Love, Death, Chariot of Fire Read online

  Mitchell can barely believe his ears. ‘Oh? Which ones?’

  ‘First up, Professor Parkin was keen to see the German Experimental Aviation Institute and its wind tunnels. From there I took him to Junkers’ research department. Then we visited the Zeppelin works in Friedrichshafen, and crossed the Swiss border to visit the Dornier works in Altenrhein. We even inspected the Do.X from the inside. Back in Germany we went to a couple of hydrodynamic research institutes, and ended up taking a flight in the Junkers G.38 from a Dutch airfield.’

  ‘It sounds as if the good professor had quite a hectic holiday in Germany, if also an instructive one,’ Mitchell notes drily.

  ‘We both learned a great deal from the tour, sir. Group Captain Christie was quite fascinated by what we were able to tell him afterwards.’

  The Air Ministry and the Air Council will have shared his fascination by now, Mitchell trusts. ‘This idealistic openness of the German aviation industry – will it last, do you think, Mr Shenstone?’

  ‘It can’t last, sir. Not the way things are going over there. I arrived just before the Depression shattered what little social stability the country enjoyed. Mass unemployment, mass resentment – you can see it in the streets, hear it in the workplaces. Caginess, suspicion of foreigners, comes with it. It made my last weeks at Junkers pretty uncomfortable.’

  ‘These National Socialists I’ve read about – I suppose they feed off that sort of thing?’

  ‘Undoubtedly. Three years ago they got less than three percent of the vote in the national elections. In the regional elections last year they got over eighteen percent. Their membership is growing in leaps and bounds. Not hard to see where all that’s heading.’

  ‘And all these high-minded innovators in German aviation you’ve told me about – what will happen to them if the National Socialists get into power?’

  Shenstone shrugs. ‘They’ll either buckle under and do their new masters’ bidding, or end up on the scrap heap. Or worse.’

  Mitchell stares at his companion as he wrestles down his own turbulence. He gets to his feet and moves around his desk to signal that the interview is over. Shenstone stands up too, and takes Mitchell’s proffered hand.

  ‘Thank you for contacting us and coming to see me, Mr Shenstone. You will understand that I can’t give you an answer today – I will have to consult with my colleagues to see if we can create a position for you. I will let you know the outcome at an early date. Please leave your present postal address with my secretary.’

  ‘Yes sir, of course.’

  Mitchell paces his room, listening to the muffled conversation between Shenstone and Vera, followed by the sound of the former’s shoes clattering down the flying iron staircase to the ground-floor exit. When he hears the downstairs door close, he grabs Shenstone’s papers and hurries into Vera’s office. Without a word he settles into the chair facing her across the desk and tosses the papers onto it.

  She looks at him in surprise. Normally she has to go into his office. ‘Did that go well, RJ?’

  ‘Exceptionally.’

  ‘So you’re taking him on?’

  ‘Without a doubt. You did the right thing bringing his application to my attention, Vera. Thank you very much! He’s the sort that can get straight down to tin tacks on design issues without a lot of complicated blather. Just the kind we want. Could you please type a letter to him. Offer him a position for two months at forty-five pounds a month.’

  ‘Forty-five pounds – that’s a lot! He must have impressed you,’ she says as she jots down his instructions.

  ‘I certainly don’t want him looking elsewhere again. I suspect he’s already done that.’

  ‘So I hear, RJ.’

  ‘Oh? What have you heard, Vera?’

  ‘Only a rumour. But apparently Sidney Camm at Hawker Engineering interviewed him last week. Or started to. In the middle of it Mr Camm just got up and walked out of his office without a word of explanation. Mr Shenstone waited for him to return, but walked out himself after a while. And that was that.’

  Mitchell roars with laughter. ‘Camm! Typical! Shenstone would have gone mad working for him – moody bastard, designing wood-and-fabric biplanes and offering them up as the last word in fighter aircraft! Shenstone is far too good for him. The two of them did each other a favour that day.’

  ‘So why are you offering Mr Shenstone only two months, RJ?’

