National Spitfire Project

Alex Chalk Excerpts

Tuesday 28th March 2017 Westminster Hall

[George Kerevan]

I am happy to reinforce the sentiment to the Minister that the support comes from all over the islands. I want to underpin that with a little bit of extra history on the Spitfire, which I think all of us will do this afternoon.

The Merlin engines were largely manufactured at the Rolls-Royce shadow factory at Hillington, just outside Glasgow. Some 160,000 people worked at that factory and it provided the engines not just for the Spitfires, but for many of the other aircraft that served the RAF. That was part of what happened in world war two, and people did that selflessly. However, there is an interesting side to the Hillington experience of building the Merlin, because large numbers of the people making the engines were women. Initially, they were not paid the same as men; they were not even paid the same as the ordinary labouring workers were. That led to a lot of industrial unrest and, in 1943, to a major strike. Of course, that was a very difficult thing to contemplate in the middle of world war two. The feeling in the factory was that we were not just fighting against evil, but fighting for a new, democratic society, so they took industrial action—very regrettably, but they took it. The result was that for the first time in these islands a major engineering factory granted equal pay to men and women. We should weave into the Spitfire story the fact that the fight for equal pay began with the Spitfire, strange as it may seem.

I will not keep Members long, but I want to add another couple of Scottish contributions. I do so not to be sectarian, but to underline the fact that this would be a common monument and would represent all of these islands.

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful speech. His parents worked on the Spitfire, as did my grandparents. Does he agree that, without the combined resources and ingenuity of all the nations of the United Kingdom, the Spitfire would surely have never flown, and that the Spitfire is a powerful reminder to us today that we truly are stronger together?

[George Kerevan]

It is self-evident that we have to defend these islands together. What divides us at the moment and in times past is how we organise our democracy, and I think we are mature enough to have that discussion. What the SNP bring, and have always brought, to the table is the idea that we will share the common defence of these islands. That has never been in question. Indeed—my hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara) might say this in a brief moment—we often have discussions about defence issues because we do not think the Government protect these islands adequately, but that is a debate that we can have elsewhere. Our division on how we organise our democracy in these islands should not get in the way of the fact that we have a common interest in defending them. The history of the Spitfire and the second world war is an exemplar of that.

I will be very brief, as other Members want to speak. There is one other person who needs to be mentioned today with respect to the Spitfire and the battle of Britain: the man who was the head of Fighter Command, Hugh Dowding. We have all seen the film “The Battle of Britain”, which, for all its faults, I still love—when the music comes up I still get excited—and we have all seen Laurence Olivier play Hugh Dowding. There is just one slight problem—it is the same problem I had when Laurence Olivier played Earl Haig in “Oh! What a Lovely War”. Earl Haig was a crusty Scot, with a deep Scottish accent, which Laurence Olivier definitely did not have, and Hugh Dowding happened to be born in Moffat in Dumfries and Galloway. His father was a teacher at Fettes school in Edinburgh. The unity of these islands in the Spitfire story goes all the way to Hugh Dowding from Moffat, who was head of Fighter Command in those dark days. There is a large and very simple, but I think poignant, monument to Hugh Dowding, head of Fighter Command, in his home town of Moffat. That underlines the fact that the Spitfire monument in Southampton has been a long time coming.

I will finish with this. My wife was born and bred in Southampton—I know it well—and her image of the city is the bombed-out Southampton of the 1950s, so these islands are interconnected. We can have a serious debate about how we do our democracy. I grant no ground on that—Scotland will be independent—but we will all stand together in tough times. We share these islands; we will defend these islands together.