Colin Cruddas - A View from the Wings: 60 Years in British Aviation

T his is a very readable and remarkably detailed account of the authors life and career in the aerospace industry, where he plied his trade in the UK, USA, South Africa and, from time to time, even further afield. A proud Yorkshire lad, he was born and brought up in Bridlington not a place generally associated with aviation but which certainly saw its share of the action, both ours and theirs, during the Second World War; and which, clearly, was then a happy hunting ground for a young and enquiring adolescent. And it was this which, perhaps inevitably, played a key part in inspiring the young Cruddas to embark on what was to become a lifetime in and around his chosen profession. Entering the aircraft industrial scene as an 18-year-old trainee draughtsman with the Fairey Aviation Company, his burgeoning career later took him to the Blackburn (Hawker Siddeley), Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, British Aircraft Corporation and Atlas companies, before his final return to the UK with Flight Refuelling Limited. It was in the latter post that a major health problem brought an early retirement but also, in due course, a second career as the successful author of a range of books on the history and development of aviation in Britain. His long and varied engineering and administrative experience on a wide variety of aircraft, from Gannet to Concorde and beyond, makes this a fascinating volume particularly for those with an interest in the last sixty or so turbulent years of a great British industry.

In this, his first autobiographical work, the author writes well in a style which manages to balance a wealth of technical detail with many humorous and engagingly self-deprecating anecdotes. A very good read indeed!

Michael Knight

Fairey Aviation displays its latest asset at the Society of British Aircraft Constructors exhibition at Farnborough in 1952. The Firefly looks pretty good as well!

W hat follows required an energetic spring clean of my memory department, along with a fair amount of supporting research. There have, however, been many areas where I have needed to sharpen up on detail and I have been extremely fortunate in being able to call up air support from several long-term and new-found friends. Accordingly, my most sincere thanks go to Aimee and Harry Alexander (Poole Flying Boats Celebration), Ken Baillie (ex-Fairey Aviation and British Aircraft Corporation colleague), Roger Bellamy (ex-RAF Old Sarum colleague), Paul Bright (Yorkshire aviation author), Dudley Dobson (ex-East Lancashire Coachbuilding Company and contemporary apprentice), Brian Gardner (aviation author and historian), Colin van Geffen (aviation author, artist and Fawley historian), David Gibbings (ex-Fairey Aviation and AgustaWestland archivist and author), Bryan Hope (ex-Fairey Aviation and drawing office school colleague), Squadron Leader Tony Iveson DFC (ex617 Squadron and vice president of the Bomber Command Association), David Neave (University of Hull and Bridlington historian and author), Norman Parker (ex-Vickers Armstrong, Fairey Aviation and aviation historian), Mike Phipp (Bournemouth Airport historian and aviation author), Ted Talbot (ex-British Aircraft Corporation colleague and aviation author), the late Terry Waddington (ex-Blackburn Aircraft, McDonnell Douglas Aircraft historian, aviation author and Bridlington boyhood pal) and David Wright (ex-RAF 1104 Marine Craft Unit and Bridlington boyhood pal). Whew! Its quite a list. I wouldnt have got far without them.

The BAE Systems Heritage Centres at both Brough (Eric Barker, Paul Lawson and Peter Hotham) and Warton (Keith Spong and Tom Clayton) have willingly provided keen co-operation in supplying photographs, for which I am most grateful.

Bridlingtons ever enthusiastic and knowledgeable historian David Mooney has played a key part in this work and deserves a very special mention for providing local material and facts that had either slipped my memory or, in many cases, I simply wasnt aware of.

I also wish to include at this point Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Knight KBE AFC FRAeS, who, in responding to my appeal as an ex-Cobham plc and Buccaneer Aircrew Association colleague, instantly and kindly agreed to provide a foreword to this book. (I doubt I would have made such a presumptuous request to a high-ranking officer in my National Service days, but time has now, fortunately, eased some of the protocol boundaries.)

One of the pleasures of putting together a book of this nature is the making of new contacts and friendships. Rick Phillips, incidentally the only man ever to fly a Buccaneer, XV 168, (now the gate guardian) into Brough, who kindly checked over my Fairey and Blackburn references for service accuracy, and Dave Herriot, both of the Buccaneer Aircrew Association, certainly fall into this category. So, too, do Sarah Hutchinson and her colleagues at the Bridlington Public Library and the East Riding of Yorkshire County Council for having made available pictures of The Spa in Bridlington and those showing wartime damage in the town.

In some instances I have been unable to track down the original sources of illustration material, so I do ask those people for their forgiveness. I realise how annoying and seemingly ungrateful it can be when ones work appears elsewhere without proper accreditation, so I thank you. It almost goes without saying that The History Press, with Abbie Wood leading the production team, has done its usual highly professional job and, as on so many earlier projects, it has been my great pleasure to work with them on this volume.

Finally, hoping that I havent left any key contributors out, I must express deep gratitude to my wife Thelma, who has contributed to the onerous task of proofreading, and, to use her chilling phrase, tightened things up when far higher priorities (e.g. the garden or meal preparations) arose. Our younger daughter Sally has shown immense patience when frequently bailing me out of computer glitches, mainly of my own making, and I cant thank her enough for that.

Having now produced over a dozen or so works on specialist aviation topics, this one, I believe, is best suited for dedication to the family. So to Thelma, Helen and Sally, along with their families Jennifer, Jonathan, Angus, Giles and Robert and not forgetting our mothers, both called May, who after all placed us on lifes path, this is for you.

T his book is the result of persistent persuasion by our elder daughter Helen, who thinks that after a long life of largely undetected crime, mine might be a tale worth telling. Hopefully, both she and her sister Sally will be proved right, but you, dear reader, will have to be the final judge of that.

Life, we know, is full of challenges and frustrations, a fact quickly affirmed when I began searching for a suitable title. Dr Stanley Hooker, after retiring in 1984 as Rolls-Royces technical director, published his autobiography with the tongue-in-cheek title of Not Much of an Engineer. Everyone in the aerospace world knew that this hardly accorded with his reputation as one of Britains best aeronautical engineers. I, on the other hand, while admiring the cleverness of his choice, felt I could have claimed his self-effacing title with far more justification and with no false modesty whatsoever.