SLIDE RULE

Reviewed 4/17/2010

Slide Rule, by Nevil Shute

SLIDE RULE The Autobiography of an Engineer Nevil Shute London: Heineman, 1954				Rating: 5.0 High
ISBN-13 978-1-8894-3918-1
ISBN-10 1-8894-3918-7	276p.	SC	95¢

Some Information on the Life and Work of Nevil Shute

Nevil Shute moved to Australia in 1950. In 1953, he wrote a partial autobiography, Slide Rule, covering his life up to 1938. That was the year he resigned from the company he founded after leaving de Havilland, Airspeed Ltd., and turned full-time to writing novels. There was to be a volume 2, called Set Square, to complete the work; but he died in January 1960 of a stroke.

Born in 1899 in the London suburb of Ealing, Shute was a quiet boy and suffered from stammaring. This and a terrible school may have reinforced his love of mechanical things. In any case, he played hookey from the school for ten days to visit the museum of ETAOIN SHRDLU.

In Slide Rule, he wrote that

"I played hookey from school for ten days."

– Page 1

Julian Smith describes Shute's writing talent thus:

"A combination of events and circumstances seems to have driven him to write: the Easter Rebellion, the Great War, his involvement in an exciting new industry. But there were thousands with similar backgrounds who did not feel compelled to write. What made Shute different, I think, was the combination of a basically isolated personality (he was both shy and highly self-sufficient); an extreme reliance on imagination; and a strong desire to create order out of chaos. His was a spirit possessed not by love or hate, by drink or drugs, or even by a passion for writing, but by order and regularity. Any man who titles his autobiography Slide Rule and plans a continuation entitled "Set Square" reveals himself an obedient child of the century that made machines both art forms and objects of worship. In a confused and confusing world in which men did not always act as they should, fiction gave Nevil Shute a chance to design and construct ideal human relationships and responses."

– Nevil Shute, Page 18

Shute wrote 24 novels. Only his first two, Stephen Morris and its sequel Pilotage, were not published during his lifetime. Indeed, he typically would write a novel one year and see it published the next. He himself described these early efforts as "very bad jobs"1. But Smith notes that, with relatively minor changes, they became publishable: they "were made readable through the simple expedient of eliminating juvenile philosophizing and the lengthy opening sections that had postponed the main action."2 The novels were combined and published in 1961 as Stephen Morris.

Shute's career in aviation began more auspiciously. After leaving de Havilland, which promised slow promotion, he became chief calculator for the R.100 project. This was a giant rigid airship that would compete with the R.101 being built by the British government. He spent six years there, ending in 1930 when the R.101 crashed with great loss of life and airship building in England crashed shortly thereafter.3

A Nevil Shute Norway Timeline

1899-01-17	Nevil Shute Norway born in London suburb of Ealing
1910	Sent to Dragon School at Oxford after playing hookey for 10 days at Science Museum
1913	His father becomes head of post office in Ireland; family moves to Dublin
1913-1916	At Shrewsbury School in Oxford. Spends vactions in countryside near Dublin
1915	Only brother, age 19, dies in France.
1916	Serves as stretcher bearer in Easter Rebellion; rebels occupy and burn father's post office.
1917-1918	Trains as Royal Flying Corps gunnery officer, but a stammer fails him at final medical exam; enlists in infantry but Armistice comes before he sees combat.
1919-1922	At Balliol College, Oxford. Spends holidays yachting and working at the de Havilland Aircraft Company
1923	Joins de Havillands full-time as stress and performance calculator; learns to fly; writes but soon shelves first novel Stephen Morris about a young aeronautical engineer just out of Oxford.
1924	Leaves de Havillands to join R.100 airship project, where he works as chief calculator for six years; writes and shelves Pilotage, a continuation of Stephen Morris.
1926	Publishes Marazan, using the pseudonym Nevil Shute.
1928	Publishes So Disdained; becomes Deputy Chief Engineer of the airship project and stops writing.
1930	Flies to Canada and back in R.100; disastrous crash of rival F.101 ends airship project. Out of work, helps found a new company to build planes: Airspeed Ltd.
1931	Marries Frances Heaton; becomes joint managing director of Airspeed; finishes Lonely Road in early summer and stops writing to devote energies to growing firm.
1934	Elected Fellow of Royal Aeronautical Society.
1937	Starts writing again after Lonely Road is filmed.
1938	Resigns from Airspeed Ltd.; publishes Ruined City and sells film rights; turns full-time to writing.
1940	Publishes An Old Captivity and Landfall; sends wife and two small daughters to Canada; joins British Navy and is assigned to Admiralty Department of Miscellaneous Weapon Development where he remains until 1944 as head of engineering section.
1941	Promoted to Lieutenant Commander; writes Pied Piper, which is filmed the following year.
1942	Writes Most Secret, but the Admirality blocks publication for security reasons.
1943	Kept from writing by Admiralty duties.
1944	Writes Pastoral; goes to Normandy with invasion fleet as correspondent for Ministry of Information.
1945	Resigns from Navy; writes Vinland the Good; goes to Burma as correspondent; publishes Most Secret; begins The Chequer Board, inspired largely by Burma trip.
1947	Publishes The Chequer Board; travels by car through America.
1948	Publishes No Highway, an aeronautical engineering novel; writes most of another novel, then abandons it.
Sept. 1948– March 1949	Flies his own plane to Australia and back in search of material for new books.
1949	As a result of Australian trip, writes A Town Like Alice and begins Round the Bend.
1950	Finishes Round the Bend; moves to Australia in July.
1951	Writes The Far Country; has heart attack and stops flying; begins thinking about autobiography.
1952	Writes In the Wet to forecast future of British Commonwealth.
1953	Writes Slide Rule, his autobiography up to 1938; begins Requiem for a Wren.
1954	Explores Australian oil fields by station wagon and American Rockies by packhorse.
1955	Trip of year before results in Beyond the Black Stump; minor heart attack in November.
1956	Buys Jaguar, takes up sportscar racing, and writes On the Beach.
1957	Writes The Rainbow and the Rose.
1958	Travels extensively; filming of On the Beach begins near his home; has major stroke in December soon after beginning Trustee from the Toolroom.
1959	Despite second stroke in May, finishes Trustee from the Toolroom and sends a memorandum to Prime Minister Menzies about economic conditions of artists in Australia; begins mystical Incident at Eucla in November.
1960	Dies January 12th.

