Barnato did not report for duty with the ATA for another nine months on account of her smashed-up face, but when she did it was in a leopard-skin coat. Even so, she struck her comrades as curiously unspoilt considering her background. When grounded by bad weather she was a diligent letter writer, undistractable unless she sought distraction. And unlike Audrey Sale-Barker, she was content to order her uniform from Regent Street rather than Savile Row (she still has it; it hangs in her wardrobe in the dry-cleaner’s plastic wrap, and comes out at the slightest excuse).
The ATA girls looked sharp. Their gold-trimmed navy uniform turned heads and secured the best rooms in hotels and good tables in restaurants. It was a passport, Veronica Volkersz said; ‘it would even get you a seat on the bus’. However much its wearers loathed the ‘glamour’ word (and even one of those who did had to admit it was ‘rather fun walking down the streets in London and having people turn and look at you’), the uniform represented daring and dynamism to the general public.
Most female recruits, like Barnato, were measured up at Austin Reed’s, and the fine tailoring on offer there was the one significant concession to feminine vanity made by the ATA on their behalf. Two pilots thought they could do without it. The results were mixed, and Alison King’s unimprovable account of a visit by Margot Gore and Philippa Bennett to the Maidenhead tailor used by most of the ATA’s male pilots explains why. No woman, it seems, had set foot in there before, so there was ‘a certain amount of consternation’ when the serving gentleman discovered that Flight Officers Gore and Bennett were ladies.
Whoever heard of such a thing! But, after much debate behind a screen, he eventually emerged to whisper, almost hysterically, ‘that they would see what could be done’.
After some moments he appeared again with two other gentlemen, both rather older than his own fifty-odd years, and these he introduced as Mr Pert and Mr Hix ‘who will see to you’. He then hurried away to the far end of the room and pretended to be folding material, but taking all the time quick, alarmed glances at the measurers. Mr Hix had stood himself at a bench with pen and paper, while Mr Pert, having ushered Margot into position, was doing manual things with the tape measure. Length of sleeve, both from shoulder to elbow and elbow to wrist, had gone swimmingly, but his approach to the bust had, they thought, been unusual. He would take a few quick steps, throw the tape measure round the back, catch it in mid-air and, turning his head away as if he couldn’t bear to look, wait until the two ends met before giving a fleeting glance to the number of inches it recorded. Then he would cover the five feet or so between himself and the writer, Mr Hix, and whisper his findings in a hairy ear as if they were too awful a secret to bear alone.
Waist and hips again went swimmingly, although the secret numbers were again imparted in a whisper. When it became known that trousers were needed as well as a skirt, there was a hurried consultation, and, after a great deal of eye-rolling and obvious heart-searching, the two gentlemen, as though it were half-time, changed places, and Mr Hix took on the manual duty. Mr Hix did his measurements with easeand dash until it came to the inevitable length from crutch to ankle. This was eventually overcome, but with such delicacy that when poor F/O Gore and F/O Bennett received their long-awaited uniform, the trouser seats hung four inches too low and had to be sent back with carefully chalked instructions and a sharp note.
On 10 May 1941, Lieutenant Colonel J. T. C. Moore-Brabazon, the first man to transport live cargo in an aeroplane (a piglet in a wastepaper basket tied to the wing strut of his French-built Voisin in 1909), paid an official visit to the women’s ferry pool at Hatfield. Promoted by Churchill to the critical position of Minister of Aircraft Production because of Lord Beaverbrook’s failing health, Brabazon had been in the job all of ten days.
‘Brab’ must have attached considerable importance to the ATA women’s work, or at least to their morale. Or he may simply have enjoyed their company; naturally, he knew most of them socially. He posed with them for a photograph outside one of De Havilland’s sturdy brick workshops, hat off, linking arms with Gower on his left and Lois Butler on his right, and they all look unusually jolly. Even Lettice Curtis is smiling.
If the Hatfield tea-party picture taken seventeen months earlier was the first iconic group portrait of the ATA women, this was the second. Its subjects even acquired a nickname – ‘Brab’s Beauties’. Two of the women are wearing regulation A-line skirts and black silk stockings. These are Audrey Sale-Barker and her saucier namesake, Audrey Macmillan. The rest are in their blue flying slacks. Winnie Crossley, the doctor’s daughter, holds a pair of light kid gloves. Lois Butler holds a cigarette in one hand and has thrust the other in her trouser pocket. The picture is imbued with optimism, and, for once, the sun is out.
