This book tells one of the great stories of British engineering excellence in the twentieth century. Beginning with a two-man and two- woman family enterprise to build a primitive ‘stick and string’ aeroplane, financed by a far-sighted grandparent, the story unfolds rapidly. Within six years the aeroplane’s designer, Geoffrey de Havilland (‘D.H.’) was able to create the D.H. 2 fighters that helped to end the dominance of German Fokker monoplanes then shooting Britain’s Royal Flying Corps from the skies over France in 1915-16.