AEROGRAMME HOME  > AEROGRAMME #6 [Sent 19th October 2024]

The Spitfire Gallery

Hello Friends

It’s a shorter newsletter this week as I’ve been out of the workshop a lot.

I had to take my car to be serviced in Stoke on Trent on Wednesday and didn’t have a lift or courtesy car organised.

How to spend an hour and a half in Stoke?

Hmmm…

Turns out, there’s a Spitfire on display in a gallery within the Potteries Museum in Hanley (one of the six towns that make up the city of Stoke on Trent).

Cunningly, I’d taken my own advice and packed a couple of Magnificent Flying Machines Spitfires into a ruck sack with a view to cajoling the unsuspecting gift shop manager into stocking them.

A quick taxi ride from the garage (I think my first in about 15 years. You can pay by card these days - who knew?) and I was deposited outside the museum, a fairly typical 1950s municipal building.

I made a bee line for the gift shop desk, only to be told that the manager works in a different museum and “would you like her email?”.

Oh well.

I headed to the lower ground floor and passed through the cafe, resisting a couple of enticing Victoria sponges, and on into the Spitfire Gallery.

I’m pretty sure everyone is more than familiar with the story by now, but the relevance of Hanley to the Spitfire is of course this was the birthplace of R.J. Mitchell, who led the team that designed the iconic aircraft at the Supermarine company in Southampton.

Although Mitchell died before the outbreak of WWII, he did live to see the prototype Spitfire fly and would have been so proud to have witnessed its successes during the Battle of Britain.

The Spitfire in the Potteries Museum was donated by the RAF in 1972 and restored by the Medway Aircraft Preservation Society between 2018 and 2021.

As a Mk XVI, Spitfire RW388 has clipped wings and was designated as a low level fighter running a Pratt & Whitney built RR Merlin engine with 4-bladed prop.

Needless to say, it’s magnificent in the flesh.

The gallery itself is slickly presented and a real credit to the designers. There’s a plethora of animated information, displays of aircraft models and various artefacts associated with the Spitfire and R.J. Mitchell.

There’s also a Spitfire cockpit simulator that wasn’t running while I was there, sadly.

Worthy of special note within the gallery are two paper airframe models - a Spitfire and a Hawker Hurricane crafted by artist Suhail Shaikh in 2014. 

The level of detail in the models is superb.

Twenty minutes is plenty of time to see everything in the gallery and that left me with over an hour in the rest of the museum.

Now I may be in a community of one with this, but I LOVE spending time in empty (of people) art galleries and museums, so an hour alone browsing the halls was absolute bliss.

The Potteries Museum houses the Staffordshire Hoard, a large collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver ornaments buried in the late 600s and discovered by a metal detectorist in 2009. The level of craftsmanship in the items beggars belief but probably reinforces the argument that, when you have the time to dedicate focussed attention, in their case a lifetime, it's incredible what you can achieve.

Bearing in mind that this is a provincial museum, I was surprised to see a Rodin statue and some genuine LS Lowry paintings in the art gallery on the top floor.

There really is so much culture to enjoy in every town, if only we made the effort to seek it out.

Oh and did I mention, it was free to get in!

Here's a link to the museum website should you ever be in the area: https://www.stokemuseums.org.uk/pmag/ 

News from the Workshop

While I seem to have spent most of the week in the car travelling the country, Tim has been hard at work making the fourth of our display units.

The pictures below show the Mr Benn-like transformation from simple kitchen unit carcass to magnificent selling machine.

Well almost...

Kitchen base cabinets

Cabinets upside down ready to receive rolling chassis

Rolling chassis being attached

Units the right way up and rollable

Display box under construction

Display box almost there

Test fitting the perspex window. Yes I know it's opaque - that's just the peel-off protective sheet!

Cover panels and sign board test fitted
There are a few more hours of work before it’s finished, but I’ll share stage two next week.

COMMUNITY BUILDS

Barry Scollay has sent in some more detailed pics of his Westland Lysander. A break in the weather meant better conditions for flying and photography so feast your eyes on these!

As you may know, Barry is now knee deep in a build of our Aerographics Gloster Gladiator and it is of course looking magnificent even at this stage.

I’m sure Barry’s build will lead to lots of Gladiator sales for us - if only we had the balsa to cut them!

Finally, Júlio Isidoro sent us these pics of his Aerographics Auster J4.

A lovely build Júlio - thank you.

That’s it for this week folks!

All the best

Hadi & the VMC Team

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