Читать книгу Spitfire Women of World War II - Giles Whittell - Страница 12

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 physically weakened and barred from team sports. But she was a bundle of nervous energy which she was determined 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 was, in part, this zest for work that made Gower the obvious choice to lead the women pilots of the ATA. But she also had a natural gift for Whitehall diplomacy, and was superbly well-connected. Amy Johnson wrote gloomily to her father in late 1939 that ‘had I played my cards right and cultivated the right people, I could have got the job that Pauline Gower has got’. Johnson was right that connections were invaluable for contenders in any hierarchy, and there were doubtless others who were aggrieved at having been passed over for the best women’s job in aviation in the war. But the truth is they never stood a chance. Gower liked to say the world divided into two sorts of people: those who wanted to know and those you had to know. She knew them all.