Reg first met Jackie at an army dance at Brooklands in 1940. She let him partner her but in her shyness and respect for propriety she developed neck ache making sure her cheek never touched his. He managed to get an arm round her, but only on the parquet when they had to dive for cover from a stick of bombs during the national anthem. The army provided buses home for the WAAF girls from the coastal radar station where Jackie worked before joining the ATA, watching intently for green German blobs to be called in to Fighter Command at Stanmore. She sat next to Reg on the bus and let him hold her hand in the dark. She hoped he would kiss her goodnight, but she pulled away before he took his chance.
Two years later, impelled by orders to depart for India, Reg bought Jackie a zircon ring that would fit under her flying gloves.
‘You have no objections to an engagement?’ he asked over lunch at his parents’ house near Taunton.
‘None whatever,’ she answered.
Another two years, and they saw each other again. Reg decided to make his return from India a surprise. On a Friday afternoon in September 1944 he let himself into the riverside cottage in Hamble where Jackie was billeted, and sat down to wait. She had been faithful to him, deflecting advances with ‘a pious pseudo-saintliness that would have made a nun of Assisi a harlot by comparison’, as she put it later. But she was 300 miles away that afternoon on the north side of the Lake District, with little chance of showing up that night.
The weather over the fells and the Solway Firth beyond was bad and worsening, and Jackie’s ride home was a decrepit twin-engined Mitchell bomber, a type she had not flown before. Rows of bombs, one for each operational mission flown, were painted under its nose next to a faded dancing girl. As the plane sat outside the Kirkbride operations room in driving rain, Sorour was handed her delivery chit. ‘ONE LANDING ONLY’, it said in red. She was to fly a new type in foul weather on its last flight before being broken up. It did not seem sensible, but Hamble personnel were invited to a dance – another dance – at a nearby American army camp that night. Sorour felt indifferent about it, but her flight engineer wanted to go.
They headed out into the rain and strapped themselves in. With her Flight Authorisation Card in her top left-hand pocket, Sorour was her own captain. Operations staff could neither ground her nor order her to take off; only advise. Advice to pilots already in their aircraft but not in wireless contact came in the form of coloured flares. Green meant it was safe to proceed; red unsafe. Sorour taxied the old bomber to the east end of the runway, hemmed in by hills, and turned to line up for take-off towards the sea. As she peered down the runway the sky darkened and a squall whipped the rain and puddles into a curtain of water. A red flare went up from the control tower.
‘The dance,’ hissed the engineer, and Sorour obligingly put her hand to the throttles. She took off into the storm, choosing not to notice a second flare launched as the Mitchell lumbered into the air. She levelled off almost immediately and banked to port under the clouds, hugging the coast.
To the south the weather improved, but as the Mitchell approached the Dunfold Maintenance Unit in Surrey where it was to be broken up its starboard engine failed. Sorour shouted at her engineer to feather the propeller, trimming the flaps and opening her port throttle to compensate. A quick look at her map told her they had ten miles to go, with 800 feet to lose and not enough power to go round again if she undershot on her final approach. The engineer asked if she had landed a bomber on one engine before. She said she hadn’t, and he tightened his straps.
At this point a less confident pilot might have followed the instructions in the Ferry Pilot’s Notes even more carefully than usual, or panicked. Sorour did neither. She realised that if she let the engineer lower the undercarriage at the recommended speed and altitude she would suddenly not have enough of either because of the increased drag. So she made him hold off until they were less than a mile from the runway, then brought the plane in crabwise, kicking the rudder pedals against a gusty crosswind and squeezing as much power out of the port engine as she could without turning the plane over. They bounced once, broke nothing and rolled slowly to a halt. As the crash wagon rushed out to meet them, Sorour noticed that the maps clutched in her hand were shaking like a flag in a stiff breeze.
An Anson dropped them at Hamble, where Jackie and her engineer went straight from the airfield to the dance and jitterbugged till midnight. She went home without him, creeping over the threshold of Creek Cottage so as not to wake her hosts. In the sitting room she found Reg, thinner and browner than in 1942, rising from an easy chair surrounded by pipe-cleaners and magazines. ‘I remember little of what happened in the shy haze of welcome,’ she wrote. ‘Except … that I was firmly kissed.’
