Harry with his mechanic friends, Harry Kauper and Harry Busteed, witnessed Harry Houdini make the first flying demonstrations in Australia and all three became determined to get into aviation. In March 1911 Harry used his £100 savings to sail for England with his two friends.

Harry eventually got jobs with Commer, Mercedes and Austro-Daimler and finally, on 29th June 1912, as a mechanic with the Sopwith School of Flying at Brooklands. He was their twelfth employee, working with Harry Kauper for Thomas Sopwith’s engineer, Fred Sigrist, in sheds within the Brooklands motor racing track. Fred and his small team, whilst looking after the School’s aircraft, were completing their first new machine, the Hybrid. Harry used his savings for flying lessons with the firm’s founder, Thomas Sopwith, went solo within four days gaining Aviator’s Certificate No 297 on 17th September 1912, and immediately became Sopwith’s test and competition pilot. Harry made three attempts at the £500 British Empire Michelin Trophy Prize for the longest flight and on 24th October won it circling over Brooklands for 8hrs 23minutes.
    In November the Sopwith Hybrid became the first of many aircraft sold to the Admiralty by the newly formed Sopwith Aviation Co. Harry delivered it to the naval airfield at Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey.

Needing a ready-made factory for more military orders, in December 1912 Thomas Sopwith bought the Roller Skating Rink in the centre of Kingston upon Thames. The Bat Boat, Britain’s first practical flying boat, a sensation at the Olympia Aero Show, was  bought by the Admiralty. Alongside it at the show was the Sopwith Three-Seater tested by Harry before delivery to the Admiralty. Harry used another of these to take the British height record with one passenger to 12,900 ft and the world height record with three passengers to 8,400 ft. Testing  and improving each new Sopwith machine were Harry’s main tasks but he loved demonstration flying, races and competitions. By July Sopwith’s Bat Boat had retractable wheels and Harry flew it back and forth from land to water six times in a single day to win the £500 Mortimer Singer Prize for the first truly practical amphibious aircraft.|
    The company expanded rapidly with orders from the Army’s Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and the Admiralty’s Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS). Harry developed new skills, including flying off the sea. This was essential when attempting the Daily Mail challenge for the fastest flight around the coast of Britain from Southampton and back. In a Sopwith floatplane Harry left Southampton Water on 16th August, accompanied by Harry Kauper.
Manoeuvring to land near Dublin with a failing engine Harry’s foot slipped off the rudder pedal and they crashed into the sea. For flying 1,043 miles over 2½ days, a seaplane distance record, the Daily Mail awarded them a £1,000 consolation prize.

The machine was repaired and fitted with wheels but after taking-off from Brooklands Harry turned down-wind too soon, spinning and crashing heavily. He was lucky to survive but his back was badly injured. Back problems would plague him for the rest of his life.
    Harry wanted a small, fast, agile machine to enjoy his flying and demonstrate his flying skills. He devised a side by side two-seater soon dubbed the Tabloid. Two days after its first flight on 27th November it was tested at Farnborough and with just 80hp the performance was astonishing; 92mph top speed and 1,200ft /min rate of climb. In 1914 Harry took his Tabloid to Australia, making many demonstration flights in an attempt to promote the sale of Sopwith aircraft to the Australian air force.

Meanwhile in England a Tabloid was fitted with floats and taken to Monte Carlo for the 280 kilometre international Schneider Trophy race for seaplanes. Flown by Howard Pixton it won the race and took the world 300 kilometre speed record for floatplanes.
    By the time Harry got back to England Sopwith Aviation had 140 employees. Harry took the Schneider Trophy 100hp Tabloid, now fitted with wheels, to Farnborough where an amazing 111mph top speed was measured. With this Tabloid he mastered looping, within three days executing twelve consecutive loops. During a demonstration at Brooklands he stalled from a slow engine-off loop and span into tall trees. He had a remarkable escape. Within days he took another Tabloid higher, deliberately stalling and spinning it. He recovered in good time proving his intuition that the way out of a spin was to have the courage to simply centralise the controls, push forward and wait.
    With orders pouring in Thomas Sopwith built an extra large assembly shop on a patch of land near the skating rink, more than doubling the factory space, and bought up the cottages and land in the area for even more expansion needed for production. War was declared on 6th August and the Sopwith’s efforts were focussed on better and better military machines resulting in large orders.

