Super Aircraft Ltd

[Schneiderman]

With the Flight archive offline I am having no luck finding any information on a company called Super Aircraft Limited who had their offices in London and premises in the Abbey Works in Lincoln. The works were constructed in 1917 but Super Aircraft may not have been the original owners, but they were offering then for sale in 1936.
Can anyone help? Who were they, what did they do?

 

[newsdeskdan]

With the Flight archive offline I am having no luck finding any information on a company called Super Aircraft Limited who had their offices in London and premises in the Abbey Works in Lincoln. The works were constructed in 1917 but Super Aircraft may not have been the original owners, but they were offering then for sale in 1936.
Can anyone help? Who were they, what did they do?

I believe the Abbey Works in Lincoln was constructed by one of the city's largest industrial concerns Clayton & Shuttleworth. It was used to build aircraft such as the Handley Page 0/400. There's a long story attached to C&S, a very small portion of which can be found on Wikipedia. I believe their documents ended up at the Lincolnshire Archives. No idea when/how Super Aircraft came on the scene though.

 

[hesham]

My dear Schneiderman,

can you tell me which issue in 1917 or 1936,the date ?.

 

[Hood]

Dan is correct, the Abbey Works were built by Clayton & Shuttleworth in 1917, but for railway work by its Clayton Wagons subsidiary to make locomotive wagons and from 1920 steam-powered trucks and even servos. In 1930 the works were sold to Smith-Clayton Forge (headquartered from Tower Works in Lincoln). They undertook drop forgings for the aircraft, car and general engineering industries and stamped crankshafts and assembled engines. Smith-Clayton Forge continued in business a long time, becoming part of GKN in 1966. They still owned the site in 1950 when Aerofilms made an aerial photo shoot of the Abbey and Tower site and it seems its still in use today, the company and site being acquired by Italian company Bifrangi, there history page below has a potted history of the site.

Clayton and Shuttleworth Ltd was established in 1842 to produce agricultural equipment, specialising in threshing machines. The Company continued to progress and expanded its business to manufacture railway rolling stock, goods wagons and aeroplanes. During this time new sites were also acquired in Lincoln and at the Government's request the Abbey Works was built. This site produced Handley Page bombers and Vickers Vimys during World War 1.

After the war the Company continued to produce railway carriages and wagons and diversified into crankshafts, axles and other general engineering forgings. In the late 1920’s the Company faced difficulties and parts of the business were either sold or closed. In 1929 Smith – Clayton Forge Ltd was formed in conjunction with the parent Company, Smiths of Coventry. It was not until 1935 that the Lincoln site saw an upturn and at this time it started to produce forgings for the motor car and aircraft industries, with customers such as Rolls Royce.

Prior to, and during World War 2, the forge was producing airscrew shafts and crankshafts for Rolls Royce engines, which powered the Hurricanes, Spitfires and Mosquito aeroplanes, which played a major part in the war effort.

After the war a lot of money was invested in development and updating the equipment and consequently the Company prospered. In 1951, after the introduction of new machinery, the Company started to produce crankshafts for heavy commercial vehicles and connecting rods for diesel locomotives. During the late 1950’s, due to the skills of its employees, the Company played a part in the development of the modern gas turbine (jet engine).

During the next 40 years there were a number of new owners and changes to the business. In 1963 the Company was sold to GKN forgings and shortly after was amalgamated with British Steel Special Steels Division to form UES. During the 1970’s and 1980’s developments of the site continued and the Company was split into 2 divisions, UEF Automotive, producing crankshafts, and UEF Aerospace. In 1995 GKN Holdings was sold entirely to British Steel and the Company became part of the British Steels Forgings Group.

So whoever Super Aircraft Ltd were I'm not sure, maybe they rented a corner while times were slack in the mid-1930s. But they were dissolved as a Company in May 1948 by a record in the London Gazette.

Sources:
Grace's Guide - https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Clayton_Wagons
Aerofilms - https://britainfromabove.org.uk/image/eaw030270
Bifrangi - http://www.bifrangi.co.uk/history.html
London Gazette - https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/38283/page/2825/data.pdf

 

[avion ancien]

With the Flight archive offline .....

