Avro

Few aircraft companies span so long an arc as Avro: from the first hops of a triplane under a railway arch in 1909 to the delta-winged strategic bomber that carried Britain's nuclear deterrent through the Cold War. In between lie the trainer on which much of a generation learned to fly, the RAF's most celebrated heavy bomber, and a succession of owners that gradually dissolved the firm's independence until it disappeared altogether.

Alliott Verdon Roe (1877–1958) came to aviation by an unusual route. A merchant navy engineer, he became interested in the possibility of a flying machine while watching albatrosses soar on the West African run. In 1906 he was appointed secretary of the Royal Aero Club; in 1907 one of his model designs won a £75 Daily Mail competition, and with the prize money he built a full-size aeroplane which he tested at Brooklands in 1907–08. Effectively pushed out of that circuit, he moved his experiments to Walthamstow Marshes, renting space under a railway arch; there, in July 1909, he made the first powered flight by an all-British machine. The arch still stands in Lee Valley Park and his triplane is preserved in London's Science Museum.

On 1 January 1910, with his brother Humphrey, he founded A.V. Roe and Company at Brownsfield Mill, Great Ancoats Street, Manchester. Humphrey's contribution was chiefly financial and organisational — the capital came from the family webbing business and he served as managing director until joining the Royal Flying Corps in 1917 — while Alliott handled design. In 1911 Roy Chadwick joined as Alliott's personal assistant and the firm's draughtsman; appointed chief designer in 1918, he would go on to shape almost every important aircraft the company built.

The first Avro aeroplane produced in any quantity was the Avro 500, flown in March 1912; eighteen were built, most for the newly formed Royal Flying Corps. That same year the company produced two aircraft that never left the prototype stage but earned their place in the record: the Type F monoplane, the world's first aeroplane with fully enclosed crew accommodation, and the Type G biplane.

The Type 500 was developed into the Avro 504, first flown in September 1913. The War Office bought a small number before the war and the type saw front-line service in the opening months, but its real career was as a trainer, a role it filled until 1933. Production lasted twenty years and totalled 8,340 aircraft from the works at Hamble, Failsworth, Miles Platting and Newton Heath. No other product did as much to define the company's scale or its reputation.

The end of the war cut off orders abruptly and the company ran into serious financial trouble. In August 1920 Crossley Motors, a neighbouring car maker urgently in need of factory space for coachbuilding, acquired 68.5 per cent of the shares. In 1924 Avro left Alexandra Park Aerodrome in south Manchester, where it had been flying since 1918, for a rural site called New Hall Farm at Woodford in Cheshire; that field remained in aviation use — latterly under BAE Systems — until March 2011.

In 1928 Crossley Motors sold Avro to Armstrong Siddeley Holdings. In the same year Alliott Verdon Roe resigned from the company he had founded, sold his shares and bought S. E. Saunders to form Saunders-Roe, which after the Second World War produced radical jet fighter designs and a range of hovercraft. He was knighted in 1929 and in 1933 added the hyphen to his surname by deed poll, becoming Verdon-Roe in honour of his mother; during the 1930s he was also a member of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. In 1935 Avro became a subsidiary of Hawker Siddeley, the group in which it would eventually be dissolved almost three decades later.

Those years left industrial curiosities as well. In the immediate aftermath of 1918 Avro built road vehicles, among them the three-wheeled Harper Runabout and a light car of its own with a 1,330 cc four-cylinder engine, built integrally in wood and aluminium much like an aeroplane; roughly a hundred were made.

Keeping up its expertise in trainers, Avro built the Tutor biplane in the 1930s, which the RAF bought in quantity, followed by the twin-engined Anson, conceived as a small airliner and turned into one of the most versatile and longest-lived aircraft in British service. As tension in Europe rose, the firm returned to combat types.

The Manchester, Lancaster and Lincoln were the great designs of that period. The Manchester failed because of its Rolls-Royce Vulture engines, but Chadwick's team rebuilt it around four Merlins and produced the Lancaster, of which over seven thousand were built and which carried the heaviest bomb loads of the war, including the Grand Slam. Nearly half came from Avro's own plants at Woodford (Stockport) and Chadderton (Oldham); some seven hundred more were built at the Avro shadow factory beside what is now Leeds Bradford Airport, at Yeadon, which employed 17,500 people in a town of barely 10,000. At around 140,000 square metres it was the largest building in Europe of its day, and its roof was disguised with fields and hedges to hide it from the air.

The civil Lancastrian and, by way of the Lincoln, the Shackleton maritime patrol aircraft came directly out of the Lancaster. The York, a transport with a square-section fuselage mated to the bomber's wings, had a good career with both the RAF and civil operators. The Tudor, by contrast, was a pressurised and troublesome airliner that competed unsuccessfully with designs from Bristol, Canadair, Douglas, Handley Page and Lockheed: it first flew in June 1945 and only thirty-four were completed after BOAC cancelled its order. Both Tudors and Yorks played a significant humanitarian part in the Berlin Airlift.

The Shackleton proved the longest-lived product of the house: with thirty-nine years of active service it held the record for RAF longevity until the English Electric Canberra overtook it in 1998, and it went on flying in the airborne early warning role until 1991.

The delta-winged Vulcan bomber first flew on 30 August 1952 with Roly Falk at the controls and was the most ambitious project of Avro's last independent years. Designed for nuclear strike, it sustained the British deterrent armed with the Avro-built Blue Steel stand-off weapon. Its career ended unexpectedly as a conventional bomber in the 1982 Falklands campaign, and several airframes are now prized museum exhibits.

In parallel, during the 1950s the company developed the Avro 748, a twin Rolls-Royce Dart turboprop regional transport sold widely to airlines and governments around the world. The RAF bought six for the Queen's Flight and thirty-one of a version with a rear loading ramp and kneeling undercarriage known as the Andover.

In 1945 the Hawker Siddeley Group bought the former Victory Aircraft plant at Malton, Ontario — the factory that had built the Canadian Lancasters — and renamed it A.V. Roe Canada Limited. Commonly known as Avro Canada, it was in fact a subsidiary of the group trading under the Avro name; from it came the CF-100 fighter, the Orenda turbojet and the famous, cancelled Arrow interceptor.

When the company was absorbed into Hawker Siddeley Aviation in July 1963, following the consolidation of the British aircraft industry driven by the 1957 Defence White Paper, the Avro name ceased to be used. The brand retained strong heritage appeal, however: between 1994 and 2001 British Aerospace revived it to market the Avro RJ70, RJ85 and RJ100 regional jets derived from the BAe 146-100, -200 and -300. The Avro 748 in turn evolved into the BAe ATP.

More memory than factory survives of the historic sites. Woodford Aerodrome closed in 2011 and, as part of the deal to sell the land for redevelopment, BAE funded the conversion of the former airfield fire station into the Avro Heritage Museum, which opened on 13 November 2015 with a little over a thousand square metres of exhibition hall, gallery and reading rooms. The Chadderton plant remained in use within BAE Systems. In Manchester a plaque commemorates the founding of the company, and Avro F.C., the football club born at the Chadderton works, still exists. Roy Chadwick, the designer behind the Lancaster and much of the rest of the catalogue, was killed in 1947 when the prototype Tudor 2 crashed on take-off from Woodford.