Facebook post #026 (Jul 2020)
Aero-engines played a big part in my Grandad‘s working life. He worked for the Air Ministry at the start of the war, and had to drive around the Midlands inspecting Merlin production, probably at the 21 shadow factories operated by Alvis. One was the peacetime producer of Tizer soft drinks! I remember a story about him stopping at a phone box to warn a test facility of his own approach. Health and safety rules prohibited running more than 8 engines at a time: as he arrived he would hear 8 engines slowing up, leaving the permitted 8 running. As he drove away, he would hear the second bank starting up again.
Grandad mistrusted seatbelts as he once had cause to leap across to the passenger seat when a tank transporter (pic1) took out the driver’s side of his car, during the blackout.
At some point, he transferred to Alvis, who were making and repairing Rolls Royce V12 Merlin engines (pic2), as used in Spitfires and Lancasters (pic3).
This was in a new 1936 plant intended first for French engines under licence, and then for their own Leonides design. The men from the Ministry changed their minds on both designs, and instructed that the first batch of Leonides engines be destroyed. Grandad had them bricked up at the back of the factory instead…
I know that he went to work in Coventry in April 1941 after it had been flattened in the air raids, and I’ve heard the stories about people working in roofless factories with salvaged machine tools to keep production going. But I was surprised to see – last year at Coventry Transport Museum – an enlargement of a German reconnaissance map clearly showing the aero-engine factory.
I subsequently discovered that the Germans were able to eliminate the plant with extraordinarily precise and destructive bombing. I then found out that the bombing was better than the intelligence: the target had actually been the car plant, the aero-engine plant having been built in the empty space to the north! So that put pay to any further production of the lovely pre-war cars like the Speed 25 and Silver Eagle.
In 1944, the government allowed Alvis to start planning for peace, and the Leonides was dusted down. Those early Leonides units were used in the first hovercraft and early helicopters.
They did eventually make cars after the war but the main business was armoured cars.
When BAe had finished with the name, Alvis was bought by enthusiasts, who started on a mission to complete the batch of cars (and engines) originally planned for 1939!
