Tonight’s local rag has an article on Jersey’s connection to the Spitfire. You’ll probably find every local rag in the country is jumping on the Spitfire band wagon at the moment and claiming a link.
Anyhow tonight’s article was on Lady Houston the mega rich and eccentric widow of a shipping tycoon who bank rolled the 1931 Schneider Trophy entry, without which, the paper claims, the Spitfire would never have been developed and Britain would have possibly lost the war.
Contrary to common belief Houston was not a Conservative, she was a fascist, an ardent supporter of Mosley, Mussolini and no doubt Hitler. She was anti Socialist, and for this reason poured her money into the development of the S6B to the tune of £100K,. She openly castigated Ramsey MacDonald’s Labour Government, in one patriotic speech declaring “Every true Briton would rather sell his last shirt than admit that England could not defend herself”.
The article was ok as far as newspapers go, though I do have a “sort of” issue with the claim that Houston contributed directly to the future development of the Spitfire. My reasoning is that the reporter claims that the Spitfire was a direct development of the S6B, and that if Mitchell hadn’t developed the S6B (with the help of Houston’s money) the Spitfire would never had have happened.
I would argue that the Spitfire itself was not a direct development of the S6B, though the techniques used and experience gained were useful in the future design and building of the Spitfire. I would go as far as to claim that Mitchell probably learnt more from theS4 S5 and S6, and that the tweaking of the S6 into the S6B didn’t really add much more to his knowledge base.
Therefore Houston’s money helped Britain to win the Schneider trophy out right, no doubt about that, but contributed very little to the onward development of the Spitfire.
Anyone else care to comment?
By: stuart gowans - 11th March 2006 at 20:26
Pete, yes you are absolutely right they were spur gear not epicyclic, I think the way that the reduction casing was tapered to the front ,and the way that the cylinder banks protruded above the cowling made me remember the shape, and without checking ,post a complete load of cr*p ; no excuses
By: MerlinPete - 11th March 2006 at 19:20
Stuart, are you sure they used an epicyclic gear on R engines? Some at least had spur gears. All the pictures I have seen have the prop shaft above the crankshaft centreline. I have a cutaway of one with spur gears, but I don`t think I can post it here because of copyright?
I agree with you 100% that the Merlin was not a development of the R, this is a misconception promoted by some publications, which has become a kind of “folklore”! The Griffon has the same cylinder capacity as the R, and even that shares little else.
I don`t know enough about Spitfires to have an opinion on that, but it certainly doesn`t look very much like an S6 to me.
By: stuart gowans - 11th March 2006 at 09:36
If lady Houston part funded the s6b then presumably the s6 was already in existance.. I was under the impression that the 1931 R series engine was the major recipient of the funding, which externally was similiar to the earlier one, but internally they changed from fork and blade con rods to master rod and link ;having never had an R series apart I am of course only quoting reference work on the subject, but I have worked on Merlins ,and they are fork and blade . The R series also I believe had epicyclic prop reduction which the Merlin did not (nor the production mk’s of the Griffons) ;my view is that there is no direct lineage between the R and the merlin ,as all of the Rolls-Royce engines at that time were 60′ v12’s with varying displacement. I think your correct in saying the Mitchell learnt more from the s4 ,as this apparently introduced the largely unknown phenomenon “wing flutter” on un braced wings. The only thing you could say about the s6b (regarding the spitfire) was it made Mitchell a household name (i.e 3 wins and you keep the trophy) and gave credibility to his radical design (type 300) ,without such credibility one might think that a designer of “seaplanes” might not be the best person to produce a fighter capable of competing with the bf 109.
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March 10, 2006 at 8:52 pm