Nevil Shute - Background

Background

Born in Somerset Road, Ealing, London, he was educated at the Dragon School, Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford. Shute's father, Arthur Hamilton Norway, became head of the post office in Ireland before the First World War, and was based at the main post office in Dublin in 1916 at the time of the Easter Rising. His son was later commended for his role as a stretcher bearer during the rising. Shute attended the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich but because of his stammer was unable to take up a commission in the Royal Flying Corps, instead serving in World War I as a soldier in the Suffolk Regiment. An aeronautical engineer as well as a pilot, he began his engineering career with de Havilland Aircraft Company but, dissatisfied with the lack of opportunities for advancement, he took a position in 1924 with Vickers Ltd., where he was involved with the development of airships and structural geodetic frame design. Shute worked as Chief Calculator (stress engineer) on the R100 airship project for the subsidiary Airship Guarantee Company. In 1929, he was promoted to Deputy Chief Engineer of the R100 project under Sir Barnes Wallis and when Wallis left the project he became the Chief Engineer.

The R100 was a prototype for passenger-carrying airships that would serve the needs of Britain's empire. The government-funded but privately-developed R100 was a success in that it made a successful return trip to and from Canada and also while in Canada local trips to Ottawa, Toronto and Niagara Falls from Montreal. But the fatal 1930 crash in France of its government-developed counterpart R101 while flying to India ended Britain's interest in airships. The Secretary of State for Air, Lord Thomson, died in this crash. The R100 was grounded and scrapped. Shute gives a detailed account of the episode in his 1954 autobiographical work, Slide Rule. He strongly hinted in this autobiography that if there had been co-operation between the two teams the tragedy of R101 could well have been averted. Shute's account of the airship development program, although seemingly objective, presents a hostile and distorted account of the R101 and says little of the problems of R100. Unfortunately his account has been taken as authoritative by many later writers on the subject.

He left Vickers shortly afterwards and in 1931 founded the aircraft construction company Airspeed Ltd.

Despite setbacks and tribulations, including the usual problem of the start-up business, liquidity, Airspeed Limited eventually gained significant recognition when its Envoy aircraft was chosen for the King's Flight. The innovation of fitting a retractable undercarriage to the Airspeed Courier, and his work on R100, earned Shute a Fellowship of the Royal Aeronautical Society.

Shute identified how engineering, science and design could improve human life and more than once used the apparently anonymous epigram "It has been said an engineer is a man who can do for five shillings what any fool can do for a pound...." It is said that Shute was a cousin of the red haired Irish-American actress Geraldine Fitzgerald. However, this seems to be a confusion with his account in his autobiography of his older brother Fred's proposal in Dublin in 1913 to the "ravishingly beautiful ... dark hair" Geraldine Fitzgerald who wanted to go on the stage. Fred Norway himself died of wounds in France in 1915.

On 7 March 1931, Shute married Frances Mary Heaton, a 28-year-old medical practitioner. They had two daughters, Heather and Shirley.

By the outbreak of World War II, Shute was already a rising novelist. Even as war seemed imminent he was working on military projects with his former Vickers boss Sir Dennistoun Burney. He joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a sub-lieutenant and quickly ended up in what would become the Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development. There he was a head of engineering, working on secret weapons such as Panjandrum, a job that appealed to the engineer in him. His celebrity as a writer caused the Ministry of Information to send him to the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944 and later to Burma as a correspondent. He finished the war with the rank of lieutenant-commander RNVR.

In 1948, after World War II, he flew his own Percival Proctor light airplane to Australia and back, with the writer James Riddell. On his return home, concerned about the general decline in his home country, he decided that he and his family would emigrate and so, in 1950, he settled with his wife and two daughters on farmland at Langwarrin, south-east of Melbourne. In Slide Rule quoted from the diary he kept during the R-100's successful test flight to Canada. Shute had written in 1930, "I would never have believed after a fortnight's stay I should be so sorry to leave a country." In 1954 he introduced that quote, "For the first time in my life I saw how people live in an English-speaking country outside England," and said it was interesting in light of his later decision to emigrate to Australia.

In the 1950s and '60s he was one of the world's best-selling novelists, although his popularity has since declined. However, he retains a core of dedicated readers who share information through various web pages such as The Nevil Shute Foundation.

He had a brief career as a racing driver in Australia between 1956 and 1958, driving a white XK140 Jaguar. Some of this experience found its way into his book On the Beach. Many of his books were filmed, including Lonely Road, Landfall, Pied Piper (1942 and 1990 (as "Crossing to Freedom")), On the Beach (in 1959 and also in 2000), No Highway (in 1951) and A Town Like Alice (in 1956). The last was serialised for Australian television in 1981, as was, a little later, The Far Country.

Shute lived a comfortable middle-class English life. His heroes tended to be middle class: solicitors, doctors, accountants, bank managers, engineers. Usually, like himself, they had enjoyed the privilege of university, not then within the purview of the lower classes. However (as in Trustee from the Toolroom), Shute valued the honest artisan and his social integrity and contributions to society, more than the contributions of the upper classes.

Shute died in Melbourne in 1960 after a stroke.