ESDU Engineer

Dr Anthony J. Barrett

In a previous issue of the ESDU Engineer, we reported the sad death of Dr Anthony J. Barrett CEng., FRAeS. Dr Barrett led ESDU from its early incarnation as the Technical Department of the Royal Aeronautical Society until his retirement from the role of Managing Director in 1997. As a memorial to Tony, we have elected to publish an interview with him that was contained in the Royal Aeronautical Society’s publication Aerospace in June/July 1974. Those of us who knew Tony, including his colleagues and friends, will recognize from his own words the man who did so much to initiate and grow ESDU. Tony is survived by his wife Barbara, son and daughter.

Aerospace talks to Dr Tony Barrett
Since the Technical Department of the Society became ESDU, its operations have gone from strength to strength under Dr A. J. Barrett’s able direction. Gordon Wansbrough-White has been interviewing Dr Barrett.

GW-W: ESDU must be a unique organisation and, as Managing Director, you must hold a unique position. Is this so, and how did the organisation come about?

AJB: I sometimes feel that the word “unique” is very much overworked. It is something of an embarrassment because there are many features of ESDU that are in fact unique. We have a very large body of professional people. ESDU is far more than its permanent staff, most of whom are qualified professional engineers. To produce our data sheets as they were formerly called - Data Items as we now call them - we have to bring to bear the views of a large number of people, not only the staff who do the actual work of data collection and correlation. These voluntary workers, many of whom are members of the Royal Aeronautical Society, have made possible a type of committee operation that does not exist elsewhere: we go on hammering at the data in committees until everyone is in full agreement. As a result, these Data Items represent the best current statement that can be produced on a particular physical phenomenon.

The organisation came about as a wartime expedient in late 1938. Beverley Shenstone became aware that although we had excellent design teams we were going to have to expand them very rapidly, bringing in designers from other fields, such as shipbuilding and the motor industry. Such people were unfamiliar with stressed skin structural design. The Germans were well ahead in this field, the technical basis for this method of design having been developed in Germany by people like Wagner, who worked with Junkers. All the information had been published, but mostly in German. Shenstone put this problem to the Royal Aeronautical Society and a number of people studied it to see whether or not there was anything the Society could do to help. People had in mind an information retrieval system that listed all the available scientific literature on stressed skin design. The real stroke of genius came when people like Roxbee Cox and H. L. Cox devised a process of distillation of the contents of the research reports.

The justification for this processing came from the fact that the committee of practicing chief stressmen and researchers like Cox was able to tell the industry that here were the best data, that this was how they should be used, and that, with the imprint of the Royal Aeronautical Society on them, they could be trusted. No longer was there any need to do a lot of digging: here was an ideal working tool. That was the essential spark which influenced the whole development of ESDU.

What Shenstone, the two Coxs and many others devised in 1939 proved to be extremely successful during the war. The work was expanded into aerodynamics and later in the war into aircraft performance. For a few years after the war the work continued to cover these subjects. There was some question, however, in about 1950, as to whether or not the work, set up as a wartime expedient, should be allowed to continue. The aircraft industry insisted it was a most useful service, and in fact it was they, the users, whose enthusiasm ensured the continuity of the service. It was reconstituted in 1952 after a two-year gap in activity and from there it went on into new aeronautical areas. Supersonic aerodynamics and aircraft fatigue problems came into the scope of the series.

In 1963 the work started to become better known outside of aerospace when the Fielden Report was published on engineering design. Bob Fielden and his committee drew attention to the work that the Royal Aeronautical Society had fathered and suggested that other engineering societies could well follow the lead. When the new Ministry of Technology was set up, it seemed to have a lot of money to spend on developing ways of helping British industry. The Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the Institution of Chemical Engineers were encouraged to start similar work, but instead of setting up separate groups paralleling that of the Royal Aeronautical Society they collaborated directly with the Society.

The Technical Department was renamed the Engineering Sciences Data Unit to reflect its wider interests. Towards the end of the 1960s, Government policy on funding services to industry started to change and it became very clear that in a short time we would have to become completely self-supporting. We would have to sell the work at a commercial price and operate without the grants that the Government and the SBAC had provided to support the work. Following a suggestion by Tony Wedgwood Benn, the institution started looking around for a commercial associate who could take on the marketing of the work. In order to become self-supporting it needed marketing in a professional way. So, in 1971, the Royal Aeronautical Society set up ESDU as a wholly-owned private company, working, however, in association with many other professional bodies. In addition, a new company, Engineering Data Sales, was formed; it was actually part of the Thompson Organisation. It was set up purely to market the ESDU product - the Data Items.

GW-W: How did you come into ESDU? AJB: I first joined the Technical Department of the Royal Aeronautical Society in 1952: it was a simple matter of answering an advertisement in the Society’s Journal. It was looking for staff to restart the data sheet work after the two-year gap following the 1950 reassessment. There were just two of us - John Dunsby looked after the aerodynamics side and I looked after the structures area.

As the years went by more staff joined us. The leader of the group, Derek Smith, left to join AGARD in about 1958 and shortly after that I was appointed Head of the Technical Department. We went on developing our fields, broadening our base into mechanical and chemical engineering. Then, in 1971, when we were formed as a private company, I was invited to become Managing Director and Chief Executive.

GW-W: What was your earlier career? AJB: I always consider my career started from the day I was born. Right from the beginning, the aeroplane has been a major, if not the only source, of my bread and butter. My father was with the Gloster Aircraft Company and my earliest memories are of his work on the Schneider Trophy entries of that very successful company. Other early memories are of the workshop we had at home. My apprenticeship into engineering clearly started from a very early age. When the time came to leave school I became an apprentice with the Handley Page Aircraft company and took one or two days off each week to attend Northampton Polytechnic to obtain a degree. Having spent a number of years in various departments of Handley Page, I decided to look around the world a little and was very fortunate in being awarded a Rotary Scholarship for study in America; I was also awarded one of the first Fulbright travel grants, which paid my fare across there.

For nearly two years I spent a very enjoyable time at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the Guggenheim School of Aeronautics. The formal part of the exercise was to take a Masters Degree in Aeronautical Engineering, which I did, but many other things happened to me while there that were to have a very great influence later on.

When I returned to England I rejoined Handley Page in the Stress Office and received a very good schooling in aircraft structural engineering under Sandifer and Tyson. I became very aware of the application of basic research to real design problems and after a while, although I enjoyed aeronautical engineering and the cutting of metal so much, I developed an urge to do something about the application of knowledge in a much more direct way. I saw in the advertisement in the Journal an opportunity to pursue this line of work.

GW-W: Have you any interests outside of your work? AJB: A large part of whatever spare time I have I spend in my small workshop/laboratory where I invent things, mostly for my own amusement and that of the family, although one or two of my ideas have had a limited public success. Whenever I get the chance I go sailing and visit antiquities.

Over recent years I have developed an interest in the war between the American States, or the Civil War as it is more usually but imprecisely called. That interest derives from my belief that here we have, almost within living memory, the first major impact of modern technology on the man in the street: it is often forgotten how many of the modern engines of war were introduced between 1861 and 1865 on the North American Continent.