Spitfire Women


Spitfire Women

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Between 1939 and 1945,

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a remarkable band of 168 women helped keep Britain in the war.

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They were pioneers in aviation and equality.

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I think we were extraordinarily lucky.

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The best part of my life, I'm sure.

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It was fantastic.

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These trailblazers were part of the Air Transport Auxiliary, the ATA, a thousand-strong organization

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that delivered 300,000 aircraft to the frontline RAF during Britain's darkest hours.

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I just loved flying, I'd much rather be up in the air than down on the ground.

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Without them, the Battle of Britain may never have been won, and Britain's dominance in the air that

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paved the way for ultimate victory would never have been achieved.

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But their war wasn't all cramped cockpits and oily rags.

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If the RAF fighter pilots were the Hollywood stars of World War II,

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then these women were their leading ladies.

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No women in Britain in the war were more admired

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for doing their bit or for their uniform than the women of the ATA.

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Whether they liked it or not, they were the glamour girls of the war.

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We had lots of boyfriends, because at that time we were called the Glamour Girls.

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I don't know why, but there were always plenty of escorts around.

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If anybody pinched my behind, I was only thankful I was attractive enough to have my bottom pinched.

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But the pressure of keeping the RAF supplied with planes made it one of the most dangerous jobs in the war.

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The only time I frightened myself out of my wits was coming face to face with one of the Cotswold Hills.

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They didn't just need bags of courage to fly, they faced a constant struggle for recognition.

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I landed to pick him up and he said, "I never fly with the women.

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"Get out, I'm going to fly this aircraft."

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But their determination shone through, and they finally won the

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ultimate aviation prize of World War II - they flew the Spitfire.

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You could go up and play with the clouds, you know, and have great fun.

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It was so light, it was so with you.

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You were part of it.

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It was wonderful.

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Some of them look quite young, don't they?

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But they were! That's why they look quite young.

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At a Cotswolds country house, an elite group of ladies in their 80s

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have come together to discuss old times.

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They have one thing in common - they were all aviation pioneers.

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In World War II, they flew for the Air Transport Auxiliary, the ATA,

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delivering aircraft from factory to the RAF, and from a very early age, they needed no encouragement to fly.

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I was always saving up to try and go up and fly.

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I was always going to have a lucrative job.

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I don't know what at, make lots of money and learn to fly.

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Did you take all these with your camera?

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No idea.

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'I always wanted to fly.'

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I almost broke my neck twice

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jumping off a fence following a bird!

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In the 1920s, flying became something anyone who was rich and male could do.

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When women weren't supposed to venture out of the kitchen, one woman was to be their inspiration.

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Amy Johnson was Britain's pioneering aviatrix.

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She would also become an ATA girl in the war.

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It started in 1930, with this extraordinary flight from Croydon

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to Darwin, Australia in 12 days flat by a woman nobody had ever heard of.

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By the time she got to Darwin on Empire Day, there was a huge crowd to welcome her.

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She was a megastar for life.

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She's been described as the Posh - as in Becks -

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of her time, and that just about sums up the extraordinary

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vortex of fame that descended on her.

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It was the start of flying as a fashionable pursuit for the rest of the '30s.

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Amy Johnson inspired the women aviators, but it was

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defying gravity for the first time that hooked Freydis Sharland when she was just 10 years old.

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My brother Derek, who was up at Trinity College,

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Cambridge, rang me up one day and said there was an air display

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near us, would I like to go?

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And then he contacted my father,

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who gave us each 10 shillings because he presumed we'd want to

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go in a flight, which hadn't entered my head but, anyway, there it was.

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It was a demonstration flight, they told us,

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which meant we demonstrated all sorts of aerobatics

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and...

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after the first lot of flick rolls, my brother managed to strap me in

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and we did all sorts of different aerobatics,

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and at the end of it

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we did a great side slip down to the ground and landed,

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and when I got out, I said to Derek, I said, "If there's a war, that's what I'd like to do."

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Molly Rose fell so in love with flying, she took a job

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as an aircraft engineer after finishing school in Paris.

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It helped that her father owned the Marshall engineering and aviation empire.

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I was the only woman working on the hangar floor

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and I have to say that the chaps were extraordinarily kind to me.

