Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service, where we report the world, however difficult the issue, however hard to reach podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising. There are lots of stories about the Spitfire. You probably know some of them already. There's the story of a groundbreaking plane that's both deadly and beautiful, the one outstanding and all important requirement is speed. Every feature has to be sacrificed to this demand, these wonderful lines, these wonderful curves.

What they ended up doing is designing something which looks stunning.

There's the death or glory story. The flying ace is cheating. Death in the sky. Is it the person? I could be wrong. I'm not going to say, oh, here's why I'm coming down now. And he's going down the street and he's going into the sea, and then he goes and. This is the story of the furious arms race between Britain and Germany, the Spitfires vying with the Messerschmidt and foxholes as aeronautical engineers from both nations try to outdo one another in speed, maneuverability, altitude and deadly precision.

We were very, very good with the Spitfire. We knew it had to be better than anything the Germans did, so we had to make sure it was the best fighter. And the story of a small plane built of aluminium, steel, fabric and wood, the supposedly turned the tide of the Second World War made the Spitfires got what it takes.

You might know those stories, but there's another one you probably don't know the story of how the Spitfire was built during the Second World War and the men and women who built it of the factory that made the Spitfires at the height of the Battle of Britain and beyond, a factory that got bombed and an ingenious set of extraordinary people who went right on making Spitfires anyway. I'm Victoria Taylor, I'm a historian of British and German aviation at the University of Hull, and I'm going to tell you this story with the help of Diaries Letters, an archive from the BBC, the Imperial War Museum, the Huxley Park Archive and the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton.

You may have heard the story of the plane that saved Britain, but you might not have heard the story of the people who say plane.

Sometimes the most heroic of stories have very ordinary beginnings. We start with a couple of teenagers, typists working on the fourth floor of a busy factory in Southampton. So tell me how it went with Cheryl. He kind of had to. LaFeber Jones had is a. a best friend. Peggy Mu is 19. They worked together in the accounts department of the Super Marine Aircraft Factory in South Hampton, the factory that makes the Spitfire. Joan kept a diary of her time there.

At 18, I was interviewed for the post of Shorthand Typist in the wages office. Most of my work consisted of typing documents relating to the specification of the Spitfire aircraft supplied to our air station. I particularly dislike typing statements of the aircraft and parts. Each form had to have six copies, which meant sheets and sheets of carbon paper. The social side was present, dancers at had Guildhall, the ladies in long dresses and the men in suits with their hair smothered in Brylcreem.

Let me set the scene for you. It's the summer of 1940. Over the previous year, Hitler's forces have swept through Europe. Poland is occupied, as is Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and France. Great Britain is next in their sights. If Hitler wants to invade Britain, he'll have to cross the channel. If he wants to cross the channel, he'll have to defeat the British Royal Navy. And if he wants to defeat the Navy, he needs air superiority.

The Luftwaffe, Nazi Germany's Air Force must attack the island from above.

Throughout the summer and early autumn of 1940, in what we now know is the Battle of Britain, Hitler throws everything he's got at destroying the Royal Air Force, Britain's guardians of the sky, the Luftwaffe for bomb airfields, destroy radar stations and take out countless aircraft on the ground and in the air.

So a factory that's making the spitfire's scrambling into the air to take on the invaders and which is easily in the range of German bombers, is a very dangerous place to be working. I must admit that I'm getting rather jittery being constantly on the alert. And I'm also feeling the effects of disturbed night. Even though the planes may not be overhead. We do hear gunfire and are constantly up and down to the shelter. There are actually two factories here, just a couple hundred meters apart.

It's a huge sight right on the banks of the river. Itchin across the water from Southampton City Center on the ground floor, České Shop where Cyril Russell works. He's a 19 year old apprentice. He's just learnt the tricky art of bending metal panels for the spitfire's fuselage. We pass through the machine shop with its wine through the calm of the windshield and then into a gangway to a sea of benches with men banging and hammering pieces of silver coloured metal. The three teenagers, Cyril, Peggy and Joan, see each other every Sunday at the Methodist Church.

Cyril is a little sweet on Peggy.

