Ideas take flight for man of many talents

But one night he spent at the Mecca in Wakefield changed all that. Ivan bought a ticket to see a 16-piece dance band which opened his eyes to just how much more there was to drumming. He was immediately hooked on big bands. “Buddy Rich was my hero,” he says of the great American jazz bandleader.

He took drumming lessons from the man he had seen on the Mecca stage, learned to read music and eventually became a professional with one of the biggest names of that era, Geraldo’s Orchestra.

With them, he worked the Canadian Pacific cruise liners out of Liverpool and on the P&O liner Oriana. A job with the BBC’s British Forces Broadcasting followed.

Music promised a rewarding, even glamorous career – not the usual picture for 15-year-old school leavers. Prospects for secondary modern boys in the early Sixties were limited by the fact that they had no qualifications – not because they failed their exams, but because their schools did not do any.

Ivan also took up the violin and piano and music served to tee-up his next main career move. It happened in 1968 on a long flight to the Middle East on a VC-10. Ivan was part of a touring show for BBC British Forces Broadcasting Corporation and the pilot was eager to meet the dancers. Ivan offered to make introductions in return for an invitation to the flight deck.

He had always been interested in how things worked and he was fascinated by what he heard from the other members of the flight crew about the aeroplane. “It was my epiphany,” he says. When the show returned from the Middle East tour he promptly signed up with Doncaster Aero Club to learn to fly.

A serious interest in flying and in making things that flew out of new composite materials remained with him as he set about finding other ways to make a living after drumming round the world.

“I’d started learning the violin and my teacher suggested going to college to train to teach percussion in schools,” he says. “I applied to do a music degree at Huddersfield Polytechnic and when after the audition they asked how many O-Levels I had, I said ‘none’. I went to Barnsley College of Technology and told them I’d got the offer of a place at Huddersfield if I could get five GCEs. I’ll never forget how helpful they were.” He started in the New Year and passed five in six months followed by what he describes as three hard years at Huddersfield Poly. After a postgraduate training course at Bretton Hall he taught for 10 happy years at a South Yorkshire junior school.

He is the sort of can-do engineer whose first designs are set out on the back of a fag packet. He only needs to see something once to be able to build his version of it. Watching the James Bond film You Only Live Twice his eye was caught by a heavily armed flying curiosity called Little Nellie, actually an autogyro.

Ivan promptly constructed one with a VW engine, and a joiner friend fashioned the wooden propeller. It worked, but Ivan chose not fly it. He wanted to live. Later he designed a complex twin engine aircraft that was the first amateur-built twin engine aircraft to fly in Europe.

His reputation as an innovative engineer had spread so wide by now that he received a job offer, at double his teacher’s salary, to head up a team working on a microlight aircraft devised by Colin Chapman, of Lotus sports car fame.

That did not turn out as planned and Ivan re-trained as a commercial airline pilot, a job which also offered a fair amount of thinking time.

The product of this was the germ of an idea for a unique “foldaway” small aircraft. He called it the Europa and he describes it to non-aero enthusiasts as the Porsche of the skies. “I was only going to build one for myself as a hobby, but it turned out so good it took off, a business was formed and we sold over 1,000 worldwide.”

To this uninformed listener it could be something from Ikea. The plane comes in kit form and its advent opened up private aircraft ownership to people who were not super-rich.

Here was an aeroplane they could build in their garage for £30,000 and then tow on a trailer behind the family car to the nearest unprepared landing strip.

If you want to make a reliable product that flies, it must concentrate the mind wonderfully if you act as your own test pilot, which Ivan does. The Europa became the most successful British general aviation aircraft. It’s also used for more exotic pursuits like big game spotting in Africa and sheep farming in Australia. “We also sold some to customers in Colombia who were especially interested in the low radar profile of the composite material,” says Ivan. He had no evidence they were drug runners.

He sold that company in 1999 and started another which builds his next version of a foldaway plane, the Liberty XL2, in Florida. He took it there because America is home to three-fifths of the world market for an aircraft of this type. It costs from £100,000.

