Chapter CLVII: Moving at the Speed of Empire.
In the early 1930s the Empire Marketing Board produced a poster encouraging the public to buy British products on the basis of speed, as at that time a number of high profile world speed records were in British hands. The exact connexion between the nationality of the world water speed record holder and the nationality of the bacon producer one should purchase from remains a mystery to all but the marketing men involved in the poster, and perhaps even to them, but it does highlight that speed was seen as desirable and something to be proud of. In the years subsequent to that poster the various records had changed hands and by the autumn of 1937 not all were still held by Britain. The reactions, or lack of reaction, to those changes provide a useful perspective on the priorities of the various arms and branches of the British government.
The poster itself. At the top the Supermarine S.6B of Schneider Trophy winning fame which had gone on to capture the air speed record, being the first aircraft to break the 400mph barrier. The water speed record craft handily has it's name printed on the hull, this particular record had been set on Lake Garda when Anglo-Italian relations had been if not warm then at least cordial. The land speed record is one of the Campbell family's seemingly endless Blue Birds, this particular one being the Campbell-Napier-Railton Blue Bird that set the record on Daytona Beach in the US. Finally we come to the odd one out as it is not the absolute speed record holder, the clue being that the record is given as a time and distance not a speed. As the rail absolute speed record was somewhat murky the marketers instead highlighted a record that definitely was in British hands, the fastest scheduled train service. The Great Western Railway's 'Cheltenham Flyer' averaged a shade over 80mph on the run from Swindon into Paddington station, a testament both to the Castle-class locomotives and the quality of Brunel's track. While not as visceral as an absolute speed record it was in some ways the more challenging achievement; It is one thing to briefly maintain a high speed over a measured mile, quite another to sustain high speed over 77 miles while pulling several hundred tonnes of coaches and then to keep doing so day after day in regular service.
The land speed record section is the simplest to deal with as the record remained in British hands, indeed still in Sir Malcolm Campbell's hands, and his latest land-based Blue Bird had taken the record to 301mph in March 1935. The future prospects also looked good in the Autumn of 1937 with George Eyston's Thunderbolt and John Cobb's Railton Special preparing to starting a new all-British rivalry that would push the record to 350mph and beyond. The general public retained a deep interest and sense of pride in these records and the rivalries behind them, something the government attempted to capitalise on by handing out honours to the various drivers as a way to express the appreciation of the nation and no doubt to try and get some of the glamour and success to rub off. In truth political and governmental involvement was limited to turning a blind eye to quite where certain ex-RAF aero-engines ended up, the record holding Blue Bird and Thunderbolt used Rolls Royce 'R' engines that had previously been used by the RAF to win the Schneider Trophy. It would be untrue to say that government decided to continue a policy of masterfully inactivity on the subject, because that would imply any official attention was paid to the subject at all, beyond thoughts on how best to associate themselves with the successes of course. The railway record was superficially similar, while the record had advanced somewhat to a shade over 80mph it remained with the GWR as no other railway had the combination of engine, track route and commercial need for such a fast scheduled service. Looking at the pure speed side in early 1934 the London and North Eastern Railway had hooked a dynamo car up to their A3-class Flying Scotsman and recorded the first unarguable 100mph in a train, while looking ahead there was another Speed War brewing on the London to Scotland run. Both the London and North Eastern Railway and London Midland and Scottish developing ever faster engines, the following year would see the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow and both companies wished to be the 'fastest to Scotland', in the pursuit of this more records would be broken. However these records would be for the fastest steam-locomotive, the absolute record sat in Germany with the Reichsbahn's diesel-electric powered Class SVT 137s, with the Italian State Railway's purely electric ETR-200 soon to overtake it. It should be emphasised the British rail companies were working on diesel railcars and other experiments and the Southern Railways had a rolling electrification programme across their region, however the emergence of diesel and electric trains as serious options on the prestige 'express' runs and not just for light commuter work would still come as an unpleasant shock. Being a strategic industry by any definition the government was paying more attention to the railways, however it was very much results orientated rather than concerned with the details. To the extent government had a view it would be a strategic and economic one, diesel had to be imported and coal (or electricity generated from coal) did not, so steam on the long runs and electrification in the south ticked that box. However it must be emphasised that it would never have crossed the minds of anyone in government to take the rail companies to task about the subject, certain over-excitable MPs from coal-mining districts excluded. The government did have concerns about the railways that it would intervene on, but these were generally in terms of regulation or competition not operational detail. In the autumn of 1937 there two significant exceptions, both of which were live matters of concern that were threatening to require direct intervention.
