The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

much larger armaments manufacturer, Vickers Armstrong, the initial order
was planned to be produced entirely by the small Supermarine factory at
Woolston in Southampton and there were concerns over whether they
would be able to cope with such an order.
While Hawker, a much bigger enterprise, dutifully got stuck into
Hurricane production, Supermarine struggled. The Spitfire was a more
complicated design and required new skills and new tools. The Hurricane
had, in essence, the same airframe as many of Hawker’s earlier biplanes, so
the step up was not so drastic. By February 1938, not one production
Spitfire had been completed, even though more than 80 per cent of its
production had already been outsourced. A further order for 200 more
merely added to Supermarine’s woes. The production of the Spitfire, a
plane much vaunted and publicized, was an utter mess, and on 14 May
1938, the very day the first production aircraft finally took to the skies,
Lord Swinton was forced to resign.
However, before his fall, Swinton had developed what had become
known as ‘shadow factories’. These were factories set up to mirror the work
of their parent plants in an effort to cope with the kind of mass production
needed for rearmament. Swinton had been keen to bring Lord Nuffield into
the shadow factory scheme as his Morris car company was probably the
country’s biggest mass producer. However, the two had fallen out and
Nuffield had refused to play ball. Swinton’s departure, however, paved the
way for another approach to the notoriously prickly car magnate. A
proposal was made in May 1938 that he build a huge new factory, in which
he would mass-produce Spitfires – no less than an order of 1,000 to be
going on with. It was the largest single order of any aircraft Britain had ever
made. Nuffield agreed. A vast 135-acre site was chosen at Castle Bromwich
on the edge of Birmingham and bought from the Dunlop Rubber Company;
work began on developing the site almost immediately. It was agreed that
sixty Spitfires a week would be produced once the factory was up and
running.
The problem was that the factory had to be built from scratch, engineers
had to be trained, and machinery built, and that all took time. In the long
term, the Castle Bromwich factory would no doubt pay dividends, but what
Britain and the RAF needed was Spitfires now and they weren’t getting
them from Lord Nuffield. The first four had finally entered service in
August 1938 but fortunately, by that time, many of Supermarine’s