I had quite a crush on her and we had gone to the Grand Theatre together. She was a secretary and known to the lads as the Girl in Green because of the smart green outfit she wore with a little Ferhat. Her name was Peggy Peggy Moon from Canada Road and a lovely girl one could not wish to know.

In between work and air raids, life carries on. By mid-August, the air raids are becoming more frequent Tuesday, the 13th of August 1940. We are very busy at work and it's becoming difficult to complete everything because of the constant interruptions for air raid alarms, which means frequent dashes to the shelter, which is beside the railway bank and Searoad. At least five minute walk away. The air raid shelters at Super Marine are not easy to get to. Peggy and Joan have to clatter down full flights of narrow stairs before running straight into the flow of hundreds of other factory floor workers making their own way out.

Once offsite, they turn up, see Rose Hill, duck through a narrow railway tunnel and sprint across patrie green. Only then do they reach the shelters.

We had a real air raid this afternoon. We reached the shelters and these were shaking as the planes came over, machine gunning a bombing to drown out the sound of the bombs.

They play games and sing their favourite songs from the wireless national. Bless Them All, the long and the short and the bless all the Sergeants and W.O. plus all the corporals and BLENKIN sons. Could we say goodbye to them all as back to another shelter, a man brought in a portable gramophone.

Anything to cheer the long nights away. One elderly lady said to me, Warden contrasts that man to stop playing his gramophone. So I said, already helped. But yes, but it means we can't hear the bombs for us.

How are you? And help all the better. If you don't hear I'm coming. If it's got your number on it, you'll have it. You know anything about it, which is very true. Nobody knows what you have. So you on, my lad.

All German planes are overhead. More and more often the factory feels like it's a sitting duck. Surely it's only a matter of time before the Luftwaffe is bombers hit their target. Britain needs Spitfires. This work is simply too important to be left, so vulnerable to attack. It's about this time that the management of Super Marine begins to put a fairly extraordinary plan into action. What if Spitfire's could be made somewhere else, somewhere safer, somewhere less obvious to the German reconnaissance plane scanning the south of England somewhere completely ordinary.

After a search, it was decided that Kennedy's garage, Impounds Street Lane and seaweed's garage in Winchester Road would be ideal.

This is Dennis Webb. He's the manager of the spare parts department as super Marine. He's just received orders to scout out some premises around Southampton. Unassuming places like garages, warehouses, bus depots that might be converted to the production of Spitfires should the need arise.

Elliotts asked me to get all the windows blacked out and some spare fuselage jigs dumped over there in case they were needed.

Dennis Webb is 33 years old, relentlessly cheerful, occasionally brusque and did. Suffer fools gladly. He was a very versatile engineer, very quick to turn his hand to all sorts of jobs within the company.

That's Alan Matlock, a local historian in Hampton who knows all about what Dennis was up to.

He is very straight and very fair. He wanted to see the best job that could be done in every way. We did a similar job at seaweed's garage in Winchester, wrote an earmarked load. This garaging Shirley for a room.

Dennis begins scouting out suitable locations all in the north of the city, close enough to be accessible, far enough away to be out of the action.

They didn't start their preparations. A moment to sue. On Sunday evening, the 15th of September, I just got home from the works and the air raid warning was sounded and we heard explosions in the general direction of Woolston. And soon saw clouds of smoke rising. And I guess the Jerries were having a crack at the. Dennis sees the action from his home around a mile from the center of town, the teenagers Joan, Peggy and Cyro were right in the thick of it.

Once more, the siren sounded and we rushed to the shelter. Unfortunately, we had to go a long way round as a bomb had fallen on the path to the shelters. I got a tin can go to my heel, so I slowed up when climbing the bank. I am not looking forward to going to work tomorrow. We are so busy and I feel we are likely to be attacked very shortly. I wish they would evacuate us to a safer place.

The hunt for locations around Southhampton for a potential evacuation of the entire factory has gone from pressing to urgent, no longer a contingency plan. It's an immediate plan of action. Empty garages are not going to cut it. They need more premises and fast.

