Secrets of the Spitfire

The Story of Beverley Shenstone, the Man Who Perfected the Elliptical Wing

Lance Cole

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Aviation
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781781599969
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book tells the tale of the brilliant aerodynamicist Beverley Shenstone MASc, HonFRAes, FAIAA, AFIAS, FCASI, HonOSTIV. As R.J. Mitchells chief aerodynamicist, it was Shenstone who designed the Spitfires wing the wing that gave the Spitfire it crucial advantage in the Battle of Britain and beyond. A quiet man, Shenstone never sought glory for his work, yet in recent years he has been credited as the man who persuaded Mitchell to adopt the ellipse a modified ellipse that was unique in its shape and its combined use of two integrated aerofoil sections. Shenstones knife-edge shape reached far back into early aeronautics for its inspiration. This book also names the other forgotten Spitfire design contributors who were Mitchells men Mr Faddy, Mr Fear, Mr Fenner, Mr Shirvall, a Prof Howland and others.Intriguingly, Shenstone had left his native Canada and early training as an RCAF pilot, to study at Junkers and then under the father of the delta wing Alexander Lippisch in Germany in the early 1930s. There, he became immersed in delta wings and flying wings. He also became a glider pilot. The story of how Beverley came to be in the right place at the right time is revealed for the first time. So too are the enigmatic tales of his involvement with the military, the intelligence world, Lord Beaverbrook, the USAF, and Canadian aviation.During the war Shenstone worked at the top secret Wright Patterson air force base and was involved with the Air Ministry and the pro-British movement in America when Shenstone worked for Air Chief Marshal Sir Wilfrid Freeman, the unsung hero behind British defence procurement. Shenstone achieved high office a President of the Royal Aeronautical Society, technical director at BOAC, chief engineer at BEA and a consultant to several aircraft makers. He was courted by Avro, de Havilland and Vickers, and was the force behind the renaissance of human-powered flight.Using exclusive access to his family documents, his unpublished autobiography and many notes and stories, as well as forensic research, this book details for the first time, a new twist to the Spitfires story and the secrets of its advanced science. A tale of design and military intelligence reveals a story of a man whose name should be more widely known in the UK, Canada and the aviation world.

1

Before Take-off – Early Days in Canada

From School to Sailing, and a Meccano set

Beverley Strahan Shenstone, 1906 – 1979, MASc, HonFRAes, FAIAA, AFIAS, FCASI, HonOSTIV, was fortunate enough to be born into a well-heeled and well-connected Canadian family. He was of ancient stock – stemming from a lineage of Scottish and British ancestry, like many of Canada’s early families.

The family name did not originally end in ‘e’, but somewhere along the line it morphed into Shenstone. Linkage to the English poet William Shenstone has been both suggested and denied. Ancestors ranged from Scotland, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, and London, but it was emigration to Canada by Benjamin Shenston (without the ‘e’) on Friday 9 March 1832 aboard the Florida, 550 tonnes, at St Katherine’s dock, London, under the command of Samuel Sherborne, that created the Canadian arm of the family that begat Thomas Shenston, Joseph Shenstone and then Beverley’s father, Saxon Shenstone (with the ‘e’) and then Beverley Shenstone in June 1906. Before that, Thomas Shenston, a luminary of the Baptist Church in Canada, had set up home on a farm near Guelph, later renamed St Catherine’s Ontario. Soon he moved to Woodstock, Ontario, and later became the Registrar for the new County of Brant.

Like many who go on to lead in their fields, Beverley Shenstone lost one of his parents as a child. On Christmas Day 1915, his father, Saxon, was out searching for his tame ducks, which had escaped from their pen at the family’s home in Wychwood Park, Toronto. Saxon Frederick Shenstone complained of feeling dizzy and dropped dead on the spot. He was thirty-six years old and left a young wife, Katherine (Kitty), who was left with three young sons to bring up – Beverley aged nine, and his brothers Douglas, seven, and Wynn, four.

Katherine had not just lost her husband, she had also lost her mother and brothers in the recent past. She was deeply affected by her loss. Beverley’s grandfather, Joseph Newton Shenstone, then sixty years old, stepped into the breach and according to Beverley’s recollections: ‘Provided for the family from that day onwards.’¹ Grandfather Joseph, and his family, notably Thomas, were leading members of the Baptist church in Canada and the boys were brought up surrounded by such influences. In contrast to the Shenstone family’s religiosity, Wychwood Park was well heeled and perhaps a touch liberal in that it was created and built as home to a colony of writers, artists and sculptors, many of them leading figures in Canadian art and design. The Shenstones may have been the first non-artistic family to move into the new garden suburb.

