HAWKER — A British Aviation House Since 1920

An Archive of British Flight

Some names belong to history. Founded in Kingston-upon-Thames in 1920, Hawker carried the craft of the first flying machines into the jet age — a house whose aircraft defended a nation and then taught the jet to hover, written across the better part of a century of flight.

This is, first, a heritage. A documented century of engineering, courage and invention, preserved and told in full. What may one day be worn or collected is simply the natural inheritance of a story worth keeping alive.

The History · In Full

A house that carried
flight into the jet age

When H.G. Hawker Engineering was founded in 1920, it inherited not only the workshops of Sopwith but its restless ambition. The company took its name from Harry Hawker, the Australian test pilot whose nerve had been inseparable from the firm's reputation — and who, only the year before, had survived an attempt to be first to fly the Atlantic non-stop, ditching in the open ocean and being given up for dead before he was found alive.

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From 1925 the drawing office was led by Sydney Camm, perhaps the greatest fighter designer Britain ever produced. Under his hand the company gave the Royal Air Force the graceful Fury and Hart biplanes, then the Hurricane that bore the weight of 1940, the ground-shaking Typhoon and Tempest, the Sea Fury, the sublime Hunter jet — and finally the P.1127, the experiment that became the Harrier and changed what an aircraft could do.

1920

H.G. Hawker Engineering founded at Kingston from the remains of Sopwith.

1921

Harry Hawker, the firm's namesake, is killed while testing an aircraft at Hendon.

1933—35

Renamed Hawker Aircraft Ltd (1933); Camm's Hurricane flies and the Hawker Siddeley group is formed (1935).

1940

Hurricanes carry the greatest share of victories in the Battle of Britain.

1951

The Hawker Hunter first flies, becoming one of the most admired jets ever built.

1953

Thomas Sopwith, the founder, is knighted for his services to British aviation.

1960—69

The P.1127 hovers; the Harrier enters service as the first operational VTOL fighter.

1978

Sir Thomas Sopwith steps back from the board, aged 90 — fifty-eight years after founding the firm.

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Through all of it stood one constant figure: Thomas Sopwith. The man whose name had marked the Camels of the First World War gave the new company another’s — Harry Hawker’s — and then guided it for the rest of his long life. He served as its chairman, and later as chairman and life president of the Hawker Siddeley Group that grew around it, steering the house from fabric biplanes to the supersonic Hunter and the hovering Harrier. He stepped back from the board only in 1978, at the age of ninety; knighted along the way in 1953, he lived to 101, dying in 1989 — a single life that spanned, and helped to shape, almost the whole first century of powered flight.

From Sopwith to Hawker

Thomas SopwithFounder & chairman · 1888 – 1989

Harry HawkerTest pilot · 1889 – 1921

The Inheritance · 1920

Born from one of
aviation's great names

When punitive post-war taxation closed the Sopwith Aviation Company, the men who had built the Camel did not disband. In 1920 they began again, founding a new firm in Kingston-upon-Thames and naming it for the test pilot whose daring had defined the old one: Harry Hawker.

The same workshops, the same hands, the same unbroken pursuit of the new. What began in the heroic age of canvas and wire simply continued under a new name, with the whole of the jet age still ahead of it.

And at its head stood the same figure who had led Sopwith: Thomas Sopwith himself, who would guide the firm that carried Hawker’s name for more than half a century to come.

The lineage never broke. It only changed its name.

Harry George Hawker, MBE, AFC
1889 — 1921

The Founder

The pilot whose
nerve named a name

Aviator · Engineer · Atlantic Pioneer · 1889 — 1921

Harry George Hawker was born near Melbourne in 1889, the son of a blacksmith, and arrived in England with little but an instinct for machinery. Within a few years he had become the most celebrated test pilot of his age — the man who flew the prototypes others would not, who set endurance records, and whose name became so bound up with the aircraft he tested that, when a new company rose from Sopwith in 1920, it could be called nothing else.

If the Hurricane gave Hawker its place in history, it was two men who gave it its soul: Harry Hawker, the fearless pilot who lent the company its name, and Sydney Camm, the designer who carried that name from fabric biplanes to the hovering jet. One supplied the daring, the other the genius — and between them they defined British aviation for the better part of a century.

