Douglas Bader’s Last Spitfire – page 2

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Tail group
Being a late production machine RK917 was fitted with the “broad-chord” pointed rudder often seen fitted to Mk.VIIIs and XVI’s, it also featured elevators with the later pattern enlarged balance horns.

Undercarriage
Both newsreel stills and the first image confirm that RK917 was fitted with 4 spoke wheels, this information and the period in which the aircraft was manufactured suggest that the smaller bulges associated with the late pattern undercarriage modifications were present on the upper-wing surface.

Colours and Markings
This element of the story is much more complex.

The first photograph is the one that set me off on this quest to know more about RK917; I made a number of assumptions about the picture when I first received it.

I noticed the broad loosely sprayed dark camouflage on the lower port cowl but didn’t notice that it actually dipped lower down the cowl than normal for a regular RAF Day-Fighter scheme.

I also noticed the odd colour of the outer blue portion of the fuselage roundel and initially put that down to the effects of ortho-chromatic film emulsions.

My third mistake was in not noticing the very obvious angle of the sun in the image, in particular the long shadows being cast by the propeller blades across the lower cowl, and the apparently brighter colour of the lower rudder, not because it was a different colour from the rest of the airframe but because it is offset and facing towards the sun and the photographer.

I was rudely awakened from my fantasies by the generous and timely help from three fellow modellers,

First was John Green, aware of my quandary he posted me a selection of black-and-white scans from Dilip Sarkars’ book on Bader, these were taken on the day of the flypast at North Weald and feature Bader, other RAF dignitaries and a couple of images of Bader boarding RK917.

The pictures made one thing very clear; there was evidence that the outer yellow ring of an otherwise standard “Type C1” fuselage roundel had been over painted. I looked again at the original photo; why, if the roundel blue has been affected by the film emulsion, don’t the underwing and fin markings look the same way?

Working from the premise that the simplest solution is usually the right one I took a guess, the fuselage roundel had been over-painted in a non-standard colour. It fit the evidence of two separate images of the same aircraft; it’ll do for me.

John’s pictures also showed another interesting detail, Bader used a long mat of some description over the wing root of his aircraft when boarding, it is clearly visible in the image above left.

Then Jonathon Strickland got in touch and offered his comments, at first he and I argued a little over the colour of the ‘DB’ codes the aircraft carried, I was ready to accept them as being white with a roundel-blue border, Jonathon suggested that they might be Sky with a black border, in the end we compromised, and as it turned out I think we’re pleased that we did! We came down in favour of white codes with a black border!

That left the question of the colour of the spinner, my earlier misjudgement of the colour of the roundel had also led me in a different direction about this as well, and I’d convinced myself the spinner was red. I’d done this because the colour was clearly different from the blue of the roundel which I figured was reversed by the effect of the ortho film, ergo, it had to be red! Well not exactly, there are a number of colours it could have been, red just seemed the most likely.

Jonathon had other ideas, in his opinion the spinner was more likely to be blue, we had argued this subject back and forth for some time until I made the connection about the non-standard colour in the roundel, that was throwing off my perception of the tone of the spinner and once I allowed for that I found myself agreeing, a little reluctantly, with Jonathon’s position.

Read the final part: the Spitfire colour and markings and see some beautiful profile paintings by Stephen Mudgett