The Solent

The pilot was Flight Lieutenant John Boothman of the Royal Air Force High Speed Flight, a unit whose entire purpose was to prepare pilots and machines for exactly this kind of flying.

September 12, 1931, the Solent , clear skies, light winds and enormous crowds along the shore, and in boats in the estuary, tens of thousands of people who had come specifically to watch what a man and a machine could do at the edge of what was physically possible.

Italy and France had both withdrawn, citing insufficient preparation time, so Boothman flew alone, seven laps of the triangular course over open water, watched and timed from the shore.

He flew all seven laps clean, the R engine held together for the full race distance, which at those temperatures and those power settings was not something you could simply assume would happen.

The Schneider Trophy was permanently theirs.

Mitchell accepted the congratulations, went home and started working on something else.

Two weeks after the race on September 29th, Flight Lieutenant George Stainforth took an S6B out over the Solent for a straight line speed run.

back and forth over a measured course timed both ways, the average taken 407.5 miles per hour, a piston engine aircraft, 1931, 407 miles per hour.

September 13th, 1931.

The Solent, that stretch of cold water between Southampton and the Isle of Wight, is lined with people as far as you can see in either direction.

A million spectators, some estimates say, dockworkers and schoolchildren and admirals.

They are standing on every seawall, every cliff edge, every rooftop that has a sightline to the water.

They called it the Merlin.

Ernest Hives said it plainly years later, The Schneider Trophy program was the most important single investment that Rolls-Royce ever made in the Merlin's future.

Every hard lesson learned chasing speed over the Solent on a racing fuel mixture ended up, one way or another, in the engine that went into the Hurricane and the Spitfire.

Mitchell died in June of 1937.

But this looks like it's going to go ahead this weekend.

It involves Thruxton, Popham and Solent airfields.

You go to each and there's a little exercise to perform at each.

There's a taxi challenge at one airfield.

And it was a beautiful, and for me at the time, and in hindsight, vital morning, emotional, life-affirming, and a reminder, as I say, of the great power and consolation of lifelong friendship.

We had the Solent, the Isle of Wight, Hale and Island, and Portsmouth in the distance, all burnished by the rising sun as myself and Jono chatted.

we laid some ghosts to rest we reminisced about our shared history and i got to find out more about this long strange recent trip jono is on as the man in the pink hat as i said the other day i'm a big believer in the right conversation the right messenger the right person at the right time and this one was just the ticket thank you jono i love you like a brother i'll be back at the end for housekeeping corner So how's life as the man with the pink hat?

It's opened up a lot of opportunities, maybe less than I would have expected.

because now we can see Portsmouth.

Oh, and you'll love this.

So you won't be able to pick up on camera, I don't think, but you can see the forts in the Solent.

So you're seeing the gap between...

Pompey play up.

I didn't know this, but the day when I went to see this, we went big on it on Solent and South Today because it was, I don't know if it was filmed at Southwark House, but the whole film is set there.

at this location.

So I then went in, like after talking about it all day, I went in to the film.

So-

... on both sides of the Solent

... a bit of yin and yang.

Bit of a yin and yang.

...

I think so as well.

But they, so the interesting thing about Ryde Lawn, so it's often it is, it is, um, with, with teams, not ones that are across the Solent.

I think in the, in both, so yeah, Avenue twos, they conceded their match, which would've been their last match at Ryde Lawn, but that they knew they were in the bottom two, I guess, and they opted not to play that one.

yeah

it is indeed so we'll start when with uh with saturday In the Britain Division, 5pm at Solent.

Your favourite.

The sound maker full of all the fans.

And it was as close as we thought it would be, actually, I think, because, you know, the size of that rink, it doesn't really play into the hands of the way that Slough play with their speed.

So I think it was always going to be a little bit tight.

Ironically for Solent, it was exactly the same two scorers as their game last week as well, Martin and Danny Williams.

Shocked.

Fortunately, I had been given a get-out-of-jail-free card in the form of this weekend.

Therefore, I retrieved the song sheet, using a similar process to that used by the team who raised the Mary Rose from the Solent, put all the songs onto a Deezer playlist and ranked them.

I then made doubly sure the list was in my work pad in readiness for this morning's meeting.

I think it's fair to say the customer was not expecting the level of feedback I offered, nor the number of related stories I could tell about the songs.