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Fairey Swordfish/Albacore Auction - 1970
NOTE:
Swordfish Photos below....

     I had never heard of the String Bag until I attended an auction held on Ernie Simmons field near Tillsonburg, Ontario, Canada back on the Labor Day weekend in 1970. (He had been murdered)

     Amongst the acres of old cars of all kinds were about a dozen Harvards and Yales. But in addition there were the bare remains of some of the ugliest planes imaginable! I found out a little later that these were Fairey Swordfish/Albacore and probably the most intact ones left in the world. Rumors were rampant that there were representatives from several aviation museums on hand and the bidding was expected to be brisk, but I never did hear who did finally purchase them. Until...
     Thanks to Terry Scott, in Ontario, I have been able to find out the following:
Swordfish No. HS554 flew for a grand total of 362 hours with the Eastern Air Command based in the Canadian Maritimes. It was sold at this auction for the sum of $1,630 to a Mr Bob Spence of Muirkirk, Ontario and his family. After a major restoration, this Swordfish took its next maiden flight on the Labor Day weekend, 1991.

     I was notified by Eric Edgar, a member of the Shearwater Aviation Museum, April 14/01, that they purchased another of these Stringbags and it too is operational.

Some Bodies...

Some Bodies

     A couple of excellent books are: "Bring Back My Stringbag" by Lord Kilbracken, (John Godley) published by Pan Books in 1979. and "To War In A Stringbag" by Commander Charles Lamb published by Nelson Doubleday.

     I found a very interesting article by Gary Brounstein on a beautiful RC scale model in "Scale R/C Modeler" magazine Volume 7, No. 1 dated Feb. 1981.

     The pilots of these flying relics certainly deserve our greatest admiration. Imagine trying to land one of these mostly open-cockpit beasts in the gales of the North Atlantic when the plane could hardly make enough knots to catch up to their aircraft carriers and tiny converted Merchant Navy carrier ships.





An interesting poem of WASP pilots of that era:
Some Interesting Swordfish Links:

Some Canadian Aviation Museum Sites: