Love, Death, Chariot of Fire

by Winton Higgins

  ‘It includes men who want to give priority to bombers, so they can support our land forces who might end up fighting on the Continent again. And others who think the best answer to mass bombing raids on this country would be a lumbering two-seater fighter armed only by a man firing twin guns from a swivelling turret behind the cockpit. No forward-facing guns at all! They seem to imagine modern air battles would be like naval battles in the Napoleonic Wars – massed formations trading broadsides with enemy bombers flying on a parallel course.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake! A machine like that wouldn’t stand a chance against what we – and the Germans presumably – have in mind: a single-seater low-wing monoplane fighter. Fast, nimble, and with forward-facing guns.’

  ‘Dowding’s sentiments precisely! And of course he has a lot of personal air combat experience from the war to back up his viewpoint. So over lunch I took the liberty to tell him what you and I have in mind under the Type 300 rubric – developing this sort of plane quite outside the normal routine of working from official specifications. Only when we think we’ve got the goods will we make an official approach to the ministry.’

  Mitchell jerks up straight in his chair, wincing at the pain accompanying the sudden movement. ‘Good God! What was his reaction to that?’

  ‘Couldn’t have been happier. I gather he’s giving the same message to some other selected firms as well. But he hinted that he wouldn’t be at all surprised if the answer to his prayers came from either ourselves or possibly Hawker. Or both.’

  ‘Hawker!’ Mitchell sniffs. ‘That means Sidney Camm’s obsession with building fast biplanes out of wood and canvas!’

  ‘Maybe Dowding thinks he can now pull rank and get Camm to design a monoplane. Not sure he’ll ever wean the bugger off wood and canvas, though.’

  ‘This is all certainly cheerful news, Bob. Just as you promised. But the fact remains that we’re stuck with a barmy government that refuses to see the danger we’re in and won’t spend a penny on a new production fighter.’

  ‘I took this up with Dowding too. According to him, senior members of the government are coming round. They’ve received intelligence reports that Germany is on course to exceed our fleet of front-line aircraft.’

  ‘Bloody hell! That can’t be true, can it?’

  ‘It’s being taken as gospel at all the highest levels in London. That’s all I can tell you. So now there’s a plan afoot to double the number of RAF squadrons here at home – from forty-two to eighty-four. The majority of them will fly bombers, but it still means that an awful lot of new fighters will be needed too. The ministry has already ordered a few score Gloster Gauntlets as a stopgap to re-equip some fighter squadrons in a couple of years’ time. But that machine just goes to show how bloody far this country has fallen behind in military aircraft. It’s just a damned two-gun open-cockpit biplane with a top speed of 230 miles an hour.’

  ‘How depressing! Even our Type 224 will probably do better than that. Not much better, though, I have to admit.’

  ‘So, now you know what’s on the agenda when you get back to work. Had any bright ideas about Type 300 in the meantime?’

  ‘None that I can talk about at the moment. Waiting for inspiration.’

  ‘And where’s that inspiration going to come from?’

  ‘I think I’m onto a source. But I’m not going to tell you about it yet, Bob. You won’t approve.’

  ‘Well, that’s a right teaser, I must say! But all right, I won’t press you, RJ.’

  Monday 11 December. Mitchell picks up the phone and asks the operator to connect him to the Eastleigh Flying School.

  ‘Good morning. Flying School,’ a female voice answers after several signals.

  ‘Could you put me through to Mr Dudley, please.’

  ‘He’s in the hangar somewhere, sir. Would you like me to fetch him?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  ‘Who should I say is calling?’

  ‘Reg Mitchell.’

  After a long pause a male voice comes on the line. ‘Good morning Mr Mitchell, sir. How can I help you?’

  ‘I want to learn to fly. Word has it that you’re just the man who can help me with that.’

  The irregular patter of typewriter keystrokes in the background comes down the line until Dudley clears his throat. ‘Forgive me, sir, but you are the Mr Reginald Mitchell from Supermarine?’

  ‘Yes. Is there a problem?’

  ‘No, no, sir. It’s a huge honour. But we only fly Gipsy Moths. It would be like teaching a man who makes the world’s fastest racing cars how to ride a bicycle.’

