Spitfire Women of World War II (24 page)

Douglas Fairweather once said he loved Margie ‘better than any dog I ever had … or even a pig or a cat'. It was a quietly requited love. She was heavily pregnant when he died and gave birth a few days later to a daughter. She was still mourning him four months later, when she took off in a Percival Proctor from Heston bound for Hawarden, near Liverpool. She was acting as air chauffeur for a male VIP and her own sister, the Hon. Mrs Kitty Farrer – Pauline Gower's adjutant – who had a personnel problem to attend to in Scotland. Less than twenty miles from Hawarden the Proctor's engine coughed and died. Fairweather tried to restart it by switching tanks, but accident investigators found the port tank's vent pipe had been carelessly blocked by a skin-like membrane of weatherproof paint. If no air could enter the tank, no fuel could leave it.

Unflustered, Fairweather chose a field in the lower reaches of the Dee valley for a forced landing. It had been ploughed at right angles to her direction of approach, which would ordinarily have been bumpy but not deadly. The Proctor's wheels stuck in a furrow and its nose tipped forward. Kitty was thrown clear and was injured, but not fatally. The VIP, a Mr Louis Kendrick of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, broke his thumb. Margie was slammed forward, shattering her spectacles, from which shards of glass went through her eyes into her brain. The Cold Front – the grown-up with a faraway look in her eye when the ATA girls met the press at Hatfield; the first woman to fly a Spitfire – died the following day at Chester Royal Infirmary. Her reserve meant she was not widely known, but she was remembered, not least by those she
had taught to fly at Glasgow Flying Club before the war. Two of them had joined the RAF and fought in the Battle of Britain. When her brother-in-law visited the crash site, he found them there in tears.

Death was not much discussed in the ATA, but it was always round the corner, or liable to happen in a split second and right in front of you, leaving no time to look away. Around lunchtime on 17 January 1943, Lettice Curtis was on her final approach to Sherburn-in-Elmet, in East Yorkshire, in one of several Hurricanes flown up there from White Waltham en route to Scotland. Visibility was good, but the Sherburn aerodrome was a mess. It had started the war as a farm, with a massive stone farmhouse that could absorb and thaw out as many pilots as pitched up there, whether from the Shetlands or the Sussex coast. But it had nothing that remotely resembled a runway. Taxi flights began and ended among chickens in the farmyard.

In late 1942 the Air Ministry approved the building of a pair of full-length concrete runways, triggering an invasion of bulldozers that turned the fields into mud baths. Meanwhile, ferry pilots had to go on landing there.

The Hurricane immediately ahead of Curtis was being piloted by Flight Captain Alan Colman (of the Colman's mustard family). His instructions from the White Waltham Maps and Signals Department were to land on the north side of the farmhouse. He did so, and ran into a broad sheet of standing water eighteen inches deep. The Hurricane cartwheeled onto its back and lay there in the water. By the time the crash crew got to Colman he had drowned in his straps. Curtis landed next to him and insisted, years later, that there was nothing anyone could do until enough people arrived to lift the tail and release the canopy. The official history of the ATA, written in 1945, stated that help arrived in ‘the shortest possible time'. This may be so, but as Ann Wood noted after hearing about the accident that night, Colman died ‘within
sight of many a potential helping hand, so one never knows'. One never knew how death would come; nor could one ever count on others to keep it at bay.

As the war ground on it developed a terrifying momentum. Veronica Volkersz was collecting an Airspeed Oxford from Christchurch in Dorset soon after D-Day when she had to wait for an American squadron of P-47 Thunderbolts to take off for France. These were heavyweights at the best of times, even by single-engined standards. They had huge double radial Pratt & Whitney engines stuffed into their blunt noses, and semi-elliptical wings not unlike a Spitfire's that were usually enough to get them airborne. For their mission on 29 June 1944, however, each carried two 1,000-lb bombs. There was no headwind, and the runway was short, ending in houses. The Thunderbolts took off in pairs, or that was the idea. The first pair cleared the houses by a few feet, but one of the second slammed into them and blew up. Volkersz watched in horror as the third pair accelerated towards the inferno and staggered through it into the air. Then came the fourth: one made it, the other never left the ground. It ploughed through the gap left by the first crash into the next row of houses; another shattering explosion. Twenty people were dead or injured before the squadron had even regrouped above the airfield.

