One wet autumn day while researching this book I visited Lettice Curtis in her retirement home near White Waltham before lunch, and Diana for tea. Lettice was terrifying, as usual. I tried to learn from the mistakes of my previous visit and keep my questions short, well sourced and to the point. She still considered most of them ridiculous, and made it clear she’d rather be downstairs having coffee with the widow of the man who had led the Dambusters. Diana was, as usual, charm itself. She served Victoria sponge and sherry with the tea, and offered supper as the evening closed in. I declined in order to make the most of my time in her drawing room, where Bentley-owner magazines adorn the coffee table and her scrapbooks fill a long shelf next to the window. The star of the scrapbooks, in swimsuits, ballgowns, frocks by Schiaparelli and uniforms by Austin Reed, was a radiant, irresistible young woman who lived each day as if it was her last, which many of them nearly were. The owner of the scrapbooks is not so young now, but still somehow irresistible.
As I was getting ready to leave she went over to her bookshelves, from one of which hangs a group portrait of the pilots of No. 15 Ferry Pool at Hamble. ‘There’s a tough bunch of babies,’ she murmured, more to herself than me. And toughness, in the end, defined them. It is what Lettice and Diana had in common, even if they showed it differently. It is what Jackie Cochran and Pauline Gower had in common, even if they found they couldn’t work together under the pressures of war. Could they have done so in peace? We will never know. Pauline Gower died in 1947, two years after marrying and two days after giving birth to twins.
By then the former Dorothy Bragg had married David Beatty and given him an heir. It was a difficult pregnancy and a difficult marriage. Despite her new position as a countess, or perhaps because of it, certain members of the British ruling class still considered her both fascinating and available. She met Anthony Eden, then Shadow Foreign Secretary, at a weekend house party at Ditch-ley Park in the late 1940s. They fell in love. Beatty tolerated their affair at first, possibly hoping for political advancement, then he threatened to expose it.
The relationship was already an open secret in high society. Had it become an open scandal it would have ruled out Eden’s progression to Prime Minister. The Suez Crisis, not to mention world history, might have turned out very differently. In the event, Churchill persuaded Beatty to withdraw his threat on condition that Eden stop seeing his wife. The affair ended quietly and Dorothy, divorced from Beatty in 1950, went on to marry Abe Hewitt, a millionaire horse-breeder and attorney who had helped draft the New Deal for Franklin Roosevelt. She had three more sons, took up scuba diving aged seventy-seven and died in 2006.
Her friend and mine, Ann Wood, died a few months earlier after becoming Pan Am’s first female vice president and de facto custodian, via the new miracle of email, of the Cochran pilots’ collective memory. Her early dismay at English fecklessness had long since been replaced by deep affection. In 1946 she told an audience at D’Youville College, her alma mater in upstate New York, that she would ‘always deem it the greatest privilege of my life to have served the British Government in its hour of need and to have come to know the English people so intimately’. She was a towering figure in aviation and in life, whose only complaint as it drew to a close was that George Bush had ruined her retirement.
Mary de Bunsen was lucky to have a retirement at all. Laid low by pneumonia and the hole in her heart – diagnosed as an interatrial septal defect – she flew to Philadelphia in 1954 for pioneering surgery in which she was given a one in ten chance of surviving. She did survive, retiring to a two-room former army hut at the foot of the South Downs to write her memoirs (the chapter on her coronary crisis is proudly entitled ‘Not Beyond Salvage’).
By the time of de Bunsen’s operation, Margot Duhalde had joined the Free French, served in Morocco as their only female pilot and returned to Chile where for thirty years she worked as an air traffic controller in Punta Arenas, Patagonian gateway to the Antarctic. From the British government she received nothing more effusive in the way of thanks than her Certificate of Service with the ATA. From President Jacques Chirac of France she received a personal letter in June 2006, appointing her Commander of the Order of the Legion of Honour and thanking her for putting her life ‘in the service of the land of your ancestors’.
