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An Old Captivity: Nevil Shute’S Requiem for the Golden Age of Aviation

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An Old Captivity: Nevil Shute’S Requiem for the Golden Age of Aviation 87 PLURAL SPACES, FICTIONAL MYSTERIES AN OLD CAPTIVITY: NEVIL SHUTE’S REQUIEM FOR THE GOLDEN AGE OF AVIATION FRED ERISMAN Texas Christian University Abstract: In 1940, the British engineer Nevil Shute Norway, writing as “Nevil Shute”, published An Old Captivity. Although the Second World War had begun, Shute chose to look backward, invoking for one last time the romance and excitement of the Golden Age of Aviation (1925-1940). Writing of a small-scale Arctic expedition and a mysterious dream linking two young people, he uses an important civil airplane, two moments of British national eminence in aviation, and an episode of trans-Atlantic flight to characterize the Golden Age. He poignantly invokes an era quickly vanishing, its excitement and innocence destroyed by war. Keywords: British aviation history, “Golden Age of aviation”, MacRobertson Race, Nevil Shute, World War II 1. Introduction When the British engineer-turned-author Nevil Shute (1899-1960) settled down to write his sixth novel, An Old Captivity (1940), Europe was going to pieces around him. Shute began his actual writing in 1939; by that time he had seen the German annexation of Czechoslovakia, the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and the world’s first experience of Blitzkrieg. As the German invasion of Poland began in September of 1939, waves of Ju-87 and He-111 bombers destroyed air defenses and Bf-109 fighters assured air superiority, while the air attacks were coordinated with mechanized Panzer units that swept across the country’s borders and crushed all ground resistance. The coming of a new kind of war was obvious to all, and only the question of where and when remained (Roberts 2011: passim). Earlier in 1939, Shute had published his fifth novel, What Happened to the Corbetts, a cautionary tale attempting to give an accurate portrayal of the effects of aerial bombing upon the British populace. Now, “sick of war, and war talk,” he began thinking of a happier time – the first two-thirds of the 1930s, the last months of “the heroic period of aviation” and a time commonly spoken of as the last, glorious days of the Golden Age of Aviation (Smith 2002: 38-39). It was a time when Shute himself, a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society and former managing director of the Airspeed aeronautical manufacturing firm, was deeply involved with aviation progress, helping to shape the technological evolution of the airplane (Shute 2000: 171-183). This is the time that he endeavoured to reconstruct, drawing upon one of the period’s most charismatic and aeronautically significant airplanes and three historical allusions of varying specificity. Two of the latter recall the newness of aviation in the 1930s and the tentative, but steady exploration of the airplane’s potential. A third at book’s end explicitly acknowledges some of the notable and most-publicised aerial achievements of the era. Through them he creates one last, nostalgic evocation of the age of aviation’s innocence, as the world hurtled into modern war. B.A.S. vol. XXV, 2019 88 2. An Old Captivity The story Shute tells is outwardly simple. The time is 1933. Out-of-work pilot Donald Ross is hired by Oxford don Cyril Lockwood to fly him and his daughter, Alix, to Greenland, where Lockwood wants to carry out a photo survey and archeological dig. As the little enterprise’s sole pilot and mechanic for their float-equipped airplane, Ross exhausts himself carrying out the expedition preparations, the flight to Greenland, and the actual flying of the survey itself, resorting at last to sleeping pills to deaden his compelling sense of responsibility. At their campsite, unsettled by an increasing attraction to Alix and drugged by fatigue and the pills, he lapses into a near-coma. In that state, he dreams of a former existence as Haki, a Scottish slave of Leif Ericson’s Viking explorers. In the dream, Ericson and his band cross the Atlantic Ocean in search of a timber-rich region, somewhere west of Greenland. As the trip proceeds, Haki falls in love with another of the group’s slaves, a young Scottish woman named Hekja. The two win Ericson’s respect with their devotion to scouting virgin territories, and he allows them to remain in the New World. When Ross awakens, the Lockwoods decide to end the expedition. Ross himself, recovered from his stupor but shaken by the dream and Hekja’s resemblance to Alix, agrees. They set out, flying along the eastern coast of Canada and the United States, at last reaching Cape Cod. There, stunned by the region’s similarity to the landscapes of his dream, Ross lands the seaplane in a tranquil bay. Going ashore, he discovers a rock carved with the names of Haki and Hekja. He has indeed lived a former life; Alix at the site also feels echoes of that existence, and the two look ahead to a life together. 