A Fiat Littorina diesel railcar outside Tripoli station, note the distinctive square grille and fasces on the nose and the fact it looks like a streched bus with railway wheels attached, which it essentially was. The new Libyan government was converting the railways from the inaccurately named Italian 1m gauge (which was neither 1m wide nor technically even a gauge) to standard gauge, as part of the grand Tripoli-Cairo-Basra railway project. As a result the de-fascesed Littorina railcars would be shipped to East Africa where they could run on the narrow gauge lines in Ethiopia and Somalia. With Egypt thriving under the regency of Queen Fawzia the Egyptian section was also progressing rapidly, so the first Tripoli to Cairo train would run by the end of the year. The section through Palestine and the Trans-Jordan mandate would prove far trickier.
The most broadly held railway concern in government was rail links in the Empire. The Tripoli-Cairo-Basra railway was seen as something of a questionable idea as it was unclear where the traffic would come from to fund it in the long term, but as it was being almost entirely paid for by the local rules in Libya, Egypt and Iraq and using British designers, contractors and suppliers it was not a cause for particular immediate concern. The Cape-to-Cairo railway was a different matter, historically politics and diplomacy had prevented serious discussion and even when the end of the Great War mean an 'all red' route could be plotted the idea had been successfully suppressed. Post-Abyssinia however the subject had resurfaced as everyone had been reminded of the difficulty of moving anything about in-land Africa. The problem, from the civil service perspective, was that the gap sections were mostly in British East Africa, in crown colonies that would expect Britain to pay as there was no hope of them doing so themselves. Under the Austen Chamberlain administration the idea of such a grand Imperial project had at least raised a degree of interest, it being understood that such a thing was done for grand strategic reasons or just prestige rather than any more tangible benefit. However the success of the various 'air bridges' between Cairo and Johannesburg during the South Africa Incident and the now well established Imperial Airways routes were seen to show that the existing transport links worked well enough. It was therefore no surprise that in the autumn the project was ceremoniously booted to a Royal Commission on Trans-Continental Rail Transport in Africa, effectively killing it off until well after the next general election. That is not to say Eden was against grand projects, he had the same desire to 'make his mark' as any politician, however his focus would be elsewhere and he saw little benefit in a money pit infrastructure project in Africa. The other group in Whitehall who were paying close attention to the railways at this time was, of all people, the War Office. This was not out of strategic concern about how they would move around the country, this was mostly a solved issue and there was a standing committee between the army and railways that kept on top of the matter. The War Office interest was in the engineering capacity and capabilities of the railways, with only one dedicated tank factory in the country (the Elswick works owned by Vickers-Armstrong) any serious tank production would require mobilising the locomotive works, as had happened during the Abyssinian War. After that conflict the War Office had hoped to convince at least one of those firms to carry on as a peace time tank factory, or at least a shadow factory, but had been disappointed. While the ongoing A9 and A10 orders had been honoured the three works that had converted to tank production (Birmingham Railway Carriage and Wagon Company, Metropolitan-Cammell Carriage and Wagon Company and Harland and Wolff) all indicated they would be returning to railway work, as they had a full civilian order book and no real faith the army had budget to continue large scale tank orders. The choice by H&W was particularly disappointing as pre-war their locomotive division had been a fairly small scale affair and Belfast had been struggling due to the still ongoing Anglo-Irish trade dispute, unfortunately for the War Office the Admiralty had moved first with it's decision to order two of the Unicorn-class light carriers from H&W, this both ticked the regional support box for the government and pulled in most of H&W's engineering capability. The War Office had been reduced to keeping tabs on the trends in locomotive construction and production, as an example the enforced switch to welding due to the boilermakers influenced the requirements in the A14 spec; the design had to match the capabilities of the expected manufacturers. While this was a positive change it was still one that had been imposed, where the other services could make a considered choice or even drive development through their contracts and specifications, the War Office had to work with what was available. That this reflected the army's position at the bottom of the defence priority list was true but not something the War Office had to be happy about.
