Stuart Duncan Davies CBE, BSc(Eng), CEng, Hon FRAeS

Stuart was born in London in 1906 and was educated at Westminster City School. He started work at Vauxhall Motors before joining Vickers in 1925.

During his six years he gained his BSc in Engineering.

In 1934 he joined the Technical Staff at Hawker Aircraft under Sir Sydney Camm. During this time, he was Project Engineer on the Hurricane and Henley.

Four years later he joined the Avro Design Office at Newton Heath, Manchester as Assistant Designer on the Avro Manchester, but he was transferred to the Experimental Dept, which had moved to Ringway (Manchester Airport) in 1939. He organised the department into a self contained manufacturing unit which produced the prototypes of Manchester, Lancaster, York, Lincoln and Tudor in addition to many other tasks that needed doing during the War.

In late 1944 he became Chief Designer of the Yeadon Factory where the Anson and York were produced and design work was proceeding on the Athena trainer and an Anson replacement.

Less than two years later, he was appointed Chief Designer under Roy Chadwick who had become Technical Director and moved to
Chadderton by then the Head Office. The main task at that time was the design of the Type 698 (VULCAN) and the scale model Type 707's. In 1947 tragedy struck when Chadwick was killed in a Tudor II crash here at Woodford on August 28th Stuart Davies was also on board but miraculously survived and shouldered the responsibility of seeing the Vulcan design through its vital development before leaving to take up the position of Managing Director at Dowty Fuel Systems in 1955.

Three years later he became Technical Director of Hawker Siddeley Aviation then in 1964 moving to the same Dowty Rotol Ltd. From whence he retired. He sadly passed away in 1995, having worked through the incredible technological phase of aviation development with honours.