‘What are you dicing with today?' the Hamble women would enquire dryly of each other as they headed for their taxi planes with a new day's chits. It was partly a type-check, to make sure no one else had been favoured with something new or exotic or especially fast. It was also a reference to a propaganda poem called ‘Dicing With Death Under Leaden Skies' that they all felt applied not unflatteringly to them. It didn't make death itself more palatable, though; not the sudden end of a person or her physical remains. Rosemary Rees was once called to a crash site, possibly Honor Salmon's, and found that the ATA's Inspector of Accidents had got there before her and was looking unwell.

Death was a part of life even when names you knew weren't being rubbed off the Hamble blackboard. Freydis Leaf told me how she lost seven cousins during the war and how her older brother, Derek, had taken her to one side before the storm arrived and foretold it all:

At this Freydis sighed and looked away – away from the coffee table in her sitting room, and my tape recorder taking it all down. Her eyes filled and she fell silent for what seemed like a long time. ‘And it did work out like that,' she said eventually.

To woo a woman more interested in aeroplanes than men took patience. No-one ever managed it with Joan Hughes or Margaret Frost. Three men thought they had succeeded with Margot Duhalde, but she tired of each of them soon after marrying them.

As for Jackie Sorour, the South African, a succession of eligible types tried their luck and their best lines on her because she was adorable to look at and maddeningly good on the dance floor. With loose black curls and a starlet's bright face, she was vaguely aware of her attraction for men even though she was shy and inexperienced with them. She was fiercely impatient whenever she thought her femininity was holding her back, but not uninterested in learning to flirt with it. At the same time she was a natural and utterly determined pilot. All of which made her a ‘hot pertater' – hotter than she knew. She did fall for one of her admirers in the end – Lieutenant Reg Moggridge – because she liked the look of him and fell in love with his deliberate way of doing things. But mainly because he was as patient as a statue.

Reg first met Jackie at an army dance at Brooklands in 1940. She let him partner her but in her shyness and respect for propriety she developed neck ache making sure her cheek never touched his. He managed to get an arm round her, but only on the parquet when they had to dive for cover from a stick of bombs during the national anthem. The army provided buses home for the WAAF girls from the coastal radar station where Jackie worked before
joining the ATA, watching intently for green German blobs to be called in to Fighter Command at Stanmore. She sat next to Reg on the bus and let him hold her hand in the dark. She hoped he would kiss her goodnight, but she pulled away before he took his chance.

Two years later, impelled by orders to depart for India, Reg bought Jackie a zircon ring that would fit under her flying gloves.

‘You have no objections to an engagement?' he asked over lunch at his parents' house near Taunton.

‘None whatever,' she answered.

Another two years, and they saw each other again. Reg decided to make his return from India a surprise. On a Friday afternoon in September 1944 he let himself into the riverside cottage in Hamble where Jackie was billeted, and sat down to wait. She had been faithful to him, deflecting advances with ‘a pious pseudo-saintliness that would have made a nun of Assisi a harlot by comparison', as she put it later. But she was 300 miles away that afternoon on the north side of the Lake District, with little chance of showing up that night.

The weather over the fells and the Solway Firth beyond was bad and worsening, and Jackie's ride home was a decrepit twin-engined Mitchell bomber, a type she had not flown before. Rows of bombs, one for each operational mission flown, were painted under its nose next to a faded dancing girl. As the plane sat outside the Kirkbride operations room in driving rain, Sorour was handed her delivery chit. ‘ONE LANDING ONLY', it said in red. She was to fly a new type in foul weather on its last flight before being broken up. It did not seem sensible, but Hamble personnel were invited to a dance – another dance – at a nearby American army camp that night. Sorour felt indifferent about it, but her flight engineer wanted to go.

They headed out into the rain and strapped themselves in. With her Flight Authorisation Card in her top left-hand pocket, Sorour was her own captain. Operations staff could neither ground her nor order her to take off; only advise. Advice to pilots already
in their aircraft but not in wireless contact came in the form of coloured flares. Green meant it was safe to proceed; red unsafe. Sorour taxied the old bomber to the east end of the runway, hemmed in by hills, and turned to line up for take-off towards the sea. As she peered down the runway the sky darkened and a squall whipped the rain and puddles into a curtain of water. A red flare went up from the control tower.

