I was informed today that personal jewellery of Lady Houston, pre-war English aristocrat and philanthropist, was put on auction at Bonhams. One of the highlights of the sale was her beautiful (and expensive) double-row pearl necklace.

What does it have to do with a Spitfire? The connection is indirect, but very tangible. Lady Houston made a pivotal contribution to aviation history when in 1931, she donated £100,000 to Supermarine, preventing the company from withdrawing from the Schneider Trophy contest due to the lack of government funding. Without her, Britain would not have won the contest that year. There would be no Supermarine S.6B and World Speed Record, nor the Trophy permanently won for Britain. And without the S.6B, Supermarine would not be entrusted with designing and producing a new monoplane fighter for the RAF. Perhaps they would have stayed with the flying boats. There would be no Spitfire.

Formally, the entry for the Schneider Trophy races was made by the Royal Air Force, which also funded the development of suitable aircraft and supplied the pilots to fly them. Despite the British success with the S.6 in 1929, preparation for the 1931 race were hindered by mounting political opposition, which in turn was fuelled by economical problems of the day.

On January 15, 1931, the Air Ministry refused a last minute request by the Royal Aero Club for funds for an entry. It was a mortal blow to the programme; the Ministry not only withdrew funding for development of new aircraft, but also forbade the use of aircraft that competed in the previous race. It also expressly forbade RAF pilots of the High Speed Flight to take part in the race, and said that it would not police the race course in 1931 in the busy shipping lanes in the Solent.

The Royal Aero Club sent a statement to the Cabinet on January 22, 1931, offering to raise £100,000, if the Government would rescind the Air Ministry’s decrees on planes, pilots and policing. As it turned out, the sum was guaranteed by a single person, Lady Houston, then at the age of 71 (sic), who stated that she “…will be responsible for all extra expenses beyond what Sir Philip Sassoon (President of the Royal Aero Club) says can be found, so that Great Britain can take part in the race for the Schneider trophy.”

Accused of being spoilsports, and faced with a favourable private funding option, the government consented. There were only nine months to prepare for the race and so Supermarine’s designer Reginald Mitchell could only update the existing airframes – and so the S.6B was born, primarily through engine upgrade.

The rest, as they say, is history. Lady Houston’s gift provided a valuable impetus to the development of aviation and engine technology that would prove so vital in the Second World War. As Arthur Sidgreaves, the managing director of Rolls Royce, commented at the time:

“It is not too much to say that research for the Schneider Trophy contest over the past two years is what our aero-engine department would otherwise have taken six to ten years to learn.”

Thus an old excentric lady, former suffragette and known political extremist (she supported Mussolini and publicly denounced the Labour PM Ramsay MacDonald as a traitor), became the mother of the Spitfire.

Ever interested in aviation matters, Lady Houston later also offered to give £200,000 to strengthen the air defence of London which, in her own words, was “shamefully neglected”. In 1933 she financed the Mount Everest Flight Expedition by F/Lt David McIntyre, in which two Westland Wapitis became the first aircraft to fly over the summit of Everest.

Outlandish to the end, Lady Houston became so upset by the Abdication Crisis in 1936 that she stopped eating and died of a heart attack on December 29, 1936.