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January 10, 2002
 How
to get a copy of the book |
The Lives of Ken Wallis,
fully illustrated, costs £6.95 and is published
by Ian Hancock himself.
Copies are available from bookshops, as well as
the aviation museum shop.
Copies are also available by post and cost £8 including
postage and packing.
Send your details and a cheque made payable to The
Norfolk and Suffolk Aviation Museum to:
Norfolk and Suffolk Aviation Museum,
The Street,
Flixton,
nr Bungay,
Suffolk NR35 1NZ.
Signed copies are also available by post for £9,
and limited-edition “flown and signed” copies are
available by post for £10.
All profit goes to the museum. |
Obviously sharing his father’s mechanical interests,
the young Ken Wallis built his first motorcycle when
he was just 11.
By the 1930s, he was designing long-bonnet touring
motorcars. With self-taught engineering skills, his
gifts were applied to water as well as dry land. He
developed a passion for power-boating, winning his first
race at Denver Sluice in 1934 aboard the speedboat Per
Ardua IV. He continued powerboating until 1957, when
he won the 56-mile Missouri Marathon.
Well-versed in ground and water-based speed machines,
Wallis first reached for the sky in the 1930s when he
bought and assembled a kit for a Flying Flea aircraft.
The Fleas were banned in 1936 when several fatalities
were caused by design flaws.
Desperate to fly for a living, he went to a Cambridge-based
flying school in 1938 and earned his pilot’s licence
before applying for a short-service commission with
the Royal Air Force. Unfortunately, he was turned down
after failing the eyesight test and joined the Civil
Air Guard, an organisation which provided a possible
stepping stone to people trying to get into the RAF.
All he needed to do was solve the problem of being
partially-sighted in his right eye, so he obtained the
fitness manual used by examiners.
“Because he is poorly-sighted in the right eye, he
had to get around the medical by memorising the various
tests you had to achieve,” said Mr Hancock. “Strictly
speaking, he achieved a pass when he shouldn’t have
done, and later he used goggles with a corrective lens.”
Wallis’s career in the RAF began with anti-invasion
patrols along the coast, flying Lysanders. In 1941,
he flew a photo-mosaic mission over Norwich, capturing
the city on film for a mysterious purpose. A year later,
he was transferred to Bomber Command, stationed near
Grimsby and flying Wellingtons.
More than once, he was indebted to the geodetic fuselage
construction invented by his namesake Sir Barnes Wallis.
On one occasion, he was limping back to base after a
mission to Mannheim was aborted. His radio had been
knocked out by a lightning strike and ice had cut out
one engine. As his aircraft reached the coast en route
to Elsham Woods south of the Humber, a gun battery at
Harwich opened fire because the noise of his damaged
engines was unfamiliar.
As if that was not bad enough, he flew into barrage
balloons which had not been illuminated from the ground
because he was considered an intruder. One of them released
a 5000ft cable designed to slice through aeroplanes
like a cheesewire, and his port wing was nearly severed.
He managed to crash land, and the remorseful battery
crew treated him and his crew to a party at Battery
Command, presenting each of them with a piece of the
offending cable.
Wg Cdr Wallis’s next tour of duty was in Italy, and
after the war he worked in research and development,
building and testing new equipment such as missiles
and heavy machine guns.
At this time, his mechanical hobbies were continuing
unabated. He devised numerous miniature and fully-working
gadgets, such as a breech-loading pistol just one and
one-eighth inches long, a tiny camera and a toy car
slot-racing system, dreamed up in a billet while waiting
to fly.
He served with the RAF until 1964, when he retired
to Reymerston Hall near Dereham with his wife Peggy,
whom he married in 1942. More
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