Beatrice Shilling
Of all the people who could be said to have saved Britain in the Second World War, perhaps few contributed such a small but valuable item as Beatrice Shilling. As Blue Miller recounts, she was, in short, the lady who kept our fighter planes flying.
Beatrice ‘Tilly’ Shilling was born on March 8, 1909, in Hampshire, the daughter of a local butcher. Growing up in an ordinary middle class family, her parents could have had no idea of the career their somewhat shy and homely daughter would forge for herself, although there were inklings from an early age.
From a small child, Beatrice was little interested in her sisters’ games; as she became fascinated by engineering her pocket money went on small hand tools, penknives and an adjustable spanner, rather than sweets and dolls.
At the age of 14, frustrated at not being able to keep up with her sisters on their bicycles, she managed to procure a Royal Enfield motorcycle, sparking a lifelong love of motorcycles and speed.
In her teens, instead of training as a nurse or teacher or simply getting married as might be expected at the time, in 1926 she obtained an apprenticeship with a Devon electrical company run by Margaret Partridge, herself something of a pioneer.
Beatrice would spend the next three years installing wiring and generators and becoming a talented electrical engineer. Margaret Partridge not only mentored the young woman,but encouraged her to apply to study for an engineering degree at Manchester’s Victoria University. Thanks to a loan from the Women’s Engineering Service (cofounded by Partridge), Beatrice was able to take up the place she was offered and graduated in 1932. She spent another year gaining a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering, specialising in the piston temperatures of highspeed diesel engines.
But it was around this time that she began to put her knowledge to good use, taking up motorcycle racing, and soon became a familiar sight on her 500cc Norton M30 at the famous Brooklands track.
But a stock Norton was no use to Miss Shilling! She fettled and modified the Norton, fitting it with a supercharger, and it was on this bike that, in 1934, she was the only woman to be awarded a Brooklands Gold Star, the tiny but highly sought after badge which indicated the rider had lapped the outer circuit at over 100mph. Beatrice did it in style, clocking 106mph on the M30.
The mid-1930s were a time when it was difficult enough for most people to find work, let alone a woman in an almost entirely male environment such as engineering. She worked as a research assistant to Dr G F Mucklow, investigating the behaviour of supercharged single cylinder engines, before going to work for the Royal
Aircraft Establishment (RAE) in Farnborough, Hampshire, in 1936, where she would stay until she retired 33 years later.
Although throughout her career she would tussle with her superiors (often over pay and conditions), it seems that it was an environment in which her colleagues viewed her first as an engineer and secondly as a woman, which is exactly what she wanted. Dr Guy Gratton who worked with her at the RAE said: “Beatrice Shilling was arguably the archetypal technical engineer – a brilliant woman who would compromise nothing for the quality of her work.”
It was at the RAE that she met her future husband, George Naylor, although there is a wonderful rumour (which, given what we know of Beatrice, is quite likely to be rooted in fact) that she refused to marry him until he too had gained his Brooklands Gold Star on his motorcycle. Luckily he did just that and the wedding went ahead!
Beatrice kept her maiden name, saying it was less complicated, and so, for their long marriage, she was always Miss Shilling. Incidentally, the RAE workshop staff gave her a wedding gift of a set of stocks and dies because she was always borrowing their own ones so often.
By the outbreak of war, Beatrice was in charge of research and development of carburettors at the RAE and it was this that would, in a way, write her name in history. At the beginning of the Second World War, it became increasingly clear that there was a problem with the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine fitted to Spitfires and Hurricanes. When subjected to negative G-force, such as when in a dive, the engine would cut out. German Messerschmitt 109 pilots were quick to take advantage of this and were able to escape.
When presented with the problem, Beatrice was able to diagnose what was wrong in a short time. She realised that the Messerschmitt’s Daimler engine had fuel injection while the Merlin used a float carburettor. When the British aircraft followed the Messerschmitt into a dive, centrifugal force would push the carb float upwards, cutting off the fuel supply and causing the engine to cut out, whether through fuel starvation or, if the negative G-force continued, by flooding the carb. A new type of carburettor was required.
But this would take years to design, develop and produce; Britain was at war and the RAF didn’t have weeks, let alone years. So Beatrice came up with a simple but ingenious solution. It was basically a small washer with a hole in the middle, its dimension precisely calculated. Welded to the inside of the carburettor, it stopped the float rising too far and the hole allowed fuel through; it was even produced in two versions, one for 12psi manifold pressure and the other for the 15psi of supercharged engines. More importantly, it worked.
She and a crew of mechanics visited every RAF base in the country to weld the diaphragm into each Merlin engine and – unsurprisingly, as this was a tiny component which could save their lives – she was greeted with enthusiasm by pilots everywhere.
With affection and good British ribaldry, the ‘fix’ was dubbed with a number of nicknames, but the one that stuck was ‘Miss Shilling’s Orifice.’ Miss Shilling’s Orifice would save countless lives while Beatrice and her staff developed the RAE-Hobson carburettor. Without that tiny washer, much of the RAF’s fleet would have been grounded and it’s likely that the war would have been over much quicker. And we would not have won.
By the time war broke out, both Beatrice’s racing days and the Brooklands circuit were at an end. She never returned to motorcycle racing although both she and
George went onto race cars, from a Lagonda Rapier to an Elva 200 Formula Junior single seater, although the latter proved unlucky, both of them suffering accidents.
She worked on a number of projects after the war, moving to the supersonic division of the RAE and then the guided weapons departments where she was one of the senior engineers on the Blue Streak nuclear missile. She also worked on internal cooling of highspeed aircraft, solid fuel rockets and, following the 1958 Munich air disaster in which most of the Manchester United football team were killed, on aircraft aquaplaning.
In 1967, she was asked to consult on overheating problems suffered by the Weslake V12 of Dan Gurney’s race car. It was perhaps one of the most incongruous partnerships of her career, the famous dashing American racing driver and the engineer, looking rather like a dowdy middle-aged housewife with her handbag clamped to her arm. Two years later she would retire, although she slowed little. She and George raced cars until their health began to fail and then took up target shooting, while Beatrice was a familiar sight in her Triumph, believed to be the fastest Triumph Dolomite in the country!
Beatrice Shilling died in 1990 at the age of 81. By happy coincidence, her birthday – March 8 – is the day on which International Women’s Day is celebrated.
In recent years there has been a sudden recognition of her achievements. In 2019, the Royal Holloway University of London opened the Beatrice Shilling Building, home of its Department of Electrical Engineering, and the following year Coventry University named its engineering and computing facility after her, while there is even a Tilly Shilling pub in Farnborough!
For more on the remarkable Miss Shilling, seek out a copy of Matthew Freudenberg’s excellent biography, ‘Negative Gravity.’