It was not that Curtis didn’t suffer fools gladly; she didn’t suffer them – or anyone who had not somehow proved that they deserved her respect – at all. She would simply ignore them, or cut them off with a conversational carving knife. Naomi Allen, the flamboyant ex-parachutist and glider pilot, once recorded in her diary telling Curtis that she would be seeing Jim Mollison, Amy Johnson’s estranged husband. ‘Oh,’ Curtis replied. ‘Give him my hate will you?’
To this day some of Curtis’s defenders explain away her spectacular froideur as proof of crippling shyness. But Peter Mursell, who knew her well, said she wasn’t a bit shy as long as she was ‘on firm ground’, and firm ground was Lettice Curtis’s speciality, even in the air.
Her father was a country lawyer, too hard of hearing to engage in more than perfunctory conversation. He sent her away to boarding school when she was six. At seven, after scandalising her nurse on a weekend at home by telling her she was expected at her new school to share a bath and bedroom with a boy called Monty, Curtis was moved to an all girls’ establishment on the north side of Dartmoor. It was run by three spinsters, victims of the man-drought left by the First World War, who gave her a solid grounding in all subjects along lines set out by the Parents’ National Educational Union. The school had a library, where Lettice found herself indifferent to Dickens but entranced by the adventure novels of Rider Haggard. Aged thirteen she was moved again, to Benenden public school, in Kent, which taught her ‘the importance of exams and passing them’, and the loneliness of wanting, above all, to win.
‘Benenden was to some extent a bittersweet experience,’ she wrote in her autobiography, ‘as until I became House and School Captain, when I thoroughly enjoyed being a leader, I never completely fitted in …’. She was, she said, extremely competitive. ‘To me, second place at anything was a failure.’ She went to Oxford University in 1933, longing ‘to be told the right way to do everything’.
Academically, Oxford disappointed Curtis, and vice versa, since her college, St Hilda’s, had no mathematics tutor of its own. So she concentrated on sport, which naturally entailed sweeping all before her. She was a triple blue in fencing, tennis and lacrosse.
She joined the ATA reluctantly, so she said, having scared herself in bad weather over the Pennines while doing aerial survey work for the army before the war. She also claimed to find her fellow women pilots pleasant and intelligent, but hamstrung by ‘a fundamental lack of enterprise – a willingness to cling perhaps a little too rigidly to rules and customs good or bad’.
This was her explanation for applying to be posted from all-female Hamble to the all-male headquarters at White Waltham. It appears no coincidence, however, that the commanding officer there was the darkhaired, blue-eyed Frankie Francis, leader of men and enchanter of women. Curtis would have known of Francis from ferry flights in and out of White Waltham, and from gossip, and the most poignant strand of the Curtis legend holds that she had something deeper than a crush on him; that she lobbied for White Waltham postings to be near him, and that she even allowed herself to think of a life with him. In her history of the ATA her formal narrative tone is dropped for two subjects: Spitfires and Francis. ‘All the girls fell for Frankie and I was no exception,’ she wrote. ‘I thought he was wonderful.’ There is a sense at this point of the incorrigible, binary-minded competitor aching to elaborate on something unfamiliar and mushy, and to an extent she does. She writes about her marathon backgammon sessions with Francis, and her admiration for his methodical and scientific approach to winning them.
Whatever motivated her to aim for White Waltham, she was there one sodden October morning in 1942 when Eleanor Roosevelt came calling, and that visit propelled her into history.
17
Girl Flies Halifax
There were any number of stories that the papers could have told about the First Lady’s visit to White Waltham. Apart from anything, the Germans bombed the place while she was there.
Mrs Roosevelt, in greatcoat and fox fur, had just finished a short speech of thanks and encouragement in front of a Lockheed Hudson draped with the Stars and Stripes. Her invited audience, including most of Jackie Cochran’s recruits, then repaired to the mess to eat bountiful American food and to bombard her with questions about when women would be flying back home. ‘We proceeded to gorge ourselves,’ Ann Wood wrote that night, ‘when suddenly the siren went and we were all told to make for the shelter. It was rather a weird awakening, and my first into-the-shelter raid. I couldn’t help but marvel at the German timing.’