Joseph Newton, or ‘JN’ as Beverley called him, had as young man worked for the Donnelley printing family and their Lakeside Press in Chicago. Joseph’s sister Naomi married into the Donnelley family. Joseph moved back to Canada in 1876 and by 1881 had entered into partnership with the agricultural firm of A. Harris & Son of Brantford. By 1891, the Harris firm had merged with the Massey family firm to produce Massey-Harris, a company better known today worldwide in its new Massey Ferguson incarnation. Part of the Shenstone family had married into the Massey family. In the 1890s Joseph Shenstone had become a board member of the firm and became the president of the firm from 1925 to 1930, which was how tractors and agricultural engineering were also a large part of Beverley Shenstone’s story – along with boats.

This background gave the young Shenstone boys, and Beverley as the eldest, access to an engineering background, good connections in Canada’s hierarchy of leading families and the financial resources he would later need. His father had left very little money, but his grandfather, Joseph, was fortunate enough to be financially secure. In Toronto, the foundations of the young Beverley’s thinking and personality were being laid. Another significant influence was the family’s love of sailing. They owned a cottage up on the Nova Scotia coast at Smith’s cove near Digby and were regular summer visitors. There, Beverley, or ‘Bev’ to his friends and family, learned to sail and was surrounded by the wooden and metal structures of boats. Beverley was clearly affected by place, and was certain it laid the foundations of his habits. He later wrote:

It was the world of the sea and tides that made the most lasting impression on me. More than half a century later, the smell of seaweed at low tide says ‘Nova Scotia’ to me.²

He later spoke of his regret at not seeing the dying era of the West Indies timber trade ships during these childhood days. The last of these wooden schooners used to load at Bear River inlet, but he did not know this. But Beverley was taught to sail by his uncles, Allen and Osborne, in their small skipjack yacht, and also sailed one of the dories in the local racing fleet. Recalling his childhood in later life, Beverley wrote that boats had lurked in his background throughout his life:

Not ships, just boats, and small ones at that. I cannot remember when I was not thinking of boats.³

The little skipjack boat he loved had a 20ft mast and was 20ft long with a wooden centre board and was fast in the cold waters of the Annapolis Basin. When Beverley was fifteen, the family took another summer cottage – in Muskoka just below Bala, Ontario, on a small island in the Mushkosh River. Perhaps it was there that the love of canoes and small yachts really took hold of Beverley. From that time on he was always tinkering with boats, designing and making hulls, and studying the effects of his designs on handling qualities. He spent the following winter carving a 44-inch hull from solid wood and sailed it in the spring.

Having encountered Henry Secord, the Toronto architect and model boat builder, Beverley spent the summer of 1922 building four different hulls to race. In the winter of 1923, Beverley built a model four foot skipjack using ⅛-inch pine planking, over frames. He designed his own adjustable keel. Soon afterwards, Beverley joined the Toronto model yacht club, which included Emanuel Hahn, the German émigré sculptor from Stuttgart, amongst its members. From him, Beverley tried to master the art of thinking in three dimensions. These early mentors, with their tutorials in chord, tumblehome, aspect ratio, critical separation point, steerage and flow characteristics, allied to the form and shape of sculpture, must have gone deep into Beverley’s thinking; they were an excellent precursor to designing boats, float planes, and aircraft.

From 1924 onwards, Beverley concentrated on canoe trips along various waterways – on rivers such as the Moon, the Muskosh, and lakes such as the Peninsula, the Sturgeon, the Kawaratha, and the Fairy. The river and lake steamers the Ojibway and Iroquois, were still in regular use.

These long canoe trips were often supervised by an ex-Royal Flying Corps pilot named Frank Wood who was studying at the University of Toronto, and Beverley soon got himself onto Wood’s staff. Wood, it seems, became a mentor to the young Shenstone. By 1926, Beverley was leading long, canoe and overland porterage trips around the lakes area under Wood’s tutelage.

