SPITFIRE WOMEN OF WORLD WAR II

Giles Whittell

For Karen

Contents

List of Illustrations

Epigraph

Prologue

1 Encounter

2 No Way Down

3 Queen Bee

4 The First Eight

5 All Over Europe the Air Was Free

6 Escape From Poland

7 None of Us Is Snobbish

8 We LIKE You In Your Harness!

9 Brab’s Beauties

10 The Perfect Lady’s Aeroplane

11 The Originals

12 Team Cochran

13 Over Here

14 Flygirls in London

15 Hamble

16 Heroines

17 Girl Flies Halifax

18 Mayfair 120

19 Over The Top

20 Eyes Wide Shut?

21 Women of the World

22 Left Behind

23 Honeymoon in Belgium

24 Better To Have Lived

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

A Note on Sources

Index

By the same Author

Copyright

About The Publisher

List of Illustrations

Amy Johnson RAF Museum

Gordon Selfridge and Rosemary Rees From ATA Girl, Memoirs of A Wartime Ferry Pilot by Rosemary du Cros

Rosemary Rees with a Miles Hawk Major From ATA Girl, Memoirs of

A Wartime Ferry Pilot by Rosemary du Cros

Audrey Sale-Barker Courtesy Lord James Douglas-Hamilton

Sale-Barker and Joan Page Courtesy Lord James Douglas-Hamilton

Gerard d’Erlanger Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

Pauline Gower in a Tiger Moth Imperial War Museum

Lt. Col. J.T. Moore-Brabazon Imperial War Museum

The ‘First Eight’ Eric Viles/ATA Association

The men of the ATA Imperial War Museum

Lettice Curtis climbing into a Spitfire Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

Curtis and Gower in the cockpit of an Anson Imperial War Museum

Gabrielle Patterson climbing out of an Avro Anson Imperial War Museum

Diana Barnato Walker Courtesy the collection of Diana Barnato Walker

Derek Walker Courtesy the collection of Diana Barnato Walker

Joan Hughes Imperial War Museum

Jackie Sorour Hulton Getty

Mary de Bunsen Photograph by J.D.H. Radford, from Mount Up With Wings by Mary de Bunsen

Freydis Leaf Courtesy Freydis Sharland

Joan Hughes standing with a Short Stirling Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

Maureen Dunlop Hulton Getty

Ann Wood Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

Ann Wood with her fellow flying pupils Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

Waiting to be cleared for take-off in a Spitfire Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

An ATA Anson Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

Ann Blackwell in a Typhoon Imperial War Museum

Jackie Cochran Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

Helen Harrison, Ann Wood and Suzanne Ford Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

Pauline Gower at White Waltham Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

Cochran and Gower Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

King George VI and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

Eleanor Roosevelt at White Waltham Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

Helen Richey Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

Flt. Capt. Francis ‘Frankie’ Francis Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

Bobby Sandoz, Opal Anderson, Jadwiga Pilsudska and Mary Zerbel-Ford Imperial War Museum

‘A tough bunch of babies’ Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

Stewart Keith-Jopp Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

Betty Keith-Jopp Courtesy Katie Hirsch

Lowering the flag A.G. Head/ATA Association

Dorothy Hewitt with Lord Beatty Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

Ann Wood on Remembrance Sunday in London Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

‘Under the bridge goes Lady Penelope’, Daily Express, 21st March 1968 Express Newspapers

Margot Duhalde Courtesy author

Diana Barnato Walker in 1963 Popperfoto

‘Everyone is equal before the machine … There is no tradition in technology, no class-consciousness.’

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Prologue

‘Indaba’ is Zulu for ‘conversation’, and at the Indaba Hotel on the northern outskirts of Johannesburg a conversation is what I hoped for. If it materialised it would be with an elderly lady who had insisted several times on the telephone that she really had nothing to say. But we both knew this was not quite true, and now, as she walked carefully down the steps to the hotel entrance, with a grandson hovering at her shoulder, she looked up with a smile.

‘You must be Betty,’ I said.

She was easily recognisable from the one blurred picture I’d seen of her in a smart blue uniform, leaning on the wing of a Fairey Barracuda over sixty years earlier. Now she wore a gold-coloured woollen shawl and carried a stick. She was tall and alert, and gave the impression she might even be looking forward to our meeting. Her name was Betty Keith-Jopp.

Soon after that photograph was taken in late May 1945, Betty and a fellow pilot named Barbara Lankshear took off from Prestwick on the west coast of Scotland, the eastern terminus of the great Atlantic air bridge that had kept Britain supplied with bombers since before Pearl Harbor. They were both ferry pilots, unarmed and untrained to fly on instruments, with less than eighteen months’ flying experience between them. Both were in Barracudas – lumpy, underpowered torpedo bombers with unusually large cockpits and a history of unexplained crashes. They were bound for Lossiemouth, 200 miles to the north on the rugged Moray Coast.

‘Shall we sit outside?’ Betty asked. She led the way through the hotel lobby and out onto a shaded terrace where we found a table and talked briefly about the weather. Then she ordered a large glass of wine and returned to 1945.

She would never have taken off that day if there had been even a hint of menace in the weather report, she insisted, and initially the sunny forecast seemed to have been accurate. ‘We were flying along perfectly happily. It was a lovely, lovely day.’ But their route took them south of Glasgow, between Dunfermline and Edinburgh and into thick cloud over the northern edge of the Firth of Forth.

As ferry pilots, Third Officers Lankshear and Keith-Jopp had standing orders never to fly over the top of cloud as a way out of trouble. Barbara disobeyed those orders and was lucky to find a way down; she landed safely soon afterwards. But Betty decided discretion was the better part of valour and turned back. She knew there was rising ground behind the coast to her left, so began a slow turn to the right, unaware that she was losing height.

She saw the water a second before hitting it.

‘I made a good landing, all things considered,’ she told me, still quietly astonished at the memory. ‘I just managed to get my nose up and the plane landed gently. It sat there on the surface for a few moments, then started sinking. I must have gone down quite decently, like in a lift.’

Still level, the aircraft settled on the bottom of the firth. Water began squirting into the cockpit from cracks between the canopy and fuselage. At first, not being a strong swimmer, Betty made little effort to get out. She thought of the life insurance payment that her death would trigger; of how her mother would be able to make good use of it caring for her brother, who had recently contracted polio. She thought of Amy Johnson, one of her heroes, dying in similar circumstances four years earlier despite vastly more experience in the air. ‘I can’t remember being frightened,’ she said. ‘I can remember more or less accepting it.’

Then instinct took over. She reached up, took a last breath and pulled the red canopy release lever above her head. A giant bubble from the Barracuda’s oversized cockpit would then have headed for the surface. It could have taken her with it if she had unclipped her straps and parachute harness – but she hadn’t. ‘I wouldn’t have had the intelligence to have worked those things out,’ she said. ‘I was working on reflexes. I was acting purely like an animal. I must have bashed the thing that released the harness once the water had come in. It took forever to get to the top.’

Even so, Betty was alive when she bobbed to the surface. There was a strong swell and the water was bitterly cold. She had no life jacket and the cloud that had engulfed her aeroplane now enveloped her. She had no way of knowing how far she was from the shore until a wave lifted her and she glimpsed it for an instant, too far to swim to but close enough to let her hope. She started to shout.

John Morris, skipper of the trawler Providence from the port of St Monans, would never have been anywhere near Betty had he not developed engine trouble earlier that morning. Nor would he have paid much attention to what sounded at first like a seal if it hadn’t been so persistent. He altered course towards the barking, and Betty’s head appeared out of the mist.

‘All I can remember after that are the words “Hang on, laddie”,’ she said, sixty-one years later, sipping her chenin blanc on a cool South African afternoon. ‘And everything going black, and tea being poured over my hands to warm them up.’ She paused, blinking and smiling almost apologetically as if still unable to fathom her good fortune. ‘Why that dear little fishing boat should have come chugging along just then … really and truly, it was a miracle.’

Yet it was not a miracle that she has often spoken about since. The stories of why Betty Keith-Jopp is so reluctant to talk about her escape from the bottom of the sea, and how she came to be flying into a cloudbank in a Barracuda in the first place, are among those this book tries to tell. They are part of the larger tale of a unique sisterhood of flying addicts – young, hopeful and ridiculously brave – who came to England from five continents to ferry combat aircraft for the Air Transport Auxiliary in the war. There were 164 of them in all, and they were the only women from among the Western Allies who flew in the war. (The Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in Britain stayed firmly on the ground and in America the Women’s Air Service Pilots – or WASPs – flew too, but never less than 3,000 miles from a war zone.) They flew torpedo bombers if they had to and Lancasters if they lasted long enough; but they had eyes mainly for the fastest aerial hot-rods of the age – Hurricanes, Mosquitoes and the plane that many of these ATA women came to feel had been designed especially for them, the Spitfire.

One of these pilots, Margaret Frost, lived for many years in an ancient half-timbered cottage on the far side of my grandmother’s favourite flower bed in Sussex. I’d always known she flew Spitfires in the war, and occasionally she would appear on television on Remembrance Sunday in her best grey overcoat, dwarfed by Guards officers, laying a wreath at the Cenotaph. But I never asked about her flying – that might have been indelicate; and then she moved to Wales.

About twenty years later another ATA pilot, Ann Wood, walked up and introduced herself to me outside the old town hall in Newcastle, New Hampshire. She looked and talked like Katharine Hepburn in her septuagenarian prime, and the only reason I had her attention was that the occasion was my wedding. She had been my wife’s neighbour in Massachusetts for twenty years, and a friend of Margaret Frost’s since 1942.

In that absurd understatement of the war years, they had both ‘done their bit’. Margaret would only venture that she had done her bit for England – and then only if pushed. But Ann was quite comfortable with the idea that she’d done hers for freedom; for a way of life she consciously held dear. She arrived in Liverpool in May 1942, one of twenty-five American women to join the ATA. She flew warplanes continuously until the end of 1945 and she told stories of craziness and courage that I had never heard from our side of the flower bed in Sussex; stories of upside-down engine failure and squeezing under bridges at high tide; of dodging U-boats and romancing Earls and cooling beer down for the Atlantic ferry boys by flying it to 10,000 feet. It turned out that she had also kept a meticulous, clear-eyed diary that serves as a case study of fearlessness, and of mutual Anglo-American incomprehension.

Ann died as this book was being written, and it would have benefited from her criticism. But she and her fellow Spitfire women still deserve to be remembered for the quiet revolutionaries they were; I hope this helps.

1

Encounter

Monday, 22 September 1941 was a miserable day for flying. Low cloud covered England from Bristol to the Scottish borders. Where the overcast thinned an opaque autumn haze still blurred the horizon in every direction, and over the Midlands it mixed with smog from the munitions factories, turning the barrage balloons from a deterrent into an almighty trap. Even so, at about three in the afternoon, a lone Spitfire took off from Prestwick and headed south.

It climbed over the Ayrshire hills, then sped down the Nith valley to Dumfries and crossed the Solway Firth. It picked up the main west coast railway line at Carlisle and followed it past Oxenholme to Appleby, then headed east through the Pennines in search of clearer skies. Visibility did improve, but not by much. Reaching the London-to-Edinburgh line just south of Darlington, the plane turned south again and pressed on through the murk, England slipping beneath it as the enormous Merlin engine in its nose steadily drained its 90-gallon tanks.

The Spitfire was running almost on empty when, soon after 5 p. m., it descended towards Maidenhead and landed safely at what had been the peacetime home of the De Havilland School of Flying at White Waltham in the Berkshire countryside. It was now headquarters of the ATA. The figure who eased herself out of the cockpit once she had taxied to the dispersal area and cut the engine was perhaps the finest woman pilot then flying for the Western Allies. There was no shortage of contenders in both Britain and America, and as Mother Russia fought for survival against the Nazi onslaught the following year her daughters excelled in the air, even in combat. But they had no-one quite like Lettice Curtis.

She was tall and slim, with angular features and a tentative smile. She was a triple Oxford blue (in tennis, swimming and lacrosse) with a degree in mathematics and a reputation, even at twenty-three, for extreme impatience with anyone she thought deserved it. Stepping off the wing of her Spitfire in the dark blue uniform of the Air Transport Auxiliary, she took her delivery chit to the operations room beside White Waltham’s grass airstrip and handed it over with nothing much to report. No-one had been killed. No aircraft had been damaged. There had been no sightings of the enemy even though the entire route was within range of the Luftwaffe and bombing raids were still routine a year after the Battle of Britain. No-one had even tried a loop or a roll for the hell of it – and that was the point. No-one else had been flying.

For most pilots the day had been a washout. That meant unflyable; not worth the risk of ditching in the Wash or sudden death on the slopes of Black Cwm or Shap Fell. In particular, a group of American pilots based at White Waltham, all of them men, had tried taking off that morning. Every one of them turned back.

‘It was many weeks later that I learned this, and of the consternation caused by the arrival of a female in a Spit’,’ Lettice Curtis wrote, and the sentence is laden with meaning. ‘Consternation’ is an exquisite understatement for the pique that a group of pilots apprenticed in barnstorming and crop-dusting across the American mid-west would actually have felt. And Curtis’s satisfaction at having pulled off what the Yanks had balked at may simply have been too intense to put into words. For she was a remorseless competitor despite an expensive education in schools that valued refinement above all, and she had an unhappy knack of seeming less than cordial to Americans. Most of a lifetime later I sat down with another woman pilot in a retirement home in Oregon to talk about her wartime flying. On most subjects she was thoughtful and diplomatic, but when I mentioned Curtis her first words were: ‘Lettice always looked on Americans as if they were a bad smell.’ Which was unfortunate, because more were on their way.

The war by this time was two years old; two years in which tenacity in the air had saved Britain from an invasion across the Channel, and superiority in the air had become Churchill’s obsession. On 12 July 1941 he had sent a note to Sir Charles Craven, Secretary of State for Air, under the command ‘Action this day’. It ended with this peroration:

We must aim at nothing less than having an Air Force twice as strong as the German Air Force by the end of 1942. This ought not to be impossible if a renewed vast effort is made now. It is the very least that can be contemplated, since no other way of winning the war has yet been proposed.