Joan Hughes, the second woman cleared to fly four-engined aircraft, received an MBE after the war – and an acquittal in 1968 from the Buckinghamshire Quarter Sessions at Aylesbury, after facing seven charges there of endangering people and property while flying under a motorway bridge during the filming of Thunderbirds. Shortly before her death in 1993 told her old friend Alex Henshaw, the former Castle Bromwich test pilot: ‘I have had a wonderful life and would not change a thing.’
Most of the surviving ATA women are now those who joined late in the war. Of these, the truly miraculous survivor is Betty Keith-Jopp. After sinking to the seabed off St Monans in her Barracuda and being hauled to safety by John Morris of the Providence, she was taken to the nearest RAF station, at Crail, across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh. There she was laid in a heated cradle specially designed to thaw out frozen pilots. Like Captain Morris, she was ordered not to speak to anyone about her accident, but news of her escape spread quickly. On her return to Prestwick she found herself constantly approached by well-wishers who had heard a little and wanted to know more.
Betty was thankful to be alive, but mortified to have lost an aeroplane. To prove herself and repay the ATA for her training, she continued flying. Her logbook shows four more Barracuda flights from Prestwick in the weeks after the accident. But her nerves were shredded. ‘You think nothing will ever happen to you,’ she said. ‘But once it does you know it can, and probably will again.’
Ordinarily she would have been expected to appear in person before the Accidents Committee. No-one invited her to do so and to this day she does not know for certain why. But she suspects her Uncle Stewart, minus arm, eye and sundry other body parts, took it upon himself to represent her. If so, his intentions may have been noble but he made little attempt to fight her corner. When she left the ATA in August 1945, she was sent her personal file and with it the official Accident Report. ‘Pilot to blame’, it said. Remembering this as we wait for lunch to arrive at the Indaba, she looks momentarily helpless; more embarrassed than angry. ‘I was shattered,’ she says. ‘I so wanted to be useful.’
Acknowledgements
My thanks are due, first, to the Spitfire women themselves, and in particular to Diana Barnato Walker, Freydis Sharland, Lettice Curtis, Margaret Frost and Maureen du Popp in England; Ann Wood-Kelly, Dorothy Hewitt, Roberta Leveaux, Kay Hirsch and Betty Lussier in the United States; Betty Keith-Jopp in South Africa; Margot Duhalde in Chile; and Jadwiga Pilsudska in Poland. Ann was not only a mine of anecdote but also, before her death, tireless in putting me in touch with her fellow American pilots. Eric Viles, Ed Heering and Sir Peter Mursell were, likewise, generous with their recollections and collections. For their help providing access to scrapbooks, logbooks, letters and photographs I am also indebted to Paul Jarvis, Ted Stirgwolt and many of the pilots’ relatives, including Lord James Douglas-Hamilton, Michael Fahie, Jan Welch, Sharon Hirsch, Ann Shukman, Caroline Roos, Joanna Pitman, Frances Guthrie and Mary Walton, niece and namesake of Mary Nicholson.
Christopher Kelly was a constant source of encouragement and alerted me to the existence of Gerard d’Erlanger’s magnificent photo album. Minnie Churchill kindly showed it to me. Walter Kahn, Jennifer Gordon, Roy Fisher, Jo Loosemore, Lady Mary Teviot, John Austin and Mike Rowland all offered valuable leads or hunted them down, or both. Xavier Rey went far beyond the call of duty in matters of translation and diplomacy. Richard Poad put the Maidenhead Heritage Trust’s fine collection of ATA documents at my disposal and was unfailingly generous with both his time and advice. In Denton, Texas, Dawn Letson made available a treasure trove of papers, painstakingly assembled.
My colleagues at The Times tolerated my absences with ala
rmingly good grace but I am grateful nonetheless, and especially to Tim Hames, Anne Spackman and Robert Thomson. This book would not have been started but for the enthusiasm of Bill Hamilton at AM Heath and Richard Johnson at HarperCollins. It would not be comprehensible but for the genius of Katie Johnson. It would not have had any pictures but for Melanie Haselden. There would have been nowhere to write it without the shed built for the purpose by Jim Whittell, and it would never have been finished but for the extraordinary and undeserved patience shown me by Bruno, Louis and Karen.
