R. J. Mitchell(1895–1937)

Reginald Joseph Mitchell was born at 115 Congleton Road, Talke in north Staffordshire on the twentieth of May 1895, eldest son of Herbert Mitchell, a schoolmaster of the Stoke-on-Trent schools, and Eliza Brain. He was schooled at Hanley High School, was apprenticed at sixteen to the locomotive engineers Kerr, Stuart and Co at the Hartshill foundry in Stoke, studied engineering and mathematics at the Wedgwood Memorial Institute night-school, and in 1916 in his twenty-first year was offered the post of personal assistant to Hubert Scott-Paine, founder of the Supermarine Aviation Works at Woolston, Southampton. He accepted, moved south, and remained with Supermarine for the rest of his working life.

He was promoted Chief Designer of Supermarine in 1919 at twenty-four, became Chief Engineer in 1920, and across the 1920s designed the great Schneider Trophy racing seaplanes that took the trophy permanently for Britain. The Schneider Trophy was the international high-speed seaplane competition that drove the engine and airframe development of the late inter-war period. Mitchell's Supermarine S.4 of 1925, S.5 of 1927 (first place), S.6 of 1929 (first place) and S.6B of 1931 (first place, taking the trophy for keeps after three consecutive victories) set successive world air-speed records, the S.6B reaching four hundred and seven point five miles per hour on the thirteenth of September 1931, the first aircraft of any kind to exceed four hundred miles per hour in level flight. The Rolls-Royce R engine developed for the Schneider racers was the direct ancestor of the Rolls-Royce Merlin that powered the Spitfire.

In August 1933, on the diagnosis of rectal cancer, he was operated on at Bournemouth and was given a year to live. He spent his recuperation through 1933 to 1934 walking on the Dorset coast with his sketchbook and returned to Supermarine in October 1934 to begin work on the project he had judged the use of the time he had left should go to. The Type 300 prototype, designed under Air Ministry specification F.7/30 for a fighter, was on Mitchell's own design initiative redrawn into an all-metal stressed-skin monoplane of elliptical-wing planform powered by the new Rolls-Royce PV-12 (the engine that became the Merlin), an architecture for which there was no specification and no Air Ministry interest at that date. The prototype K5054 first flew at Eastleigh aerodrome outside Southampton on the fifth of March 1936 under the chief test pilot J. Captain Mutt Summers, who taxied back after the eight-minute first flight and said, in the famous line, Don't change a thing. The Air Ministry placed an order for three hundred and ten aircraft in June 1936; the type entered RAF squadron service in August 1938.

Mitchell died of pancreatic cancer at his house at 2 Russell Place, Portswood, Southampton on the eleventh of June 1937 in his forty-third year. He saw none of the Spitfire's production career and none of the Battle of Britain. The Spitfire (1938 to 1948 production) was built in twenty-two production marks, twenty thousand three hundred and fifty-one of them, the largest single-design production run of any British fighter; the Spitfire and the Hawker Hurricane together fought and won the Battle of Britain from August to October 1940, in which the Royal Air Force defeated the Luftwaffe's bid for air superiority over the south coast of England in advance of the planned German invasion. The single Mitchell sketch on which the Spitfire began is preserved at the Solent Sky Museum at Southampton, beside the surviving Spitfire and S.6B Schneider racer. The 1942 Leslie Howard film The First of the Few told Mitchell's story to wartime audiences. The Mitchell name in modern British engineering carries the weight of the Spitfire prototype K5054 that the Staffordshire chief designer made the work of the last three years of his life.