The Silver City Comet at Sydney Central station on a test run in late 1937. A diesel passenger rail car she was the first air condition train to run in Australia, eventually successfully operating on the Broken Hill line in New South Wales. While the chassis' of the power units were built in Australia by the government railway works, the engines were Harland & Wolff 'Harlandic' diesel units imported from Belfast. It was orders such as these both from inside and outside the Empire that convinced H&W management to stick with their nascent locomotive and engine works rather than gamble on the War Office actually having the budget to back it's armoured aspirations. Many of these engine and locomotive orders used equipment that had been brought to fulfil the 'war emergency' A10 cruiser tank orders and the War Office did manage to keep them earmarked for future armoured orders in a similar emergency. In the short term however the government was happy to see the equipment used to boost the local economy in Belfast and earn export orders, regardless of what the army may have preferred.
Turning to the water record the success of Miss England II had been temporary as she was just one part of an ongoing rivalry between the US and the UK. This culminated in the Miss America X taking the record in late 1932, after which the two sides were spent and the record spent the next few years in American hands. The good news from the British perspective was that when Sir Malcolm Campbell had abandoned land speed records it was in order to concentrate on water, thus he was making a new effort to reclaim the record, unsurprisingly his craft was called Blue Bird K3, and equally unsurprisingly it used a Rolls Royce 'R' engine. This new craft would reclaim the record for Britain in September and then take the record up to 130mph in August of the following year, his later Blue Bird K4 would take the record to 141mph before the end of the decade. As on land there was great public interest in this, doubtless heightened by the shear danger of the attempts; across the 20th century just over half of the people who attempted to break the world water speed record would die in the attempt. Political involvement was just as limited as on land, but across the wider government a degree of attention was paid to the subject. The Royal Navy, and perhaps unexpectedly the Royal Air Force, had an interest in small fast boats and in the nature of such things the designers who worked on world record boats also produced more standard power boats. The continued existence of the Marine Branch of the RAF remained an irritant to almost everyone who wasn't in the Air Ministry, however the various sea planes that the RAF operated did need a range of tenders and launches to support them and thus the branch was grudgingly tolerated. It should be noted that the Admiralty maintained the position that the aerial vehicles in question were in fact flying boats so it would be neater to just transfer them all, along with the rest of Coastal Command and the Marine Branch, to the Royal Navy. At this point however the Air Ministry was in the ascendant and was in the process of expanding it's flotillas with new High Speed Launches for air-sea rescue, it being long established that they had the duty and responsibility to recover the crew when an aircraft ditched into the sea. After a series of disasters where their existing launches had proved too slow to react, and with the knowledge larger aircraft with more crew were coming, the new launches were intended to be not only faster but also larger than those that had come before. To the annoyance of almost everyone involved these craft proved to be remarkably similar to the new MTBs (Motor Torpedo Boats) that the Admiralty were procuring as part of their plans for the defence of overseas harbours, which we shall be looking at in later chapters. That the designs were similar should not have been a surprise as the only significant difference was the payload; stretchers and a medical bay for the rescue launches verses a pair of large torpedoes and some light machine guns for the MTBs. Under the skin is where we find our interest for these craft required very high performance engines and these were not items that the UK had in abundance. As discussed in Supporting Appendix A if you wished for maximum performance from an engine you would look for a water cooled in-line engine, which in practice meant looking at aero-engines or at least units derived from an aero-engine.
The Bird-class high speed range clearance launch Kestrel, at the time of the photograph on service in Ceylon and based out of Colombo. As one should expect from the name the job of these vessels was to keep commercial shipping out of the area during coastal defence battery live firing exercises. It was therefore somewhat logical that, as (most) coastal defence guns fell under the Army's control, these vessels were brought and operated by the War Office. Fortunately for all involved the British Army had an even more relaxed definition of 'high speed' and was content with 18knots, that being more than sufficient to chase around after typically far slower merchant vessels.
