Flying kick.

ONE doesn't like to bang on about the achievements of Northerners.

Well, all right, one does. A bit. Just for fun. Praise where praise is due, I say.

A recent contributor to the North-South pseudo-debate claimed the designer of the Spitfire, the World War II fighter plane without which the Battle of Britain would have been lost, was a southerner.

Trevor Elam, of Dalton, is a member of the Huddersfield and District Family History Society and begs to differ.

"Reginald J Mitchell, the brilliant designer of the Spitfire, was born in Salke, Staffordshire, in the Midlands - hardly Southern England," he says.

Reginald was the child of Eliza Jane Mitchell (ne Brain) the teacher wife of Herbert Mitchell, also a schoolteacher, who was actually born in Wooldale, Holmfirth, in 1855.

"Herbert Mitchell was the son of Joseph Jagger Mitchell, born in Thurstonland, and his wife Ann Turner of Wooldale, and Joseph Jagger Mitchell was the son of Uriah and Martha Mitchell (ne Jagger).

"So the Spitfire design had its paternal roots well planted in the hills of the Holme Valley even though circumstances forced its actual birth in a factory in Southampton," Trevor asserts.

Further details, he tells me, will be found in the forthcoming October Journal of the Huddersfield and District Family History Society.

CAPTION(S):

ONE OF OURS: The Supermarine Spitfire