The Female Few E-Book

Jacky Hyams

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 299

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Through the darkest days of the Second World War, an elite group of courageous civilian women risked their lives as aerial courier pilots, flying Lancaster bombers, Spitfires and many other powerful war machines in thousands of perilous missions. The dangers these women faced were many: they flew unarmed, without radio and in some cases without instruments, in conditions where even unexpected cloud could mean disaster. In The Female Few, five of these astonishingly brave women tell their awe-inspiring tales of incredible risk, tenacity and sacrifice. Their spirit and fearlessness in the face of death still resonates down the years, and their accounts reveal a forgotten chapter in the history of the Second World War.

Leseprobe

This book is dedicated to the memory of the people of the Air Transport Auxiliary who sustained the Royal Air Force and the Fleet Air Arm during the Second World War.

‘Remember then that also we, in a moon’s course, are history’

(From the poem ‘Passage’ by John Drinkwater, inscribed on the ATA Memorial in the crypt at St Paul’s Cathedral, London.)

‘Some people, both sexes, didn’t make it. They dropped out. There’s a lot to flying. You need “the touch”. I think women were much better when it came to flying the Spitfires. Women have a lighter touch. They’re not as ham-fisted.’

(Yvonne MacDonald)

First published 2012

This paperback edition published 2023

Reprinted 2019

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Jacky Hyams, 2012, 2016, 2023

The right of Jacky Hyams to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7524 8122 7

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Foreword by Richard Poad MBE

Introduction

1    A Brief History

2    Joy Lofthouse

3    Yvonne MacDonald

4    Molly Rose

5    Mary (Wilkins) Ellis

6    Margaret Frost

Appendix I Ranks of the ATA

Appendix II ATA Ferry Pilots and Flight Engineers

Appendix III Five Lives Lost

Appendix IV Famous Pilots of the ATA

FOREWORD

The story of the Air Transport Auxiliary is one of the most inspiring of the Second World War. It is an almost unbelievable tale of courage, skill and sacrifice. I first came across the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) in 1990, when I was researching an exhibition about the aviation history of Maidenhead. As a commercial pilot, I was awestruck and my interest in this forgotten story grew from that point on, encouraged by the fact that ATA’s headquarters had been just outside Maidenhead at White Waltham, which is still an active airfield. Subsequently, in 1993, I was one of the team that set up and launched the Maidenhead Heritage Centre, of which I have been the Chairman since 1995.

Over the years, we have built up an impressive collection of historical ATA material, which we believe is the largest outside the Imperial War Museum and the RAF Museum at Hendon in North London. HRH Prince Michael of Kent opened Maidenhead Heritage Centre’s dedicated ATA exhibition and archive in 2011 and it is already a centre of excellence for research into ATA, located 2 miles – or 30 seconds away by Spitfire – from White Waltham airfield.

Women taking to the skies was not new when the Second World War broke out. In 1910, Orville Wright’s sister, Katherine, became the first woman in the world to fly and, a year later, Hilda Hewlett became the first woman to receive a British pilot’s licence. The trail-blazing pioneers of aviation in the 1920s and 1930s included wonderful people like Lady Mary Bailey, Amy Johnson and the US aviator Amelia Earhart. These pilots caught the public imagination like no other before them. When Amy Johnson flew to Australia in 1930, Britain and Australia went crazy.

Pauline Gower, Head of the Women’s Section of the ATA, was one of the most prominent women in aviation in the pre-war period. She was unusual in that she made her living out of flying, joyriding in the flying circuses. When she was asked, before the war, ‘If there’s a war, women won’t be able to fly, will they?’ Pauline’s response set the tone for what was to happen. ‘Why not?’ she asked. Flying might have been seen as a man’s world but her reply was spot on. There are no skills for flying that are inherently exclusive to men. So, for the women who flew for the ATA, there was nothing special about it.

