From Nighthawk to Spitfire

by John K Shelton

  It ought, however, to be mentioned that his very pragmatic willingness to listen to all points of view was not matched by a readiness to bear fools gladly. Most accounts mention his shortness with those who did not get his message quickly enough. For example, Joe Smith said:

  R.J. was an essentially friendly person, and normally even-tempered, and although he occasionally let rip with us when he was dissatisfied with our work, the storms were of short duration and forgotten by him almost immediately – provided you put the job right.

  Mitchell’s condition after his operation for bowel cancer in 1933 exacerbated his testiness, but unfortunately for those working with him, he had kept his ailment private. Even before then, it was not unknown for him to contemptuously flick aside a drawing that did not satisfy him and even to tear it into shreds if it particularly displeased him; and his secretary, Miss Vera Cross, reported that he had no time for those who did not measure up to his standards. Nor did he encourage interruptions when deep in thought at his drawing board, as Joe Smith has recalled:

  A mental picture which always springs to my mind when remembering him, is R.J. leaning over a drawing, chin in hand, thinking hard. A great deal of his working life was spent in this attitude, and the results of this thinking made his reputation. His genius undoubtedly lay in his ability not only to appreciate clearly the ideal solution to a given problem, but also the difficulties and, by careful consideration, to arrive at an efficient compromise.

  One result of his habit of deep concentration was that he naturally objected to having his train of thought interrupted. His staff soon learned that life became easier if they avoided such interruption … If you went into his office and found that you could only see R.J.’s back bending over a drawing, you took a hasty look at the back of his neck. If this was normal, you waited for him to speak, but if it rapidly became red, you beat a hasty retreat!

  On the other hand, Beverley Shenstone, Mitchell’s chief aerodynamicist, reported that he found Mitchell ‘very gregarious – when out of the office’, and, indeed, in his younger days, he was part of a high-spirited management group not unknown for ‘serenading’ a rather pompous business manager in the early hours of the morning. There are various later accounts of practical jokes, including Mitchell’s dismantling of a colleague’s bed when staying at a hotel and his setting fire to another’s notes while the latter was giving a speech.

  It is also recorded that when his brother visited Southampton, he took him out for a drink at a pub frequented by Supermarine workers, who were not at all disconcerted by the arrival of their boss. His lack of ‘side’ and, outside work hours, his readiness to be ‘one of the boys’ was complemented by his taking an active part in the firm’s sporting activities – particularly tennis and cricket. Nevertheless, only the breezy RAF Schneider Trophy pilots called him ‘Mitch’; in the works, ‘R.J.’ was the limit of familiarity.

  On the domestic front, Mitchell’s son, Gordon, remembers that his father was ‘damned difficult to live with’ and that there were sometimes ‘some pretty awful rows’. On the other hand, Denis le P. Webb, who had joined Supermarine in 1926, also recalled the less stormy side of Mitchell’s character. When still a very junior apprentice he found that Mitchell ‘was friendly and pleasant’ and that he put him completely at ease. It was quite obvious that R.J.’s successes had not gone to his head, and they never did. ‘Later, if he saw me foot-slogging over to Southampton and he was making his stately way in his Rolls-Royce, he would not be above offering me a lift.’

  Flying Officer Atcherley spoke in similar terms: ‘He was a man with an alert and inquisitive mind, and in spite of his very considerable attainments in the world of aircraft design he was always ready to crack a joke or take on anyone on his own wavelength.’

  In the presence of strangers or women (he left interviews of female staff to others), a certain remoteness was the result of shyness, and he had a slight stammer which increased his dislike of public speaking – something that was demanded of him more as his reputation as a designer increased. Nevertheless, Smith remembered that he could also be charming, with ‘an engaging smile which was often in evidence and which transformed his habitual expression of concentration’.

