The Girl who could Fix Anything - Beatrice Shilling, World War II Engineer
"Despite graduating with honours in electrical engineering and going onto earn her masters of science doing research on internal combustion engines, Beatrice found it hard to get a job in her field. Hearing that she placed first at Brooklands racetrack on a motorbike she had modified herself, one interviewer said, 'I suppose the men let you win."
As a young child Beatrice loved to pull things apart and put them back together. She clearly had an engineering mind. Luckily her mother and father were happy to encourage her even though it is early 1900 and girls do not usually study engineering especially not at a university.
Beatrice is most famous for inventing the restrictor that saved the spitfire and Hurricane. In 1949 she was honoured by King George VI with the Order of the British Empire.
Read more here:
Meet Beatrice Shilling Stemettes
Beatrice Shilling - Revolutionising the Spitfire
I hope this post amazes you. I had never heard of Beatrice Shilling and yet she played a very important role in WWII and later she worked on runway safety and she designed and built a bobsled for the Royal Air Force Olympic team.
In US schools students in Grade 4 or 5 study genre and in particular they study the genre of biography. Publishers have seen this gap in the market and so in recent years hundreds of wonderful picture book biographies have been published. I have talked about a few here on this blog and my friend from Kinderbookswitheverything has an enormous collection of them in her library. She incorporates this topic into her work with her higher ability Grade 2 students. This new one about an amazing engineer Beatrice Shilling who was born in 1909 by American author Mara Rockliff and British illustrator Daniel Duncan.
Blurb from the author web site: Beatrice Shilling wasn’t quite like other children. She could make anything. She could fix anything. And when she took a thing apart, she put it back together better than before. When Beatrice left home to study engineering, she knew that as a girl she wouldn’t be quite like the other engineers—and she wasn’t. She was better. Still, it took hard work and perseverance to persuade the Royal Aircraft Establishment to give her a chance. But when World War II broke out and British fighter pilots took to the skies in a desperate struggle for survival against Hitler’s bombers, it was clearly time for new ideas. Could Beatrice solve an engine puzzle and help Britain win the war?
"Text and pictures work together to capture the life and spirit of a remarkable woman....The text is lively and succinct, full of vigorous action verbs. The expressive illustrations convey time and place beautifully and are infused variously with humour (such as when apprentice-engineer Beatrice, helping to bring electricity to villages, falls through a ceiling) and drama (as in a stunning double-page spread of London aflame during the Blitz)." Horn Book
I've added this Daniel Duncan book to my "to read" list:
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