Dennis is certainly faced with a daunting task to take to the streets and deliver the message to business owners and landlords across the city that their buildings, their businesses, their livelihoods and sometimes their homes were needed for the war effort and they were to clear out.

It was a disaster overcome by improvisation and guts. Taking on places that had never thought of being aircraft factories all over the city, finding out exactly where they were wasn't always straightforward. First on Denis's list is a laundry, a 1940s laundry that is an enormous building full of drums, dryers, presses, racks, rollers and irons.

I was sent to see the manager of the Sunlight Laundry in Winchester Road, which was on the outskirts of Southampton, and to tell him we were about to requisition his works and ask him to move out as quickly as possible. I don't remember any great opposition, although rather naturally the idea wasn't popular. But this had begun to move all the machinery out.

The Sunlight Laundry was owned by a guy called George Goldsmith. And George, when asked to vacate his premises, did so with very little resistance and they would have been making parts of the wings, parts of the fuselage, as some of that laundry had got all their stuff out by the weekend.

But we found that the roof trusses were absolutely deep in cotton lint, which was festooned everywhere, giving me the answer as to why nothing lasted long when sent to a laundry took us all quite a while to get it all cleared off.

Also in the same street just next door. In fact, there was the HandsOn Dorset bus garage. It had one thing that many of the other locations didn't. A high ceiling high enough for the enormous frames or jig's used to construct the spitfire's distinctive leaf shaped wings.

Only problem was someone else had got there first.

My next task was to go and see the deputy town clerk whose name was Bernard Fyshwick, and ask him to shift all the trailer pumps of the fire brigade out of the hunts and Dorset bus carriage trailer pumps were small fire engines that could be towed behind any vehicle.

And they had the whole of the bus depot filled with these and surrounded by sandbags.

Fyshwick refused to clear them out on the basis that the fire brigade trailer pumps were of more importance to the town than bloody Spitfires. My argument the bloody Spitfires in adequate numbers could make trailer bombs unnecessary was not accepted. And so I said that the matter would have to be referred to Beaverbrook and company who would undoubtedly enforce their removal.

The enemy is making preparations for the invasion of Britain, invasion by land and sea, but principally by the air that smacks of the first Lord Beaverbrook in the charismatic Polish newspaper magnate who's just been appointed by Churchill as the head of the Ministry for Aircraft Production.

And here, let me say that all those engaged in the production of aircraft have demonstrated a vast measure of industry.

And in general, Lord Beaverbrook has been variously described as a firebrand, a whirlwind, a force of nature. Spitfire test pilot Alex Henshall described him as a bit of a bastard worthy of the man who fly for Britain over the land and over the sea.

He threw his full weight behind the scheme to disperse the factory into the city and send his boys in to make sure it was done right.

The deputy town clerk had removed his trailer, perhaps by the weekend, if I remember correctly. But all the sandbags were still there and we were trying to find out from him where we could dump them, it being anatomically impossible to put it, where we would have liked things.

And moving tools and equipment are beginning to be shifted away from the waterside factory, but it's not fast enough.

It's Tuesday, the 24th of September, in the afternoon without warning. That was terrific gunfire and we rushed to the window. How foolish. We heard the sounds of planes and the Weiner bombs. So all the staff fall to the floor underneath the desks, boxes and all found myself laughing. We tried to make our way to the ground floor, but the stairs were blocked with those too frightened to venture forth. Heard this terrible roar. And I can't describe really what it was like.

It was just a great solid roar. And, you know, we all looked at each other absolutely horrified.

Joan and Sarah weren't the only ones who remembered this raid on the 24th of September, 1940. It was an unforgettable moment for everyone in the factory, from the design offices to the typing pool to the work benches on the construction floors, a whole workforce united in fear after the first war. And I had anything was wrong because I heard a gun go off and I was up in the I was before. And of course, I'll come in like a jack rabbit made me wait for the to the shelters.

And that's when all hell shifted antiaircraft fire bombs just dropping and it just all merged into one sound and above. The sound of bombs, you could hear the roar of the this really quiet. You've got to know the same of German bombers. They had that most distinctive note coming across and you could tell they were heavily Laden because you could do this. And then as soon as they drop their phone, there was one more. Mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, why they went and we sat just waiting, crunched up and praying that what they'd let go was going to go somewhere else and not onto us.