2.1. The role of aviation in An Old Captivity For all his emphasis on Ross’s dream (which occupies only twenty-eight of the novel’s 333 pages), Shute’s greater concern is aviation’s Golden Age. He draws upon the latest in aircraft technology, equipping the expedition with one of the period’s most advanced aircraft. He then reflects at length on the many hopeful efforts, educational, scientific, and commercial, to build public awareness of aviation and aircraft technology and to explore and develop the prospects they offered. His novel as a whole points up how that progress leads to aviation’s saddening loss of innocence in the present of 1939-1940, as a machine once held to be an elevating and exalting device becomes known instead as a killing machine. Shute takes his readers back to a time before the world changed forever, and the resulting novel constitutes a memorable requiem for the innocence, excitement, and even heroism of the Golden Age of Flight (approximately 1925-1940). 2.2. Aeronautical technology and Shute’s choice of aircraft The Golden Age is characterized by the rapid evolution of aircraft and aircraft technology. The wood-framed, open-cockpit, wire-and-linen biplanes of the World War I era were giving way to sleek, metal-framed designs with single wings and enclosed cabins – craft more comfortable for the occupants and more efficient aeronautically. As an aeronautical engineer and executive of an aircraft firm, Shute of necessity was aware of these advances, and his knowledge is reflected in An Old Captivity. Despite his familiarity with British designs, he chooses to equip the Lockwood Expedition with an American-made “Cosmos.” 89 PLURAL SPACES, FICTIONAL MYSTERIES The craft, he says, is a single-engined, high-winged, cabin monoplane, seating six to seven occupants. Manufactured in Detroit, Michigan, and priced at $25,000, it is “a fine, robust, workmanlike seaplane, most suitable for the job it had to do.” (Shute 1940: 45, 81) As the story proceeds, readers learn further details about the ship. It is a metal-framed craft with fuel tanks in the wings and a larger reserve tank in the cabin, having a nominal range of fifteen hundred miles under optimum conditions. It is equipped with Edo pontoons (“the colonial type […] for beaching”) and a Pratt & Whitney “Wasp” engine that will stand up to the rigors of Arctic conditions, and is painted “chrome” orange overall for heightened visibility for rescuers in the event of a forced landing. In Ross’s opinion, it is “a very good machine […] the best I could get” (Shute 1940: 70, 90-91). While the Cosmos is fictional, Shute bases it upon an actual machine: the Lockheed “Vega”. The first Vegas, designed by Jack Northrop for the fledgling Lockheed Aircraft Company, appeared in 1927 and quickly captured the attention of the aeronautical world. The majority of the Vegas (and their descendants) were wooden – a molded-wood, bullet-like fuselage topped by a wooden wing rigidly braced by a series of internal trusses and covered with smooth plywood veneer. A high-winged, single-engined cabin monoplane, it was a singularly clean design; at a time when biplanes and external rigging were still commonplace, no external struts or wires marred its appearance or created unnecessary drag. In 1929 the Lockheed firm briefly became a division of the Detroit Aircraft Corporation (DAC), which manufactured ten metal-bodied Vegas, all powered by Pratt & Whitney Wasp engines. One of these metal Vegas was bought by Lieutenant- Commander Glen Kidston, a member of the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm, who believed that “British civil aviation [was] much in want of speed and modernization.” Using his Vega, he made record-setting flights from London to Paris and from London to Capetown, South Africa, in 1931, then futilely attempted to persuade the British aircraft industry to manufacture the craft under license (Allen 1993: 13-16, 99-100, 198, 226-227, 242). Meanwhile, the Vega was rapidly gaining world-wide recognition as a speedy, durable airplane. By 1930, Vegas had captured so many speed records that the company adopted the slogan, “It takes a Lockheed to beat a Lockheed” (Allen 1993: 34). Sir Hubert Wilkins flew Vegas on his Arctic and Antarctic forays of 1928. Wilfred R. May and Victor Horner in 1928 acquired a Vega (painted vividly orange, like Ross’s) and began commercial service in the Canadian outback; their experiences with rigorous winter conditions anticipate those Ross experiences (Gwynn-Jones 1991: 246-247). The respected trade journal Flight devoted a detailed article to Kidston’s ship, and later talked at length of potential Lockheed entries in the MacRobertson Race of 1934 (“The Lockheed ‘Vega’” 1931: 288-89; “The England-Australia Race” 1934: 830-831).
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