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If I got stuck with a bolt, a jolly old nut I couldn't get off, there was usually someone

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around that you could say "help" and they would come and do it for you.

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I was bent double over a cockpit, rewiring this Tiger Moth,

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and suddenly I had a clip over the bow-hind, and so I gradually got

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myself out of this and looked around and there wasn't anyone to be seen.

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And so I just roared with laughter and went back into the cockpit.

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If I'd been very prim about it then I think they would have discarded me,

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but as it was, I was happy to work with them and they were happy to work with me.

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Ruined my hands for life but apart from that, it was fine.

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But it wasn't all chapped hands and tight nuts.

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If you were well-off, the thing to do was buy a plane of your own.

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Flying was the skiing of the interwar period for the very wealthy.

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At the controls of a plane, they could go to the Magyar pilots' picnic in Budapest,

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could be in Berlin for lunch.

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They could be entertained in Stockholm in the afternoon and, as Gordon Selfridge,

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the department store heir, told Rosemary Reiss, you won't have any fun without a plane.

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Wendy Sale-Barker learnt to fly so she could travel to South Africa

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with a friend for Christmas and ski in the Alps in the same season.

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They ran into a tremendous storm,

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outside Mount Kilimanjaro,

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and they crashed into a bush.

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The girls were missing and believed to have come down

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in lion-infested territory, but she wrote a message

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in lipstick, and a Maasai warrior took this message

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to the British Commissioner and help was sent.

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And this is the actual message.

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"Please come and fetch us.

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"We have had an air crash and are hurt."

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And it's signed Sale-Barker and Page, which were their surnames, in fact

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Audrey Sale-Barker was her real name, but she was always nicknamed Wendy,

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because in Peter Pan, Wendy had flown away and somehow that nickname always stuck.

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Wendy went on to become one of the first ATA girls.

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She also captained the British women's skiing team at the 1936 Olympics.

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It was here that another future ATA girl witnessed what Nazi Germany was like.

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Freydis Sharland's father won a gold medal for sailing at Kiel on the Baltic Coast.

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My mother and I, and my brother Derek were taken out each day

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in a tug or something to follow the racing, which was very exciting.

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One place we saw three U-boats launched in one day.

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We thought that surely nobody would be so stupid as to start another war.

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Having been brought up just after the First World War we could see the

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devastation and the awful mourning of all the people who'd lost things.

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Hitler came over one day to Kiel and there was this enormous crowd to greet him.

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And in the middle of it, everyone was saying, "Sieg heil, sieg heil,"

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and they all lifted up their arms, you know, and I was longing to put up my arm.

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I felt the power of it all but my mother looked at me daggers and,

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you know, I knew that I couldn't, because I would be going against my father and everyone.

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So I didn't, but it was very powerful.

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It was certainly a tremendous feeling of solidarity

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for him, and you could see what

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an influence he was.

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By the time war came, Freydis Sharland, then aged 18, had become less enchanted with Hitler.

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She wanted to fulfil her childhood ambition of flying for Britain,

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but the RAF and the flying establishment was rather against it.

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There were various articles written in the press saying that the women

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really ought to be staying in the kitchen, because if they didn't know

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how to cook their husbands dinner,

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how the heck could they fly an amazing high speed aeroplane?

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Women anxious to serve their country should take on

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work more befitting their sex instead of encroaching on a man's occupation.

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When the Air Transport Auxiliary, the ATA, was formed in 1939 to ferry

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aeroplanes from factory to the front line bases, it was, naturally, a male-only club.

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But they hadn't reckoned on the determination of one female trailblazer.

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Pauline Gower was a well-connected MP's daughter with a penchant for aerial acrobatics.

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Her daddy was an MP, so she moved in all the right circles.

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She had flown for a living in the 1930s, giving joy rides

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at the flying circuses, and she'd made a business out of flying.

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By the time war broke out in 1939, she had over 2,000 hours flying time, which was very high, and had

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safely flown tens of thousands of passengers on five-minute joy rides

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in a three-seater aeroplane her daddy bought her.

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It was Gower who first proposed that women might fly as part of the war effort.

