Barnes was the second son of Charles and Edith, born in 1887 in Ripley in Derbyshire where his father had an unsuccessful medical practice and where his mother longed to be home in Woolwich. The family soon moved to New Cross where a third child, Anne, was born and where Charles contracted polio. He soldiered on in spite of losing the use of a leg and managed modest success.
Barnes and his brother John were fortunate at being accepted by Christ’s Hospital school. This public school accepted pupils on the basis of need and, in view of Charles’ disability, welcomed the boys. John would pursue classical studies with distinction. For Barnes, fortune had anticipated his arrival by the involvement of the eccentric Professor Armstrong who championed science in schools. In Barnes’ day this found tangible expression in Dr Browne as science master.
As I have written elsewhere, science was a second class citizen, but Browne encourage Barnes who delighted in the subject and also modern languages. The time came for Barnes to leave and his father decided that there were not funds sufficient for Barnes to follow his brother to university. Barnes took but failed London matriculation and so had to look for work.
This came at the Thames Engineering Works which built engines for the Thames Shipbuilding Company. Barnes was bored, there being insufficient work. He had however fallen in love with ships and in 1908 moved to Cowes and indentures with John Samuel White shipbuilders.
I have written elsewhere of the key position of Vickers in the defence of the nation. This company and others were busy increasing the size of the Navy. The Germans, however, had begun serious work on Zeppelins. Vickers had already dabbled unsuccessfully, attracting criticism from an employee, H.B. Pratt whom Vickers had let go and who came to work alongside Barnes. With the start of the First World War, the Admiralty had a change of heart and instructed Vickers to follow Germany’s lead; Pratt was re-engaged and with him Barnes Wallis.
Wallis’s biographer J.E. Morpurgo sets out in embarrassing detail that politics and maladministration that surrounded the British zeppelin programme. Pratt and Wallis worked secretly on design, whilst Vickers at Barrow found endless reasons to slow their progress. The army would have nothing to do zeppelins and so it was left to the Navy, only part of which had any enthusiasm. On top of this both Pratt and Wallis deeply resented the blocking of repeated attempts by them to join up. As the war progressed so too did aeroplanes in which Pratt and Wallis had little involvement. It was four years of frustration.
The coming of peace saw no new enthusiasm for airships, but Vickers decided to hedge their bets and keep on a retainer Wallis who was then the country’s foremost designer. Wallis took the opportunity to take the degree which he had so wanted to take after leaving school. Alongside this academic achievement, he discovered that he had a gift in communication. His voice was delightful and he could engage an audience on many subjects. Over the coming years his technical papers too proved clear and compelling.
Over the next ten years the airship programme staggered forward as, with changes in government, the involvement of Vickers was brought into question. The Vickers programme of what became airship R100 at Holden in Yorkshire was joined by a government sponsored R101 at Cardington near Bedford. Instead of collaboration, there was fierce rivalry not from Wallis or his right hand man Neville Shute Norway but from their superiors. Wallis did manage to focus on the project and taught himself and the wider aeronautical engineering community a huge amount about flight. In this, the work of Lanchester comes to mind.
A key area which would hold Wallis in good stead in the forthcoming war years to come was geodetic construction, a latticework (show in the image) tightly covered with cloth. It was said that the ability of the Wellington bombers to return safely to base in spite of severe damage was the result of the inherent stability offered by the design. There were other technical advances: the use of alloys and the design of fuel tanks, to name but two.
Following the successful flight of the R100 to Canada, the R101 suffered a catastrophic crash in France only seven hours into its maiden flight to India. So much store had been placed in the project by an eager public, that the crash was met by widespread mourning, not least from Wallis. The airship programme came to a halt.
The ten years of the programme has taught Wallis and his colleagues a massive amount. For Wallis it had also seen his marriage to his much younger cousin Molly and the beginning of their family life together.
For Vickers, the end of the programme removed a barrier to Wallis joining Vickers Aviation, which after all had an enviable record with the Vimy. Wallis came with a glowing reputation and immediately impressed Pierson, the Chief Designer at Weybridge. A similar relationship with Mitchell who joined Vickers with Supermarine presented a greater challenge. A third relationship with chief test pilot Mutt Summers bore fruit from the start.
