In September 1940 the Luftwaffe bombed the Spitfire factory in Southampton and claimed to have wrecked it. They had every reason to believe they had crippled British fighter production.
What followed instead was that the Spitfire was taken apart and hidden. Production was scattered into garages, laundries, bus depots and sheds across southern England.
Much of the work was done by young women in their teens and twenties.
This is the story of the Secret Spitfires..
The Spitfire was designed and built at the Supermarine works at Woolston, on the banks of the River Itchen in Southampton.
It was close to the worst place in Britain to build a fighter. The factory sat beside a naval shipyard, across the water from the docks and the gas works, in plain view from the air. Everyone who worked there understood the risk. But with Castle Bromwich, the huge new shadow factory in Birmingham, still failing to deliver aircraft, nothing could be allowed to interrupt production. Any real dispersal was put off.
By September a start had been made. Two garages had been requisitioned and were being prepared. A bus depot on Winchester Road was taken as well, chosen because the roof was high enough to build wings underneath it.
It was not enough, and it was not in time. On 24 and 26 September the Luftwaffe came for Woolston and Itchen. Around 110 people were killed across the two raids. Many died in the air raid shelters that had been built to protect them, when the bombs meant for the factory fell short and hit them instead.
In a bitter irony, among the Supermarine dead was the man who had been given the job of setting up the new, safer workshops away from the works.
In the aftermath, Lord Beaverbrook ordered the riverside factories abandoned and the whole of Spitfire production dispersed.
So Britain took the Spitfire apart. The manufacturing process was broken into pieces and spread across the south of England, into buildings nobody would think to bomb because nobody would think to look.
Dozens of sites, eventually forming a chain running through Hampshire, Wiltshire and Berkshire. Garages. Laundries. Warehouses. Bus stations. Sheds. A hotel. Work spread out through Southampton, Winchester, Newbury, Reading, Trowbridge and Salisbury, while the design office moved into a country house at Hursley Park. Some small components were reportedly made by people in their own homes and garden sheds.
The parts were brought together at hidden assembly points, and the finished aircraft were test-flown and ferried onward, including by the celebrated women pilots of the Air Transport Auxiliary.
The workforce was not what you would expect either.
Skilled men had been called up or were stretched thin, so much of the work fell to young women, to teenagers, and to older men, trained up quickly on specialised tasks they had never done before.
Bette Blackwell was 20 and working as a hairdresser in Salisbury when her call-up came. After an interview and a medical she was told to report to the Wessex Motor Garage on New Street. Like most people in the city, she had no idea what was being made there. On her first day she was overwhelmed by the noise and the fumes, and found that the workers had to shout to be heard over the machines.
Salisbury became the largest centre of the whole operation. One engineer who worked there remembered around 40 Spitfires a month coming out of the town at its peak. In total, more than 2,000 are credited to the Salisbury network.
The work was compartmentalised and nobody discussed it, and that habit held long after the war ended.
Norman Parker, one of the engineers, remembered a dinner party in the 1970s. A woman at the table mentioned that she had built Spitfires in Salisbury during the war.
Her husband told her she was wrong. He had built Spitfires in Salisbury.
They had worked in the same operation, and had been married for years without either of them ever finding out.
The story stayed largely unknown to the wider public until a documentary in 2016 brought it to light, and a full-size replica Spitfire was later unveiled in Salisbury as a memorial to the people who built them. Parker said the city should be very proud of what it did.
The Luftwaffe bombed the Spitfire factory and believed they had done the job. Britain had simply moved the Spitfire into the last place anyone would look. A garage, a laundry, a bus depot, and the hands of a hairdresser from Wiltshire.
This was the story of the Secret Spitfires.
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