R. J. Mitchell racing the Spitfire

Some men are given a single object to finish in a single life, and the calendar of their illness and the calendar of their work run side by side like two columns of figures that will not balance. The arithmetic is private. They keep it in their head while the drawing board fills and the deadlines move, and they tell no one outside the room what the right-hand column says. Reginald Joseph Mitchell, chief designer at Supermarine in Southampton, kept his column to himself from the August of 1933 onward.

THE DESIGNER AT SOUTHAMPTON

He had come up through the drawing office at Supermarine from 1917, a Staffordshire locomotive apprentice's son who had taught himself stress calculation at night school in Hanley. By the late twenties he was the firm's chief designer, and the four Schneider Trophy seaplanes he drew between 1925 and 1931 carried the Trophy outright for Britain at Calshot. The S.6B took the world air-speed record at four hundred and seven miles an hour in September 1931. He was thirty-six. In the August of 1933 a surgeon at the Nuffield in Woking removed three-fifths of his stomach for a carcinoma of the rectum, told him he might have four years, and told him plainly that the cigarettes and the long hours would shorten that figure. He came back to the drawing office at Woolston inside six months. He did not tell Florence the surgeon's number. He told the draughtsmen nothing at all. There was, on his board, a single-seat monoplane fighter to Air Ministry specification F.7/30, designation Type 300, and the firm's nameplate would ride on it.

THE PROTOTYPE IN THE SHED

Through 1934 and 1935 the Type 300 was redrawn from the ground up. The thick-winged Type 224 of 1934 had been a disappointment to him and a failure to the Ministry; he scrapped it and started again. He took the elliptical wing from Beverley Shenstone's aerodynamic sums, the stressed-skin monocoque from the Schneider experience, the retracting undercarriage from the American practice he had studied in 1931, and the Merlin engine from Rolls-Royce at Derby, which arrived three weeks late and one specification short of what he had asked for. The Air Ministry had paid ten thousand pounds for a single prototype under contract 361140/34. The works number was K5054. By the end of February 1936 the aircraft stood in the experimental shed at Woolston with a duralumin skin not yet polished, no paint, no squadron markings, and the firm's hopes resting on a wing planform that Sydney Camm at Hawker had said publicly would not work. Camm's Hurricane had flown in the November. The Spitfire, as no one yet called it, was nine months behind.

EASTLEIGH, FIVE PAST FOUR

The aerodrome at Eastleigh lay four miles north of the Woolston works, a grass field with a marker hut at the threshold of runway one-six and a windsock standing east-north-east in a light breeze. The afternoon of the fifth of March 1936 was overcast, cold, the cloud base around two thousand feet. Mitchell drove up from Woolston in the works Rolls. He was forty-one. He had three of his five-eighths of a stomach removed three years before and was, for the second time in eighteen months, in pain through most of the day. He wore a tweed jacket and a flat cap. He had a tin of mints in his coat pocket that his surgeon had told him not to bother with. He kept his hands in the pockets so the men at the marker hut would not see them shake. Captain Joseph Summers, Mutt to the company, Vickers's chief test pilot, was already in the cockpit. The four-blade propeller was up to two thousand revolutions. The Merlin Two was at run-up boost. Joe Smith, the chief draughtsman, stood five feet from Mitchell with his notebook open and his pencil cold in his fingers.

A FEW MINUTES IN MARCH

The chocks came away at a quarter past four. Mitchell watched the aircraft along the grass and did not speak, and what passed behind his face in those minutes is not in any minute book, but the columns of figures he carried were known to him alone and they ran together now: nine months behind Camm, a second operation booked for the May, an Air Ministry contract that would go to Hawker if Summers brought the K5054 down in pieces, a second prototype not before the autumn, and the right-hand column, the private one, contracting by the week. He had drawn the wing for the speeds it would need against a German monoplane fighter that nobody at the Air Ministry would yet name aloud, and he had drawn it knowing he would not see the squadrons that flew it. The tail lifted after eighty yards. The wheels left the grass after three hundred. Summers climbed at six hundred feet a minute on a long left turn into the wind, took the aircraft in two slow circuits and a wider one out towards Bishopstoke, and brought it down on the same strip of grass after eight minutes. He rolled to the marker hut, cut the engine, and got out on the wing root with his helmet under his arm. He walked across to Mitchell. By Joe Smith's testimony, standing five feet away, Summers said in the dry voice he used about all his test flights the words any aircraft designer in the country would have given six months of his life to hear: don't touch anything. In flying-club shorthand he meant the aeroplane was, on its first flight, almost finished. Mitchell did not say anything. He took the tin of mints out of his coat pocket, shook out two, and handed one to Summers.

THE QUIET BETWEEN

Summers drove back to Brooklands that evening and filed the test report in a single hand-written page. Joe Smith walked the K5054 into the hangar and stayed with it until the duralumin was cold. In the experimental shed at Woolston the night-shift drew the modifications for the rudder horn balance and the undercarriage doors against the morning. At Hazeldene, Russell Place, Florence Mitchell put dinner on the table at half past seven and her husband ate what he could and said only that the aircraft had flown and that Mutt had been kind about it. He did not tell her, that night or in the fifteen months that followed, what the surgeon at the Nuffield had said in the August of 1933 about the four years. She found the surgeon's letter, by her son Gordon's account, in a drawer at Hazeldene in the July of 1937.

THE MINISTRY SIGNS

The K5054 made twenty-four further flights at Eastleigh in the March, five at the maker's controls, the rest with service pilots, and went up to Martlesham Heath for full service evaluation on the twenty-sixth of May. The Air Ministry signed contract 527113/36 on the third of June 1936, for three hundred and ten airframes at four thousand five hundred pounds each. The name Spitfire was approved by the board at Vickers a fortnight later; Mitchell had told his daughter Ann at the dinner table it was the sort of bloody silly name they would give it. He was at home for the second of his cancer operations when the contract was signed. He came back to the office only in fragments after that. He worked, as energy permitted, on early pencil sketches of the Type 312, a four-cannon stretched-fuselage fighter, through the spring of 1937. He flew to Vienna in the April for an experimental treatment the Royal Marsden could not offer, and came home in the May without improvement. He died at Hazeldene on the eleventh of June 1937 of metastatic carcinoma of the rectum and lungs. He was forty-two. He is buried at South Stoneham Cemetery in Southampton, under a plain Portland stone.

THE PLATE ON THE FUSELAGE

The first production Spitfire flew at Eastleigh on the fourteenth of May 1938, eleven months after his death. The aircraft entered RAF service at Duxford with 19 Squadron in the August. By the opening of the Battle of Britain in the July of 1940 the Air Ministry had nine fighter squadrons of Spitfires, three hundred and thirty operational airframes, and Mitchell had been dead for three years and forty days. The aircraft kept his initials on the design plates. Reginald Joseph Mitchell, Designer, on the rivet plate, on every airframe Supermarine and the shadow factories at Castle Bromwich built between 1938 and 1948, twenty thousand three hundred and fifty-one of them. Joe Smith took the chair after him and carried the Spitfire through twenty-four marks of airframe and three engine families to the end of production; by Smith's own account in 1957 the question on every problem of every mark was what would Reg have done with this? Some men are given a single object to finish in a single life and the calendar will not let them see the use it is put to. The plate is still on the fuselage of Spitfire AB910 of the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight at Coningsby, and the aircraft is flown, on summer afternoons, over the Lincolnshire fields at six hundred feet.