All anyone wanted to talk about at Hatfield that spring was flying Hurricanes and Spitfires. Gower had proved herself as a player in the aeronautical establishment without alienating its key men. Her women had proved themselves extremely capable pilots. The best of them had moved on from Proctors and Lysanders to Fairey Battles and large, noisy radial-engined Harvards. Hurricanes had to be next. ‘Politically,’ Lettice Curtis wrote, ‘the implications were great, since there were still many men who kidded themselves that only ace pilots could fly fighters.’ Practically, therefore, the move had to be incremental, below the radar – a fait accompli.
That bright spring day at Hatfield, Brab lunched with Gower, Butler and Crossley. Lettice Curtis believes that they discussed with him flying a wider range of aircraft (and they surely discussed little else). She also records a theory that Gower effectively clinched the long-awaited promotion to fly operational aircraft by buttonholing d’Erlanger at a party a couple of months later. ‘I suppose there isn’t really any reason why women shouldn’t fly Hurricanes,’ d’Erlanger is meant to have said, at which point Gower pounced: ‘Fine – when can we start?’
Brab may have used the proper channels and written a memo urging the Air Council to require the RAF to allow the use of women in operational planes. If so, it has never been produced. More likely, he simply telephoned d’Erlanger and told him to get on with it. He was one of Churchill’s people, after all. He was an aviator’s aviator, a pioneer; the man who’d shown that pigs really could fly.
At 9 a.m. on 19 July 1941, the day’s assignments went up in chalk as usual on a blackboard outside the Hatfield operations room. In one column were the pilots’ names; in the next, the types of aircraft they would be flying. After ‘Miss Crossley’, written in capitals, was the word ‘HURRICANE’. Shortly afterwards, a Captain R. H. Henderson of the ATA’s technical department at White Waltham flew over in the department’s own Hurricane. Four women flew the plane that day, all from the First Eight. They were Winnie Crossley, Margie Fairweather, Joan Hughes and Rosemary Rees. They were no more experienced than Cunnison, Patterson, Wilberforce or Friedlander; just lucky to find themselves at Hatfield on the appointed day. Crossley went first, with the fate of the women pilots depending on her. The others watched, too anxious and excited to talk, as she climbed in, buckled on her parachute and harness and taxied away. Take-off, circuit and three-point landing were all perfect, and were over in minutes. The Hurricane rumbled back to the spectators. ‘It’s lovely, darlings,’ Winnie smiled as she stepped out onto the wing. ‘A beautiful little aeroplane.’
After a brief tour of the cockpit from Captain Henderson, the other three followed. No-one put a foot wrong. One of those watching was Alison King, who was too timid to fly for the ATA but experienced the pilots’ entire war vicariously as an operations officer. ‘Afterwards there was much laughter and celebration and we eyed each other with furtive, unspoken delight,’ she wrote, ‘for we knew that that afternoon something momentous had happened.’
To mark that something the women pooled their petrol coupons and drove into London for dinner in St James’s at the Ecu de France. Their excitement was at what they had proved, and what they would prove. Because it meant that Spitfires would be ne
xt.
10
‘The Perfect Lady’s Aeroplane’
In January 1942, the Ministry of Information’s Crown Film Unit released to cinemas a short documentary called Ferry Pilot. The film was about the ATA, and it proved a minor hit. Part of the appeal lay in Captain F. D. Bradbrooke’s starring role. He was a senior ATA pilot with a short haircut and a voice indistinguishable from Cary Grant’s, and he gave a relaxed and personable depiction of himself as a fatherly jack-of-all-aerial-trades. Part of the appeal lay in the heavy ledgers and clouds of pipesmoke behind which two slightly effete operations officers masterminded a typical day’s flying from White Waltham; and part in the unique talent of the chief Spitfire test pilot at Castle Bromwich, Alex Henshaw.