‘The dance,' hissed the engineer, and Sorour obligingly put her hand to the throttles. She took off into the storm, choosing not to notice a second flare launched as the Mitchell lumbered into the air. She levelled off almost immediately and banked to port under the clouds, hugging the coast.

To the south the weather improved, but as the Mitchell approached the Dunfold Maintenance Unit in Surrey where it was to be broken up its starboard engine failed. Sorour shouted at her engineer to feather the propeller, trimming the flaps and opening her port throttle to compensate. A quick look at her map told her they had ten miles to go, with 800 feet to lose and not enough power to go round again if she undershot on her final approach. The engineer asked if she had landed a bomber on one engine before. She said she hadn't, and he tightened his straps.

At this point a less confident pilot might have followed the instructions in the Ferry Pilot's Notes even more carefully than usual, or panicked. Sorour did neither. She realised that if she let the engineer lower the undercarriage at the recommended speed and altitude she would suddenly not have enough of either because of the increased drag. So she made him hold off until they were less than a mile from the runway, then brought the plane in crabwise, kicking the rudder pedals against a gusty crosswind and squeezing as much power out of the port engine as she could without turning the plane over. They bounced once, broke nothing and rolled slowly to a halt. As the crash wagon rushed out to meet them, Sorour noticed that the maps clutched in her hand were shaking like a flag in a stiff breeze.

An Anson dropped them at Hamble, where Jackie and her engineer went straight from the airfield to the dance and jitterbugged till midnight. She went home without him, creeping over the threshold of Creek Cottage so as not to wake her hosts. In the sitting room she found Reg, thinner and browner than in 1942, rising from an easy chair surrounded by pipe-cleaners and magazines. ‘I remember little of what happened in the shy haze of welcome,' she wrote. ‘Except … that I was firmly kissed.'

The war had changed them both, but not so much that they did not want to be together. On the contrary, the cocktail of exaggerated independence and prudishness that Reg had left behind suddenly found herself ‘eager to be dominated by man and marriage'. She suggested a wedding the following Easter. Reg suggested January. Jackie agreed, provided she could visit her mother in Pretoria first, and that self-imposed deadline launched her on one of the more remarkable hitchhikes of the war.

When Sorour called her mother with the news that she was getting married, her mother replied that she was suffering a nervous breakdown. It was not clear whether the breakdown was a result of the announcement, or even if it was genuine, but it gave Jackie grounds to request two months' compassionate leave. The request was granted, and in mid-December 1944, she left Hamble for RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire in a Spitfire with an overnight bag. ‘We waved her off with quite a lot of heart-searching on our part and great deal of aplomb on hers,' Alison King remembered. Jackie had no exit permit or air ticket; only an iron will almost completely camouflaged by coquetry, and a hopeful letter from South Africa House addressed ‘To whom it may concern'.

It took her two days to persuade Lyneham that she was serious, but eventually she managed to talk her way into the co-pilot's seat of a giant four-engined Consolidated Liberator bound for Cairo (even though she had not been cleared to fly four-engined aircraft). The Liberator landed to refuel in Malta, but it developed a fault and failed to take off again. Jackie switched planes, volunteering her services as a stewardess on a Cairo-bound military Dakota.
She was grounded in Egypt for three days for want of a yellow fever inoculation certificate, but eventually forged one with the help of a South African colonel who knew her vaguely from a previous life. Then she hopped another Dakota, this one bound straight for Pretoria, and arrived there three stormy days later.

She found her mother less ill than advertised, and soon had her out of her bed. She stayed for ten days, gorging on fresh milk and fruit and declining lavish inducements to cancel her return: her mother offered her a car, a flat, an aeroplane and a hand-picked selection of alternatives to Reg. None measured up. Nor did she feel at home. ‘To be so suddenly engulfed in a forgotten world of rich food, naked lights and untroubled skies … it was too much,' she wrote. ‘My destiny was with an austere island still grappling with a mortal foe.' And so, with two weeks' leave left and 6,000 miles to go, she headed north again. The third Dakota of the trip took her to Khartoum, where she dashed across the tarmac and begged her way onto a fourth, which had landed minutes before her carrying Gurkha officers from Kathmandu to Boscombe Down. There were waterspouts over the Mediterranean and a forced landing at Istres, near Marseilles, but she was back in England with six days in which to get married in Taunton and honeymoon in Brighton (with lingerie smuggled in in her slimline overnight bag from South Africa).