  Mitchell’s son has also left a boyhood anecdote which relates to this ‘concentration’. Having been shown round his father’s workplace, he was asked how he had got on and, to his reply that he had enjoyed it, his father responded, ‘I don’t care a damn whether you enjoyed it, I want to know what you learned.’

  Harry Griffiths has supplied a reminiscence of Mitchell which encapsulates some of his apparently contradictory character traits and foibles:

  R.J. was human like the rest of us – he could be moody, but in general he had a pleasant personality and I always had the impression that he was somewhat retiring yet he was decisive and when necessary could be very firm.

  He had a small personal staff consisting of a clerk, two typists and an office boy – they were all loyal to him and understood his moods. When any unwanted visitor asked to see him he would tell his staff, ‘I’ll see him in ten minutes’ and they knew that this meant, ‘Get rid of him!’ It worked well until a new typist arrived and the visitor was ushered in after precisely ten minutes! It only happened once.

  I’ve already said that his office was immediately over the laboratory and occasionally he would come downstairs to see Arthur [Black] and would always stop and ask how I was getting on. Sometimes these visits would be to ask the boss if he fancied a game of golf and off they would go for the afternoon. On another occasion he came and played merry hell because the office was untidy, although in fact it was no worse than usual.

  Sir Robert McLean, the managing director of Vickers (Aviation), summed up Mitchell’s complex character, ‘He was a curious mixture of dreams and common sense’. His wife had to become accustomed to his talking at one moment and the next being miles away, and she soon learned to contact his secretary when preoccupation with some design problem led to the evening meal at home going cold. Practical matters such as money were left to her and she would hand out cash for his personal use and replace it as required. And as Vera Cross grew into her job as his secretary, she soon organised his very imperfect filing system, learned how to prevent interruptions, and also relieved him of the main burden of correspondence, which he hated – although she had often to wait beyond office hours before letters were signed.

  Apart from seeking a mental break from the inevitable minutiae of aircraft design, or the later demands of becoming a director of the firm, by taking time off for golf, he would, on a nice afternoon, also slip away for a few hours’ sailing. This absenting himself is not necessarily at variance with previous accounts of his fierce work ethic but must surely have been a necessary part of the otherworldliness that Sir Robert spoke of. Bearing in mind his well-known concentrated stance at his drawing board, as described by Smith earlier, and the intuitions that pre-figured his many ground-breaking designs, Yeats’ lines about prominent persons in history put the matter rather well:

  His eyes fixed upon nothing,

  A hand under his head.

  Like a long-legged fly upon the stream.

  His mind moves upon silence.

  THE BEGINNINGS

  Given Mitchell’s capacity for hard work and, in a more authoritarian time, given his willingness to listen to the views of the team of experts he collected around him, a description of his early years will, nevertheless, show how unexpected – one might say, inexplicable – was his emergence as the man behind the aircraft which contributed so significantly to winning the Battle of Britain.

  Reginald Joseph Mitchell was born on 20 May 1895 at 115 Congleton Road in the Butt Lane district of Kidsgrove. Then, three months after his birth, Reginald’s family moved a few miles to Longton, one of the ‘six towns’ soon to be constituted as Stoke-on-Trent: first to 87 Chaplin Road, in the Normacot district, and then to the nearby Victoria Cottage at 1 Meir Road, Dresden, where he grew up.
He died only forty-two years later, on 11 June 1937.

  Nevertheless, from 1919, when he became chief designer at Supermarine Aviation, Southampton, his relatively brief career spans the whole development of aviation since the pioneering days until just before the beginning of the jet era.

  It is worth recording that on 17 December 1903, the year when Mitchell began elementary school, the Wright brothers made the first powered aircraft flights, lasting less than one minute in duration. Only six years later, aviation progress was such that Blériot made a stir by flying across the Channel, and aerial activity came to Britain quite soon afterwards, with Alliott Verdon Roe being credited with making the first flight by a British designed, built and powered aircraft on 12 July 1909.

