Spitfire Women of World War II (11 page)

There followed detailed descriptions purportedly from Sale-Barker herself of trying frantically to fly on instruments alone through thickening mist, of being frightened to death, sleepless from pain and terror and ‘thrilled by the sight of the native', only to have her joy snatched away when, ‘at the sound of our cries, he threatened me with his bow and poisoned arrow, then turned on his heels and fled'.

‘Desperately,' she was quoted as saying, ‘I leaped in pursuit …'.

Afterwards, Sale-Barker disavowed almost every detail of the Express's ‘scoop'. There had been no interview, she told
Aeroplane
magazine, no somersault, no about-turn by a mail plane, no poison arrow threat and no ‘notorious Lions'. Puffed up by its own mini-scoop six months after the event, the
Aeroplane
concluded that ‘the British press at home and in Africa behaved disgracefully over the whole affair. Apparently the newspaper people were unable to understand that two young English gentlewomen might like to make a tour by air without publicity or self-advertisement.'

Perhaps. And yet the disavowal itself does not ring quite true. Page and Sale-Barker did crash, in the dark, in zero visibility, having lost sight of another plane they had been following. They
did suffer grave injuries and a grim night in the bush. There may even have been lions around. On waking, they did meet a Masai herdsman, and Sale-Barker did write out for him, in bright red lipstick, the SOS that saved their lives. ‘Please come and fetch us,' it implored whoever read it. ‘We have had an air crash AND ARE HURT.' It hangs today in the family home of Lord James Douglas-Hamilton, Sale-Barker's nephew, a few miles east of Edinburgh.

The pilots recuperated in Nairobi. On their return to Europe by boat the racing at Schilthorn was over. But the snow was still worth a visit – the giant cliffs separating Lauterbrunnen in the valley floor from Mürren on the alp above provided some protection from the press. Sale-Barker went there to readjust to society and to mourn Lord Knebworth, who had been killed in her absence. Her eventual return to England in May 1933 was written up by the ‘Talk of London' columnist in the
Daily Express
:

Wendy was a ‘name', whether she liked it or not. She also had style, and a marked preference for plus-fours and puttees over a full-length trousers on the slopes. Inevitably, the build-up to the next ski season found her featured in full-page advertisements in the
Tatler
for Fortnum & Mason's latest skiwear: Sale-Barker is pictured standing on artificial snow, most of her face in a shadow cast by her thick blonde hair.

Her sartorial flair never left her. When the time came to be measured for her ATA uniform, in June 1940, Sale-Barker shunned Austin Reed, went to her own tailor in Savile Row and stipulated a scarlet satin lining for her jacket. It was a characteristic flash of
colour, wisely hidden. For the women of the ATA still had to prove to the RAF, and men in general, that they were serious about flying.

The spring of 1940 was bitterly cold, which made it an ordeal for the First Eight in their Tiger Moths. It was also a particularly anxious time for Pauline Gower, because by no means all the publicity generated by the Hatfield photo opportunity of 10 January had been as helpful as she had hoped.

It made no difference that the women pilots were not, at this point, to be allowed anywhere near frontline operational aircraft. The Moths were RAF machines, and the news that women would be flying them spread fast. It spread outward from the Hatfield aerodrome, then started bouncing back again. On 17 January 1940, a week after the chilly photocall, the Nazi propagandist William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw-Haw, read out the gist of the
Daily Express
's report on the day over the wireless from Hamburg. He was still trying to dissuade the British from fighting at all, and he picked up on the money angle. He quoted an envious RAF man as saying the ATA girls would be getting £8 a week, and mocked this as ‘a novel plan for getting back some of the money the fathers and husbands of these young ladies have paid, and will pay as taxpayers to the Government for this war'. Nor did he let the young ladies off the hook. He called them unnatural and decadent, and Goebbels himself pitched in, calling them ‘perverted'.

To begin with, plenty of Brits were inclined to agree. Taking their cue from
Aeroplane
's flatulent editorial blast against women
who fancied themselves as bomber pilots when they lacked ‘the intelligence to scrub the floor', readers let rip in numbers. ‘Someone has erred grievously … The present ATA is nothing more than a tea party – yess'r and they are getting paid for drinking tea.' ‘I am absolutely disgusted … When will the RAF realise that all the good work they are doing is being spoiled by this contemptible lot of women?' They were ‘overpaid show-offs', mere imitators of the true titans of aviation. The National Men's Defence League agitated for the question of women pilots encroaching on men's work to be discussed in Parliament.