Jackie Sorour was Jackie Moggridge at last: a woman of the world in a world that had changed almost as much as she had. The chance to leap from Dakota to Dakota to South Africa and back was part of that change. The globe would shrink still futher when Constellations and jet-powered Comets replaced Dakotas, and the network of military air bridges that Sorour had found so useful became the basis of a civilian airline revolution after the war. But a more significant change for women who flew Spitfires, and women generally, had already occurred on the more intimate stage of the Palace of Westminster.

On 18 May 1943, Miss Irene Ward, Conservative MP for Wallsend, rose in the House of Commons to address a question to Sir Stafford Cripps, Minister of Aircraft Production. Was it his understanding, she asked, that the women pilots of the ATA received the same rate of pay as their male colleagues? The gaunt and earnest Sir Stafford (who was a vegetarian; when he visited a group of ATA women at White Waltham they fed him macaroni cheese), replied that as of the following month these women would indeed be paid the same as men of the same rank doing the same work.

Miss Ward: ‘Is the Right Honourable and learned Gentleman aware how gratifying it is that this decision has been arrived at without pressure from women members of the house?'

The Minister: ‘I am grateful.'

History made, the house moved on. But two days later its attention was drawn to a related subject. The board of BOAC had resigned en masse in a power struggle with the newly formed RAF Transport Command, and a new board had been nominated. Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air, read out the names of his nominees. To those of Viscount Knollys, KCMG, MBE, DFC, Air Commodore A. C. Critchley, CMG, DSO, and a handful of other predictably stalwart gentlemen, the Mother of Parliaments offered little reaction. But when the last name was announced, the House suddenly bestirred itself. What began as a self-conscious ‘Hear! Hear!' from the Tory backbenches grew into a generalised waving of order papers, and eventually swelled into a full-throated roar of approval that straddled the aisle and echoed – one likes to think – along the corridors of Westminster, into the Lords, across Parliament Square and down the ages.

That name was Pauline Gower's, and those few seconds on the afternoon of 18 May 1943, were her moment of triumph. She hadn't done much flying in the war, but that was because she had more to prove on the ground than in the air. What she had done was to lead a stealthy if not quite bloodless coup. Jackie Cochran made enemies by appearing to put her crusade for women before the war effort. Gower always put duty first, then merit. She almost
never argued about gender. That way, any great leaps forward that she achieved for womankind could be categorised as entirely incidental. This was her genius. Under cover of war and her own brisk smile she ambushed the Establishment. Her appointment to the board of the organisation that would connect up whatever was left of the British Empire after the war was recognition that the ambush had succeeded. It would have been unimaginable before the war, and unimaginable for anyone else. She did hope that having proved equal to their task, and to men, her pilots would clear the way for a proper peacetime role for women in aviation. She had abandoned such talk, at least in public, barely a year into the war. But now her strategy of letting the flying do the talking seemed to be sweeping all before it. Anything seemed possible again.

It was suggested by one of the sketchwriters in the press gallery that afternoon that the applause for Miss Gower was started by the long-serving and honourable member for Gillingham, Sir Robert Gower. It probably was. It was also suggested, in a diary entry by Ann Wood after sharing a car journey with Sir Robert's daughter a few weeks later, that the projects to which Pauline had been devoting herself for the previous four years were not as engrossing or important as her subordinates were led to believe. This was uncharitable. Wood may still have blamed Gower for Jackie Cochran's isolation in London and Helen Richey's early return to the US; but the fact was that without Gower there would have been no women's section of the ATA; no progression from Moths to Magisters, Magisters to Hurricanes, Hurricanes to Spitfires and Lancasters and weird gas-guzzling jets; and certainly no equal pay.

The struggle with the British Treasury's rule that women were worth 20 per cent less than men had seemed one for another generation. It was, after all, ‘an affront to society for a woman to ask to get equal pay for equal work', as Bobby Sandoz put it. ‘The idea was that the man had a family to support and a woman alone did not.'

Even now, no-one was suggesting that any other women would get equal pay for equal work. Those working the land or in munitions factories, or building Merlin engines in Glasgow or rebuilding broken men at the Royal Canadian Hospital at Clive-den, dutifully went on giving the government their sweat, toil, tears and 20 per cent discount until peace broke out and sent most of them back home. They lacked their Pauline Gowers.