Spitfire Women of World War II (7 page)

It was true, or true enough. The younger pilots did revere her, but when Johnson eventually enrolled in the ATA in May 1940 she found she didn't mind. One of her admirers was Jackie Sorour, a tungsten-tipped South African who affected a ditzy innocence but would later pull off an extraordinary aerial hitchhike to Pretoria and back. Sorour, a qualified instructor by the age of twenty despite her mother's dogged opposition to her flying, was interviewed by Gower at Hatfield in July 1940, and immediately admitted to the ATA. From Gower's office, she wrote later:

There was something else that gradually endeared Johnson to the ATA besides the return of the old adulation – the prospect of
flying Spitfires. For all her experience, Wonderful Amy had never flown anything faster than a De Havilland Comet, maximum speed 200 mph. The war was forcing up speeds. By the summer of 1940, when Fighter Command's precious Hurricanes and Spitfires were being tested daily to destruction by the Luftwaffe's formidable Messerschmitt 109s and Focke-Wulf 190s, the Vickers Super-marine factories in Southampton and Castle Bromwich were already turning out Mark V Spitfires capable of 400 mph when straight and level and no-one knew quite how fast in a dive.

Johnson never flew one. She died too soon. One reason for her death, oddly, was national security. Before the war the Lorenz company in Germany had devised a beautifully simple radio navigation system based on corridors of land-based transmitters. The transmitters on one side of the corridor would broadcast, continuously, only the Morse signal for A – a dot and then a dash. Those on the other side would broadcast only the signal for N – a dash, then a dot. Suitably equipped aircraft flying straight along the corridor would know they were on course because of antennae mounted at opposite ends of their fuselages: one tuned to the N signal and one to the A. As long as each antenna was the same distance from its signal's source, the dots and dashes would overlap into a continuous tone, dull but infinitely reassuring. If the plane drifted off this radio ‘beam' in either direction, its antennae would slip in relation to their sources. The overlapping would become imperfect, the tone interrupted, and the pilot would be snapped out of her daydream or funk.

If you had an ordinary voice radio you could also call up the nearest radio-equipped aerodrome and ask it where you were. Eric ‘Winkle' Brown, the finest test pilot Britain ever produced, once did this over a fogbound patch of Kent, and it probably saved his life. But in that Airspeed Oxford at Squire's Gate, with her chit for Kidlington in Oxfordshire, Johnson had no radio of any kind, and nor did any other ferry pilots. As the spliced-in newsreel puts it in
They Flew Alone
: ‘No radio of course. Too useful for Jerry.'

The other reason Johnson would never fly a Spitfire was the
weather that was keeping her on the ground at an aerodrome near Blackpool on that miserable Sunday in January 1941; the weather that would have made the radio navigation option something of a life-saver; the sodden, all-pervading, bloody-minded British weather.

Johnson finally lost patience and took off at 11.49 a.m. Not many others ventured up that day, but Jackie Sorour did. ‘That same afternoon I took off from South Wales in a twin-engined Oxford aircraft bound [like Johnson] for Kidlington,' she wrote in
Woman Pilot
.

There is not much that can be said with any confidence about Johnson's last flight, though it must have droned on against an appalling crescendo of fear. For those left to reconstruct it over the years there is also the knowledge that, for all her fear, she had every reason to believe until the last second of her life that she would survive this scrape as she had so many others.

Did she, in fact, kill herself? She did once tell a friend that she was sure she'd finish up in the drink. And it was alleged by Jimmy Martin (later Sir James, an aircraft builder who never quite finished an aircraft for her to fly) that she told him her first impulse on learning years earlier that Hans Arreger had married someone else had been to end it all by finishing her flying training and then crashing. But the idea that her doomed run down to Kidlington
was a suicide mission is even less plausible than the more popular conspiracy theory that she was carrying a mystery passenger on a clandestine or illicit trip (some speculated she was smuggling the faithless Arreger back to Switzerland, even though there is no evidence that she was still in contact with him) – and had to bale out because of a catastrophic malfunction or even after being hit by friendly fire.

The truth was almost certainly more prosaic, but just as deadly. She went ‘over the top', as she said she would and as Sorour also did. But she couldn't ‘crack on through' because there were no cracks in her swathe of sky: just deep, unrelenting cloud. Sorour had risked everything by descending through it. Johnson actually risked much less by summoning the courage to do what she had always dreaded and bale out– something, amazingly, that she had never had to do before. After three and a half hours the Oxford's second tank ran dry. As the two engines died, she feathered the propellers and levelled the plane at 3,000 feet, and falling. It was now gliding eastwards. She unstrapped herself from her seat, strapped on her parachute and walked a few steps back down the floating fuselage to the emergency exit door, which was not hinged. It had to be wrenched right out of its opening. Johnson managed this, and jumped. She would have experienced a considerable physical shock because the cabin had been heated but the cloud was nothing but freezing moisture; for anyone below, it was snowing gently.

