'STICK TO ME LIKE GLUE, AND KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN'

Bill Newton describes building 1/48 models of the real stars of the classic 1969 film ‘Battle of Britain’

- Bill Newton

This project originally began aspart of a themed display‘Movies in Miniature’, for my then local IPMS Branch, Coventry and Warwickshire. This was to be for the 1995 ScaleModelWorld Show, in its last year at Donnington before moving to Telford. It was a simple representation of a Battle of Britain period Spitfire and Bf 109 from the eponymous film on a graphic base. The models were a Spitfire PR XIX in the guise of an RAF Spitfire Mk I and a HA-1112M1L Buchón, representing a Messerschmitt Bf 109E.

Over the next couple of decades, I expanded the collection and all the models were displayed as a ‘Work in Progress’ at last year’s IPMS Scale Modelworld.

The completed collection would have been displayed on the Battle of Britain SIG stand at this year’s IPMS ScaleModelWorld, before it was cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The RAF Models

The various marks of Spitfires used in the film were all meant to represent the Supermarine Spitfire Mk I.

Spitfire T9

The Spitfire T9 was an ex-Irish Air Corps machine originally built as a Mk IX, with serial number TE308. The model is based on the Hasegawa Mk IXc kit with the Brigade Models twin-cockpit fuselage conversion. Although the fuselage of the conversion is a little chunky, it is accurate in outline and once assembled really captures the lines of the T9.

Spitfire Mk IX