In the experimental shop the Sigrist Bus was completed, using Fred Sigrist’s vision for a simpler wing strut arrangement. Harry took it up to 18,393ft for a new British height record. The production version of the machine was the Sopwith 1 ½ Strutter. It was the first British two-seater with a forward firing gun for the pilot and a machine gun on a revolving ring mount for the observer-photographer behind. Sopwith built some 250 of these and hundreds were ordered for the RFC from contractors. Over 4,000 were ordered from French companies for the French armed forces.
    Using an old 50hp engine, a ‘runabout’ was built for Harry to travel from Brooklands around the Naval Air Stations to test, approve and hand over locally assembled Sopwith aircraft. Harry demonstrated the flying qualities of his new runabout by flying it under both footbridges that crossed the Brooklands race track. He also flew the prototype Sopwith Pup from the Kingston football ground close to the factory. This 80hp single-seat fighter incorporated the best features of Harry’s Tabloids, his ‘runabout’ and the 1 ½ Strutter and was itted with a forward firing machine gun. Sopwith got orders for nearly 100 from the Admiralty and hundreds more were ordered for the RFC from their contractors.
    In  the 110hp Sopwith Triplane development of the Pup Harry found an unequalled rate of climb and a service ceiling reaching 20,000ft. Some of the 150 built for the RNAS were soon with the RFC over the Western Front outclassing the German fighters, forcing the development of the Fokker triplane. Harry was the first to fly all new designs and advise on changes required to improve performance and handling qualities.
    Harry frequently visited the squadrons on the Western Front to find out what improvements were most needed. By December 1916 Sopwith built the prototype Camel which was even more compact and agile than the Pup or Triplane. It had two machine guns to improve chances of hits in the few seconds a pilot might have a target in his sights. By mid-1917 the factory in Kingston covered 5 ½ acres, most of it two and three storey workshops. Through the second half of 1917 Sopwith built 550 Camels with another 5,000 built elsewhere. The Camel would become the most successful allied fighter of the war and was also used for ground bombing and trench strafing.
    By now Harry had a new 50hp ‘runabout’, even more compact and with a raised seat to evaluate the pilot’s view over the top wing. He needed his cars and ‘runabouts’ even more now to visit contractors’ airfields all over the country to trouble-shoot their initial production Sopwith aircraft and train their test pilots. In one stretch of 199 flying days he flew 295 different aircraft at 21 different airfields, all but a dozen the first flights of new aircraft, sometimes ten in a day. In October 1917 when flying an aircraft out to France he injured his back again in a forced landing into snow.                                                                                                                                      On the morning of 17th November Harry was collected from Brooklands by his brother, just in time to get to Ealing to marry Muriel Peaty. Harry and Muriel moved into a large house, Ennadale, across the road from St Paul’s church at Hook. Harry added a spacious garage and well-equipped workshop for his many motoring projects.
    In Kingston Sopwith had orders for 1,400 Dolphin high altitude fighters, the world’s first with four guns, which attracted French and American interest.
    Aircraft over the western Front were averagely surviving about 8 weeks and the RFC wanted  to triple the number of squadrons to 200. So in addition to the large numbers of aircraft being built by companies all around the country, the Ministry of Munitions decided to build four huge National Aircraft Factories to help reach the target total of 3,500 new aircraft a month. One of these was built over the winter of 1917-18 at Ham which Thomas Sopwith leased as a satellite factory and used to build 1,400 Snipe fighters and Salamander armour-plated ground attack aircraft. Tom Sopwith, just 30 years old, was now employing some 3,500 people in Kingston, one third being women and one third disabled soldiers and sailors. The first Snipe entered service in June 1918 by which time Harry was appointed MBE for services to aviation.
    On the 11th November 1918 the war ended; a year earlier than military planners were expecting.