A Note on Sources
My interviews with many of the pilots in this book yielded more detail and anecdote, more vividly recalled, than I dared hope. That said, no account of this kind would be possible without drawing extensively on the pilots’ own writings. Lettice Curtis rightly regards her magnum opus, The Forgotten Pilots (Foulis, 1971), as the closest thing there is to a full-length official history of the ATA. It supersedes the livelier but slight Brief Glory (ATA Association, reprinted 2001), written immediately after the war by E. C. Cheeseman, and I have relied on it for detail on the decision to recruit women, their training and their progress to operational aircraft. Curtis is reluctant to acknowledge that different women had very different experiences of wartime flying, but proof of this is provided by Diana Barnato Walker’s superbly racy Spreading My Wings (Patrick Stephens, 1994), Jackie Moggridge’s Woman Pilot (Pan, 1959) and The Sky and I (W. H. Allen, 1956), by Veronica Volkersz. Pauline Gower’s Women With Wings (John Long, 1938) and ATA Girl (Frederick Muller, 1983), by Rosemary du Cros (née Rees) show what fun could be had in pre-war Europe with an aeroplane and a reasonable allowance, while Ann Welch’s Happy to Fly (John Murray, 1983) chronicles the adventures of someone who would surely have commanded the SAS had she been born male. Mount Up With Wings (Hutchinson, 1960), by Mary de Bunsen, stands apart as a thoughtful, moving and often hilarious autobiography by an extraordinarily courageous woman who happened also to be an obsessive flyer and natural writer. Golden Wings (Pearson, 1956), by former Operations Officer Alison King, is a fond and sometimes wistful ‘view from the ground’.
In 1953 Jackie Cochran published her remarkable rags-to-riches story as The Stars at Noon (Little, Brown). In 1987 she left the writing to Maryann Bucknum Brinley, whose updated version is titled, with suitable caution, Jackie Cochran: The Greatest Woman Pilot in Aviation History (Bantam). Ann Wood Kelly would not have disagreed, though her wonderful unpublished diaries cut through the hyperbole to which Cochran was prone. Sisters in Arms (Pen & Sword, 2006), by Helena Page Schrader, is tough on Cochran but a meticulous and useful study of the differences between the ATA and the WASP.
Midge Gillies’s Queen of the Skies (Phoenix, 2004) is now the definitive biography of Amy Johnson, though Constance Babington Smith’s earlier Amy Johnson (Collins, 1967) still complements it. I used Jonathan Glancey’s Spitfire – the Biography (Atlantic, 2006) and Spitfire, Flying Legend (Osprey Aviation, 1996) by John Dibbs and Tony Holmes as substitutes for the costly alternative of flying the real thing. Audrey Sale-Barker’s papers, archived by her nephew, James Douglas-Hamilton, include in her lipstick and Fleet Street’s breathless prose the story of her ill-fated trip to South Africa, while Douglas-Hamilton’s own history of The Air Battle for Malta (Wrens Park, 2000) describes in taut detail the background to the ATA’s finest hour, loading Spitfires onto the USS Wasp. The theory that the war was won by damming the Columbia River is set out in Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert (Penguin, 1987); the more complete theory that it took prodigious quantities of aluminium but also pilots, blood, toil, tears and sweat is all there in Winston Churchill’s essential The Second World War (Cassell, 1949).
The best newspaper cuttings collections on the ATA are held by the Maidenhead Heritage Association, the ATA Association and Texas Women’s University. The Imperial War Museum’s archives and The Times’ electronic archive also proved invaluable.
Each of the 139 women ATA pilots who survived the war could have written their memoirs. This account inevitably relies on those who did and those I was able to interview. As a result, some may still not have received the recognition they deserve, but I hope they would agree that their collective story is worth retelling, however imperfectly, for those who thought Spitfires were only ever flown by men.