The timeline above comes from Nevil Shute, by Julian Smith of San Diego State University [0-8161-6664-2]. It was published in 1976 by Twayne Publishers, a division of G. K. Hall & co., Boston. I added the colors: Items in green are writing or publishing events; blue denotes filming.

A Nevil Shute Bibliography

Title	Written	First Published
		UK	US	ISBN	Notes
See also http://www.nevilshute.org/biblio_new.php
Stephen Morris	1923	1961	1961	1-84232-297-4	Posthumously published as one novel.
Pilotage	1924	1961	1961	1-84232-297-4	Posthumously published as one novel.
Marazan	1926	1926	N/A	1-84232-265-6
So Disdained	1928	1928	1928	1-84232-294-X	Published in the U.S. as The Mysterious Aviator.
Lonely Road	1931	1932	1932	1-84232-261-3	Filmed in 1936 as Scotland Yard Commands and as episode 14 of The Jazz Age in 1968.
Ruined City	1938	1938	1938	1-84232-290-7	Published in the U.S. as Kindling. Shute sold the film rights in 1938, but it apparently was never filmed.)
What Happened to the Corbetts	1939	1939	1939	1-84232-302-4	Published in the U.S. as Ordeal.
An Old Captivity	1940	1940	1940	1-84232-275-3
Landfall: A Channel Story	1940	1940	1940	1-84232-258-3	Filmed 1949 in the UK.
Pied Piper	1941	1942	1942	1-84232-278-8	Filmed 1942 in the U.S. and as a TV movie called Crossing to Freedom in 1990.
Most Secret	1942	1945	1945	1-84232-269-9
Vinland the Good	1945	1946	1946	1-889439-11-8	This was a historical filmscript by Shute about Leif Ericcson and Iceland. The ISBN is for the version published 1998 by Paper Tiger.
The Chequer Board	1946	1947	1947	1-84232-248-6
Pastoral	1944	1948	1948	1-84232-277-X
No Highway	1948	1948	1948	1-84232-273-7	Filmed 1951 as No Highway in the Sky starring James Stewart & Marlene Dietrich.
A Town Like Alice	1949	1950	1950	1-84232-300-8	Published in the U.S. as The Legacy; filmed in 1956 and as an Australian TV miniseries in 1981.
Round the Bend	1950	1951	1951	1-84232-289-3
The Far Country	1951	1952	1952	1-84232-251-6	Filmed in 1988 as an Australian TV movie.
In the Wet	1952	1953	1953	1-84232-254-0
Slide Rule	1953	1954	1954	1-84232-291-5
Requiem for a Wren	1954?	1955	1955	1-84232-286-9	Published in the U.S. as The Breaking Wave.
Beyond the Black Stump	1955	1956	1956	1-84232-246-X
On the Beach	1956	1957	1957	1-84232-276-1	Filmed in 1959 and in 2000 as a TV movie.
The Rainbow and the Rose	1957	1958	1958	1-84232-283-4
Trustee from the Toolroom	1959	1960	1960	1-84232-301-6
The Seafarers	19??	2002	2002	1-889439-32-0

1 Smith, page 19.

2 Ibid., page 19.

3 The team that built the R.101 had crashed the R.38, killing 44 men.