Ian Handford: The Torbay engineer who outshone the USSR

The Bygones series of the Herald Express twenty years ago featured my article on Sir Frank Whittle, the famous jet engineer of the Second World War, who retired to Devon.

Now, another aircraft engineer of the past has emerged from Devon—Mr Roy Ewans—who, unlike Sir Frank, was actually born in Torquay.

Roy Ewens was born in Torquay on 21 December 1917 and became instrumental in the designing of the first Avro Vulcan B1 Bomber, a distinctive aircraft with a huge wingspan enabling it to fly at 60,000 feet using an Olympus 200 engine.

Roy was to become Avro's Chief Aerodynamicist before being appointed Deputy Chief Designer and then Chief Designer during the years of the Cold War.

Having unearthed this (now famous) star of Torquay who died 12 years ago, I quickly discovered that following his years at public school, he won a scholarship to St Paul's before graduating in Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College London when earning a First.

Sadly, he never returned to Torquay, as having earned a postgraduate diploma in aeronautical engineering in 1938, he went on to work in America before retiring to Cornwall and finally lived in Surrey, where he died at the wonderful age of 94 in January 2012.

He had married in 1944 and then worked as a designer/engineer at Farnborough yet still found time to serve in the Civil Defence movement. After D-Day this now rather special researcher was quickly sent to Europe to be attached to the Sixth Army Group, then already evaluating the work of post-war German scientists involved in the development of new aircraft for their country.

During an active career, Roy had joined the Royal Aircraft Company at Farnborough in 1949, where he could contribute to the fast-changing advances of military aerospace development, which included the new "Vulcan" of the post-war era, which earned him the title of "one of the most significant aircraft designers of post-war Britain".

Finally, with the years over, Roy joined the Blackburn Aircraft Company before moving on again to join AVRO in Manchester, where he was appointed the firm's chief research designer and eventually became responsible for the first-ever Vulcan Mk2 of post-war Britain, designed especially as a nuclear aircraft deterrent bomber.

Again distinctive by its wing, this bomber was in fact the largest so-called delta-winged aircraft ever built. It is understood that 132 were finally constructed for the RAF and that they were in active service between 1956 until 1984. Meanwhile, during this period in 1957, Roy became an elected Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society.

Working with British Aircraft Corporation as its design engineer of military machines, Roy eventually moved to Maryland in America in 1967 and joined the Fairchild Hillyer Systems as a project engineer, developing a small passenger aircraft.

It seems he also involved himself in the advancement of helicopters by improving their rotor systems. This work saw him appointed Chief Engineer on their S340 passenger aircraft, a collaboration project between SASH, a Swedish aircraft company, and Fairchild Hillyer.

It was in America that Roy became besotted with boats at Chesapeake Bay and later Long Island, and it was reported that he had owned no less than thirteen motorboats. On his final retirement in 1982, Roy returned to Britain with his wife, Enid, and went to live at St Mawes in Cornwall. Having taken up sailing in preference to more motor launches, this he repeated after the family moved on to Poole in Dorset.

Their final move came when moving to Virginia Water, Surrey, where Roy suffered his first stroke. Sadly, he lost Enid to Alzheimer’s in 2005. They had produced four sons and a daughter, and Roy now survived until the wonderful age of 94, when, on 22 January1912 he died. He was survived by three of his sons and daughter.