Alliott Verdon Roe
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sir Edwin Alliott Verdon Roe (April 26, 1877 – January 4 1958) was a pioneer British pilot and aircraft manufacturer, and founder in 1910 of the Avro company. He was the first Englishman to make a powered flight (in 1908 at Brooklands) and the first Englishman to fly an all British machine a year later, on Hackney Marshes. Roe was born in Patricroft, near Manchester. The son of a doctor, he left home when he was 14 to go to Canada where he spent a year working odd jobs.
Once he returned to Britain he served as an apprentice with the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway and later went to study marine engineering at King's College London. As well as dockyard work, the young Roe joined the ship S.S. Inchanga as fifth engineer. It was during this time that he first turned his mind to the possibility of actually building a flying machine.
He began with small models and in this he was quite successful. When the Wright brothers made the very first flight in a heavier than air machine at Kittyhawk, U.S.A. he was almost immediately in correspondence with them. He cycled to Le Mans to meet them when they made their first, very impressive, European flights. He applied for and took a job with the Royal Aero Club. He then found a job in the U.S.A. with a firm trying to build a gyrocopter. The machine was a failure and Roe came back to Britain; but not discouraged.
In 1899 he worked for the British & South African Royal Mail Company as an engineer. Gradually he developed an interest in birds and in flight, and began to construct flying models, winning a Daily Mail competition with a prize of £75 for one of his designs in 1907, against fierce competition. With the prize money he built a full size aeroplane based on his winning model.
Walthamstow marsh was the location of Roe's later attempts to build and fly his early aeroplanes. Despite many failures, Roe continued his experiments and there is now a blue plaque commemorating his first successful flight (in July 1909) on one of the railway arches he worked from.
Soon he founded the A.V. Roe Aircraft Co. in 1910. His most popular model, the 504, sold more than 8,300. In 1928, he sold his shares and bought S. E. Saunders Co., and formed Saunders-Roe Aviation.
He was knighted in 1929. During the 1930s he was a supporter of Oswald Mosley. He was a great believer in monetary reform and thought it was wrong that banks should be able to create money by "book entry" and charge interest on it when they lent it out. In this respect he shared the same enthusiasm for reform as the American poet Ezra Pound, who also wrote for the Mosley press.
