A telegram address that became a legend

Before Supermarine was an aircraft company it was a word on a telegram form. In 1913 Noel Pemberton Billing — boxer, actor, Boer War veteran and yacht dealer — bet Frederick Handley Page £500 that he could earn a pilot’s licence within 24 hours of first sitting in an aeroplane. He won, and used the money to start an aircraft business on the River Itchen at Woolston, Southampton. For its telegraphic address he registered Supermarine, Southampton: the opposite of submarine, a boat that would go above the sea. The company itself was registered as Pemberton-Billing Ltd on 27 June 1914, with Hubert Scott-Paine running the works.

The MP who wanted a boat that flies

Billing’s first machine, the P.B.1 flying boat, almost certainly never flew; he said he had wanted a boat that would fly rather than an aircraft that would float. When war came the firm nearly died — 80 per cent of the staff were laid off, leaving 14 — and survived on licence work and anti-Zeppelin quadruplanes such as the Nighthawk. In 1916 Billing was elected to Parliament and began attacking the Royal Aircraft Factory. To keep the Admiralty sweet, the directors bought him out for about £12,500, and on 27 June 1916 the company became Supermarine Aviation Works Ltd. Billing went on to a notorious 1918 libel trial; Supermarine went on to flying boats.

Racing for the Schneider Trophy

In 1917 Scott-Paine hired a personal assistant from a Staffordshire locomotive works: Reginald Mitchell. By 1919, aged 24, Mitchell was chief designer. Supermarine was then the only British firm dedicated to flying boats, and its showcase was the Schneider Trophy. In 1922 at Naples the Sea Lion II, flown by Henri Biard, beat the Italians and stopped them taking the trophy for good. Mitchell then abandoned flying boats for slim monoplane floatplanes: the S.5 finished first and second at Venice in 1927, the Rolls-Royce-powered S.6 won in 1929, and in 1931 the S.6B won Britain the trophy outright. Soon afterwards an S.6B became the first aircraft over 400 mph, reaching 407.5 mph.

Vickers, Barnes Wallis and the loft

The money came from less glamorous machines. The Southampton flying boat of 1925 sold 83 copies and pushed sales from £137,683 in 1923 to £403,868 in 1927. In 1928 Vickers bought the firm for £390,000. Its managers found Supermarine profitable but untidy, and sent their engineer Barnes Wallis to reform the design office while Mitchell was on his Christmas holiday in 1929. Mitchell came back, found Wallis at his desk, and moved him to a disused loft in a remote corner of the works with orders that nobody make him comfortable. Faced with Mitchell’s threat to resign, Vickers recalled Wallis to Weybridge.

The Spitfire

Mitchell’s first fighter, the Type 224, was a disappointment, and in 1933 he had surgery for rectal cancer. He kept working, learned to fly, and redrew the fighter as the Type 300, with a thin elliptical wing shaped with aerodynamicist Beverley Shenstone and the new Rolls-Royce Merlin. It flew from Eastleigh on 5 March 1936 and three months later the Air Ministry ordered 310. Vickers’ Sir Robert McLean named it after his spirited daughter, a little spitfire; Mitchell reportedly thought it a silly name. He died on 11 June 1937, aged 42. More than 20,000 Spitfires followed, the only Allied fighter in production for the whole war.

September 1940: the works destroyed

Supermarine’s riverside works were an obvious target. On 24 September 1940 a low-level raid killed 42 people, many in a shelter under a railway embankment. Two days later about 60 Heinkel He 111s and their escorts dropped more than 70 tons of bombs; the Woolston works were wrecked beyond repair and 55 more people died. Lord Beaverbrook ordered complete dispersal. Design moved to Hursley Park, near Winchester, and production scattered into bus depots, garages, a laundry and part of a steamroller factory across Hampshire, Wiltshire and Berkshire. Output halved for two quarters, then recovered: 8,000 Spitfires came out of the dispersed workshops by the end of the war, while Castle Bromwich built 12,129 more.

Into the jet age, and out of the name

Under Mitchell’s successor Joe Smith, the Spitfire went from Merlin to Griffon, and the Spiteful and Seafang tried to replace it with a new wing. The jet engine made both obsolete, so Smith grafted the Spiteful wing onto a Nene-powered fuselage to make the Attacker, the first jet fighter in Fleet Air Arm squadron service. The swept-wing Swift followed, troubled as a fighter but a record-breaker: on 26 September 1953 Mike Lithgow flew one at 735.7 mph near Tripoli. The Scimitar, delivered from 1957, was the last aircraft to carry the name. When Vickers-Armstrongs (Aircraft) joined the British Aircraft Corporation in 1960, the Supermarine name was dropped.

Fábricas

• Woolston Works (Oakbank Wharf) · Woolston, Southampton — Original works from 1914; wrecked on 26 September 1940 and never rebuilt; the listed slipway survives
• Itchen Works · Southampton — Modernist factory by Oliver Bernard, opened 1939; damaged 1940 and rebuilt after the war
• Hythe · Hythe, Hampshire — Former Air Ministry flying-boat base leased from 1927 for Southampton assembly; closed 1938
• Eastleigh · Eastleigh, Hampshire — Final assembly and flight test; the Spitfire prototype first flew here
• Hursley Park · Hursley, near Winchester — Design and administration headquarters from December 1940
• Castle Bromwich shadow factory · Castle Bromwich, Birmingham — Built 12,129 Spitfires, more than half the total
• Dispersed production centres · Reading, Salisbury, Trowbridge and Southampton — About 60 workshops with assembly at Aldermaston, Henley, Chattis Hill, High Post, Keevil and Eastleigh
• South Marston · South Marston, Wiltshire — Supermarine headquarters from 1957

Gente

• Noel Pemberton Billing · founder, later MP — Sold out in 1916 before campaigning against the Royal Aircraft Factory
• Hubert Scott-Paine · works manager, then owner 1916–1923 — Sold his shares for £192,000 and later founded the British Power Boat Company
• James Bird · director, owner from 1923 — Sold the company to Vickers in 1928 and stayed as managing director until 1940
• R. J. Mitchell · chief designer 1919–1937 — Designed the Schneider racers and led the Spitfire design; died 1937 aged 42
• Beverley Shenstone · aerodynamicist — Canadian who shaped the Spitfire’s elliptical wing
• Joseph Smith · chief designer from 1941 — Developed the Spitfire through the war and led the jet designs
• Leonard Gooch · works engineer, then works manager — Organised the dispersal of Spitfire production after the 1940 raids
• Mike Lithgow · chief test pilot — Set the 1953 world air speed record in a Swift

Récords y primicias

• Schneider Trophy winner 1922 (Sea Lion II, Naples), 1927 (S.5, Venice), 1929 (S.6) and 1931 (S.6B), the last securing the trophy outright for Britain
• World seaplane speed record of 226.75 mph with the S.4, 1925
• World air speed record of 407.5 mph with the S.6B, 1931, the first aircraft over 400 mph
• World absolute air speed record of 735.7 mph by Mike Lithgow in a Swift F.4, 26 September 1953
• Type 510 of 1948: first British aircraft with both swept wings and a swept tailplane
• A Spitfire reached Mach 0.92 in a 1944 test dive, described by Wikipedia as the fastest ever recorded for a piston-engined aircraft