When the parachute opened cleanly, and high enough for an orderly descent, Johnson would also have felt relief. At this point, still with no view of whatever part of England was beneath her but uninjured and alert, the only irreversible loss in her world that day was of one twin-engined Airspeed Oxford. Much else had gone wrong. There would be an accident investigation and report. She would have to answer questions. It would be a story. Pauline Gower, for one, would ask whatever had induced her to take off that morning, and in truth it would be difficult to tell her. Pride? Boredom? Sullen arrogance? A secret conviction of invincibility,
annealed in the homicidal Taurus Mountains and somewhere over Nova Scotia one terrifying night in 1932?

When she descended through the cloud she saw for the first time that she was over water. Her parachuting nightmare was now coming true. The cold was about to intensify in a way she could not imagine, or endure for long. But even in the few seconds between appearing over the Thames estuary and plunging into it there were, suddenly, new reasons to hope. By pure chance there were ships everywhere, some close enough to help if only they spotted her and she could get clear of the parachute.

They had certainly spotted her. An entire convoy, numbered CE21, consisting of seventeen merchant ships, two destroyers, four minesweepers, four motor launches and five cross-Channel ferries converted to deploy barrage balloons, was steaming up the estuary. One of the balloon ships, HMS
Haslemere
, was closest to Johnson. From its bridge a Lieutenant Henry O'Dea actually saw her drop gently into the water at a distance of perhaps half a mile. His captain, Lieutenant Commander Walter Fletcher, ordered the
Haslemere
to head for her at full speed. Johnson was still alive when it reached her, and was heard to shout the words, ‘Hurry, please hurry'. But she failed to grab hold of any of the lines thrown in her direction.

In its dash to pick her up, the
Haslemere
ran aground in mud beneath the shallow waters of the estuary's southern edge. Fletcher ordered the engines to slow astern but they took ten precious minutes to work the vessel free. By this time Johnson had drifted towards the ship's stern and was helpless with cold. As Captain Fletcher pulled off his outer clothes to dive in for her, a wave lifted the
Haslemere
and pushed Johnson under its propellers. As they fell, they crushed her. ‘She did not come into view again,' seaman Nicholas Roberts, who was watching from the ship's bulwark, wrote later in an affidavit. Indeed, her body was never found.

Fourteen months later,
They Flew Alone
received its première at Leicester Square. In attendance, besides Pauline Gower, Jackie Cochran and Anna Neagle, was Lord Wakefield, Amy Johnson's
faithful oiler. In the film, shaking his head in something like bewilderment, the Wakefield character tells a white-tied friend: ‘She's driven a coach and four through centuries of custom and convention.'

‘She's opened a great gap in the fence that's been surrounding our young women for generations,' the friend replies. ‘And now the rest of the devils will come pouring through after her. I can't quite see the end of it.'

‘There isn't any end to it. What that young woman has done is the sort of thing that goes on forever,' says Wakefield.

After a final image of Anna Neagle's character dissolving into a montage of uniformed women marching purposefully in all directions, the film ends with the dedication:

‘To all the Amy Johnsons of today'.

Could the ATA have managed without its women pilots? Sixty years after its demise I put the question to Sir Peter Mursell, the organisation's only surviving senior administrator. He replied without hesitation: ‘Yes' – and there was certainly never a shortage of qualified male applicants eager to join the ATA.

Nor was there a shortage of female ones: Amy Johnson had inspired a generation of rich, or at least resourceful, women to follow her into the air. But they might never have flown in the war without the skilled and tireless lobbying of Pauline Gower.

Prominent progressives such as Captain Harold Balfour had offered enthusiastic predictions of a role for women pilots in the coming conflict as early as 1938. But the RAF's opposition was granite, and at that stage no-one had even thought of handing the job of ferrying military aircraft to civilians. Subsidised flying training in the Civil Air Guard – a belated effort to match Germany for ‘air mindedness' – had helped to swell the ranks of civilian pilots and instructors, women as well as men, but when war was declared all civil aviation was grounded, and most of these new pilots melted away in search of other work.

It was on her own initiative that Gower requested meetings, first with Pop d'Erlanger and then with the Director General of Civil Aviation, Sir Francis Shelmerdine, in September 1939. D'Erlanger's instinctive answer to the question ‘Why women?' was ‘Why not?'. He accompanied Gower to the meeting with Shelmerdine
on 21 September. It went well. Gower knew Shelmerdine through Amy Johnson, whose wedding he had attended as best man, and as a trailblazer in her own right. Gower came away with permission to recruit twelve women pilots and an understanding that she would be in charge of them.

