Another historic Spitfire, Mk. Vb BL628 YO-D made its first flight on September 28 in New Zealand, after an epic restoration which took full 30 years to complete.
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All photos in this article have been provided by Mark Davies. Thanks!
This aircraft was delivered from Castle Bromwich in January 1942. Allocated to No. 410 Squadron RCAF at Gravesend, BL628 became a personal aircraft of G.B. Murray who named it Marion after his girlfriend. It subsequently served briefly with No. 308 Squadron 31st Fighter Group USAAF in Aug 1942, then Nos. 167 and 610 Squadrons. Transferred to Royal Navy in 1943, the aircraft was converted to hooked Spitfire configuration by Cunliffe Owen Aircraft in June 1943. Allocated to No. 899 Squadron FAA for training, it served in Belfast, Ireland. Before the end of the war, it went to 719 and 794 Squadrons Royal Navy at St.Merryn, but the airframe was now at the very end of its service life and the aircraft was eventually struck off charge and abandoned on a farm in St. Merryn, Cromwell.
It is in the same place that the fuselage was found in derelict state some thirty years later. Acquired by Peter Croser & Michael Aitchison from Australia in 1977, it was initially painstainkingly rebuilt using components from various scrapyards in the UK. In the process, the aircraft went back to the UK in 1991 for a short period, then to Australia, where it received a new pair of wings built on Isle Of Wight, UK. More recently the aircraft was transferred to Avspecs Ltd in Auckland, New Zealand for final assembly. The first post-restoration flight took place on 29 September 2007.
The success of Marion’s restoration brings up the number of airworthy Spitfires Mk. V in the world to seven.
Phase 1 of her test flight program has now been completed and the aircraft is currently being disassembled in preparation for shipping to Southern California to its new post-restoration owner.
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i so wish i could see this old girl completed… i made heaps of parts for her when marion was in melbourne australia. loved working on it.
My father was a lighthouse keeper and we moved around the country from lighthouse to lighthouse. Between 1968 and 1973 he was stationed at Trevose Head Lighthouse in North Cornwall. The station is about three miles from the village of St Merryn where I attended the (very) small village school.
At the school I had a friend called Paul (I can’t remember his surname, but I think it began with B). Paul’s father was a farmer and his farm was the old St Merryn Airfield.
The airfield was opened in 1937 as a civil airport and in 1939 it was taken over by the Fleet Air Arm with the name HMS Vulture. After the war it was used by the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) and various training schools. Then in 1952 it was re-commissioned as HMS Curlew, flying stopped in 1953 and the airfield was sold off in 1959.
When I knew it in the late 1960′s Paul’s parents lived in a small bungalow by the main gates. I often used to go over to see Paul and we had the run of the whole (deserted) camp. We would go into buildings and it was just as though people left to go home at the end of a working day and never came back. The offices had desks and chairs in them and the drawers and cupboards were full of papers which at the time seemed meaningless to two young boys.
My favourite place on the airfield was a building that Paul’s father used for storing bales of hay, but thinking back it was probably a hanger. In the hanger was the fuselage of a very old plane. It was in a sorry state, but we still spent many hours playing in and on it. At the time my knowledge of planes was zero, but in my mind I had always thought of it as being a Spitfire.
A little while ago I Googled Spitfire and St Merryn and found this site. It is so good to know that Marion was found, fully restored and is now flying again!
If anyone has any photographs of her before restoration I would love to see them.
Cheers
Colin.