What happened to the five Airspeed Couriers bought in 1936 for the Spanish Republic?

In 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, an arms-trafficking organisation, the Union Founders' Trust, bought five Couriers with the intention of selling them for use by the Republican side. The operation ran into the British political climate: protests by supporters of non-intervention in England stopped the delivery, and the aircraft did not leave by the intended route.

Two Republican sympathisers who worked at Airspeed then tried to take one of the aircraft, registered G-ACVE, on their own. The Courier crashed after taking off at Portsmouth on 20 August 1936. One of the two, Arthur Gargett, died in the accident; the other, Joseph Smith, was sentenced to four months in prison.

Airspeed's co-founder, Nevil Shute, told the episode differently in his autobiography Slide Rule. According to him, six Couriers returned to the company when the operator that ran them suspended its services; soon afterwards war broke out in Spain, the aircraft were quickly sold to various middlemen above their original price, and all of them ended up reaching Spain by roundabout routes. Shute had earned a reputation for being unscrupulous because he resisted the auditors' attempts to write down his book values. The two versions do not fully fit together and do not allow the fate of the five bought by the Union Founders' Trust to be traced aircraft by aircraft.

Spain was not an isolated destination for the Airspeed family of aircraft: the AS.8 Viceroy G-ACMU, a long-range variant built for the 1934 MacRobertson race, was sold in Spain in December 1936 and served during the war.