  In the same year, air shows were organised in Doncaster and Blackpool and, in 1910, the young Mitchell must have been caught up in the local interest in flying as crowds flocked to aviation meetings which took place closer to home at Wolverhampton and Burton-upon-Trent. Even nearer, a Wright machine was put on display at the Hanley Park fete in the same year.

  By this time, Mitchell was just turning 15 and his enthusiasm for the air would have been further stimulated by the flight of Louis Paulhan in a Farman biplane, which passed no more than 12 miles west of the family home on the way to winning the Daily Mail London–Manchester competition. Two years later, another early aviator, Gustav Hamel, came to nearby Stafford and to Stone, for which special trains were organised, and he also came as near as Longton for the Whitsuntide fete.

  The young Mitchell was known to have had a passion for building model aircraft, no doubt informed by press photographs and the displays of the very earliest aircraft, particularly the successful machines by the Wright brothers, Farman and Blériot. But an account that Mitchell’s models ‘swooped and dipped’ (which full-size machines seldom do outside airshows), would seem at variance with the approach of a lad who, at the age of 16, made his own lathe and, later, a dynamo. It would seem more likely that his obsession would be directed more technically towards understanding the principles of aerodynamics, as exemplified in straight, level flight – a good preparation for his first Supermarine aircraft which had to satisfy the Air Ministry inspectors that it could ‘fly itself’ for at least three minutes.

  There was a short-lived aircraft firm nearby at Wolverhampton (the Star Aeroplane Co., which in 1910 offered a monoplane based on the Antoinette aircraft and a biplane based on the Farman type), but there is no evidence that the young Mitchell ever visited it. And, even if this had been countenanced by the family, any such precocious visiting of manufacturers with longer-term prospects, such as Sopwith or Shorts, would have involved travelling considerable distances from Stoke-on-Trent. At this time, even motor transport was in its early stages: the year of Mitchell’s birth saw the very first car journey in Britain and Herbert Austin began car building in Britain ten years later, when Mitchell was about to go to Hanley High School.

  But at least the young boy had the advantage of a good educational background, as his father, Herbert Mitchell, a Yorkshireman, had moved to the Potteries to become a headmaster at Longton. Mitchell also had the advantage of a more practical influence, as his father subsequently became a master printer and, eventually, a managing director of a printing company.

  In view of the aesthetic aspects of his design work, discussed later, it should perhaps be mentioned that Reginald’s younger brother, Billy, was to set up his own business, designing patterns for the local pottery industry, and that his nephew, Jim, became an artist whose aviation prints of his uncle’s Spitfires sold widely.

  It is also noteworthy that, having decided to read all the novels of Walter Scott while still a schoolboy, Mitchell is reported to have persevered to the bitter end, and his father would certainly have approved of Reginald’s sticking to the task, as he was known to demand high standards of conduct and application.

  Similar perseverance was required when Reginald took his first major step away from his father’s world and towards his own future career, being apprenticed in 1911 to the locomotive engineering firm Kerr, Stuart & Company, in Fenton, another of the Potteries towns. Shipbuilding, bridge building or textiles might just as well have provided a suitable preparation for the world of engineering at that time, and the local locomotive maker would have seemed to offer just as good and as stable a career beginning. By the time Mitchell finished his apprenticeship to the company, their narrow and standard gauge engines had been sold as far afield as California, Chile, Mexico, China and India (examples are maintained at the Talyllyn, West Lancashire and Leighton Buzzard Railways).

  Whatever his future career prospects, Reginald’s early training in the workshops must have been a culture shock to a lad brought up in a middle-class environment (including the works of Walter Scott). Returning each day covered with the oil and grime of the engine sheds was not to his liking and he was all for abandoning the apprenticeship, but his father would have none of it and Reginald stayed on. At least he won one minor victory when his foreman likened the tea that Mitchell had made to urine (or words to that effect). The gentleman was much better pleased with a second mug which Reginald had personally doctored accordingly.

