Mr Pybus had a problem. It was 1915. The Great War looked like lasting a long time and Britain needed flying machines. Although it was only 12 years since the Wright brothers had made the first powered flight, the war had transformed the flimsy flying machines into vital weapons. Planes were needed to fight, to drop bombs and to spy on the enemy.
AS the war dragged on, Britain鈥檚 official aircraft manufacturer, the Royal Aircraft Factory, could no longer meet demand and so the work had to be farmed out to companies that had never built a plane before. One of the companies asked to lend a hand was the Phoenix Dynamo Manufacturing Company, a firm of electrical engineers in Bradford. John Pybus was its managing director.
The metal parts were no problem for a company that made innovative electrical machinery for the mining and texile industries. But the framework of early aircraft was made from wood and fabric braced with struts and wires.
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Undaunted, Pybus took his problem to the local Methodist Sunday School where he often put on a magic lantern show, aided by his friend Christopher Pratt, a member of a long-established local firm of cabinet-makers. Phoenix Dynamo鈥檚 workforce knew all about metal and engines, said Pybus, but Pratt鈥檚 workers understood the strengths and weaknesses of wood. Pratt also employed upholsterers who could cut and stretch fabrics, not to mention knock up a comfortable seat for the pilot. Perhaps between them they could build a plane?
Over the next few years, Pratt鈥檚 workers made parts for torpedo seaplanes and flying boats, bombers and trainers-even an experimental quadruplane. The blueprints offer a snapshot of people at work-people who spilt tea and splashed glue, engineers who were asked to explain something, and did, by scribbling a sketch in the margin. They tell of designers who made improvements as they went along, drawing their ideas on the backs of the blueprints.
The first problem came with the very first order. The Royal Naval Air Service wanted 12 Short 184s-seaplanes designed by the Short Brothers, pioneers in aircraft design. The Shorts though, as talented engineers, adjusted their designs as they built their planes-and there was no standard set of engineering drawings that other companies could work from. Phoenix Dynamo, roped into the great plane-making enterprise along with other companies, sent its own draughtsmen to measure up and draw all the parts 鈥渇rom life鈥�. Each draughtsman drew a part of the plane. Back at their own works, they made copies of all the components, swapping copies until everyone had a full set and work could start.
The next obstacle was labour. Both Phoenix Dynamo and Pratt鈥檚 lost many of their men when the call-up came. They desperately needed more workers. They took on barge-builders, who knew how to make things float-whether it was a barge or a float for a seaplane. Piano-makers were good with strings-which held together key parts of the early wooden planes. Organ-builders were skilled in cutting and shaping sheet metal-whether to make musical pipes or sockets to take wooden struts. They also hired upholsterers, toymakers and, in the absence of fit young men, they hired women.
They signed up mill girls, domestic servants, housewives and girls straight from school. Women who knew how to work with fabric covered fuselage and wings with strong, tightly woven linen, 鈥渄oping鈥� it with a petroleum-based compound which bonded with the fibres to form a smooth, hard skin.
Women鈥檚 work
But the women didn鈥檛 do just 鈥渨omen鈥檚 work鈥�. They were trained in every engineering skill imaginable. They traced and copied engineering drawings. They were taught how to measure, cut and fit parts as well as any engineer. And that wasn鈥檛 all. Like the men, they had to lift and shift large parts of the planes about, without the help of conveyor belts or forklift trucks. Towards the end of the war, women made up a third of the workforce.
Between 1916 and 1918, Pratt鈥檚 and Phoenix Dynamo turned out more than 150 planes. Although they built large numbers of Longhorn trainers, their speciality was seaplanes, planes with floats instead of wheels, and flying boats, bigger boat-like craft with wings. These were designed to take off and land on water.
The little Longhorns took off from local football fields. But how did the seaplanes ever get airborne? Today it seems astonishing that anyone would build flying boats and seaplanes in Bradford, a city at least 100 kilometres from the sea to both east and west. Amazingly, the finished aircraft were dismantled and the pieces carted to the coast on horse-drawn drays. Just getting some of the immense flying boats out of the works posed serious logistical problems. Overhead tram wires had to be taken down while fuselages and wings were removed from the factory and carted through the city streets. Even once they had left town, there were narrow, winding roads to negotiate. Where carters couldn鈥檛 get their loads around corners, they ploughed through hedges and fences and cut across the fields.
After the war, demand for planes dwindled almost to nothing and Bradford鈥檚 plane-making days ended as suddenly as they had begun. Phoenix Dynamo became part of English Electric and its aircraft division moved away from Bradford. Pratt鈥檚 went back to building fine furniture. The piano-makers went back to their pianos, the barge-builders to their barges-and the women back to their homes or the mills. But across the whole country something had changed. It was impossible to ignore the contribution women had made to the war effort .
In 1918, women were given the vote. Mr Pybus went on to become transport minister. And Pratt鈥檚 blueprints were walled up and forgotten.