Nevil Shute

Author

• Born: January 17, 1899
• Birthplace: Ealing, Middlesex, England
• Died: January 12, 1960
• Place of death: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Biography

Novelist Nevil Shute was the son of Arthur Hamilton Norway, an assistant secretary in London’s general post office, and Mary Louisa (Gadsden) Norway; Nevil Shute Norway dropped the surname Norway in his writing career, publishing as Nevil Shute. As a young boy, Shute attended a preparatory school in Hammersmith, but at age eleven he was caught skipping school to explore the science museum’s aircraft exhibits, where he was focused on learning how the planes worked. Shute then attended Oxford’s Dragon School and Shrewsbury. When he was seventeen, Shute witnessed the Easter rising of 1916 in Dublin, where his father was then working in Ireland’s post office. Volunteering as a stretcher-bearer, he earned a commendation for gallant conduct.

With admission to the Royal Military Academy, Shute tried to join the Royal Flying Corps but failed his final medical exam due to a bad stutter, and he served in the final part of World War II as a private in the Suffolk regiment. In 1919, he enrolled in Oxford’s Balliol College, graduating with a degree with honors in engineering science in 1922. He performed unpaid work for the Aircraft Manufacturing Company in Hendon and for Sir Geoffrey de Havilland’s aircraft company during school breaks, and he gained employment at the latter business upon his graduation from Oxford. He learned to fly and became a test observer while spending his evenings writing novels and short stories. As an aeronautical engineer with the de Havilland Aircraft Company, Shute served as deputy chief in the development and construction of one of Britain’s last airships and flew aboard the airship to North America at least twice. Shute’s work on the project concluded in 1930 when the R100, a rival government aircraft which Shute believed was inefficient, crashed, killing most of the airship’s passengers, including Lord Thompson, the British minister of aviation. Disillusioned with the future of airships, Shute in 1931 founded the aircraft construction company Airspeed Ltd., acting as its joint managing director through 1938. In the same year as his company’s inception, Shute married physician Francis Mary Heaton, and the couple had two daughters.

Once Airspeed Ltd. became established and successful, Shute decided to leave the company for a full-time writing career, for which he had been preparing for the previous several years. He had published his first novel, Marazan, in 1926 and had published three additional novels by the time he left Airspeed in 1938. The film rights to two of those novels, Lonely Road and Ruined City, had also been purchased. In 1939, with the onset of World War II, Shute enlisted in the Royal Naval Reserve, rising from sublieutenant in the miscellaneous weapons department to lieutenant commander. He was also present at the Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944, on behalf of the Ministry of Information, and he was a correspondent the following year in Burma.

When Shute’s service concluded in 1945, he moved to Langwarri, Victoria, Australia, where he lived out the remaining twenty-five years of his life, setting most of his subsequent novels in Australia. He published the highly successful novel Pied Piper in 1942; the book, which tells the story of an elderly man who helped a group of children in France escape the Nazis by taking them to the United States, was made into a film. Indeed, several Shute novels found their way to the screen, including On the Beach, published in 1957, and A Town Like Alice, published in 1950. The 1959 film adaptation of On the Beach was praised as an antibomb film. In 1954, six years before his death, Shute published his autobiography, Slide Rule.