LONDON (Reuters) - It was April 1944 when flight engineer Norman Jackson clipped on his parachute, grabbed an extinguisher and crawled out onto the wing of his Lancaster bomber flying through the night at 20,000 feet to put out a fire.

Still under attack from a German fighter after a bombing raid on the town of Schweinfurt, the 25-year-old sergeant's parachute partially opened, caught fire and dragged the badly burned man from the wing into the 200 miles an hour slipstream.

He tumbled to earth, breaking his ankle, was captured and spent 10 months in hospital before being transferred to a prisoner of war camp.

For his extreme courage, King George VI presented Jackson with the Victoria Cross, Britain's top military medal in 1945.

Sixty years after his act of bravery, his children reluctantly put the medal up for sale through auction house Spink, where it sold on Friday for a record 235,250 pounds. ($417,110)

The previous record for one of the rare Maltese Cross-shaped medals which bear the simple inscription "For Valour" and are traditionally made from the metal of Russian cannon captured during the Crimean War, was 178,250 pounds.

Jackson, who later achieved the rank of Warrant Officer, died in 1994 and left the medal to his wife Alma.

But on her death last year her children, who wanted to give the VC to the Royal Air Force Museum, found that because she had not specified which of them was to receive the medal they could only either store it or sell it as part of her estate.