failed to secure fame through breaching the dams, he would have deserved notice as a remarkable human being. He was the son of a doctor who practised in London’s humble New Cross area, hampered by having suffered polio. Barnes, born in 1887, attended a minor public school, Christ’s Hospital, only after winning a scholarship. He missed university, and instead became an engineering apprentice at a shipbuilding firm, then in 1913 graduated to working on airship development for the industrial giant Vickers. While he was adequately paid, his finances were chronically strained by his insistence upon aiding other members of his unlucky family. No stranger to pawnbrokers’ shops, he once sold a bicycle to pay for his parents to enjoy a holiday.
When World War I came, Wallis’s repeated attempts to join the army foundered because Vickers reclaimed his services. He served for a few months on airships, with the rank of sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Air Service, but retained a lifelong guilt that he had not fought as did most of his contemporaries. In 1922, with the post-war run-down of the armed forces, Vickers abandoned airship production and made Wallis redundant. During the years that followed, somewhat unexpectedly he served as a part-time Territorial Army soldier in an anti-aircraft artillery unit. For a time he studied for an external degree at London University, and was reduced to seeking employment through the scholastic agency Gabbitas Thring, who found work for him as a mathematics teacher at an English school in Switzerland. It was from there, as a bachelor already thirty-five, that he began writing to his seventeen-year-old cousin by marriage, Molly Bloxam, to whom he explained mathematical formulae, then progressed to discussing technical and physics issues that fascinated him. Their correspondence developed into a romance. In that long-ago era before social telephoning, he wrote ten- to twelve-page letters to his beloved, signing himself ‘your affectionate cousin’.
Molly soon pledged her heart to Barnes, but her father was wary of this middle-aged ‘cradle-snatcher’, for a year restricting their correspondence to a letter apiece a fortnight. It was only in April 1925, three years to the day after they met, that they were finally married – to live happily ever after. The Wallises never became rich, but in 1930 they achieved chintzy middle-class comfort in a mock-Tudor suburban home at Effingham in Surrey which eventually hosted the rumpus generated by four noisy children. This largely self-taught polymath rejoined Vickers in the year of his wedding as assistant chief designer, working on the R100, then the largest airship ever built. While labouring at this day job he found time for bell-ringing in the village church and service on the parish council – he was a devout Christian and vegetarian. Until war came he practised Sunday observance, declining even to read a newspaper. A friend wrote of a conversation with Wallis in which he exuberantly expressed his admiration for God: ‘My dear boy, do you realise that the Almighty has arranged a system whereby millions of electric circuits pass up and down a single cord no bigger than my little finger, and each one most beautifully insulated. The spinal cord is an absolute marvel of electronics!’ So deep was Wallis’s attachment to family that for most of his life he subsidised, and indeed supported, first his father, then his grown-up sister and her husband.
All the Wallises were music-lovers, and Barnes played an occasional round of golf on the course adjoining his garden. He proved an ingenious handyman around the house, and an imaginative wood-carver. Though not teetotal, the family drank little, and never succumbed to extravagance. Barnes took a cold bath every morning. For all his devotion to Molly, he could be a stern paterfamilias. ‘We were used to my father isolating himself in his study at the top of the house,’ said his daughter Mary. ‘Always working, often abstracted, he was frequently absent from the daily round of chat, laughter and games which large families enjoy. But when he did join in it was lively and great fun. Even in the darkest days he would burst into cheerful, spontaneously made-up doggerel verse under the name “Spokeshave-on-Spur”, which delighted us all.’ Wallis relaxed discipline on annual family camping and walking holidays. Mary described how, on a Dorset beach, he taught his children to skim flat stones: ‘Mine went plop, plop and sank. His would slide smoothly with six or seven hops and quietly submerge.’ Barnes and Molly, their daughter added, ‘succeeded in protecting us from fear, anxiety, hunger or distress’, a notable achievement for any parents.
Yet Wallis’s stubborn, spiky eccentricities not infrequently engaged him in quarrels. There was a peculiar episode when Molly met, admired and brought home to Effingham the great birth-control evangelist Marie Stopes. She and Barnes disliked each other on sight, and continued to do so, though her son Harry eventually married the engineer’s daughter Mary. At the outset, Wallis and Stopes argued fiercely over his indulgence and indeed encouragement of Molly’s semi-overt breastfeeding of her baby of the moment, a practice which the visitor deemed barbaric.
Barnes’s favourite domestic relaxation was to read aloud to Molly from Dickens, Hardy or Jane Austen while she mended the children’s clothes. The Wallises were good people, if that is not an inadequate adjective, committed to the virtues of honesty, family and honourable behaviour. This tall, angular figure was also, of course, a workaholic. ‘He was a collision of times,’ observes Richard Morris. ‘In manners and values he was of the 1890s; in aerodynamic possibility, of the 2030s or beyond. He combined confidence, self-pity, vision, regret, hope, loyalty, disdain and ten-score other characteristics.’
To understand Wallis’s wartime experiences it is important to recognise that, while his talents and imagination were remarkable, he was very far from right about everything. All his life he pursued doomed projects with the same manic, obsessive commitment that he brought to those that prospered. Throughout a long association with airships, he failed to perceive that winged aircraft represented the future, writing to a colleague soon after World War I: ‘All my heart is in airships, and I have worked so hard.’ He championed their cause, and especially that of the R100, even after the 1930 incineration of the R101, together with similar disasters in the United States, had laid bare inherent limitations of the lighter-than-air concept.
In 1933 the M.1/30, a prototype torpedo biplane which Wallis designed, broke up in mid-air, though the structural failure was not his fault. Its test pilot, Captain Joe ‘Mutt’ Summers, took to his parachute successfully, but the plane’s observer had a close brush with death when his straps became entangled with the rear machine-gun as the wreck screamed earthwards. The man was fortunate to escape, and to deploy his canopy, before the plane spun into the ground. While Wallis was often applauded for creating the geodetic framework of the Wellesley and Wellington bombers – latticing derived from his wiring system for harnessing the gasbags of airships, which created exceptional fuselage strength – other nations concluded that it was too complex to be cost-effective, and the RAF spurned geodetic frameworks for its later heavy bombers.
Between 1941 and 1943 the foremost brains of Vickers-Armstrong were engaged in creating a new aircraft, christened the Windsor, armed with 20mm cannon, capable of carrying a bomb load of fifteen tons at a speed of 300 mph. Rex Pierson, Barnes Wallis – who held the title of Assistant Chief Designer (Structures) – and supporting teams of engineers and draughtsmen devoted countless hours to this project, which never advanced beyond the prototype stage. The ever-improving performance of the Avro Lancaster, which entered service in 1942, made the Windsor redundant, though work on it continued through 1944.
None of the above is intended to detract from Wallis’s achievements – merely to explain why it was not unreasonable for those in authority to greet with caution his higher flights of imagination. At one time and another of his life, large sums of public money were expended on the development of devices, weapons, and indeed aircraft which failed after he had proclaimed their virtues at Whitehall meetings with the same messianic fervour he deployed in advocating his winners.
Moreover, Wallis was only one among a host of enthusiastic inventors peddling ambitious schemes to the armed forces. Lord Cherwell, the prime minister’s favourite scientist, railroaded into the experimental stage an absurd scheme for frustrating enemy aircraft with barrages of aerial mines. Cherwell likewise promoted a CS – Capital Ship – bomb that was an expensive failure, as were early British AP – Armour-Piercing – bombs. Lord Louis Mountbatten, as director of combined operations, sponsored a scheme for creating aircraft-carriers contrived
