Gower did not take his non-responsiveness personally. She just went ‘around the blockage’, as she put it in her diary. She sent an ostensibly innocent request for advice to her friend Leslie Runciman, Margie Fairweather’s brother and director general of BOAC, who happened to be d’Erlanger’s boss. And she requested a meeting with Air Marshal Sir Christopher Courtney, who was on secondment from the RAF to take charge of supply and organisation at the Air Ministry.
Results came swiftly. Runciman had words with d’Erlanger and Gower had dinner with Courtney. The two seem to have hit it off famously. The meal was the perfect chance for Gower to explain to someone in power the frustration for a highly experienced woman pilot – such as those on her waiting list – of watching raw male recruits reach for the sky in state-of-the art aircraft when all they wanted to do was help, but rules prevented them from flying anything at all. For Courtney, the meal presented an opportunity to be seen to be acting on the Prime Minister’s most urgent priorities: a few days earlier, Churchill had lit a firework under the Air Ministry, demanding to know why it had failed to ratchet up pilot supply when his friend, Lord Beaverbrook, had worked such miracles with the supply of aircraft. ‘It will be lamentable indeed if we have machines standing idle for want of pilots to fly them,’ Churchill concluded.
The morning after his meal with Gower, Courtney informed d’Erlanger that he had authorised her to double her number of pilots, take over all ferrying of the RAF’s new Percival Proctors (a low-wing, three-seater monoplane with a closed cockpit). Further, Gower had been told she could now select five of her best pilots for training on bigger, faster aircraft.
By the standards of world events in 1940 it was small beer. Yet something significant had happened. A dam on a tiny tributary of a mammoth war effort had been breached by a perfect combination of reason, timing, charm, cajolery and the discreet use of those people whom one ‘had to know’. It was vintage Gower. It wouldn’t have happened in peacetime; nor would it have happened without her.
News of Gower’s modest British coup spread quickly through the ranks of the ATA, and Amy Johnson, who had joined in May, wrote to her parents showing her first real enthusiasm for her new work. A chosen few would very shortly be training ‘on Masters, Hurricanes and things like that!’ she told them, clearly assuming she would be one of them. ‘I am very thrilled at the prospect.’
Veronica Volkersz was thrilled, too. Hers became a name that flyers conjured with. The first British woman in a jet, she was considered ‘vague’ on the ground but brilliant in the air. She loathed England after the dizzying colour and astringent air of Srinagar high in Kashmir, where she spent some of her teenage summers as the daughter of a major in the Royal Scots Fusiliers. But she forgave the old country at least some of its slate skies and girls’ boarding schools when furnished by her father (now retired), with a 17-hand Irish jumper called Killarney and an Aston Martin sports car. She always drove it with the hood down, and sometimes sported a white leather helmet.
Volkersz craved excitement. Cars and horses went some way to satisfy this craving, but not so far that she could resist learning to fly when subsidised lessons were offered in 1938. Her enrolment was covered in her local Windsor paper under the headline: ‘Beauty Queen Joins the Civil Air Guard’.
The Civil Air Guard (CAG) had been set up in October 1938 with Lord Londonderry as its Chief Commissioner and the aim of deepening the country’s pool of pilots in the event of war. But the entire organisation had been grounded, along with the rest of the country’s civil aviation, at the outbreak of war. So Volkersz became an ambulance driver in the Blitz. The news that the ATA were recruiting women as pilots had left her ‘wildly excited’ to the point of leaping from buses to chase anyone she thought might be wearing their uniform. When finally summoned for a flight test she made the grade but was only offered a place on a waiting list.
Veronica shared a small flat on Hyde Park with her father, who had come out of retirement to work for MI5. She spent the winter of 1940–41 attending West End bombsites in her Volunteer Aid Detachment uniform and parties at the Brasserie Universelle on Piccadilly in cocktail dresses. ‘On February 1st, 1941,’ she wrote later, ‘tottering home after night duty, I opened the door of the flat to see a long brown envelope lying on the floor.’ It bore a Hatfield postmark. ‘My fingers trembled with excitement as I tore the flap open. I knew at once what it would say.’