As a direct result of this memo, a gigantic chain of production was willed into being that would eventually rain fire on Dresden and give Eisenhower the air support without which D-Day would have been in vain. At one end of this chain were the bauxite mines of the British Empire and the Americas, from which the raw material for aluminium was dug in ever-increasing quantities. The next link was one of the great flukes of economic history – the astonishing potential for aluminium production created by the building of the huge Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams across the Columbia River in the American north-west in the depths of the Depression. Aluminium is produced by electrolysis; without the dams the Allies would have been hard-pressed to build the air force Churchill was demanding. As it was, from Everett in Washington state, now home town to the Boeing 747, to Castle Bromwich and Southampton, the miraculous silver metal, which in the nineteenth century had been as costly as gold, was banged and moulded into more aircraft in 1944 alone than Germany could produce in the entire war. Initially their cost was met from the Lend Lease loans signed by Roosevelt from October 1941 onwards as a way of aiding Britain without violating US neutrality. Then Pearl Harbor consigned that neutrality to history and rendered the whole question of payment secondary. Pilots were queuing up to fly the aircraft into combat. All that was missing were people to deliver them to the front line.

The first beneficiaries of this desperate need for ferry pilots were, inevitably, men. Thirty of them had been recruited in September 1939 on the initiative of Gerard ‘Pop’ d’Erlanger, an air-minded young merchant banker with an immaculate parting and a strong sense of duty. D’Erlanger was also a director of British Airways and a keen private pilot, and had been worrying for at least a year that hostilities in Europe would bring an acute pilot shortage if flyers like himself could not be used.

‘Dear Balfour,’ he had written in May 1938 to Harold Balfour, then Parliamentary Under Secretary for Air, ‘I know how busy you must be and therefore have hesitated in worrying you, but there is a question which for some time has been puzzling me …’. Was there a reservists’ Air Force in which people like him could enlist? The answer was no, and so, in August 1939, d’Erlanger suggested forming such a unit from holders of private licences with at least 250 hours in the air. The Director General of Civil Aviation, Sir Francis Shelmerdine, agreed, and put d’Erlanger in charge of it. One thousand licence-holders were contacted. One hundred of them replied, and thirty were selected after interviews and flight tests held at British Airways’ wartime base at Whitchurch, outside Bristol. The first intake included a publican, a motorcycling champion and an animal lover who had recently flown back from Africa with two new pets – a cheetah and a chimpanzee.

D’Erlanger had envisaged the ATA as an aerial courier service for VIPs, medicines and the wounded, but even in the Phoney War his pilots were more in demand for ferrying. They called themselves the Ancient and Tattered Airmen because it was a more amusing explanation for their ATA badges than the official one, and because, to a great extent, it was true. In a rumpled sort of way, the ATA was the most exclusive flying outfit of the war. The name was an anomaly, The Times’ aeronautical correspondent noted in 1941, and ‘the body itself one of those curious, almost romantic improvisations which the special demands of war sometimes call into existence’.

To be eligible for membership you had to be ineligible for the RAF but still able to fly. That ruled out clear-eyed, coordinated, brave young men; but it ruled in a different sort of elite; one of oddballs, intellectuals, artists, bank managers, civil servants, wounded veterans and Francis ‘Frankie’ Francis – flying ace, backgammon ace, ex-Guards officer and raven-headed millionaire from the north shore of Lake Geneva. There, in peacetime, he had maintained his own Sikorsky biplane for joyrides over Gstaad and the Haute-Savoie. Come the war, he would have chafed at returning to a military hierarchy but among fellow civilians anxious only to fly, he was adored. It did his reputation no harm that he had the looks and torso of a film star and would strip to the waist for physical jerks whenever the sun came out.

For the winter of 1939–40 the men were seconded to existing RAF ferry ‘pools’ at Hucknall, near Nottingham, and Filton, east of Bristol – the future birthplace of Concorde. Here they got their hands on operational aircraft and were even permitted to ferry them to France. Women, by contrast, were considered by the RAF’s top brass to be unworthy of either privilege, physically or temperamentally. They were never formally attached to RAF units and were based in their own all-civilian pools from the start, which came with the recruitment of the first eight pilots in January 1940. At first the only RAF machines they were allowed to fly were trainers – open cockpit De Havilland Moths, and, later, Miles Magisters (with a blistering top speed of just 132 mph).

The women had to struggle for nearly two years to be allowed in fighters, and five before they started flying them to Europe. Yet it was clear from the outset that despite their relative youth and their nickname (the ‘Always Terrified Airwomen’), they were altogether more formidable than the Ancient and Tattered.

The simple fact of having learned to fly before the war made them an elite within an elite. Their eventual success in flying operational aircraft in the teeth of RAF resistance only compounded their kudos. They were marshalled by the daughter of a prominent Tory MP, championed by a powerful handful of ‘pro-women men’, and led through the air by the likes of Lettice Curtis. They were a close-knit group, barely twenty-strong. Many knew each other from Stag Lane, Heston and Brooklands – London’s most famous pre-war flying clubs. Most were from monied backgrounds, with accents and assumptions to match. Those that were not were ruthlessly frugal. Some were well known, especially to the society editors of the Daily Sketch and the Picture Post. They were ‘It Girls’ doing their bit, but there was nothing remotely superficial about their courage or their motivation. On the contrary, their defining traits were inner steel and a fierce if usually unspoken patriotism.

Later ATA recruits found some of these pioneers downright imperious. Margaret Fairweather, the first woman to fly a Spitfire, was nicknamed the Cold Front. Lettice Curtis was known to everyone in the ATA but that did not mean she would talk to them. (One new arrival from South America remembers handing her a letter of introduction and being stunned when ‘she read it, said nothing and turned away’.) Another relative novice who had to spend a week at the first all-women’s ferry pool at Hamble, near Southampton, called it ‘the loneliest time I’ve ever spent’.

But the exigencies of war – and especially the worsening shortage of pilots as the air war intensified – meant that all-comers would eventually have to be accepted by the pioneers, just as the pioneers had been accepted by the men.

And this was why, towards the end of April 1942 (and four months after Pearl Harbor) two young women in ATA uniform set off from London for Liverpool docks to meet a converted coal carrier called the Beaver Hill. These women were Pauline Gower and the Hon. Mrs Kitty Farrer. Gower, the high-achieving daughter of Sir Robert Gower, MP for Gillingham, had been appointed head of the women’s section of the ATA in September 1939. Farrer was her adjutant. The ship they were meeting had had a rough and dangerous crossing from Montreal. The last convoy to have sailed this route had lost six of its ten vessels to U-boats, but the Beaver Hill somehow made it through both the German blockade and a ferocious three-day storm. On it were five unusual guests of the British government – the first five of twenty-five American women pilots to cross the Atlantic that year to join the ATA.

They cannot have been hard to pick out on the gangplank. In the tide of over a million Americans who came ashore at Liverpool to help Churchill reverse the catastrophe of Nazism only a few handfuls were women. Even so, Commander Gower and Executive Officer Farrer did not get to them first. As the ship’s passengers disembarked, the Englishwomen were dismayed to see the captain and crew, formed up in a ragged line at the end of the gang-plank, surround their charges and smother them in what appeared to be drunken kisses. ‘They grabbed each one of us and hugged us and kissed us on both cheeks,’ one of those women remembered. ‘Pauline Gower was so prim, I can just imagine her thinking, “Oh my god, what are these Americans doing?”’

Miss Gower and Mrs Farrer waited for the raucousness to end. Then they stepped forward to shake hands. By their own account they invited their visitors to dinner at the nearby Adelphi Hotel, and the new arrivals appeared to accept. In fact the Americans were exhausted and went off to sleep. Not one of them showed up at the appointed time, leaving Gower and Farrer to dine alone at a table for seven. They were so affronted that they left on the night train and suggested their American ‘cousins’ make their own way to London in the morning.

That suited Dorothy Furey perfectly.

Furey was the bewitching, violet-eyed daughter of a New Orleans banana importer, and she had already decided that Pauline Gower was uptight. Her father had lost a large fortune in the crash of 1929, and since then she had gained wide experience of the susceptibilities of men. She had also nearly killed herself looping over Lake Ponchartrain in an open cockpit Arrowsport biplane. She was twenty-four when the Beaver Hill docked in Liverpool, and the only one of the five women in her group to have packed an evening gown with her flying gear. She called it her Gone With The Wind dress. It was red and not especially long, and she would use it to spectacular effect before the war was out. Some of the other Americans called her the seductress. Not all were proud of her. For her own part, when Furey looked back on her fellow women pilots at the end of her life she stated quietly: ‘There wasn’t anybody to compare with me.’

Not that her hosts were quick to notice. On arriving in London, Furey and company were escorted directly to a meeting room near the Grosvenor House Hotel and made to listen to a schoolmasterly talk by Pop d’Erlanger on ‘ill-mannered Americans’ and how not to be counted among them. Pop was popular, especially among his peers in the British boardroom class, but he irritated Furey no end.

‘They called him the man with the runways on his shoulder because we all had stripes but he had gold, like an admiral,’ she remembered. ‘And he greeted us with a lecture on ill-mannered Americans. Yes he did. Because they had had some young men who had come over to help and they had, I guess, got drunk and behaved badly. So that was our greeting. I was so furious I nearly got up and walked out, except I didn’t know where I was or where I would go.’

In the event the five Americans were taken to Austin Reed’s on Regent Street to be measured for their uniforms. From there they went to Paddington to catch the train to White Waltham, thirty miles to the west. It was a journey that would become as familiar as ration coupons over the next three years, but it must have seemed unutterably strange that first time – to be trapped in the gaze of English fellow-passengers too war weary and curious to lower their eyes, to stare out at suburbs vast enough to swallow whole a New York borough, and then at ‘countryside’ too thick with roads and villages to count as countryside except on such a crowded island, as the aerodrome that was to be their gateway to a new life of heroic and unprecedented flying clanked closer by the minute.

Cars met the Americans at Maidenhead station. From here they were ferried to ATA headquarters, a flat-roofed, two-storey brick building next to the operations room. As the new arrivals clambered out they realised at once that the aerodrome’s entire male pilot contingent had downed tools to size them up. Faces filled every window; they made a peculiar reception committee. Its members included the gruff and jowly Norman Shelley, an actor who would disappear without explanation for days at a time for what turned out to be stints impersonating Winston Churchill on the radio during the Prime Minister’s secret absences abroad. There were also no fewer than three fully functioning one-armed pilots based there, among them the terrifying Stewart Keith-Jopp, Betty’s uncle, who was also missing an eye. (‘I was told he lost the arm on a bombing run in World War One,’ Betty told me, miming the awkward business of hand-delivering high explosives from the cockpit of a Sopwith Camel. ‘Apparently it went off in his hand, but he never talked about it.’)

The other one-armed men were First Officer R. A. Corrie and the Honourable Charles Dutton, later Lord Sherborne, who was once interrupted by a woman pilot in the White Waltham common room arguing over which arm it was better for a pilot to be without. The answer was not clear, but Dutton did explain that he could take off in a Spitfire only with the control column clenched between his legs. And he could land only with the throttle pulled right back in advance. Every landing was effectively a forced one, with no second chances.

The most discerning judge of the new arrivals was probably Dr Arthur ‘Doc’ Barbour, White Waltham’s chief medic. Barbour was Scottish, single, dedicated to his pilots’ welfare and ‘perfect for the ATA’, according to a colleague who knew him well. He also had a fondness for grainy 16-mm ‘adult films’ that might have got him into trouble in another age, and he insisted that all new pilots, male or female, present themselves unclothed for their medical examinations. Barbour saw no reason to make an exception for the Americans on account of their gender or their nationality. In fact he seems to have relished forcing the issue, which is why one of the first orders given to the women of the Beaver Hill by their new employer was to strip. But by this time they had been joined in London by a mercurial millionairess from Manhattan’s Upper East Side who considered herself their guardian angel – and she was having none of it.

Jacqueline Odlum Cochran, born Bessie Lee Pitman, had first delivered herself to Britain at the controls of a twin-engined Lock-heed Hudson bomber the previous summer. Her many British critics called the trip a publicity stunt, which it was. Publicity had served Cochran well on her journey from shoeless orphan to cosmetics millionairess and daredevil air racer, and she was addicted to it. She was also married to an industrialist who was a friend of President and Mrs Roosevelt and a dependable donor to their Democratic Party. They in turn supported her idea of drawing attention to the work being done by women pilots in war-ravaged Britain. Hence the night crossing from Gander, Newfoundland, to Carlisle and on to Prestwick; nineteen hours in all, which she survived despite acts of sabotage by mutinous ground crews and mysterious tracer bullets fired up at her from the middle of the Atlantic.

Given only a little more luck, Jackie Cochran might have become a thoroughgoing megalomaniac. She had grand visions of an all-female US military flying force answering to none other than Jackie Cochran, and throughout the war she worked tirelessly to make this vision a reality. But first she had to settle for hiring twenty-five competent women pilots with at least 350 hours’ flying experience to help ferry planes round Britain. By the time she started welcoming them to London she had travelled the length and breadth of North America to interview candidates whom she had canvassed in advance with long, excited telegrams.

‘CONFIDENTIAL,’ one of them began.

ON BEHALF OF BRITISH AIR TRANSPORT AUXILIARY I AM WIRING ALL THE WOMEN PILOTS WHOSE ADDRESSES AVAILABLE TO ASK IF YOU WOULD BE WILLING TO VOLUNTEER FOR SERVICE … EVERY FRONT NOW OUR FRONT AND FOR THOSE DESIRING QUICK ACTIVE SERVICE SHORT OF ACTUAL COMBAT BUT INCLUDING FLIGHT EXPERIENCE WITH COMBAT PLANES THIS SERVICE ABROAD SEEMS IDEAL CHANCE … WIRE ME 630 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK CITY AND YOU WILL RECEIVE LETTER WITH MORE DETAILS … RELEASE NO PUBLICITY AS A RESULT OF THIS TELEGRAM.

