Hubert Scott-Paine (1891-1954)
Long time associate of Noel Pemberton-Billing; became factory manager of the Pemberton-Billing aircraft factory.
1916 Purchased the Pemberton-Billing factory and renamed the company Supermarine Aviation Works. The company became famous for its successes in the Schneider Trophy for seaplanes, especially the three wins in a row of 1927, 1929 and 1931.
1954 Obituary [1]
WE regret to record the death of Mr. Hubert Scott-Paine, which occurred at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut, at the age of sixty-three. Although he was one of the earlier pioneers of aircraft design and construction he later specialised in the field of flying boats and high-speed marine craft design, the work for which he was most noted.
Scott-Paine was born on March 11, 1891, and after an eventful boyhood began the design of his first land-based aircraft in 1910. He first flew in that year and about three years later he constructed the first circular flying boat hull, and his patents for many other developments in flying boat design soon followed. He was one of the first to build a twin-engined land machine in this country and to build the first all-cabin aircraft.
After the 1914-1918 war, Scott-Paine opened the first international flying boat service which operated between Havre and Southampton.
In 1922 he financed and built the "British Challenger" with which this country won the 1922 Schneider Trophy.
He was then the managing owner of Super-Marine Aviation Works, Ltd., but in 1923 he organised and financed the British Marine Air Navigation Company. The following year this company was incorporated with Imperial Airways, of which he remained a founder director until 1940.
Scott-Paine's interests were mainly directed to the design and development of high-speed marine craft towards the end of the 1920s.
He founded the British Power Boat Company in 1927, and amongst the famous craft he designed, built and raced were the "Panther" I and II, and the "Miss Britain" class of power boats. Later came the designs on which were based the motor torpedo boats, gunboats and high-speed air-sea rescue craft used in the last war.
Just before the (second world) war he established the Marine Design and Engineering Development Corporation in America and the Canadian Power Boat Company, Ltd., where these classes of craft are manufactured.