There were hiccups. In late 1939 the RAF was still using its own pilots for most of its ferrying, and the whole plan to recruit women to the ATA had to be put on ice for three months while the RAF high command and its allies in the Air Ministry fought a rearguard action against the attachment of women to existing RAF ferry pools. Shelmerdine made several tactical retreats, assuring the RAF top brass that their men would never have to fly with women, insisting on a minimum of 500 hours solo experience for women candidates – far more than was required for men – and cutting Gower's initial quota, without explanation, from twelve pilots to eight.

There was also the Treasury's standard stipulation, uncontested at this point by Gower or anyone else, on women's pay. While they would be expected to perform exactly the same duties and work exactly the same hours as male ATA pilots, female ones would earn 20 per cent less. And there was one other thing, which may even have put a smile on the faces of the air vice marshals in their stalwart defence of gender apartheid. While their fighter boys would be arcing over Europe in sleek new Hurricanes and even sleeker newer Spitfires, these crazy women, initially at least, would be flying only Tiger Moths, with nothing to protect them from the elements except their clothing and a comical crescent of Perspex fixed to the front edge of the cockpit – and in the worst winter for almost fifty years.

As the
New York Times
reported two weeks after the first women pilots reported for duty at the Hatfield aerodrome north of London in January 1940 (and the time lapse is significant):

The reference to zero was in Fahrenheit. It was the worst weather imaginable to be flying around in open planes. Small wonder that when the ‘First Eight' attended a mid-winter photo shoot to mark their arrival at Hatfield, they looked happier in Sidcot suits than in their Austin Reed skirts.

Though not in Amy Johnson's league, Pauline Gower had been newsworthy in her own right for several years by the outbreak of war. Like Rosemary Rees she was the daughter of a senior Tory and smitten with flying. Unlike Rees, she had flown for a living. She started in 1931 as a freelance ‘joyrider' flying from a field in Kent, and moved on to contract circus flying for the British Hospitals' Air Pageant. This was a less charitable outfit than the name implied, but the steady work helped make the payments on her £300, two-seater Simmonds Spartan, bought on an instalment plan. By 1936 she was operating a profitable air taxi service across the Wash from Hunstanton to Skegness. ‘And now,' she told a BBC reporter at the start of 1940, ‘I can claim to have carried over 30,000 passengers in the air.' Given that she had never flown anything bigger than a three-seater, it was no idle boast.

The flying had toughened her. Performing one summer evening in 1933 at Harrogate with the Hospitals' Air Pageant, Gower landed shortly before dusk to watch one of the show's most reliable crowd-pleasers with the rest of the spectators – the parachute jump. ‘We had several parachutists, one of whom was named Evans,' she wrote. ‘He was extremely clever at his job and
could judge his descents so well that he often landed between two machines parked on the ground right in front of the public enclosure.'

There was a stiff breeze that evening, and plenty of visibility. Evans was taken up to 1,000 feet. He jumped and pulled his ripcord in the normal way, but he was drifting fast on account of the breeze. The performer in him still wanted to get down in front of the crowd, so he spilled air from the parachute by pulling on the shroud lines. The idea was to come down faster than usual to minimise the drift, releasing the shroud lines with a few seconds to go to allow the canopy to refill and soften his landing. Evans had done it scores of times before, but this time the parachute collapsed completely. The crowd watched, horror struck, as he accelerated into the ground unchecked by the twisted sausage of silk above him. He was killed instantly.

‘Fortunately, the light was already beginning to fail,' Gower recalled. The performance was terminated immediately, and the shocked crowds went home. ‘It was a blow for all of us. Evans was extremely popular … but in the air circus business there is no time for sentiment.' Next day the Pageant moved on to Redcar. There, ‘although the thoughts of many of us were at Harrogate with the still, dark form we had left crumpled up on the field the night before, the show went on as usual'.

Later, in the ATA ferry pools, the phrase adopted to describe the routine business of embroidering a close shave to make it sound closer still was to ‘line-shoot'. It was used in the mess at the all-female No. 15 Ferry Pool at Hamble, in particular, to stop the chattier young pilots making fools of themselves. But no-one ever accused Gower of ‘line-shooting'.

The toughening of this deceptively sunny convent girl with the bright laugh and a resolute smile had begun thirteen years earlier, on what her Mother Superior had feared would be her deathbed. Struck down in her late teens with a raging ear infection, together with complications of pneumonia and pleurisy, Gower was sedated for surgery that she was not expected to survive. A
priest was summoned to her bedside and the other boarders at the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Tunbridge Wells prayed for her at evensong. She pulled through and emerged from her illness physically weakened and barred from team sports. But she was a bundle of nervous energy which she was determined to channel into that most daring and controversial of womanly pursuits, a ‘career'. Whatever she chose would rile her father, a driven but illogical old paragon who set great store by education, including his daughter's, even though he would not allow her to go to university. So she set her sights on flying.