When Cochran’s gals started arriving in England she was ready for them, at the Savoy. White Waltham must have seemed terribly humdrum by comparison, but when she drove down there, at the wheel of a borrowed Daimler, it was not so much the shortage of glamour that irked her. It was ‘Doc’ Barbour’s order to get undressed.

Cochran was livid. She was a bit of a prude, and she fancied herself as defender-in-chief of the good name of her handpicked representatives of dynamic American womanhood. ‘There he is,’ she wrote of Barbour, ‘adamant about his damn procedures. There I am – not about to take off all my clothes or let the other American girls be subjected to such ridiculous procedures. Where was it stated that England needed its pilots to be examined in the buff?’

In the end it didn’t matter. For both the British and the American governments, Cochran was an unclassifiable anomaly whose personal contacts and sheer force of will demanded attention. A pal of Roosevelt’s – blonde, rich, short-fused, married but without her husband in attendance – had taken up residence at the Savoy. She could not be allowed to storm home firing off tirades to the White House about British ingratitude. Instead, when she stormed back to London and started complaining to Pop d’Erlanger’s paymasters at the Air Ministry, he caved in. The message was passed to Doc Barbour at White Waltham that he would have to satisfy himself with stethoscope and tongue depressor. Dorothy Furey and her fellow Americans entered the Air Transport Auxiliary with their clothes on.

Cochran had won her first pitched battle with England’s ‘damn procedures’. But she had lost any hope of being accepted by the British Establishment into which she had barged. According to the splendidly sober Lettice Curtis, Cochran had ‘entirely misjudged the wartime mood of the British people’. And it was true. Ground down by rationing – of clothes as well as food – and with little first-hand experience of the United States, most Britons bought into the stereotype of American women as movie stars or gold diggers more readily than they let on. And Cochran’s presence only reinforced it.

American men were not much more graciously received. When GIs started arriving in numbers later in 1942 they looked so healthy that Londoners started calling them ‘pussies’. Margaret Fairweather was even blunter. ‘What a strange, barbaric lot,’ she sighed in a letter to her brother about the ‘cousins’. ‘So well up in bodily civilization and so dismally lacking in mind. They are really – the ones we contact at least – great over-grown wild adolescents.’

The disappointment was mutual. Ann Wood arrived in England as a twenty-four-year-old flying instructor infused with transatlantic solidarity by what she had seen in newsreels and heard in the CBS radio broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow. But the Brits and Britishness quickly drove her nuts. At first she gave them the benefit of the doubt. Landing in Liverpool a month after Dorothy Furey, she was impressed by the sight of ‘fifty cheery little men’ from HM Customs and Excise who came aboard her ship, a French Canadian freighter called the Indochinois. They were ‘wonderful – didn’t open a thing’. But once ashore she was immediately struck by ‘the blackness and dirt … and then the poverty’ of Britain.

She was unimpressed by the ‘pretence’ of the British labourer in his shirt and tie and ‘inevitable tan raincoat which is black and shiny with grease’; by the ‘puny moustaches’ on so many supposedly stiff upper lips; by the lack of variety on the BBC, not just compared with back home but also with German radio, to which she also listened; by the ‘utter and complete mess’ of the White Waltham canteen; and above all by the unwarranted superiority complex of the British officer class, which was happy to blame America for anything and everything while its members blithely gamed the system for a few extra petrol coupons. As she wrote more than once during her first British summer, when rain and mandatory navigation classes kept her grounded for days at a time, ‘sometimes I wonder about this war’.

The British, it seems, wondered less. (This, too, exasperated Wood. Her diary is peppered with pleas to her hard-pressed hosts to ‘sacrifice less and THINK more’.) But then, for the British, the war was a much simpler matter of life and death.

A few weeks after Ann Wood disembarked at Liverpool, another smart young woman took off from White Waltham in a strong crosswind. She was flying a low-winged monoplane with an open cockpit called a Miles Magister, and her assignment was to familiarise herself with southern England. She was to land at Henlow, then fly over RAF Debden in Essex, head north towards Wattisham in Suffolk, land again at Sywell near Northampton and be back at White Waltham in time for tea. That day, she got no further than Debden.

Diana Barnato was an exceptional, intuitive pilot who once landed a Typhoon at 230 mph with a clear view of the runway beneath her feet because the underside of the plane had been torn off in mid-air. She was also lucky, and very rich. The daughter of British motor-racing champion Woolf Barnato, and granddaughter of a South African diamond tycoon who had provided amply for his descendants before being ‘lost’ over the side of the SS Christiana somewhere off Namibia, Diana felt just enough fear to survive. But not much more.

High over Debden that April morning the wind began to throw the Magister around as if preparing to snap its fabric wings in two. She decided to land, and made her way unannounced towards the aerodrome buildings.

Thanks to her parallel existence as a socialite it was rare for Miss Barnato to enter an RAF mess and not know a face or two, and Debden did not disappoint. She immediately recognised Sas de Mier, a Mexican air gunner then flying with the RAF in Bristol Blenheims over northern Germany. He introduced her over lunch to ‘a well-built, thickset young man, dark with blue eyes [and] one of the worst haircuts I had ever seen’. This was Squadron Leader Humphrey Gilbert of the Humphrey Gilberts of Revesby Abbey in Lincolnshire. ‘We got along fine,’ Diana recalled.

Gilbert had the Magister’s spark plugs removed and Diana was forced to spend three days at Debden, in which time she and Gilbert fell in love. Within three weeks they were engaged. Within a month, Gilbert was dead. He had survived the Battle of Britain to be killed giving a corpulent air traffic controller a lift in his Spitfire. As the ATA women were soon to learn, there was no spare room in a Spitfire cockpit even for the slimmest of them. Humphrey Gilbert, with a whole extra body in his lap, had found out too late that he couldn’t pull the stick back. The aircraft barely left the ground.

Diana mourned Humphrey for many years, but not to the exclusion of pleasure or excitement or the company of other men. Life was too short – and too ethereal – for that, and the importance of filling every unforgiving minute with excitement was something on which all the early ATA women could agree. These included a willowy blonde ski champion called Audrey Sale-Barker (better known for most of her life as the Countess of Selkirk); the ice hockey international Mona Friedlander, whom the Fleet Street diarists quickly nicknamed ‘the Mayfair Minx’; and Lois Butler, wife of the chairman of the De Havilland Aircraft Company, and former captain of the Canadian women’s ski team.

Pauline Gower, who as Commander of the ATA women’s section was queen bee of British women pilots in the war, had first excelled as the perfect schoolgirl at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Tunbridge Wells. She was the Mother Superior’s pet: bright, bouncy, diligent and fizzing with ideas. One of these, while still a teenager, was to follow her father into the Conservative party as an MP. But then an infection that required surgery almost killed her at seventeen, and permanently weakened her health. So she took up flying as ‘the perfect sedentary occupation’. Mary de Bunsen, who was seldom photographed without thick glasses and a furrowed brow, found it a thrilling distraction from ‘the ghastly importance of a good marriage’.

When these young ladies landed at stately homes and castles converted for use as Satellite Landing Grounds, they would often recognise the great lawns from weekend house parties. When they first flew Hurricanes, they celebrated with a sumptuous dinner at the Ecu de France in St James’s – for who knew what tomorrow would bring?

The weather was always the decisive factor. When the sun shone at White Waltham, and the great Flight Captain Frankie Francis set hearts aflutter by removing his shirt and flexing his muscles, and the spire of the Collegial Church of St John the Baptist at Shottesbrooke could be seen beyond the trees at the western end of the runway, that meant good flying weather; at least two miles’ visibility. The Shottesbrooke spire in plain view meant ferry chits at nine o’clock and long days in the air. It meant butterflies, because no good pilot ever assumed fog would not rear up out of a cloudless sky and grab her; but more than that it held the prospect of total gratification.

No women in Britain in the war were more admired for doing their bit – nor for their uniform – than those who flew with the ATA. But in doing so they partook of a very private pleasure. ‘Our happiness was almost indecently visible in time of trouble and distress,’ Mary de Bunsen fretted – unnecessarily. As Lettice Curtis knew, no-one ever saw these women at their happiest. To be airborne over the Pennines on a clear spring morning with a delivery to Colerne, Kirkbride or even Lossiemouth, jumping-off point for Scapa Flow and the murderous North Atlantic, was to be ‘blissfully cut off from the rest of the world’. Alone in the cockpit, ‘past and present would recede until existence became once more a pinpoint in time, concerned solely with the immediate present of gauges, weather, navigation and finding that next landmark’.

But when the cloud came down, so did the dreadful pall of death. Ferrying aircraft around well-defended Britain was, bizarrely, one of the most lethal activities on offer to either men or women in this war. Nearly one in ten of the ATA’s women pilots died. None of them ever fired a shot in anger because they flew unarmed, so they were sitting ducks should the Luftwaffe happen on them. They could also be shot at by friendly ack-ack units, ensnared by barrage balloons and, at any moment, ambushed by the weather. They flew without radio, and this was tightrope-walking without a safety net: no weather ‘actuals’, no check calls to the nearest RAF or met station, no radio beam to home in on.

Immediately in front of their joysticks, on Spitfires and almost every other class of aircraft used by the RAF, was the same six-instrument panel: air speed indicator, altimeter, gyro compass, attitude indicator, turn-and-slip gauge and artificial horizon. ATA pilots knew what each instrument did and they used them separately every time they flew. But in the alchemic business of saving their own lives by using these instruments together to work out where they were going when the gloom outside their canopies was thick as concrete – in blind flying – they had no formal training at all. They were told this was to discourage going ‘over the top’ of cloud and generally ugly weather; and they were told this despite the fact that getting down through generally ugly weather is what instrument flying is for. The real reason seems to have been to save time and money, and the cost would be in lives.

When the Shottesbrooke spire was lost in cloud ATA pilots were not obliged to fly, but they still did. Out of boredom, rivalry, the pressure to deliver aircraft, or sometimes needling from operations officers who were themselves being needled by a chain of command that stretched directly to the Ministry of Aircraft Production and Churchill, they flew in all weathers, convincing themselves that holes would open up and let them down through the great blankets of condensation that kept England so green. They also flew every type of aircraft produced by the Allies. There were nearly 200 of them, from lumbering amphibian Supermarine Walruses to high-altitude reconnaissance Spitfires; from Blenheims and Beaufighters to Mitchells and Mosquitoes, from unsinkable old Tiger Moths to half-baked experiments like the Airacobra, with a rear-mounted engine and a transmission shaft that spun furiously between the pilot’s legs.

What training the ATA pilots did have was thorough, and they were justly proud of it. It consisted of ground school in meteorology, map-reading, navigation and mechanics, with special classes on where to expect barrage balloons; then dual and solo flights in docile Moths to build confidence for the marginally faster Miles Magisters. In these, recruits were expected to complete no fewer than thirty long cross-country flights along fixed routes, intended to imprint on pilots’ minds a giant aerial picture of England, with particular attention paid to railway lines and Roman roads since these were often the best guides out of trouble. Finally, pilots were assigned to ferry pools for ‘Class I’ ferrying, of light, single-engined planes. For promotion to faster Class II machines and above, all the way up to Class V four-engined bombers, conversion courses were eventually offered at the RAF’s Central Flying School at Upavon in Wiltshire.

No training programme could familiarise every pilot with every type of plane in the sky. So they familiarised themselves, using a ring-bound set of handling notes prepared by Flight Engineer Bob Morgan of the British Overseas Airways Corporation. Twenty minutes with Morgan’s notes was usually enough to work out what made a Walrus different from a Wellington, but not always, especially if the Walrus had been shot up or marked down as unserviceable. The ATA would still fly it to the wrecker’s yard.

For combat pilots, the risks of flying varied from intense, in battle, to non-existent, on leave. For ferry pilots they were virtually constant. The weather never went away, and they (almost) never stopped flying. They worked thirteen days a fortnight and died steadily, on hillsides, in the Irish Sea, when their engines failed or blew up or their undercarriage refused to come down. The casualties’ names were posted on the ferry pool notice board every morning, and everyone knew the dead as well as it was possible to get to know someone who might be gone at any moment. One notice at White Waltham read:

Accident Report. 12 September 1942. Hurricane JS346. Prince Chirasakti.

Near Langholm 11.30 hours; aircraft flew into hill, the pilot having persisted too far into hilly country contrary to orders …

Thus perished the ATA’s only Siamese royal. Diana Barnato remembered him fondly. ‘Keen type,’ she wrote. ‘Pressed on too long. I shed a tear.’

By the time the Americans arrived, everyone who greeted them already understood what they had yet to learn. This flying lark was not a lark. The previous November Lettice Curtis had taken off from the Kirkbride (No. 16) Ferry Pool minutes before one of her most illustrious superiors, Captain Walter Handley of pre-war motorbike racing fame and the ferry pool at Hawarden, tried to do the same in a dreaded Airacobra. The engine over-revved and belched black smoke on the take-off run, but by that time Wally was committed. Seconds after leaving the ground his aircraft exploded.

Bridget Hill and Betty Sayer, the first women pilots to die, did not have the luxury of wondering in their final seconds what they could do to save themselves. They were passengers in a taxi plane that crashed through the roof of a house on the edge of the White Waltham aerodrome on 18 March 1942. Hill’s closest friend from school was another ATA girl, Honor Salmon. She, too, was dead by summer.

When Diana Barnato’s fiancé died, she cried briefly, in a phone box, until First Officer Corrie, one of the White Waltham one-armers, lost patience waiting for the phone and banged to be let in. But on the whole her compatriots conformed to stereotype. On hearing that a friend had died, they went quiet, pale, and after a while reached for the sherry.

