Lot 269
Will Spencer (1921-2002) "Animal Crackers: When we go to England I want to try those Barnes-Wallis adjustable wings!", ink with watercolour, signed with initials and inscribed, 23cm h x 14cm w. Provenance: Sir Barnes Wallis thence by descent. Note: In 1954 Spencer joined the News Chronicle to start the "Animal Crackers" pocket cartoon series. This ran in the News Chronicle until that paper was absorbed by the Daily Mail in October 1960, when it continued in the combined paper. The Daily Mail continued to feature "Animal Crackers" until May 1971, when the newspaper was redesigned as a tabloid and the series was dropped. This work, depicting swallows in flight, alludes to Sir Barnes Wallis's pioneering "Swallow" project of the 1950s. During this period, Wallis advanced a bold variable-geometry concept he termed the "wing-controlled aerodyne", conceived to maximise the efficiency and economy of high-speed flight. His earliest investigations took shape in the "Wild Goose" study, which laid the groundwork for subsequent developments. Wallis later refined these ideas into the "Swallow", a tailless, blended-wing aircraft envisioned as capable of completing return journeys between Europe and Australia in under ten hours - an extraordinary ambition for its time. As the project evolved, the Swallow was increasingly regarded as a potential supersonic successor to the RAF's subsonic Vickers Valiant bomber. Throughout the mid-1950s, various models of the design were tested with promising results, including a six-foot scale model that achieved speeds approaching Mach 2. Despite its technical promise, the programme was curtailed in 1957 when the British government withdrew support from several advanced aeronautical initiatives, bringing Wallis' visionary work on the Swallow to an end.  £150-250