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Saviour of the Spitfire

Without the eccentric Poppy Houston , the Battle of Britain might have had a very different outcome. Peter Almond tells her story.

By Peter Almond

Published: 7:00AM BST 15 Sep 2010

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Lady 'Poppy' Houston saved the Spitfire from being stillborn nine years before the battle that would safeguard our future. Photo: Hulton Archive

As the last surviving Spitfires wheel over our cities, marking the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain this week, a few people – a very few – will look skyward and remember a former chorus girl called Poppy Houston.

For it was as Lady “Poppy” Fannie Lucy Houston that she saved the Spitfire from being stillborn nine years before the battle that would safeguard our future. She donated £100,000 (some £3.4 million in today’s money) to keep research going into the Spitfire’s predecessor – the Supermarine S6, a single-engined racing seaplane – when Ramsay MacDonald’s government pulled funding for the project during the Great Depression in 1931.

The decision ran against popular feeling, however. The Supermarine S6 was Britain ’s entry to the prestigious Schneider Trophy, awarded to the world’s fastest seaplane. The 1931 race off Cowes was Britain ’s chance to win the trophy for the third time. Besides, the Rolls Royce engine and low-wing monoplane designed by Reginald J Mitchell, an aeronautical engineer, promised to be a world-beater which would transform the RAF and its slow old biplanes.

The government, however, would not budge. Then Lady Houston stepped forward and offered to pay for it, declaring: “Every true Briton would rather sell his last shirt than admit that England could not afford to defend herself.” MacDonald relented and the plane and its RAF crew claimed the trophy.

Without Lady Houston, Mitchell’s design team would not have gained the experience in producing high-speed aircraft that led to the development of the Spitfire fighter, or at least not in time to join the Hurricane in fighting off the Luftwaffe in 1940, according to Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Graydon, president of the Battle of Britain Memorial Trust.

“[The donation] was the incentive to develop a high-speed aeroplane. We were just about able to prepare in time for Hitler’s air armada, but we got away with it only by a gnat’s eyebrow,” says Sir Michael, former Chief of the Air Staff.

So who was Lady Houston? Daughter of a box-maker, she was born in Kennington, south London , in 1857. As a 16-year-old chorus girl she attracted the wealthy – and married – brewer Frederick Gretton of the Bass family and they eloped to Paris .

They never married but she was known as ''Mrs Gretton’’. “She was a beautiful young coquette, with... impudent speech and a tiny waist who became expert in Parisian fashions and manners,” says the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Gretton showered her with gifts and bequeathed her £6,000 a year for life when he died in 1882, aged just 42.

Described as a ''fresh-air fiend and nudist”, she claimed “prophetic powers” of a quasi-religious nature. This did not deter Theodore Francis Brinckman, the eldest son of a baronet, from marrying her the following year. She divorced him in 1895.

Her second marriage was in 1901 to George Frederick William Byron, 9th Baron Byron of Rochdale . Already a bankrupt, “Red Nose George” appeared to have had little impact on her life, except as the provider of social status.

She supported the suffragettes and later opened a rest home for nurses who had served on the Western Front. The government named her one of the first of five newly created dames in 1917, the same year Byron died, aged 63.

Then in her sixties, she suffered from depression and developed post-war obsessions with Prussians, communists and socialists, and patrolled Hampstead Heath in her carriage “haranguing holidaymakers”. She had not, however, lost her charms. In 1924 she married another baronet, Sir Robert Paterson Houston, a ruthless Liverpool shipowner and Conservative MP whom she nevertheless got the better of. He once showed her his will, bequeathing her £1 million. She is said to have torn it in half, declaring: “If I’m only worth a million, then I’m worth nothing at all!”

The couple settled in Jersey as tax exiles, but Sir Robert was in poor health and died in 1926, leaving £5.5 million of his £7 million fortune to his wife, whose “wonderful intuition”, he declared, “on two occasions saved my life when the doctors despaired of it.” On his death, a distraught Lady Houston had to be restrained, eventually recovering to sail away on her husband’s yacht without paying any death taxes.

Believed then to be the nation’s richest woman, she embarked on more political adventures. In 1932, aged 75, she declared the nation’s defences against air attack to be so bad she tried to give £200,000 to the Army and Navy, which the government rejected. Four years later, she was so upset by the abdication of King Edward VIII she stopped eating and died that year of a heart attack, aged 79.

Lady Houston is buried in St Marylebone cemetery in north London with a headstone describing her as “one of England ’s greatest patriots”. Some believe she deserves greater recognition. One pilot blogger said a statue of her should adorn the vacant fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square .

Another wrote: “I seriously suggest a statue of her, looking as she did when she was the toast of Edwardian London, arm in arm with two young pilots with a suitable inscription: “Poppy Houston – The First of the Few.”

Sir Michael Graydon does not disagree. To criticisms that she was at least a little mad, he says: “Well, thank God for her madness!”

*Peter Almond is a former defence correspondent of 'The Telegraph’ and author of 'Aviation: The Early Years’, and 'Century of Flight’