Let's go straight to see those bombs for The Plain Dealer.

That's the command. And that was the way. And I would kill people like that.

I looked up and to my left and there they were with the bombs already leaving their wrecks, the exploding bombs made the ground tremble and kick. And for a moment or so, it seemed longer. There was just nothing I could do. Terrible. Now, I don't think anybody brave enough doing bombing, they say some of them think they have it. Oh, and you're frightened. You really frightening their knows that Jaran Bombers. When there was a lull, we managed to get out and rush to the shelters, found to a horror that many of them had been hit.

We could only stand and stared horror as the stretcher bearers staggered by us with the dead and injured. Dennis Webb had been lunching in the canteen when the raid came. He emerges after the smoke clears to survey the scene.

Eliot suggested that I scramble over the railway embankment to see if there was anything I could do when I did so I could see the full tragedy. The bombs had missed the targets, the works, as usual, and instead had landed on some of the shelters, which in one case had turned into a heap of soil and sand with arms and legs sticking out. Rescuers were already frantically digging in the hopes that some people might get out alive. Although aiming for the factories, the bombs of the 24th of September largely missed their target, several in shop.

Jones stock up on the fourth floor, Dennis having lunch in the canteen. They all survive and so do the precious half built spitfire's what the bombs hit.

Instead of the air raid shelters, 42 people are killed and 63 seriously injured, buried in the badly designed shelters, trapped under the arches of the railway bridge, all caught in the open as they ran for cover.

My foreman came over to me and told me quietly that one girl had been killed. Was the girl in green? Peggy Moon. My friend Peggy had been one of those killed sheltering beneath the railway bridge we had on the previous Saturday attended a friend's wedding. I walked home with Peggy talking about our favorite songs. Peggy's favorite was beginning the beginning. I felt very trembley and could not believe it.

It all happened. During a war, there's often no time to stop and grieve, tragedy can't be allowed to get in the way of this most vital of work to get Spitfires built.

And in the air, the workers picked themselves up, dusted themselves off and simply got back to work.

For many of them, the fear factor was balanced out by the excitement of it.

Maybe it was the wartime spirit.

Maybe it was the camaraderie of being in a team and working together and not letting the others down.

But the day after the bombing, almost everyone reported for work. Most of us had to report to Woolston Labor Exchange on the day after the bombing. I went back into the works to collect my tools and saw for myself that men were busily uprooting the vital jig's whilst the almost undamaged machine shop was actually working under a missing roof. The super marine spitfire factory has life in it yet, and their vital work continues amid the dust and rubble. But the German bombers are about to seriously up their game.

I'm Victoria Taylor, and you're listening to spitfire's stories on the BBC World Service will be back in just a moment to continue this story.

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This is Spitfire stories on the BBC World Service. I'm Victoria Taylor. The Southhampton Spitfire factory on the south coast of England is a vulnerable target for German bombs. It's been hit several times already, although the vast majority of the buildings are still standing. The work to disperse the factory out into safer premises in the city itself is in full swing, but some departments still have nowhere else to go. Jones Hack and the other typists now without the friend Peggy, carry on their work on the fourth floor of the factory.

In times like these, what else can you do? Thursday, the 25th of September, peaceful morning managed to catch up on my pile of invoices.

We went across the road to the canteen tea and I was just raising the cup to my lips when the immediate danger hooter blasted out.

I was busy trying to get people and things sorted out along Winchester Road on the 26th of September when. The Germans came over again to put the finishing touches to their Tuesdays work, this time this final raid on the 26th of September, the German bombers hit their target. I stayed at the house and had a bird's eye view of the Thursday attack on the factory. Around about 100 bombers with a first class fighter escort hovering and hoovering above US cover. I watched the aircraft come over the forest, over the factory, drop their bombs and a way out on the way.

