Roy Chadwick

Widnes

Roy Chadwick was born on 30 April 1893 at Marsh Hall Farm in Farnworth, Widnes, Lancashire. His father Charles was a mechanical engineer. The family moved to Urmston, south of Manchester, and Roy attended St Clements Church School there. He was not an academic prodigy. He was a boy who liked drawing and understood how things worked.

From 1907 to 1911, while still a teenager, he attended night school at the Manchester Municipal College of Technology, studying draughtsmanship. The college is now part of the University of Manchester, the same campus where Rutherford found the nucleus and Brian Cox still teaches. During the day he trained at British Westinghouse Electrical Company in Trafford Park, learning the practical side of engineering under George Edwin Bailey. Westinghouse later became Metropolitan-Vickers. Night school and a factory floor. That was the training that produced the designer of the Lancaster bomber. No university. No degree. Just four years of evening classes and a drawing board at Trafford Park.

Brownsfield Mill

In September 1911, aged 18, Chadwick joined A.V. Roe and Company, known as Avro, at their works in Brownsfield Mill, Manchester. Alliott Verdon-Roe, the company's founder, had been one of the first Englishmen to fly, and Avro was still a small operation building experimental aircraft in a converted cotton mill. Chadwick was hired as a personal assistant and draughtsman. He was drawing aircraft before he was old enough to vote.

The early years were prolific. He worked on the Avro D, the Avro E, and the Avro F, which in 1912 became the world's first monoplane with an enclosed cabin. He contributed to the Avro 504, which became one of the most important training aircraft of the First World War and was still in service into the 1930s. By the end of the war, Chadwick was Avro's chief designer. He was 25.

Through the 1920s and 1930s, he designed a succession of aircraft: the Avro Tutor, the Avro Cadet, the Avro Anson. The Anson became the first RAF aircraft with a retractable undercarriage and was used extensively for reconnaissance and training in the early years of the Second World War. But the aircraft that defined Chadwick's career, and that places him on this website, began with a failure.

The Lancaster

In the late 1930s, the Air Ministry asked Avro to design a twin-engine heavy bomber. Chadwick designed the Avro Manchester, powered by two Rolls-Royce Vulture engines. The Vulture was ambitious but unreliable. The Manchester entered service in November 1940 and proved troublesome almost immediately. Only 200 were built before the type was withdrawn in 1942. It was a failure, and it was Chadwick's failure, insofar as any designer owns the limitations of someone else's engine.

His response was to redesign the aircraft around four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines instead of two Vultures. The airframe was stretched, the wingspan increased, and the result was a different aircraft entirely. The Avro Lancaster first flew on 9 January 1941 and entered service with the RAF in February 1942. It had a crew of seven, four Merlin engines, and an unobstructed bomb bay 33 feet long, the largest of any Allied bomber. It could carry a standard bomb load of 14,000 pounds. Modified, it could carry the 22,000-pound Grand Slam, the largest bomb dropped by any aircraft in the war.

7,377 Lancasters were built. They flew 156,000 sorties and dropped 608,612 long tons of ordnance. The Lancaster was the backbone of RAF Bomber Command's strategic bombing campaign. It was not the only heavy bomber in service, but it was the best. It could fly higher, carry more, and reach further than anything else available. And it came from a cotton mill in Manchester, designed by a man who had learned to draw at night school.

The Dams

On the night of 16-17 May 1943, 19 specially modified Lancasters of 617 Squadron, led by Wing Commander Guy Gibson, attacked the Möhne, Eder, and Sorpe dams in the Ruhr valley. The operation was called Chastise. The weapon was Barnes Wallis's bouncing bomb, a cylindrical device spun backwards at high speed and released at exactly 60 feet above the water to skip across the surface and sink against the dam wall before detonating.

The Lancasters had to be modified to carry it. The bomb bay doors were removed. A motor was fitted to spin the bomb. The aircraft had to fly at precisely 60 feet at 230 miles per hour in the dark over defended water. It was Chadwick who oversaw the modifications that made the Lancaster capable of carrying and delivering a weapon it was never designed for. The Möhne and Eder dams were breached. Eight of the 19 Lancasters were lost. 53 of the 133 aircrew were killed. Gibson was awarded the Victoria Cross.

Chadwick was appointed CBE in the 1943 Birthday Honours for his contribution to the Lancaster and specifically for the Chastise modifications. He was 50 years old. He had been designing aircraft for 30 years, all of them for the same company, in the same part of England, since that first day at Brownsfield Mill.

Woodford

After the war, Chadwick kept designing. The Avro York, a transport aircraft derived from the Lancaster, was already in service. It would go on to carry over 40 per cent of the entire British tonnage during the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49, an operation Chadwick did not live to see. The Avro Tudor, Britain's first pressurised airliner, was in development. And from 1946, Chadwick was overseeing the initial designs for what would become the Avro Vulcan, the delta-wing nuclear bomber that served as Britain's strategic deterrent in the early Cold War.

On 23 August 1947, Chadwick was aboard the prototype Avro Tudor 2 at Woodford Aerodrome in Cheshire for a test flight. During the overnight servicing before the flight, the aileron control cables had been inadvertently crossed. When the pilot applied corrective input on takeoff, the aircraft rolled the wrong way. It crashed near Shirfold Farm, close to the aerodrome. Chadwick was killed. He was 54 years old. So was Bill Thorn, Avro's chief test pilot. Stuart Davies, another senior Avro engineer, survived the crash.

A crossed cable. A servicing error. The designer of the Lancaster, the man who had turned a failed bomber into the aircraft that broke the dams, killed by a mistake that had nothing to do with his design. He had been with Avro for 36 years, from Brownsfield Mill to Woodford, from canvas biplanes to jet-age airliners. Thirty-six years, one employer.

He married Mary Gomersall in 1923. They had two daughters. He was a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He received the Freedom of the City of London in 1943. After his death, the Vulcan was completed by Stuart Davies, the man who had walked out of the wreckage, and it flew for the first time in 1952. It carried Britain's nuclear deterrent until Polaris took over in 1969.

The Lancaster's descendants outlasted him too. The Lancaster became the Lincoln, which became the Shackleton, which was still in RAF service in 1991. A night-school draughtsman's 1941 design was flying operationally 44 years after he died.

He trained at British Westinghouse in Trafford Park. Westinghouse became Metropolitan-Vickers. During the war, Metrovick built over a thousand Lancasters at that same Trafford Park site. The factory where he learned to draw built his bomber. Lancasters were also built at Avro's factory at Greengate in Chadderton before final assembly at Woodford, and that is where his blue plaque is today.

A night school draughtsman from Widnes who joined a cotton-mill aircraft company at 18 and designed the bomber that changed the course of the Second World War. Trained at Trafford Park. Built at Chadderton. Tested at Woodford. That's a Manchester legend.