The Aviator

Hawker learned to fly at Brooklands and quickly outstripped everyone around him. He took endurance and altitude records, won the Michelin prizes, and earned a reputation for an almost supernatural feel for a machine in the air. Where others tested cautiously, he flew to the very edge of what a new design could do — and reported back exactly what it needed.

The Atlantic Pioneer

In May 1919 Hawker and his navigator, Kenneth Mackenzie-Grieve, set out to be the first to fly the Atlantic non-stop. More than a thousand miles out, with the engine overheating, they ditched beside a passing steamer. With no wireless contact, Britain mourned them as lost — and then, days later, came the news that they had been picked up alive. He returned to a hero's welcome and an audience with the King.

The Name That Endured

Harry Hawker did not live to see what his name would become. In July 1921, still only thirty-two, he was killed while testing an aircraft. But the company founded the year before carried his name onward — through the Hurricane, the Hunter and the Harrier — making it one of the most enduring in the history of flight.

Before the Company, the Legend

Hawker & the Atlantic

The First Non-Stop Attempt · 1919

A year before the company that bore his name was founded, Harry Hawker attempted the feat that would make him a household word across two continents: to be the first to fly the Atlantic Ocean non-stop. The aircraft was a single-engined biplane, the navigator a Royal Navy commander, and the odds against them were enormous.

For days the world believed them dead. Then a steamer reached port and signalled the news that turned mourning into celebration: they were alive.

Harry Hawker and Commander Kenneth Mackenzie-Grieve beside the aircraft before the 1919 transatlantic attempt — Harry Hawker & Cdr. Mackenzie-Grieve · Atlantic attempt · May 1919

1919The Attempt

~1,050 miFlown before ditching

14½ hrsContinuous flight

AliveRescued at sea

They flew through the night and into worsening weather until a blocked cooling system forced them down beside a small Danish steamer, the only ship for miles. With no radio aboard her, no word reached land for nearly a week. When it finally came, Harry Hawker returned to crowds in the streets — and a year later his name was fixed above the door of a new aviation house in Kingston.

Sir Sydney Camm, CBE, FRAeS
1893 — 1966

The Designer

The hand behind
a century of flight

Chief Designer · Fighter Pioneer · 1893 — 1966

If Harry Hawker gave the company its name, it was Sydney Camm who gave it its aircraft. From 1925 he led the Kingston drawing office, and for more than four decades scarcely a Hawker machine took shape without his hand on it.

One supplied the daring, the other the genius — and between them they defined British aviation for the better part of a century.

The Biplane Years

Under Camm the company gave the Royal Air Force the graceful Fury and Hart biplanes — fast, elegant machines that set the standard for their era and carried the Hawker name into the front rank of British design.

The Hurricane and Beyond

Then came the Hurricane, which bore the greatest share of the fighting in 1940, followed by the ground-shaking Typhoon and Tempest, the Sea Fury, and the sublime Hunter jet — and finally the P.1127, the experiment that became the Harrier and changed what an aircraft could do.

The Aircraft · 1935

The fighter that bore
the Battle of Britain

The Hawker Hurricane first flew in November 1935, the work of chief designer Sydney Camm. In the summer of 1940 it became the backbone of Fighter Command, and Hurricanes were credited with more enemy aircraft destroyed than every other British defence combined.

More than fourteen thousand were built. Rugged, steady and forgiving, it was the aeroplane that gave the few a fighting chance — and gave the name Hawker a place in the story of a nation.

More than a century on, its silhouette is known the world over.

"From a fabric biplane to a fighter that could hang motionless in the air — one drawing office, one lineage, one name."

Hawker · Kingston-upon-Thames · 1920 — A century of flight

III

The Engineering

An unbroken
line of invention

The thread of engineering that began in a Kingston workshop ran, unbroken, for the rest of the century. Through the elegant Fury and Hart biplanes, the war-winning Hurricane, the Typhoon and Tempest, the beautiful Hunter — and on to the Harrier, the first aircraft in the world to rise vertically into the sky as if by magic.

