BEATRICE "TILLY" SHILLING, who has died aged 81,
was not only a notable acro engineer, responsible for remedying a defect in the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine during the Second World War, but also a renowned racing motorcyclist.
In the 1930s she stormed round the Brooklands circuit and was awarded a coveted Gold Star for lapping the track at more than 100 mph on her Norron 500. "Tilly" Shilling was once described by a fellow scientist as "a flaming pathfinder of women's lib"; she always rejected any suggestion that as a woman she might be inferior to a man in technical and scientific fields.
In 1940, when Hurricane and Spitfire pilots encoun- tered a life-or-death carburettor problem, she was already
a highly regarded scientist at the Royal Aircraft Estab- lishnient at Farnborough. The problem which landed on her desk in the carburation department was this: pilots were obliged to turn on their backs in combat to dive because the "negative-G" of simply putting the nose down resulted in starving the engine, causing it to splutter or cut 6ut.
This was a critical defect since the Daimler-Benz engine powering enemy Me 109s permitted Luftwaffe pilots to perform the manoeuvre unhindered. Miss Shil- ling came up with a simple stop-gap device - which cost less, as it happened, than a shilling.
Nicknamed "Miss Shilling's Orifice", it was a metal disc about the size of an old threepenny bit, with a small hole in the middle. It was brazed into the fighter's fuel pipe, and when the pilot accelerated in a dive the disc stopped even momentary starvation of the Merlin engine. By March 1941 Miss Shilling's Orifice had been installed
throughout Fighter Command, sufficing until replaced by an improved carburettor.
A butcher's daughter, Beatrice Shilling was born at Waterlooville, Hants, on March 8 1909 and after working as an electrician and electrical linesman she took an engineering degree at Manchester University.
In the 1930s she was recruited as a scientific officer by the RAE and began on a small salary doing fairly menial work. Even as a senior member of that establish- ment she was renowned for rolling up her sleeves and getting her hands dirty - shopworkers respected the fact that she could braze a butt joint between two pieces of copper with the skill of a fitter.
When she married George Naylor, whom she had
