John Groves joined Westland in 1948 as an apprentice Design Engineer and the first helicopter he worked on was the Wyvern

It was the first aircraft I ever worked on was the early Eagle engine Wyvern Mark One. They built nine of them because they were going to put gas turbines into them, prop jets and I worked on, that’s right. I always remember I was an apprentice in the coppers at the time with a very able coppersmith, I can’t remember his name off hand, working on the Wyverns. They were a bit awkward to get in and out because I used to assist in fitting all the main fuel pipes in there and everything. They were huge pipes too, about two inches diameter on those big Rolls Royce Eagle engines, two and a half thousand-horsepower, twenty-four cylinder, of course, they had the contra-rotating airscrew. Eventually, the Wyvern had the Armstrong Sidley Python engines. I think the desired engine for it was the Rolls Royce Clyde but Hives, who were in charge of Rolls Royce at the time, didn’t want to build, weren’t interested in building a small batch of Clydes so we wound up with the Armstrong Sidley’s Python engine. It was quite a powerful engine, it was quite a powerful aircraft though they had a few problems with the contra rotating airscrew because it was the first time they had a naval aircraft, single engine naval aircraft, with a gas turbine in it and if anything they ironed out most of the snags for the subsequent ones that came, the Wyverns.