Mitchell · 1936
R. J. Mitchell racing the Spitfire
Reginald Joseph Mitchell, chief designer at Supermarine in Southampton, was diagnosed with rectal cancer in August 1933. He had a major operation, came back to work, and refused for the next four years to slow the pace of his work on the prototype that was to be the K5054, the aircraft that would carry the company's nameplate as the Spitfire. The prototype flew for the first time at Eastleigh aerodrome on the fifth of March 1936 with Captain Joseph Summers at the controls. Mitchell stood on the grass beside the marker hut. Summers landed after eight minutes and said the now-famous line: *don't touch anything*. Mitchell had eleven days short of fifteen months to live. He died at his home, *Hazeldene*, in Southampton on the eleventh of June 1937. The Spitfire entered RAF service in August 1938. By the summer of 1940 it was the only single-seat fighter in the British inventory capable of out-turning the Messerschmitt 109. The man who designed it had been dead for three years and forty days when the Battle of Britain opened.
It is a quarter past four on the afternoon of the fifth of March 1936, on the western edge of Eastleigh aerodrome, by the marker hut at the threshold of grass runway one-six. He is forty-one years old. He is Reginald Joseph Mitchell, chief designer at Supermarine, in his eighth year on the Schneider Trophy seaplanes that won the Trophy outright for the country in 1931, in his third year on the prototype now standing at the head of the runway, designation Type 300, factory works number K5054, with no painted name and a duralumin skin that has not yet been polished.
He has had three of his five-eighths of a stomach removed three years ago and is, for the second time in eighteen months, in pain through most of the day. He has not told his wife Florence the cancer is back. He has, in his pocket, a tin of mints that the surgeon has told him not to bother with. He is in a tweed jacket and a cap. His hands are in his coat pockets so the men at the marker hut will not see them shake.
The pilot in the cockpit, Captain Joseph Summers (Mutt to the company), Vickers's chief test pilot, has just been given the chock-away signal. The propeller, an Air Ministry standard four-blade, is up to two thousand revolutions. The Merlin Two engine, which Rolls-Royce delivered three weeks late and one specification short, is at run-up boost.
Mitchell thinks: we are nine months over schedule. Camm at Hawker has flown the Hurricane in November, four months ahead of us, and Camm's plane is a less complicated airframe and will be in production faster than ours.
Mitchell thinks: if Mutt brings it down in a piece, the prototype will go to Martlesham for service trials in May, and the Air Ministry will sign the contract by August.
Mitchell thinks: if it does not fly we will not have a second prototype until the autumn. The Air Ministry will give the contract to Hawker. Camm has said publicly that the Spitfire wing planform will not work in service.
Mitchell thinks: I do not have eight months to wait.
Summers releases the brakes. The K5054 rolls. The tail lifts after eighty yards. The wheels leave the grass after three hundred. He climbs at six hundred feet a minute on a long left turn into the wind. He stays in the circuit for eight minutes, two slow circuits, one wider one out toward Bishopstoke and back. He brings it down on the same runway and rolls to the marker hut.
Summers gets out of the cockpit on the wing root. He has the helmet under his arm. He walks across to Mitchell. He says, by the tradition, in the dry voice he used about all of his test flights, the words that any aircraft designer in the country would have given six months of his life to hear: don't touch anything. What he meant was, in flying-club shorthand, that the aeroplane was, on its first flight, almost finished. Mitchell, by the testimony of the chief draughtsman Joe Smith standing five feet away, did not say anything; he took out the tin of mints from his pocket and shook out two and handed one to Summers.
The K5054 went on to make twenty-four further flights at Eastleigh in March, five at the maker's controls, the rest with service pilots, and to Martlesham for full service evaluation on the twenty-sixth of May. The Air Ministry signed the production contract for three hundred and ten airframes on the third of June. Mitchell, by then, was at home for the second of his cancer operations and never came back fully to the office. He visited the prototype on its return to Eastleigh in the autumn of 1936. He worked, as energy permitted, on the Type 224 design and on early pencil sketches of what would have been the Type 312, a four-cannon stretched-fuselage fighter, in the spring of 1937. He flew to Vienna in April for an experimental cancer treatment that the Royal Marsden could not offer and came home in May without improvement. He died at Hazeldene, Russell Place, Southampton, on the eleventh of June 1937, of metastatic cancer of the rectum and lungs. He was forty-two years old. He is buried in South Stoneham Cemetery in Southampton. The first production Spitfire flew on the fourteenth of May 1938, eleven months after his death. By the time of the Battle of Britain in the summer 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. The plates went on every Spitfire airframe Supermarine and the shadow factories built, twenty thousand and three hundred and fifty-one of them, between 1938 and 1948. The plate is on the fuselage of the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight's Spitfire AB910 at Coningsby today. Joe Smith, his chief draughtsman, succeeded him in the chair and ran the Spitfire's continuous redesign through twenty-four marks of airframe and three engine families to the end of production. Smith, by his own account given in 1957, was always working in his predecessor's drawing office; the question on every problem of every mark was, by Smith's phrase, what would Reg have done with this?