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Pauline Gower was an establishment figure and knew, crucially, Gerard d'Erlanger, who set up the ATA,

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and Sir Francis Shelmerdine,

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Minister of Civil Aviation at the start of the war.

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There was one crucial meeting in September 1939 when Pauline Gower comes up

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to London to meet Gerard d'Erlanger and she says to him, "Why not women?

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"Why not women pilots?" To which his natural response is, "Why not?"

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And from that point they're both able to go on to meet

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with Sir Francis Shelmerdine, Minister of Civil Aviation.

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She has d'Erlanger's support and it's practically a done deal.

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She will be allowed to hire, initially, they tell her 12 pilots,

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but Shelmerdine cuts that to eight because of opposition from the RAF.

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The RAF insisted the first eight needed 500 flying hours, far more than was required for the men,

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but the press knew a good thing when they saw one.

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In January 1940, the first eight were introduced to the public.

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NEWSREADER: These women are in the news at home

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because they've undertaken a somewhat unusual war job.

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Miss Pauline Gower is their leader, and their work is to ferry

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new aircraft to the Royal Air Force from factory to aerodrome.

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The very first women pilots became known as the first eight.

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They were basically the eight women with the most hours, the most experience

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in the country, and seven of them were instructors.

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The main reason for the photo call was that the press had got wind of the fact that the ATA was hiring

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women, it was the middle of the Phoney War, there really wasn't much else to report,

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certainly nothing good or glamorous, so they flocked to Hatfield, it was a big deal.

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I think, really, that photo call was bowing to pressure and hoping that that would be an end to it.

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Of course, it ignited an appetite for the women of the ATA

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on Fleet Street that lasted throughout the war.

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But the first eight were allowed to pilot training planes, not state-of-the-art fighters.

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Over the next five years, the women struggled to overcome ingrained prejudice.

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Freydis Sharland was once asked to give a senior RAF officer a lift.

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I landed to pick him up

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and he said, "I never fly with the women. Get out!

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"I'm going to fly this aircraft."

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I felt furious about it all, but nothing I could do.

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Most people were glad to fly with me because I was a safe and good pilot.

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By June 1940, after defeat in the Battle of France

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and with the threat of invasion looming, pilots were in ever shorter supply.

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The second group of women were recruited in the summer of 1940.

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Well, that's Dunkirk,

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isn't it? It's about to be the Battle of Britain.

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The factories are churning out aeroplanes like a sausage machine, and they've all got to be moved.

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All arguments based on prejudice frankly went out the window,

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and when Churchill and those who reported to him

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understood those arguments,

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the lingering chauvinists in the RAF hierarchy really had...

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could only make a fool of themselves by continuing to resist the recruitments.

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Freydis Sharland had faced rejection when

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she first applied to join the ATA, but her cousin, a bomber pathfinder, had encouraged her to try again.

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He said, "Freydis, are you in the ATA yet?" and I said, "No, not yet."

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He said, "Why not? Write to them again.

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"It's the one thing you want to do."

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Which I agreed,

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so I did write again, and I must have written a better letter or

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something because they wrote and invited me to come for a flight test

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and after that, I was offered a place in ATA.

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Like many of the ATA girls, Freydis' contemporaries in her family served in the front line forces.

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Her brother Derek forewarned her of what fate might have in store.

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Derek was a very mature young man,

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and at the start of the war

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he'd been in Germany, he spoke German.

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He'd seen all the things we'd seen at Kiel and everything

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and he realised it was going to be a big battle.

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And he took me aside one day and said, "Once I get into action,

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"I'll be lucky enough to have a month or two,

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"but you must realise this will happen."

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Freydis joined a new wave of women recruits. They included volunteers from all round the globe.

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ATA became almost a Foreign Legion of the air.

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Their pilots came from 28 different countries.

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From Azerbaijan to South Africa, with everywhere in-between.

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The four girls who came from New Zealand

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paid for their own passage to England to join the ATA.

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And from South America came two different ladies, one from each side of the Andes.

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Maureen Dunlop came from Argentina, Margot Duhalde came from Chile,

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and nobody could say her name so they called her Chile.

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The 19-year-old Chile spoke no English and was briefly interned on her arrival in Britain.

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The language barrier would get her arrested again when she began to ferry planes.

