royal Air Force as an independent organisation and in subordinating British air power to the Army and Navy; that they failed to do so was mainly due to the determination of the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Hugh Trenchard. By 1921 the strength of the RAF was at a very low ebb, with only 24 squadrons of all types at home and abroad (including a solitary fighter squadron in the United Kingdom), but in April 1922 a defence sub-committee recommended the force’s expansion to fifty-two squadrons, totalling some 500 aircraft – later increased to 600 – for home defence. The re-equipment programme had to start from scratch, and to fulfil the air defence role it was decided to standardise on the Sopwith Snipe, the fighter designed during the closing months of WWI to replace the Camel.

Harvey Heyworth, seen here second on the left, during Rugby School’s Officer Training Corps Easter Camp at Tidworth in 1926. Already a head and shoulders above his colleagues, Heyworth was six feet five inches tall. Corinne Moore

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The first squadron to equip fully with Snipes was No 29, which re-formed at Duxford on 1 April 1923. By the end of the year the fighter strength available for the air defence of Great Britain stood at eleven squadrons, equipped predominantly with Snipes. It was still a long way from the planned total of fifty-two squadrons. It was also clear that the Snipe, although invaluable as an interim aircraft, was quickly approaching obsolescence, and steps were taken to rearm the fighter squadrons with post-war designs at an early date. The first such design was the Gloster Grebe, a product of the Gloucestershire Aircraft Company (which changed its name to Gloster in 1926), whose chief designer was H.P. Folland. Folland had previously worked for the Nieuport and General Aircraft Co, which had been set up in Britain late in 1916 to licence-build the fighter designs of the French company. In 1917 the British-based firm began to design its own fighters, the first of which was the Nighthawk. Although it never went into service with the RAF, the Nighthawk deserves its place in history as the first British fighter to be powered by a stationary radial engine instead of the more common rotary type. The Grebe prototype was originally ordered as a Nighthawk; it made its first public appearance at the RAF Air Pageant, Hendon, in June 1923 and entered RAF service with No 111 Squadron in October that year, subsequently equipping five more RAF fighter squadrons. One of them, No 25 Squadron, subsequently became famous for its spectacular aerobatic displays in the mid-1920s. Despite early problems with wing flutter, the Grebe was a highly manoeuvrable and robust little aircraft, and was the first British machine to survive a terminal velocity dive, reaching 240mph. Grebes also took part in some interesting experiments, one of which involved the release of a pair of aircraft from beneath the airship R.33 in October 1926.

Although the Grebe replaced the Sopwith Snipe in some first-line RAF squadrons, the true successor to the Snipe was the Hawker Woodcock, the H.G. Hawker Engineering Company having re-established Sopwith’s former aviation enterprises. The Hawker Company’s early activities involved refurbishing Snipes and Camels for sale overseas. The first of its own designs, the Duiker parasol monoplane, was unsuccessful, but the Woodcock singleseat fighter was accepted after lengthy trials and was delivered to No 3 Squadron in May 1925, becoming the first new British fighter to enter production after the end of World War I. The Woodcock only equipped one other RAF squadron, No 17, but a version of it known as the Danecock (or Dankok) served with the Danish Army and Naval Air Services until 1937. It was at this juncture that the Hawker design office accepted the services of Sydney Camm, who had previously worked for Martinsyde Aircraft Ltd. Later, Camm was to be responsible for one of the most famous fighters of all time, the Hawker Hurricane.

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A Hawker Woodcock II, pictured in the markings of No 17 Squadron RAF. Author

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The Gloster Gamecock was very unforgiving of mistakes and had an abnormally high accident rate. This is one of the twenty-two that were destroyed during the type’s short career. Author

In common with other aircraft manufacturers of the 1920s, Hawker produced a series of aircraft prototypes that covered the whole spectrum of military and naval requirements at that time. Among them were the Hornbill fighter, which had mixed wood and metal construction and which reached a speed of 200mph in 1926 with a 690hp Rolls-Royce Condor engine, the Hawker Hawfinch, which set trends for several other biplane fighter designs; and the Heron, the first fighter to use the patent all-metal construction evolved by Sydney Camm and works director Fred Sigrist. From the Gloster stable, the Grebe was followed by the Gamecock, which first flew in February 1925 and equipped five RAF fighter squadrons, beginning with No 23 in May 1925. The Gamecock’s service life was relatively short-lived. This was partly because of an abnormally high accident rate; of ninety Gamecocks that were built, twenty-two were lost in spinning or landing accidents.

