BIOGRAPHY - Alexander Adolphus Henshaw

One day in February 1939 Alex Henshaw, then 26, rich and a sports aviator, landed at Waltham aerodrome, near Grimsby. He had just returned from a record-breaking 12,754-mile solo flight from Gravesend to Cape Town and back. As he was pushing his Percival Mew Gull into the hangar, he glimpsed another aircraft, a Mark 1 Supermarine Spitfire, which was vast after the Mew.

Entranced then by "the beauty of its classic lines", he went on to become, from 1940 to 1946, the chief Spitfire test pilot at Vickers' huge Castle Bromwich works in Birmingham.
Jeffrey Quill (obituary, February 24 1996) said, "the last of the great amateurs, who under stimulus of war then became a very great professional".
While Quill was the test pilot in charge of Spitfire development, Alex was also a key figure in the fighter's evolution, and Castle Bromwich was pivotal to turning it out. Built in the run-up to war as a "shadow factory" by Nuffield, the Morris cars group, the aim was to mass produce Spitfires.

The initial results were poor. In June 1940, during the Battle of Britain, Alex arrived from the Southampton Supermarine plant. That month Castle Bromwich made 10 fighters. So Vickers-Armstrong was entrusted with the plant. Production accelerated to peak at 320 planes a month. The Spitfire Mark 1 that he had sat in February 1939 had half the weight, and less than half the horsepower, of the final marques. In 1948 the last of more than 22,500 Spitfires were delivered, 11,694 of them produced at Castle Bromwich.

Photo: Spitfire making a pass over the Vickers factory.

Alex oversaw a team of 25 pilots, and flew more than 2,300 Spitfires, plus other planes. He barrel-rolled a four-engined Lancaster bomber; scandalised the authorities when he flew a Spitfire down Birmingham's Broad Street - flipping it upside down over the town hall - and survived a potentially lethal engine failure.
The R.J. Mitchell - designed fighter was first flown by test pilot Mutt Summers from Eastleigh, Southampton, on March 6 1936. Twenty days later, Quill made his own first take-off. Alex's inaugural Spitfire flight was on his birthday, in November 1939, but back in spring 1936 he and his father were touring Europe in a de Havilland Leopard Moth, taking in Basle, Vienna, Budapest, Warsaw, Brest-Litovsk and Germany. In Sigh for a Merlin (1979), Alex wrote that in those times, he had mingled "with what would now be called the jet-set".

Alex was raised in Lincolnshire and educated at Lincoln grammar school. At 16, his father had run away to North America, and working with an old prospector, had discovered and staked a claim to a silver mine, thus boosting a family fortune that would include fertiliser manufacturing, a building company, a radio business and a golf course.

Henshaw Sr was also clever with engines, inspiring his small, pugnacious son's dreams of competing in the Isle of Man TT races. Then one day, walking on a riverbank, the teenager was transfixed by the sight of a diving biplane flattening out over the waters. The plan had been for Alex - who had hated school - to be apprenticed to Rolls-Royce, but flying took over.

His father paid for the lessons and, successively, for a de Havilland Gypsy Moth, a Comper Swift - in which he won the Siddeley Trophy at the 1933 King's Cup air race - the Leopard Moth, an Arrow Active and the Mew Gull. And it was in the Mew Gull, which he called the "king of all racing machines" that Henshaw, in 1938, won the King's Cup. Then, in January 1939, came the Cape Town flight. The plane was just 22ft long, had 205hp and weighed 2125lb.

To read Alex's account of his adventures in The Flight of the Mew Gull (1980) is to enter a world infused with the spirit of Biggles, and, in his descriptions of visits to Germany, something of Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands - with planes filling in for boats.

Photo: Alex in his testing days and a recent photo of him re-visting the Spitfire IV to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Mutt Summers flight.

Then there is the pilot's account of that African odyssey; sand, distant oceans, colonial outposts, night flying 14,000ft up in a thunderstorm, between canyons of clouds peaking at 30,000 - and a bout of malaria racking him for 4,000 miles, and 27 hours, from Libreville back to Gravesend.
Postwar, Alex returned to a business career. As for the Mew Gull, it was restored in the 1970s. Its flight with Alex remains a record. He was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society in 2003, and donated his flying records to the RAF Museum in 2005. Last March, he was in a two-seater Spitfire IV when five of the aircraft flew to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Mutt Summers' flight.
His wife, Barbara, whom he married in 1940, predeceased him. His son, Alex, survives him.

Credits.

Nigel Fountain, the Guardian, UK