Nevil Shute

Nevil Shute
Born (1899-01-17)17 January 1899
London, England
Died 12 January 1960(1960-01-12) (aged 60)
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Pen name Nevil Shute
Occupation Novelist
aeronautical engineer
Nationality British, emigrated to Australia 1950
Genre Fiction

Nevil Shute Norway (17 January 1899 – 12 January 1960) 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 any potential negative publicity in connection with his novels.

Early life

Born in Somerset Road, Ealing, London, he was educated at the Dragon School, Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford; he graduated from Oxford University 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.[1] 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.[2]

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 the Great War as a soldier in the Suffolk Regiment.[1]

Career in aviation

An aeronautical engineer as well as a pilot, he began his engineering career with the De Havilland Aircraft Company. (He used his pen-name as an author to protect his engineering career from any potential negative publicity in connection with his novels.)[3]

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 (stress engineer) 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.[1]

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 1930 return trip to and from Canada and while in Canada undertook 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 British interest in dirigibles. The Secretary of State for Air, Lord Thomson, was killed in the crash along with many senior figures in the airship development programme.[1] 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, Slide Rule. 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.[4]

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.[1]

A site was available in a former trolleybus garage on Piccadilly, York.[5] 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. 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, Heather 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 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. 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."[6]

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.

Literary career

Shute's first novel, the novella Stephen Morris, was written in 1923, but not published until 1961.

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" (Ruined City) or brilliant boffin (No Highway).

Another recurrent theme is the bridging of social barriers such as class (Lonely Road and Landfall), race (The Chequer Board) or religion (Round the Bend). The Australian novels are individual hymns to that country, with subtle disparagement of the mores of the United States (Beyond the Black Stump) and overt antipathy towards the post-World War II socialist government of Shute's native Britain (The Far Country and In the Wet).

Shute's heroes tended to be like himself: middle class solicitors, doctors, accountants, bank managers, engineers, generally university graduates. 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.

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 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."[7]

Several of Shute's novels explore the boundary between accepted science and rational belief on the one hand, and mystical or paranormal possibilities, including reincarnation, on the other hand. Shute does this by including elements that can be considered fantasy or science fiction in novels that are classified as mainstream. These are based in elements that would be considered religious, mystical, or psychic phenomena in the British vernacular when they were written. These include: Buddhist astrology and folk prophecy in The Chequer Board; the effective use of a ouija board in No Highway; a messiah figure in Round the Bend; and past and future lives with a psychic connection, near-future science fiction, and Aboriginal psychic powers in In the Wet.

Twenty-four of his novels and novellas have been published. 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, and in 1997 a six-part radio version of A Town Like Alice was broadcast on BBC Radio 2 starring Jason Connery, Becky Hindley, Bernard Hepton and Virginia McKenna, who had starred as the novel's heroine, Jean Paget, in the film version. The work was dramatised by Moya O'Shea, produced by Tracey Neale and David Blount and directed by David Blount. It won a Sony Award in 1998. The Far Country was made as a TV movie in 1988.

Vintage Books reprinted all 23 of his books in 2009.[8]

Post war activities

In 1948, after the Second World War, Shute flew his own Percival Proctor light aeroplane 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.[9] In Slide Rule, quoting from the diary he kept during the R100'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 the light of his later decision to emigrate to Australia.[10] Although he intended to remain in Australia, he did not take out Australian citizenship, but at that time it would have been an unnecessary formality as he would have had the same rights as an Australian citizen because he was a British subject.[11]

In the 1950s and 1960s he was one of the world's best-selling novelists, although his popularity has since declined in Australia.[12]

Between 1956 and 1958 in Australia, he took up car racing as a hobby, driving a white Jaguar XK140.[13] Some of this experience found its way into his book On the Beach.

Shute died in Melbourne in 1960 after a stroke.[14]

Works

Classification

Shute's works can be divided into three sequential thematic categories, centred round World War II:

The Pre-War category comprises Stephen Morris, Pilotage, Marazan, So Disdained, Lonely Road, Ruined City and An Old Captivity; also the film script Vinland the Good.

The War category comprises What Happened to the Corbetts, Landfall, Pied Piper, Pastoral, Most Secret, The Chequer Board and The Seafarers.

Most novels in the Post-War category are at least partially set in Shute's adopted country of Australia. It comprises No Highway, A Town Like Alice, Round the Bend, The Far Country, In the Wet, Requiem for a Wren, Beyond the Black Stump, On the Beach, The Rainbow and the Rose and Trustee from the Toolroom.

Honours

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.[18]

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.[19]

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Ryan, A. P. "Extract from the Dictionary of National Biography 1951–1960". Nevil Shute Foundation. Retrieved 23 April 2015.
  2. ↑ "Photo Timeline: 1911–1920 page 2". Nevil Shute Foundation. Archived from the original on 19 April 2012. Retrieved 10 June 2016.
  3. ↑ Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer (1954) ISBN 1-84232-291-5 pages 44–45; (1964) p. 63.
  4. ↑ Squires, Arthur (1986). The Tender Ship. Birkhauser. pp. 3–10.
  5. ↑ Stead, Mark (26 October 2013). "New aviation museum planned for city centre". The Press. York.
  6. ↑ Gerald Pawle (1957), Secret Weapons of World War II (original title, The Secret War), 1967 reprint, New York: Ballantine, Part II, "The Enemy under the Waters", Ch. 18, "Harrying the U-boats", pp. 183-186.
  7. ↑ Quote from Shute's autobiography Slide Rule, 2nd ed., London: Pan, 1969, p. 63
  8. ↑ Hensher, Philip (4 December 2009). "Nevil Shute: profile". The Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved 12 April 2013.
  9. ↑ Croft (2002)
  10. ↑ Slide Rule, (1964), pp. 113–114.
  11. ↑ "Citizenship in Australia – Fact sheet 187". National Archives of Australia. Retrieved 28 December 2012.
  12. ↑ Meacham, Steve (25 July 2003). "Remaindered with little honour in his adopted land". The Sydney Morning Herald.
  13. ↑ "Photo Timeline 1951–1960 page 5". Nevil Shute Norway Foundation. Retrieved 11 June 2013.
  14. ↑ "Books: The Two Lives of Nevil Shute", Time, 25 January 1960. Retrieved 24 April 2011.
  15. ↑ Milgram, Shoshana. "The Seafarers". Book Review. Nevil Shute Norway Foundation. Retrieved 18 August 2011.
  16. ↑ Haigh, Gideon (June 2007). "Shute the Messenger – How the end of the world came to Melbourne (6800 words)". The Monthly (24). Retrieved 12 September 2013.
  17. ↑ Haigh, Gideon (1 June 2007). "Shute's sands of time". The Daily Telegraph. Australia. Retrieved 11 September 2013.
  18. ↑ Alice Springs public library history Retrieved 29 April 2013
  19. ↑ 100 Best Novels Retrieved 2 May 2013

References

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