“Most of the small private aircraft you see today are 30 to 40-years old – if you think of an American gas-guzzling car of the 1960s, that’s what you are looking at. A litre of avgas now costs over £2. It’s sharpening people’s minds and makes them think about economy.

“I’m in performance-efficiency technology – how to get more bang for your buck. Cost, weight, and complexity are the enemies of the aircraft designer. The clever thing is to design something that’s simple.”

He is still inventing and following this philosophy in his workshop at the bottom of his garden at Hutton-le-Hole. On the drawing board now is a faster and more fuel efficient kit-plane which he has nicknamed the Pocket Rocket. Also at an early stage of testing is the Power Barge, a system he has devised for generating green electricity from tidal power or river flow.

The day before his 67th birthday earlier this month Ivan was pondering a celebration bike ride from his home. Should it be to nearby Rievaulx Abbey, or to the Western Isles or maybe the French coast? Either of the latter is easily within his compass. To prove the point, he jumps in his car and 10 minutes later is unlocking the bolts on a dark green sea container sitting on its own near a runway at Wombleton airfield, an old Second World War bomber base.

Inside the narrow container, Ivan’s foldaway bike sits in a neat zip-up case behind his even neater fold-up aeroplane. He slides out the Liberty XL2 into the hot sunshine and opens the wings rather like a glossy butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. With a bit more simple rigging and flight checks we are airborne for a flight over the North York’s Moors.

Unhampered by sea or traffic jams Ivan says we could make Le Touquet for lunch if we chose. It’s also a cheaper way of getting there than going by a car. Last year he toured Luxembourg, Germany, France and Switzerland and, at 150 mph, used under four gallons an hour of ordinary unleaded petrol.

“With my folding bike I’m really into this aerial cycling,” he says. “I want to do North and South Uist this summer, landing at Benbecula in the Western Isles and also Barra where you land on the beach.”

At Hutton-le-Hole he looks like one of the typically prosperous incomers who now mostly populate the village. In fact just across the beck from his house is the former home, barn and tack room of his farmer grandfather.

“He was one of seven sons and there was not enough work for all of them. In the hard times of the 1920s he walked from here to Barnsley to find work. Giving me a name like Ivan you can guess his politics. I think he was somewhat to the left of the Labour Party.

“He spent much of his working life as a fitter in a steelworks and used to say, ‘When my football coupon comes up we’ll move back to Hutton-le-Hole’. It never came up.”

The Shaws go back generations in Farndale, Hutton and Helmsley and Ivan re-joined them 22 years ago when re-building the house which he still lives in with his wife, Judith, became another of his can-do projects.

But how has he accomplished this after being destined for the pit or the factory as an 11+ failure? “I was a secondary modern kid, I had a poor education. I think I learn in a different way to other people. I’ve done it by osmosis, working with many talented people over the years.

“My time on the cruise ships was like doing my National Service, it broadened my horizons. It was very easy for boys of my background to have a parochial outlook – your world was your home, the pit, the workingmen’s club. But when you got back from a voyage around the world you realised what a small place Barnsley is.”

He is passionate about this country’s ability to innovate. “Talk is cheap, that’s why there’s so much of it,” he says. “Get on and do it.”

This is his approach with the Power Barge which he is working on with a local engineering company. “None of the electrics or mechanical bits are under water so it will be more robust. It’s a bankable proposition – meaning the capital cost should be covered by the cash flow without huge government subsidies.

“The innovation is in the design, but it requires only low-tech manufacturing. The Power Barge could be made in a factory here and then shipped anywhere in the world and tethered. If you’ve got a river you’ve got a resource.”

Would anyone buy it? “If successful I’ll put the intellectual property rights into a company and I have one or two investors who are interested.

“You earn your reputation and people know my background in developing aircraft. Because they know I do what I say I am going to do I have a certain amount of credibility.”

His pragmatic problem solving and vision as an engineer suggests a North Yorkshire version of Barnes Wallis inventing in a shed at the end of the runway.

Ivan will have none of it. But he adds, “It’s an addictive illness designing aeroplanes, once you start it’s difficult to stop!”