Spitfire Women of World War II. Giles Whittell
to channel into that most daring and controversial of womanly pursuits, a ‘career’. Whatever she chose would rile her father, a driven but illogical old paragon who set great store by education, including his daughter’s, even though he would not allow her to go to university. So she set her sights on flying.
It was still two years before Amy Johnson ensured that flying eclipsed mere motoring as the fashionable expression of late adolescent rebellion for young women of means. But Gower was not interested in fashion. Nor was she one to hang about. She took her first flight, while still at school, with Captain Hubert S. Broad, who was visiting Tunbridge Wells as part of a national tour after competing in the Paris air races. She kept a diary and may have allowed herself a line or two of breathlessness in it about Kent from the air and the wind in her hair, and even about Captain Broad. But there is no such sappiness in anything she wrote for public consumption. She filed flying away as what she would do in the likely event that nothing else came along to satisfy both her need for excitement and her father’s for respectability. And nothing did.
Dispatched to finishing school in Paris, she ran away. She wondered about earning a living playing her violin, but realised she wasn’t good enough to perform and gave it up. Back home she was presented at court and ‘did all the things expected of the debutante, and was bored to tears’. She dabbled in Tory politics, but the Tories were not ready for her. (Even Lady Astor, Britain’s first woman MP, was only elected in 1919, and she was a Liberal.) So, on 25 June 1930, with Amy Johnson still on her delirious, nervewracking victory tour of Australia, Pauline Gower enrolled at the Phillips and Powis School of Flying at the Woodley airfield outside Reading. She did not tell her parents. For six hours’ worth of flying lessons she managed to keep the reason for her trips to Reading secret. Then she told her father what she was up to, and he cut off her allowance.
Gower was a natural pilot, and did not have to wait long to go solo. But her novel idea of flying for a living (a regular living, as opposed to being paid large sums by newspapers for occasional death-defying epics in the manner of Amy Johnson), required a commercial licence and dozens more expensive hours of training. For a year she paid for them by teaching the violin. In that time she switched flying schools and moved to Stag Lane, and there she befriended the vulnerable Johnson just as Johnson was adjusting to her new life as a megastar. At the same time, Sir Robert Gower came round to the idea of having a pilot for a daughter. For her twenty-first birthday, to her ‘unutterable joy’, he made the down-payment on her first plane. It was a two-seater Spartan, about as cheap as aircraft came in 1931, ‘but to me’ she reflected, ‘it was the finest aeroplane that had ever been built’.
Miss Pauline Mary de Peauly Gower became the world’s third female commercial pilot, and Britain’s first. She was already forming a grand world view centred on the notion of flying as a liberator of women and unifier of nations. Another of her new friends from Stag Lane, Dorothy Spicer, a pilot as well as an engineer, was more interested in engines than flying. Tall, blonde and very beautiful, she was a graduate of University College London and a qualified aeronautical engineer. She and Gower decided to go into business together.
Gower would later write an account of her time with Spicer as co-directors of the world’s first all-female airborne business venture. Her publisher described it as ‘a record of pioneer achievement in the air related with much humour and a cheerful philosophy’. The book was reviewed by the sniffy and none-too-progressive editor of Aeroplane magazine, C. G. Grey. Spicer, he wrote:
looks more like the British working woman’s idea of the idle rich, or alternatively a cinema star, than any girl I know … [and] Pauline Gower does not give one exactly the notion of being one of the world’s workers either. And yet for six years those two girls did a job of sheer manual labour, which would have been more than enough for half the British working men of the country.
Spicer kept the plane airworthy; Gower flew it. They started with a rented Gipsy Moth in a field near Sevenoaks, charging half a crown per flight and fifteen shillings for an aerobatic sequence consisting of two loops and a spin. When Gower’s first aerobatics customer requested another loop she made him hand over another half crown in the air first. With Gower’s Spartan, they flew from Wallingford in Berkshire, and spent the rest of that first summer flying for whoever would pay them, and playing host most evenings to friends from Stag Lane who would drive out to shoot the breeze (and rabbits).
They slept in a hut next to their beloved aeroplane, exhaustion competing with nightmares about a serial killer thought to be at large in that part of Berkshire. Besides joyriders, their customers included yacht race spectators from Cowes Week and a Gloucester-bound businessman who paid them a fat fee and then embarrassed them by telling a reporter that he was in ‘lavatory deodorisation’. There were also two men pursued to the airfield by plainclothes detectives and arrested before Gower – with tank full and engine running – could fly them to France; and another who requested a moonlit flight over the royal residence at Sandringham. The directors of Air Trips turned him down.
There is no mention during this time, in anything written by them or about them, of boyfriends. ‘It is only logical,’ Gower mused, ‘to suppose that matrimony will claim the majority of women pilots ultimately, just as it claims many other girls who have been trained at great expense for different professions.’ It did claim them both, eventually. But as twentysomethings they had no time for whatever preceded matrimony. They were smitten with the thrill of flying, with being busy and with making money. In 1933, in the course of six months with the Hospitals’ Air Pageant, they flew from 185 airfields, moving from one to the next every day. For the next two seasons they stayed put in a field outside Hunstanton and let the holidaying public come to them. The following year, 1936, as Hitler hosted the Olympics and occupied the Rhineland, Gower and Spicer hit the touring trail again, this time with Tom Campbell Black’s Air Display.
They had a miserable time. They witnessed another death, this time of a young and inexperienced member of the display team showing off in a new Drone monoplane near Hereford. He flew past the crowd at 400 feet, waving and smiling. Then he put the plane into a spin. ‘At that height the result was a foregone conclusion,’ Gower wrote briskly. ‘Almost before the Drone hit the ground, the ambulance was on the spot. The pilot was extricated from the wreckage terribly smashed up and rushed to hospital. The show continued for another hour, then word was brought to us that he had died and the evening performance was abandoned.’
A few weeks later Gower herself was nearly killed, colliding on the ground with another plane while trying to take off from Coventry. She had been hit on the head by a wheel from the other plane; the wheel came off and Gower was off flying for a month. She saw out the rest of the season, but was badly shaken up and prone to unhelpful attacks of nerves.
This may have been one reason why the brave firm of Air Trips closed down for the season in September 1936, and never reopened. But another reason was undoubtedly the tragedy that befell the Gower family in November of that year. Pauline’s mother, who was convinced, despite a lack of any symptoms, that she was suffering from terminal cancer, gassed herself in the kitchen at Tunbridge Wells. She left a note for her daughter: ‘A very hurried line to send you my love, and all my wishes for your future happiness and peace … Again I say, you have nothing to blame yourself for. Try to forgive me. Your utterly bewildered and terrified but loving Ma.’
It was the sort of sign-off to crush a softer soul, but Pauline’s had already been cauterized by six years of living one slip – one misjudgement – from death. She never spoke publicly about her mother’s suicide; nor would it have occurred to her to. Instead, like Amy Johnson after her sister’s suicide, she immersed herself in work with an almost manic vigour. Perhaps out of consideration for her father she made sure that more of her work was on the ground. In any case, by the time the war broke out her curriculum vitae was as full as her diary. She was a popular lecturer on aviation and women’s role in it; a Civil Air Defence Commissioner for London; a district commissioner for the Girl Guides; a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society; a King’s appointee to the Venerable Order of St John of Jerusalem; and an active member of a new parliamentary subcommittee set up to review safety regulations concerning low-flying banner-pullers. She could surely cope with being head of the ATA women’s section as well.
It