Eight months later she would be back in London, celebrating after flying her first Hurricane.
For Mary de Bunsen the progression from earthbound supplicant to queen of the skies was less straightforward. The fourth daughter of the Rt Hon. Sir Maurice de Bunsen – Bt, GCMG, GCVO, CB and British ambassador to Vienna – at the age of four she contracted polio. This resulted in her right leg being two inches shorter than her left and of limited use below the knee. She had to wear an orthotic boot for most of her childhood. Her heart, they told her later, was ‘rather an odd shape for a Mosquito pilot’ – and weakened from birth by a hole in the wall between its two main chambers. Had de Bunsen been male and healthy, her eyes alone, barely visible behind her triplex lenses, would have had her laughed out of any RAF recruiting station.
Until Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in 1914, the de Bunsens had divided their time between the ambassadorial residence on Metternichgasse and a rented castle in the Tyrol. There was enough privilege to shield the fourth daughter from many of the implications of her disabilities. Then circumstances dragged her back to England and boarding school and games, as they had dragged Volkersz. De Bunsen wondered later if she would have been as fond of flying if she had been better at games and a ‘success with men’. As it was, she was ‘madly keen’ on sports but was always out of breath, and always the worst.
On leaving school she endured several London seasons as a wallflower. She was bookish, and thrilled to take tea with Thomas Hardy and T. E. Lawrence at the summer cottage her parents rented in Dorset. No-one had warned her that life after matric was a harsh marriage market in which her chances would be poor. Flying saved her.
High over Reading in a Cirrus Moth, solo for the first time, she felt born again. Her mother told her whenever she left the house for a flying lesson that she would be burnt alive, but any risk seemed worth taking when drifting towards ‘the ghastly fate of the daughter-in-waiting’. Besides, she was seduced by the accoutrements of flying and the brave new Mary de Bunsen they created:
the delicious leathery smell of a new flying helmet, in which you parade secretly before the looking glass; the firm grip of goggles; a Sidcot suit if you can run to it, and the swashbuckling boots, lined with sheepskin, which give such a wonderful feeling of confidence on frosty mornings.
She did encounter difficulties. On her first attempt to earn a private licence she failed both the practical and medical tests. But the ever-present, ever-helpful Pauline Gower bumped into her at Woodley airfield and gave her the name of a doctor who was ‘accustomed to the idea of women pilots’ and willing to vouch for her fitness to fly despite her weak right leg and tendency to breathlessness.
De Bunsen’s next stroke of luck was to land a public relations job at the ultra-smart Heston aerodrome. Here she could put in hours of cheap practice (and was once given a pearl ring by the Sheikh of Kuwait, who dissolved with mirth at the sight of a kit plane called a Flying Flea being assembled by its French designer; the Sheikh liked to reward those who entertained him, and de Bunsen had arranged the inspection). After that, in the early stages of the war, she worked for a Tiger Moth dealer in Devon as Britain’s most improbable test pilot. She had been turned down once by the ATA – ‘a bitter moment’, she wrote, since those who were accepted that day ‘had the dewy, sparkling look of souls reborn’. But eventually, in August 1941, with a note from her oculist in her licence to say that she could see adequately with glasses, she was accepted.
By this time the first two Polish women pilots – Anna Leska and Barbara Wojtulanis – had reached Engl
and via Romania and served with the ATA for nearly eight months. Ann Welch, the glider pilot whom Rudolf Hess had failed to impress either as a politician or a skier, had been in for nine. (She described the process of joining up with typical economy: ‘The war was just beginning to get serious and I had to be involved; and it had to be in flying. Nothing else could even be contemplated.’) They had all been tested either by Gower herself or by one of her trusted lieutenants from the First Eight. The form was simple: climb into a waiting Tiger Moth, start her up, take-off, climb to 2,000 feet, turn one way and then the other, first gently and then in a steep bank, and make a forced landing when the examiner cuts the engine. Instructions came via speaker tube from the rear seat.