  Mitchell struggles to suppress a laugh, sending a sharp pain through his lower abdomen. ‘If a man like that still can’t ride a bike, Mr Dudley, it’s high time he learned!’

  ‘Yes of course, sir. Well, at least I won’t have to waste our time explaining aerodynamic principles and how the basic controls on an aeroplane work.’

  ‘Quite. When can you fit me in?’

  ‘How about 10 am on Friday the twenty-second – our last day before the Christmas break?’

  ‘Perfect! I’m leaving the following day to spend Christmas with family in Staffordshire. I’ll see you next Friday, Mr Dudley.’

  Chapter 8

  A flop

  Eastleigh aerodrome, Hampshire. Monday 19 February 1934, 11 am. Reginald Mitchell stands among a small group of Supermarine mechanics, riggers and technical staff at the perimeter fence close to the hangars and the admin building. High clouds float across an otherwise blue late-winter sky. A light, very cold breeze nips at the onlookers. The mechanics wear leather jackets over their greasy overalls and have their hands jammed down into their pockets. Along with the rest of the technical staff present, Mitchell is wearing a long overcoat, hat and gloves.

  There’s little activity around the aerodrome. One of the flying school’s Gipsy Moths has just taken off a little uncertainly, no doubt with a student at the controls. Some of the hangar doors gape open, to emit the clatter of hand tools and the whistling and shouting of mechanics.

  Supermarine leases one of the hangars that stands fifty or so yards from the onlookers. It houses an erection workshop as well as parking space for a couple of smallish aircraft. In front of it stands the prototype of the Type 224 fighter monoplane, bearing its registration number K2890 on its rear fuselage, and is about to take to the air for the first time. In its open cockpit the onlookers can see Mutt Summers – leather-helmeted and assisted by a mechanic standing on the wing root – checking the controls and adjusting his harness over his flying suit. The suit is evidently padded out with God knows how many inside layers. All going well he’ll be testing the plane’s effective service ceiling, where the chill in an open cockpit will be considerable.

  Mitchell is still officially on sick leave. He hasn’t yet returned to the Woolston works. This is his first meeting with some of his colleagues, and certainly with shopfloor workers, since his operation. But of course he’s been receiving his closest collaborators – Joe Smith, Alf Faddy, Alan Clifton, Agony Payn and Bev Shenstone – at home, while the prototype has been built ready for its trials.

  Those men whom he hasn’t received at home have greeted him boisterously, and congratulated him on having yet another of his creations ready to take wing. His closest colleagues, though, are more subdued, perhaps sharing his forebodings. He replies to questions about the state of his health in vague terms that appreciate the questioners’ concern without assuaging their curiosity.

  Mitchell feels distinctly queasy. There’s the usual terror that he might have designed a machine that is inherently unsafe. Even though he’s had highly competent colleagues go over the drawings with a fine-tooth comb, and seen to it that those charged with overseeing the prototype’s construction have kept a very close eye on every stage in the process. He recognises the pattern, of course – fear has accompanied every maiden flight and every race involving one of his designs. Yet he can’t break it.

  What adds to it now is t
he fear that the plane will reveal itself to be a fiasco. The very sight of the inelegant thing sitting in front of the hangar oppresses him. His every design mistake is staring back at him. Starting with its stubby legs, set wide apart and covered in billowing ‘trousers’ and ‘spats’. Actual men haven’t worn baggy trousers like that since the time of The Three Musketeers! But the ministry’s specification called for an undercarriage wide enough for safe night landings on turf airfields – and so it is!

  That faux pas has led to that other striking eyesore – the kinked gull wings. They slope down at the roots to support the undercarriage, and then bend up and curve back in a swept-wing formation that lacks conviction. At forty-six feet the wing span is too wide, inviting flutter, and so necessitating a thick wing profile to cover the structural reinforcements. Which in turn has demanded an oversized tail fin. Given all that, the plane weighs in at a ponderous 3,400 pounds. And in a moment of weakness he agreed to skinning the wings behind the main spar, and the tail surfaces, in canvas! Finally, he’s allowed the leading edges of the wings in front of the steam condensers to be skinned in corrugated plate so as to dissipate the heat more effectively. Talk about a thing of rags and patches!

