Roy Chadwick CBE: the man who designed the Avro Lancaster

As the designer of the Lancaster, the RAF’s workhouse heavy bomber of WW2, Roy Chadwick deserves to be lauded as a ‘Great’; it was his invention that delivered perhaps the most famed precision air attack of the whole war, the Dambusters raid of May 1943, while his work bridged the eras of flight from the early biplanes through to the jet age.

Born at Marsh Hall Farm in Farnworth, Widnes, on 30th April 1893, Chadwick was the son of mechanical engineer Charles Chadwick; becoming the family's fifth generation of engineers. He attended St Luke’s Church School in Weaste, St Clement’s Church School in Urmston (now in Trafford, Greater Manchester) and studied night school at the Manchester Municipal College of Technology (1907-11) while also training as a draughtsman at the British Westinghouse Electrical Company, Trafford Park, which he joined as a 14-year-old. As far as aviation was concerned, he was really in at the beginning, enthused by the new technology from the point when the Wright brothers took to the air in December 1903, Chadwick by then just a wide-eyed lad of 10.

Aged 18 in September 1911, Chadwick began his association with Avro when he was taken on as a PA/Draughtsman by A.V. Roe and Company, based in Manchester. He then worked on various designs in the lead-up to WW1 including the Avro 504, a Great War light bomber and trainer. King George VI learned to fly on one of these when he was Duke of York, while the very first QANTAS was an Avro 504K. When still only 22, Chadwick designed the Avro Pike twin-engine bomber (1915), the first bomber to have internal bomb stowage and a gun turret, and by then was based at Hamble, southeast of Southampton. His rapid ascent continued, for in 1918 Chadwick had become Avro’s chief designer, coming up with the first true light aeroplane, the aptly-named Avro Baby. Two years later he added the world’s largest single-engine bomber to his growing CV, the Avro Aldershot, which had a crew of four, a wingspan only 20 feet less than the Lancaster, which would be rolled out to the RAF’s 99 Squadron in 1923. It was while test-flying the Baby in 1921 that Chadwick crashed his plane into trees, his arm, leg and pelvis all fractured and the joystick penetrating his neck. A variant of the Baby, the Antarctic Baby, was supplied for explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s final expedition to the Antarctic (1921).

Chadwick married Mary Gomersall in 1921 and went on to have two daughters with her.

Roy Chadwick's most famous aircraft design, the Avro Lancaster. Pictured here is the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight Lancaster PA474. An all-metal plane was designed (1925), the single-seat fighter, the Avro Avenger, while his 1926 Avro Avian though was used for the first England-Australia solo flight (1928). In the same year, Chadwick was back in Manchester at the Avro factory in Woodford and the designs continued for what remained of that decade and then into the early 1930s, including the Avro Anson, which would be used for training and transport in WW2 with some 11,000 of these being built. Chadwick's collaboration with a Spanish inventor, Juan de la Cierva, saw rotors mounted on the body of an Avro 504K to create the Avro Autogiro, a forerunner of today’s helicopter.

As an aircraft design engineer for the Avro Company, indeed its chief designer, Chadwick became responsible for almost all its aeroplane designs including the Avro Lancaster, Avro Tudor (a post-war airliner and the first pressurised one, with the Tudor Mk 11 designed to carry 60 passengers) and Avro Lancastrian (a larger variant of the Lancaster). He was also responsible for the Avro Lincoln, another larger follow-up to the Lancaster, which he converted into the Shackleton (named after Sir Ernest Shackleton), and early designs for the Avro Vulcan V-bomber.

However, it was as the designer of the Lancaster that Chadwick would be most remembered. In the late 1930s work had begun on a long-range bomber, the Avro Manchester, which was followed by the iconic Avro Lancaster, dubbed the best bomber of the war and the one used most often for night raids, capable of carrying 10 tons of bombs. Well over 7,000 would be built with more than 40,000 aircraft workers, occupying over six million square feet of factory space, engaged in their construction. It was the British bomber, above all, that took the fight back to Germany, especially after the plane was re-engineered with four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines over the winter of 1940-41, as it flew higher and further than anything else we had. Another Chadwick design, from 1941, was the Avro York, a long-range transport, with one of its number, Ascalon, being made for Prime Minister Winston Churchill to use during the war. Among other flights, it took Churchill safely to the Yalta conference in the Crimea in February 1945 when he met Stalin and Roosevelt to discuss the shape of post-war Europe. Another leading figure with his own personal York would be Louis Mountbatten when he was Viceroy of India.

Roy Chadwick was forever keen to encourage younger people to follow him into engineering and aviation. Image: International Bomber Command Centre Chadwick was honoured with the CBE in 1943, the same year as the Dambusters raid. The honour was partly for the adaptations, worked out with Barnes Wallis, that enabled that attack to take place. As the war turned in the Allies’ favour, Chadwick took time out to visit Altrincham Grammar School for Boys in 1944 where he was guest of honour at an ATC rally. He also returned to Manchester and his former College of Technology in November 1946, where he was made an honorary Master of Science. With the war over, Chadwick’s final job for Avro would be his work on the Avro Vulcan, from 1946, as he wrestled with the design of a bomber capable of carrying a nuclear weapon. His thinking turned to a Delta shape, foreshadowing Concorde. After the onset of the Berlin Blockade, when the Soviet Union attempted to stop the Western Allies from bringing supplies into West Berlin, the Berlin Airlift (1948-49) saw Chadwick’s Avro York, with its range of 2,700 miles, responsible for one-third of the British tonnage lifted into West Berlin during what was one of the first major international crises of the Cold War. His Lancaster, Lincoln, Tudor and Lancastrian were also used, in November 1946, after being fitted with Rolls-Royce Nene jets, the Lancastrian had become the first jet airliner to fly between two countries; Roy Chadwick was aboard the journey from London to Paris.

Roy Chadwick died in an air crash on 23rd August 1947 when the Avro Tudor prototype came to grief on take-off from Woodford Aerodrome. He was aged just 54. An enthusiastic and artistic man, Chadwick always had several designs on the go at any one time and was forever keen to encourage younger people to follow him into engineering and aviation. The International Bomber Command Centre in Lincolnshire includes the Chadwick Centre, named in honour of the pioneering aviation designer, which tells the story of Bomber Command, while the £53 million Poynton Relief Road, on the outskirts of Stockport, which crosses the site of the former Avro aircraft manufacturing site at Woodford, was named Roy Chadwick Way when it was completed in March 2023. A memorial board stands beside the new road, near the site of the crash that saw Chadwick lose his life.

Roy Chadwick designed more than 200 aeroplanes, 35 of which became production models. As he said: ‘In this business, one cannot rest on one’s laurels. There is always another and another aeroplane.'

Propaganda poster extolling the achievements of Roy Chadwick's design: 'Lancaster bombers are smashing German industries' CHRONOLOGY