Not Much Of An Engineer:- An Autobiography

Product Information

The interview seemed to go well, but two months passed before a letter arrived from Ernest Hives, which “ requested my presence at Derby for an interview with Hs [Company parlance for Hives, 1886-1965]. In other words, the pressure differences caused by the air velocities are small compared with the pressure of the atmosphere, and so the air behaves as if its density remained constant. Livesey led me around the corridor, and at a junction he opened a door, and said ‘This is your office, cheerio’. New Zealanders like me have reason to be grateful to the performance of the Bristol Olympus engines fitted to the Avro Vulcan bomber; in appalling weather conditions the grand opening of Wellington Airport was marred by the early touchdown of the Vulcan, and the port undercarriage was broken off by contact with a wall. In late 1937, while working at the Admiralty he applied for a job at Rolls-Royce, and after being interviewed by Ernest Hives, started there in January 1938.

In August 1940, with the Battle of Britain being fought with the motive power of Rolls-Royce Merlin engines in both Hawker Hurricanes and Supermarine Spitfires, the first jet engines of Frank Whittle (1907–96) were beginning to demonstrate their potential. What I also like is that in this age where everyone snipes at everyone else, and bad mouthing people is 'ok', Stanley Hooker doesn't have a bad word to say about anyone. Bedford talked about the various fighters he had flown, many of which had been powered by Hooker's engines.I feel that Sir Stanley was perhaps somewhat glib about the harsh realities of the changes, viewing the past with rose-tinted glasses. A must read for all budding engineers, which is both light and easy to follow despite the complex engineering involved. Hooker was excited, and in turn brought Rolls-Royce chairman Ernest Hives to visit Rover's factory in Barnoldswick. and here is a good place to mention Hooker’s essentially collegial approach, as throughout his book he gives credit to the people he worked with, and to the companies great and small, which often self-financed developments. By this time there was scarcely a single modern British aero-engine for which Hooker had not been responsible.

It taught me a lot as an aspiring engineer and it would help to keep the name of one of Britain’s finest engineers alive. Of the many great applied mathematicians in the field of aerodynamics or fluid motion whom I have had the good fortune to know, G. Ric gained the CBE for Services to Engineering in 2013 and was named European CTO of the Year in 2014. I’ll admit the final pages were a bit too much for me, but for more technical readers with a better understanding of the maths/physics/engineering involved I’m sure they would have been useful/interesting.But your skill set needs to go much deeper than frameworks if you’re going to have success in your next job — the one where you get hired because you had 3–5 years of “engineering” experience on your resume. It was about eight feet square and contained a desk, a chair, an empty bookcase and a telephone, and nothing more. For the first four years, I had an uninspiring career, because I soon found that I could maintain an ‘invisible’ position, about mid-form, with the minimum of effort on my part.