Margaret Frost said she didn’t care what the men thought. She just wanted to fly. She was a pilot and had a job to do; her gender was irrelevant. Initially, it was the Establishment that had the problem, despite the precedent of women flying in the 1920s and 1930s. One of the most interesting aspects of the story is that through the quiet diplomacy of Pauline Gower the basic principle of women in the ATA was conceded in the autumn of 1939, despite the resistance of certain sections of the Establishment. Then it was really a case of fighting for equality of opportunity and pay. The first women were restricted to flying trainer and communications aircraft, but in July 1941 Winifred Crossley became the first woman to be cleared to fly fighters. Then the sky was the limit and in 1943 a few women were at last permitted to fly four-engined bombers such as the Lancaster. In May that year the politically astute Pauline Gower won equal pay for the ladies of ATA, which thus became one of the first ‘equal opportunity employers’.

People often marvel at the fact that the ferry pilots flew in the ever-changing British weather without radios or navigation aids, in the days before SatNav. Flight instruments showed how fast or high they were flying. However, because ATA pilots were required to stay within sight of the ground, they were not taught the art of flying on instruments – flying blind. Nevertheless many ATA pilots did teach themselves instrument flying, sometimes by scrounging sessions in a Link Trainer, a kind of rudimentary flight simulator. Flight above cloud was not permitted, though sometimes practised, simply because without radios there was no way for a pilot to find his or her way back down through the cloud. In time of war, radio silence was the order of the day, except for combat missions, whilst the radios themselves were pretty unsophisticated and the crystals needed changing all the time. Only when ATA started flying into Europe after D-Day in 1944 were its pilots given courses in how to use radios. Their call-sign was ‘Ferdinand the Bull’.

Planning each day’s work was a logistical nightmare. Each day, Central Ferry Control at Andover, Hampshire, would pass details of the next day’s movements to the individual Ferry Pools. There, the operations officers worked out the most efficient way of using their available pilots. This might involve using air taxis to take the pilots to and from jobs.

The plane came out of the factory in a flyable but possibly unfinished state, sometimes with radios, armaments and some secondary instruments still to be fitted. So the ATA ferry pilot would arrive at the factory to fly the brand-new plane to a maintenance unit, generally in the west of the country – as far from enemy bombers as possible. When the plane was completed, another civilian pilot was sent by Ferry Control to fly it to the front line squadron, which could be anywhere in the UK.

So before the boys in blue got to see this shiny new plane, it had already been flown twice by an ‘amateur’. Then the plane would go into battle and perhaps be damaged or need overhauling. So another civilian pilot would take it to a repair or maintenance unit, while yet another would deliver the serviceable plane to keep the squadron up to strength. In some cases, you could have the same plane being flown three, four or even more times by an ATA ferry pilot.

ATA work was dangerous. Some ferry pilots were shot at by the enemy and occasionally by their own side. But weather was the biggest hazard. Getting ‘stuck out’, in a location far from base, was not uncommon. Often, pilots would have to turn back or land if conditions were too bad. Yet the casualty rate among ATA women was proportionally much lower than amongst ATA men. One of the reasons is that the women were more reliable, tending to obey the rules more readily than some of the wilder elements amongst the men. Of course, there were always exceptions. One American woman told me: ‘I flew across the airfield at a height of 10ft at 300 miles an hour!’ Another frightened herself flying a Spitfire under a railway bridge across the Severn Estuary when the tide was in.

Perhaps ATA’s women were more cautious because at the back of their minds they knew that people were looking over their shoulders, looking for any excuse to say: ‘I told you women couldn’t do it,’ though I very much doubt if anyone ever said it to their faces.

These modest ladies often insist they were not ‘special’, that they were just doing their job. But they were special, along with their male colleagues, because they did such extraordinary things. To us, in a world of regulation, licences and certificates, the idea of flying six different types of plane in one day is unbelievable, particularly when you consider that they would be seeing some of those planes for the very first time. Nowadays it just would not be allowed to happen.

Interest in the ATA is high partly because the Second World War is still – just – in living memory. And although this should not be the case, there is something exciting about women achieving in what has traditionally been a man’s world. Like it or not, there is a romance about the little woman against the elements, flying a Lancaster bomber or a Spitfire.