  He stares again at the plane, and notices yet another misstep due to his specification-induced tunnel vision. The aircraft has to be easy to manufacture and maintain, the document insisted. So he’s made the fuselage too long, flat-sided and flat-bottomed, as if to ape a railway carriage. It’s neither an aerodynamic nor an aesthetically pleasing form at all.

  A week ago, when his colleagues reported to him that the external exhaust system wasn’t working during engine trials on the ground, he agreed with them to have it removed altogether. So now there are just six hastily mounted individual exhaust stubs running along each side of the nose.

  It’s been an expensive lesson to drum into him one simple truth: one must never, ever let a specification set the starting point for a new design! A designer has to start from his own developed and integrated concept of the final product, and only glance at the specification along the way.

  ‘Clear propeller!’ Summers yells from the plane.

  The whine of the starter motor is just audible; the firing of the big engine that succeeds it shatters the aerodrome’s peace decisively. For a moment flames leap from the exhaust stubs, to be replaced with thick white fumes.

  Summers varies the engine speed while he brings it up to operating temperature, before calling ‘Chocks away!’ The mechanic on the spot drags the chocks away by their lanyard. The plane starts to roll forward, making for the open field. As it passes the onlookers Summers looks across at them and waves a gloved hand. He’s strapped on his oxygen mask. They return his wave and shout encouragements. The intoxicating smell of aviation fumes fills the air.

  It’s the cue for Mitchell to detach himself from the group. On the pretext of fetching his binoculars, he walks over to the yellow Rolls thirty yards away. He retrieves them from the passenger seat, then steps up onto the running board. Bracing his elbows on the car’s roof and holding the binoculars to his eyes, he watches the plane turn into the wind.

  He’s forgotten what exultant music a big aero engine makes as its throttle is opened. It all comes back to him now. The plane accelerates across the turf; it’s soon airborne and gaining height. It executes a wide left turn and makes a pass over the aerodrome before climbing in a spiral pattern.

  After a few moments Mitchell hears the engine note deepen. The plane interrupts its climb and is simply circling. A minute later the engine note rises again, as does the plane. Two more of these pauses interrupt its climb. After something like ten minutes from the start of the climb it seems to have reached its first target altitude – 10,000 feet. Mitchell groans as he sees white vapour spurting out of the safety valves in the wingtips. The bloody evaporative cooling system isn’t working properly! If Summers doesn’t handle the situation well, the engine will seize.

  The cooling system works all right in biplanes, apparently, because the upper wing can house the condensers, and the return water finds its own way by gravity back down to the header tank feeding the sleeve around the engine block. But being a low-wing monoplane, the Type 224 carries its collector tanks in its trousers, and the water has to be pumped from there up to the header tanker. When it’s depressurised, the near-boiling water can vaporise, thus disabling the pump. Mitchell and his colleagues struck the problem in ground tests and tried to fix it. Unsuccessfully, it seems.

  A cloud drifts over the aerodrome, obscuring Mitchell’s view. But he can still hear the engine and its variable pitch. With his steely nerves, Summers seems to be persevering with the climb to probe the plane’s service ceiling. Soon Mitchell can neither hear nor see it, and anxiety lays hold of his body. He glances across at his companions, who appear to be similarly afflicted.

  As the cloud drifts away the reassuring sound of the engine returns. The plane is swooping down towards them in a shallow dive. Summers pulls the nose up, makes a circuit of the aerodrome, and a long approach in to land. Through his binoculars Mitchell sees the plane wobble in the air. It doesn’t worry him, though – Summers is simply checking the minimal safe landing speed short of a stall. He lands the plane before taxiing back to the Supermarine hangar and cutting the engine. The aerodrome once more falls into silence.

  Mitchell joins the other onlookers gathering around the plane while the attending mechanic helps Summers down from the cockpit.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, make sure none of you touch the leading edges of those bloody wings!’ Mitchell yells, unable to mask his anxiety. ‘They’ll be red-hot from the condensers! We don’t want any casualties.’

  The mechanics stand aside while the technical staff shake hands with the test pilot, and ask him how the plane handled.