This time the damage was terminal. I was met with the site of the factory in ruins under a pall of dust and smoke. The canteen was in flames. This time they carpet bombed the factory site. 55 people were killed and the super marine spitfire factory lay in ruins. A 26 year old metallurgist in the Super Marine laboratories called Harry Griffiths remembers the destruction on the days following the raids went back and started trying to sort of salvage what they could and clean up the mess.

So something that sticks in my mind really very strongly is just walking along the road by the factory and the men up there working away, throwing debris from the roof because the hole of the roof had been smashed to pieces and they were sorting it all out, putting all the work that was salvageable into boxes. And while they were throwing the debris out of the window and they were singing their heads off the weather, that was to keep the courage up or not, I don't know.

But they were working like that. It was a very uplifting experience.

Incredibly, the super Marine Spitfire factory has just one final piece of luck left, the buildings are destroyed, but the machine tools, the highly specialized jigs and frames that are the only things that can turn a pile of metal, wood and fabric into a spitfire. They're mostly intact. All hands now turn to moving everything out. Dennis Webb leads.

The charge would be moving the stores from itchin to Holly Brook with a certain degree of method. But after this further narrow squeak, I decided to take rather drastic steps until the storm and to get everything out and onto the lorry and take it to Holly Brook, tip it out onto the floor of one of the empty buildings while we move the bins and got everything back to normal.

The Thursday road really put paid to any idea of using the Woolston or Itchin works again. This then was the end of the Super Marine works at Woolston, but we had done our jobs of producing every possible Spitfire was rather a sad business, collecting all the stuff out of my old office after all these years spent there.

But on the other hand, I felt an enormous sense of relief that the long expected Chope had come and I had survived, although sadly so many others had not. It was completely irrational, but a curious smell and aura hung around the place as a sort of witch's brew made up of violence, fear and death. We were at last free to get the hell out of it. In the process of doing just that, we became less polite about everything.

And those bloody sand bags in the hansom Dorset bus carriage were bulldozed open to a stream of commandeered lorries and dumped into the Tramways depot at Portsmouth after Wilston, Holly Brook stores and Winchester Road felt a thousand miles from the war.

Up until this point, this extraordinary plan to disperse an entire aircraft factory into tiny shops and garages scattered across the city was led by the factory managers. But after this final devastating raid, the Ministry for Aircraft Production steps in.

Max Aitkin, Lord Beaverbrook himself speeds down to Southhampton. He knows better than anyone that Britain's air defenses are becoming increasingly strained. He's the minister for aircraft production and aircraft production is his only priority. Works engineer language still recovering from the raid was on hand to meet him that evening.

Lord Beaverbrook arrived here at the works and I was sent for the see this wizened faced little man. And he sat at the table and said, Look, I want more Spitfires, more Spitfires and what Beaverbrook wants.

Beaverbrook gets the first day in the polygon. Got things moving. Dennis Webb is summoned to the Temporary Management HQ on the top floor of the Polygon Hotel in the days after the raid. It's a hive of activity. Super marine management scramble to organize the monumental logistics and to of Lord Beaverbrook own men from the ministry. A mismatched pair called Whitehead and Cowley were there to keep things ticking along.

The next move was to send senior staff men out in various directions to hunt for suitable buildings within 60 miles. The owners were phoned and our intention to requisition made no any obstruction occurred. The big guns were brought to bear in the shape of Cowley or Whitehead. Carly was a great character, Canadian, always calm and unruffled, with a great sense of humor. I think we all liked him immensely. Whitehead was a different kettle of fish and I don't think anyone cared for him much.

I certainly didn't.

Businesses weren't always keen to give up their precious space to the Ministry of Aircraft Production, but Beaverbrook Brooks boys were there to twist arms and twist.

They did.

One venue in Winchester had already been requisitioned by the Ministry of Food until Cowley picked up the phone.

What have you got stored there with the slow Canadian drawl? Silence, then pineapple's with a rising inflection of exasperation.

Jesus, do you think you can win this goddamn war with pineapples? We got the premises the next day.

By this time, the dispersal plan had extended far beyond the city of Southampton. We then took over all sorts of premises in the south of England, large garages and bus stations. We had a place which had until a few days before then, a laundry like the spreading fingers of a hand.