After the Second World War, many ATA women of course married and became mothers and homemakers. Of the women in this book, only Mary (Wilkins) Ellis stayed in aviation for the rest of her life. A few women, including Margaret Frost, Diana Barnato Walker and Freydis Leaf, continued to fly in the Women’s Voluntary Reserve or the Women’s Junior Air Corps and maintain a partial involvement with aviation. Generally this was with light aircraft and did not represent an aviation career, although Jackie Moggridge became a commercial airline pilot and Lettice Curtis worked for an aviation manufacturer as a senior flight development engineer. She could have been a test pilot but that just wasn’t the kind of thing women did in the 1950s and 1960s. Joan Hughes, who died in 1993, worked as a flight instructor with West London Aero Club and the Airways Aero Association and flew vintage planes in two 1960s movies, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines and Thunderbird 6.

The contribution of the women of ATA to victory by keeping the RAF and Fleet Air Arm supplied with aircraft cannot be overestimated. I hope that this book will help us all to appreciate their amazing story of courage, skill and sacrifice.

Richard Poad MBE

Trustee of Maidenhead Heritage Centre

‘The spiritual home of ATA’

INTRODUCTION

It was an unbelievably glamorous image. Such is the power of the single picture; it lifted hearts and spirits everywhere in the autumn of 1944 as it was picked up from the newsstands to be read on the way to work or in millions of blacked-out homes.

War weary families gazed in awe at the cover of Picture Post magazine and the black and white shot of a good looking woman, parachute on her shoulder, fingers running through hair streaming behind her in the sun, young, free – and in control of a mighty war machine, a Fairey Barracuda. Here was a female pilot, one of an elite group of civilian women who were helping Britain win the war. Picture Post, the most popular weekly magazine of the era, frequently published the outstanding visual images of wartime. And, of course, without television, such images had huge national impact.

The young woman, 1st Officer Maureen Dunlop, was part of an elite group of female flyers, women who had joined the civilian organisation, ATA (Air Transport Auxiliary) to carry out a dangerous but crucial wartime role: as a ferry pilot delivering new aircraft from the factories where they were being produced to the frontline squadrons on the RAF bases all over Britain, or ferrying damaged aircraft to and fro between factories, repair shops and RAF airfields.

The work was dangerous. ATA ferry pilots flew by day and did not intentionally face combat, though if they were unlucky enough to encounter a German fighter the result could be fatal. Through the war, sixteen female and 157 male ferry pilots working for the ATA lost their lives. Their 300,000-plus safe deliveries of all types of planes – from light trainers to four-engine bombers – made a heroic and substantial contribution to Britain’s war effort. As civilian flyers, their work freed up the air force pilots to get on with the business of combat.

Each carefully planned delivery was a result of a complex schedule. The flying itself was perilous work: they flew unarmed, usually without radio, often without fully functioning navigation instruments. Ferry pilots had to cope with barrage balloons and unpredictable British weather (especially uncomfortable when flying in open cockpits in the early war years and life threatening if they flew into heavy cloud). At times, they would be flying in aircraft they had never flown before, relying on printed but very detailed notes to guide them through the hazards. Every single delivery counted. In a sense, they were ‘backroom boys and girls’, ensuring the RAF had what they needed, when they needed it. But without the ATA’s valiant efforts, history might have been different.

The mythopoeic power of that Picture Post glamorous photo at the time was such that some even started to believe that it was only women pilots who were carrying out this all important work. In fact, the civilian female flyers of the ATA were a minority group. At the beginning of the war, in January 1940, the first civilian ferry pilots’ pool consisted of just eight female pilots, experienced flyers, all with more than 600 flying hours, some of them with well over l000 flying hours behind them. And while pioneering British aviators like Beryl Markham, Jean Batten and Amy Johnson – who lost her life in bad weather in 1941 while on a flying mission for the ATA – had started to make their mark on the world in the 1920s and 1930s, the female component of the ATA was small.

The ATA was certainly a diverse group of individuals. Men and women from over 25 different nationalities and from all walks of life took to the skies for the ATA as ferry pilots. At one stage the ATA was dubbed ‘The Foreign Legion of the air’ because so many different countries were represented.