The war had changed them both, but not so much that they did not want to be together. On the contrary, the cocktail of exaggerated independence and prudishness that Reg had left behind suddenly found herself ‘eager to be dominated by man and marriage’. She suggested a wedding the following Easter. Reg suggested January. Jackie agreed, provided she could visit her mother in Pretoria first, and that self-imposed deadline launched her on one of the more remarkable hitchhikes of the war.
When Sorour called her mother with the news that she was getting married, her mother replied that she was suffering a nervous breakdown. It was not clear whether the breakdown was a result of the announcement, or even if it was genuine, but it gave Jackie grounds to request two months’ compassionate leave. The request was granted, and in mid-December 1944, she left Hamble for RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire in a Spitfire with an overnight bag. ‘We waved her off with quite a lot of heart-searching on our part and great deal of aplomb on hers,’ Alison King remembered. Jackie had no exit permit or air ticket; only an iron will almost completely camouflaged by coquetry, and a hopeful letter from South Africa House addressed ‘To whom it may concern’.
It took her two days to persuade Lyneham that she was serious, but eventually she managed to talk her way into the co-pilot’s seat of a giant four-engined Consolidated Liberator bound for Cairo (even though she had not been cleared to fly four-engined aircraft). The Liberator landed to refuel in Malta, but it developed a fault and failed to take off again. Jackie switched planes, volunteering her services as a stewardess on a Cairo-bound military Dakota. She was grounded in Egypt for three days for want of a yellow fever inoculation certificate, but eventually forged one with the help of a South African colonel who knew her vaguely from a previous life. Then she hopped another Dakota, this one bound straight for Pretoria, and arrived there three stormy days later.
She found her mother less ill than advertised, and soon had her out of her bed. She stayed for ten days, gorging on fresh milk and fruit and declining lavish inducements to cancel her return: her mother offered her a car, a flat, an aeroplane and a hand-picked selection of alternatives to Reg. None measured up. Nor did she feel at home. ‘To be so suddenly engulfed in a forgotten world of rich food, naked lights and untroubled skies … it was too much,’ she wrote. ‘My destiny was with an austere island still grappling with a mortal foe.’ And so, with two weeks’ leave left and 6,000 miles to go, she headed north again. The third Dakota of the trip took her to Khartoum, where she dashed across the tarmac and begged her way onto a fourth, which had landed minutes before her carrying Gurkha officers from Kathmandu to Boscombe Down. There were waterspouts over the Mediterranean and a forced landing at Istres, near Marseilles, but she was back in England with six days in which to get married in Taunton and honeymoon in Brighton (with lingerie smuggled in in her slimline overnight bag from South Africa).
Jackie Sorour was Jackie Moggridge at last: a woman of the world in a world that had changed almost as much as she had. The chance to leap from Dakota to Dakota to South Africa and back was part of that change. The globe would shrink still futher when Constellations and jet-powered Comets replaced Dakotas, and the network of military air bridges that Sorour had found so useful became the basis of a civilian airline revolution after the
war. But a more significant change for women who flew Spitfires, and women generally, had already occurred on the more intimate stage of the Palace of Westminster.
* * *
On 18 May 1943, Miss Irene Ward, Conservative MP for Wallsend, rose in the House of Commons to address a question to Sir Stafford Cripps, Minister of Aircraft Production. Was it his understanding, she asked, that the women pilots of the ATA received the same rate of pay as their male colleagues? The gaunt and earnest Sir Stafford (who was a vegetarian; when he visited a group of ATA women at White Waltham they fed him macaroni cheese), replied that as of the following month these women would indeed be paid the same as men of the same rank doing the same work.
Miss Ward: ‘Is the Right Honourable and learned Gentleman aware how gratifying it is that this decision has been arrived at without pressure from women members of the house?’
The Minister: ‘I am grateful.’