The search for places out of Southampton and its dangers went fan wise north to Redding, Winchester and Newbury and west to Herzl's, Salisbury and Trowbridge, when jig's infusion of things and bits and pieces were sort of transferred and people were transferred and scattered all over the place.

The effort was remarkable. Apprentice several went where the winds of Super Marine blew him on the Tuesday and Wednesday, I worked on fuselages at Handy's garages and on Thursday I was sent to see WoodSmoke, which provided just enough room in its upper floors for our machines as our whaling machines, benches and other equipment were all relatively small and easily moved. It was only natural that we will be pushed around until things settled. We move from seaweed's to an agricultural show room.

Chandlers food on the 22nd of October 1940.

Chandler's Ford is a town around six miles north of Southampton. The owner of the agricultural showrooms did all they could to stop their business being commandeered by the ministry, but to no avail.

The requisitioning officer had to bring in his own labour gang and police attendants while the machinery was removed from the building and left on the grass forecourt. Requisitioning of premises were not all smooth actions. Some of the occupants objected furiously. I remember at the bond steamroller factory itself, which the owner of the premises took the wheels off his heavy, lumbering giants and yelled blue murder to his MP. In the end, they had to give way whether he was allowed to keep one part for himself.

Cyril found lodging in Chandler's Ford itself, although only a 20 minute drive from Southampton. It was the first time the nineteen year old had lived away from home.

During those winter months, our agricultural showroom unit was cold as ice, especially after dark, when we would work on until 8:00 p.m., we had a few scares from the German raider's when bombs were dropped in the general area by accident or by design. And one night and night fighter bomber less than a mile east of us and exploded in the air.

It was such an explosive force that we wondered how any night fighter could escape the blast. With the war progressing, it isn't enough to just build Spitfires, the Spitfires they're building have to be better. The German engineers are throwing everything they have into improving their mainstay fighter, the Messerschmidt Beef 109, the spitfire's foe in the Battle of Britain. Each new Mach is faster, flies higher, turns better. The emergence of the Fog of War 90 in mid 1941 strikes fear into the heart of the Spitfire Mach five pilots.

It appears to answer the Germans prayers for better visibility, agility and reliability. The Spitfire design team are on the back foot.

The Germans introduced the F1 90, which had much greater maneuverability spitfire to its, you know, its rate of roll with a much higher. And so we had to improve the rate of role of the Spitfire.

Harry Griffiths, working in the laboratories, is at the forefront of each new design breakthrough right through the wall.

We were keeping one step ahead as far as we could of the enemy. And, you know, if he got up to 40000 feet where we had to get up to 45, so on, that was the way it was.

The design department offices suffered direct hits in the September bombings. They were temporarily moved to the local university. But within weeks, the Luftwaffe launched a bombing blitz on Southampton. Hundreds of civilians died and an incendiary bomb narrowly missed the new drawing office. If they're going to improve the Spitfire, the design team has to get out of Southampton.

As the city burns, hundreds of engineers, draftsman and women, craftsmen and designers move 10 miles north to a very different world.

We went to her city park, which is on the road between Winchester and Romsey. The ministry took it over and we moved in just before Christmas 1941.

So the actual core of the house is still is from the 18th century. So it's a Georgian house, quite traditional style Quiñones style.

Hunsley House is a classic English stately home, an 18th century mansion set in beautiful rolling parkland with gorgeous views south to the Isle of Wight and the English Channel.

It's the home of Lady Mary Cooper.

We're standing in the conservatory, very bright, very airy, next to us through the doorway of the ballroom and then the drawing room of the drawing room.

Dave Quay is the historian at Herzl Park, now home to IBM's Research and development laboratory.

Much of the house looks just as it did when the Spitfire team first arrived.

All of those rooms, that entire East Wing in this conservatory, were taken over by the design team, the drawing office. So where we're standing, it looks quite pleasant now, but it would have been crammed full of drawing board.