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She had a false landing somewhere near Hatfield,

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I think in the first week, actually.

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And of course the police couldn't begin to understand why this woman

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who couldn't speak English was flying one of our aircraft around and so she

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was taken off to the police station and it did take ATA about, sort of, almost 24 hours to get her back.

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So ATA then decided she really better learn

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some English, so she went to work in the hangars and, of course,

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she took on board all the swear words the chaps had got.

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And so I think I learnt all my swear words from her.

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When I occasionally after all said, "bloody hell", it was always absolutely straight from Chile.

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The leading factions in the exotic women's section

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split into two separate types, the head girls and the it girls.

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Who attracted the attention?

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Who led the women's section of the ATA? The head girls.

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Young women with an extremely developed sense of duty,

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responsibility and the work, the sheer work they would have to put in

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to continue to persuade the male establishment they were up to the job.

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And then on the other hand from all over the world, but especially from her father's large estate in Surrey,

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Diana Barnato Walker led the contingent of it girls.

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The extraordinary Diana Barnato Walker died in 2008.

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Her son Barney is clearing out her house.

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It's packed with memories of her time flying in the war when Diana lived life to the limit.

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I don't know how they did it,

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I don't know how they found time to A, have a robust social life and B,

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do the serious bit about flying,

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but they seemed to, and so I think they led a very full life.

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At the end of a hard day's work, when she had done her job as professionally as she could, there

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was nothing amateur about her when she was flying,

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then she was off to London almost every single night.

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I don't think many of the others could keep up the pace.

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After partying all night in London, Diana would catch the early morning

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milk train down to Southampton and be in the air by 9am.

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She was always used to taking her own decisions and doing her own thing, and I suppose in ATA

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she tried to conform, but she did occasionally, you know,

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fly down to Cornwall to have lunch with a friend or something like that

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instead of delivering her aircraft straight away.

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Dear Diana, she generally got away with things like that.

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Diana always emerged from her plane with fresh war paint on.

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She always used to do her lipstick and powder her nose before she landed

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so she turned up looking, sort of, A1,

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but I mean, that was her way all the way through, to look glamorous.

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Glamour was the order of the day, but for most, sex was still a mystery.

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We hardly knew what sex was, let alone sexism in those days.

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And if anyone pinched my behind, I was only thankful

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I was attractive enough to have my bottom pinched.

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I didn't rush off and report it to someone but, no,

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I don't think there was too much, we were just all blokes together, if you like.

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If the majority didn't know what sex was, others were getting plenty of practice.

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Most of them don't seem to have had a great deal

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of sex during the war and probably wouldn't tell you if they had.

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Helen Harrison was one of the Americans that came over and vowed

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that she was going to have sex with every officer in the American army who she could lay her hands on.

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And she went about it with some gusto.

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Dorothy Hewitt was a very high-performance seductress,

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married three times, and one of those she wooed and married

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was Lord Beatty,

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the son of Admiral Lord Beatty of Jutland.

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And she subsequently had a scandalous affair with Sir Anthony Eden,

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which, had it become public, would have changed the course of history.

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But most of them

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were, I think, taking the work very seriously

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and certainly, on weekdays that ruled out sex.

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But even the most fun-loving ATA girl couldn't avoid the tragedy of war.

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Diana met 22-year-old squadron leader Humphrey Gilbert

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when she was forced to land in bad weather at his RAF base.

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Gilbert had the spark plugs removed from her plane.

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This kept her grounded long enough for them to fall in love.

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They were engaged within three weeks.

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The affair was going along swingingly

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and one day she didn't hear from him and she began to fear the worst, like you did in those days.

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You never knew when death was round the corner.

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Diana flew over, on a subsequent flight,

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the airfield where she thought he was, looking out for his Spitfire, which she knew had a blue nose.

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It wasn't there.

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On landing at her destination, Diana rushed to a telephone box

0:22:580:23:02

to be told that Gilbert had been killed in his Spitfire.

0:23:020:23:05

There, in a nutshell, you have the glamour of flying for the ATA

0:23:170:23:22

and the tragedy of doing so in the middle of a war.