It did not make Pauline Gower's life any easier that her brave young flyers were, in fact, earning substantially more than many RAF pilots. Junior flying officers conducting operational sorties over northern France were earning the princely sum of £4, 7 shillings and sixpence a week. The ATA women were on £6. This was less than Lord Haw-Haw claimed, 20 per cent less than their own male colleagues were paid – as per Treasury rules – and less than Americans of either gender would receive as of 1942. But it still seemed an awful lot to new RAF recruits and to middle-aged men casting about in vain for moderately exciting war work, especially when most of the women to whom it was being paid seemed to be the type who received aeroplanes from their fathers as gifts.

Gower appeared to understand this. ‘You never know,' she told one reporter, ‘it might cause ill-feeling with men in the RAF or other services if how much we receive is made public.' But of course it
was
made public, and in the meantime the initial headlines after the Hatfield event seemed to have been calculated to irritate the air force. They had enthused about ‘Ace Girl Pilots' and fantasised about girls ‘out to show the RAF' in ‘350 mph fighters'. To top them all there was a photograph taken from behind one of the Eight, a parachute swinging against her bottom as she walked away, captioned: ‘How d'ye like the togs, girls?'

The
Sketch
's answer was: ‘We LIKE you in your harness, and the bustle which is a parachute. We like your air. In fact, we LIKE you flighty!'

With coverage like this there was, for a few months, a real risk of the RAF running out of patience with the whole idea of women in their planes. Never mind that the aircraft these women had been assigned to fly could barely manage 80 mph and that their pilots were under intense pressure to make every last landing perfect. ‘We carried an appalling burden of responsibility,' said Rosemary Rees. ‘If one of the men broke an aeroplane it was a black [mark], of course, and much to be deplored, but after all people
do
occasionally break aeroplanes, don't they? But if one of us had broken one it would immediately have been, “There, you see, we always said they couldn't do it and they can't.”… We dared not put a foot wrong.'

For months none of them did. Their task was to deliver Tiger Moths from the De Havilland factory at Hatfield to RAF training stations and storage hangars. The snow did not start melting that year until April, and the delivery destinations were mainly in Scotland and Wales. Sometimes the women – and those men handed the short straw of an open cockpit – had to be lifted bodily from the aircraft, catatonic with cold after three hours in minus thirty degrees' windchill. At No. 4 Ferry Pool at Prestwick, not yet the swaggering transatlantic terminus it would become, they would ‘warm up' in the derelict carcass of a motor bus. In Whitchurch they used a converted wooden crate. Later there would be clever people at White Waltham and in an RAF hut on Salisbury plain to crunch the air movements data for 800 airfields and tens of thousands of planes, and provide taxi aircraft to bring the ferry pilots home at the end of a day's work. But that numbing winter, and for most of the following one, standard procedure was to trundle south on the freezing night sleeper to St Pancras in time to do it all again next day. Occasionally berths were available in the sleeper carriages, in which case the ATA would foot the bill. But just as often ferry pilots would spend their nights sitting on their parachutes in the corridor. When the trains were that full, Lettice Curtis preferred to climb up and stretch out in the luggage rack.

The women were, at least, allowed to dress appropriately. D'Erlanger had initially argued that they should fly in their official uniform of jackets, skirts and black silk stockings. (According to Rees, he simply disliked the sight of women in trousers.) Gower pointed out that this would not only be unbearably cold in winter, but immodest. Pop relented. As long as they changed immediately on landing, the women could fly in trousers or Sidcot suits, depending on the weather. Rees felt the cold particularly badly and kept it at bay with multiple layers of shawls, blankets and furs. The requirement to change on landing was eventually relaxed – though d'Erlanger continued to insist that skirts be worn on leave and in London, and women pilots continued to stuff them into their overnight bags wherever they were flying.

For months, the First Eight performed with epic stoicism and an unblemished accident record. Pauline Gower ensured that d'Erlanger and Sir Francis Shelmerdine at the Air Ministry knew this, and they never resisted her efforts to get her pilots into newer, more powerful planes. They knew, apart from anything, that the pilots' logbooks never lied. They were masterworks of disinterested data in old-fashioned pen and ink; the incontrovertible core evidence in the women's case to the male maharajas of the flying establishment. If their 500-plus hard-earned hours were more than enough to put a man in a Spitfire, why could they not do the same for a woman?

In the end there would be no answer to that. But in the summer of 1940 there were still plenty of officials, civilian as well as military, who believed, as Rees put it, that ‘“Women can't fly fast, complicated, heavy, fighter aircraft. They are not built or conditioned for it”.' And then, as if to prove them right, Mona Friedlander landed heavily in a Lysander.

