Just over fifty years ago the ashes of Shute were scattered in The Solent. A few years back I was set to write about him and his works, particularly as the Portsmouth Post magazine was printed in Norway Road, which was named after him; but the magazine folded....
Nevil Shute Norway was born on January 17,
1899 in Ealing, Middlesex, the younger son of a Cornishman, Arthur Hamilton
Norway, C.B., an assistant secretary of the General Post Office in London.
At an early age he showed an interest in flight and machines.
When 11, Shute played truant from his first preparatory school in Hammersmith,
spending days among the model aircraft at the Science Museum examining wing
control on the Bleriot and trying to puzzle out how the engine of the
Antoinette ran without a carburettor. On
being detected in these precocious studies, he was sent to the Dragon School,
Oxford, and thence to Shrewsbury. He was on holiday in Dublin, where his father
was then Secretary to the Post Office in Ireland, at the time of the Easter
rising of 1916 and acted as a stretcher-bearer, winning a commendation for
gallant conduct. He entered Balliol College Oxford but his studies were
interrupted by the war.
In 1919 the
Norways moved to Liss near Petersfield and stayed until 1927. A serious stammer
prevented him from joining the Royal Flying Corps.
The last few months of the war (in which his brother had been
killed) were spent on home service as a private in the Suffolk Regiment. After
the war, he continued his
studies in Oxford, graduating in 1922 with a third class honours in
engineering science. During the vacations he worked, unpaid, for the Aircraft
Manufacturing Company at Hendon, then as an employee post-Oxford for Sir Geoffrey
de Havilland's own firm. He now fulfilled his thwarted wartime ambition of
learning to fly and gained experience as a test observer. During the evenings
he diligently wrote novels and short stories unperturbed by rejection slips
from publishers. His first book Stephen Morris was rejected three times
and banished to a drawer until being published posthumously in 1961.
Persistence paid, eventually, a good motto for any budding author.
In 1924 Shute took the post of Chief Calculator to the Airship
Guarantee Company, a subsidiary of Vickers Ltd, to work on the construction of
the Rigid Airship R-100 which was a prototype for passenger-carrying airships that would
serve the needs of Britain's global empire. The R-100 was a modest
success.
Shute made his literary debut in 1926 with
Marazan.
In 1929 he became Deputy Chief Engineer under (Sir) Barnes Wallis,
and in the following year he flew to and from Canada in the R100. He had a
passionate belief in the future of airships, but his hopes foundered in the
crash in Beauvais, France, of its government-funded rival, the R101, wrecked
with the loss of Lord Thompson, the then Minister of Aviation, and most of
those on board. He had watched with mounting horror what he regarded as the
criminal inefficiency with which the R101 was constructed. His experience at
this time left a lasting bitterness and bred in him a distrust of politicians
and civil servants. He waited hours in the London streets with 500,000 mourners
to see the R101 dead pass by and a few weeks later he and all the R-100 staff
were given a month’s notice.
Realising that airship development was a lost cause, he founded in
1931 Airspeed Ltd, aeroplane constructors, in an old garage, and remained joint
managing director unti11938. This was pioneering stuff, working on a financial
shoestring.
That same year he married Francis Mary Heaton, a doctor,
and they honeymooned in Switzerland, Shute taking with him his stress
calculations for a glider in development. They had two daughters, Heather
and Shirley. He
delighted in the outdoor life, was an enthusiastic yachtsman and fisherman as
well as an air pilot and
a fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society – all pursuits that served him well
in his writing; he wrote about what he knew.
After two years in York, Airspeed Ltd moved down to Portsmouth. Recently an ex-office boy at Airspeed recollected that a man working on Cobhams refuelling experiments was in a fight outside Mother Shiptons Pub; the other man died. The surviving Cobham man was free but awaiting trial when he died in his Airspeed Courier which crashed in Portsmouth Harbour (April 1933). Shute used the plot point of a fatal pub fight in The Chequer Board.
In 1933 he moved his family to Craneswater Park, Southsea and his wife Francis set up a medical practice but they didn’t stay long, going on to a house called ‘Landfall’ in Bishops Waltham. In 1940 his book Landfall: A Channel Story was published.
Yet three years later they move back to Southsea – 14 Helena Road
and in the same year while travelling with Airspeed’s publicist Concord Morton (no
relation!) he discussed the recent crash of the new all metal Boeing 247
airliner; the plane’s tail fell off. Ten years later, Shute used metal fatigue
in his novel No Highway.
Aware of the war-clouds gathering in Europe, he wrote What
Happened to the Corbetts, prophetically depicting how a bombing raid would
affect a city like Southampton.
Airspeed was successful, employing about a
thousand people, producing aircraft to government orders, but he decided to get out
of the rut and live by writing since he’d enjoyed some success as a novelist
and even sold the film rights of Lonely Road and Ruined City.
He moved his family to Langstone Harbour then, on the outbreak of
war, he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a Sub-Lieutenant in the
Miscellaneous Weapons Department and rose to Lieutenant Commander, finding great
pleasure in experimenting with secret weapons.