‘Ancient and Tattered Airmen’ was another nickname, given because the men who flew for the ATA were those who did not fulfil the physical or age criteria needed to join the RAF and, in some instances, the men were disabled or veterans of the First World War.

The eventual number of women who flew for the ATA through Second World War was just 168 – out of 1245 ATA pilots and flight engineers. And they were superbly backed up: at its peak in August 1944, the ATA also deployed some 2786 civilian ground staff. Ferrying planes from A to B in wartime Britain was a supreme test of logistics and planning: so the operations officers, ground engineers, office and medical staff, drivers, messengers and pilots’ assistants of the ATA all had their important role to play.

Yet it was bound to be the women pilots who captured the wider public imagination, hungry as people were for any glimpse of stardust to distract them from the wartime gloom. Right from the start of the war, in January 1940 when newspaper articles and photos of those first eight women started to appear on breakfast tables across the country, it was clear that an exceptional group of skilled women pilots were boldly striking out, action women in the mould of Earhart and Johnson. Theirs became the glamour, the glory of the smart tailored uniform, the bold gold stripes to denote rank and, of course, the very idea that women were cheerfully and capably doing what was very much seen to be a man’s job – flying.

Our fascination with ‘the female few’, the handful of women who flew Spitfires, Hurricanes, Barracudas, Harvards, Wellington Bombers, Lancasters and more across Britain’s troubled skies in those six years, remains undiminished. Over 70 years since the Second World War ended, the allure of their wartime adventure lives on. Commercial aviation itself has lost much of its original lustre, so we are still irresistibly drawn back to the Spitfire Women, as they are often known, up there in the skies, helping save Britain.

Part of the reason for this is that the Spitfire itself has, over time, become the superstar of wartime nostalgia. We see it as an important link with a time when a tiny, beleaguered country overcame the odds – and produced a superb fighter plane to help do it.

Built in greater numbers than any other British plane during wartime, the Spitfire has the distinction of being the only fighter to be continuously in production through the war years – though the advent of jets meant that by the time war ended, the ‘Spit’ was becoming obsolete.

Over 20,000 Spitfires were made for the RAF during the Second World War. At one point, one Spitfire factory at Castle Bromwich, near Birmingham, was manufacturing 320 Spitfires a month, ten a day. In the month of May 1944, Mary (Wilkins) Ellis’ log notes 25 Spitfire deliveries from factory to base, sometimes ferrying three Spits in one day. Some have seen it in one way as a ‘woman’s plane’. ‘You could dance with a Spitfire, it responded to the lightest touch,’ said Molly Rose, who flew 36 different types of plane for the ATA through the war. Today, just a handful of Spitfires are left in the world. The memories of the remaining ‘few’ who lived to tell the tale and remain with us are becoming as valuable and rare as the legendary planes themselves (an airworthy Spitfire was reported to have sold for close to £2 million in 2009).

As a journalist, the Female Few entered my life courtesy of an excellent documentary on the BBC followed by a phone call from a publisher a few days later, asking me to look into the idea of interviewing some of the surviving ATA women pilots. Some fascinating books had been written about and by ATA female pilots over the years. A number of documentaries have also celebrated their work. Yet a small number of female ATA pilots were still alive and well to be interviewed. The idea was to interview them about their wartime work, certainly, but also to attempt to tell their personal stories, their individual lives before and since those days, in their own words.

Since ‘what happened next?’ is high on every journalist’s agenda, this struck me as a most intriguing assignment. Who were these women? And what did life throw at them once they had made their last delivery and the ATA was disbanded?

I thought, more by instinct than research, that any surviving ‘Few’ who would be willing to tell me their stories would have put their flying days behind them for good as soon as the Second World War ended (I wasn’t quite right on that one) but the opportunity to find out so much more about these women, their lives and their memories, was compelling. And here were important stories that needed to be told for posterity.