This inordinate self-control impressed some of the visitors. Roberta Sandoz, one of the last Americans to arrive in 1942, eventually became friends with several of the earliest women recruits, including one who, she recalled, ‘had already lost her first husband and while she was flying with me her son was killed in the air force. I think she missed two days’ work. There was not a lot of embracing and sobbing and commiserating, and I admired that.’

Sandoz herself kept flying through the grief of losing her fiancé, a US Navy cadet who was killed in the Pacific shortly after her arrival in England. She was every bit as stoic as the British, but that did not stop the steely Lettice Curtis remarking that the Americans were much more outspoken than their European counterparts, ‘and more emotional when their fellow pilots were killed’.

Whether the stiff upper lip extinguished fear or hid it was a personal thing, but there is evidence that the ATA’s women may have coped better than its men with the imminence of death. There are repeated references in diaries and memoirs to men sitting around in common rooms on ‘washout’ days content to leave the verdict of the weather people unchallenged, while women took off into the murk on the off-chance of getting through. There was Betty Keith-Jopp, who remembered her lift-like descent to the bottom of the Firth of Forth six decades later with undimmed amazement – not so much at her escape as at thinking calmly of the insurance payment her mother would receive. There was Mary de Bunsen, lame from childhood polio and with a congenital heart defect that left her breathless every time she climbed into a Hurricane. ‘You know,’ she told a fellow pilot towards the end of the war, ‘when I was in training pool I was so certain that I was going to be killed within the next few weeks that I didn’t bother much.’ By morbid contrast there was Flying Officer W. F. Castle, married with a son, from Birmingham. He had arrived at White Waltham in November 1941 with both arms and both eyes but precious little confidence – which the ATA training staff proceeded to undermine.

Castle brooded nightly in his diary:

November 8th. Our instructors are forever emphasizing the lethal nature of the forces which will soon be under our control if misused. This point is pressed home as every subject is taken.

November 19th. Now that I have started flying it is being brought home to me very clearly that this is not what you would call a particularly safe job … Although we are not required to fly in bad weather it often seems to happen that someone has flown into a hillside during bad visibility. Three deaths are reported this week, and there must have been two or three others besides since I have been here. I dread to think of leaving Peg and Daniel alone … the thought of Daniel, my son, being brought up without me chills my heart. I am determined to take every precaution possible.’

The next day, after stalling on take-off in a Magister, Castle was close to desperate:

It is being borne in on me more and more that if I am to preserve my skin I must quickly develop a sound flying sense and take no chances whatever … The sooner I can get away from the congested area of White Waltham the better it will suit me.

As long as the very human Castle pondered his mortality, and the ice cool Lettice Curtis flew in and out of White Waltham, rain or shine, as if on auto pilot, there could be no room for overt male chauvinism within the ranks of the ATA.

In the wider world, it was a different story. From the moment Pauline Gower had first talked to Sir Francis Shelmerdine about hiring women pilots at government expense to help mobilise for war, those who considered flying somehow intrinsically male began to vent. And no-one gave them more space to do so than C.G. Grey, editor of Aeroplane magazine and an old friend of Betty Keith-Jopp’s uncle, Stewart. Early on, Grey weighed in himself. ‘We quite agree that there are millions of women in the country who could do useful jobs in the war,’ he wrote in reply to a letter Mary Bailey had sent in support of Gower. (Lady Bailey had flown from London to South Africa in a Tiger Moth in 1929, pausing only to attend a reception in her honour in Khartoum in a tweed flying suit.)

But the trouble is that so many of them insist on wanting to do jobs which they are quite incapable of doing. The menace is the woman who thinks that she ought to be flying a high-speed bomber when she really has not the intelligence to scrub the floor of a hospital properly, or who wants to nose round as an Air Raid Warden and yet can’t cook her husband’s dinner.

Grey was right about the dinner, wrong about the menace. Lettice Curtis was a consummate flyer and completely uninterested in cooking. To be obsessive about flying and deliberately careless about anything conventionally ‘female’ was, in fact, the norm for ATA girls. This infuriated Harold Collings (Aeroplane, 5 January, 1940):

Women are not seeking this job for the sake of doing something for their country … Women who are anxious to serve their country should take on work more befitting their sex instead of encroaching on a man’s occupation. Men have made aviation reach its present perfection.

Some of Aeroplane’s female readers agreed: ‘I think the whole affair of engaging women pilots to fly aeroplanes when there are so many men fully qualified to do the work is disgusting!’ one wrote. ‘The women themselves are only doing it more or less as a hobby, and should be ashamed of themselves!’

She was not entirely wrong. Some of the women had taken up flying strictly for practical reasons. Lettice Curtis and Ann Wood, for instance, insisted that at first they saw it simply as a livelihood. But for most it was indeed a hobby, and one that often deepened into an obsession. And why not? What self-respecting pilot would not have grown obsessional about the prospect, however remote, of flying something as fast and glamorous and responsive – and as feminine – as a Spitfire?

Nothing parked these days on the grass apron at White Waltham comes close to the sheer power of a Spitfire. Even the Mark 1, with its bashful two-bladed propeller, had the thrust equivalent of six supercharged racing Bentleys crammed into its nose. At 16,000 feet its 27-litre Merlin II engine could generate more than 1,000 horsepower; enough to pull the pilot wedged behind it through the air at more than half the speed of sound.

Spitfires were so streamlined that when taxiing the heat produced by their engines had nowhere to go. Reginald Mitchell had removed the side-mounted radiators on the Supermarine seaplane on which he based his new design, replacing it with ineffectual slimline air intakes under the wings. If Spitfires weren’t released quickly into the air, the glycol in their cooling systems would boil. They hated sitting around once started up, but once off the ground they made their pilots sing.

Even four-engined bombers proved easily handled by the tiniest women pilots. But the Spitfire, without exception, was their favourite. Mary de Bunsen would rejoice when let loose in one by humming fugues from Bach’s B Minor Mass. Lettice Curtis warbled in prose: ‘To sit in the cockpit of a Spitfire, barely wider than one’s shoulders, with the power of the Merlin at one’s fingertips, was a poetry of its own,’ she wrote. ‘The long, flat-topped cowling and the pop-popping stub exhausts gave an almost breathtaking feeling of power, and the exhilaration of throwing it around, chasing clouds or low flying – strictly unauthorised in our case – was something never to be forgotten by those who experienced it.’

And who would experience it? The arrival of the Americans risked dividing the women of the ATA. Would they all be as bumptious as Jackie Cochran? Could they fly? Were they really needed? But the yearning to fly Spitfires, and to a lesser extent Hurricanes, was something they all shared. This, no less than their desire to be involved in the war, was what accounted for their steady convergence on southern England, not just from across Britain and the United States but from Poland, Chile, Argentina and the Dominions.

Most of them believed passionately in the Allied cause, but all could have served it elsewhere and less dangerously had they not become smitten with the idea of flying the most thrilling aeroplane yet built. And verdant, crowded, hungry England was the only place in the world where they would be allowed to do it.

For the pilots, the war meant virtual parity of opportunity with men, eventual parity of pay, and all the flying they could handle. For their mentors, Pauline Gower and Jackie Cochran, it seemed to be a stepping-stone to an elevated yet egalitarian future. ‘I would say that every woman should learn to fly,’ Gower declared in an interview for the April 1942 issue of Woman’s Journal. ‘Psychologically, it is the best antidote to the manifold neuroses which beset modern women. The war has already accomplished much in this regard, but with the return of peace my advice to all women will still be – “Learn to fly”.’

Jackie Cochran would have seconded that, but she wanted to do more than liberate modern women from their ‘neuroses’. She wanted to change men’s minds about women. The spring of 1942 found them both shuttling between White Waltham and London, politicking while their protégées hurtled round the skies above them. Their styles were diametrically opposite, but their goals were complementary. In a world turned upside-down, they even seemed achievable.

On the evening of 30 March that year, a rare joint appearance by Gower and Cochran set off an explosion of flashbulbs in Leicester Square. They had arrived together for the première of They Flew Alone, a hastily shot feature starring Anna Neagle about a woman pilot more famous than either of them would ever be. Her life had inspired many of the Spitfire women, but her death the previous year, at this point still shrouded in mystery, had prefigured many of their disappointments. Her name was Amy Johnson.

2

No Way Down

The film playing at Leicester Square that March night in 1942 depicted one of the most spectacular lives of the thirties, and one of the more mysterious deaths of the war. Towards the end of the film there is a scene set at Squire’s Gate aerodrome outside Blackpool.

The date is 4 January 1941. The time is 11.45 a.m. Mist shrouds the aerodrome buildings, but within sight of them a bulky twin-engined Airspeed Oxford, both propellers spinning, sits on the concrete apron. In the cockpit is Amy Johnson, Hull fish merchant’s daughter, ferry pilot and celebrity. Without her example of reckless daring over the previous ten years it is doubtful that the ATA would have had a pool of trained women pilots to call on, let alone an army of women volunteers hoping to be trained from scratch. As she waits she smokes a cigarette and chats to a refueller who has climbed into the co-pilot’s seat to keep her company; she is hoping for better weather.

The scene unfolds on film as in life, except that in They Flew Alone Amy Johnson’s face is Anna Neagle’s – a thing of perfect skin and symmetry, and pluck shining from her very eyes. In real life the face was longer; a mournful-looking oval. Even so, despite a washed-out Christmas at Prestwick’s Orangefield Hotel, with nothing to stare at for six days but fog, everyone Amy Johnson talked to over those last few days recalled that she seemed unusually content.

In the film she talks like Eliza Doolittle after Professor Higgins’s ministrations. In life, a trace of a Hull accent lingered despite years of elocution lessons. In the film, when a third figure emerges from the mist to report that the weather’s just as bad right down to Oxfordshire, she glances up at him and makes the only decision that was in fact imaginable for Amy Johnson. She says she will ‘crack through and fly over the top’. In reality she said something very similar.

For most of the 164 women who ferried planes for the ATA during the war it was the pinnacle of their flying careers, unrepeatable after the war even as men went supersonic, into orbit and to the moon. For Amy Johnson it was something of a come-down, and a point of realisation that her celebrity could no longer cleave a path through Britain’s hidebound bureaucracy. She had wanted a wartime role crafted specially for her, pioneering fast new airline routes to bind beleaguered Britain closer to her colonies, or swooping into northern France (before it fell) to keep young Tommy chipper. She offered to advise the Air Ministry – on what she wasn’t sure. As it turned out, the Air Ministry had plenty of advisors.

Johnson had been overlooked for head of the ATA’s women’s section in favour of Pauline Gower, and even when Gower begged her to join she had to take a test. Once a ferry pilot, she had to leave her Astrakhan-collared flying coats in storage and wear navy worsted and a forage cap. And she had to share common rooms and taxi planes with the other girls even though, as she commented to her father, they practically worshipped her. Was this any way to treat the most famous woman pilot in the world?

Eleven years before that dank morning at Squire’s Gate, Johnson had been sitting in another cockpit waiting for another weather window. This time the aircraft was a De Havilland Gipsy Moth, the Morris Traveller of the skies, a dope-and-canvas biplane built to cruise at 90 mph. Amy had named it Jason, which was the telegraphic address of her father’s fish business. The venue was Croydon Airport. She had tried once already to take off but had failed to get the throttle forward fast enough to compensate for the weight of two extra fuel tanks and had pulled up a few feet from the perimeter fence. Now she tried again. Her father and a small group of friends watched from the tarmac in front of the aerodrome hotel. Jack Humphreys, her mentor and engineering tutor, had a sense of what she was getting into and was rigid with tension. William Johnson, down from Hull specially for this, had even less idea than his daughter of the risks she was running.

This time the Moth just cleared the fence. It staggered over the rows of houses beyond, its tiny engine (one tenth as powerful as the least powerful Spitfire’s) hammering up into the westerly wind. Johnson climbed over Purley Rise and the Selsden Park golf course and levelled out over the waking villages of Kent. She set course for Vienna.

Virtually unknown, she was airborne thanks to her father’s patronage and a modest fuel sponsorship arrangement with Charles ‘Cheers’ Wakefield, father of the Castrol brand of engine oil. But what made the combination combustible, and almost fatal, was her own searing ambition to be someone special. And three short weeks later she had realised that ambition. She was being mobbed by crowds of Australians wherever she put down, and bombarded with telegrams from Blériot, Einstein and King George V.

Amy Johnson was the first woman to fly solo to Australia. In the cockpit she wore leather when it was cold and cotton when it was hot, and she depended throughout her twenty-day flight on a four-cylinder, 110-horsepower engine pulling an aircraft with a spare propeller strapped to the outside of its fuselage. It was a breathtakingly modern thing to do. A handful of men had squeezed the 11,000 miles from Southampton to Sydney into a journey measured in days rather than weeks, but for a woman to attempt it – less than half a generation after being given the vote – was practically unthinkable. She had beaten Bert Hinkler’s record as far as Delhi, but it was not for speed that Australia adored her. It was for having shrunk the world more vividly and definitively than a strutting male action hero could ever have. Here was the girl next door (sunburned and overtired, it was true), whose next door was in Hull. She had a toothy smile, a perpetually awed voice and actually seemed to like Australia. She also had the strange aura of someone who had cheated death.

Johnson’s strategy for beating Hinkler’s record rested on the idea of flying in a straight line. As far as she could tell from the primitive maps that were all Stanford’s bookshop had for most of the journey, this would shave 700 miles off his route. Hinkler had looped south through Rome to Malta to maximise, he hoped, his number of nights on British imperial soil. Johnson headed straight for Constantinople via Austria. On the way, an overbearing crew of Viennese mechanics insisted on overhauling her engine but succeeded only in gumming up a spark plug. (This may never have come entirely ungummed; despite Johnson’s hard-won engineering certificate and her meticulous filtering of all the fuel that entered Jason’s engine, one of the male pilots deputed to escort her on her victory lap of Australia wrote later, with ill-disguised satisfaction, that he had never seen ‘an engine in such appalling condition’ as hers.)