He sent his wife and daughters to Canada in 1941, though they ended
up in Bermuda due to fund access problems. This was his family evacuation war
plan he outlined in the Corbetts book.
His novel Pied Piper became a huge
success and was adapted for the screen in 1942. In the story an elderly man,
John Sidney Howard, helps a swarm of children to escape the Nazis from France.
In the beginning John reluctantly promises an English couple to take their two
children with him back to England. During his journey through France the group
grows and John submits to his role as the "Pied Piper". The book had two sequels, Pastoral and
Most Secret. It was later made into a TV film with the late Peter O’Toole.
After fifteen months away, his family returned in 1941 and they moved to a large house called ‘Pond Head’ on Hayling Island.
But he found that his growing celebrity as a writer meant he was
sent on the Normandy landings (D+10 hours) on 6 June 1944, for the Ministry of
Information, and later went to Burma as a correspondent in 1945. He entered
Rangoon with the 15th Corps from Arakan.
In September, 1948, with only 230 solo hours flying experience behind
him – and no flight longer than a two-hour stretch - Shute decided to fly to
Australia, having meticulously planned the trip. His wife packed him a fine
lunch and he and his companion James Riddell arrived in Alice Springs four
months later. His two day stay was sufficient inspiration for A Town Like
Alice.
The Labour government was re-elected in 1950. High taxation and
what he felt to be the decadence of Britain, with the spirit of personal
independence and freedom dying, led him to emigrate. Eventually the Shutes made
their home in Langwarrin, Victoria. He had a history of heart attacks and fell
ill at his typewriter on 12 January 1960 and died that evening in the Melbourne
hospital; five days before his birthday.
Shute‘s success lay in the skill with which he described in familiar
terms technical subjects, combined with a strong depiction of human relationships
and values. His books are far more than mere
page-turners. Several of his novels also have a supernatural element, notably Round
the Bend and In the Wet.
His later novels were mostly set in his new home country, among them A Town Like Alice which tells of Jean, a London typist. In Japanese-occupied Malaya during her imprisonment Jean befriends Australian Joe Harman, who steals chickens for women prisoners and is crucified in punishment. Shute wrote that the book was based on a real-life incident.
An Old Captivity involves a pilot who is hired by an archaeologist and his daughter to take aerial photographs of a site in Greenland. My book's blurb says, ‘… listen to words spoken as if in a dream by the young pilot who holds their lives in his hands, words that bridge the gap of centuries… The difficulties, dangers and personal antagonisms of their strange expedition are forgotten as all three come under the spell of a haunting romance that began a thousand years earlier...’
On the
Beach is dark in tone, for obvious reasons. The feared nuclear war has eliminated all
life in the northern hemisphere, leaving Australia to await the inevitable
spread of radioactive contamination that will end the rest of human life on
Earth. Shute depicts people faced with inevitable doom, but his characters are
not desperate. Ostensibly about nuclear war, it’s really an examination
of how people live and what they do with their lives when they have certain
foreknowledge of their imminent mortality. Shute's optimism is still evident,
though, as he doesn’t envision a violent breakdown in society, his characters
do not riot, but try their best to cope with the inevitable. Published in 1957,
the book played a role in influencing public opinion in the U.S. toward support
for the atmospheric test ban treaty.
In the Wet is another favourite. Written in 1953, it’s about
England in the 1980s. ‘The royal family, a target of constant humiliation by
socialist politicians, reaches a crisis in their lives. A young Australian
pilot, in love with a member of their household, flies the Queen on a fateful
journey and prevents a frightening act of sabotage… A story of the future, as
foretold by a dissolute man dying in the flooded Queensland bush.’ Remarkable.
Requiem for a Wren (1955) begins with the death of Janet, the Wren. Learning
of the heroine’s death at the outset is quite devastating; only a handful of
authors can manage this well, and Shute does so superbly. Then, gradually, we
learn all about her, her life and loves. This doesn’t read like fiction, it
seems too real, too raw, too poignant. An earlier version of this was a novella written in 1946-7, The Seafairers, but not published until 2000.
Although considered by some to be dated, his works are still
popular and many are available as Vintage Classic paperback reprints. There is
a thriving FaceBook group you can join, the Shutists.
Stephen Morris (1923, published posthumously in 1961)
Marazan (1926)
So Disdained (1928)
Lonely Road (1932)
Ruined City (1938)
What Happened to the Corbetts (1939)
An Old Captivity (1940)
Landfall: A Channel Story (1940)
Pied piper (1942)
Most Secret (1942)
Pastoral (1944)
Vinland the Good (1946)
The Chequer Board (1947)
No Highway (1948)
A Town Like Alice (1950)
Round the Bend (1951)
The Far Country (1952)
In the Wet (1953)
Slide Rule: Autobiography (1950)
Requiem for a Wren (1955)
Beyond the Black Stump (1956)
On the Beach (1957)
The Rainbow and the Rose (1958)
Trustee from the Toolroom (1960)
[Thanks to Wikipedia for some of the above information…]
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