Index
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.
Aeroplane (magazine)
Air Cruises
Air Transport Auxiliary: women serve in American pilots in
women’s first fighter plane flights
headquarters
founding and recruitment
dress
and blind flying
training
risks and casualties
press interest and publicity
social background
earnings
foreign women pilots
and glamour
casualties
required to fly variety of planes
number of deliveries
accidents and escapes
and individual judgment on flying conditions
equal pay for women pilots
American pilots granted home leave
number of monthly flights
recruits and trains pilots from scratch
women achieve right to fly to Europe
wound up at war’s end
benevolent fund
Air Trips (company)
aircraft production: in Britain
Aitken, Max
Allen, Naomi see Heron-Maxwell, Naomi
aluminium: production
Anderson, Opal Pearl
Antoine of Sax Fifth Avenue
Argentina
Arkless, Irene
Arnold, General Henry Harley (’Hap’)
Arreger, Hans
Astor, Nancy, Viscountess
Atlantic Return Ferry Service (BOAC)
Australia: Amy Johnson’s solo flight to
Avila Star, SS
Babington Smith, Constance see Smith, Constance Babington
Bailey, Sir Abe
Bailey, Mary, Lady
Baker, Captain Valentyne
Balfour, Captain Harold H.
Bandar Abbas, Iran
Barbour, Dr Arthur (’Doc’)
Barnato, Barney
Barnato, Diana (later Walker): background, lands damaged Typhoon
at Debden
on Chirasakti
limited flying experience, social life
horseriding accident
warned by disfigured man
joins ATA
on pilot casualties
dress
on flying Spitfires
ambulance driving in London
posted to Hamble
force-lands through cloud in Spitfire
watches Diana Ramsay in out-of-control Hawker Tempest
finds way through bad weather
instructed in instrument-flying
flies with Douglas Fairweather
operates in Europe
marriage
flies through fog on return from Brussels
lands damaged Mitchell bomber
shot at by Messerschmitt
qualities and character
and winding up of ATA
breaks sound barrier
diagnosed with cancer
interviewed
Spread My Wings
Barnato, Solly
Barnato, Woolf (’Babe’)
Barracudas (torpedo bombers)
Bartley, Tony
Bathurst, Ben
Battle of Britain (1940): pilot losses, Dowding conducts
Beasley, Colonel Peter
Beatty, Rear Admiral David, 2nd Earl
Beatty, Dorothy, Countess see Bragg, Dorothy
Beaver Hill, SS
Beaverbrook, William Maxwell
Aitken, 1st Baron
Belgium: Diana Barnato Walker honeymoons in
Bennett, Faith
Bennett, Philippa
Bert/Ozzie (taxi-driver brothers)
Biddle, Mr & Mrs
Bird, Jean
Black, Tom Campbell: Air Display
Blakely, Larson
Brabazon, Lieut.-Colonel John Theodore Cuthbert Moore-(later 1st Baron Brabazon)
Bradbrooke, Captain F.D.
Bragg, Dorothy (née Furey,
later Beatty
then Hewitt): arrival in Britain
on Cochran
cleared to ferry British warplanes
in Montreal
travels to Britain by ship
marriages
attitude to Britain and British
in Southampton
falls for Lord Beatty
affair with Eden
death
Bragg, Lieutenant Richard
Braun, Eva
Britain: aircraft production,
US visitors’ view of
Broad, Captain Hubert S.
Bruno, Harry
Brussels: Diana Barnato Walker flies to
Bugatti, Ettore
Burma: buys Spitfires from Israel
Bush, George
Butler, Lois
Camaran, Count John de
Castle Bromwich
Castle, Flying Officer W.F.
Castlerosse, Valentine Edward Charles Browne, Viscount
Central Ferry Control, Andover
Chamberlain, Neville
Chapin, Emily
Chattis Hill
Chile: wartime volunteers from
Chirac, Jacques
Spitfire Women of World War II Page 29
