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101 pages

English

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Extrait

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Nevil Shute was a writer whose books were frequently looked down on by literary critics and yet when he died in 1960 he was one of the best selling novelists of his day. Today, books such as A Town Like Alice and On the Beach continue to attract new generations of fans. However there was more to Shute than his books, a great deal more.Richard Thorn explores Shute's personal and professional life, drawing from extensive research carried out using archives and sources in the UK, USA and Australia. Nevil Shute Norway began his professional life as an aeronautical engineer working on the outskirts of London for the newly established de Havilland Aircraft Company. He quickly went on to play a key role in Britain's ill-fated and final airship programme, before co-founding an aircraft manufacturing company at the height of an economic depression. All the while, using the pseudonym Nevil Shute, he spent his time writing for relaxation in the evenings.After the Second World War, he flew a single-engined aeroplane to Australia and back in search for new material for his novels. Fascinated by the new world that he had seen, the novelist sold up and moved his family to Australia, buying a farm in a small town on the outskirts of Melbourne. For the remainder of his life, Australia was his home and the inspiration for many of his best-loved novels.Shute tells the story of the life and times of an extraordinary man who made a significant contribution to twentieth century popular literature. This book will appeal to fans of Shute's work, those interested in his background and personal life or to readers interested in the early years of the aviation industry in Britain.

Sujets

Reino Unido

United Kingdom

Great Britain

Australia

Royaume-Uni

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	28 juillet 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781788030489
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	6 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Shute
The Engineer who became a Prince of Storytellers

by

Richard Thorn
Copyright © 2017 Richard Thorn

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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Contents
Permissions
Author’s Notes
Prologue

Part 1 Old World
1. Foundations
2. University
3. Aeroplanes
4. Airships
5. Success and Failure
6. Entrepreneur

Part 2 Transition
7. Peace and War
8. Home and Abroad
9. Australia and Back
10. Exasperation

Part 3 The Great Southern Land
11. A New World
12. Flying a Different Flag
13. The Future and the Past
14. Novelist, Farmer and Racing Driver
15. Armageddon, Conflict and Decline
16. The Last Year
17. Epilogue

The Published Works of Nevil Shute
Selections from a Photo Timeline
Image Credits
Notes on Sources
A Select Bibliography
The Nevil Shute Norway Foundation
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Permissions
Sincere thanks to:
Heather Mayfield and United Agents LLP on behalf of the Estate of Nevil Shute Norway, for giving permission to quote from the published books, unpublished writing and letters of Nevil Shute Norway.

Penguin Random House UK for giving permission to quote from correspondence between staff at William Heinemann Ltd and Nevil Shute Norway.

Karen Sharpe-Kramer for giving permission to quote from correspondence between Stanley Kramer and Nevil Shute Norway.

Thank you to the following individuals and organisations for allowing access to the papers and correspondence of Nevil Shute Norway:

Angela Groves
British Library, London
National Archives of Australia, Canberra
National Library of Australia, Canberra
The Nevil Shute Norway Foundation
Petersfield Museum, Hampshire
Portsmouth Museum, Hampshire
RAF Museum, Colindale, London
Random House Group Archive, Rushden
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas at Austin
State University of Victoria, Melbourne
Syndics of Cambridge University Library
Syracuse University Libraries, New York
Charles E Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions for copyright material used. Any omissions to make appropriate acknowledgements will be corrected in any future editions.
Author’s Notes
i) Norway or Shute?
As he was in full-time employment when his first book was published in 1926, Nevil Norway wrote under the pseudonym of Nevil Shute in order to protect his daytime reputation as an aeronautical engineer. Even when he became a famous novelist he usually signed his books N. S. Norway or Nevil Shute Norway. In this book I have usually called him Nevil Norway, only using the name Nevil Shute when referring to his books or specific activity as an author.

ii) Units of Measurement
Over Nevil Norway’s lifetime, imperial units of measurement were the norm in the United Kingdom and Australia. Conversion of the imperial units used in this book to the metric-based International System of Units (SI) used by most countries today is shown below.