Early in the film, Bradbrooke and an American pilot nicknamed Alabam stride into the Castle Bromwich operations room brandishing ‘chits’: ‘Two Spitfires, please,’ Bradbrooke says cheerfully, placing his bits of paper on the ops officer’s desk. He has jumped a short queue – two young women are already there – but they don’t seem to mind. They are easily recognisable as the tiny Joan Hughes, and the willowy, mysterious Audrey Sale-Barker, even though when Bradbrooke addresses Sale-Barker it’s as ‘Betty’.
‘What have you got today, Betty?’
‘Trainers,’ she mumbles, and leaves the room.
Joan Hughes follows, saying much more brightly: ‘Yes, 200 miles an hour’s our limit, I’m afraid.’
Outside, a Spitfire hurtles past at shoulder-height. The all-knowing Bradbrooke announces it’s Alex Henshaw at the stick: ‘Should be worth watching’. Henshaw climbs near-vertically into the sun, twists at the top to give a flash of the Spitfire’s elliptical wings, then dives back towards the ground. Alabam can scarcely contain himself; he says he’s heard all about Henshaw and sure enough he ‘ain’t never seen anything quite this’.
Henshaw roars by again, close enough, it seems, to touch. Then he recedes to a faint line against a wash of stratocumulus, and dives again. This time the camera picks out a gentle rise on the ground beyond the aerodrome. Henshaw keeps diving until he disappears behind it. When he re-emerges, much closer and louder, he rolls the Spitfire lazily onto its back, so low that its tail appears to brush the grass.
Hughes and Sale-Barker let their awestruck faces do the talking. Their necks twist sharply as if at Wimbledon. Henshaw’s gravity-fed carburettors begin to dry up and his engine sputters, but somehow the Spitfire stays upside down and rock-steady. Alabam promises not to ape the master and he and Bradbrooke head for two Spitfires of their own. The camera lingers on them as they taxi and take off, leaving the ladies firmly on the ground.
Six months before the film was screened in cinemas, Captain Bradbrooke flew into a mountain on the Isle of Arran in a Consolidated Liberator. Newly assigned to BOAC’s Atlantic Return Ferry Service, he was killed instantly along with twenty other male ferry pilots, most of them Americans returning home after bringing bombers over from Newfoundland.
Meanwhile, ATA women had been flying Spitfires for five of those six months, even if, as far as the Crown Film Unit was concerned, their speed limit was still a deferential 200 mph. Spitfires were capable of more than double that. They were happy cruising at 300 mph, but were unhappy waiting on the tarmac with their engines idling for more than a few minutes. The American Colonel Jim Goodson, who flew for the RAF from early 1941 onwards, explained somewhat heretically what this could mean for a pilot:
the Spit was a little bitch on the ground. The long nose completely blocking your forward vision meant that you had to constantly weave right and left, and if you took too long before taking off you could lose your brakes entirely through lack of air, or even overheat the engine. The narrow landing gear also made it prone to ground looping on landing.
Spitfires belonged in the air. Up there, their pilots didn’t see the aeroplane that had stolen most of the limelight in the Battle of Britain from the manlier Hurricane (responsible for 80 per cent of that battle’s kills). They didn’t see the plane that Harold Balfour described in 1938 as ‘slimly built with a beautifully proportioned body and graceful curves just where they should be’. They saw a big, black, semicircular instrument panel, a dome of sky around it, and a rearview mirror.
The six central instruments – airspeed indicator, artificial horizon, rate of climb indicator, altimeter, turn indicator and gyroscopic compass – were the same as on any operational plane. Everything else was more cramped if you were big or heavyset; more snug if you were small. For women, the whole package was perfect. Without exception, the women aviators of the ATA longed to fly Spitfires because of what they’d seen and heard, but they loved them when they got their hands on them because of how they felt.
First there was the power that kicked them in the back when they released the brakes. It has taken engineers seventy years to work out how to cram as much muscle into a road-going car as was crammed into a 1938 Mark I Spitfire. Later Spitfire marks were vastly more powerful again. The 1,600-horsepower Rolls-Royce Merlin-powered Mark IXs and 2,300-horsepower Griffon-powered F24s spoilt pilots who moved on from them to early jets and found some sluggish by comparison.
After the power, they felt the lift generated by a wing with a slower stalling speed at its tips than close in to the fuselage. This meant that just before it fell out of the sky – in a vertically banked turn, say, or on a misjudged final approach – a Spitfire would shudder. It was a uniquely generous final warning that saved the lives of aces and novices alike.
