has a couple of Camm memories…
As a long-time collaborator, I was particularly interested to read Ron Williams's recollections of working for Sir Sydney (in NL28). Just to expand on one of Ron's stories, I recall that on joining the project office in Canbury Park Road as a postgraduate apprentice in early 1956, I was gleefully shown the only drawing they had ever seen Sir Sydney actually make.
Pasted to the wall behind one of the framed photographs was a scrap of paper with two concentric circles and two kidney shapes between them. This represented a Hunter rear fuselage and the joke was that nobody was really sure whether he had intended the additional fuel tanks to go above and below, or on either side of, the jet pipe.
On the subject of iconic humour, I also recall that some months earlier, when I was working in Jim Wilde's section of the production drawing office, after carefully looking around to see that Sir Sydney was nowhere in sight, Bob Copland showed me a drawing of the Hunter main spar that the great man had had them make, using a pin-jointed structure. The word was that Sir Sydney had less than total confidence in the ability of the stress office to predict kink-loads in the bent spar-booms of the initial design, so we had this thing that looked like the Firth of Forth bridge, in case Hunter wings started breaking off.
Working for Hawker Aircraft was an expensive pastime for most of us, but we had some great times and lots of laughs.