Chugalug and Walter,
Walter, you should have practised the "picking up the handkerchief" trick before trying to plough up the airfield ! Seriously all would not necessarily have been lost if you had got back airborne without an ASI. You would instinctively have flown the thing round the circuit with all the right attitudes, and using the normal power settings at each stage, the airspeed would have been in the right ballpark.
I flew my first 60 hours in that way, and in Peter Smith's "Vengeance", "Red" McInnis (my Canadian predecessor on 1340 Flight) relates how he once got airborne in a VV on a sortie, only to find that some fat beetle or other had taken up residence in the pitot head and the ASI was u/s. He joined the formation, had no difficulty in flying the sortie (including the dive, of course) and the circuit and landing (what happened to the beetle is not recorded).
I would have thought that the Beau would have had fuel gauges to show where the fuel was at any one time - reminds me of the Vampire, where you had five gauges to watch - and in any violent manoeuvre the fuel re-distributed itself among the five, so you had to tot-up again every time to see your fuel state. Perhaps it was the same with you.
Pilots, Military or Civil (and some not so civil !), as a body, contain the same proportion of idiots as in the population in general:
...The temptation to offer him further professional advice must have been very great indeed...
"
Go forth and multiply ?"
Cheers, Danny.