He guarded the Isle of Grain in the Thames Estuary, and served in military funeral parties in Kent during the 1918 flu pandemic.

[5] When he started, he wrote that he was shocked to find that before building the R38 the civil servants concerned '"had made no attempt to calculate the aerodynamic forces acting on the ship"' but had just copied the size of girders in German airships.

[9] In 1931, with the cancellation of the R100 project, Shute teamed up with the talented de Havilland-trained designer A. Hessell Tiltman to found the aircraft construction company Airspeed Ltd.[2] A site was available in a former trolleybus garage on Piccadilly, York.

[10] Despite setbacks, including the usual problems of a new business, Airspeed Limited eventually gained recognition when its Envoy aircraft was chosen for the King's Flight.

For the innovation of developing a hydraulic retractable undercarriage for the Airspeed Courier, and his work on R100, Shute was made a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society.

He was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) as a sub-lieutenant, having joined as an "elderly yachtsman" and expected to be in charge of a drifter or minesweeper, but after two days he was asked about his career and technical experience.

He reached the "dizzy rank" of lieutenant commander, knowing nothing about "Sunday Divisions" and secretly fearing when he went on a little ship that he would be the senior naval officer and "have to do something".

After the first U-boat was sunk by it, Charles Goodeve sent him a message concluding "I am particularly pleased as it fully substantiates the foresight you showed in pushing this in its early stages.

The most common theme in Shute's novels is the dignity of work, spanning all classes, whether a Spanish bar hostess in the Balkans (Ruined City) or a brilliant but unworldly boffin (No Highway).

His novels are in three main clusters: early pre-war flying adventures; Second World War tales; and stories set in Australia.

Another recurrent theme is the bridging of social barriers such as class (Lonely Road and Landfall), race (The Chequer Board), or religion (Round the Bend).

They included Buddhist astrology and folk prophecy in The Chequer Board; the effective use of a planchette in No Highway; a messiah figure in Round the Bend; reincarnation, science fiction, and Aboriginal psychic powers in In the Wet.

Many of his books have been adapted for the screen, including Lonely Road in 1936; Landfall: A Channel Story in 1949; Pied Piper in 1942 and again in 1959, and also as Crossing to Freedom, a CBS made-for-television movie, in 1990; On the Beach in 1959 and again in 2000 as a two-part miniseries; and No Highway in 1951.

A Town Like Alice was adapted into a film in 1956, serialised for Australian television in 1981, and also broadcast on BBC Radio 2 in 1997 starring Jason Connery, Becky Hindley, Bernard Hepton and Virginia McKenna.

[15] In 1948, Shute flew his own Percival Proctor aeroplane to Australia and back, accompanied by the writer James Riddell, who published a book, Flight of Fancy, based on the trip, in 1950.

[17] Remembering his 1930 trip to Canada and his decision to immigrate to Australia, he wrote, in 1954, "For the first time in my life I saw how people live in an English-speaking country outside England.

[23] In the Readers' List of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels of the 20th century, A Town Like Alice came in at number 17, Trustee from the Toolroom at 27, and On the Beach at 56.