The five women I interviewed for this book retained the links with their past and the Air Transport Auxiliary. In a sense, they had already become aviation ‘celebrities’ in their own right, deserving all of the attention they were receiving in later life. Though age and distance were making it increasingly difficult for the surviving pilots to meet up with each other, an ATA reunion dinner in the autumn of 2011 meant I could initially meet Joy Lofthouse and Margaret Frost to introduce myself. Yes, they were happy to tell me their stories. By now, they had become experienced interviewees anyway. It was a good start. Clearly, their advancing years would be no barrier to the occasionally tiresome process of a series of interviews.

As the history of the ATA’s early days includes the recruitment of a group of women from well-to-do backgrounds, I started out assuming that all my interviewees came from privileged, or upper class backgrounds and that was why they were able to indulge their passion for aviation in the first place. I wasn’t quite right. Whilst the early war years saw civilian pilots with existing flying experience or training being recruited by the ATA, as time went on the need for more ferry pilots meant pilots, both sexes, were also being recruited without any flying experience, ab initio through magazine advertisements. Once recruited they were then trained from scratch.

So it came as a surprise to learn that some of the women did not fit the stereotype: the Gough Girls, Joy and Yvonne, as the young sisters were known locally in Cirencester, came from ordinary backgrounds, had never been near a plane before and wanted to fly because they were, like millions of other women, keen to make their individual contribution to the war effort.

Margaret Frost was a country parson’s daughter who had carefully saved up her schoolgirl pocket money for flying lessons, much to the initial dismay of her family. Molly Rose and Mary (Wilkins) Ellis were, indeed, from comfortable backgrounds. Though their inherent modesty – a trait of all the women interviewed for this book and so typical of their generation – meant that they did not, quite clearly, view themselves as in any way different from anyone else or deserving of any special treatment.

As you might expect from people who were born in the early part of the twentieth century, while their memories of their wartime experiences were vivid and had left a powerful imprint on their subsequent lives, they had also encountered their own personal tragedies or setbacks. Yvonne MacDonald was already a young war widow and still grieving when she decided to apply to the ATA; but like many other bereaved women then, she was not about to let personal feelings prevent her from making her contribution to the war effort.

Clearly resilient and definitely not prone to hyperbole, each woman told me – insisted – that their ATA work meant doing a job, no more, no less, and that heroics or courage didn’t come into it, this was simply the way it was, ‘doing your bit for your country’. That was what millions of women did. Today, such reticence or understatement is uncommon. And the fact that they were, essentially, doing a man’s job in wartime was, for them, something to smile about, rather than provoking any militancy or table thumping attitudes about women’s roles or rights, either in aviation or peacetime.

As for all the attention they got in their smart tailored uniforms – all that perceived glamour for flyers, both sexes – it was not unwelcome. Why should it be? They were young and attractive women. But the inherent truth of it all was, they wanted to fly. The ATA motto: Aetheris Avidi, ‘Eager for the Air’ sums it up perfectly.

They also, in turn, expressed an essentially feminine common sense about their task: they were cautious in their approach to their work as ferry pilots. And they were, of course, constantly reminded of the wisdom of such an approach: ‘We pay you to be safe, not brave’ was the notice prominently displayed at the entrance to the Operations Section at Hamble, the all women’s Ferry Pool. They might have been widely portrayed as adventurous daredevils in leather flying jackets and goggles, yet right from day one of their training, they were acutely conscious of the huge responsibility they undertook.

Being tasked with transporting these very expensive, often brand-new war machines from factory to base meant not making any mistakes. A daredevil, gung ho approach to flying was out of the question. Was that fear of crashing and loss of life? I asked them all in turn, knowing that one in ten ATA female ferry pilots lost their lives, though the women’s fatality record was lower than that of the men. No, they all told me, the fear was not for themselves or their own survival. Their overall concern was not to thwart the war effort by damaging the aircraft in any way. You had to be extra careful. That was how you were trained.

One thing that also came out loud and clear to me through our interviews was that the language of their generation was totally different to the everyday language of the twenty-first century. Essentially, I was seeking their personal stories and memories. They were happy to answer every question. But understatement was, mostly, their style. Florid expressions of emotion – or displaying emotion – had never played a part in their world. The torrent of personal, intimate revelations we are bombarded with now, the finer detail of what it’s like to experience shock, grief, pain is very much a hallmark of the times we live in now. It wasn’t like that back then.