From Constantinople, Johnson had to find a way through Anatolia’s forbidding Taurus Mountains, and this is where her straight line became sinuous. As she approached the mountains around lunchtime on 7 May, they were covered by cloud. She climbed to stay in clear air, as she would years later with much less reason to be scared. But at 11,000 feet her ‘engine started an ominous coughing and spitting’, she wrote afterwards:

I descended to 10,000 feet and decided to try to follow the railway through its winding gorges … I had one very unpleasant moment when threading my way through an exceptionally narrow gorge with the mountains rising sheer on either side of me only a few feet from my wings and towering high above. Rounding a corner I ran straight into a bank of low clouds, and for an awful minute could see nothing at all. In desperation I pushed down the nose of the machine to try to dive below them, and in half a minute – which seemed to me an eternity – I emerged from the cloud at a speed of 120 with one wing down and aiming for a wall of rock. Once I could see where I was going it was easy to straighten the machine, but I was rather badly shaken.

Johnson’s passage through the Taurus Mountains was undoubtedly terrifying and it marked her graduation from suburban dilettante to Shackletonian adventurer.

From Aleppo she flew to Baghdad, with only one forced landing in the desert, then down the Tigris, over Basra and on to Bandar Abbas at the eastern end of the Persian Gulf, her journey advanced across the Middle East like a line on a map in a movie. It was followed with quietly mounting interest in newsrooms the length of Fleet Street.

On 10 May, Johnson flew clear over Baluchistan and into aviation legend. Landing that evening at Drigh Road aerodrome outside Karachi, she had beaten Hinkler’s Croydon-to-India record by two days and handed the papers an exquisitely constructed rolling news story. The tale of Britain’s lone girl flyer had been germinating nicely ever since a reporter for the London Evening News had chanced on her at the Stag Lane Flying Club’s hangar in North London five months earlier. He had written a prominent exclusive about a twenty-two-year-old blonde from the Midlands that was inaccurate in every detail except the headline: ‘Girl To Fly Alone To Australia’. The scoop was widely followed up. Then interest slumped. It began to return when she took off, and when she smashed her first record she was considerate enough to do so a short drive from a major node of the British Empire. Karachi had reliable telegraphic links to London and a surfeit of hungry stringers. Best of all, it was at least ten days from Australia, even in a Gipsy Moth. If this Johnson lass could only keep flying, her story had legs.

She obliged. She pressed on despite crash-landing on a playing field near Rangoon, impaling her wings on bamboo shoots on a sugar plantation in Java, going missing for twenty-four hours over the shark-infested waters of the Balinese archipelago and shuddering to a halt in the half-light among six-foot anthills near the Portuguese colonial outpost of Atamboea. Every night she threw herself on the mercy of those she found. Every day she fought fatigue, rain, heat, volcanic dust storms and a private catalogue of terrors including, but not limited to, cannibals, engine failure and death by corkscrew dive into the sea.

It made terrific copy. The News of the World wanted exclusive rights and opened the bidding at £500 while Johnson was in the air between Calcutta and Rangoon. Before she took off again, the Daily Mail had won the auction (which was handled by her father) for four times as much.

When she landed in Darwin on Empire Day, solid servants of that empire cried with joy from Hull to Canberra. One who confessed to tears was a retired naval rating who wrote to Johnson’s parents that ‘in all a long, adventurous life’ he’d seen nothing to compare with their daughter’s flight. ‘I was down the Java coast in 1858; you see I have been all that long journey myself and so have just a little idea of what it means. But then to do it alone, and in the air; it is more than wonderful, it is marvellous.’

The use of ‘wonderful’ was a reference to ‘Wonderful Amy’, an instant, cloying hit that played in music halls from Clapham to Llandudno all that summer. Not to be outdone, the pseudonymous Wilhelmina Stitch divided her ‘Fragrant Minute’ column in the Daily Sketch into four breathlessly worshipful stanzas, ending:

Amy! For ever more your name will stand synonymous with pluck;

And when we weary of life’s game, or when we whine and blame ‘our luck’;

We’ll think of your immortal plane and spread our wings and try again.

Johnson’s flight to Australia was a singular achievement: pure in conception, pure in execution and perfectly encapsulating the escapist yearnings of a nation ground down by the Depression. But it was conjured from a complicated life.

As a teenager Amy had been a tomboy and a rebel. When she ‘grew up’, which she never really did, she combined soaring ambition with morbid self-doubt, vanity with shyness and outward prudishness with a serious libido. At the Boulevard School in Hull she was the only girl who could bowl overarm in cricket, and she led two mutinies. One of these involved wearing soft straw Panamas instead of hard straw boaters because she hated straw boaters and because her more vivacious sister, Irene, had moved to the more exclusive Hull High School – where they wore Panamas.

Constance Babington Smith, Johnson’s first biographer, insists that the ‘Revolt of the Straw Hat Brigade’ ended up a humiliating solo effort. (The evidence from Johnson herself tends to support this: ‘The majority of schoolgirls have no gumption at all,’ she wrote later to her younger sister, Molly.) But there was no place for solitary gumption in They Flew Alone, shot in wartime as a propagandist piece. Everybody needed it. So everyone at the school shows up in Panamas and Amy is the Boulevard’s Boadicea.

In fact she was a loner, quick to brood and slow to smile, especially after losing her two front teeth to a cricket ball and having them inexpertly replaced. As a teenager she may have been shy, though this was not the same as being afraid of boys – or men. On the contrary, by the time she was sixteen she was infatuated with one of the more exotic creatures to have graced Hull society before the war. Babington Smith, writing in the 1960s, spared his blushes by referring to him as ‘Franz’. His real name was Hans Arreger. He was Swiss, sarcastic, rather squat, full in the lips and twenty-four years old. Johnson’s aunt Evelyn had met him at her tennis club and invited them both to one of her parties. She was his ticket to better English and, eventually, to furtive encounters in London hotels. He was her Rudolph Valentino.

By later, wartime, standards their affair was not wildly adventurous. But for years it teetered on the brink of scandal, and it did not end happily. In the summer of 1928, seven years after the party at Aunt Evelyn’s and almost as many since Johnson had made plain her wish to marry him, Arreger turned up unexpectedly at the London flat she was sharing with a girlfriend, to tell her he had married someone else – a BBC researcher based in Manchester. She flung herself on her bed and sobbed her heart out.

Part of her anguish was over having ceded the initiative at the last moment to someone she insisted she no longer loved. That spring she had sent him a devastating 2,000-word sign-off letter chiding him for stringing her along, chiding herself for her naivety and chiding men in general for their ‘staring, desiring eyes’. ‘I no longer want you, sexually or any other way,’ she wrote. ‘I don’t believe we could for a single moment be happy together, and if you came to live in London I should probably leave …’. Just in case he concluded that she was seeing someone else, she added in a postscript: ‘I do not want men and have no intention now of ever getting married.’

She would modify that position soon enough. In the meantime, reaching for something that might satisfy her yearning for excitement, and shock Arreger at the same time, she learned to fly.

To fly. Three quarters of a century later it is hard to think of any activity that comes close to the phenomenon of flying in the late 1920s in terms of danger, newness, glamour or the power to liberate and thrill. Pilots in 1928, like computer scientists in 1978, knew their machines were going to change the world. The difference was that every time the pilots went up in theirs they set themselves literally apart from the uninitiated throng, and risked their lives.

Johnson’s first close encounter with this new world of daring and defiance came after a long bus ride to the London Aeroplane Club at the De Havilland aerodrome at Stag Lane, near Edgware. In April 1928 Stag Lane was London’s launchpad to the skies, or at least to the clouds. Naturally inclined to push things until told to stop, Johnson walked onto the aerodrome without a membership card, found a deck chair and watched, enthralled, as the cream of the flying set practised circuits and bumps. Eventually she plucked up the courage to talk to one of them, who told her teaching could be had for 30 shillings an hour. That evening she wrote briskly to her parents: ‘It is too good to be true … I’m going up one evening next week to sign the papers, and I’ll probably have my first lesson next weekend.’

In twenty-five months she would be taking off for Australia with a thermos and a packet of sandwiches. The appearance of an epic journey accomplished on a whim was part of its extraordinary appeal, but in reality Johnson was fiercely driven – and not just by a desire to prove how much Arreger had underestimated her. She was also in search of powerful distractions from grief, for in the summer of 1929 her sister, Irene, had committed suicide by putting her head in the oven at her new marital home. Ultimately Amy was stubbornly convinced that whatever life threw at her she was destined for what came to be known as ‘stardom’.

Not many women pilots in the ATA shared this conviction. Most considered it vulgar to court publicity or were actually scared of it (as some still are, in their late eighties, self-censoring at the sight of a tape recorder out of modesty and a lifelong allegiance to the Official Secrets Act). But all of them understood Johnson’s love of flying as an escape from the wretched trap that faced adventurous young women in the 1930s. They had been handed the vote and a few seats in Parliament. They had won sullen recognition that a man’s work could sometimes be done quite well by women (though not yet – Heaven forbid – for the same pay). Yet in practice almost as soon as they applied for work they were thrown back on the mercy of men.

In Johnson’s case these men included Vernon Wood, partner in a City law firm. He gave this Sheffield University graduate, with her second-class degree in Economics, French and Latin, the best job she had before becoming famous – in his typing pool. There was also Jack Humphreys, sinewy chief mechanic at Stag Lane, who every evening after her day job taught her how to dissect and reassemble Tiger Moth engines. And there was her father, who sent regular envelopes of bank notes to his daughter, and boxed herrings to those who helped her.

For the women who followed Johnson into the air the war would give them a purpose. Johnson had to find her own. From the moment she first considered flying to Australia her best hope of sponsorship lay in persuading Lord Wakefield she could boost his sales of Castrol lubricants. She wondered about delivering an Irish setter to the Maharaja of Patula, since they both loved dogs, but eventually, less than a month before that misty Croydon takeoff, Wakefield came through with a promise of petrol and £300 towards the cost of a plane.

The flight to Australia launched her into a new, blindingly public life that had the rhythm of a professional boxer’s. Every few months, slackening gradually to every few years, she would hatch a new plan to risk her neck, grab some headlines and secure a fat purse with which to fund a lifestyle of sometimes prodigious extravagance. Her first goal after Darwin was Peking, but she got no further than Moscow after crash-landing in a snowbound field sixty miles north of Warsaw. (In Moscow, she found her fame transcended ideology and immunised her against internment: Lenin’s widow hailed her as a model for Soviet womanhood.) She then flew to Tokyo and sat there for tea and photographs with General Nagaoka of the Japanese Imperial Aviation Society. In 1932 she smashed the London-Cape Town-London record in a De Havilland Puss Moth by taking a wild western route over the Sahara and Fernando Po. And the following year she made it ‘backwards’ over the Atlantic, against the prevailing westerlies, and joined the American aviatrix Amelia Earhart and the Roosevelts for tea.

Earhart apart, Johnson was the leading woman in an elite corps of aviation fanatics. Theirs was a golden age of record-breaking in which the right route, written up with the right sort of understatement and to deadline, could net a newspaper deal worth six figures in modern money. There was stiff competition for front-page treatment, but Johnson stayed in contention by means of the second most audacious stunt of her career. Over lunch at Quaglino’s in Soho, on a spring Monday in 1932, she agreed to marry her most formidable and flamboyant rival.

This was Jim Mollison. More than anyone, Mollison drew Johnson into the ‘Mayfair set’ that epitomised 1930s style and superficiality, and from which the ATA eventually offered her relief. He was photogenic and knew all about the paralysing exhaustion of long-distance flying. Otherwise he wasn’t her type. He was short-tempered and addicted to liquor and adrenalin. Scottish by birth, he had flown some of the earliest airliners to have entered service in Australia. It was there he met Johnson while escorting her to Sydney on her post-flight publicity tour in 1930. They Flew Alone depicts that meeting as the dreamy work of fate; an instant connection in a softly lit cockpit pushed through the night by four rumbling great piston engines. He asks for two dances at the Governor General’s ball to which he is taking her, but when he seeks her out there the host himself, in cockaded hat and tails, declares her taken.

In reality, Mollison rates no mention in Johnson’s diaries until 1932, when she met him in Cape Town and began to fall for him. Earlier that year she had had a hysterectomy, apparently to put an end to debilitating period pains that were interfering with her flying. At any rate, whoever married Amy Johnson would not have to be a model father, and when the press learned it was to be Mollison, this incomparably racy couple was adopted as story fodder with no sell-by date.

They lived together at once, not in a house or flat but in a succession of suites in the Grosvenor House Hotel. Their views were of Park Lane and the sky. Their public relations were handled by William Courtney’s Aviation Publicity Services, which had a branch office in the lobby. Their shopping trips would often take in Selfridges – a short walk away on the far side of Oxford Street – which had its own aeroplane department.

Mollison was bad company. He was not quite a monomaniac: adulation and money interested him as much as flying. But he brought out the monomaniac in his new wife, and she drifted rapidly away from the emotional moorings her long-suffering father had provided. After years of regular correspondence in which she would trail her schemes, their costs and their potential returns and he would offer cautious encouragement and money, they fell out of touch. Will and Ciss Johnson would read of their daughter’s flights and fancies in the papers, or hear of them from neighbours and have nothing to add.

On 22 July 1932 they received a rare letter from Amy posted from the Grosvenor House Hotel saying there was nothing to the printed rumours that her wedding to Mollison was imminent. But a week later a telegram arrived in Hull, at 9 p. m., also from Amy, to say the wedding was set for 10 o’clock the following morning and that she and Mollison were ‘trying to keep it as quiet as possible‘. Her parents were patently not invited. But something in the senior Johnsons snapped. They drove all night, left their car in Golders Green at 9.40 a.m. and took the tube and then a taxi to St George’s Church in Hanover Square, arriving as the service ended. As the bride walked out in a black coat and white gloves, she failed to notice them. By the time she learned that her parents had made the trip they were inconsolable, and on their way back home.

