to bases across Canada. This supply was suspended during the spring 1940 crisis caused by the fall of France and the evacuation at Dunkirk. The BCATP plan had envisaged that wingless Ansons would be supplied from overseas and fitted with wings built in Canada because of their wood content. Suddenly even fuselages were unavailable.
Canada would have to build Ansons from scratch. Federal Aircraft Ltd. was formed “almost overnight”18 to build the Anson 11, a version with American Jacobs L6MB radial engines instead of the Mark I’s British Armstrong-Whitworth Cheetahs and, for climatic reasons, fewer windows along its fuselage, DHC, one of five assembly plants organized under Federal’s program, built 375 Anson us. They were ideal transitional products for upgrading the skills of the DHC workforce, which nearly doubled to about a thousand workers in 1940.
So important was the Anson to the BCATP that an all-Canadian Anson v, which would use a higher proportion of wooden components, including moulded plywood skin surfaces, was developed by the National Research Council in Ottawa under the direction of the same Dick Hiscocks who had worked for de Havilland as an engineering student at the University of Toronto during the summer of 1937. As an ingenious, thoroughly re-engineered improvement on a proven design, more than a thousand of the Anson vs were produced at plants other than DHC.19
The intense demand for experienced engineers and tradespeople to staff the aircraft plants being constructed, sometimes within weeks, often worked out to DHC’S advantage. People were frequently shaken loose from established companies to work for new ones, but some had trouble adapting to workplaces that were being started from scratch.
One such luminary was the former chief engineer of Fairchild Aircraft of Longueuil, Quebec, a respected supplier of bush planes in Canada for many years. Francis Hyde-Beadle was exactly the pioneer of British aviation his hyphenated surname suggests. He was among the first engineers at Farnborough, the cradle of flight research in the U.K.—one of the first six technicians, in fact, to join the British Army’s Royal Balloon Factory, the origins of which extended back to 1882. Hyde-Beadle was there when one of the organization’s airplane designers and its test pilot was none other than the future Sir Geoffrey de Havilland. The Balloon Factory was renamed the Royal Aircraft Factory in 1911 to reflect Farnborough’s increasing preoccupation with powered, heavier-than-air flight.
Hyde-Beadle preferred working on specialized projects that required original design ideas, such as the combination float-fuel tanks on the Gloster racing planes that competed for the international Schneider Trophy, the epitome of air racing until Britain retired it by winning three consecutive times up to 1931. Looking for that kind of challenge after Farnborough ceded its experimental work to Britain’s aircraft manufacturers, Hyde-Beadle moved to the four-year-old Fairchild Aviation Corporation of Hagerstown, Maryland, in 1928. He was attracted by Sherman Fairchild’s determination to build advanced aircraft. Subsequently he moved to its plant at Longueuil, near Montreal, which opened in 1930 and produced a line of bush planes known for toughness, versatility and the ability to carry five to twelve passengers or a ton of mixed cargo.
In 1938 Hyde-Beadle was hired to head the engineering staff at National Steel Car’s new plant in Malton, built to assemble Handley-Page Hampden bombers and manufacture Westland Lysander army co-operation aircraft (it later became the Canadian Avro plant where the first six CF-105 Avro Arrow prototypes were built). NSC’s problems building the Hampden had less to do with engineering than with adapting methods suitable for producing railway rolling stock to aviation.
When he moved to DHC, Hyde-Beadle persuaded his right-hand production engineers, the Burlison brothers, George and Bill, to come with him. Like Hyde-Beadle, the Burlisons had grown up with aviation, following their father into Canadian Vickers’ Montreal plant. They too disliked the working culture at NSC.20 George joined the burgeoning production department and Bill became an inspector.
The first Avro Anson I of an eventual 264 assembled at Downsview for aircrew training in Canada. Camouflaged, with gun turrets, they arrived from Britain February 25, 1940 and were assembled that weekend. They flew Sunday and were delivered to the R.C.A.F. Monday, VIA GEORGE NEAL
Another distinguished addition from Vickers was Richard J. Moffett, a stress engineer who came to Montreal from England in 1928 and worked on the Vickers Vancouver flying-boat program. By mid-Depression, Vickers was down to four employees, but Moffett brought the company to life again in time to licence-build twenty modern all-metal Northrop Delta transports and the twenty outdated Supermarine Stranraer flying-boats that were Canada’s bicoastal aerial patrol force at the war’s outset. Moffett became Federal Aircraft’s general manager in mid-1940 to put together the Anson production consortium, but was unhappy there and resigned twice before being released to become production manager on Anson IIs at DHC that autumn.
“Suddenly,” writes Fred Hotson, who saw these changes firsthand, “DHC had a formidable factory management team—their own old-timers plus the cream of the Vickers/Fairchild experience. On his arrival at Downsview [Christmas Day, 1940] Moffett saw that the existing machine shop was completely inadequate, and he had a new one set up and furnished with the very latest equipment.”21
Hotson recalls that DHC’S two new brick buildings, “smelling of concrete and fresh paint,” were absorbed so smoothly into the expansion program of autumn 1940 that the company was soon being given such additional contracts as the conversion of another batch of seventy-five Anson is from Britain to Jacobs powerplants and the assembly of thirty-eight Fairey Battle single-engine bombers, some of which became target-towing aircraft for air training plan gunnery instruction. So far ahead of schedule was the production of Anson fuselages in 1941 that they became airborne without wings, engines or tails: the Ansons were being hung from the factory ceiling, like model airplanes, for storage.22
Two of the most outstanding Polish engineers who accompanied Jakimiuk to DHC in 1940 were the aerodynamicist W. Z. Stepniewski and Waclaw Czerwinski, a structures engineer. Aerodynamicist Dick Hiscocks would remember both as “very competent and stimulating people to be with.”23
Czerwinski, who had designed gliders in Poland, organized a DHC gliding club within the engineering department, members of which built their own glider in their spare time. He also came with plywood-forming expertise that proved invaluable when DHC became committed as a second source for the “Wooden Wonder,” the 400-mph Mosquito bomber from Hatfield that became one of the most versatile combat aircraft of the war. A group of the Polish engineers at DHC formed Canadian Wooden Aircraft to manufacture formed-plywood parts, often shaped into complex curves, that replaced parts made from strategically important metals.24 The Mosquito would eventually bomb Nazi rallies in Berlin with the aid of streamlined formed-plywood drop tanks made at first in a converted piano factory and later at a larger plant on Sorauren Avenue, both in Toronto.25
Czerwinski found himself in wide demand. He was involved with several similar projects at the National Research Council to replace metal with wood, including the Anson v, on which he worked with Hiscocks. He joined Avro Canada after the war and was part of the Arrow fighter project.
Stepniewski left DHC after the war to work for Frank Piasecki’s helicopter manufacturing company in Philadelphia and became one of the most respected vertical-flight engineers