  ‘That’s the normal trial period. He’ll understand that. I don’t want him getting a swollen head. Important to set the right tone. In the letter to him say we’d hoped he’d come to us with more experience of actual wing construction and knew more about preventing wing and aileron flutter. But we feel nonetheless that he can contribute something to this firm’s design work.’

  ‘I understand, RJ.’

  ‘Oh, and another thing, Vera. Delay the letter for a couple of days. In fact…’ He reaches over and takes back Shenstone’s curriculum vitae. ‘I see here that his birthday falls on 10 June. That’s next Monday. Please post the letter so he gets it on the day.’

  Chapter 5

  A turning point

  RAF Calshot. Tuesday 29 September 1931, 7 pm. A Supermarine S.6B stands on its tender, raising it three feet off the concrete apron in front of the slipway by which it emerged from the waters of the Solent. Twilight has given way to darkness, and two spotlights illuminate the scene from opposite ends of the apron. In the background the curved stone walls of the sixteenth-century Calshot Castle shimmer a ghostly white in the splash lighting. Ripples scintillate in the same light source at the lower end of the slipway; their slow slapping against the concrete pulses through the near-silence. The outgoing tide suffuses the chill air with the smell of exposed seaweed.

  A soldier from the RAF Armoured Car Company watches over the plane. He stands a few yards back from it, a bayonet fixed to his rifle. The aircraft looms nearly twenty feet over him, while three mechanics in grease-stained white overalls check the anchorages that secure the struts to the floats. A fourth balances on the starboard float to reach up and tinker with the engine. Yet another figure – this one with no evident task to perform – stands just forward of the port wing, hands in pockets, puffing on a pipe and staring up at the majestic beast. It is Reginald Mitchell.

  The object of his gaze has just become the fastest and most famous aeroplane in the world. A few hours earlier, flown by Flight Lieutenant George Stainforth, it set a new world speed record of 407.5 mph. Two weeks earlier, it and its twin S.6B delivered outright victory to Great Britain in the Schneider contest, thus making the country the Flying Flirt’s permanent home and bringing down the curtain on the Schneider era. Six days before that, the rival French and Italian teams, dogged by failures and mishaps, had announced their withdrawal from the contest. In particular, the fabled Macchi M.72 – with its two tandem V12 engines, concentric drive shafts and contra-rotating propellers – never materialised.

  Though the contest ended up as a one-horse race, the S.6Bs turned in faultless performances in front of over a million spectators, with the Prime Minister and the Prince of Wales once again prominent among them. Mitchell’s proud father, Herbert, had come down from Stoke to watch the contest too. Over seven laps the reliability of the bellowing engines matched the stability and grace of the aircraft themselves as they whirled around the markers and hurtled down the straight legs of the circuit. During the sustained flight the pilots had to fly at less than maximum speed to stop the engines from overheating. But the leading plane still averaged 340 mph.

  The distant sounds of celebration inside the castle waft across the scene. Lady Houston has chosen the champagne and accompanying canapés, evidently with no concern for their price tags, and is footing the entire bill. She has never spent £100,000 so well, she’s told reporters, and doesn’t intend to skimp on the festivities. She has achieved the original goal for her donation, to the acclaim of a jubilant press and nation, and received the sort of publicity that money alone can’t buy.

&
nbsp; At the party, the dashing young George Stainforth – now officially the fastest man on earth – is attracting the most adulation, especially from the fair sex. But Mitchell found himself not far behind. After consuming his share of his hostess’s hospitality, and losing count of the friends, colleagues and exalted personages who insisted on congratulating him, Mitchell has felt the need for a respite in which to enjoy a quiet smoke and deal with his own conflicted feelings.

  He gazes up at his creation with new eyes. For eight months the S.6Bs have been a production problem, a daily obsession teeming with small technical decisions to be made, operational faults to be made good. Every time they flew in earnest it caused him anxiety verging on panic. But now he and they have done their work together. He can contemplate the plane in front of him as a finished work of art. Its smoothly bulging engine cowling – an exhaust manifold faired into each side – resembles sleek muscle bulk and hints at the plane’s exorbitant power. It blends in with the details of the tapering fuselage and floats in a way that reminds him of the Art Deco interior of Lucy Houston’s yacht. The blue and silver racing livery, punctuated by RAF roundels, accentuates its home in Art Deco’s optimistic homage to the modern world. The artificial light imitates the dramatic effect of stage lighting.