A few, like the formidable Lettice Curtis, could affect indifference to the test and to the ATA in general. Most could not. The test was nervewracking regardless of experience, because the stakes were high. It was the gateway to ‘the most thrilling work women are doing’ – and to the only flying they would be allowed to do for the duration of the war. So an ability to cope with pressure was useful, especially if, as in the case of Diana Barnato, experience was lacking: When she decided to apply to the ATA, she had all of ten hours in her logbook.
In many ways Diana Barnato and Lettice Curtis were polar opposites. One was tall; the other short. One was implacably serious; the other incorrigibly romantic. One was the product of pinched middle-class finances, draughty country houses and institutionalised education; the other, of diamond encrusted opulence and a giddy disregard for rules. Curtis never rivalled Barnato for glamour, and would not have wanted to. Audrey Sale-Barker did, but Diana Barnato eclipsed even her. Until the Americans arrived, no-one could touch First Officer Barnato in the exhausting business of having fun, and even then no-one could fund as much of it as her.
In 1888, Diana’s grandfather, Barney Barnato, originally of East London’s Mile End Road but latterly of Kimberley, South Africa, found himself standing next to Cecil Rhodes and a bucket full of diamonds. The diamonds were Barnato’s. Rhodes wrote him a cheque for them and the mines from which they came for just over £5 million – reputedly the largest cheque in history to that point. Rhodes merged his mines with Barnato’s to form De Beers’ Consolidated Mines Ltd. For his own part, Barney Barnato wrote a will and, in due course, booked passage on a steamer back to London.
The will provided generously for his wife and three children. But it handed the rest of the fortune to his brother, Solly, who had helped with the management of the Barnato mines. He was with Barney on the promenade deck of the SS Christiana on the afternoon that Barney mysteriously went over the side. No-one else was around except a steward, stacking chairs. He later said he heard someone yell ‘murder ‘and turned to see Solly either holding on to Barney’s coat or letting go of it; it was not clear which. Barney was dead by the time a lifeboat picked him up. The verdict, in the absence of corroborating witnesses, was suicide. But even Solly’s son would later tell Diana that Grandpa Barney had been pushed.
Diana’s father, Woolf Barnato, eventually prised most of his rightful inheritance out of Solly through the courts. It was enough. He bought the Bentley Motor Company, an extensive spread in the Surrey Hills, and an exotic new Darracq two-seater sports car for Diana’s twenty-first birthday.
Woolf ‘Babe’ Barnato had kept wicket for Surrey in his youth and won the Le Mans 24-hour race in 1928, 1929 and 1930. He had many friends, among them Ettore Bugatti, founder of the Bugatti marque, with whom he dined in Paris after presenting Diana with the Darracq outside the Ritz. When she burned out its brand-new clutch en route to the Basilica of Sacré Coeur, Bugatti fixed it.
The year was 1939. War had been declared, and across Europe armies and economies were being urgently reorganised to fight it. If anyone was going to chance a skiing holiday in France at such a time it was the young Miss Barnato. Sure enough, she obtained a pass to enter the country from Count John de Camaran, a friend at the French Embassy, and drove out to Megève and Chamonix with Lorna Harmsworth, daughter of the owner of the Daily Mail, for ten days with the Scots Guards.
They paused in Paris on their return for five days with Gogo Schiaparelli, daughter of Elsa, the couturier whom Amy Johnson had favoured with her custom in happier times. Elsa was still very much in business. She did not let the often-photographed Diana continue to Calais without a new wardrobe created for her, and for the moment. It included a heavy tweed coat with a silk lining in red, white and blue.
For Diana, flying was an escape – but hardly from drudgery or want of opportunity. It was an escape from other women. She had been presented to the chaotic court of the future Edward VIII in 1936 and loved being a deb. Unlike so many of her fellow flyers, she thrived at balls. She delighted the hand-picked young men – the ‘debs’ delights’ – and they delighted her. The only fly in this intoxicating ointment was her mother, who chaperoned her to all the main events and deputised a bustling platoon of friends and paid professionals to cover the lesser ones. ‘However,’ she wrote, ‘I was eighteen and didn’t like all that molly-coddling anymore.’ She knew they taught flying in the middle of her father’s favourite motor racing track – at Brooklands – and that most trainers had only two seats, so ‘at least nannies, governesses, companions and chaperones wouldn’t be able to come along’.
