Out On a Wing

Sir Miles Thomas is one of the leaders of the new industrial revolution. In the realm of transport, in the car industry and in aviation, his achievement as an originator and executive is a fascinating part of the recent advances that have made our world so small.
Like most innovators, Miles Thomas has been a man of action. From his earliest childhood in Wales, he showed an affinity for modern learning and mechanics rather than the classics. Trains fascinated him, followed by the madness of motor-cycling. The first world war made the schoolboy into a young munitions worker. But soon he joined the Motor Machine Gun Corps, with whom, as an armoured car driver, he saw the frustrations and dire discomforts of the German East African Campaign. His first experience of flying was with the Royal Flying Corps in the Middle East. The R.F.C. made him a stunt instructor, and after active service the R.A.F. offered him a permanent commission.
But the R.A.F. in peacetime was not challenging enough. This was the heyday of the motoring explosion and of the motor pioneers, Herbert Austin, William R. Morris and the Rooter brothers. Miles Thomas entered motor journalism as a cub reporter, and was soon motor race reporting from the cockpit of an aircraft all over Europe, and meeting everyone connected with the driving and building of cars. William Morris was impressed and offered him a job with the growing Morris empire.
The story of Miles Thomas is also intimately the story of Lord Nuffield and of the boom years of the motor industry in Birmingham and Oxford, of the tension between its captains, Austin, Rootes, Pat Hennessey of Fords, L. P. Lord and Nuffield himself. With the approach of war, relations with the Government and integration with the manufacture of aero-engines became all-important.
After the war Miles Thomas's energies were harnessed to other Government projects, to industrial rationalisation in Central Africa and to BOAC of which he became Chairman in 1949. Currently, television is part of his story, too, together with major activities in the fields of the chemical industry, agriculture, engineering and high finance.
This is an autobiography for our generation by a man who has made a significant contribution to shaping its pattern – one of those who accelerated the engines which are carrying us, at an ever-increasing tempo, into the future.


by Sir Miles Thomas
Published by Michael Joseph 1964 1st edition, 2nd impression. 406pp illustrated, index. 15x23 very good, in worn d/j.







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