  Mitchell can also imagine it as a thoroughbred animal he has bred. He can trace many of its features back to the S.4 and its successors – the progenitors in the bloodline of today’s champion. In response to this fancy he steps forward and reaches up to pat its flanks, as if it were a racehorse that has just won the Derby. The fuselage responds to his touch with an animal warmth: ‘the flying radiator’ is still shedding the heat it generated on its heroic flight.

  He’s learned a lot on this project. Not just about aerodynamics either, but about himself. On test flights both the S.6As and the S.6Bs threw up three special challenges – rudder flutter; an initial reluctance to lift off the water no matter how fast the take-off run; and engine torque making the craft uncontrollable on the water – ‘like a kitten chasing its tail’, as one pilot put it.

  On each occasion Mitchell felt the pressure to come up with a quick solution. He had to rely on his wits and intuition rather than methodically pre-testing design changes one by one in off-site wind tunnels and hydrodynamic tanks. Each solution defied superficial common sense. Such as building weights into the ailerons, elevators and rudder to balance them and so counteract flutter. And he identified the propeller as the source of the aircraft’s misbehaviour on water, including the failure to lift off at high speed. First, he ordered and fitted a smaller one. When that modification proved fruitless, he plumped for the opposite approach and ordered a much larger prop from Fairey. It was nine and a half feet long and needed four men to lift it into position on the drive shaft. And it worked a treat.

  In a sense he’s come of age, feeling not only the confidence of an established designer and engineer, but something of the liberated flair of the artist channelling a strong intuition and aesthetic sense. He can now follow his passion for flight and speed with so much more freedom and self-assurance.

  Great art demands great sacrifice. Part of him deeply regrets the unconscionable hours spent at work these last months, hours that by rights belonged to Flo and Gordon. Overshadowing even that unease is the high risk and loss of life that accompanied the lead-up to this round of the Schneider contest. The deaths have horrified him. The Italians lost two outstanding pilots in crashes while developing the M.72. And right here on the Solent, just six weeks ago, Lieutenant Jerry Brinton – seconded to the High Speed Flight from the Fleet Air Arm – died instantly from a broken neck while attempting his first take-off in an S.6A. As with Kink’s death over three years earlier, all the indications pointed to pilot error as the sole cause of the tragedy. But it plunged Mitchell into a despair beyond consolation. It took all the moral fibre at his command to continue with the S.6B project after that.

  Perhaps it’s just as well, then, that the era of racing seaplanes has come to an end. It certainly seems to have done so, with the finale of the Schneider contests. He doubts whether ever heavier planes dragging larger and larger floats to provide the necessary extra buoyancy on water will be capable of breaking new speed records.

  The future belongs to landplanes anyway, as aero engines become more reliable and forced landings on water less likely. Take Amy Johnson, who amazed the world last year by flying solo from London to Australia in a single-engined landplane – a primitive little second-hand Gipsy Moth cruising at a mere 85 mph no less! At the same time, aerodromes are proliferating around the world to support such feats, as well as the regular mail and passenger services that are springing up in their wake.

  Of course there’ll always be a place for seaplanes as specialised workhorses, and Supermarine will probably continue to earn at least some of its bread and butter developing and building them for civilian and military clients. But if the firm – and Mitchell himself – want to hold their own in the forefront of aircraft development, they’ll need to make the move into sophisticated landplanes. This S.6B preening itself in the footlights in front of Calshot Castle is the last of the Mohicans.

  The man working on the engine closes the cowling over it, steps down and puts his tools back in their box. The other mechanics pack theirs away too. The four of them wish Mitchell a good evening before vanishing into the darkness.

  Minutes later he hears light footsteps coming up behind him.

  ‘Ah, Mr Mitchell, your wife said I might find you out here,’ Lucy Houston says. She’s wearing an immaculate purple frock with matching headband and elbow gloves, and brandishes her cigarette in a long ebony and silver holder.