Length:
1 foot (ft) = 0.3048 metres (m)
1 yard (yd) = 0.9144 metres (m)
1 mile (mi) = 1.6093 kilometres (km)

Mass:
1 pound (lb) = 0.4535 kilograms (kg)

Area:
1 square foot (ft 2 ) = 0.0929 square metres (m 2 )
1 square mile (mi 2 ) = 2.5899 square kilometres (km 2 )
1 acre (ac) = 4,046.8560 square metres (m 2 )

Volume:
1 Imperial gallon (gal) = 4.5460 litres (l)
1 US barrel oil (bbl) = 158.9873 litres (l)

Velocity:
1 mile per hour (mph) = 1.6093 kilometres per hour (km/h)

Power:
1 horsepower (hp) = 745.6998 watts (W)
Temperature ° C = ( ° F – 32)/1.8
Prologue
An Unexpected Passenger
20 July 1950
At a quarter to five on a warm summer’s afternoon in July 1950 the P & O liner SS Strathnaver left Tilbury Docks, London, bound for Australia. One of those on board was Nevil Shute Norway, better known to many around the world as the novelist Nevil Shute. Although like most of the other passengers he and his family were migrating to Australia to start a new life, Nevil Shute Norway was certainly not a typical ‘ten pound Pom’. He was wealthy and leaving behind a lifestyle that most in England could only dream of.
He was 51 years old and had already experienced and achieved a great deal: as an aeronautical engineer playing a key role in Britain’s ultimately ill-fated airship programme, as the joint managing director of a new aircraft manufacturing company, as a developer of secret weapons during the Second World War and now as a novelist.
Since the early 1920s, in parallel with his career in aviation, Norway had been writing. His first novel Marazan, written under the pseudonym of Nevil Shute, had been published in 1926, and by 1950 he had thirteen published books to his name, with three of them having been turned into feature films. The income from his novels and film rights meant that since 1938 Shute had been able to pursue a career as a full-time novelist, although this had of course been interrupted by the war. By 1950, he was living, with his wife and two daughters, on a 5-acre property on the popular holiday destination of Hayling Island, could enjoy his passions of sailing from a yacht moored at the end of the garden and flying his own aeroplane from the nearby Portsmouth Aerodrome. He had a lifestyle which would have been the envy of many in a country still suffering from austerity and rationing after the war.
It was therefore perhaps somewhat surprising that one of the most popular and successful novelists of the time was leaving England to settle in Australia, a country he had visited only once the year before and which the rest of his family had never seen. Although he would return to the country of his birth a number of times during the following years, he never returned there again to live. For the rest of his life Australia would become his home and, it could be argued, the inspiration for many of his best-loved and most enduring novels.

Nevil Shute was already dead when I first became aware of him. When I was growing up, my parents, sisters and I usually visited my aunt and uncle at Christmas. Crammed into their small but comfortably furnished living room, I was always drawn to a bookcase in the corner, the upper two shelves of which were lined with books from the Companion Book Club. To me at that time this seemed almost like a library. However, with their uniform styling, and aura of quality, the monthly selection from book clubs like this were very popular in Britain during the late 1950s and early 1960s. I can remember studying the rows of titles by authors such as Monica Dickens, H. E. Bates and Alistair MacLean, but as a teenager immersed in the world of Tolkien, most meant little to me. One, though, that always stood out during this annual review was Round the Bend by Nevil Shute; both the title and the name of the author, for reasons I did not understand, appealed to me. Of course, I did not get any further than looking at the spine of the book, but the name Shute remained with me.
A decade later in the early 1970s, as a poor engineering student looking for something to fill the time on a forthcoming train journey, I came across a copy of Trustee from the Toolroom in a second-hand bookshop in Bolton. This time I did go further than look at the title, and once I had started reading it, like countless numbers before me I was hooked.
I knew very little about Nevil Shute at that time. I might have read somewhere that he had a background in engineering, but I was certainly not aware that during the 1940s and 1950s he had been one of the most popular novelists in the English-speaking world; a best-seller of best-sellers, frequently referred to as a prince of storytellers. Like others of the era he has slowly drifted into obscurity, though less slowly than many as all his novels are still in print. There was, however, much more to Shute than his literary output, a great deal more. So who exactly was Nevil Shute, and what did he do?
Part 1
January 1899–April 1938
Old World
1
Foundations
January 1899–December 1918
Nevil Shute, or to give him his full name Nevil Shute Norway, was born in Middlesex at 16 Somerset Road, Ealing on 17 January 1899. He was the second son of Arthur and Mary Norway, with his rather unusual second Christian name coming from his paternal grandmother Georgina Shute, also a prolific author in her day.

Ealing was then on the edge of London, which, as the capital of the British Empire, was in many respects the centre of the world. The colonialist Cecil Rhodes summed up a commo