No-one was hurt, so the raid’s newsworthiness was deemed marginal. The reporters covering the visit were similarly uninterested in the Cochran angle. Where was she? Why had she gone home so soon? Would it not have been appropriate for her to return with Mrs Roosevelt since without her there would have been no American women pilots for her to visit? But Cochran was three months’ gone, and long forgotten.
A piquant human interest story also went unsampled – that of Mary Zerbel, petite, attractive and beside herself with worry as the others delighted in the attention of the ‘soft and kindly’ Mrs Roosevelt and her ‘very cute’ companion, Mrs Clementine Churchill. Zerbel had learned to fly in Southern California and lived in Hollywood until her boyfriend, Wesley Ford, was posted to England soon after Pearl Harbor. She leapt at the chance Cochran offered, not so much to fly as to follow Wes. They were married in Sir Lindsay Everard’s private chapel at Ratcliffe Hall. Now Wes was missing, and had been for two weeks; shot down over Germany. Ann Wood did not foresee a happy ending: ‘Mary is being terribly plucky,’ she wrote, ‘but it must be quite an effort as [I] don’t believe she was ever too thrilled with her work, nor the people, and it was only the nearness to Wes that made the job passable at all.’
It was Mrs Roosevelt’s encounter with Lettice Curtis that made the headlines the following day. For the First Lady’s walkabout before her speech, Curtis was positioned under the giant wing of a Handley Page Halifax, which provided shelter from the rain and a conversation point. Curtis was at this stage the only woman in the world to have taken the controls of a four-engined bomber, having earned the privilege with relentless work and a blemishless record. She would gloss over the achievement afterwards, saying she had merely been ‘lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time’. But her promotion to four engines opened the way for her and a select few other women to a class of planes that included Short Stirlings, American Liberators and Fortresses, and the mighty Avro Lancaster. When she met Mrs Churchill, Curtis had yet to go solo in the lumbering monster that shielded them both from the rain, but that didn’t bother the gentlemen of the press. ‘Girl Flies Halifax’, they announced the next day, which meant there was no turning back now even if the girl had wanted to.
The ATA’s assault on the last bastion of male air supremacy began, typically, with no fanfare and the quiet help of some supportive men. Commander Frankie Francis put Curtis up for what was known as ‘Class V conversion’ because he thought she was ready for it. Chief Instructor Captain Macmillan agreed. The only possible objection anyone else might have had was that she was a woman, but the d’Erlanger-Gower doctrine that gender was no bar to anything had been established thirteen months earlier by Winnie (‘It’s lovely, darlings’) Crossley in her first Hurricane. There were, of course, still men who believed that 30 tonnes of aeroplane needed at least 200 lbs of man to fly. But any of them inclined to grumble to Aeroplane magazine would have thought better of it when they learned that the insurgent 130 lbs of woman belonged to the triple blue with the frozen sense of humour and angular jaw who played backgammon marathons with Frankie Francis. And in any case, the grumblers were wrong, as Rosemary Rees explained briskly to one of them after joining the women’s Class V elite in 1943: ‘I remember having quite an argument with a Wing Commander about an [Avro] York I was collecting,’ she wrote. ‘He said it was so heavy compared with my five foot three and seven stone weight. I pointed out that I was not proposing to attempt to
carry it after all, but on the contrary to make it carry me.’ Taxiing a four-engined bomber in a strong wind could take a bit of elbow grease, Rees admitted, but ‘the controls of a big aircraft were not at all heavy in the air’.
Before the Roosevelt visit, Lettice Curtis had done several dual circuits in a Halifax with a mild-mannered Polish instructor called Klemens Dlugaszewski, also known as Double Whisky. He had founded LOT, the Polish national airline, in 1929, and escaped to England ten years later. He was much loved: a model of probity, patriotism and pride in his pupils; and it was up to him when Curtis would go solo. She did so before the ‘Girl Flies Halifax’ headline became fish-and-chip paper.