She went solo after six hours, but then lost interest. Or rather, she suffered a fright, the memory of which haunted her for years and probably saved her life several times over. Just before that flight a badly burned man appeared beside her Tiger Moth. She put what happened next into verse:
He put his claws upon the wing
Impelling me to turn to him,
And said, above the engine’s din
‘Don’t fly! Don’t fly Miss! Look and see
What aviation’s done to me.’
I scanned his scarred and broken face
And horror shuddered in my mind
What flying now could do to me,
And I would end up same as he.
Rosemary Rees and Diana Barnato both wrote that they would rather die in a crash than survive, horribly disfigured, to endure the rest of a lifetime of staring strangers and conveniently absent friends, and Diana found out soon enough how fickle friends could be.
In the spring of 1941, while out horse riding with her friend Bobby Lowenstein, a bomber pilot and wealthy heir to a Belgian financier, Diana’s tired mount crashed through a gate instead of jumping it. The horse was uninjured; not so Diana. She broke her jaw and rearranged her teeth so thoroughly that one of them lodged just beneath her eye. She wrote of the aftermath of the accident, and of a visit from her then boyfriend Claude Strickland, in her memoir, Spreading My Wings:
I was patched up in the London Clinic. The jaws were wired up, and as the risk of blindness receded I was allowed to see my friends. Claude Strickland took one look at me and never came back. Having been my most important love, this was devastating. He moved on to another, more attractive girl, but I didn’t blame him.
One late summer afternoon Diana invited me to join her in Surrey for tea and to look at her scrapbooks. Through them marched an extraordinary parade of bravehearts, Spitfire aces returned from battle to the society photographer’s studio. They were an absurdly handsome bunch, but Strickland, with curly blond hair and a hint of melancholy in his face, looked even more perfect than the rest.
‘Flying Officer Claude Strickland was shot down over Ostend’, read a newspaper cutting pasted next to one of his portraits. ‘Presumed alive.’
‘Wrong,’ Diana said.
He never came back, then?
‘No.’
I asked how long she had known him: ‘Oh, forever. He was a debs’ delight when I was a deb. He was a boyfriend … but they were all shot down two a penny.’
One friend who did keep visiting was Lowenstein. He and Dick Fairey (son of the founder of Fairey Aviation, soon to lose his legs to gangrene after four days in an open boat off Greenland) had en
couraged Diana Barnato to try for the ATA even though she had barely a fiftieth of the experience of the least experienced of the First Eight. Lowenstein and Fairey knew the ATA’s chief flying instructor rode in Windsor Great Park each Sunday morning. They had contrived to bump into him there with Diana in tow on a thoroughbred black mare. Startled and socially outshone, the normally unflappable Captain A.R.O. MacMillan, ex-BOAC, agreed to give her a flight test the following Wednesday. There was no legal way of practising in the air, so Diana roared up and down the Egham bypass near her father’s home in one of his Bentleys – a silver-grey 1936 four-and-a-half litre. ‘I opened all the windows and pretended I was seated in a Tiger [Moth],’ she wrote, ‘looking out of the side windows at the grass verges so that I could judge what the waving grass looked like when I would be easing off the ground or trying to land again.’ In the evenings, Dick and Bobby talked her through every detail of the White Waltham aerodrome and the circuit above it from the orange sofa in an outer hallway of the Barnato mansion.
Captain MacMillan supervised Diana Barnato’s test himself. She passed first time.
It was on the day after the test, in the grounds of a house that the Lowensteins maintained in Leicestershire, that Diana had her riding accident. Bobby blamed himself. In the ambulance on the way back to London he told her he loved her and hoped to marry her. For ten days he reported for duty as usual each morning with his bomber squadron, and visited her at the London Clinic after flying. Then, coming into land in a Blenheim, he inadvertently shut down one engine, flipped the aircraft onto its back and was killed.
‘Pilot error,’ Diana wrote. ‘Not to be wondered at. Once more I was devastated. No Claude, plus no Bobby, plus no face.’
Spitfire Women of World War II Page 11