The drawing office was accommodated in the ballroom. The production engineers offices were spread all over the place. Initially, the laboratory was based in the basement in what had been the living room. Lady Cooper was a patriotic sort. She welcomed the team from Super Marine with an enormous floral display, a model spitfire made out of chrysanthemums. If her home has to be requisitioned for the war effort, then so be it. But this Mudie booted invasion is sometimes just too much.

One of the things about an Edwardian house where any actually stately home is you have parts of the house that are for the family and guests and part of the house, which are servants with Superman. They were using all the staircase and they are chatting on the stairs. And this is particularly Lady Cooper found difficult to cope with the fact that you had these basically working class people loitering on her staircase. A big culture shock for her.

Lady Cooper and her servants can't seem to grasp that Herzel is no longer hers. The butler would stroll through top secret meetings on his way to the pantry, and her son proved to be a bit of a menace.

After a few bottles of beer above the staircase just to our side goes to the roof. And that's where the fire watch was. Lady Cooper's youngest son, Alistair, was living here as well. He was an enthusiastic social drinker, and when the fire team were on the roof, he had a tendency to go up there with a load of beers and join them, which got a lot of very happy fire watch team for is pretty boring being on a roof in the middle of nowhere.

All you can do is watch your own city get burned in the background, but not very good.

If you really are in charge of the safety of the street, something has to be done. Lady Cooper and Allaster must be removed. The perfect opportunity soon presents itself.

The Butler hired a casual labourer to come in and be an assistant cook. They decided that a far better job would be to take the family silver and run with it. To do so, he said. A fire is a distraction. All he actually managed to do was to knock himself out with the smoke and I said that is incompetent to Robbery's has ever been.

But it did give Superman the excuse that they've been looking for to say this is just not a terrible thing. And Lady Cooper was forced out at last.

The Spitfire designers have the place to themselves and the team can be expanded and refreshed.

I knew that I had skills that nobody else had and therefore I was in a different category to the other girls through the gates of her sleeping cycles, a very determined eighteen year old art student from the city of Portsmouth by the name of Stella Broughton. On my first day at sea for Marine, I left home about 6am. The cycle was on thirty odd miles. After having packed my bike with all I needed for the next week, I started to climb up Port's downhill, a climb of six in one, passed forwardly, turned down pigeon house lane for three miles.

There was no need to pedal.

I was literally commandeered from working for the Navy to go and work on the Spitfire because my skills were required and no one else had those particular skills.

There are plenty of young women working at Herzl's Park, highly skilled Trace's, who turned the designer's drawings into finished design sheets. But Stella's department is dominated by men.

The drawing office comprised some 200 draftsman, and my appointment had caused some embarrassment to the fact I would be the first female of under 21 years to sit at a board. The traces were of different ages, and some were rather dismissive of what they called pretty pictures.

We had to clock in and out every day. Then I go to my desk and there I would join my colleagues who prepared the initial drawings for the assembly of parts of the aircraft.

Those drawings were then given to me and I had to do the master linen copy of these drawings for printing.

I was told that the drawings I had been given to do were to be sent to North Africa. A motorcyclist was waiting at the gates to get them to London, where they would then be put into crates and sent to General Montgomery. My drawings will be inside these crates to show how to assemble the Spitfire parts.

Stella is determined to hold her own. Nothing will stop her producing the very finest work on the new Spitfire designs, even if that means appealing to the very top. The minister of aircraft production himself.

I wanted a particular ruler. We call them scales in those days with a bevelled edge so that I could get accurate lines. I went to the shop in Portsmouth. I got the pens, but they couldn't supply me with a ruler. They just weren't available. So I went back to the firm, told my boss and he told his boss and he told the head of the firm and the head of erm obviously had words with Lord Beaverbrook. Within a week I had a message from Lord Beaverbrook go back to the shop in Portsmouth.

I have arranged for one Bevell edged scale to be sent there and that is to be sold. You and nobody else, with all the designers, draughtsmen drawing teams, Trace's testers and engineers, all in one fabulous location, modifications and improvements on the Spitfire design come thick and fast.

At the outbreak of the war, the Spitfire Mach one had a top speed of 584 kilometers per hour by the end of the war. The Spitfire was able to fly at 724 kilometers per hour and its surface ceiling had increased by over 10000 feet, allowing it to soar faster at ever greater heights.