0:23:220:23:24

By 1941, the girls were still restricted

0:23:260:23:32

to flying antiquated planes,

0:23:320:23:35

but that year, Pauline Gower, the head of the ATA's women's section,

0:23:350:23:39

finally made the revolutionary breakthrough that allowed the girls to fly state-of-the-art fighters.

0:23:390:23:44

There's a key moment in ATA history when

0:23:440:23:48

Pauline Gower attends a party in May 1941 with Gerard d'Erlanger,

0:23:480:23:53

and the question of whether or not women are ever going to be allowed to fly fighters comes up.

0:23:530:24:00

She buttonholed d'Erlanger when he was a little bit harassed and asked

0:24:000:24:06

him if there was any reason why the ladies shouldn't fly the Hurricanes and Spitfires just like the men.

0:24:060:24:12

And he said, "Well, I don't suppose so." So she said, "When can we start?"

0:24:120:24:17

Winnie Crossley, who was the first woman to fly a Hurricane, performed a perfect loop,

0:24:430:24:49

climbed out and said, "It's a lovely little aeroplane, darlings."

0:24:490:24:52

I believe it was a Friday but, either way, they pool their

0:25:010:25:07

ration coupons and petrol money, drive down to London

0:25:070:25:10

and have a slap-up dinner at the A L'Ecu de France,

0:25:100:25:13

which I think then is the finest French restaurant in St James's.

0:25:130:25:18

Then, in August 1941, the girls got their hands on the ultimate flying prize,

0:25:210:25:27

the Spitfire.

0:25:270:25:29

It was just a marvellous aeroplane. The aeroplane and you were just one

0:25:380:25:42

together, and it would do just anything you wanted it to do.

0:25:420:25:49

You were there with the cockpit around you.

0:25:490:25:52

It was the nearest thing to flying oneself, because the slightest touch on the stick and it responded.

0:25:520:25:57

Absolutely marvellous.

0:25:570:25:59

It was a woman's aeroplane.

0:25:590:26:02

It was poetry.

0:26:020:26:06

It seemed kind of like riding a good horse.

0:26:060:26:11

One ATA girl was already showing the men what a special Spitfire pilot she was.

0:26:130:26:20

Lettice Curtis had been recruited in the second wave.

0:26:200:26:23

In September 1941, shortly after she joined the ATA, Lettice Curtis took

0:26:230:26:27

off in a Spitfire from Prestwick near Glasgow, destination White Waltham, the base of the ATA.

0:26:270:26:34

It's a miserable day for flying.

0:26:340:26:36

She knew the countryside,

0:26:380:26:42

the mountains, the rivers,

0:26:420:26:45

so she would wind her way

0:26:450:26:50

up the valleys and...

0:26:500:26:55

find a route to get to her destination

0:26:570:27:01

when a lot of pilots, and particularly the Americans,

0:27:010:27:07

who were used to wide open spaces,

0:27:070:27:10

would say, "We'll wait till the weather will clear."

0:27:100:27:17

There's no-one else in the air that day.

0:27:170:27:20

When she lands at White Waltham there's a bunch of American pilots, all men,

0:27:240:27:29

who have been on the ground all day because they'd decided it was a washout

0:27:290:27:35

and Lettice says, "There must have been some consternation among those American men that a woman had

0:27:350:27:40

"not only taken off from Prestwick, but got all the way down there in one piece."

0:27:400:27:45

Consternation doesn't even begin how to say how upset the men would have

0:27:450:27:49

been and how satisfied Lettice would have been to have achieved something that they couldn't.

0:27:490:27:54

Lettice was the ultimate head girl, getting through with the plane in

0:27:540:27:58

one piece using the most direct route.

0:27:580:28:01

But some of the girls couldn't resist the temptation to have fun with the Spitfire.

0:28:010:28:07

You could go up and play with the clouds, you know, and have great fun.

0:28:070:28:12

My favourite

0:28:150:28:17

was a vertical eight.

0:28:170:28:20

You dived, come up,

0:28:200:28:23

dived, turn, so you do a figure-8. It's graceful.

0:28:230:28:29

This was the plane that you wore.

0:28:310:28:33

The throbbing engine,

0:28:330:28:36

the dancing through the air, the joy, the tremor in the wings...

