ere, for a long array
of charges against the administration and command of the Royal Flying
Corps. A parliamentary committee, under the chairmanship of Mr. Justice
Bailhache, was appointed to investigate these charges. Their report
vindicated the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Aircraft Factory, and
expressed admiration for the work done by both under the stress and
strain of war. The charges, it should be added, were not supported by
the private makers, or 'the trade', as they are called; none of them
made any complaint, and some of them went out of their way to record
their gratitude for the help they had received from the factory.

Nevertheless, the uncertainty of its relations with the trade caused the
factory, in its early days, to undertake a great diversity of business.
The designing of aircraft was plainly a matter of the first importance,
and for this designing it was necessary to collect a trained staff. The
difficulty here was that there were no professional designers; the
aeronautical world was a strange ferment of inventors, amateurs,
enthusiasts, heretics of all sorts, wedded to their own notions, and
mutually hostile. The factory decided to employ only those designers who
had had a solid course of training in engineering shops. By degrees
engineers trained in shipyards and officers skilled in motor-car design
were added to the staff of the drawing office until, by 1916, it had
increased from some half-dozen to two hundred and seventy-five.

When the war came this drawing office proved its value. An immense
number of aeroplanes was required, and many firms had to be employed to
make them. Some of these firms were well staffed, others not so well.
The factory made elaborate detailed dimensioned drawings, marked with
every permitted kind and degree of variation--as many as four hundred
drawings to a single aeroplane. With the help of these drawings all
kinds of firms--organ-builders, makers of furniture, or pianos, or
gramophones, or motor-cars--could be turned on to aeroplane manufacture.
In the course of two years half a million drawings were issued to
various firms; and those firms to whom the whole business of engineering
was strange were successfully initiated in one of its most delicate and
difficult branches. Here, too, the outcry was raised, in the newspapers
and in Parliament, that the factory was attempting to make a Government
monopoly of aircraft design and air-engine design. The accusation was