There is a fascinating story of supercharging that the BBC gas turbine, and Moss and Ellor are part of... eventually A A Griffith ends up visiting BBC as part of his scientific duties pre-RR; they gave him some unfortunate steers that actually slowed the development of successful axial compressors at RAE. It is interesting to see how the BBC layout is also reflected in the Betty layouts. We can deal with that here but the other railway stuff, fascinating though it is does not impinge on the thread topic so I will return to British gas turbine development.
The tragedy of the Nene was that it had no outlet! There was originally no aeroplane for it. Whilst the team carried on with development and milestones were passed no one was sure what would happen to the engine. Late in 1944 Whittle arrived to see the Nene run and afterwards a celebratory dinner was held (at the Swan and Royal, Clitheroe) During dinner there was much bemoaning of the fact they had no outlet for such a fantastic engine when Whittle had a brilliant idea... why not scale it downto fit in the Meteor and see what thrust could be obtained. Lombard did the calculations on a tablecloth and came up with 3,650 lbt! As this was much more than the 2,000lbt of the current Derwent I there was much excitement. A week or two later Hooker raised the matter with Hives at a regular Monday afternoon meeting. According to Hooker HS was not amused having just built a factory for the Derwent I. But he didn't forbid work on such an idea.
Hooker authorised work to start on the scaled engine; on 1st January 1945 design commenced to produce an exact 0.855 scale of the Nene. Unfortunately nuts and bolts don't scale so some change is necessary but no major alterations minimised the calculations necessary to define the design. The engine was first tested on 7 June 1945 running for 100 hr non-stop at a thrust of 2,600 lb.Later the thrust was increased to 3,500 lb. and two flightworthy engines were prepared and installed in a Meteor. Mk 4. On 15 August 1945 Eric Greenwood made the first test flight, returning to say "At last we have a real aeroplane."Within weeks Greenwood was flying at 570 mph at 10,000 ft. Calculations showed that 600 mph at sea level could be attained if the thrust was raised to 4,000 lb. It was decided to go for the official World Speed record and the engines were tested and cleared to run at 4,000lbt for 1 hour. Two aeroplanes were prepared for an attempt on the World Speed record. Eric Greenwood was to fly one and Group Captain H.J. Wilson the other. and flown at sea level The attempt on the World Speed Record took place on 7 November 1945, over Herne Bay (finally EE454 flown by Group Captain Willie Wilson was just faster than Greenwood's steed). The record was successfully raised to 606 mph. Just under a year later, Group Captain E M Donaldson added another 10mph to this record, also in a mark 4 (EE 549), but with clipped wings The photo shows the RAF High Speed Flight engineers at Tangmere preparing the Rolls Royce Derwent 5 of Group Captain E.M. Donaldson's ready for his attempt on the speed record
setting Meteor F4 in 1946
