During a recent visit to Kemble Airport in Gloucestershire with our young grandsons, we were lucky enough to see this Spitfire land for refuelling. After a bit of research I found out it was Spitfire TE308, built as a single seater in 1945 but never saw combat.
In the 1950s it was converted to a two-cockpit training aircraft and later given its current shark’s teeth livery in homage to the livery used during WWII by 457 squadron of the Royal Australian Air Force.
All of this squadron’s Spitfires had been painted with a shark’s mouth, giving them the nickname of the ‘Grey Nurse Squadron’.