In 1927, Beverley decided to ask his grandfather if he would fund a vacation period canoe trip in England following the canals and rivers of the home counties and west country, which he had read about in the National Geographic magazine. Grandfather Joseph Shenstone agreed, and funded a companion ticket as well. So it was that Beverley, with his friend Ken Hunter, sailed to England, and arrived well before their canoe – a sixteen-foot canvas covered native Indian type that was bought in Quebec and shipped to Messum’s at Richmond, Surrey. The pair spent the summer navigating the waterways of southern England, camping, eating and drinking in pubs and journeying up the Oxford Canal, onwards to the Warwick and Napton Canal and down to the Avon. Where the Warwick Canal crossed the Stratford Canal by aqueduct, they simply slid the canoe down the embankment into the Avon. They joined the Severn and went down to Sharpness, oblivious to the dangers of the Severn. It seems the locals did not believe that the boys had navigated the Severn in a Canadian Indian canoe – not until the boys proved it with their records.

Via Bristol harbour and sections of the partially closed Kennet and Avon Canal, the pair got to Reading and London.

After Ken had left, Beverley remained in England and worked for few weeks in a basement of the Science Museum in Kensington with an aeronautical student group placed within an Air Ministry laboratory. Maybe it was here that Shenstone’s talents were first noted by those who were later to employ him in wartime. Was this his first brush with the men from the Ministry? This placement was arranged by contacts of his tutor Professor John Parkin of Toronto University. A student, associate membership of the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS) was also secured by the young Shenstone at this time. He also made another canoe trip – solo to Cricklade and the upper reaches of the Thames. The canoe was sold to Salter’s of Oxford.

So it was small wooden boats, not aeroplanes, that were written large in the young Shenstone’s psyche, and his knowledge of hydrodynamics and boat hull design, was growing. Perhaps also evident was the confident and unconscious ability to just go off across the world, at a time (the 1920s) when few could, framing the personality of the young Shenstone. Having money helped, of course, but even so, here was someone who had vision allied to focus and tenacity. Sailing and boats were, of course, deep within his blood – the ancestors from the Outer Hebrides had seen to that. It was, as can be seen, a comfortable childhood, yet not a lifestyle of indulgence or excess. Family members came and went, some often moving in. Beverley’s mother’s family, the Patersons, hailed from the Isle of Lewis, and also from Kirculdy on the mainland and one of them, grandfather John Andrew Paterson, came to live with the family in 1908 after his wife was killed by a cyclist at the bottom of Avenue Hill in Toronto. Paterson, son of a Presbyterian Minister from Stornoway and born in 1846, had emigrated to Canada when he was twenty. Within six years he had graduated from the University of Toronto with a BA. He married a Christina Riddell and they produced four children, one of whom, Ernest, became one of the first Rhodes Scholars at Oxford.

Intelligence was also evident in Beverley’s late father Saxon and also in his grandfather Joseph Newton Shenstone’s other boys who all went to university. Beverley’s uncle Osborne became a well known engineer and his uncle Allen Goodrich Shenstone FRS served in the Royal Engineers in France in the First World War, served in the Second World War, and went on to become one of the world’s leading atomic physicists based in Princetown, USA. He built an international reputation in atomic spectra and was described in his obituary (written by W.R.S. Garton FRS), as ‘one of the great spectroscopists of this century’. Allen won a Military Cross in the First World War and in the Second World War earned an OBE as a Scientific Intelligence Officer, and had regular contact with his nephew Beverley during the war. Allen was also a member of the National Research Council of Canada alongside Beverely’s mentor, Professor Parkin. The phrase, ‘keeping it in the family’ seems apposite.

Norman Shenstone became one of Canada’s leading surgeons, notably in the field of pulmonary research. He also invented the Shenstone pulmonary tourniquet in 1929 with Robert Janes. Clearly, a student of genealogy and intelligence quotients would be astounded by finding so many inventive scientists in one gene strain, and young Beverley Shenstone was soon to add to this unusual level of family achievement on an internationally important scale. Sport, sailing, fishing and rugby were major themes in the Shenstone family – alongside an obvious level of superior IQ handed down through the genes.

 

The influences on the fatherless Beverley were clear, and were further underlined by the role his uncle Osborne Shenstone played in his young life. Osborne was a graduate engineer who encouraged the young Beverley in all matters related to engineering, as Beverley wrote in his own unpublished diaries:

It is surely due to him that I took to engineering, a very important and lasting influence.⁴

Like so many, Beverley Shenstone’s childhood forays into designing, building and testing structures and vehicles, were fostered by Meccano. He recalled spending any money he had on buying more pieces of Meccano. He also built those carved or planked wooden hulls to test into-wind handling and rudder effectiveness.