The fastest of the many craft the Admiralty were testing, Vosper's MTB 102, used three Isotta Fraschini 183 engines, with an unusual W-18 layout these were fully marinised 1,100 horse power units that could push MTB 102 up to almost 50knots in testing. However as the name suggests they were Italian and so utterly unavailable, even if the Italian government had been willing to allow an export licence to a British firm (which was very unlikely post-Abyssinia) all engine production was being retained for Italy's own re-building and re-armament efforts. As a backup the Admiralty had approached Rolls Royce about getting a marinised Merlin, given their experience with fitting the 'R' to the world water record boats this was seen as straightforward enough, however it was rapidly objected to by both the Air Ministry and more seriously the Committee for Imperial Defence (CID). Having recently acquired the role of mediating such disputes the CID decreed that as Rolls Royce were already badly over-stretched they could not be distracted with yet another project, also ruling out the option of marinising another less in demand Rolls Royce engine. The RAF Marine Branch were not doing much better, as they had a more relaxed definition of High Speed (36 knots in trials being entirely acceptable) they only required half the power from their engines and so theoretically had a wider choice. The initial preference had been a marinised Napier Lion engine, somewhat predictably called the Sea Lion, however the Alvis-Napier merger had severely disrupted supply. The RAF Technical Branch was strongly arguing that the last thing they wanted was for the new Alvis-Napier to waste it's time on restarting production of a 20year old Great War era engine when they should be working on the next generation of engines for actual aircraft. Recognising the force of that argument, and very much agreeing that aircraft should be the priority over boats, the Air Ministry moved onto their backup choice of the Thornycroft RY 12. Being an entirely marine engine and built by the engine arm of an actual shipbuilder this should have been fine. However the potential of the RY 12 had already been noticed by others, specifically the Army who had specified it in their A14 Tank project. The A14 was a project and the Marine Branch had actual orders, so in any fight the RAF would probably prevail but it would be a fight and one that would doubtless escalate up to the CID. As the issue was studied it became clear that the prize may not be worth the fight, while the RY 12 was slightly more powerful than a Sea Lion it was massively larger, to the point barely two could be fitted in the same space as three Sea Lions. While the Marine Branch was more relaxed about speed that didn't mean it was prepared to accept a 'high speed' launch that couldn't reach 30 knots. It was therefore grudgingly recognised that the Air Ministry and Admiralty had a common interest in finding a solution and that if they did not voluntarily co-operate they risked it being imposed on them by the CID, or worse the Ministry of Defence Co-ordination.
The hydroplane Empire Day I under tow on Lake Windermere in the autumn of 1937, piloted by it's co-designer Edward Spurr. Even allowing for the great public interest in something as exciting and dangerous as a water world record attempt the event was incredibly well attended and covered by the press, no doubt because of the identity of the other designer; Thomas Edward Shaw or, as he was more famously known, Lawrence of Arabia. While still busy in Palestine Shaw had remained involved in the project and was at Windermere for the attempt, it is telling that there were as many people in government hoping he would stay in the UK as desired his rapid return to Jerusalem. Empire Day I did not break the absolute record and would have to be substantially rebuilt before her next attempt, neither she nor any other water speed record receive any official support. The problems facing the power boats were not a lack of cutting edge design, but those of industrial logistic and engineering capacity, hardly things a world record attempt could assist with.
