What was the first British production aircraft with a retractable undercarriage?

In late 1931, with the Airspeed Ferry nearly finished, Hessell Tiltman, a co-founder of Airspeed, put to the company's board the first sketches of an aeroplane for private owners that would be more useful and roomier than anything on the market, with space for five or six people. The result was a low-wing cantilever cabin monoplane of wooden construction, with a fabric-covered wing and a plywood fuselage over welded tubes. Its most striking feature was the main undercarriage, which the pilot retracted with a hand-operated hydraulic pump; the mechanism was an Airspeed patent, for which the company later earned royalties when it was used on other aircraft such as the Oxford.

The prototype G-ABXN, ordered by Sir Alan Cobham to attempt a non-stop flight to India, began construction in York and flew at Portsmouth in April 1933 with George Stainforth at the controls (sources give either the 10th or the 11th of that month). The first trials, flown even without an engine cowling, gave performance very close to the predictions, and Airspeed decided to put it into production that same summer: the first production aircraft was delivered on 4 September 1933 to the dealer Air Exchange and Mart. Between 1933 and 1934 the factory turned out 15 production Couriers; counting the prototype, total production came to 16 aircraft.

The achievement is a specific one: the first British type with a retractable undercarriage built in quantity. In military aviation, the Supermarine Seagull V amphibian is listed as the first British aircraft of its kind with a retracting undercarriage. Couriers were sold to civil customers as small airliners, air taxis, racing aircraft and test beds, and the first production example finished sixth in the 1934 MacRobertson Air Race from England to Australia.