I feel very privileged to be asked to give the 26th R. J. Mitchell Memorial Lecture in honour of a great man whose work and designs inspired many of us in our youth. My lecture tonight covers a period of time similar to that which elapsed between R. J. Mitchell’s death and the first Memorial Lecture by Joe Smith in 1954. In this period, which covered the Second World War and the immediate post-war era, the activities of the British industry were manifest with a proliferation of designs and immense technological and radical advances such as the introduction of the jet engine, the swept wing, early supersonic flight, etc.

It was a period when the evolution of new designs—while led by men of inspiration, vision, genius and persistency like Mitchell—became more and more the work of teams ever increasing in number.