You don’t have to have read Howards End to know its epitaph: “Only connect”. Only one other book has a similarly well known inscription; On the Beach.
It is the only book by Nevil Shute that I can say with certainty I’ve read and jolly depressing it was. He borrowed “Not with a bang but a whimper” from TS Eliot’s The Hollow Men. Although he writes well and a lot of readers loved his novels – he published one every two years for most of his life – I gave him up. That is until I bought Requiem for a Wren this month. I should have read the Sunday Express review on the back cover. Well I couldn’t because I bought it online. “Tragically sad but also uplifting.” I am a third of the way and have given up. I just don’t want the tragically sad stuff and don’t think I will find it remotely uplifting.
Nevil Shute (1899-1960), real name Nevil Shute Norway, played a small part in the 1916 Easter Rising. His father was head of the Post Office in Ireland, working in the GPO. His son helped as a stretcher bearer. Subsequently he failed to get into the Royal Flying Corps instead enlisting in the ranks as a soldier in 1918. After the Dragon and Shrewsbury he had been to Balliol leaving with a 3rd in engineering science. That set the path for his working life. He was an aeronautical engineer at de Havilland and Vickers until 1931 when he started his own company. When war broke out he joined the RNVR. Unusually the military found him the perfect job to make use of his skills; a round peg in a round hole.
“So he ended up in the Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development. There he was a head of engineering, working on secret weapons such as Panjandrum, a job that appealed to the engineer in him. He also developed the Rocket Spear, an anti-submarine missile with a fluted cast iron head. After the first U-boat was sunk by it, Charles Goodeve sent him a message concluding “I am particularly pleased as it fully substantiates the foresight you showed in pushing this in its early stages. My congratulations.” (Wikipedia)
At Vickers he worked with Barnes Wallis developing airships, specifically the R 100 project. It was designed to be a passenger airship that would serve the empire, British of course. When its sister ship, R 101, crashed in France in 1930 killing 48 out of 50 people on board, the British airship project died with them.