Spitfire Women of World War II. Giles Whittell
it was true. In a rumpled sort of way, the ATA was the most exclusive flying outfit of the war. The name was an anomaly, The Times’ aeronautical correspondent noted in 1941, and ‘the body itself one of those curious, almost romantic improvisations which the special demands of war sometimes call into existence’.
To be eligible for membership you had to be ineligible for the RAF but still able to fly. That ruled out clear-eyed, coordinated, brave young men; but it ruled in a different sort of elite; one of oddballs, intellectuals, artists, bank managers, civil servants, wounded veterans and Francis ‘Frankie’ Francis – flying ace, backgammon ace, ex-Guards officer and raven-headed millionaire from the north shore of Lake Geneva. There, in peacetime, he had maintained his own Sikorsky biplane for joyrides over Gstaad and the Haute-Savoie. Come the war, he would have chafed at returning to a military hierarchy but among fellow civilians anxious only to fly, he was adored. It did his reputation no harm that he had the looks and torso of a film star and would strip to the waist for physical jerks whenever the sun came out.
For the winter of 1939–40 the men were seconded to existing RAF ferry ‘pools’ at Hucknall, near Nottingham, and Filton, east of Bristol – the future birthplace of Concorde. Here they got their hands on operational aircraft and were even permitted to ferry them to France. Women, by contrast, were considered by the RAF’s top brass to be unworthy of either privilege, physically or temperamentally. They were never formally attached to RAF units and were based in their own all-civilian pools from the start, which came with the recruitment of the first eight pilots in January 1940. At first the only RAF machines they were allowed to fly were trainers – open cockpit De Havilland Moths, and, later, Miles Magisters (with a blistering top speed of just 132 mph).
The women had to struggle for nearly two years to be allowed in fighters, and five before they started flying them to Europe. Yet it was clear from the outset that despite their relative youth and their nickname (the ‘Always Terrified Airwomen’), they were altogether more formidable than the Ancient and Tattered.
The simple fact of having learned to fly before the war made them an elite within an elite. Their eventual success in flying operational aircraft in the teeth of RAF resistance only compounded their kudos. They were marshalled by the daughter of a prominent Tory MP, championed by a powerful handful of ‘pro-women men’, and led through the air by the likes of Lettice Curtis. They were a close-knit group, barely twenty-strong. Many knew each other from Stag Lane, Heston and Brooklands – London’s most famous pre-war flying clubs. Most were from monied backgrounds, with accents and assumptions to match. Those that were not were ruthlessly frugal. Some were well known, especially to the society editors of the Daily Sketch and the Picture Post. They were ‘It Girls’ doing their bit, but there was nothing remotely superficial about their courage or their motivation. On the contrary, their defining traits were inner steel and a fierce if usually unspoken patriotism.
Later ATA recruits found some of these pioneers downright imperious. Margaret Fairweather, the first woman to fly a Spitfire, was nicknamed the Cold Front. Lettice Curtis was known to everyone in the ATA but that did not mean she would talk to them. (One new arrival from South America remembers handing her a letter of introduction and being stunned when ‘she read it, said nothing and turned away’.) Another relative novice who had to spend a week at the first all-women’s ferry pool at Hamble, near Southampton, called it ‘the loneliest time I’ve ever spent’.
But the exigencies of war – and especially the worsening shortage of pilots as the air war intensified – meant that all-comers would eventually have to be accepted by the pioneers, just as the pioneers had been accepted by the men.
And this was why, towards the end of April 1942 (and four months after Pearl Harbor) two young women in ATA uniform set off from London for Liverpool docks to meet a converted coal carrier called the Beaver Hill. These women were Pauline Gower and the Hon. Mrs Kitty Farrer. Gower, the high-achieving daughter of Sir Robert Gower, MP for Gillingham, had been appointed head of the women’s section of the ATA in September 1939. Farrer was her adjutant. The ship they were meeting had had a rough and dangerous crossing from Montreal. The last convoy to have sailed this route had lost six of its ten vessels to U-boats, but the Beaver Hill somehow made it through both the German blockade and a ferocious three-day storm. On it were five unusual guests of the British government – the first five of twenty-five American women pilots to cross the Atlantic that year to join the ATA.
They cannot have been hard to pick out on the gangplank. In the tide of over a million Americans who came ashore at Liverpool to help Churchill reverse the catastrophe of Nazism only a few handfuls were women. Even so, Commander Gower and Executive Officer Farrer did not get to them first. As the ship’s passengers disembarked, the Englishwomen were dismayed to see the captain and crew, formed up in a ragged line at the end of the gang-plank, surround their charges and smother them in what appeared to be drunken kisses. ‘They grabbed each one of us and hugged us and kissed us on both cheeks,’ one of those women remembered. ‘Pauline Gower was so prim, I can just imagine her thinking, “Oh my god, what are these Americans doing?”’
Miss Gower and Mrs Farrer waited for the raucousness to end. Then they stepped forward to shake hands. By their own account they invited their visitors to dinner at the nearby Adelphi Hotel, and the new arrivals appeared to accept. In fact the Americans were exhausted and went off to sleep. Not one of them showed up at the appointed time, leaving Gower and Farrer to dine alone at a table for seven. They were so affronted that they left on the night train and suggested their American ‘cousins’ make their own way to London in the morning.
That suited Dorothy Furey perfectly.
Furey was the bewitching, violet-eyed daughter of a New Orleans banana importer, and she had already decided that Pauline Gower was uptight. Her father had lost a large fortune in the crash of 1929, and since then she had gained wide experience of the susceptibilities of men. She had also nearly killed herself looping over Lake Ponchartrain in an open cockpit Arrowsport biplane. She was twenty-four when the Beaver Hill docked in Liverpool, and the only one of the five women in her group to have packed an evening gown with her flying gear. She called it her Gone With The Wind dress. It was red and not especially long, and she would use it to spectacular effect before the war was out. Some of the other Americans called her the seductress. Not all were proud of her. For her own part, when Furey looked back on her fellow women pilots at the end of her life she stated quietly: ‘There wasn’t anybody to compare with me.’
Not that her hosts were quick to notice. On arriving in London, Furey and company were escorted directly to a meeting room near the Grosvenor House Hotel and made to listen to a schoolmasterly talk by Pop d’Erlanger on ‘ill-mannered Americans’ and how not to be counted among them. Pop was popular, especially among his peers in the British boardroom class, but he irritated Furey no end.
‘They called him the man with the runways on his shoulder because we all had stripes but he had gold, like an admiral,’ she remembered. ‘And he greeted us with a lecture on ill-mannered Americans. Yes he did. Because they had had some young men who had come over to help and they had, I guess, got drunk and behaved badly. So that was our greeting. I was so furious I nearly got up and walked out, except I didn’t know where I was or where I would go.’
In the event the five Americans were taken to Austin Reed’s on Regent Street to be measured for their uniforms. From there they went to Paddington to catch the train to White Waltham, thirty miles to the west. It was a journey that would become as familiar as ration coupons over the next three years, but it must have seemed unutterably strange that first time – to be trapped in the gaze of English fellow-passengers too war weary and curious to lower their eyes, to stare out at suburbs vast enough to swallow whole a New York borough, and then at ‘countryside’ too thick with roads and villages to count as countryside except on such a crowded island, as the aerodrome that was to be their gateway to a new life of heroic and unprecedented flying clanked closer by the minute.
Cars met the Americans at Maidenhead station. From here they were ferried to ATA headquarters, a flat-roofed, two-storey brick building next to the operations room. As the new arrivals clambered out they realised at once that the aerodrome’s entire male pilot