“Phil Garratt didn’t believe in formal organization,” aerodynamicist Dick Hiscocks recalls. “He didn’t like titles. He said, ‘You know what you’re here for. Go and do it.’” Hiscocks remembers appealing to him at one point after the war for more of an organization chart in engineering. “He said, ‘Your job is to be where you’re needed.’”2
“He gave us a lot of freedom. We never punched time-clocks. People came in late and stayed later. We didn’t ask for time off. Of course, you’d come in on Sunday, too.
“Jakimuk encouraged people to come forward with their ideas—like Fred Buller. I wasn’t used to that in a senior man. It was a very co-operative, friendly atmosphere.”
A family is the term many oldtimers use to describe the pre-Mosquito DHC. In fact, a lot of de Havilland was families. There were, among many others, the Burlison brothers, George and Bill, who, with their father, had worked for Canadian Vickers ever since they were building varnished mahogany-planked Vedette flying boats. Or John and George Neal and their sister Kay, each a pioneer there. John was the first Neal to work at DHC, a distinction in itself. George float-certified the Beaver and took the Otter up for its first flight. Kay Neal’s career at DHC personifies the wartime growth of the company. Originally a seamstress, she rose from Betty McNicoll’s dope shop, where she fitted snug fabric skins to stick-and-wire biplanes and painted them with dope to form a tough, slick surface, to fabricating bulletproof rubber fuel tank liners for Mosquitoes in a shop filled with potentially explosive fumes. (No wonder Kay eventually became secretary-treasurer of de Havilland Local 112 of the Canadian Auto Workers in 1949.) Phil knew them all before the wartime surge in employment made knowing every employee’s name out of the question.
The transition from one type of organization to the other was an intense, painful sidelight to one of the most glorious chapters in aviation history: the often-told story of the DH.98 Mosquito’s secret development in an old mansion, Salisbury Hall. How the project persevered despite the determination of British aircraft production czar Lord Beaverbrook to kill it—Beaverbrook is said to have ordered it closed down three times. How the company’s test pilots, including Geoffrey de Havilland Jr., overcame with spectacular flight demonstrations the Royal Air Force’s early reluctance to embrace the cheeky speedster that would soon interrupt speeches by Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels in Berlin, in broad daylight, five hours apart on the same day.3 Mixed emotions remain with the Downsview veterans from the company’s difficult metamorphosis into a prime contractor for what was, until the last year of the wat, the Allies’ fastest aircraft.
Garratt masterminded this growth. In the year leading up to the decision to build the Mosquito, DHC’s staff had grown 140 per cent. By March 1942 the parking lot was being expanded to handle the cars of 2,400 employees, and a new cafeteria had replaced the circus tent in which workers had been lunching. By the end of 1942 DHC’s employees had more than doubled once more.4 Hotson remembers that it seemed at the time that no amount of new square footage would be enough.
Managing that kind of growth requires creativity and the ability to adjust, but as the company grew it became less and less the kind of place where the top banana could walk the production lines every day, let alone know all the employees’ names. The organization chart was being revised monthly. It was no longer a family-type operation. Garratt deserves credit for overseeing such explosive growth, which brought with it new requirements for internal communication, personnel and, above all else, training. But a gentleman with the personal touch is not necessarily the right guy to push production hard.
Lee Murray, Garratt’s predecessor as DHC managing director, who had since become GM at Hatfield, arrived at Downsview at the end of July 1941 to cast his sympathetic eye over the Canadian outfit’s production potential and requirements. “A mound of drawings” is Hotsor’s aptly vague characterization of the Mosquito production materials that soon arrived from the English plant that had run less by modern methods than by its employees’ skills and memories. There would also be shipments of vital parts for twenty-five aircraft and a completed Mosquito Mk.iv to show how it all went together.
Murray’s report led to orders a month later from the British Ministry of Aircraft Production for 400 Canadian-built Mosquitoes. These would soon be designated Mk.XX—an equivalent of the Mk.IV bomber version, powered by the American-built Rolls-Royce Merlin V-12, the Packard Merlin 31.
Soon after, Doug Hunter and Harry Povey arrived from Hatfield after a trans-Atlantic flight that was, for that time, a marvel of time management. “[They had left] England on Thursday and begun work in Toronto on Saturday” is how Fred Hotson summarizes their then-amazing experience. After that, however, flying across the Atlantic lost much of its charm for Hunter. He may have thought his luck couldn’t hold out indefinitely, or perhaps he changed his mind once ocean voyages became less stressful with the demise of the U-boat threat.
Hunter immediately became chief engineer of DHC, a position fully equal to chief design engineer Jakimiuk’s—and, at that moment, more valuable to the company. Hunter was regarded as a typical product of the parent de Havilland company.
“He was a well-educated man. Hunter was not a deep technical engineer but he was a very practical one,” in Dick Hiscocks’s estimation. “He had mastered the art of getting people to work together. During wartime, things were turbulent and nerves were jangled, and he had a very soothing influence on the more temperamental characters in the engineering department. And, like Garratt, he was a very humane man.”
Hunter had begun as a draftsman with one of the original British aircraft companies, the Grahame-White Aviation Co., forerunner of the great Bristol Aeroplane Co., de Havilland’s only British rival as a combined engine and airframe producer. George White acquired the land for the U.K.’s post-World War I display flying centre and today’s RAF Museum, at Hendon. Hotson remembers Hunter as “always immaculately dressed, spoke quietly, flicked his cigarette ashes over his shoulder, and punctuated every conversation with ‘Quite!’”
Hunter’s travelling companion, Harry Povey, who had been with de Havilland a year longer than Hunter, was slicked-back and rotund to Hunter’s grey-haired and aristocratic spareness. Povey has been described as “an aircraft production engineer without peer.” His first move at DHC was to ask for a new plant to build Mosquito fuselages.
The fuselages were formed in halves over concrete forms, using heat-treatment in huge autoclaves to shape the seven-sixteenths-inch-thick plywood left and right sides. Stiffeners and equipment were added before the halves were joined along the top and bottom.
DHC’s wing subcontractor was the farm-equipment manufacturer Massey-Harris of Weston, which had supplied Anson wings to Downsview. R. B. (Bob) McIntyre began his long association with the DHC engineering department as chief engineer of Massey-Harris, one of the most reliable suppliers the wartime DHC had.5 Their record of delivering Anson wings made Massey-Harris de Havilland’s first choice for Mosquito wings. They delivered the first set May 9, 1942. Always ahead of schedule, McIntyre and his workers became victims of their own efficiency when changes to the specifications of aircraft on the production line obliged Massey-Harris to modify wings already built but waiting in storage at their plant. McIntyre, who was with DHC by 1944, was a first-rate thinker who became a talent magnet for the company, recruiting, among others, Fred Buller.
Aside from the problem-free wings, the Downsview Mosquito program’s early setbacks were all too prophetic. A consistent 2 per cent loss rate for important drawings shipped from England was only the beginning. They arrived as microfilm, which had to be translated into full-size profiles and thence to huge sheets of plywood on the lofting-shop floor in mid-October. Lofting, the process of transferring full-scale drawings to raw materials from which the first parts are made, was a normal part of building any new airplane. It was just that DHC had never done that before.