C. F. Caunter

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Cyril Francis Caunter, b. March 22, 1899, Ilford, Essex, d. April 10, 1988, was a British aviation historian and author.

In 1932 he published the novel "Madness Opens The Door", a space novel, and "Ex-Gangster" and "Killers Must Die". Two technical books on aero engines were published in that year as well, one of which was "The Two-Cycle Engine" which describes his 60 h.p. two-stroke light aero engine. Frederick George Miles of the Miles Aeroplane Company built a test prototype of the Caunter engine. Successful tests were carried out at Reading Aerodrome during the late 1930s.

In 1936 Caunter wrote "Death of the War God", which was about the Second World War, which he scheduled in the novel to start in 1939. His publishers at that time were afraid of publishing it because everyone at that time was afraid of war and did not want to know anything about it. Caunter mentions in his 1969 unpublished autobiography that his space novels were inspired by those of H.G. Wells but were written too soon to be popular in the 1970s.

The Caunter engine ran well at Reading Aerodrome with Frederick George Miles, who proposed initial plans for forming a small engine company to produce it to install in a small cheap design of airplane to be sold in large numbers like Ford cars. The two-stroke engine design was cheaper to make than the usual four-stroke varieties of light aero engine.

Caunter worked at the Royal Aircraft Establishment starting in the summer of 1937 in the aero engine department writing some of the operational text books of the R.A.F. aero engines, including the Rolls Royce Merlin engine which powered the Hurricane and Spitfire fighters.

The F.G. Miles firm at Reading was diverted to war production in 1938 and the Caunter engine went into discard. He sold the prototype which had done tests to Alvis Ltd., Coventry, for 2,000 pounds after the war.

Caunter eventually became the Chief Technical Librarian for the Establishment for the R.A.E. after a 1943 transfer.

In 1950, he joined the Science Museum as keeper of the Road Transport Collections, beginning ten years of work documenting one of the finest collections in existence at the time. He began the process of restoring the collection. An 1888 1 1/2 h.p. Benz three-wheeled car which had been purchased by the Science Museum in 1913 for 5 pounds and was one of the oldest cars in the world, was driven in the 1957 London to Brighton Veteran Car Run, as the No. 1 car, but its poor braking meant it did not finish. He fitted a second brake to it in 1958 and successfully completed the Run. Caunter wrote six H.M.S.O. books about Science Museum subjects during the 1950s.

When C.F. Caunter was at school he asked his Head Master, Fr. Ignatius Rice M.A., O.S.B.: 'How is a book written?' He answered, with an understanding smile: 'Soak yourself in your subject, and then write in the simplest English.'

Caunter's first publication was a small handbook, "Model Petrol Engines", published in 1920 by Percival Marshall Ltd., followed by "Small Electric Lighting Sets", which he described as "bad, although it was published". "Madness Opens The Door" was written in 1931 in six weeks for 100 pounds. Pitman published "Small Two-Stroke Aero Engines" and "Small Four-Stroke Aero Engines" as well as "Light Aero Engines" and "The Two-Cycle Engine". His H.M.S.O. official handbooks include "The History and Development of Cycles".

C. F. Caunter was writer-in-residence at Glendon College in 1979, completing his degree there that he started in 1916. He received his M.A. in June 1982; thesis was "Hydrogen : A Transport Aircraft Fuel as Applied to the Ontario Scene."