At first, all seems to have gone well. New Elizabethans like the young Hamilton-Paterson thrilled to the feats of test pilots scything the latest experimental jets over and along genteel south coast resorts, or else pirouetting above them at crowded Farnborough air shows. The assumption for boys of Hamilton-Paterson's generation, born during the second world war, was that British was rip-roaringly best.
One new aircraft after another appeared to take to the skies above southern England, each piloted by a self-deprecating daredevil who would as soon jump into the cockpit of some untried bomb-on-wings as whirl a girl in a swirling frock around the floor of the Café de Paris. Hamilton-Paterson cites the likes of Neville Duke, John Cunningham, Roland Beamont and Peter Twiss, as familiar to the public then, he says, as footballers are today, although they were charged with "extra voltage" because they had all flown in the war and were "authentic heroes".
While it was hard not to admire such men, it was harder – much harder – to thrill to the inner workings and commercial dimwittedness of the companies that built the craft they flew. And it is here, at the core of this book, that Hamilton-Paterson is at his convincing best. Britain certainly had the boffins and blueprints to fly into the future; what it lacked was the necessary back-up by politicians, management and labour. The decline of its aircraft industry – one that had shone like fireworks in the 1940s – makes for sorry if illuminating reading.
It is heartbreaking to hear about Beverly Shenstone, the Canadian aerodynamist who shaped the superbly efficient wing of the Spitfire alongside Reginald Mitchell at Supermarine, speaking at an industry conference in 1953. As chief engineer of British European Airways, Shenstone told how, "
in the UK, the average finish given to aircraft is far inferior to that given to the average American aircraft".
He said he had seen workers dragging wings across factory floors.
Stanley Hooker, chief engineer of the Bristol Aeroplane Company's engine division, believed the "Bristol lunch" to be symptomatic of all that was going wrong with the industry. This meal, he said, was the "biggest obstacle to Bristol's progress". How so? "In each factory, the top man had his own little private dining room. We would start with hot canapés while we partook of sherry. Then we would sit down to a multi-course lunch ending with cheese, fruit and coffee – and, on occasion, brandy." Management of the school of Terry-Thomas proved, far too often, to be little more than a "shower", tucking into club-like luncheons while the industry fell to earth around them.
Hamilton-Paterson reminds us that all too many British production aircraft of the time were little more than prototypes, bristling with faults. The De Havilland Comet jet
airliner made its debut in 1951, and yet it took a further six years before its flight was as good as this jet-age Spitfire should have been in the first place.
Wrapped around this tale of Britain and the decline and fall of its native aircraft industry, however, are any number of literary flights of fancy, some that take wing, others that feel a little over-ornate and even unnecessary. If Hamilton-Paterson shows a weakness, it is in the way he sometimes seems like a lively raconteur at a dinner party who has a great story to tell, yet is simply unable to stop himself indulging in diversion after diversion. This makes him speed up at other times, as if trying to keep on course, so that too many aircraft and people come and go as
Empire of the Clouds enters its final approach.