The late Eric Shipley's Distinguished Flying Cross and four more service decorations went under the hammer during a sale at London's Spink auctioneers.

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An anonymous bidder paid £3,840 for a collection that also included Flt Lt Shipley's goggles and wartime logbooks.

But no price can be put on the raw courage shown by the Middleton-born navigator as he earned his medals.

Educated at Leeds Technical College, he worked for local engineering firm Fawcetts before wartime service with the RAF volunteer reserve.

His first operational sortie sent him to Ostend in Belgium in September 1940, a mission carried out under cover of darkness despite having just five previous night flying hours to his name.

Around the end of 1940, Flt Lt Shipley was shot down over North Africa and taken to what he described in a letter home as "a rat infested desert prison camp" in Algeria.

Flt Lt Shipley was among 30 men who were re-captured after escaping from the camp via a 100-yard tunnel dug at a rate of an inch-and-a-half an hour using table knives and bare hands.

"It was the finest engineering feat I've ever seen," he later recalled to his mother.

Flt Lt Shipley's time as a prisoner of war was finally ended around the turn of 1943 by the Allied advance into North Africa.

Less than a week later he returned to active service as a navigator, clocking up dozens more operational sorties with Mosquito Pathfinder squadrons.

On one occasion over Berlin, his aircraft was caught in searchlights for 15 minutes and subjected to intense fire but he still managed to bring the plane safely back to base.

After the war, Flt Lt Shipley returned to Leeds, where he eventually became chairman and managing director of Fawcetts. He died in 1996, aged 76.