Beyond the physical difficulties or dangers of their flying, consider the day-to-day realities they sometimes faced on the ground: turning up for the day’s work at the ferry pool to learn that a close friend, another female pilot, had been killed in an accident. Whilst working for the ATA, Molly Rose placed ads in The Times for news of her husband, missing in action, believed killed. Then she learned he was alive, but imprisoned. Yet even had she not received the good news, it is doubtful that she would have stopped flying. Many others had to fly knowing close family members were lost.

Certainly, intensely personal dramas like these were being experienced by millions all through the Second World War. And even now, sadly, our armed forces and their families must face the worst at times. Whilst due homage is now frequently made to the way the women of Britain coped courageously through wartime, whether they were dashing aviators or ordinary women, struggling to raise families as best they could, the way they all dealt with tragedy or wartime uncertainty transcended their backgrounds or individual circumstances: they didn’t stop or collapse. They simply got on with it. They took in the truth of their situation and dealt with it as best they could. Histrionics or self pity were as unacceptable to the ATA women pilots as taking the slightest risk in the air. As Molly Rose put it: ‘Everyone was doing their part for the war. Ours was just a more interesting job than most.’

You need a cool head to be a safe, capable pilot. And you need excellent co-ordination skills. Joy Lofthouse believed the athletic background she and her sister Yvonne shared gave them a real advantage when it came to being accepted as trainee pilots without experience. Mary (Wilkins) Ellis, a sickly infant, confidently took the controls and soared into the air in a Spitfire, aged 90. And there’s the dogged determination factor too: Margaret Frost was rejected initially, told she did not quite fit the criteria. Yet eventually she was in the cockpit, safely ferrying Spitfires. So it is fair to say that their collective determination to do a good job, not take any risks, coupled with a resilient temperament or personality well suited to the times – where staying cool and calm was the only way to get through the worst – meant they could withstand what we now view as the awesome difficulties of their wartime role.

Today, we make so much of sharing our feelings, showing we care or how we feel. This generation were schooled completely differently: mostly, you kept such personal feelings to yourself. Spending time with these women made me understand very clearly, that the ‘stiff upper lip’ was not a cliché about the wartime British invented by Hollywood. It was real, the only sensible way to get through the worst times.

The American women who joined the ATA pilots later in the war were known to comment on this remarkable restraint. Frequently, silence was out of consideration for other people’s feelings, knowing they too had their share of wartime concerns. There was no counselling or talking balm for sudden loss or bereavement. You got a day or two off the roster. Then you went back to the job. As Margaret Frost put it so succinctly: ‘Feelings? We didn’t have time for feelings. There was a war on.’

Recognition for these women and the work of the ATA took a long time to come. Whilst a memorial plaque was placed in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral in London in 1950, commemorating the 173 men and women of the ATA who were killed serving in the organisation, the important role of the ATA women pilots themselves went largely unnoticed for decades. And it is fair to say they did not expect any kind of praise or acclaim.

Only in 2008 were the few surviving members presented with special award badges by the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, at 10 Downing Street after an ATA reunion at Maidenhead, near White Waltham, ATA’s headquarters.

For anyone keen to learn more about the ATA, the Maidenhead Heritage Centre is a very good place to start, with its collection of ATA memorabilia and stories of its past. There have, of course, been several books written about the ATA, though some are no longer in print and require some diligent tracking down. Most notable of those available are Spitfire Women of World War II by Giles Whittell and Spreading Their Wings by the late Diana Barnato Walker. The late Lettice Curtis’ book, The Forgotten Pilots: A Story of the Air Transport Auxiliary 1939–45 is a very detailed history of the female flyers and their wartime work.

In my research I was fascinated to learn more about the ATA women who continued to fly after the war, so I have included short histories of several remarkable women in Appendix IV. I have also included an introductory brief history of the ATA’s formation, the work of the women pilots and other key areas of interest until its disbandment in November 1945.