  Looking back from Mitchell’s later appointment as assistant works manager at Supermarine with its no-nonsense working practices (see later), one can see that these early days were not wasted. More important, however, was his move to the Kerr, Stuart & Co. drawing offices and his attending the Wedgwood Burslem Technical School for evening classes in engineering drawing, mathematics and mechanics. This more cerebral work clearly matched his potential better, as he was awarded one of three special prizes presented by the Midland Counties Union.

  By the time he was 21, he had completed his apprenticeship and the First World War had been raging for two years. He made attempts to join the forces but his engineering training was considered more useful in civilian life. Initially, he undertook some part-time teaching at the Fenton Technical School, but his interest in flight (which had also been expressed by the keeping of homing pigeons) then took the form of the fateful decision to apply for the post of personal assistant to the managing director of the Pemberton-Billing aviation works at Woolston, Southampton.

  This small company was fully engaged in the war effort, particularly with land planes, although their main interest lay in marine aircraft, and so Mitchell was not only applying for employment in a relatively esoteric form of engineering but also in the doubly remote one of seagoing aircraft. One might say that this type of product was triply remote, as ‘hydro-aeroplanes’, as they were then called, were less developed than the early land planes. It was only in March 1910 (when Reginald was nearly 15) that Henri Fabre made the first take-off from water by a powered aircraft and in the January of the next year that Glenn Curtiss took off from water in San Diego with a more practical hydro-aeroplane.

  The first British aquatic events took place in 1911 at Cavendish Dock, Barrow-in-Furness, where there were several none-too-successful attempts with a converted Avro land plane. Shortly afterwards, on 25 November, another converted Avro machine made the first, more successful, take-off and alighting on water in Britain, with the newly formed Lakes Flying Company of Windermere, which was to be contracted by the Royal Naval Air Service for the development of seaplanes (much to the annoyance of author Beatrix Potter and Canon Rawnsley, founder of the National Trust).

  As Blériot had already flown across the Channel two years earlier, it was clear that efficient machines dedicated to water operation were yet to be produced, despite the obvious advantages of large, readily available (and flat) stretches of water. Accordingly, Jacques Schneider sought to encourage their development by offering a trophy for hydro-aeroplanes. The first competition for the new trophy, on 16 April 1913, produced only four contestants, three Frenchmen and an American, and their aircraft all betrayed their land plane origins.

  At the time of the second contest on 20 April 1914, Mitchell was exactly one month from hi
s 19th birthday and still an apprentice to the locomotive engineering firm in Fenton, but, if his mind had already been turning to aviation as a career, the primitive state of watergoing aircraft and reports of the first two Schneider Trophy contests could hardly have been encouraging to his family – of those aircraft which managed to cross the start line, only four out of nine had completed the course.

  The First World War then brought such civilian competitions to an end, but at least it saw a significant increase in the development of aircraft and of water-cooled British aero engines. Aeroplanes were now becoming sufficiently reliable to play a significant part in warfare – mainly in fighter, reconnaissance, target and gunnery spotting duties – so the demand for aircraft for the war effort now made a career in aviation at least something of a prospect for the young Reginald Mitchell. Nevertheless, it was an unexpected and bold decision at that time for a provincial lad to take a train to the (then) remote south coast for an interview at the Pemberton-Billing flying boat firm at Woolston, engaged in making machines even more unfamiliar than the new-fangled motor omnibus.

  His work colleagues later noticed his apparently intuitive feel for which aerodynamic shape would work, and so his early design of model aircraft must have somehow generated an instinct to head for the unknown world of aviation in the same way that an exceptional person fifty years later, with all the insouciance of youth, would have struck out for a place in the space industry. No doubt his keenness to involve himself in this new industry and his youthfulness overcame any misgivings he might have had when he saw what a small-time and underfunded operation the company was at that time. On being offered the personal assistant position, he instantly asked for his belongings to be sent down to him.