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Armstrong Whitworth Siskin IIIA J9315 of No 5 FTS, 1931. This aircraft previously served with No 19 Squadron. Author

The Snipe, Grebe, Woodcock and Gamecock were for the most part replaced in service by the Armstrong Whitworth Siskin IIIA. The first Siskin IIIs, in fact, were delivered to No 41 Squadron at Northolt in May 1924, and a month later to No 111 Squadron at Duxford. These were the only two units to use the early mark, but the Siskin IIIA, with a more powerful engine and a number of aerodynamic refinements, began to replace the Snipes of No 1 Squadron and the Grebes of No 56 from mid-1927. The type subsequently equipped nine RAF fighter squadrons, all in the United Kingdom.

The Siskin was also an unforgiving aircraft if badly handled. The caption on the back of this photograph reads ‘A cadet’s efforts’. Author

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The Hawker Fury was the most elegant biplane to serve with the fighter squadrons of the Royal Air Force. Pictured here is a Mk I. Author‘s collection

The expansion of the Royal Air Force towards the planned target of fifty-two squadrons was dictated, apart from economic considerations, by the activities of the French. In the late 1920s, an emasculated Germany was not regarded as a serious threat, but the idea of France, a mere twenty-one miles away across the English Channel, possessing a larger and more effective air force than Britain’s was unthinkable. The speed of formation of new RAF squadrons was therefore dictated by the need to match the French in air matters, and when the expansion of the French Air Force slowed down, so did that of the RAF. The original target date for the fifty-two squadron force was 1930, but by 1927 this had been put back to 1936, and in 1929 it was again postponed to 1938. As far as the home defence fighter squadrons were concerned, the principal fighter type during the first three years of the 1930s was the Bristol Bulldog, which equipped ten squadrons and, with a top speed of 180mph was much faster than the fighters it replaced. Its contemporary was the Hawker Fury, the epitome of British fighter biplane design and one of the most beautiful aircraft ever built. The first of 118 Fury Mk Is entered service with No 43 Squadron at Tangmere in May 1931, and the type also served with Nos 1 and 25 Squadrons. Further development of a version known as the High Speed Fury led to a production order for twenty-three Fury Mk IIs, followed by another seventy-five, and the first of these entered service with No 25 Squadron in December 1936, also serving with four more squadrons of what was, by then, RAF Fighter Command. Other fighter units in the early 1930s were equipped with the Hawker Demon, a fighter variant of the Hart light bomber; 244 Demons were built for the RAF in the United Kingdom, serving with six Regular and five Auxiliary Air Force squadrons.

A Hawker Fury makes a simulated attack on a Handley Page Heyford bomber. Author’s collection

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Such was the state of Britain’s air defences during Harvey Heyworth’s formative flying years, from the moment when, as an acting pilot officer, he first flew in a Royal Air Force aircraft at RAF Sealand in September 1931.

CHAPTER ONE

FIGHTER PILOT AND TEST PILOT

Harvey Heyworth arrived at No 5 Flying Training School, RAF Sealand, fresh from his month of ‘square bashing’ at RAF Uxbridge in Middlesex, which was then the venue for courses for those who had been accepted for a Short Service Commission. (The RAF Short Service Commission scheme had been implemented in January 1924, with an Air Ministry announcement that 400 officers would be required for flying duties). On 30 September Harvey went aloft in Avro 504N J9686, spending forty minutes under the instruction of Flying Officer J.A. Simpson, who initiated him into the mysteries of taxiing and handling, the effect of controls with and without engine, and straight and level flying. Exactly one month later, with fifteen hours and twenty minutes of flying time under his belt, he was checked out by a Flight Lieutenant Yonge and sent off on his first ten minute solo flight.