Thus we come to the final record on the poster, the Supermarine S.6B and the world air speed record. This had not stayed in British hands for long before the Machhi M.C.72 had reclaimed the record for Italy and raised the record up to 440mph. The government however had disbanded the RAF's High Speed Flight after winning the Schneider Trophy and the Air Ministry did not consider the matter serious enough to warrant reviving it, a stance that seemed justified by continued success in various air races in the following years. By the autumn of 1937 this had changed with Germany claiming the landplane speed record with a specially modified Bf 109 that reached 379mph on it's final runs, for comparison the Spitfire Mk.I could reach just over 360mph and this was at it's full throttle altitude, an air record had to be set at 245ft or lower and at that altitude a Spitfire struggled to do even 300mph. To their credit the Air Ministry managed not to panic about this as they rationalised that the record breaking German effort would have used a special engine, been unarmed and generally heavily modified, all of which was true. It was felt that a record breaking effort of their own was justified, not particularly for prestige reasons as the Italians still held the absolute record, but to support another leap in aircraft and engine technology. The Schneider Trophy efforts had resulted in the development of the Rolls Royce 'R' engine, which had itself led to the Merlin, significant advances in fuel technology which had born fruit in the development of BAM 100 high octane fuel and a great deal of aerodynamic advances which had influenced the Spitfire and had been copied by firms outside Supermarine. In the context of the Air Council focusing it's efforts on Fighter Command and strategic air defence there was great value in aircraft that could climb and fly faster, the further from London the enemy was intercepted the more time there was to shoot them down, indeed with a fast enough fighter and enough warning from the RDF it was hoped to be able to credibly defend the Channel ports from hostile bombers with more than just anti-aircraft guns. The lessons from the air war in Spain should also be acknowledged, the 'observers' and liaisons had confirmed that while skill, training and tactics were all very important, there was a great deal to be said for just flying a considerably faster aircraft than your opponent. The decision was therefore made to reform the High Speed Flight and make an attempt at the world air speed record, the only one of the four record attempts on the poster that would receive government support and funding. In part this was because the water and land records were somewhat parasitic, they did not develop new technologies but adapted ones that had been developed elsewhere, not least the Rolls Royce 'R' engine. The main reason though was that the air speed record was the most directly applicable to a vital strategic concern of the government and where it was new technology that was required not more production industrial capacity. In the short term the Air Council approved development of a Speed Spitfire, a lightened and de-armed Spitfire with a specially tuned Merlin was felt to be capable of taking the landplane record and re-building the High Speed Flight organisation and industrial links. To target the absolute record something more would be required and the key to that effort would be the engine, as the Air Ministry reviewed it's portfolio of upcoming engines, and started to grapple with high powered marine engine requirement discussed above, it became apparent a review and reshuffling of their engine plans would be required. This would be the first major review since the 'co-operation' agreement with the Admiralty over engine development and with the CID looming over the process as a far from neutral adjudicator with it's own concerns about engine development. This review and it's consequences will be the subject of our next chapter.
---
Notes:
I may have written a tad more than I intended about that poster, but I like to think it's all relevant to the Butterfly Universe and even includes some plot nuggets. It is perhaps longer than really required.
Lawrence of Arabia remains not dead in Butterfly and did OTL work on both Empire Day and the RAF Marine Branch launches. All of the services liked having branches that transgressed onto the other's domain. The RAF had the Marine Branch and it's Armoured Car Companies (eventually the RAF Regiment), the Royal Navy had the Fleet Air Arm and Royal Marines, the Army had it's launches and it's balloon (eventually the Army Air Corp). On which note it remains a trope of this work that most defence co-ordination will be carried out under the threat, real or imagined, of the Minister for Co-ordination of Defence getting involved and not because of the actual efforts of that department. In contrast the Committee of Imperial Defence will continue to accumulate duties precisely because it is not particularly political.
To put some detail on the changes scattered through this. On water the Italian W-18 engines were available right up until Italy declared war, US Packard engines were also more acceptable substitutes. The marinised 'Sea Merlin' engine did get put in a couple of MTBs before being killed as a waste of Merlins needed elsewhere, here it is killed a bit earlier as RR are even busier. The Admiralty did like the idea of MTBs for overseas defence, we will look at that properly in the port/docks update sometime in... 2025... ?
Rail in the Empire was never much of a concern in OTL, the Libya railway was obviously impossible and Egypt was too unstable (and the leadership too corrupt) to care much about infrastructure and Britain didn't want to waste influence changing that. Equally no-one outside die-hard Imperialists even talked about Cape-to-Cairo, it remains a very expensive and not wildly useful idea so had been booted into the long grass.
Italian 1000mm railway is exceptionally Italian. It isn't technically a gauge, as gauge measures inside edge of rail to inside edge (because rail track sizes vary) whereas the Italians decided to measure between the centre of the rails. As a result while the track is 1000mm between rail centres, it is about about 950mm from inside edge to inside edge so should be called 950mm gauge. The practical consequence of this is that it is a bit rough running as the actual gauge varies with the tolerances of the rail, which is not ideal for smoothness.
The Speed Spitfire did exist, but was fairly low priority and got overtaken by events. Here it will be rushed, not least due to the reformed High Speed Flight which never happened in OTL, so will at least make an attempt. If it works is of course a different matter. And on that note we have a thrilling inter-service (and intra-service) row about engine development in prospect, which I hope you are all looking forward to as much as I am.
