Spitfire Women of World War II (12 page)

The will provided generously for his wife and three children. But it handed the rest of the fortune to his brother, Solly, who had helped with the management of the Barnato mines. He was with Barney on the promenade deck of the SS
Christiana
on the afternoon that Barney mysteriously went over the side. No-one else was around except a steward, stacking chairs. He later said he heard someone yell ‘murder ‘and turned to see Solly either holding on to Barney's coat or letting go of it; it was not clear which. Barney was dead by the time a lifeboat picked him up. The verdict, in the absence of corroborating witnesses, was suicide. But even Solly's son would later tell Diana that Grandpa Barney had been pushed.

Diana's father, Woolf Barnato, eventually prised most of his rightful inheritance out of Solly through the courts. It was enough. He bought the Bentley Motor Company, an extensive spread in the Surrey Hills, and an exotic new Darracq two-seater sports car for Diana's twenty-first birthday.

Woolf ‘Babe' Barnato had kept wicket for Surrey in his youth and won the Le Mans 24-hour race in 1928, 1929 and 1930. He had many friends, among them Ettore Bugatti, founder of the Bugatti marque, with whom he dined in Paris after presenting
Diana with the Darracq outside the Ritz. When she burned out its brand-new clutch en route to the Basilica of Sacré Coeur, Bugatti fixed it.

The year was 1939. War had been declared, and across Europe armies and economies were being urgently reorganised to fight it. If anyone was going to chance a skiing holiday in France at such a time it was the young Miss Barnato. Sure enough, she obtained a pass to enter the country from Count John de Camaran, a friend at the French Embassy, and drove out to Megève and Chamonix with Lorna Harmsworth, daughter of the owner of the
Daily Mail
, for ten days with the Scots Guards.

They paused in Paris on their return for five days with Gogo Schiaparelli, daughter of Elsa, the couturier whom Amy Johnson had favoured with her custom in happier times. Elsa was still very much in business. She did not let the often-photographed Diana continue to Calais without a new wardrobe created for her, and for the moment. It included a heavy tweed coat with a silk lining in red, white and blue.

For Diana, flying was an escape – but hardly from drudgery or want of opportunity. It was an escape from other women. She had been presented to the chaotic court of the future Edward VIII in 1936 and loved being a deb. Unlike so many of her fellow flyers, she thrived at balls. She delighted the hand-picked young men – the ‘debs' delights' – and they delighted her. The only fly in this intoxicating ointment was her mother, who chaperoned her to all the main events and deputised a bustling platoon of friends and paid professionals to cover the lesser ones. ‘However,' she wrote, ‘I was eighteen and didn't like all that molly-coddling anymore.' She knew they taught flying in the middle of her father's favourite motor racing track – at Brooklands – and that most trainers had only two seats, so ‘at least nannies, governesses, companions and chaperones wouldn't be able to come along'.

She went solo after six hours, but then lost interest. Or rather, she suffered a fright, the memory of which haunted her for years and probably saved her life several times over. Just before that
flight a badly burned man appeared beside her Tiger Moth. She put what happened next into verse:

Rosemary Rees and Diana Barnato both wrote that they would rather die in a crash than survive, horribly disfigured, to endure the rest of a lifetime of staring strangers and conveniently absent friends, and Diana found out soon enough how fickle friends could be.

In the spring of 1941, while out horse riding with her friend Bobby Lowenstein, a bomber pilot and wealthy heir to a Belgian financier, Diana's tired mount crashed through a gate instead of jumping it. The horse was uninjured; not so Diana. She broke her jaw and rearranged her teeth so thoroughly that one of them lodged just beneath her eye. She wrote of the aftermath of the accident, and of a visit from her then boyfriend Claude Strickland, in her memoir,
Spreading My Wings
:

One late summer afternoon Diana invited me to join her in Surrey for tea and to look at her scrapbooks. Through them
marched an extraordinary parade of bravehearts, Spitfire aces returned from battle to the society photographer's studio. They were an absurdly handsome bunch, but Strickland, with curly blond hair and a hint of melancholy in his face, looked even more perfect than the rest.

‘Flying Officer Claude Strickland was shot down over Ostend', read a newspaper cutting pasted next to one of his portraits. ‘Presumed alive.'

‘Wrong,' Diana said.

He never came back, then?

‘No.'

I asked how long she had known him: ‘Oh, forever. He was a debs' delight when I was a deb. He was a boyfriend … but they were all shot down two a penny.'

One friend who did keep visiting was Lowenstein. He and Dick Fairey (son of the founder of Fairey Aviation, soon to lose his legs to gangrene after four days in an open boat off Greenland) had encouraged Diana Barnato to try for the ATA even though she had barely a fiftieth of the experience of the least experienced of the First Eight. Lowenstein and Fairey knew the ATA's chief flying instructor rode in Windsor Great Park each Sunday morning. They had contrived to bump into him there with Diana in tow on a thoroughbred black mare. Startled and socially outshone, the normally unflappable Captain A.R.O. MacMillan, ex-BOAC, agreed to give her a flight test the following Wednesday. There was no legal way of practising in the air, so Diana roared up and down the Egham bypass near her father's home in one of his Bentleys – a silver-grey 1936 four-and-a-half litre. ‘I opened all the windows and pretended I was seated in a Tiger [Moth],' she wrote, ‘looking out of the side windows at the grass verges so that I could judge what the waving grass looked like when I would be easing off the ground or trying to land again.' In the evenings, Dick and Bobby talked her through every detail of the White Waltham aerodrome and the circuit above it from the orange sofa in an outer hallway of the Barnato mansion.