One continuous pursuit of the new, from canvas and wire to the jump jet, much of it drawn by a single hand: Sydney Camm, who shaped Hawker's aircraft for more than forty years.

Few names in British engineering carry a pedigree of this depth.

The Jet Age

The Hawk & the Hunter

Two jets, a generation apart, that carried the discipline of the Kingston drawing office into the age of swept wings and afterburners — one the fighter that defined an era, the other the trainer on which a nation's pilots were made.

The Hunter

First flown in 1951, the Hawker Hunter was Sydney Camm’s jet masterpiece — a swept-wing fighter that married speed and grace as few aircraft ever have. It set a world air-speed record, served the Royal Air Force and air forces around the globe for decades, and is still remembered as one of the most beautiful jets ever to take to the air.

A surviving Hawker Hunter in private hands, photographed in flight — referenced here in tribute to the aircraft and those who keep it flying.

The Hawk

If the Hunter closed one era, the Hawk opened another. A Hawker Siddeley design first flown in 1974, it became the Royal Air Force’s advanced jet trainer and the mount of the Red Arrows — the aircraft on which generations of fast-jet pilots earned their wings, and the most successful British jet trainer ever built.

RAF Hawk T1 trainers in the 2010 “4 FTS — 50 Years” display livery — referenced here in tribute to the aircraft and aircrew, with admiration.

Around the World

A name recognised the world over

The aircraft Hawker and its successors created did not stay British for long. The Hawk alone flies with air forces and national display teams across the globe — a single lineage, drawn in a Kingston drawing office, carried into the skies of dozens of nations.

The Saudi Hawks

Among the most striking is the Royal Saudi Air Force’s Saudi Hawks, whose green-and-white jets have become a source of national pride across the Kingdom. They are one of many teams the world over — from Britain’s Red Arrows to Finland’s Midnight Hawks — that have chosen the Hawk to represent their nation in the air, a measure of the esteem in which the design, and the name behind it, is still held.

The Royal Saudi Air Force “Saudi Hawks” display team — referenced here in tribute, with admiration.

Beyond Aviation

Hawker in popular culture

Few aircraft cross from the history books into the world's imagination. Hawker's did it more than once — as the fighter that became the symbol of a nation's defiance, and as the jump jet that captured the imagination of cinema audiences the world over.

The Harrier on Screen

Few aircraft of British design have been more irresistible to filmmakers than the Harrier. Its most famous screen moment comes in True Lies (1994), in which Arnold Schwarzenegger’s secret-agent hero commandeers a Harrier and brings it to a hover among the towers of downtown Miami, plucking his daughter to safety as the jet hangs motionless outside the glass. The sight of a fast jet rising vertically and bowing to a halt in mid-air seems to belong to science fiction — yet the Harrier did it for real.

It remains the rarest kind of tribute: an aircraft so extraordinary that its real capability needs no exaggeration on screen.

Still from True Lies (1994), dir. James Cameron · Lightstorm Entertainment / Twentieth Century Fox, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The aircraft in the film is the AV-8B Harrier II, developed from Hawker’s original Harrier. Title and image are the property of their rights-holders; referenced here in tribute, with admiration.

The Hurricane & the Few

If the Spitfire became the face of 1940, it was the Hurricane that did the greater share of the fighting — and it has held its place in books, paintings and film ever since. From the great cinema retellings of the Battle of Britain to the memoirs of the pilots who flew it, the Hurricane endures as the steady, dependable aircraft on which the summer of 1940 was won.

Pilot scrambling into a Hawker fighter with ground crew

Half a century after the last left service, its name still stands for a moment when much was owed by so many to so few.

Referenced here in tribute to the aircrew and engineers who built and flew it, with admiration.

The Road as Well as the Sky

Hawker & the Motorcycle

Kingston-upon-Thames · 1920 — 1923

Harry Hawker was as devoted to the road as he was to the air. A natural and fearless competitor, he raced cars and motorcycles at Brooklands with the same instinct that made him a great test pilot, and when his engineering company was founded in 1920 it built more than aircraft from the start. Among its first products were motorcycles bearing the Hawker name.

The same Kingston workshops that would one day build the Hurricane began, in part, by building motorcycles — drawn by a founder who loved speed in every form.