In his own words, Beverley notes that his mother (no doubt through her sense of loss) became overprotective of her sons, and there were times when it seems the boys were cloistered into a narrow and soft environment by their mother. Aged nine, Bev’s brother Douglas disgraced himself by helping himself to apple sauce without using a spoon! For this crime and for what Beverley recalled as being described as other ‘revolting acts’ Douglas was packed off to a school in Oakville, twenty-five miles from home. As the boys grew up, they broke out of the maternal environment. Douglas left home early, or as Beverley recorded:

Douglas revolted early and pretty well permanently whereas Wynn did not. I did not actually revolt but when I left home for Europe at 23, I never regretted it.⁵

Douglas did not go to university but found his own course, at one stage studying the art of pewter smelting and design as an apprentice under Rudy Renzius. After a period odd-jobbing around Canada, which included being a Pinkerton detective, Douglas joined up in 1939 and saw action with the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry. He was on the Dieppe raid, where he was Mentioned in Despatches. He was injured at the battle of the Falaise Gap and repatriated. Douglas returned to Canada, joined a government department and in 1973 retired as Assistant Director for the public relations function at the Department of Energy, Mines and Resources. He also returned to working with pewter, to some critical acclaim.

Wynn grew up as the youngest boy and seems to have had a closer relationship with his mother – the pair toured Europe on a BSA motorbike and sidecar in 1934. Wynn attended the University of Toronto, but did not graduate, preferring, it seems, to travel. From as early as 1929, while still at university, he signed on for working passages at sea. Later he undertook numerous sea voyages as crew on a number of freighters. He also hitchhiked to Los Angeles for the Olympics in 1932. But motorbikes were his thing, and he owned several. By the mid-1930s, his wanderlust was served by his working for the Canadian National Railway (CNR) company where he remained until the outbreak of war. In 1940 he joined the Canadian Army cavalry, yet he never saw a horse. Instead he set up an army motorbike training course using twelve ‘Indian’ motorcycles. As he got to Europe, the war ended as he arrived in the Netherlands with the army. In 1946, he was demobbed and rejoined the railways at Canadian National Railways. Wynn’s son Roger enjoyed a career on Canadian radio.

Beverley went to school at Brown School on Avenue Road near St Claire, Toronto, which meant a daily ride on the new Toronto street car railway. From there he attended the University of Toronto’s preparatory school. Beverley then went on to study at the University of Toronto and, after graduating in Engineering during 1928, his life course had begun to take shape. At Toronto University, Beverley had also met J.T. ‘Jack’ Dyment, with whom he subsequently enjoyed a lifelong friendship. Dyment joined Trans Canada Airlines (latterly Air Canada) as chief engineer on its formation and stayed there until 1969. Dyment also Chaired the IATA Technical committee for a year, a remarkable achievement that provided an interesting parallel with Beverley’s own high-flying career, notably at British European Airways (BEA).

Shenstone later wrote of Jack Dyment:

His clear thinking and sound views forcibly expressed soon won him recognition far beyond the confines of TCA and Canada. This was far from appreciated by his employers who tended to think of international activities as a waste of time. They were staunch ‘little Canadians’ whereas Dyment was and is a ‘Big Canadian’.⁶

Other university friendships made at this time included those with Campbell Macbee, Price Brown, Ronald Bertram and Darcy Dingle. Other friendships were with Morley John Campbell Lazier who Shenstone describes as ‘by far the brightest man in my year in mechanical engineering’, and with Donald Carlisle and W.R. McIntosh.

As was clear by 1928, Beverley also had wanderlust in his veins, but by a series of circumstances his travels became something out of the ordinary.

2

Canadian Wings – From Water to Air

In 1928, 1929 and 1930, a series of defining events took place in Beverley Shenstone’s life. First, his passion for boats led him, upon graduation, to further his studies in the field of flying boats and aerodynamics and hydrodynamics. He also then joined the Royal Canadian Air Force via his university place and learned to fly. And there was also the small matter of him marrying a young Scots-Canadian girl, named Helen Home, in 1929.

Helen was interested in sailing, flying, and liked sculpture. She came from Scottish roots and the Home family was linked by marriage to the Peuchen family of Coburg, Ontario. The Peuchen family were keen sailors and had a boathouse at Ashbridges Bay.

Sailing was indeed a dominant passion for young Bev. For him, it all started with those boats – not aeroplanes. Thus it was the fascination with boats and hull design that led Shenstone to thinking about flying boats, at which point, not long before Beverley’s graduation in 1928, Toronto University’s Professor John H. Parkin offered him a post-graduate ...