Shute As Establishmentarian

You might look at Shute's autobiography, _Slide Rule_(1954) as well. Shute had a very definite sense of how close to the wind he was running as managing director of Airspeed. The issue was usually the valuation of aircraft which were in the process of becoming obsolete, but which would be wanted anyway if there was a war. 

It is an oversimplication to claim Shute as a Libertarian. He was a man of the establishment, in the same way that Joseph Conrad was. I think he would have been more of a Kirkean conservative, and he would certainly have been disgusted by Ayn Rand. What was implicit in Rand's thinking was that no one was ever going to trust her with  power. Shute was someone who was trusted with power, a "man under authority." In _So Disdained_ (1928), one of the earliest of his novels, the English countryside, complete with vicar, squire, and butler, is presented in an enormously sympathetic way. Shute favored there being a sizable class of gentlemen of inherited means. As he argued, in _Slide Rule_, it is necessary to have officers and higher civil servants who can afford to do the right thing, even if it gets them cashiered. Shute's father had himself been a higher civil servant, a postal official.

Shute was a man  of the time of the world wars. His elder brother was killed in the First World War, and he himself was in the training pipeline when the war ended. During the Second World War, Shute served as an officer in the Royal Navy, starting as an  "elderly yachtsman," and then, when his credentials had been appraised, as a staff officer. He was very comfortable with the armed services, and by extension, with places like government laboratories. For example, look at the portrait of the Royal Aircraft Establishment in _No Highway_ (1948), and of the character of  Theodore Honey, the classic absent-minded professor, or as Shute puts it, "an inside man."

Well before there was a labor government, Shute was enthusing about  the United States and the British  Dominions. See for example, the portrait of Canada in An Old Captivity (1940), as well as that in _No Highway_. For that  matter, note the description of the unspoiled Eskimo in _An Old Captivity_. In Landfall (1940), the heroine feels a sense of liberation about leaving  England, because she is getting away from people who judge her by her accent-- she is not a lady born, but the  daughter of a non-commissioned officer. There is the same sense of enlargement _Round the Bend_ (*). The narrator, on arriving in  the newly independent  Middle East, is suddenly free to do all kinds of unconventional things, like crossing the color-bar, that is, ignoring the whole carefully cultivated system of racial distinctions which had been ingrained into  him.

In _Trustee From the Tool Room_ (*), the hero has recovered some diamonds which have been illegally smuggled out of England, but instead of doing the  economically rational thing, and depositing them  in America, beyond the reach of the British government, he smuggles them back into England so that he can  pretend they never left. The people who smuggled the diamonds out are dead, but the hero is concerned to protect their reputation.  There was a strong element of "render unto Caesar" in Shute's thinking.

_Round the Bend_ (*) is about a man who founds a religion based on craftsmanship, and the ethical values of craftsmanship. Significantly, one of his admirers, an Arab  prince, donates money to keep  the sage's workplace free of usury. Then there is the naval lieutenant in _Landfall_, commander of a trawler, who has spent twenty years between the wars being unhappy as a small businessman:
   "War came and he was called up. Twenty years slipped off him like a cloak. Gieves, the naval tailors upon Portsmouth Hard, gave him another sort of  cloak, on tick. The Admiralty gave  him _Rosie and Kate_, of Grimsby. God gave him happiness, and he set  to work." (p.  58, pbk. ed. n.d.)

Most Secret (*), another of Shute's war novels, culminates in the hero's heroic suicide.  Shute was certainly  not a radical free-marketeer. He wasn't a radical anything.

(*) going by memory here, about half of my set of Nevil Shute  vanished in the course of moving, some years ago.

Let's see, are we talking about _Strike From Space_ (1965), the book Schaffley wrote with R.Adm  Chester Ward. It's been some time since I looked at it. I couldn't get through it, because it seemed to be a rather silly book, mostly fueled by  hostility to Robert McNamara. At  any rate, _On the Beach_ came out a bit after the  time  when the John Birch Society discovered  that Eisenhower  was a communist. William F. Buckley made a famous retort to that:  "He's not a communist, he's a golfer."

(somewhat later)

Well, I recall having run across it in  Buckley. However, Bon Mots of that sort are commonly borrowed back and forth.