  ‘Quite nicely. A few hiccups though. I’ll have a chat with RJ about them, and then go and write up my flight report back in Woolston.’

  The other technicians pile into an Austin Seven and a Morris Oxford in the parking area, and head back to the Woolston works. The mechanics haul the plane tail-first back into the hangar. Mitchell and Summers make for the rudimentary little admin building and commandeer an office cubicle that’s temporarily unoccupied.

  ‘So how did it go really, Mutt?’

  ‘Well, as you might have guessed, RJ, the cooling system was a pain in the backside. That bloody flashing red light in the cockpit! It kept coming on the whole time. Each time it did that I had to throttle back. I never got to open the throttle fully. So the performance figures are down on your estimates because of that.’

  ‘You better tell me what they are.’

  Summers takes out a small notebook with figures scribbled in pencil. ‘Maximum speed 228 miles per hour. Took nine and a half minutes to climb to 10,000 feet. Service ceiling 28,800 feet. The turning circle was pretty wide, I must say. The minimal landing speed was 65, not the hoped-for 60.’ He pauses, as if trying to think of something consoling to say.

  ‘The plane handles well. Reasonably responsive, quite stable. And good field of vision from the cockpit. That’s one of the main virtues the spec called for, wasn’t it? But I must say it’s a tad draughty, not least at the higher altitudes. A canopy would be a kindness.’

  ‘We’ll see what we can do to improve its performance before the official trials, Mutt,’ Mitchell says, without conviction.

  ‘Yes of course, RJ. I don’t think I’d want to go chasing Germans in it as it is now, though.’

  Summers takes his leave, to drive back to Woolston. Mitchell wanders over to the flying school’s office. On an impulse to restore his faith and sanity. He finds Eunice Wiley sitting in her poky little office.

  ‘Hello, Mr Mitchell! I wasn’t expecting to see you here today.’

  ‘I actually came out here to do a job for my firm. I’ve done it now, and I’m just wondering if Wes Dudley could squeeze me in tomorrow sometime.’

  ‘I’ll just have a look.’ Eunice opens her big diar
y. ‘Oh my, you’re in luck! He’s had a cancellation. Ten o’clock. Does that suit?’

  ‘Eminently! Thank you, Eunice. I’ll see you then.’

  Chapter 9

  A flyer

  Eastleigh aerodrome. Tuesday 20 February 1934, 10 am. For the second day in a row, Mitchell pulls up in the parking area. The cloud cover has thickened since yesterday, though it presents gaps which release occasional pulses of sunshine.

  As the windsock indicates, a light, variable south-westerly wind blows across the field. He opens the boot, takes out his fleece-lined flying suit and pulls it on over his clothes, before replacing his shoes with flying boots. Carrying his leather helmet, goggles, gloves and map case in his hands, he makes his way towards the flying school’s open hangar. He’s relieved to see the Supermarine hangar closed today; he doesn’t want to catch even a glimpse of the Type 224 prototype inside.

  The little yellow Gipsy Moth biplane is standing waiting for him in front of the flying school’s hangar. As he draws closer, the stocky, greying figure of Wes Dudley – also in his flying suit – emerges. The school’s taller and younger mechanic, Cecil Staunton, accompanies him.

  ‘Good to see you again, Reg,’ Dudley says. ‘I hear you were here yesterday too, but on another mission entirely.’

  He pauses, as if hoping Mitchell would comment on the Type 224’s performance on its first test flight. But Mitchell has no desire whatever to go into that. Today’s flying lesson offers him a chance to escape yesterday’s sense of failure. The Moth and the 224 occupy different universes.

  Met with Mitchell’s silence, Dudley resumes. ‘Anyway, we should be able to get in a couple of hours before there’s any risk of rain. Any preferences?’

  ‘You know me, Wes – any excuse to practise taking off and landing! But I’d also like to leave the circuit behind for a while. How about a navigation exercise? I brought my maps just in case.’

  ‘Right you are then. You’ve got a map that covers Hampshire and west Sussex, I seem to remember. Let’s spread it out on the wing here. I’ll suggest a route you haven’t flown before, and you can fly it.’