People occasionally wonder about the story behind the logo of the Mongoose Club.
It
appears on the club stationary of course, and is embossed upon the club's polo
mallets and cricket
bats, but most people who give the logo any thought at all do so
while enjoying a cocktail
at the Mongoose Club bar, where the logo is etched into
the glass of the barroom mirror.
As those who have enjoyed a Mongoose Manhattan
or Mongoose Mimosa will have noticed, the club logo
depicts a mongoose flying a
plane, specifically a British Aerospace Sea Harrier (which is,
as canny readers will of
course be aware, simply a Hawker Siddeley Harrier GR.1 outfitted
with radar for the Royal
Navy). The idea that the Mongoose Club logo should features
a mongoose strikes
most viewers as sensible; and while few are so priggish as to complain
that a mongoose
cannot operate a modern fighter aircraft, some still wonder why the Mongoose
(whose
nickname is Sir Sydney Camm) is flying a plane instead of ringing a church bell or baking
a meat pie or dancing the tinikling or tossing a caber, or any of the other myriad things
that one is just as unlikely to see a mongoose doing as piloting a plane. The all-too
straightforward answer is that Sir Edmund Whittle-Spittlefield served as a pilot in the
Royal
Navy long before establishing the The Mongoose Club; and Meredith Mongoose
was his pet name
for his jet (upon first seeing the aforementioned Sea Harrier,
Whittle-Spittlefield is said to
have exclaimed 'What a remarkable plane! It resembles
nothing so much as a mongoose.' Most
people who have seen a Sea Harrier fail to spot
the similarity; but then Whittle-Spittlefield (pictured
below with fellow former airman
Fidelis Banville Bindlestaff) sees many things that others fail
to see.)
