Spitfire Women of World War II. Giles Whittell

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       Queen Bee

      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):

      Now it can be told. For the first time since the war began, British censors today allowed that humdrum conversational topic, the weather, which has been a strict military secret in Britain, to be mentioned in news dispatches – providing the weather news is more than fifteen days old. The weather has been so unusually Arctic that by reaction the censors’ hearts were thawed enough to permit disclosure of the fact that this region shivered since past several weeks in the coldest spell since 1894, with the mercury dropping almost to zero and a damp knife edge wind piercing the marrow.

      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