Actually technically they're 'McCutchen flying machines' after Charles McCutchen the American postdoctoral nuclear physicsstudent at Cambridge University who first created them in 1953-ostensibly as the result of a bet in a pub to design the simplest stable powered flying machine. The 'Charybdis' was a nod to one of the two legendary monsters believed to live in the Straits of Messina between Siciliy and the mainland; Charybdis was a whirlpool that could swallow ships whole....
Attached are scans of the original article published in Aeromodeller the July 1954 issue

ChrisM
'ffkiwi'