Harold Clisby's clever engineering skill used by Keith Litchfield and GMH Adelaide for World War II arms projects
Harold Clisby was recruited to the design section of the General Motors-Holden's plant, in the Adelaide suburb of Woodville, with its huge munitions manufacturing operations.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia
Adelaide’s Harold Clisby left working with his father’s clothing factory in the late 1930s to start his wildly inventive engineering in an era that matched his bold adventurousness.
In 1936. Clisby produced some steel model aeroplane engines. This led to an approach from kindred spirit Keith Litchfield, a former speedway racer who’d moved into the engineering business. One of Litchfield Engineering’s early ventures was building a Flying Flea (Mignet Pou-du-Ciel), a small French “home-built” kit aircraft, with a dubious safety record. Clisby took part in testing the Flying Flea with aviator Harry Butler and it was successfully flown at Parafield Aerodrome, north of Adelaide, but only became a one-off exercise.
Litchfield switched to jobbing work, included making full-size aeroplane engine parts for customers such as the flying doctor service and Guinea Airways. Several cars were produced for clients experimenting with manufacturing them.
Adelaide motor trader and World War I fighter pilot Jack Thomson envisioned a low-priced economic car with a 700cc two-cycle engine. Clisby built and redesigned the engine. He test drove it eight miles in his small car every day to work from the Grange to Adelaide. The car performed so well, it encouraged the All-Australian Motors Ltd to be floated June 1939 but World War II put an end to that venture.
Clisby also fixed basic problems another four-cyclinder four-cycle 2.2-litre engine referred by another motor trader George Bateup. The engine was then fitted in what was called the Auscar, announced by South Australian premier Thomas Playford in March 1939 but again halted by World War I.
In 1938, Clisby reluctantly returned to his father Leopold’s factory that had gained more military clothing contracts. He brought his inventiveness to the factory with a small electrically heated steam boiler, connected to a normal iron, that were made for most factories acriss Adelaide. Later he built a two cylinder marine engine of four-horse power in his private workshop space in Leopold’s factory.
Petrol rationing during World War II prompted Cliby to fit a gas producer, automatically lit by pushing a button on the dashboard, for his Oldsmobile car. This attracted the interest of chief engineer of General Motors Holden’s at Woodville, with Clisby demonstrating the car's performance down Port Road at more than 70 miles per hour.
When he showed the GM-H management his designs for speedboat hauls, he was offered a job in their motor body design section. His first work was on a Chevrolet automobile dashboard layout but the pressing need for war munitions saw him transferred to the two-pounder anti-tank gun section. He was given a free hand to redesign machine tools such as special lathes to bore the barrels of the guns and a rifling machine to cut the spiral grooves within the barrel.
Another large design project was the casing for an ariel-launched torpedo, codenamed OS28. At the end of World War II, General Motors offered Clisby any job he liked at any of their Australian plants. Clisby declined the offer and also his father’s wish for him to take over running his clothing factory. When his father moved out of his rented house, Clisby was left temporarily homeless and slept on the banks of the River Torrens for a week awaiting a room in the Grosvenor Hotel on North Terrace, Adelaide city.
Clisby made use of his father’s factory, still filled with flammable textiles, to make his first experiment with the new rage of jet propulsion in 1946. Clisby made a small device of steel tubing, filled with gasoline and sealed. The device was lit up and spun unbalanced on a pole and spun as fast as Clisby could by hand but it wouldn’t accelerate beyond 80-90 miles per hour.