And finally: the responsiveness that gave meaning to the cliché that you didn’t fly a Spitfire at all; you wore it. Or, as Diana Barnato put it: ‘You moved, it moved.’ This was largely a product of Reginald Mitchell’s long experience designing airborne thoroughbreds, and of his intuitive genius. The Spitfire was nose-heavy on the ground and would tip forward if braked harshly, but it was perfectly balanced in flight. It also had an unusual joystick that pivoted forwards and backwards from a fulcrum on the floor but left and right from the neck between the spade-style handle and the stick itself, much higher up. To turn, in other words, you only had to twist your wrist. In skirts or slacks, a pilot’s knees never had to be more than 6 inches apart.
The Spitfire is the only fighter plane to have been honoured with a full-length literary biography. Paraphrasing the lustier fighter boys who flew it, its author, Jonathan Glancey, calls the Spitfire ‘aerial totty’; a ‘mechanical Lady Hamilton’. Certainly, none of the women who flew it thought it masculine. To the contrary, it was every inch the boyish Hawker Hurricane’s desirable sister, though the women’s feelings for it were more sisterly than carnal, or like those of a teenager with a crush on her pony. But they were no less ardent for that. It was, according to Katie Hirsch, one of the last ATA women to learn to fly it, ‘simply bliss’.
‘Everyone loved them,’ Jadwiga Pilsudska recalled, ‘but especially the women.’ Some recorded their first Spitfire experiences in quasi-sexual language. ‘It seemed the most natural thing in the world to be sitting there in the cockpit,’ wrote the South African Jackie Sorour, ‘as though my entire life had led to this moment’:
I started up inexpertly and felt the power coursing through the Spitfire’s frame. A little awed but stimulated by the urgent throb of the Merlin engine that seemed to tremble with eagerness to be free in its own element, I taxied cautiously to the down-wind end of the field … A few seconds later I found myself soaring through the air in a machine that made poetry of flight. Carefully I familiarised myself with the controls as the ground fell away at fantastic speed and felt exhilarated by the eager, sensitive response. Singing with joy and relief I dived and climbed and spiraled round the broken clouds, before turning on to course.
For Helen Richey the Spitfire was ‘a fish through water, a sharp knife through butter, a bullet through the sky’. For Veronica Volkersz this was, quite simply, ‘the perfect lady’s aeroplane’.
The only woman pilot who categorically refused to get
carried away by the Spitfire was the very first of the ATA women to fly it. In a letter to her father, Lord Runciman, dated 8 October 1941, Margie Fairweather devoted five paragraphs to thanking him for a gift of money, to news of her and her husband’s new life at the Prestwick ferry pool and to her daughter’s gratifying enjoyment of her new Oxford boarding school. She then added: ‘Knowing your great love of aeroplanes I am sure you will appreciate the great honour [I] have brought to the family by being the first woman to fly in a Spitfire.’ She then asked her father to thank her mother for her letters, and signed off.
If the ATA had wanted to keep this latest small step for womankind a secret it could not have chosen a more discreet trailblazer. But any idea that news of the flight would not spread far and fast was ludicrous. By the time Margie Fairweather had written her letter, that news had already reached New York, Pretoria, Santiago and, as we shall see, the scarcely populated estancias of Patagonia.
11
The Originals
Statistically, it was unusual for a woman in wartime Britain to set out to fly fighters and bombers and succeed. One hundred and seventeen British women managed it, or about one in every 200,000. But this ratio represented a positive avalanche compared with the number of women pilots who came from the rest of the world. Of these there were forty-seven (or roughly one in 29 million based on 1941 world population figures). These women were not representative of their gender or their times, except in so far as their times were cataclysmic. They were originals.
Twenty-five came from the United States, too enthralled by the idea of flying combat planes in England to wait and see if they would be allowed to do the same at home. They came from every corner of the country: Maine, Chicago, Kansas City, California, Louisiana and the foothills of the Kettle River range in northern Washington. Others, motivated at least partly by loyalty to Britain and the Empire, came from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and – that great ‘forgotten colony’ – Argentina.
Spitfire Women of World War II Page 12