Mollison’s best man had been Sir Francis Shelmerdine, the Director of Civil Aviation, who managed to straddle the new world of Mayfair aviation crazies and the older ones of civil service and landed gentry. Yet when fate began to sour on Amy Johnson, even he couldn’t help. Her marriage suffered from the start from Mollison’s inability to resist other women – chief among them Beryl Markham, who had been seducing the Duke of Gloucester at the Grosvenor House Hotel even as Johnson was fêted there on her return from Australia. (Markham, who grew up drinking cow’s blood and curdled milk on her father’s Kenyan farm, later became the first person to fly non-stop from England – rather than Ireland – to North America. She was as fearless as Johnson, and, some say, a more natural pilot.)

Johnson, now being squeezed off the aviation pages by wilder, more glamorous upstarts, began a defiantly elegant descent from stardom. In 1934, she and her husband entered a race from Suffolk to Melbourne as favourites. They lost it to Charles Scott, a preening ex-RAF officer who, four years earlier as an envious escort pilot on her victory tour of Australia, had taunted her unsubtly about her dreadful period pains. The race ended for ‘Jim and Johnnie’, as the Mollison pair were known to the press, with a seized-up engine and a furious, whisky-fuelled argument in their cockpit in Allahabad.

By this time they had in any case been eclipsed in the publicity stakes by none other than Jackie Cochran, the New York beautician and pilot who had hauled herself into the air by her proverbial bootstraps – and by marrying a multi-millionaire. In the race itself, she fared even worse than the Mollisons, running out of fuel over the Carpathians, but she had already beguiled reporters by emerging from her plane at Mildenhall wordlessly and in full make-up, with a printed press release drafted by her lawyer.

Two years later, Amy Johnson was back in the air to publicise a doomed business venture that she and a putative French backer (and lover) were calling Air Cruises. She climbed aboard a Percival Gull in a woollen suit and newsprint scarf designed for her by Elsa Schiaparelli, bound once again for Cape Town. She got there eventually, but only after botching a take-off in North Africa and restarting the whole flight a month later. Even then, far from being fêted at her refuelling stops in Italian-occupied East Africa, she ‘could not shake off the feeling that I was a trespasser, and a nuisance at that’. She had been turned down by the News of the World, but a deal with the Daily Express let her pay off her overdraft and a debt to her father. It failed to rescue her marriage, though. She and Mollison were divorced in 1936, and the approach of war found her broke again and desperate for work. In June 1939, after a brief stint as editor of The Lady Driver, a decidedly earthbound new monthly, she accepted her first full-time flying job, shuttling day and night between Hampshire and the Isle of Wight for a local airline known as the Solent air ferry. The Daily Mirror considered it a story. ‘Folks, you’ve got a chance of being flown by a world-famous air pilot for five bob a time,’ it announced. It was honest work, but it ended abruptly with the outbreak of war and failed to serve as a springboard to the job she really wanted: the head of the ATA.

Johnson already knew and liked Pauline Gower. They had met at the London Aeroplane Club in 1931, when Gower was immersed there in the improvised sort of aero-engineering apprenticeship that Johnson had glamorised the year before.

Years later, she spent a weekend at the Gower family home near Tunbridge Wells, where Pauline and her friend Dorothy Spicer invited Amy to join their two-woman firm providing joyrides in the sky to crowds who would queue up at fairgrounds across the country for a taste of the fad that was changing the world. Johnson considered them ‘nice girls’, but declined. Theirs was a raucous, retail sort of flying, taking off from new airfields for new crowds every day of the summer. Johnson considered it several steps beneath her. But as far as the aviation establishment was concerned, she was beneath them.

Francis Shelmerdine and Pop d’Erlanger favoured Gower for the ATA job on the grounds that she had never been an aviation record-seeker like Johnson, ‘with all the publicity which is attached to that role’. This may have been sensible: the idea of putting women in RAF aircraft in wartime was an invitation to scarlet-faced apoplexy in the RAF’s own high command, especially if they were to be led by the curious, chippy creature who had pioneered the heretical unisexing of the cockpit. But d’Erlanger’s verdict was also a simply coded confirmation that Gower was ‘One of Us’. Johnson, with her flat, Humberside vowels and undisguised need for recognition – not to mention money – clearly was not.

But Pauline Gower didn’t forget about her. On the contrary, after she was appointed head of the ATA’s women’s section she sent Johnson a formal letter inviting her to apply to join up. Johnson did, and was put on a waiting list. In May 1940 she agreed to take a flying test that Gower assured her would be a formality, but Johnson appears to have been simultaneously revealed as a clumsy lander (which she was) and repelled by the idea of mucking in with the other hopefuls. She described one of them in a letter home as ‘all dolled up in full Sidcot suit, fur-lined helmet and goggles, fluffing up her hair etc. – the typical Lyons waitress type … I suddenly realised I could not go in and sit in line with these girls (who all more or less look up to me as God!), so I turned tail and ran’.

It was true, or true enough. The younger pilots did revere her, but when Johnson eventually enrolled in the ATA in May 1940 she found she didn’t mind. One of her admirers was Jackie Sorour, a tungsten-tipped South African who affected a ditzy innocence but would later pull off an extraordinary aerial hitchhike to Pretoria and back. Sorour, a qualified instructor by the age of twenty despite her mother’s dogged opposition to her flying, was interviewed by Gower at Hatfield in July 1940, and immediately admitted to the ATA. From Gower’s office, she wrote later:

I went to the crew room to find the pilot who was to give me a brief refresher on the Tiger Moth. There were four or five women lounging on chairs and tables. One was laughing as I entered. I looked at her dumbfounded as I recognised the face that had inspired me during my brief flying career and had flitted on the world’s headlines for a decade. I rushed over to her and gushed: ‘Miss Johnson, may I have your autograph?’ She stared at me. There was a painful silence. Oh God, I wished the floor would open up and devour me. How could I have behaved so inanely? Suddenly she grinned: ‘My dear child, I’ll swap it for yours.’

There was something else that gradually endeared Johnson to the ATA besides the return of the old adulation – the prospect of flying Spitfires. For all her experience, Wonderful Amy had never flown anything faster than a De Havilland Comet, maximum speed 200 mph. The war was forcing up speeds. By the summer of 1940, when Fighter Command’s precious Hurricanes and Spitfires were being tested daily to destruction by the Luftwaffe’s formidable Messerschmitt 109s and Focke-Wulf 190s, the Vickers Super-marine factories in Southampton and Castle Bromwich were already turning out Mark V Spitfires capable of 400 mph when straight and level and no-one knew quite how fast in a dive.

Johnson never flew one. She died too soon. One reason for her death, oddly, was national security. Before the war the Lorenz company in Germany had devised a beautifully simple radio navigation system based on corridors of land-based transmitters. The transmitters on one side of the corridor would broadcast, continuously, only the Morse signal for A – a dot and then a dash. Those on the other side would broadcast only the signal for N – a dash, then a dot. Suitably equipped aircraft flying straight along the corridor would know they were on course because of antennae mounted at opposite ends of their fuselages: one tuned to the N signal and one to the A. As long as each antenna was the same distance from its signal’s source, the dots and dashes would overlap into a continuous tone, dull but infinitely reassuring. If the plane drifted off this radio ‘beam’ in either direction, its antennae would slip in relation to their sources. The overlapping would become imperfect, the tone interrupted, and the pilot would be snapped out of her daydream or funk.

If you had an ordinary voice radio you could also call up the nearest radio-equipped aerodrome and ask it where you were. Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown, the finest test pilot Britain ever produced, once did this over a fogbound patch of Kent, and it probably saved his life. But in that Airspeed Oxford at Squire’s Gate, with her chit for Kidlington in Oxfordshire, Johnson had no radio of any kind, and nor did any other ferry pilots. As the spliced-in newsreel puts it in They Flew Alone: ‘No radio of course. Too useful for Jerry.’

The other reason Johnson would never fly a Spitfire was the weather that was keeping her on the ground at an aerodrome near Blackpool on that miserable Sunday in January 1941; the weather that would have made the radio navigation option something of a life-saver; the sodden, all-pervading, bloody-minded British weather.

Johnson finally lost patience and took off at 11.49 a.m. Not many others ventured up that day, but Jackie Sorour did. ‘That same afternoon I took off from South Wales in a twin-engined Oxford aircraft bound [like Johnson] for Kidlington,’ she wrote in Woman Pilot.

The weather … lay like a blanket over the Southern Counties. Drizzle and low cloud was forecast for most of the route to Kidlington but with a promise of improvement. Reluctantly I headed into the curtain of rain and, a few hundred feet above the ground, searched for the promised improvement. It was non-existent. I should have turned back but valleys beckoned invitingly. I flew into one and peered ahead but the trap had sprung. The other end of the narrow valley was blocked with a wall of cloud. I rammed open the throttles, pulled the control column back and climbed steeply. With unnerving suddenness the ground vanished as the clouds swirled around the Oxford in a cold embrace and forced me to climb on instruments … I tried to keep the angle of climb constant. Suddenly at four thousand feet the clouds splintered into bright wintry sunshine; beneath me the clouds stretched to all horizons like a soft woollen blanket. Desperately lonely and frightened, I searched for a gap. There was none. Whilst I stayed above I was safe. Like a spotlight the sun cast a shadow of the Oxford on the top of the clouds and circled it with a halo of rainbow hue. I had the odd thought that I was the shadow and the shadow was me. Curiously I watched it to see what it was going to do next; silly thing, it was going round in circles.

The petrol gauge drooped inexorably. I had to go down … Reluctantly I throttled back and eased the nose down. The clouds embraced me like water around a stone as I slowly descended. Two thousand feet. Fifteen hundred. One thousand. Six hundred. It’s no good, prompted experience, get back. Ignoring the urgent warning I eased lower with the altimeter ticking off the altitude like a devilish clock. If I were lucky I would be over the hill-less sea. If not, I had not long to live. Suddenly the clouds broke, revealing, just beneath, the grey, sullen waters of the Bristol Channel. I pulled off my helmet and wiped the sweat from my face before turning towards the Somerset coast faintly visible to the east.

I looked at the petrol gauge. Twenty minutes left to find an aerodrome. Absently I worked out the little problem. Twenty times sixty. Two sixes are twelve. Add two noughts. That’s it. One thousand two hundred seconds before I wrecked the aeroplane and paid the penalty for not turning back. But all the luck in the sky was with me that day. Soon after crossing the coast an aerodrome blossomed out of the ground like a flower from the desert. Pulling the Oxford round in a tight circuit I landed on the glistening, rain-soaked runway.

Next day on returning to Hatfield I learned that Amy Johnson was dead.

There is not much that can be said with any confidence about Johnson’s last flight, though it must have droned on against an appalling crescendo of fear. For those left to reconstruct it over the years there is also the knowledge that, for all her fear, she had every reason to believe until the last second of her life that she would survive this scrape as she had so many others.

Did she, in fact, kill herself? She did once tell a friend that she was sure she’d finish up in the drink. And it was alleged by Jimmy Martin (later Sir James, an aircraft builder who never quite finished an aircraft for her to fly) that she told him her first impulse on learning years earlier that Hans Arreger had married someone else had been to end it all by finishing her flying training and then crashing. But the idea that her doomed run down to Kidlington was a suicide mission is even less plausible than the more popular conspiracy theory that she was carrying a mystery passenger on a clandestine or illicit trip (some speculated she was smuggling the faithless Arreger back to Switzerland, even though there is no evidence that she was still in contact with him) – and had to bale out because of a catastrophic malfunction or even after being hit by friendly fire.

The truth was almost certainly more prosaic, but just as deadly. She went ‘over the top’, as she said she would and as Sorour also did. But she couldn’t ‘crack on through’ because there were no cracks in her swathe of sky: just deep, unrelenting cloud. Sorour had risked everything by descending through it. Johnson actually risked much less by summoning the courage to do what she had always dreaded and bale out– something, amazingly, that she had never had to do before. After three and a half hours the Oxford’s second tank ran dry. As the two engines died, she feathered the propellers and levelled the plane at 3,000 feet, and falling. It was now gliding eastwards. She unstrapped herself from her seat, strapped on her parachute and walked a few steps back down the floating fuselage to the emergency exit door, which was not hinged. It had to be wrenched right out of its opening. Johnson managed this, and jumped. She would have experienced a considerable physical shock because the cabin had been heated but the cloud was nothing but freezing moisture; for anyone below, it was snowing gently.

When the parachute opened cleanly, and high enough for an orderly descent, Johnson would also have felt relief. At this point, still with no view of whatever part of England was beneath her but uninjured and alert, the only irreversible loss in her world that day was of one twin-engined Airspeed Oxford. Much else had gone wrong. There would be an accident investigation and report. She would have to answer questions. It would be a story. Pauline Gower, for one, would ask whatever had induced her to take off that morning, and in truth it would be difficult to tell her. Pride? Boredom? Sullen arrogance? A secret conviction of invincibility, annealed in the homicidal Taurus Mountains and somewhere over Nova Scotia one terrifying night in 1932?

When she descended through the cloud she saw for the first time that she was over water. Her parachuting nightmare was now coming true. The cold was about to intensify in a way she could not imagine, or endure for long. But even in the few seconds between appearing over the Thames estuary and plunging into it there were, suddenly, new reasons to hope. By pure chance there were ships everywhere, some close enough to help if only they spotted her and she could get clear of the parachute.

