Search results for ""Author Derek James""

Today it is difficult to imagine that the parishes of Hucclecote and Brockworth once were home to one of Britain's major manufacturers. Gloster Aircraft Company, with its forebears H.H.Martyn & Company and Gloucestershire Aircraft Company, produced some 10,000 aeroplanes between 1917 and 1963. It also provided employment for countless thousands of local people. During World War II alone it employed 14,000 men and women working at the main factory and at 40 sites dispersed in Gloucester, Cheltenham, Stroud and other more distant parts of Gloucestershire.Gloster designed a number of outstanding fighter aircraft which were built in large numbers; it also produced many prototypes which failed to win orders and very many more projects which never left the drawing board. By chance the company was chosen to design and build Britain's first jet aircraft and followed by building 4,000 jet fighters for the Royal Air Force and a dozen air forces around the world. Gloster finally became the first victim of a programme of political and economic stringency which has since decimated British aircraft manufacturing companies. This album portrays some of those people who worked 'up at the 'drome for GAC' and the works of their hands.

Read more less

The Gloster Aircraft Company had its foundation in 1917 and in 1934 the company was taken over by Hawker Aircraft, though it continued to produce aircraft under its own name. In that same year the company produced the famous Gladiator biplane. Having no modern designs of its own in production, Gloster undertook manufacture for the parent company Hawker. During the Second World War it built more than 6,000 Hurricanes and Typhoons. The Gloster Meteor was the first operational Allied jet fighter aircraft of the Second World War, commencing operations in mid-1944, only some weeks later than the world's first operational jet, the German Messerschmitt Me 262. In 1945 a Meteor gained a World Airspeed Record of 606 mph. Meteors remained in service with several air forces and saw action in the Korean War. In 1952, the two seat, delta winged Gloster Javelin was developed as an all-weather fighter that could fly above 50,000 feet. In 1961, the company was merged with Sir W. G. Armstrong Whitworth Aircraft Limited to form Whitworth Gloster Aircraft Limited. Following re-organisation, the firm became part of the Avro Whitworth Division of Hawker Siddeley Aviation in 1963, and the name Gloster disappeared.

Read more less