Spitfire Women of World War II (8 page)

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.

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 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.