  ‘“Communing with his creature”, as she put it. She’s having a whale of a time back there, as is everyone else. Sir Henry is cock-a-hoop over what “his” engine achieved today. And I doubt whether any of the RAF boys will be going to bed alone tonight. But you yourself haven’t found the party diverting enough?’

  ‘Well, ma’am I’ve certainly savoured my share of your hospitality and enjoyed myself with friends and colleagues. For which I’m truly grateful. As I am for your financing our whole Schneider effort. But I was afraid you’d ask me to give a speech. My “creature” here makes no such demands.’

  She throws back her head and laughs warmly. There’s much to disapprove about Lucy Houston, starting with her regrettable political opinions and obscene wealth. Not least in these straitened times. But Mitchell – loosened up by the fine champagne he’s imbibed – has to acknowledge that there’s got to be a place in the world for someone like her. Someone to disrupt the greyness of the everyday world, its damned predictability. For one thing, this ‘creature’ of his wouldn’t be standing here at all but for her wilfulness and money.

  She switches her attention to the plane as if reading his thoughts and noticing it looming there for the first time. ‘She is beautiful, isn’t she? What will become of these machines now?’

  ‘Don’t know, really. The air force or the Fleet Air Arm might want them for training purposes. Some museum might lay claim to at least one of them. Who knows? Not much sentiment attaches to pioneering aeroplanes once they’ve done their dash.’

  ‘That’s appalling! The S.6B should now be treasured as part of the national estate!’

  Mitchell doesn’t know how to respond to her comment, and leaves it hanging in the air.

  ‘Mr Mitchell, I sometimes get the impression that you don’t share my patriotic fervour, in spite of all you’ve done to enhance British industry, prestige and pride.’

  ‘Hmm. I do share your strong determination to protect our country and our way of life.’ Mitchell pauses to free himself of his earlier inhibitions when talking to her. The champagne fizzing in his brain helps. ‘But I also see a danger in adopting means which defeat that very purpose. Such as whipping up mob hysteria, resorting to thuggery and tyranny. I saw it in action in Venice during the 1927 Schneider round. That sort of regime is precisely what we’r
e likely to end up having to defend ourselves against.’

  ‘Oh dear. You seem to have taken offence at my occasional praise of Mussolini, Mr Mitchell.’

  ‘I’m afraid I have, ma’am. Yes.’

  ‘I just like the way he gets things done. That’s all! As against our own government’s do-nothing irresponsibility.’

  ‘But if a gang of yahoos like that got into power here we wouldn’t be able to get rid of them again, no matter what they did or didn’t do.’

  ‘Well obviously I’d rather the vital things got done under democratic conditions.’

  ‘That’s up to us as voters, isn’t it? Thanks to your own efforts, and those of many others, all women got the vote three years ago. You wouldn’t want to throw that away so quickly, would you?’

  She hesitates. ‘Very well, Mr Mitchell: no fascism for Britain, then. Does that satisfy you?’

  ‘It helps, ma’am. But the fascism raising its ugly head abroad at the moment seems very warlike. A regime like Mussolini’s could easily turn on us.’

  ‘Look, I would never side with any foreign power, whatever its regime, if it threatened British integrity and interests. Which the Italians are hardly about to do. They’re too sensible – they love their dolce vita too much to risk it all in an unwinnable war.’

  ‘Maybe so. But what about Spanish fascism? Or the German variety? These movements are growing. No dolce vita there! Just the same brutal standover tactics and crackpot harking back to some imaginary golden age they want to restore, instead of moving forward – developing our modern potential. That’s not patriotic, it’s just plain barmy! What sane person today would want the Roman Empire back, for instance? It was just mean, violent and barbaric by our modern lights.’

  She looks at him, smiles uncertainly. ‘Mr Mitchell, I think at this point I should throw in the towel before you turn me into a one-eyed Liberal voter. Perhaps I can lure you back to the party on the promise not to suggest you make a speech. You’ve filled me with disquiet about what you might say. Agreed?’