The old Spitfire was pretty fast. This one's a lot faster, but it's certainly the answer to that 190. We've been hearing so much about. Very pleased that I was able to use my talents in such a way that gives me a little bit of pleasure to know that I was one of the people who helped during the war to produce the plane which really saved this country. The workforce continued to grow and grow, and the help came from anywhere and everywhere, from all walks of life and across the social classes were off the park place.

There is a country house called Park Place, very close to little country town of Wickham, about 15 miles east of Southampton. And it turned out that it was owned by Sir James Byrd.

Sir James Byrd or Jimmy, as he was known, was the original managing director of Super Marine. He had retired some years ago, but came out of retirement to help Spitfire production in its moment of need.

He had an extension, built a very long, narrow hut, and women from the Women's Voluntary Service in Wickham would come from the town and their job was to sort rivets.

I wouldn't think that that was much of a job, but the rivets are incredibly varied. There are different colors, there are different lengths, there are different shapes to the ends of them, flat rivets for the wings, domed rivets to the rear heat-resistant, rivets for under the mighty exhaust, thousands, millions of tiny rivets while they were mixed up in the first place. I'm not sure, but there's a lovely photo of the ladies sitting on a workbench and piles of rivets and different pots to put them in.

But if you look carefully at the photo, there's a poster on the wall, a little tuck stops, a lot of work. Riveting was good work, if you could get it. It was one of the many jobs that often fell to women. One of the places where the riveting compresses rolled away day and night was the requisitioned sunlight laundry on Winchester Road. Two women keen to get work. There are sisters, Florrie and Daisy.

Floriane and Daisy had been working for British American Tobacco and they heard that there was work to be had at the newly acquired some laundry making spitfire parts. The pay was better, so they moved up there and were trained on the job.

They expected better pay with super Marine and perhaps more interesting work. What they might not have expected was an opportunity for romance.

Floriane Daisy. They met Ray and Reg, who were aircraft fitters, got very close, got engaged, in fact, and there are photos of them on a picnic. That was their engagement time in war time.

Opportunities for joy and celebration were scarce. So when they came around, everyone joined in.

They got married at the local church, St James's Church, and they were amazed when they came out of the church on the Saturday afternoon and the road was full of their work mates from the sunlight laundry and the other dispersal units up Winchester Road who'd been given the afternoon off to see them. The Spitfire Sweethearts come out of church, possibly the only time they'd had a break like that.

The newlyweds couldn't have their reception at the church hall because it too had been requisitioned and was being made to make Spitfire fuel tanks.

So they found somewhere else for their double wedding reception with their double bridesmaids, their two cakes and a shared first dance.

I think it was a very special time. The local newspaper was headlined Spitfire Sweethearts, and that name stuck with them throughout their life. And Reg and Daisy have a memorial which is still outside St James's Church.

The great dispersal of Spitfire production in the autumn of 1940 and beyond was a Herculean effort done largely under the radar.

Hidden away in small, scattered communities. Hundreds of people took the risk of becoming a target themselves to build the plane, which would help turn the tide of the war. By early 1941, all requisitioned laundries, garages, bus stations, glove factories, steamroller works and strawberry busked works were producing spitfire parts and components.

Three quarters of a century on. The question remains, just how successful was this transfer of resources?

The quarterly report for March 1941, six months after the raid, reads, Great difficulty has been encountered in transferring skilled men from Southampton to the various dispersal centres. This has resulted in considerable retardation of production.

But Dennis Webb goes on to tell a different story. By the end of 1941, we had got back to pre dispersal output and by the middle of 1942 we had surpassed it. Eventually it came together.

I can say quite definitely that it was not preplanning that made the dispersal successful, but the quite marvellous improvisation and hard work that did the trick.

It was Churchill in his speech about the Battle of Britain who said memorably that never was so much owed by so many to so few. But he also said in the same speech, the front line runs through the factories. The work men and women are soldiers with different weapons, but the same courage.

It was the people who made the plane, not just the few that make the war effort, the success that it was.

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