Captain MacMillan supervised Diana Barnato's test himself. She passed first time.

It was on the day after the test, in the grounds of a house that the Lowensteins maintained in Leicestershire, that Diana had her riding accident. Bobby blamed himself. In the ambulance on the way back to London he told her he loved her and hoped to marry her. For ten days he reported for duty as usual each morning with his bomber squadron, and visited her at the London Clinic after flying. Then, coming into land in a Blenheim, he inadvertently shut down one engine, flipped the aircraft onto its back and was killed.

‘Pilot error,' Diana wrote. ‘Not to be wondered at. Once more I was devastated. No Claude, plus no Bobby, plus no face.'

Barnato did not report for duty with the ATA for another nine months on account of her smashed-up face, but when she did it was in a leopard-skin coat. Even so, she struck her comrades as curiously unspoilt considering her background. When grounded by bad weather she was a diligent letter writer, undistractable unless she sought distraction. And unlike Audrey Sale-Barker, she was content to order her uniform from Regent Street rather than Savile Row (she still has it; it hangs in her wardrobe in the dry-cleaner's plastic wrap, and comes out at the slightest excuse).

The ATA girls looked sharp. Their gold-trimmed navy uniform turned heads and secured the best rooms in hotels and good tables in restaurants. It was a passport, Veronica Volkersz said; ‘it would even get you a seat on the bus'. However much its wearers loathed the ‘glamour' word (and even one of those who did had to admit it was ‘rather fun walking down the streets in London and having people turn and look at you'), the uniform represented daring and dynamism to the general public.

Most female recruits, like Barnato, were measured up at Austin Reed's, and the fine tailoring on offer there was the one significant concession to feminine vanity made by the ATA on their behalf.
Two pilots thought they could do without it. The results were mixed, and Alison King's unimprovable account of a visit by Margot Gore and Philippa Bennett to the Maidenhead tailor used by most of the ATA's male pilots explains why. No woman, it seems, had set foot in there before, so there was ‘a certain amount of consternation' when the serving gentleman discovered that Flight Officers Gore and Bennett were ladies.

On 10 May 1941, Lieutenant Colonel J. T. C. Moore-Brabazon, the first man to transport live cargo in an aeroplane (a piglet in a wastepaper basket tied to the wing strut of his French-built Voisin in 1909), paid an official visit to the women's ferry pool at Hatfield. Promoted by Churchill to the critical position of Minister of Aircraft Production because of Lord Beaverbrook's failing health, Brabazon had been in the job all of ten days.

‘Brab' must have attached considerable importance to the ATA women's work, or at least to their morale. Or he may simply have enjoyed their company; naturally, he knew most of them socially. He posed with them for a photograph outside one of De Havilland's sturdy brick workshops, hat off, linking arms with Gower on his left and Lois Butler on his right, and they all look unusually jolly. Even Lettice Curtis is smiling.

If the Hatfield tea-party picture taken seventeen months earlier was the first iconic group portrait of the ATA women, this was the second. Its subjects even acquired a nickname – ‘Brab's Beauties'. Two of the women are wearing regulation A-line skirts and black silk stockings. These are Audrey Sale-Barker and her saucier namesake, Audrey Macmillan. The rest are in their blue flying slacks. Winnie Crossley, the doctor's daughter, holds a pair of light kid gloves. Lois Butler holds a cigarette in one hand and has thrust the other in her trouser pocket. The picture is imbued with optimism, and, for once, the sun is out.

All anyone wanted to talk about at Hatfield that spring was flying Hurricanes and Spitfires. Gower had proved herself as a player in the aeronautical establishment without alienating its key
men. Her women had proved themselves extremely capable pilots. The best of them had moved on from Proctors and Lysanders to Fairey Battles and large, noisy radial-engined Harvards. Hurricanes had to be next. ‘Politically,' Lettice Curtis wrote, ‘the implications were great, since there were still many men who kidded themselves that only ace pilots could fly fighters.' Practically, therefore, the move had to be incremental, below the radar – a fait accompli.

That bright spring day at Hatfield, Brab lunched with Gower, Butler and Crossley. Lettice Curtis believes that they discussed with him flying a wider range of aircraft (and they surely discussed little else). She also records a theory that Gower effectively clinched the long-awaited promotion to fly operational aircraft by buttonholing d'Erlanger at a party a couple of months later. ‘I suppose there isn't really any reason why women shouldn't fly Hurricanes,' d'Erlanger is meant to have said, at which point Gower pounced: ‘Fine – when can we start?'

Brab may have used the proper channels and written a memo urging the Air Council to require the RAF to allow the use of women in operational planes. If so, it has never been produced. More likely, he simply telephoned d'Erlanger and told him to get on with it. He was one of Churchill's people, after all. He was an aviator's aviator, a pioneer; the man who'd shown that pigs really could fly.