On 27 October 1943, Dlugaszewski clambered down from a Mark II Halifax that he had flown for her to an airstrip with a convenient east-west runway, and left Curtis to get on with it. She flew a perfect circuit and remembered long afterwards the sight of Dlugaszewski standing at the edge of the runway and saluting as she taxied it back towards him. Someone, at least, had witnessed this little piece of progress. But if Dlugaszewski was proud of her, she would not confess to any pride in herself. Granted, it might have helped that she was tall and strong, even if physical strength was no particular requirement to fly big planes. Granted, it might have helped that she had got herself posted to the otherwise all-male White Waltham pool. But you weren’t proud, she said. You had a job to do.
That evening the instructors held a party at White Waltham to which Curtis was invited. I made the mistake of asking if it had been in her honour, and quickly understood that a more preposterous question had not been asked in the whole history of aviation. Too much celebration would, in fact, have been premature. Gender politics intervened just before Curtis was cleared to ferry heavy bombers: she was required to make ten perfect landings, rather than the usual seven, and Freddie Laker (the future airline tycoon) accused her of bouncing on one of them. He was her flight engineer and may have been alarmed at being flown by a woman; Dlugaszewski happened to be watching the landing from outside, and vouched for the fact that it was ‘perfect’.
Curtis finally completed her Class V conversion at RAF Pocklington in Yorkshire in February 1943. She was lonely there, and self-conscious about having to request landing permission by radio in line with RAF procedure. She wrote simply: ‘I went solo on my second flight.’ But it was not that perfunctory from where her new instructor, Captain Henderson, was sitting. He wrote an account of it in 1946:
The Halifax had barely taken off when the Control Room was invaded by no less a person that the Group Captain commanding the Station, accompanied by an Army Staff General. Everyone snapped to attention, momentarily overpowered by the weight of red tabs and ‘scrambled eggs’ [gold braids].
‘Oh hello, Henderson! No work this morning?’ asked the Station-master in a fatherly manner.
‘Just watching a first solo, Sir,’ I replied.
The Control Officer could contain himself no longer.
‘It’s a woman pilot, Sir.’
‘It’s a WHAT?’ gasped the S.M., and, turning to the General: ‘Come on Fred, we must watch this.’ He led the way hastily out on to the balcony. Arriving there he discovered that the runway in use was the one adjacent to the Control Tower and passing it within about thirty yards. He thereupon returned to the Control Tower as hastily as he had left it.
‘Which way will the Halifax swing when it lands?’ He sounded urgent.
‘Away from the Control Tower, Sir, with this cross-wind,’ replied the Control Officer.
The S.M. was relieved, and returned to the balcony with ‘Fred’.
I said nothing. Suddenly the loudspeaker began to buzz and Lettice’s voice came through: ‘May I come in to land? Over.’ The Control Officer nodded: ‘You may land’ returned the Operator. ‘Over.’ I watched confidently; the others excitedly.
The great undercarriage appeared and slowly extended itself. The Halifax slowed perceptibly, made its final turn toward the aerodrome and descended steadily towards the runway. It crossed the hedge, checked its descent and held off just above the ground. Then the wheels kissed the surface gently and the 30-ton aircraft rolled steadily down the runway in the smooth manner which seldom characterizes a first solo, and came to a dignified halt.
‘It didn’t swing!’ said the S. M. in a musing tone. ‘It didn’t even bounce! And my lads have always kidded me how difficult Halifaxes are. Why damn it, they must be easy if a little girl can fly them like that!’
I said that Lettice wasn’t so little. He snorted. I told him that Lettice had 2,000 hours and a lot of variegated types in her log book.
‘Has she, by Gad!’
He thought for a moment, then: ‘Come on, Fred, let’s drink a half-can before lunch.’ And departed.
There was now no logical bar to women flying any type of aircraft – only an illogical ban on their presence on flying boats. The reason, apparently, was the risk of untoward intimacy among mixed-sex flight crews should they find themselves left with no alternative to sleeping on board. But the ban affected few of the ATA women; only eleven of them were ever cleared to fly Class V planes, the prerequisite for anyone hoping to move on to flying boats. The remaining 153 women pilots found the awesome power of fighters and fighter-bombers challenge enough.
