Readers’ Letters
Beatrice Shilling
Three remarkable women were awarded Gold Stars for lapping the Brooklands circuit at over 100mph – two were mentioned in ‘The Rugged Road’ book review (TCM, February 2018).
Just by chance, I came across a photograph of the third of this exclusive trio, Beatrice Shilling, riding her 197cc Tandon in a postwar Southern Centre trial. In the 1930s, Shilling raced her home-tuned 500cc Norton International and occasionally beat professional riders, such as Noel Pope, and was awarded the Gold Star for lapping the banked circuit at 106mph during a race.
After gaining her PhD and MSc in electrical engineering at Manchester University, she was recruited as an aeronautical engineer by the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) at Farnborough, Hampshire.
During the Second Word War, she invented what was affectionately known as “Miss Shilling’s Orifice,” a small metal disc, similar to a metal washer that restricted fuel flow to the carburettor, helping to prevent stalling in the
