Nevil Shute


Nevil Shute Norway was an English novelist and aeronautical engineer who spent his later years in Australia. He used his full name in his engineering career and Nevil Shute as his pen name to protect his engineering career from inferences by his employers or fellow engineers that he was not a serious person or from potential negative publicity in connection with his novels, which included On the Beach and A Town Like Alice.

Early life

Shute was born in Somerset Road, Ealing, then in Middlesex, in the house described in his novel Trustee from the Toolroom. He was educated at the Dragon School, Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford; he graduated from Oxford in 1922 with a third-class degree in engineering science.
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. Shute himself was later commended for his role as a stretcher-bearer during the rising. On 13 June 1915 his elder brother, Fredrick Hamilton Norway, aged 19, was wounded at Epinette, near Armentières, and was evacuated to Wimereux where he died, on 4 July, with his parents by his side. He was buried at Wimereux Communal Cemetery, Pas-de-Calais.
Shute attended the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and trained as a gunner, but because of his stammer he was unable to take up a commission in the Royal Flying Corps in the Great War. He served as a soldier in the Suffolk Regiment, enlisting in the ranks in August 1918. He guarded the Isle of Grain in the Thames Estuary, and served in military funeral parties in Kent during the 1918 flu pandemic.

Career in aviation

An aeronautical engineer as well as a pilot, Shute began his engineering career with the de Havilland Aircraft Company.
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, working as Chief Calculator on the R100 airship project for the Vickers subsidiary Airship Guarantee Company. In 1929 he was promoted to Deputy Chief Engineer of the R100 project under 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 made a successful 1930 round trip to Canada. While in Canada it made trips from Montreal to Ottawa, Toronto and Niagara Falls. The fatal 1930 crash near Beauvais, France of its government-developed counterpart R101 ended British interest in dirigibles. The R100 was immediately grounded and subsequently scrapped.
Shute gives a detailed account of the development of the two airships in his 1954 autobiographical work, . His account is very critical of the R101 design and management team, and strongly hints that senior team members were complicit in concealing flaws in the airship's design and construction. In The Tender Ship, Manhattan Project engineer and Virginia Tech professor Arthur Squires used Shute's account of the R100 and R101 as a primary illustration of his thesis that governments are usually incompetent managers of technology projects.
In 1931, with the cancellation of the R100 project, Shute teamed up with the talented de Havilland-trained designer A. Hessell Tiltman to found the aircraft construction company Airspeed Ltd.
A site was available in a former trolleybus garage on Piccadilly, York. Despite setbacks, including the usual problems of a new business, Airspeed Limited eventually gained recognition when its Envoy aircraft was chosen for the King's Flight. With the approach of war, a military version of the Envoy was developed, to be called the Airspeed Oxford. The Oxford became the standard advanced multi-engined trainer for the RAF and British Commonwealth, with over 8,500 being built.
For the innovation of developing a hydraulic retractable undercarriage for the Airspeed Courier, and his work on R100, Shute was made a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society.
On 7 March 1931, Shute married Frances Mary Heaton, a 28-year-old medical practitioner. They had two daughters, Felicity and Shirley.

Second World War

By the outbreak of the Second World War, Shute was already a rising novelist. Even as war seemed imminent he was working on military projects with his former boss at Vickers, Sir Dennistoun Burney. He was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a sub-lieutenant, having joined as an elderly yachtsman and expected to be in charge of a drifter or minesweeper, but after two days he was asked about his career and technical experience. He reached the "dizzy rank" of lieutenant-commander, knowing nothing about "Sunday Divisions" and secretly afraid when he went on a little ship that he would be the senior naval officer and "have to do something".
So he 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. He also developed the Rocket Spear, an anti-submarine missile with a fluted cast iron head. After the first U-boat was sunk by it, Charles Goodeve sent him a message concluding "I am particularly pleased as it fully substantiates the foresight you showed in pushing this in its early stages. My congratulations."
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 in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserves.