18
Mayfair 120
From the ‘Standing Orders for Delivery Pilots’, given to each of them on signature of contract and posted at all ferry pools in case of emergency:
If you have a forced landing, ring up ‘Mayfair 120’ extension 4, and give your particulars to the Transit Officer (Central Dispatch Pool) LONDON …
In the case of a forced landing or crash you are responsible for unloading guns.
Tel. ‘Mayfair 120’ each day no later than 10 a.m. if still unable to proceed.
If you have a crash, send a written and signed report immediately to O.C. Central Dispatch Pool. THIS IS MOST IMPORTANT.
Occasionally, after a crash, unloading one’s guns and telephoning Mayfair 120 (a central search, rescue and salvage number for the RAF as well as the ATA) was not immediately practicable. This was certainly the case when another Diana ran into difficulties after taking off from Langley, near Slough, in a Hawker Tempest in 1943. First Officer Diana Ramsay (known as ‘Wamsay’ because she couldn’t say her ‘r’s) was a dainty young woman with an upturned nose and light brown hair held back with a blue velvet ribbon. She joined the ATA the same month as Diana Barnato, who was at White Waltham as she flew overhead in serious trouble.
With a monstrous 2,500-horsepower Centaurus engine, Wamsay’s Tempest was one of the fastest piston-powered aircraft of the war. It could cruise at 350 mph and sustain 450 mph for brief periods at maximum boost, making it perfect for chasing flying bombs. But it proved a handful when anything went wrong.
Soon after take-off, bound for Henlow to the north of London, ‘Wamsay’ felt an unsolicited surge of power and saw her airspeed indicator climb smartly to 400 mph. At that speed she would be at Henlow in less than three minutes, but with no hope of surviving a landing. She tried to throttle back and cut her boost setting, but found to her alarm that both were stuck at maximum. At this point, she told the Accidents Committee, she altered course, turning west for White Waltham, because she knew the aerodrome and surrounding area better. (She also knew that as a training school White Waltham had a practised crash wagon and its own blood cart.)
Unable to lower the undercarriage at 400 mph, she hurtled over Wembley and tried to climb to lose speed. It didn’t work; she simply gained height and knew she would accelerate again when the time came to lose it. Not wanting to bale out over such a built-up area, she made a low pass over White Waltham at full power and full speed, shattering the mid-morning calm in the operations room; then she cut her engine. She was still travelling at close to 400 mph in an aircraft designed to land at not more than 100 mph. The crash wagon was already racing across the grass as she turned and began a last-ditch final approach. Di
ana Barnato and others emerged from the administration block to see her ‘trying to lose speed in a series of humps, like a Dover sole or flatfish along the bottom of the sea’. The Tempest whistled clear across the aerodrome, pulled up to avoid a church spire and disappeared. Arthur ‘Doc’ Whitehurst – who had taken over as Commanding Officer at White Waltham when Frankie Francis was reassigned to Ratcliffe in December 1942 – ran for his car and invited Diana Barnato to go with him.
Dreading what they might find they drove to the edge of the aerodrome, then walked quickly across two fields in the direction the Tempest had been flying when last seen. The first sign of the crash was a series of cuts in the soft turf from the propeller. A section of wing and a heavy branch lay on the ground between two oak trees at the edge of a third field in which a small herd of cows had been grazing. Beyond this, something large and powerful had heaved itself over a ditch, smashed into a wood and kept going. Barnato and Whitehurst picked their way through the tunnel of torn branches it had left behind and came to a circle of flattened trees which looked, Diana wrote, ‘as if a couple of dinosaurs had had a fight in there’. On the far side the Tempest’s fuselage, shorn of wings and tail, was wedged up against a final bulwark of larger trees. Sitting astride its engine, minus her flying helmet but with hardly a bruise, was ‘Wamsay’. She had begun to walk back towards the aerodrome, she said apologetically, but thought better of it since she was afraid of cows. In any case, she had left a velvet ribbon somewhere in the trees.
Spitfire Women of World War II Page 21
