It seems that Jakimiuk consistently saw eye-to-eye with Phil Garratt, who had been involved with de Havilland Canada since 1928, when Garratt volunteered for hazardous work as a test and aircraft delivery pilot “just for the pleasure of it.”11 Like Jakimiuk, Garratt was one of his country’s aviation pioneers.
He had been one of the original student pilots at Canada’s first flying academy, the Curtiss Flying School, Toronto, in 1915.12 He soloed in a Curtiss Jenny, received his wings with the Royal Flying Corps in 1916 and spent that summer and fall as a fighter pilot with 70 Squadron. Garratt must have been an accomplished pilot; he was posted as an instructor to the noted Gosport School of Flying for the duration of the war. Like so many First War pilots, he became a barnstormer after he returned to Canada in 1919—in his case, with the Bishop Barker Flying Company.
Despite the cachet of its partners’ combined 122 victories in the skies over France (and the Victoria Cross each had been awarded), the company soon collapsed, leaving Garratt clear eyed about aviation’s immediate commercial possibilities.13 He managed his own chemical company from 1923 until 1936, when the enthusiastic part-timer was offered the general manager’s post at DHC. This was an opportunity to become the first Canadian to run the company.14 By then, it was beginning to look as if assembling airplanes might finally become a profitable business in Canada.
Garratt, pilot, salesman and manager, and Jakimiuk, the engineer’s engineer, had a lot in common, including outsized appetites for life. They looked on things from the same six-foot-plus viewpoint. Both were driven by big hearts. Each was, in his way, an aviation pioneer. Both recognized talent and appreciated the value of allowing young engineers free rein.
On December 17, 1939, the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan was launched in Ottawa, and by the following mid-March the first trainees were being taken on strength. Within a year there were sixty-seven training bases and ten advanced flying schools in Canada. The BCATP has been called Canada’s most important contribution to the war effort. As a central commitment around which a vast industrial complex had to be built, the air training plan generated activity far beyond the training of aircrew.
At these schools the most numerous aircraft types were the single-engine Harvard fighter trainer being built by Noorduyn near Montreal under licence from North American of Inglewood, California, and the twin-engine Avro Anson, in which bomber crews would be trained.15 The Anson was the Royal Air Force’s first monoplane aircraft with retractable landing gear when it was introduced in March 1936. While it was a total failure as an operational combat aircraft early in the war, it used mainly non-strategic materials in its construction and was widely available.16
DHC’S experience with the Anson started with the assembly of a used Anson 1 that arrived from England February 25, 1940, complete with gun turret and camouflage paint.17 A total of 264 second-hand Ansons, some with bullet-holes, were assembled and distributed 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