Spitfire Detectives

摘要

There is a derivative of a children's game called 'Pin the tail on the donkey', it's called 'Pin the serial on the Spitfire'. This pursuit owes its origins to a first serious attempt to list all of the world's survivors in 1960, when Bruce Robertson included a listing in his superb book Spitfire — The Story of a Famous Fighter. He featured 80 in the first edition and upped it by three in the 1961 version. By May 1973, with all the great interest generated by the film Battle of Britain, a further revised edition listed no less than 127. Thirty-four years later there are 220-plus, with ever more projects being re-constituted from ever smaller provenance-commanding parts of fuselage.