Key to the Vickers later success was Sir Robert McLean who believed in giving talent the resource and opportunity it needed despite the insistence of government that war was unthinkable. Vickers had been vilified after the First World War and government was for ever cautious of its relationship with the foremost arms manufacturer.
Wallis went about the design task alongside Pierson with total dedication. He allowed himself time for exercise but hid behind the masque of theVictorian father in his remoteness from his children leaving Molly to carry the family.
Wallis’s first design was for a biplane to meet Air Ministry specifications. Its crash made way for the monoplane with geodetic construction that Wallis favoured. McClean argued for it successful with the RAF hierarchy and the Wellesley was conceived. Such was the speed with which technology advanced that its successor the Wellington was conceived as soon as the Wellesley was born. Then politics reared their ugly head once more with the Air Ministry set on Handley Page’s Hampden. McClean argued long and hard and the Wellesley performed far ahead of specification. The Vickers board was desperate to nurture a good relationship with the Ministry and so McClean was forced to resign. Wallis’s champion had gone and the Ministry had set itself against geodetic construction.
With the coming of war, the Wellington was needed and Wallis was kept busy with modifications. He achieved both high altitude (40,000ft) and long distance. He had though a longer term project to crush Germany’s might: very large penetrating bombs. The old guard were reluctant to move away from the model of bombers as artillery in the air and fighters as airborne cavalry. Wallis saw a wholly new role in heavy targeted bombing. He designed a very large bomber capable of carrying such a bomb. He researched explosives and bomb casings. He mapped Germany’s industries and particular ways of attacking each. The Air Ministry wouldn’t listen and he had no McClean to bang his drum. The Ministry chose the Lancaster with its conventional construction designed by Roy Chadwick at Avro. There was a further issue which gave the Ministry concern, bomb aiming was simply insufficiently accurate for precision bombing.
The arrival of Beaverbrook at the Ministry of Aircraft Production offered a chink of light for the heavy bomb. Wallis’s paper entitled Method of Attack slowly garnered support and found expression in a newly formed Air Attacks on Dams Committee.
The story of the Dam Busters raid is well known. Less well known to me certainly was the attitudes of Bomber Harris, Charles Craven (Managing Director of Vickers) and Lord Cherwell (Lindemann, the scientist on whom Churchill relied). Taking Cherwell first, he simply couldn’t see the importance of the dams. Then Harris didn’t believe that pin point accuracy possible and so favoured blanket bombing. Craven like his predecessors was determined not to upset the Air Ministry. There was one further point I hadn’t picked up, Wallis had conceived a spherical bomb which would bounce like a Tudor canon ball on its way to hit a man-of-war. Small test models proved highly successful and were warmly welcomed by the Navy who adopted them to be dropped from de Havilland Mosquitoes. For a full size bomb the powers that be said a sphere would take too much scarce steel and hence the cylindrical version that actually destroyed the dams.
Wallis and his team went on to produce the Tallboy, a bomb designed to set off an earthquake reaction close to a highly defended rocket emplacement. In the event before the Tallboy could be used, the rockets were redeployed to mobile sites. Nevertheless the Tallboy was used, including in the successful attack of the Tirpitz. The other big bomb, the Grand Slam, was used to devastating effect in the final push into Germany.
After the war, Wallis remained with Vickers at Weybridge with a free ranging remit. He used this first to continue his exploration of aerodynamics with the Wild Goose glider which was launched from a trolley and then radio controlled using only wing moderation. The other was the Swallow, a rocket using a swing wing arrangement. In the American F111, it is possible to see the influence of the Wild Goose which Wallis had taken to the USA. The Swallow came into being as a possible swing-wing successor to the Valiant and influenced the design of the V Bombers.
It was not until 1968 that Wallis contribution to aviation was acknowledged with a knighthood. Wallis died in 1979 but had never really gave up inventing.
Further reading:
Morpurgo, J.E. Barnes Wallis (London: Longman, 1972)
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