For families seeking more of their own personal history, there is a full list of the names of all the female ferry pilots who flew for the ATA. This book focusses on the five women who have told me their story, but it is intended as a tribute to every one of the ATA female flyers.

I would like to offer sincere thanks to those who were so helpful and generous to me with their time. Richard Poad, whose continuous hard work and dedication keep the ATA flame burning so brightly; the British Legion Press Office, whose initial assistance led me to Eric and Mary Viles (whose diligent work on behalf of the ATA Veterans’ Association came as a result of Eric’s wartime work as an Air Cadet/Pilot’s Assistant from 1944–1945); and, of course, all gratitude and thanks to the remarkable Few. Molly Rose, Mary (Wilkins) Ellis, Joy Lofthouse, the late Yvonne MacDonald and Margaret Frost – inspirational, brave, modest women, so deserving of the attention that came to them late in life.

They have insisted repeatedly that all ‘the Female Few’ were just ordinary women ‘doing their bit’ like everyone else. Most of us, nevertheless, cannot help looking up and remembering all those fighter planes making their way across the stormy skies of war with a tinge of awe and wonder.

Jacky Hyams

East Sussex

2022

1

A BRIEF HISTORY

In the 1920s and 1930s, the idea of taking to the skies was growing in popularity. Flying clubs had already started up in the 1920s, partially subsidised by the British Government. It was not until October 1938, when it was clear to some that war was imminent, that the Civil Air Guard scheme was devised, thanks to the efforts of Gerard D’Erlanger, a director of the then British Overseas Airways Corporation and an enthusiastic private pilot. The idea of this scheme was to encourage civilian would-be flyers. They might well be needed if war broke out. The scheme offered subsidised flying lessons at flying clubs. It was widely available to civilians, either sex, ages 18–50, who passed the private pilot’s ‘A’ licence medical.

The response to the news that the Government was contributing to flying lessons via the Civil Air Guard was overwhelming. Over 4000 would be flyers signed up. By May 1939, female members of the Civil Air Guard included approximately 200 pilots.

At that point, while the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Air had told the House of Commons that in a national emergency, civilian women would certainly be used to ferry aircraft, it remained unclear where or how they would be deployed. Would it be via the ATS (the Women’s Army Auxiliary) or the WAAF (the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force)? No decision was made.

When war finally broke out at the beginning of September 1939 it was still unclear what kind of role, if any, the civilian women pilots would be playing. Yet the Air Transport Auxiliary or ATA was formed – thanks again to the resourceful efforts of Gerard d’Erlanger, founder and Commanding Officer of the ATA. He had foreseen a shortage of trained pilots if the qualified civilian group who could fly were excluded from joining the RAF. And it had been agreed that civilian women pilots could fly, so they could fly for the ATA.

Gerard D’Erlanger initially saw the ATA as a courier service, flying VIPs and wounded servicemen. But it quickly became obvious that the role of these civilian pilots would extend beyond that – and would involve ferrying aircraft from factory or maintenance to airfield so the RAF could then fly the planes into combat.

Letters had been sent out to about 1000 male pilots asking if they were interested in joining the ATA. After interviews and flight tests, 30 civilian men were chosen to fly for the ATA, qualified pilots who did not fit RAF eligibility criteria. Initially, the first group of male ATA pilots were seconded to work out of RAF ferry pools. It might have seemed obvious that any female ferry pilots recruited by the ATA could simply join them. But the RAF was not keen on the idea of women pilots, civilian or otherwise, at that point: war might have just broken out and all resources were needed. But women pilots? It didn’t seem likely.

If Gerard d’Erlanger was the driving force in the formation of the Civil Air Guard and the creation of the ATA, the individual who was largely responsible for the successful push to recruit women ferry pilots was the daughter of a well known Tory MP, Pauline Gower (see Appendix IV).

An experienced commercial pilot and a canny strategist, Gower had already made it known to the authorities that a women’s section of experienced flyers could be deployed as delivery pilots, to complement the group of early male ATA pilots.