Tony Holdaway - Return
Anthony Albert (Tony) Holdaway
Design Engineer
14th October 1920 - 3rd April 2011
Tony worked as a Research and Development Design Engineer, covering a wide variety of engineering design projects in many companies and organisations. These included Vickers Aircraft at Weybridge in Surrey, Hawker Siddeley at Kingston and Dunsfold later this became British Aerospace (BAe), also with Tiltman Langley Ltd (Airspeed) and later the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) at Boscombe Downs and Farnborough. At Boscombe Downs (RAE) tested the Vickers Valiant bomber which carried one of our cold war nuclear deterrents, these aircraft required design modifications to carry these advanced bombs on which Tony was employed
Other designs which were aero based and due to the advances in this field tended to be new and unique, such as restraining systems for naval aircraft landing on sea based carriers, especially jet powered fast fighters with a much higher landing speed than earlier aircraft.
Tony excelled at mathematic, a requirement of all engineers well before the advent of computers and calculators, this ability became necessary when he moved into automated product packaging, with the design of food processing and packaging where the extremely fast mechanisms function in an apparently fast flowing procedure but in fact is a synchronized stop and start process that require much high level mathematics to ensue a “continuous” process, even when using standard and other profile edge designed cams and Geneva mechanisms, used in bottling plants and food production lines, to enable the products plus free gifts to be precisely measured into a variety of containers without crushing any of the inserts.
Tony evolved a super fast stitching mechanism for dog biscuit sacks, plus designing a complex card manufacturing machine (flow line) to produce multi layered greetings cards again needing a wide variety of complex gears and mechanisms required to be calculated and designed, these just gives a flavour of Tony’s long involvement in engineering design often at the leading edge.
Tony was a great achiever because in retirement he complete at Birkbeck College, University of London a course with Merit in Earth Sciences.
Hawker Siddeley was a group of British manufacturing companies engaged in aircraft production. Hawker Siddeley combined the legacies of several British aircraft manufacturers, emerging through a series of mergers and acquisitions as one of only two such major British companies in the 1960s. In 1977, Hawker Siddeley became a founding component of the nationalised British Aerospace (BAe). Hawker Siddeley also operated in other industrial markets, such as locomotive building (through its ownership of Brush Traction) and diesel engine manufacture (through its ownership of Lister Petter). The Company was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.