On 1 January 1932, with his flying training well advanced under the tutelage of Flying Officer Simpson, Heyworth got his first taste of a more powerful military aircraft when Simpson took him for a 25-minute flight in Armstrong Whitworth Atlas J9472. The Atlas, which had been on the strength of No 5 FTS for about a year, came to grief only two days after Heyworth’s trip, when it was hit by Avro 504N J8501 as the latter was landing, and written off.

Harvey Heyworth’s initiation into flying with the RAF, like hundreds of other young pilots of the time, was in an Avro 504 trainer of the type seen here. This aircraft, J9428, was used by No 5 FTS at Sealand in 1930-31, but was not flown by Heyworth, the aircraft having left for another flying school at RAF Leuchars, Scotland, by the time he arrived. Author

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RAF Sealand, 1931. Harvey Heyworth, left, perched on a Hucks Starter with three fellow pilot officers; ‘Peek’ Atkinson, ‘Wave’ Cameron and Alan Saw. Corinne Moore

On 29 February 1932, Harvey Heyworth completed his basic flying training on the Avro 504 with an assessment of ‘Above the Average’ and went on to begin his advanced training on the Armstrong Whitworth Siskin TM, the dual-control version of the biplane fighter. His instructor on the new type was an NCO, Sergeant Roxburgh, who sent Heyworth off solo on 13 April 1932. Heyworth’s log book reveals that he spent about a week practising pinpoint landings, with which he seems to have experienced some difficulty, as he was taken up by a Flight Lieutenant May in an Avro 504 on 18 April for further instruction. After that he got it right, and began a course of aerobatics.

Harvey Heyworth’s first taste of a more powerful biplane came on 1 January 1932, when he had a flight in an Armstrong Whitworth Atlas army co-operation aircraft. Corinne Moore

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Above & below: Armstrong Whitworth Siskin IIIAs of No 5 FTS, RAF Sealand, on the flight line in 1931. Corinne Moore

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His very thorough training continued in both the two-seat and single-seat Siskin variants, briefly reverting to the Avro 504 for demonstrations of compass errors and elementary instruction in blind flying, and by June 1932 he had amassed 100 flying hours, of which 64 were solo. At the end of August 1932 his total flying time had risen to 148 hours. He had now completed his flying training, again with an ‘Above the Average’ assessment, and was awarded his ‘wings’ on 4 September.

On 5 September 1932 Pilot Officer Harvey Heyworth was posted to No 54 (F) Squadron at Hornchurch in Essex, a station very much in the front line of Britain’s air defences. Having disbanded after the end of the 1914-18 war, No 54 Squadron had re-formed in 1930 and, after a few months operating Siskins, was now equipped with the Bristol Bulldog IIA, the last word in fighter biplanes. Heyworth settled happily into squadron life as a member of Flight Lieutenant Chapman’s ‘C’ Flight, flying at least once a day whenever the weather permitted, or more usually twice or even three times, carrying out a great deal of formation practice, cross-country flying, battle climbs and so on. Interestingly enough, his log book shows that it was only on 28 February 1933, after he had completed a total of 200 hours in the air, that he made his first night flight, which involved two circuits and two landings at Hornchurch. Night flying became more frequent after that, although not routine, and was accompanied by radiotelephony (R/T) practice. R/T equipment was progressively being fitted to all RAF fighter aircraft assigned to the air defence of Great Britain, and high priority was given to developing operational tactics with its aid.

Left & right: Taken by Harvey Heyworth from the cockpit of his own aircraft, these photographs show a Siskin IIIA flown by Pilot Officer John Grandy - later Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Grandy, who became Chief of the Air Staff and who died in 2004 at the age of 90. Corinne Moore

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On 30 June 1934 Heyworth formed part of the 54 Squadron aerobatic display team that performed at that year’s Hendon Air Pageant, an honour that reflected on his flying skill. Indeed, he continued to maintain his ‘Above the Average’ rating in all his flying assessments.

On 22 November 1934, Flying Officer Heyworth