They had certainly spotted her. An entire convoy, numbered CE21, consisting of seventeen merchant ships, two destroyers, four minesweepers, four motor launches and five cross-Channel ferries converted to deploy barrage balloons, was steaming up the estuary. One of the balloon ships, HMS Haslemere, was closest to Johnson. From its bridge a Lieutenant Henry O’Dea actually saw her drop gently into the water at a distance of perhaps half a mile. His captain, Lieutenant Commander Walter Fletcher, ordered the Haslemere to head for her at full speed. Johnson was still alive when it reached her, and was heard to shout the words, ‘Hurry, please hurry’. But she failed to grab hold of any of the lines thrown in her direction.

In its dash to pick her up, the Haslemere ran aground in mud beneath the shallow waters of the estuary’s southern edge. Fletcher ordered the engines to slow astern but they took ten precious minutes to work the vessel free. By this time Johnson had drifted towards the ship’s stern and was helpless with cold. As Captain Fletcher pulled off his outer clothes to dive in for her, a wave lifted the Haslemere and pushed Johnson under its propellers. As they fell, they crushed her. ‘She did not come into view again,’ seaman Nicholas Roberts, who was watching from the ship’s bulwark, wrote later in an affidavit. Indeed, her body was never found.

Fourteen months later, They Flew Alone received its première at Leicester Square. In attendance, besides Pauline Gower, Jackie Cochran and Anna Neagle, was Lord Wakefield, Amy Johnson’s faithful oiler. In the film, shaking his head in something like bewilderment, the Wakefield character tells a white-tied friend: ‘She’s driven a coach and four through centuries of custom and convention.’

‘She’s opened a great gap in the fence that’s been surrounding our young women for generations,’ the friend replies. ‘And now the rest of the devils will come pouring through after her. I can’t quite see the end of it.’

‘There isn’t any end to it. What that young woman has done is the sort of thing that goes on forever,’ says Wakefield.

After a final image of Anna Neagle’s character dissolving into a montage of uniformed women marching purposefully in all directions, the film ends with the dedication:

‘To all the Amy Johnsons of today’.

3

Queen Bee

Could the ATA have managed without its women pilots? Sixty years after its demise I put the question to Sir Peter Mursell, the organisation’s only surviving senior administrator. He replied without hesitation: ‘Yes’ – and there was certainly never a shortage of qualified male applicants eager to join the ATA.

Nor was there a shortage of female ones: Amy Johnson had inspired a generation of rich, or at least resourceful, women to follow her into the air. But they might never have flown in the war without the skilled and tireless lobbying of Pauline Gower.

Prominent progressives such as Captain Harold Balfour had offered enthusiastic predictions of a role for women pilots in the coming conflict as early as 1938. But the RAF’s opposition was granite, and at that stage no-one had even thought of handing the job of ferrying military aircraft to civilians. Subsidised flying training in the Civil Air Guard – a belated effort to match Germany for ‘air mindedness’ – had helped to swell the ranks of civilian pilots and instructors, women as well as men, but when war was declared all civil aviation was grounded, and most of these new pilots melted away in search of other work.

It was on her own initiative that Gower requested meetings, first with Pop d’Erlanger and then with the Director General of Civil Aviation, Sir Francis Shelmerdine, in September 1939. D’Erlanger’s instinctive answer to the question ‘Why women?’ was ‘Why not?’. He accompanied Gower to the meeting with Shelmerdine on 21 September. It went well. Gower knew Shelmerdine through Amy Johnson, whose wedding he had attended as best man, and as a trailblazer in her own right. Gower came away with permission to recruit twelve women pilots and an understanding that she would be in charge of them.

There were hiccups. In late 1939 the RAF was still using its own pilots for most of its ferrying, and the whole plan to recruit women to the ATA had to be put on ice for three months while the RAF high command and its allies in the Air Ministry fought a rearguard action against the attachment of women to existing RAF ferry pools. Shelmerdine made several tactical retreats, assuring the RAF top brass that their men would never have to fly with women, insisting on a minimum of 500 hours solo experience for women candidates – far more than was required for men – and cutting Gower’s initial quota, without explanation, from twelve pilots to eight.

There was also the Treasury’s standard stipulation, uncontested at this point by Gower or anyone else, on women’s pay. While they would be expected to perform exactly the same duties and work exactly the same hours as male ATA pilots, female ones would earn 20 per cent less. And there was one other thing, which may even have put a smile on the faces of the air vice marshals in their stalwart defence of gender apartheid. While their fighter boys would be arcing over Europe in sleek new Hurricanes and even sleeker newer Spitfires, these crazy women, initially at least, would be flying only Tiger Moths, with nothing to protect them from the elements except their clothing and a comical crescent of Perspex fixed to the front edge of the cockpit – and in the worst winter for almost fifty years.

As the New York Times reported two weeks after the first women pilots reported for duty at the Hatfield aerodrome north of London in January 1940 (and the time lapse is significant):

Now it can be told. For the first time since the war began, British censors today allowed that humdrum conversational topic, the weather, which has been a strict military secret in Britain, to be mentioned in news dispatches – providing the weather news is more than fifteen days old. The weather has been so unusually Arctic that by reaction the censors’ hearts were thawed enough to permit disclosure of the fact that this region shivered since past several weeks in the coldest spell since 1894, with the mercury dropping almost to zero and a damp knife edge wind piercing the marrow.

The reference to zero was in Fahrenheit. It was the worst weather imaginable to be flying around in open planes. Small wonder that when the ‘First Eight’ attended a mid-winter photo shoot to mark their arrival at Hatfield, they looked happier in Sidcot suits than in their Austin Reed skirts.

Though not in Amy Johnson’s league, Pauline Gower had been newsworthy in her own right for several years by the outbreak of war. Like Rosemary Rees she was the daughter of a senior Tory and smitten with flying. Unlike Rees, she had flown for a living. She started in 1931 as a freelance ‘joyrider’ flying from a field in Kent, and moved on to contract circus flying for the British Hospitals’ Air Pageant. This was a less charitable outfit than the name implied, but the steady work helped make the payments on her £300, two-seater Simmonds Spartan, bought on an instalment plan. By 1936 she was operating a profitable air taxi service across the Wash from Hunstanton to Skegness. ‘And now,’ she told a BBC reporter at the start of 1940, ‘I can claim to have carried over 30,000 passengers in the air.’ Given that she had never flown anything bigger than a three-seater, it was no idle boast.

The flying had toughened her. Performing one summer evening in 1933 at Harrogate with the Hospitals’ Air Pageant, Gower landed shortly before dusk to watch one of the show’s most reliable crowd-pleasers with the rest of the spectators – the parachute jump. ‘We had several parachutists, one of whom was named Evans,’ she wrote. ‘He was extremely clever at his job and could judge his descents so well that he often landed between two machines parked on the ground right in front of the public enclosure.’

There was a stiff breeze that evening, and plenty of visibility. Evans was taken up to 1,000 feet. He jumped and pulled his ripcord in the normal way, but he was drifting fast on account of the breeze. The performer in him still wanted to get down in front of the crowd, so he spilled air from the parachute by pulling on the shroud lines. The idea was to come down faster than usual to minimise the drift, releasing the shroud lines with a few seconds to go to allow the canopy to refill and soften his landing. Evans had done it scores of times before, but this time the parachute collapsed completely. The crowd watched, horror struck, as he accelerated into the ground unchecked by the twisted sausage of silk above him. He was killed instantly.

‘Fortunately, the light was already beginning to fail,’ Gower recalled. The performance was terminated immediately, and the shocked crowds went home. ‘It was a blow for all of us. Evans was extremely popular … but in the air circus business there is no time for sentiment.’ Next day the Pageant moved on to Redcar. There, ‘although the thoughts of many of us were at Harrogate with the still, dark form we had left crumpled up on the field the night before, the show went on as usual’.

Later, in the ATA ferry pools, the phrase adopted to describe the routine business of embroidering a close shave to make it sound closer still was to ‘line-shoot’. It was used in the mess at the all-female No. 15 Ferry Pool at Hamble, in particular, to stop the chattier young pilots making fools of themselves. But no-one ever accused Gower of ‘line-shooting’.

The toughening of this deceptively sunny convent girl with the bright laugh and a resolute smile had begun thirteen years earlier, on what her Mother Superior had feared would be her deathbed. Struck down in her late teens with a raging ear infection, together with complications of pneumonia and pleurisy, Gower was sedated for surgery that she was not expected to survive. A priest was summoned to her bedside and the other boarders at the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Tunbridge Wells prayed for her at evensong. She pulled through and emerged from her illness physically weakened and barred from team sports. But she was a bundle of nervous energy which she was determined to channel into that most daring and controversial of womanly pursuits, a ‘career’. Whatever she chose would rile her father, a driven but illogical old paragon who set great store by education, including his daughter’s, even though he would not allow her to go to university. So she set her sights on flying.

It was still two years before Amy Johnson ensured that flying eclipsed mere motoring as the fashionable expression of late adolescent rebellion for young women of means. But Gower was not interested in fashion. Nor was she one to hang about. She took her first flight, while still at school, with Captain Hubert S. Broad, who was visiting Tunbridge Wells as part of a national tour after competing in the Paris air races. She kept a diary and may have allowed herself a line or two of breathlessness in it about Kent from the air and the wind in her hair, and even about Captain Broad. But there is no such sappiness in anything she wrote for public consumption. She filed flying away as what she would do in the likely event that nothing else came along to satisfy both her need for excitement and her father’s for respectability. And nothing did.

Dispatched to finishing school in Paris, she ran away. She wondered about earning a living playing her violin, but realised she wasn’t good enough to perform and gave it up. Back home she was presented at court and ‘did all the things expected of the debutante, and was bored to tears’. She dabbled in Tory politics, but the Tories were not ready for her. (Even Lady Astor, Britain’s first woman MP, was only elected in 1919, and she was a Liberal.) So, on 25 June 1930, with Amy Johnson still on her delirious, nervewracking victory tour of Australia, Pauline Gower enrolled at the Phillips and Powis School of Flying at the Woodley airfield outside Reading. She did not tell her parents. For six hours’ worth of flying lessons she managed to keep the reason for her trips to Reading secret. Then she told her father what she was up to, and he cut off her allowance.

Gower was a natural pilot, and did not have to wait long to go solo. But her novel idea of flying for a living (a regular living, as opposed to being paid large sums by newspapers for occasional death-defying epics in the manner of Amy Johnson), required a commercial licence and dozens more expensive hours of training. For a year she paid for them by teaching the violin. In that time she switched flying schools and moved to Stag Lane, and there she befriended the vulnerable Johnson just as Johnson was adjusting to her new life as a megastar. At the same time, Sir Robert Gower came round to the idea of having a pilot for a daughter. For her twenty-first birthday, to her ‘unutterable joy’, he made the down-payment on her first plane. It was a two-seater Spartan, about as cheap as aircraft came in 1931, ‘but to me’ she reflected, ‘it was the finest aeroplane that had ever been built’.

Miss Pauline Mary de Peauly Gower became the world’s third female commercial pilot, and Britain’s first. She was already forming a grand world view centred on the notion of flying as a liberator of women and unifier of nations. Another of her new friends from Stag Lane, Dorothy Spicer, a pilot as well as an engineer, was more interested in engines than flying. Tall, blonde and very beautiful, she was a graduate of University College London and a qualified aeronautical engineer. She and Gower decided to go into business together.

Gower would later write an account of her time with Spicer as co-directors of the world’s first all-female airborne business venture. Her publisher described it as ‘a record of pioneer achievement in the air related with much humour and a cheerful philosophy’. The book was reviewed by the sniffy and none-too-progressive editor of Aeroplane magazine, C. G. Grey. Spicer, he wrote:

looks more like the British working woman’s idea of the idle rich, or alternatively a cinema star, than any girl I know … [and] Pauline Gower does not give one exactly the notion of being one of the world’s workers either. And yet for six years those two girls did a job of sheer manual labour, which would have been more than enough for half the British working men of the country.

Spicer kept the plane airworthy; Gower flew it. They started with a rented Gipsy Moth in a field near Sevenoaks, charging half a crown per flight and fifteen shillings for an aerobatic sequence consisting of two loops and a spin. When Gower’s first aerobatics customer requested another loop she made him hand over another half crown in the air first. With Gower’s Spartan, they flew from Wallingford in Berkshire, and spent the rest of that first summer flying for whoever would pay them, and playing host most evenings to friends from Stag Lane who would drive out to shoot the breeze (and rabbits).

They slept in a hut next to their beloved aeroplane, exhaustion competing with nightmares about a serial killer thought to be at large in that part of Berkshire. Besides joyriders, their customers included yacht race spectators from Cowes Week and a Gloucester-bound businessman who paid them a fat fee and then embarrassed them by telling a reporter that he was in ‘lavatory deodorisation’. There were also two men pursued to the airfield by plainclothes detectives and arrested before Gower – with tank full and engine running – could fly them to France; and another who requested a moonlit flight over the royal residence at Sandringham. The directors of Air Trips turned him down.

There is no mention during this time, in anything written by them or about them, of boyfriends. ‘It is only logical,’ Gower mused, ‘to suppose that matrimony will claim the majority of women pilots ultimately, just as it claims many other girls who have been trained at great expense for different professions.’ It did claim them both, eventually. But as twentysomethings they had no time for whatever preceded matrimony. They were smitten with the thrill of flying, with being busy and with making money. In 1933, in the course of six months with the Hospitals’ Air Pageant, they flew from 185 airfields, moving from one to the next every day. For the next two seasons they stayed put in a field outside Hunstanton and let the holidaying public come to them. The following year, 1936, as Hitler hosted the Olympics and occupied the Rhineland, Gower and Spicer hit the touring trail again, this time with Tom Campbell Black’s Air Display.

They had a miserable time. They witnessed another death, this time of a young and inexperienced member of the display team showing off in a new Drone monoplane near Hereford. He flew past the crowd at 400 feet, waving and smiling. Then he put the plane into a spin. ‘At that height the result was a foregone conclusion,’ Gower wrote briskly. ‘Almost before the Drone hit the ground, the ambulance was on the spot. The pilot was extricated from the wreckage terribly smashed up and rushed to hospital. The show continued for another hour, then word was brought to us that he had died and the evening performance was abandoned.’