Literary career

Shute's first novel, Stephen Morris, was written in 1923, but not published until 1961.
His first published novel was Marazan, which came out in 1926. After that he averaged one novel every two years through the 1950s, with the exception of a six-year hiatus while he was establishing his own aircraft construction company, Airspeed Ltd. His popularity grew slowly with each novel, but he became much more famous after the publication of his third to last book, On the Beach, in 1957.
Shute's novels are written in a simple, highly readable style, with clearly delineated plot lines. Where there is a romantic element, sex is referred to only obliquely. Many of the stories are introduced by a narrator who is not a character in the story. The most common theme in Shute's novels is the dignity of work, spanning all classes, whether an Eastern European bar "hostess" or brilliant boffin. His books are in three main clusters, early pre-war flying adventures; second world war; and Australia.
Another recurrent theme is the bridging of social barriers such as class, race, or religion. The Australian novels are individual hymns to that country, with subtle disparagement of the mores of the United States and overt antipathy towards the post-World War II socialist government of Shute's native Britain.
Shute's heroes tended to be like himself: middle-class solicitors, doctors, accountants, bank managers, engineers, generally university graduates. However, Shute valued the honest artisans and their social integrity and contributions to society more than the contributions of the upper classes.
Aviation and engineering provide the backdrop for many of Shute's novels. He identified how engineering, science, and design could improve human life and more than once used the anonymous epigram, "It has been said an engineer is a man who can do for ten shillings what any fool can do for a pound."
Several of Shute's novels explored the boundary between accepted science and rational belief, on the one hand, and mystical or paranormal possibilities, including reincarnation, on the other hand. Shute did this by including elements of fantasy and science fiction in novels that were considered mainstream. They included Buddhist astrology and folk prophecy in The Chequer Board; the effective use of a Planchette in No Highway; a messiah figure in Round the Bend; reincarnation, science fiction, and Aboriginal psychic powers in In the Wet.
Twenty-four of his novels and novellas have been published. Many of his books have been adapted for the screen, including Lonely Road in 1936; in 1949; Pied Piper in 1942 and again in 1959, and also as Crossing to Freedom, a CBS made-for-television movie, in 1990; On the Beach in 1959 and again in 2000 as a two-part miniseries; and No Highway in 1951. A Town Like Alice was adapted into a film in 1956, serialised for Australian television in 1981, and also broadcast on BBC Radio 2 in 1997 starring Jason Connery, Becky Hindley, Bernard Hepton and Virginia McKenna. Shute's 1952 novel The Far Country was filmed for television as six one-hour episodes in 1972, and as a two-part miniseries in 1987.
Vintage Books reprinted all 23 of his books in 2009.
Shute's final work was published more than 40 years after his death. The Seafarers was first drafted in 1946–47, subsequently rewritten, and then put aside. In 1948, Shute again rewrote it, changing the title to Blind Understanding, but he left the manuscript incomplete. According to Dan Telfair in the foreword of the 2002 edition, some of the themes in The Seafarers and Blind Understanding were used in Shute's 1955 novel Requiem for a Wren.

Activities after the war

In 1948, Shute flew his own Percival Proctor aeroplane to Australia and back, accompanied by the writer James Riddell, who published a book, Flight of Fancy, based on the trip, in 1950.
On his return, concerned about what he saw as the decline of his home country, he decided that he and his family would emigrate to Australia. In 1950, he settled with his wife and two daughters on farmland at Langwarrin, south-east of Melbourne. Remembering his 1930 trip to Canada and his decision to emigrate to Australia, he wrote, in 1954, "For the first time in my life I saw how people live in an English-speaking country outside England." Although he intended to remain in Australia, he did not apply for Australian citizenship, which was at that time a mere formality because he was a British subject.
In the 1950s and 1960s he was one of the world's best-selling novelists, although his popularity has since declined in Australia.
Between 1956 and 1958 in Australia, he took up car racing as a hobby, driving a white Jaguar XK140. Some of this experience found its way into his book On the Beach.
Shute died in Melbourne in 1960 after a stroke.

Works

Norway Road and Nevil Shute Road at Portsmouth Airport, Hampshire were both named after him. Shute Avenue in Berwick, Victoria was named after him, when the farm used for filming the 1959 film On The Beach was subdivided for housing.
The public library in Alice Springs, Northern Territory is the Nevil Shute Memorial Library.
In the Readers' List of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels of the 20th century, A Town Like Alice came in at number 17, Trustee from the Toolroom at 27, and On the Beach at 56.