I did lots of spins in the T10 and never remember anything particularly surprising, either solo or dual, including during a ten-turn spin. However, we always did everything by the book - CFS standardization at its best - and I certainly never felt like experimenting with different entries or recoveries.
bri, concerning Captain Gilman's Croydon experience, that sounds very odd. Maybe he had a very far-forward C of G. In my experience of teaching spins in a Blanik, it was quite common to enter a spiral dive at forward C of Gs, particularly of course, if the student wasn't holding the stick all the way back.
Dora-9, I see your aircraft still has the UHF aerials. Did it come with the whole fit, or had the boxes been taken out? I remember when the UBAS Chipmunks arrived back after the summer break (1968 I think), freshly painted in the grey and dayglo scheme with white canopies, with the new UHF radios. It actually made our life at Shawbury more difficult, since the other resident aircraft were Marshall's VHF equipped Vampires and Piston Provosts, used by the ATC trainees for PAR practice. The UHF didn't help for cross-country very much either, since it was a limited channel set with only the RAF common UHF frequency (362.3?) and 243 MHz for communicating with other towers. I remember ATC at Syerston trying to get us to change to their Approach frequency and refusing to believe that a UHF equipped aircraft could not do so.
Does anyone know about the background of the UHF conversion. It must have been incredibly expensive. Were these sets designed and built for the Chipmunk or were they used in other aircraft?