    Sopwith had been developing ideas for an aircraft to meet the Daily Mail challenge to be first to fly the Atlantic non-stop and by February 1919 the Sopwith Atlantic was being tested at Brooklands by Harry and his navigator Kenneth McKenzie-Grieve. (The story of this is being reported separately in the Newsletters).
    Afterwards Harry was back testing the latest Sopwith prototypes all designed around the promising but troublesome ABC Dragonfly engine. But, with the war over and plenty of Snipes already built, there were no serious prospects of production orders for new types. The Royal Air Force was formed in 1918 and the Snipe was seen as its standard front-line fighter for the foreseeable future. Initial attempts with civil aircraft brought only a handful of orders; the last aircraft built by Sopwith was the Antelope three seat airliner. So the company set out to build 10,000 ABC motorcycles a year but design modifications delayed deliveries. Missing out on springtime motorcycle sales and daily accruing huge losses, Thomas Sopwith put the company into voluntary liquidation. Whilst they could still pay all their creditors in full, the remaining 1400 employees lost their jobs, including Harry.
    For his crucial role in the success of Sopwith Aviation Harry had been paid a significant salary throughout the war. This had been almost trebled by commission bonuses based on numbers of aircraft delivered, so Harry was able to buy his Scooter runabout and take on the Australian agency for the French DFP cars. Harry also bought an AC sports car and designed a streamlined single seat aluminium body for it.
    Just eight weeks after the liquidation Harry, Thomas Sopwith, Fred Sigrist and two others each took £5,000 of shares in a new company with just 20 employees, back in the roller-skating rink. It was named the HG Hawker Engineering Co in recognition of Harry’s huge contribution to the success of Sopwith Aviation. Initially they built Hawker two-stroke motorcycles whilst striving to find ways back into aircraft work.They were also building aluminium car bodies, many like Harry’s much-admired home-built one, soon to become ‘de riguer’ for any driver racing ACs and other types at Brooklands.
    Harry got the chance to fly the much admired Nieuport Goshawk in the 1921 Aerial Derby. On July 12th. Harry took off from Hendon to test it. At around 2,000ft there was a fuel leak which started a fuselage fire that reached Harry’s shoes and ankles. Hastily diving to land, he appeared to lose control and crashed. Harry was flung out and died soon after. At the inquest it was suggested that he lost control paralysed by a haemorrhage of his long-endured tuberculosis of the spine. This back condition possibly hindered him in trying to get the flames extinguished by diving but it is also possible that he lost control getting ready to jump out to avoid further burns. The inquest verdict was death by misadventure, glossing over the root cause - a fuel fire probably initiated by a loose cap on the carburettor float chamber.
    Crowds blocked the streets in Hook to pay tribute as Harry’s coffin was carried past his home to his funeral at St Paul’s church. The ceremony was attended by many famous names in the aviation industry and the military. King George V sent a telegram: “The nation has lost one of its most distinguished airmen, who by his skill and daring has contributed so much to the success of British aviation.”
    Fred Sigrist tells us more. “Harry was a wonderfully strong personality, his methods revealed intensely deep thinking like a man of 50 not 30 but in private life he was like a boy, full of mischief, remarkably athletic, and always light hearted in temperament. None could help admiring his courage and his blind confidence in himself and he possessed the courage of his convictions more strongly than anyone I ever knew. It would be impossible to ever realise the amount of good work for which he was responsible and to record how, from time to time, he demonstrated the possibilities of getting machines out of difficulties in the air. He undoubtedly was the means of saving hundreds of lives. He has tested more machines than any man and there is no one who has done more actual flying.”                                                                                                                     Harry Hawker’s name will always be linked to the many successful Sopwith aircraft types he helped conceive, test and improve, and it lives on in the achievements of the many thousands of aircraft subsequently built by H G Hawker Engineering, Hawker Aircraft Ltd and Hawker Siddeley Aviation through much of the Twentieth Century.