History made, the house moved on. But two days later its attention was drawn to a related subject. The board of BOAC had resigned en masse in a power struggle with the newly formed RAF Transport Command, and a new board had been nominated. Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air, read out the names of his nominees. To those of Viscount Knollys, KCMG, MBE, DFC, Air Commodore A. C. Critchley, CMG, DSO, and a handful of other predictably stalwart gentlemen, the Mother of Parliaments offered little reaction. But when the last name was announced, the House suddenly bestirred itself. What began as a self-conscious ‘Hear! Hear!’ from the Tory backbenches grew into a generalised waving of order papers, and eventually swelled into a full-throated roar of approval that straddled the aisle and echoed – one likes to think – along the corridors of Westminster, into the Lords, across Parliament Square and down the ages.
That name was Pauline Gower’s, and those few seconds on the afternoon of 18 May 1943, were her moment of triumph. She hadn’t done much flying in the war, but that was because she had more to prove on the ground than in the air. What she had done was to lead a stealthy if not quite bloodless coup. Jackie Cochran made enemies by appearing to put her crusade for women before the war effort. Gower always put duty first, then merit. She almost never argued about gender. That way, any great leaps forward that she achieved for womankind could be categorised as entirely incidental. This was her genius. Under cover of war and her own brisk smile she ambushed the Establishment. Her appointment to the board of the organisation that would connect up whatever was left of the British Empire after the war was recognition that the ambush had succeeded. It would have been unimaginable before the war, and unimaginable for anyone else. She did hope that having proved equal to their task, and to men, her pilots would clear the way for a proper peacetime role for women in aviation. She had abandoned such talk, at least in public, barely a year into the war. But now her strategy of letting the flying do the talking seemed to be sweeping all before it. Anything seemed possible again.
It was suggested by one of the sketchwriters in the press gallery that afternoon that the applause for Miss Gower was started by the long-serving and honourable member for Gillingham, Sir Robert Gower. It probably was. It was also suggested, in a diary entry by Ann Wood after sharing a car journey with Sir Robert’s daughter a few weeks later, that the projects to which Pauline had been devoting herself for the previous four years were not as engrossing or important as her subordinates were led to believe. This was uncharitable. Wood may still have blamed Gower for Jackie Cochran’s isolation in London and Helen Richey’s early return to the US; but the fact was that without Gower there would have been no women’s section of the ATA; no progression from Moths to Magisters, Magisters to Hurricanes, Hurricanes to Spitfires and Lancasters and weird gas-guzzling jets; and certainly no equal pay.
The struggle with the British Treasury’s rule that women were worth 20 per cent less than men had seemed one for another generation. It was, after all, ‘an affront to society for a woman to ask to get equal pay for equal work’, as Bobby Sandoz put it. ‘The idea was that the man had a family to support and a woman alone did not.’
Even now, no-one was suggesting that any other women would get equal pay for equal work. Those working the land or in munitions factories, or building Merlin engines in Glasgow or rebuilding broken men at the Royal Canadian Hospital at Clive-den, dutifully went on giving the government their sweat, toil, tears and 20 per cent discount until peace broke out and sent most of them back home. They lacked their Pauline Gowers.
Gower had been closely involved in the manoeuvring that led to the announcement of 18 May. In a sense, the process had begun two years earlier. She had seized on her pilots’ success in switching to Hurricanes to announce at a lunch for the Royal Aeronautical Society that the theory that ‘the hand that rocks the cradle wrecks the crate’ had been proved wrong. There was now no limit to the types of aircraft women could fly, she declared, and no-one contradicted her. In practice, it took until February 1943 for Lettice Curtis and Joan Hughes to be cleared to fly four-engined aircraft – but as soon as they were, the ATA’s Director of Services and Personnel, the Hon. Ben Bathurst, urged on by Gower, asked Sir Stafford Cripps for more money for his women. At first Cripps said there was nothing he could do. Then Gower went to see him herself, and he changed his mind. It seems that she simply let him know that Irene Ward MP would shortly be raising the matter in the Commons. Armed with a credible threat of embarrassment for the government, Cripps went to the Treasury, which capitulated.
Was it part of the plan that Miss Ward would be able to congratulate the government on doing the right thing ‘without pressure from women members of the house’? Presumably. But whose plan was it? Who decided to involve Miss Ward? She never claimed credit for it, but it can only have been Miss Pauline Mary de Peauly Gower.