If I can be forgiven slight tangentialism, I fear that rather than the Flight archive being offline, it may have ceased to exist as a generally accessible online archive. It has been unavailable now for the best part of three months and still the same message, viz.:

'As part of the flightglobal.com relaunch, the Flight magazine archive is undergoing maintenance to transition to our new web platform. It will be back online as soon as possible.'

appears when one goes to what was the entry page. I contacted the magazine in January, asking whether it was able to provide any indication of the date by which it anticipated that it will be available online again and whether access to it will continue to be free. Its response, on 20 January, was that:

'As part of the FlightGlobal relaunch we had to re-platform the site and unfortunately the Flight PDF archive was not compatible with the new software so we had to take it down for maintenance and development. The archive will be back online soon, however I can't give you a date for this or tell you in what form it will be in. We will let our readers know as soon as the archive is back online.'

If, as I fear, we have seen the last of this archive as an online research tool, it will be not just sad but a great loss. It will mean that, like The Aeroplane, it will be available only to those with access to those few libraries that keep a complete run of the magazine - and I doubt that those are searchable as the Flight online archive was.

Addendum: I should have mentioned that pre-1936 copies of Flight magazine can be found at https://archive.org/search.php?query=Flight+Magazine&and%5B%5D=subject%3A%22Flight+International+Magazine%22&sort=date&page=1 but I don't think that these are searchable as the Flight online archive was.

 

[Schneiderman]

Dan and Hood. Yes, you are correct about the Clayton & Shuttleworth connection so I guess it is possible that Super Aircraft Ltd may have been a subsidiary set up to ringfence the aircraft side of the business. Super Aircraft, whoever they were, were involved in a business deal to sell part of the works in 1936, but that fell through.

 

[Schneiderman]

Looking in more detail at the failed deal it looks as if Super Aircraft Ltd acted as an intermediate step between Lincoln Council, Smith Clayton Forge, and others, and the company that was intending to acquire the lease to part of the Abbey Works. Perhaps set up just for that one purpose.

 

[newsdeskdan]

Question about Clayton & Shuttleworth: Looking through a list of architectural drawings associated with the company held by the Lincolnshire Archives - it appears as though around January-April 1918 plans were laid to build National Aircraft Factory Number 4 in Lincoln (which is where I'm from incidentally). Did it ever get built there? Were the Abbey Works or Tower Works originally intended to be National Aircraft Factory Number 4?

 

[Hood]

Question about Clayton & Shuttleworth: Looking through a list of architectural drawings associated with the company held by the Lincolnshire Archives - it appears as though around January-April 1918 plans were laid to build National Aircraft Factory Number 4 in Lincoln (which is where I'm from incidentally). Did it ever get built there? Were the Abbey Works or Tower Works originally intended to be National Aircraft Factory Number 4?

That is an interesting question. What made a factory come under the National Aircraft Factory scheme? Sub-contracts and conversion of factories and new factories seem to have been commonplace before (and indeed during) the scheme and yet they were never so designated. I assume it must be something in the contractural arrangements, I know for some of the NAF's the land was requisitioned by the Crown. Maybe Clayton & Shuttleworth had already purchased the land for the factory? The Abbey Works seems to date from around the time of the planning of the scheme, if completed a bit sooner than the four NAFs.
I wonder if the factory was to be NAF No.4 but not actually designated to avoid confusion with No. 4 Aircraft Acceptance Park at West Common Racecourse and Bracebridge Heath in Lincoln? This was mainly used by Robey and Co. Ltd., but Clayton & Shuttleworth did also assemble Sopwiths there.

The O/400s were flown out of the site, which the workers called 'Handley Page field'. The aerial photos in 1950 still show fields around the site so its not impossible the site could have been used for aircraft production in the 1930s. Interestingly the firm's 35hp caterpillar track tractor was adopted as the main ground handling tug for the O/400 too.

 

[Schneiderman]

From the share prospectus