Giles Whittell - Spitfire Women of World War II

Giles Whittell

For Karen

List of Illustrations

Epigraph

Prologue

1 Encounter

2 No Way Down

3 Queen Bee

4 The First Eight

5 All Over Europe the Air Was Free

6 Escape From Poland

7 None of Us Is Snobbish

8 We LIKE You In Your Harness!

9 Brab’s Beauties

10 The Perfect Lady’s Aeroplane

11 The Originals

12 Team Cochran

13 Over Here

14 Flygirls in London

15 Hamble

16 Heroines

17 Girl Flies Halifax

18 Mayfair 120

19 Over The Top

20 Eyes Wide Shut?

21 Women of the World

22 Left Behind

23 Honeymoon in Belgium

24 Better To Have Lived

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

A Note on Sources

Index

By the same Author

Copyright

About The Publisher

Amy Johnson RAF Museum

Gordon Selfridge and Rosemary Rees From ATA Girl, Memoirs of A Wartime Ferry Pilot by Rosemary du Cros

Rosemary Rees with a Miles Hawk Major From ATA Girl, Memoirs of

A Wartime Ferry Pilot by Rosemary du Cros

Audrey Sale-Barker Courtesy Lord James Douglas-Hamilton

Sale-Barker and Joan Page Courtesy Lord James Douglas-Hamilton

Gerard d’Erlanger Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

Pauline Gower in a Tiger Moth Imperial War Museum

Lt. Col. J.T. Moore-Brabazon Imperial War Museum

The ‘First Eight’ Eric Viles/ATA Association

The men of the ATA Imperial War Museum

Lettice Curtis climbing into a Spitfire Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

Curtis and Gower in the cockpit of an Anson Imperial War Museum

Gabrielle Patterson climbing out of an Avro Anson Imperial War Museum

Diana Barnato Walker Courtesy the collection of Diana Barnato Walker

Derek Walker Courtesy the collection of Diana Barnato Walker

Joan Hughes Imperial War Museum

Jackie Sorour Hulton Getty

Mary de Bunsen Photograph by J.D.H. Radford, from Mount Up With Wings by Mary de Bunsen

Freydis Leaf Courtesy Freydis Sharland

Joan Hughes standing with a Short Stirling Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

Maureen Dunlop Hulton Getty

Ann Wood Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

Ann Wood with her fellow flying pupils Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

Waiting to be cleared for take-off in a Spitfire Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

An ATA Anson Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

Ann Blackwell in a Typhoon Imperial War Museum

Jackie Cochran Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

Helen Harrison, Ann Wood and Suzanne Ford Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

Pauline Gower at White Waltham Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

Cochran and Gower Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

King George VI and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

Eleanor Roosevelt at White Waltham Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

Helen Richey Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

Flt. Capt. Francis ‘Frankie’ Francis Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

Bobby Sandoz, Opal Anderson, Jadwiga Pilsudska and Mary Zerbel-Ford Imperial War Museum

‘A tough bunch of babies’ Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

Stewart Keith-Jopp Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

Betty Keith-Jopp Courtesy Katie Hirsch

Lowering the flag A.G. Head/ATA Association

Dorothy Hewitt with Lord Beatty Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

Ann Wood on Remembrance Sunday in London Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

‘Under the bridge goes Lady Penelope’, Daily Express, 21st March 1968 Express Newspapers

Margot Duhalde Courtesy author

Diana Barnato Walker in 1963 Popperfoto

‘Everyone is equal before the machine … There is no tradition in technology, no class-consciousness.’

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

‘Indaba’ is Zulu for ‘conversation’, and at the Indaba Hotel on the northern outskirts of Johannesburg a conversation is what I hoped for. If it materialised it would be with an elderly lady who had insisted several times on the telephone that she really had nothing to say. But we both knew this was not quite true, and now, as she walked carefully down the steps to the hotel entrance, with a grandson hovering at her shoulder, she looked up with a smile.

‘You must be Betty,’ I said.

She was easily recognisable from the one blurred picture I’d seen of her in a smart blue uniform, leaning on the wing of a Fairey Barracuda over sixty years earlier. Now she wore a gold-coloured woollen shawl and carried a stick. She was tall and alert, and gave the impression she might even be looking forward to our meeting. Her name was Betty Keith-Jopp.

Soon after that photograph was taken in late May 1945, Betty and a fellow pilot named Barbara Lankshear took off from Prestwick on the west coast of Scotland, the eastern terminus of the great Atlantic air bridge that had kept Britain supplied with bombers since before Pearl Harbor. They were both ferry pilots, unarmed and untrained to fly on instruments, with less than eighteen months’ flying experience between them. Both were in Barracudas – lumpy, underpowered torpedo bombers with unusually large cockpits and a history of unexplained crashes. They were bound for Lossiemouth, 200 miles to the north on the rugged Moray Coast.

‘Shall we sit outside?’ Betty asked. She led the way through the hotel lobby and out onto a shaded terrace where we found a table and talked briefly about the weather. Then she ordered a large glass of wine and returned to 1945.

She would never have taken off that day if there had been even a hint of menace in the weather report, she insisted, and initially the sunny forecast seemed to have been accurate. ‘We were flying along perfectly happily. It was a lovely, lovely day.’ But their route took them south of Glasgow, between Dunfermline and Edinburgh and into thick cloud over the northern edge of the Firth of Forth.

As ferry pilots, Third Officers Lankshear and Keith-Jopp had standing orders never to fly over the top of cloud as a way out of trouble. Barbara disobeyed those orders and was lucky to find a way down; she landed safely soon afterwards. But Betty decided discretion was the better part of valour and turned back. She knew there was rising ground behind the coast to her left, so began a slow turn to the right, unaware that she was losing height.

She saw the water a second before hitting it.

‘I made a good landing, all things considered,’ she told me, still quietly astonished at the memory. ‘I just managed to get my nose up and the plane landed gently. It sat there on the surface for a few moments, then started sinking. I must have gone down quite decently, like in a lift.’

Still level, the aircraft settled on the bottom of the firth. Water began squirting into the cockpit from cracks between the canopy and fuselage. At first, not being a strong swimmer, Betty made little effort to get out. She thought of the life insurance payment that her death would trigger; of how her mother would be able to make good use of it caring for her brother, who had recently contracted polio. She thought of Amy Johnson, one of her heroes, dying in similar circumstances four years earlier despite vastly more experience in the air. ‘I can’t remember being frightened,’ she said. ‘I can remember more or less accepting it.’