A few weeks later Gower herself was nearly killed, colliding on the ground with another plane while trying to take off from Coventry. She had been hit on the head by a wheel from the other plane; the wheel came off and Gower was off flying for a month. She saw out the rest of the season, but was badly shaken up and prone to unhelpful attacks of nerves.

This may have been one reason why the brave firm of Air Trips closed down for the season in September 1936, and never reopened. But another reason was undoubtedly the tragedy that befell the Gower family in November of that year. Pauline’s mother, who was convinced, despite a lack of any symptoms, that she was suffering from terminal cancer, gassed herself in the kitchen at Tunbridge Wells. She left a note for her daughter: ‘A very hurried line to send you my love, and all my wishes for your future happiness and peace … Again I say, you have nothing to blame yourself for. Try to forgive me. Your utterly bewildered and terrified but loving Ma.’

It was the sort of sign-off to crush a softer soul, but Pauline’s had already been cauterized by six years of living one slip – one misjudgement – from death. She never spoke publicly about her mother’s suicide; nor would it have occurred to her to. Instead, like Amy Johnson after her sister’s suicide, she immersed herself in work with an almost manic vigour. Perhaps out of consideration for her father she made sure that more of her work was on the ground. In any case, by the time the war broke out her curriculum vitae was as full as her diary. She was a popular lecturer on aviation and women’s role in it; a Civil Air Defence Commissioner for London; a district commissioner for the Girl Guides; a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society; a King’s appointee to the Venerable Order of St John of Jerusalem; and an active member of a new parliamentary subcommittee set up to review safety regulations concerning low-flying banner-pullers. She could surely cope with being head of the ATA women’s section as well.

It was, in part, this zest for work that made Gower the obvious choice to lead the women pilots of the ATA. But she also had a natural gift for Whitehall diplomacy, and was superbly well-connected. Amy Johnson wrote gloomily to her father in late 1939 that ‘had I played my cards right and cultivated the right people, I could have got the job that Pauline Gower has got’. Johnson was right that connections were invaluable for contenders in any hierarchy, and there were doubtless others who were aggrieved at having been passed over for the best women’s job in aviation in the war. But the truth is they never stood a chance. Gower liked to say the world divided into two sorts of people: those who wanted to know and those you had to know. She knew them all.

4

The First Eight

On 9 January 1940, in the depths of a bitter winter and in the middle of the Phoney War, the office of Pop d’Erlanger contacted the news desks of the major Fleet Street titles, the BBC and most of the foreign newsreel companies represented in London to inform them of a ‘photographic opportunity’. The following day, members of the Air Transport Auxiliary would be available for pictures and to answer reasonable questions at the Hatfield aerodrome north of London (recently relinquished to the ATA for the duration of hostilities by Geoffrey de Havilland and his aircraft company). There would be aeroplanes. There would be take-offs and landings. And there would be a bevy of interesting young women in uniform.

For this unusual and welcome photocall – the country may have been at war but there was no fighting – the press turned out in force. They were not disappointed. Rumours that women were to be allowed to ferry RAF aircraft, albeit only low-performance machines such as Tiger Moths, had first surfaced at the beginning of December 1939 and been widely reported. D’Erlanger rightly considered it a sensitive subject and had released no details except the name of the commanding officer of the women’s section, Pauline Gower. Ever since, Fleet Street had been badgering him for more. Initially, there hadn’t been much more to give. It was not until 16 December that Gower had even invited candidates to lunch and a flight test at Whitchurch, where the first male recruits had been assessed three months earlier. Twelve of the country’s most experienced women pilots had attended, all with at least 500 hours in their logbooks, and from them eight were selected. Their names were kept under wraps over Christmas but come the New Year, d’Erlanger and Gower decided to relent.

Hatfield aerodrome had been owned and operated by De Havilland’s until the war, and had been chosen as headquarters of the women’s section because it was already home to many of the Moths they would be flying. The idea in inviting the press was to give them everything they wanted in one concentrated dose and hope they would be sated until something more momentous came along. In principle, it was a sound and modern strategy for managing the news. In practice it ignited a fascination with the women of the ATA that hardly faded throughout the war. To the chagrin of some of the male ATA pilots, who outnumbered the women by six to one, it also created an enduring public impression that this was an all-female outfit.

Luckily the First Eight had been well briefed and were cooperative. It was vital for both d’Erlanger and Gower that their new recruits struck the right balance between enthusiasm and seriousness – enthusiasm for a job that needed absolutely every hand on deck (including, as Gower later put it, ‘the hand that rocks the cradle’), and seriousness because the slightest hint of frivolity would bring down an avalanche of harrumphing from the air vice marshals who considered their aircraft the sacred preserve of men.

That balance was duly struck. One of the pilot-mannequins on 9 January described the demands of the photographers:

They said, ‘Pick up your parachutes and run to your aero planes.’

We said, ‘What, scramble? To Tiger Moths?’

They said, ‘Yes.’

And so we did. We ran in our new creaking flying suits and our new stiff fur-lined flying boots carrying our 30 lb parachutes. Then when we came panting back they said, ‘We didn’t get that very well, please do it again.’

They also wore their dress uniforms. The order of that day appears to have been an hour or two’s gallivanting in oversized greatcoats and Sidcot flying suits, followed by a change into the navy worsted suits and forage caps for which these women were to become famous. They posed, exhausted, one final time on a stone patio outside the aerodrome’s main building. In this picture, a classic of its kind, the pilots and the press reached a new and sullen equilibrium. In the background, the two propellers of a gawky De Havilland Flamingo point towards an opaque sky; a tractor nuzzles under its port wing. On the left, four of ‘the Eight’ sit demurely on a low wall. On the right, the remaining four, together with Gower, her adjutant and Lois Butler, sit in folding chairs round a trestle table laid with a white cloth and tea service. All but one of the group deign to look at the camera, but most of them do so with suspicion as well as weariness. If this is fame, they are determined not to look as if they care for it.

Only two raise anything like a smile. One of these is Joan Hughes: the youngest and least composed of the group, her hands next to her thighs on the wall. She is 5 foot 2 inches tall, 21 years old and has already been an instructor for three of them. In due course she will fly Lancasters to Lakenheath and a Tiger Moth under a bridge on the M40 as Lady Penelope’s stunt double in a 1968 Thunderbirds film. For now, she looks as if she is about to push herself up from the wall and make a playful run for the camera. The other smiler sits at the tea table with her hands on her lap and her right shoulder raised in something like a shrug. She is Rosemary Rees, acrobat and daughter of Sir John Rees, Bt, MP. She has short, dark curly hair and a wit that one of her operations officers says could ‘tear the husk of an argument or person with a very few words and leave the bare bones’.

Strictly speaking, Rees is more dancer than acrobat. Her only formal training to date, other than in the cockpit, has been at Mme Astafieva’s ballet studio in Chelsea. But unlike most of Mme Astafieva’s pupils, Rees has put her endless hours at the barre to commercial use. She has hit the road, touring Britain in the early 1930s with a kitschy review ensemble called ‘Catlin’s Royal Pier-rots’. She has been unmasked by her fellow performers as minor gentry, and nicknamed the ‘Bloody Duchess’ (mainly to give local reporters an angle). But even for toffs, membership of the Royal Pierrots requires acrobatics.

It was while dancing in Llandudno in the early summer of 1930 that Rose Rees became aware of Amy Johnson. ‘Wonderful Amy’ was the hit song of the season and it was played every night at high volume in the interval between the two halves of the Royal Pierrots’ show. ‘Amy, wonderful, Amy,’ went the refrain, ‘how can you blame me/For Loving you?/Believe me, Amy/You cannot blame me, Amy,/For falling in love with you.’

Eleven years later, Rees and Johnson were colleagues and comrades, both stuck in south-west Scotland in grim weather, waiting to fly south. Johnson was in Prestwick, at the Orangefield Hotel; Rees was in Dumfries. They had arranged that Johnson would pick Rees up if no taxi planes were moving from Dumfries, and apparently none was. So a call was booked to Prestwick to confirm that First Officer Mollison (Amy Johnson was still using her married name) would have to stop for a passenger en route to Kidlington as planned. But before the call went through the crew of an RAF Avro Anson walked into the watch office at Dumfries and offered Rees a lift.

‘So I cancelled my call and went with them,’ she told a stunned collection of women pilots later in the war. ‘I wonder what would have happened if I had got through, and she had picked me up … Poor Amy! How she must have hated not finding that hole in the clouds.’

Datelined ‘Somewhere in England’, newspaper articles about the First Eight began appearing on 10 January 1940. They stressed accomplishment and lineage, not looks, and accomplishment is what marked these women out. They were doers par excellence; action ladies in the Johnson mould. They had to be. Even for those with money, to amass at least 500 hours flying time as a woman took dedication bordering on obsession.

When Joan Hughes had her first flying lesson at the age of fifteen she thought she would die of excitement. When the cost of further lessons went up to £2 and 10 shillings an hour, she told her father she was happy to go without food to help pay for them. And when the first of her many admirers asked her to marry him, and she realised he would expect her to give up flying, she ‘ended it there and then’.

The ice hockey international and ‘Mayfair Minx’ Mona Friedlander told the journalist from the Daily Mail at the photocall that she had taken up flying in 1936 as a cure for boredom. Over the next three years, she gained a private and commercial pilot’s licence, a navigator’s licence and the staggering wage of £10 an hour towing targets for anti-aircraft gunnery units.

Winnie Crossley, ‘party-minded’ to her friends but poker-faced behind the tea table in the Hatfield photograph, had what was then a unique claim to fame. Her father, a Dr Harrison, had delivered the world’s first surviving naturally conceived quadruplets in St Neots, Cambridgeshire, in 1935. Winnie had flown him there. She had also flown five seasons as a stunt pilot for C. W. A. Scott’s air circus.

Next, but curiously absent in other photos of the First Eight, as if airbrushed out, or called away or gone to powder her nose, was Marion Wilberforce, daughter of the ninth Laird of Boyndlie, graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, mountaineer, ju jitsu enthusiast and all-round tomboy. This did not mean she was unable to attract members of the opposite sex, as a deportment teacher had once warned her. But before her fiancé would commit himself to marrying her in 1932, he spent six months in a monastery to be sure he did not want to go into the Catholic priesthood instead. Marion was waiting for him at the monastery gates when he came out.

By this time Marion was the proud owner of a De Havilland Cirrus Moth. She would later upgrade this to a Hornet and use it to carry livestock to and from her Essex farm at Nevendon Manor, and to explore Europe with friends or by herself, sometimes roaming as far as Budapest. She had logged 900 hours before joining the ATA.

Margaret Cunnison, the daughter of a Glasgow University professor, had earned her private licence at eighteen and worked before the war as an instructor at the Renfrew aerodrome on Clydeside. Gabrielle Patterson, too, was a flying instructor – the first British woman to earn an instructor’s licence. She was married with a young son, and came from Walsall in the West Midlands.

All but one of the sitters for this portrait of uncommon womanhood survived the war. The one who didn’t was the one who most obviously refuses to say cheese, sitting side-on to the camera and staring straight ahead.

This is Margaret Fairweather – the Cold Front – supremely capable, supremely self-effacing, and the epitome of what Pop d’Erlanger and Pauline Gower had been looking for in their First Eight. It did not hurt Margaret that she was born into the governing class. Not only was her father, Viscount Runciman of Doxford, a frontbench Liberal politician who had entered the House of Commons aged twenty-nine by defeating Winston Churchill for the constituency of Oldham; her mother also entered the Commons in 1928, making them the first husband-and-wife team of MPs in the history of Westminster. Her brother, Air Commodore the Hon. Leslie Runciman, and managing director of BOAC, was the person who had authorised d’Erlanger to set up the ATA. Even so, it seems that Margie preferred to get ahead the hard way. She had dropped out of Cambridge in order to study singing in Paris, but never sang professionally. She married at twenty-four and had a daughter, but later divorced. At thirty-five she was an upper-class single mum with means, motive and a serious case of wanderlust. What else could she do but learn to fly? Like Amy Johnson six years earlier, she even set her heart on soloing to Australia. But having divorced the son of one baronet, she married the son of another and altered her travel plans.

In the summer of 1938, by way of a honeymoon, Margie and Douglas Fairweather flew to Prague to meet her father, who was trying unsuccessfully to mediate between the German and Czech governments to forestall war. On the way back they gave themselves an extensive aerial tour of Germany, noting the locations of new airfields being built for the Luftwaffe in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, and hiding the details in jaunty letters home in a code of Margaret’s own devising. The letters were addressed to her younger brother, the historian Steven Runciman, who gave them back to her on her return. He never found out what she did with them. ‘It was of course pure espionage and entirely hush-hush,’ he wrote, years later, in response to an inquiring letter from Margaret’s daughter by her first husband, Ann. ‘But I suppose they may have acquired some useful information.’

The amateur spies became professional pilots, instructing at an airfield outside Glasgow. Their personalities complemented each other. Douglas was eleven years older than Margie, and as ebullient as she was reserved. As a late convert to aviation he was also an ardent believer in its usefulness for his peacetime job as a patent agent. He would shuttle between client inventors in his own plane in double-breasted blue suits rendered light grey by a steady rain of cigarette ash. For a year or so, life at the Fairweather home in Stirlingshire, and in the skies above it, could not easily have been improved on. But then Ann had to start at boarding school in Oxford and a war that everybody knew was coming, came.

Perhaps the reason for the bleak look on Margie Fairweather’s face at the Hatfield tea party was the prospect of a dangerous new life, apart from her beloved daughter and husband. But it might also have been the knowledge that a golden age of flying had passed into history, and so had the world that made it possible.

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