On 22 May 1943 Ann Wood visited White Waltham and noted that Gower was ‘overjoyed’ at her appointment to the board of BOAC. Indeed she was, even though her new post nearly killed her: on the first of several route inspection flights that summer, her plane, a De Havilland Fortuna airliner, disintegrated while making a forced landing on a mud flat near Shannon in the west of Ireland. Miraculously Gower was unhurt.
Feeling generous, Gower gave some of her American pilots permission to go home on leave. This was, apart from anything, good people management. The Americans’ lives had been upended. Many of the British women pilots could go home for their fortnightly two days off, or at least to friends. The ‘cousins’ were lucky if they had any. And apart from anything, there was only so much Britishness a gal could take at a stretch.
For Bobby Sandoz there was also some important family news to impart. Two days before heading home from Prestwick in a B-24 via Reykjavik, Newfoundland and New York, she was married to Peter Leveaux, a cavalry officer who had muscled in on a date she was not particularly enjoying with a test pilot in Mayfair the previous year. It was, she said, ‘a pretty simplified wedding’. The groom’s family was there in numbers. Emily Chapin stood in for the bride’s. There was no honeymoon. Instead, the new Mrs Leveaux wrapped herself up in an oversized US Army Air Corps sheepskin coat given to her by a pitying sergeant on Atlantic ferry duty, and made the 12,000 mile trek to Evans and back. She spent four days at home in the mountains north of the Grand Coulee Dam. Mainly for practical reasons, her parents regretted that their only child hadn’t married an American, but they didn’t belabour her with their regret. ‘My stepfather was probably afraid of crying,’ Bobby said. ‘My mother just wanted to hold my hand all the time.’ She would not see her daughter again for another six years.
Ann Wood took a longer break. She had learned that ‘he who yells loudest to the right people generally is heard’ and she practically demanded a decent summer holiday. For the month of August 1943, she was Mrs Oliver Wood’s prodigal daughter and the toast of Waldeboro, Maine. The strangeness of home and abundance after blockaded England – and of airborne Atlantic crossings when they were still so new – were obviously worth it. She shelved her diary writi
ng, but her holiday snaps show a citizen of the world such as that part of the world had never seen before. In most of them she wears dark slacks, a button-down white shirt and a grin. She had been through what Waldeboro and her old flying school down on the coast at Bowdoin College had only heard about on CBS. She had seen the blackout, dived for an air raid shelter, flown the Spitfire, shaken Ike’s hand and buried a comrade. She left as ‘socialite’ Ann Wood. Now she was First Officer. People seemed to want to reach out and touch her.
It was, she wrote to her mother on her return to England, ‘a colossal holiday’, and it ended in style. Weighed down with gifts and provisions, she reported to Atlantic Ferry Command in Montreal for her return to England in the second week of September. Captain Hump Moody of Illinois, aged twenty-three, was to be her pilot in a lightly laden Mitchell fitted with long-range tanks instead of bombs in its bomb bay. Harry McKinley, of New York and the Royal Canadian Air Force, was navigator. Larson Blakely of Montreal was radio operator. Wood took the co-pilot’s seat; there were no others.
Hump had the choice of a straight shot to Greenland over 1,500 miles of tundra and cold sea, or a stop half-way in Goose Bay, Labrador, where the North American continent finally slips under water. He chose Goose Bay, which turned out to be the right decision. One of the reserve tanks sprang a leak which none of Hump or Harry or Larson Blakely could fix. So they stayed the night, perplexing the local wing commander, who, four years into the war, still had no agreed procedure for feeding or accommodating females.
Next morning the leaking tank was drained. At noon the Mitchell took off again and headed north by north-east for Narssarssuaq on Greenland’s ice-mangled southern tip. The plan was to stay within safety limits by taking a stopping route the whole way over; they would refuel again in Iceland. But the plan did not allow for dud weather, or dud weather reports. In Goose Bay the forecast had been for clearing skies on the far side of the Labrador Sea, but they never cleared. Instead, as darkness approached, the cloud and sea mist over Greenland merged. After circling for an hour in search of a way through, Hump turned round with just enough fuel left to make it back to Labrador.
Spitfire Women of World War II Page 24