It was still two years before Amy Johnson ensured that flying eclipsed mere motoring as the fashionable expression of late adolescent rebellion for young women of means. But Gower was not interested in fashion. Nor was she one to hang about. She took her first flight, while still at school, with Captain Hubert S. Broad, who was visiting Tunbridge Wells as part of a national tour after competing in the Paris air races. She kept a diary and may have allowed herself a line or two of breathlessness in it about Kent from the air and the wind in her hair, and even about Captain Broad. But there is no such sappiness in anything she wrote for public consumption. She filed flying away as what she would do in the likely event that nothing else came along to satisfy both her need for excitement and her father's for respectability. And nothing did.

Dispatched to finishing school in Paris, she ran away. She wondered about earning a living playing her violin, but realised she wasn't good enough to perform and gave it up. Back home she was presented at court and ‘did all the things expected of the debutante, and was bored to tears'. She dabbled in Tory politics, but the Tories were not ready for her. (Even Lady Astor, Britain's first woman MP, was only elected in 1919, and she was a Liberal.) So, on 25 June 1930, with Amy Johnson still on her delirious, nervewracking victory tour of Australia, Pauline Gower enrolled at the Phillips and Powis School of Flying at the Woodley airfield outside Reading. She did not tell her parents. For six hours' worth
of flying lessons she managed to keep the reason for her trips to Reading secret. Then she told her father what she was up to, and he cut off her allowance.

Gower was a natural pilot, and did not have to wait long to go solo. But her novel idea of flying for a living (a regular living, as opposed to being paid large sums by newspapers for occasional death-defying epics in the manner of Amy Johnson), required a commercial licence and dozens more expensive hours of training. For a year she paid for them by teaching the violin. In that time she switched flying schools and moved to Stag Lane, and there she befriended the vulnerable Johnson just as Johnson was adjusting to her new life as a megastar. At the same time, Sir Robert Gower came round to the idea of having a pilot for a daughter. For her twenty-first birthday, to her ‘unutterable joy', he made the down-payment on her first plane. It was a two-seater Spartan, about as cheap as aircraft came in 1931, ‘but to me' she reflected, ‘it was the finest aeroplane that had ever been built'.

Miss Pauline Mary de Peauly Gower became the world's third female commercial pilot, and Britain's first. She was already forming a grand world view centred on the notion of flying as a liberator of women and unifier of nations. Another of her new friends from Stag Lane, Dorothy Spicer, a pilot as well as an engineer, was more interested in engines than flying. Tall, blonde and very beautiful, she was a graduate of University College London and a qualified aeronautical engineer. She and Gower decided to go into business together.

Gower would later write an account of her time with Spicer as co-directors of the world's first all-female airborne business venture. Her publisher described it as ‘a record of pioneer achievement in the air related with much humour and a cheerful philosophy'. The book was reviewed by the sniffy and none-too-progressive editor of
Aeroplane
magazine, C. G. Grey. Spicer, he wrote:

Spicer kept the plane airworthy; Gower flew it. They started with a rented Gipsy Moth in a field near Sevenoaks, charging half a crown per flight and fifteen shillings for an aerobatic sequence consisting of two loops and a spin. When Gower's first aerobatics customer requested another loop she made him hand over another half crown in the air first. With Gower's Spartan, they flew from Wallingford in Berkshire, and spent the rest of that first summer flying for whoever would pay them, and playing host most evenings to friends from Stag Lane who would drive out to shoot the breeze (and rabbits).

They slept in a hut next to their beloved aeroplane, exhaustion competing with nightmares about a serial killer thought to be at large in that part of Berkshire. Besides joyriders, their customers included yacht race spectators from Cowes Week and a Gloucester-bound businessman who paid them a fat fee and then embarrassed them by telling a reporter that he was in ‘lavatory deodorisation'. There were also two men pursued to the airfield by plainclothes detectives and arrested before Gower – with tank full and engine running – could fly them to France; and another who requested a moonlit flight over the royal residence at Sandringham. The directors of Air Trips turned him down.

There is no mention during this time, in anything written by them or about them, of boyfriends. ‘It is only logical,' Gower mused, ‘to suppose that matrimony will claim the majority of women pilots ultimately, just as it claims many other girls who have been trained at great expense for different professions.' It did claim them both, eventually. But as twentysomethings they had no time for whatever preceded matrimony. They were smitten with the thrill of flying, with being busy and with making money.
In 1933, in the course of six months with the Hospitals' Air Pageant, they flew from 185 airfields, moving from one to the next every day. For the next two seasons they stayed put in a field outside Hunstanton and let the holidaying public come to them. The following year, 1936, as Hitler hosted the Olympics and occupied the Rhineland, Gower and Spicer hit the touring trail again, this time with Tom Campbell Black's Air Display.