Forty years ago Flight Lieutenant John Nelson Boothman, AFC, RAF, won the Schneider Trophy outright for the Royal Aero Club of the United Kingdom, flying a Vickers-Supermarine S-6B (S.I595) on Sunday 13th September 1931. “The better the day the better the deed.”

To some, that win at 340.8 mph over a 270 mile course seemed the end of an era and the climax of the careers of both Reginald Mitchell, and of Henry Royce, the designers of the S-6B and of its 2300 bhp Rolls-Royce “R” engine.

In the event, as history has unfolded, the winning of the Schneider Trophy was but the opening page of a more significant story—the evolution of Mitchell's Spitfire, of Camm's Hurricane and of their Rolls-Royce Merlin engines. Those later Schneider Contests—from 1927 to 1931—led directly to the winning of the Battle of Britain in 1940—and to our presence here in a free world tonight.