True to the best practice of the day, the machines were finely assembled around bought-in proprietary engines, chiefly the well-regarded Blackburne singles, and finished to the standards of a firm that thought like an aircraft maker. They were never built in great numbers; this was engineering of quality rather than quantity, carrying the same attention to detail Hawker brought to everything that left its doors.

A surviving Hawker motorcycle, with its “Hawker” tank badge · early 1920s

1920First machines

BlackburneProprietary engines

KingstonHand-built

1923Production ends

After Harry Hawker's death in 1921, the firm turned its full attention to the aircraft that would make its name, and the motorcycle line was wound down within a couple of years. Brief as it was, it remains a fitting first chapter: a company born of a man who simply loved fast, finely made machines — whether they ran on the road or rose into the sky.

The Hawker World

Sky, machine and the spirit of invention

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Aviation

The founding world. The Hurricane, the Hunter, the Harrier, and a century of flight written into the name.

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Engineering

One drawing office, from fabric biplanes to the first jet that could hover — an unbroken pursuit of the new.

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The Spirit

Courage, craftsmanship and pioneering ambition. The qualities that built the name, carried into everything that bears it.

1920

Founded · Kingston

14,500+

Hurricanes built

First VTOL

Operational jump jet

Made in Britain

By intention

The Atelier · In Time

A heritage worth
wearing.

A history this rich asks to be kept alive, and in time it will be, through a considered collection drawn from a century of aviation and engineering. Not a fashion line, but the natural inheritance of the story. Made in Britain, released with intention, never in volume.

FlightShearling & leather

HeritagePremium apparel

EngineeringConsidered goods

Hawker Automotive

The future of
Hawker.

Hawker was born in Britain's golden age of high-performance engineering — a name built on precision, aerodynamic mastery and structural integrity under pressure. Hawker Automotive carries that lineage onto the road.

This is an advanced-engineering flagship: a marque whose credibility is inherited, not manufactured. Where aviation discipline meets the modern performance car.

Four expressions. One marque.

The Halo

Hypercar · Supercar

A track-bred flagship in the purest sense — carbon construction, aerodynamic obsession and limited-run precision. The clearest statement of what the name can build.

The Grand Tourer

Performance Saloon · GT

A driver's flagship built for distance and pace alike — the advanced-engineering halo applied to a refined performance saloon or GT. Combustion or electric; the name justifies the premium either way.

III

The All-Terrain Flagship

Rugged Luxury SUV

A commanding, go-anywhere luxury SUV in the spirit of the segment's icons — sculpted, muscular and built to dominate any surface. Capability worn as confidence.

Two Wheels & Terrain

Roadster · Scrambler · Side-by-Side

Hawker built motorcycles long before most rivals existed — a genuine lineage this range revives. A heritage roadster of classic British-twin character; a stripped-back scrambler built for rough ground; and a roll-caged all-terrain side-by-side. Rugged machines, honestly engineered.

Engineering across mobility

Hawker's discipline was never confined to one medium. From the airframe to the road, the through-line is the same: performance, reliability and innovation treated as non-negotiable. For an automotive partner, that is decades of engineering reputation inherited on day one — credibility that cannot be fabricated, only earned and passed on.

An invitation to partners

Hawker Automotive does not yet exist on the road — and that is by intention. The company is actively seeking serious partners to bring the marque into being, and, in exceptional cases, would consider the acquisition of the Hawker automotive lineage outright. The aim is singular: to see a century of British engineering reputation carried forward onto the road, in the right hands and on the right terms.

Licensing enquiries

Partnerships

An authentic heritage for partners who value the real thing.

Hawker brings a genuine British aviation story, a documented history and a century of provenance. For the right collaborations, it offers something increasingly rare: heritage that is real, not invented.

Selective partnerships are considered with brands that share a commitment to craft, quality and authenticity.

Licensing

The Hawker name and marks, for products and ventures worthy of carrying a century of provenance.

Publishing

Books, periodicals and printed works drawing on one of aviation's great engineering stories.

Apparel Collaborations

Heritage capsules and co-branded collections with houses that share our standards of craft.

Institutions

Museums, archives and commemorative programmes preserving the Hawker legacy.