G-AAXP  Saunders-Roe A.22 Segrave Meteor               (c/n  1)

                              

                                   Here's an interesting shot. It depicts the Segrave Meteor 1, built by Saunders-Roe for Sir Henry
                                   Segrave.  In 1928 Samuel Saunders, then 71 years old, retired.  Sir Alliot Verdon-Roe took over
                                   the Saunders company and renamed it Saunders-Roe (usually truncated to Saro).  In the early 1930s
                                   this concern gleaned contractual work to build aircraft not of their own design from several sources
                                   in order to to fill their plant capacity at East Cowes, Isle or Wight.  One instance of this were some
                                   55 Bluebird IVs built for Blackburn of Brough, Yorkshire.   They also contracted with renowned
                                   racing driver (both land and water) Sir Henry Segrave to build the twin engine monoplane machine
                                   he had designed, seen above,   Unfortunately Sir Henry was killed on Lake Windermere on 14 June
                                   1930 attempting to raise the world water speed record and hence this promising aircraft was not prod-
                                   uced in quantity.  Two more were actually built - one by Blackburn and one in Italy by Piaggio.  Later
                                   on, Saunders-Roe went on to manufacture the Spartan Cruiser which, although a three engined type,
                                   had a superficial resemblance to the machine pictured above.  One wonders how much influence Sir
                                   Henry's design had among Saro engineers when the Spartan was designed, along with the inputs from
                                   Edgar Percival?    The shot below is from the Norman Ellison c0llection (via the National Library of
                                   Australia), circa 1930.