Sorry to all Vans owners!
As for Chippys being prone to spinning, I know it was successfully rebuked - I was using it as an illustration of the attitude prevailing. In fact, of course the Chippy was designed to spin. It was designed as a military trainer when the front line fighters were Spitfire, Mustangs, Tempests etc. Learning on an aircraft which had any spin tendancy removed would make it worse trainer. Plus any increased safety margin at the stall would probably make it more stable and less manoeuvreable - most would agree the handling of the aircraft is it's best feature.
Chippy spinning has a bit of a myth about it which probably arose from the high accident statistics it achieved in RAF service. There were some initial probalems, remedied with the fitting of anti spin stakes and a wider chord rudder. And later in it's service, pilots would climb in one on an Air Training Corps summer camp, think "it's only a Chippy" and then go and have an accident. This prompted an excellent article called "a wolf in sheeps clothing" in the RAF safey magazine 'Air Clues' which highlighted and tried to remedy the errors made by complacent fighter pilots.
In a thousand hours of flying it, I never found it particularly prone to spinning. It's true that you can induce a spin with use of aileron against any roll at the stall, but this is true of many types. I have spun the Chippy many hundreds of times and never had a unpleasant experience. In fact, when we used to teach the RAF students incipeint spinning, the handling was impecable. Entering a spin from about 60 knots in various attitudes, the student was given control and all he/she had to do to recover was centralise the control cloumn and close the throttle - the spin would recover almost immeditely (if acted on promptly enough) - which is exactly what you wanted in a military trainer and why it was so good.