The Lysander was a high-winged monoplane with a 50-foot wingspan and an exceptionally low stalling speed, designed for dropping spies behind enemy lines, and, if necessary, picking them up. With a strong enough headwind it could take off in 250 yards.

When Friedlander bounced in one and burst a tyre, a dark cloud descended over Hatfield. As the women's perfect safety record had extended into the summer of 1940, Gower's softly-softly approach had begun to yield dividends. Her pilots were given chits for Miles Magisters and Masters, then Percival Proctors and, eventually, low-performance operational types including the Lysander. Now one of them had been ‘bent'. Here was the told-you-so moment that they had all dreaded and the harrumphers had been waiting for. Before the women were allowed to resume flying anything heavier than a Tiger Moth, a full inquest was held into their leg strength, powers of concentration and reaction times when hit by windshear.

The Mayfair Minx had come dangerously close to jeopardising the whole insanely daring project, the one that consumed the daydreams of every one of the pioneers, even though they spoke of it only
sotto voce
for fear of hexing it. Mona, alone among them, had actually dared breathe a word of it to a reporter. ‘Oh,' she'd said airily when the
Daily Mail
had asked what she hoped to achieve in the ATA. ‘We're all waiting to fly a Hurricane.' Even she did not yet dare say ‘Spitfire'. Women in Spitfires? Given that they were still officially restricted to trainers, and then only on their best behaviour, the idea would have invited ridicule. Before women would be allowed to fly fighters of any kind, the world would have to change

So much changed so quickly in 1940 that the world seemed to have surrendered to a monstrous experiment in time-lapse photography. Holland and Belgium succumbed to the blitzkrieg in six days. Italy sided with Germany. France and the Channel Islands fell. Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister and Churchill replaced him. Half a million British and French troops were evacuated from Dunkirk, and, under Emergency Regulation 18B, 763 members of the British Union of Fascists were interned.

It was the human cost of the Battle of Britain, however, that brought forward the day when women would fly aircraft worth bragging about. In the two weeks between 20 August and 6 September 1940, Fighter Command lost 103 pilots killed and 128 seriously wounded. By mid-September its total pilot strength of 1,000 pilots at the start of the battle had been cut by a quarter, and Churchill was deeply worried that those being scrambled to replace them were ‘ardent but inexperienced pilots drawn from training units, in many cases before their full courses were complete'.

On 15 September Churchill woke at Chequers. It was a clear morning, ‘suitable for the enemy'. He had had a special train fitted out with a bath, bed, office, radio telephone and staff quarters to enable him to visit the busiest fighter stations in Kent and Sussex on a couple of afternoons a week ‘to see for myself what was happening' (and to raise morale). But on this particular day – a
Sunday, he noted, like the day of the Battle of Waterloo – he asked to be driven to RAF Number 11 Group Headquarters at Uxbridge on account of the weather, which held the promise of unusually intense action. He was not disappointed.

The nerve centre from which Luftwaffe movements were monitored and the RAF's response for the whole of south-east England directed comprised just a small amphitheatre, two storeys high, arranged round a giant blackboard divided into six columns, one for each of London's main defensive fighter stations. A swarm of officers fielding incoming intelligence and issuing orders to the squadrons filled the ‘stalls'. Churchill sat in the ‘dress circle', enthralled. The day started quietly, but by mid-morning all twenty-five squadrons under Number 11 Group's immediate command were in the air, most for the second time after refuelling, and three more squadrons had been scrambled from Number 12 Group, based at RAF Stanmore. Wave after wave of German aircraft showed up in the Uxbridge amphitheatre as signals representing groups of 20-plus, 40-plus, 60-plus and even 80-plus aircraft.

‘Hitherto, I had watched in silence,' Churchill wrote. ‘I now asked: “What other reserves had we?” “There are none,” said Air Vice Marshal Park. In an account which he wrote about it afterwards, he said that at this I “looked grave”. Well I might … the odds were great; our margins small; the stakes infinite.'

In such circumstances, no RAF pilot could be spared for anything but combat. And no RAF commander who objected to women ferrying his aircraft could look anything but foolish, which was just as well for Pauline Gower.

By the beginning of June 1940, a letter from Gower had lain unanswered on Pop d'Erlanger's desk for three weeks. In it she asked what she should do with suitable women applicants whom she had turned down on orders from above but who would surely be useful if the RAF's pilot shortage worsened any further. It is possible that the ever-chipper Gower was getting on d'Erlanger's
nerves, pushing the women thing again after her ill-advised hiring of Lady Bailey earlier in the year. More likely, Pop simply had other things on his mind as his main client, the RAF, geared up for its epic defence of the realm.

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:

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 England 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.