0:28:360:28:43

..it's perhaps more loyal than a man as well.

0:28:450:28:47

But the joy of flying wasn't without its dangers.

0:29:000:29:03

There's no doubt that weather was our worst enemy.

0:29:030:29:08

I think we had about 136 casualties, and I would think that 75% of them were to do with the weather.

0:29:080:29:16

This is a cloudy country, it's a hilly country,

0:29:160:29:19

and the fear that

0:29:190:29:22

engulfs you as quickly as the cloud is you'll simply fly into a hill, or a tree, or a church tower.

0:29:220:29:27

The women were expected to fly using only landmarks on the ground to guide them.

0:29:270:29:32

They were unarmed and without radios.

0:29:320:29:36

I frightened myself out of my wits coming face to face with one of the Cotswold hills.

0:29:360:29:41

Fortunately I'd got enough power

0:29:410:29:43

to actually put pressure on to go up over it.

0:29:430:29:45

Cloud meant death, or as good as.

0:29:520:29:55

You had to be very lucky to fly into cloud and get out of it alive.

0:29:550:29:59

This morning, there were five of us flying Spitfires.

0:30:010:30:06

The weather was not good.

0:30:060:30:09

I decided that I could cope.

0:30:110:30:15

Dora Lang, my friend, decided she could cope.

0:30:150:30:21

The other three decided that they wouldn't.

0:30:210:30:23

We were both going to the same place.

0:30:270:30:30

When I got to this place,

0:30:320:30:36

I could hardly see the aerodrome, and as I landed,

0:30:360:30:41

I was whistling down the runway and to my horror,

0:30:410:30:46

another Spitfire coming in the opposite direction

0:30:460:30:50

doing exactly the same as I was doing, rushing down the runway

0:30:500:30:54

and there we were, two Spitfires

0:30:540:30:57

landed exactly the same time in the opposite directions.

0:30:570:31:03

It was an absolute miracle that we didn't touch each other,

0:31:030:31:09

and didn't even see each other until we actually passed on the runway.

0:31:090:31:16

That was very frightening, afterwards, thinking about it.

0:31:160:31:20

We tended to keep to the left side of the runway, so I was on my left

0:31:240:31:31

and she was on her left, and that saved our lives.

0:31:310:31:35

If I ever started having nightmares that I was crashing my aeroplane or something, then I'd know that

0:31:490:31:56

I'd been pressing on too much and frightening myself, I suppose.

0:31:560:32:01

But nightmare and reality were never very far apart.

0:32:020:32:06

Mary Wilkins-Ellis and her friend Dora Lang had survived one near miss.

0:32:060:32:11

Dora wasn't so lucky when she was ferrying a twin-engine Mosquito with a female engineer.

0:32:110:32:18

She was about to land, and for some reason, the aeroplane suddenly shot

0:32:180:32:25

up into the air and then fell down onto the runway, burst into flames,

0:32:250:32:32

and that was the end of everything.

0:32:320:32:35

So, Dora was killed

0:32:360:32:39

and so was the pretty little engineer girl.

0:32:390:32:44

Very sad.

0:32:440:32:46

There was something rather brutal about the way that deaths were reported in the ferry pools.

0:32:490:32:55

The operations officer would simply erase the name on the blackboard

0:32:550:33:01

that all the women would look at to know where they were supposed to be flying the next day.

0:33:010:33:06

I missed her terribly.

0:33:070:33:09

She was a very nice person,

0:33:090:33:13

and for two days I was not allowed to fly.

0:33:130:33:19

I didn't want to, but after that, one realised there is a war on,

0:33:190:33:26

we must get on with our jobs, and we did.

0:33:260:33:31

The most famous woman flier of all was ultimately to become an ATA fatality.

0:33:320:33:39

Amy Johnson, the inspiration for British

0:33:390:33:42

women fliers, got lost in cloud whilst ferrying a plane in 1941.

0:33:420:33:47

She bailed out over the Thames Estuary and was lost at sea.

0:33:470:33:51

Nearly one in ten of the women fliers were to lose their lives,

0:33:520:33:56

making it one of the most dangerous jobs in the war.

0:33:560:34:00

Yes, quite a few of our friends

0:34:000:34:03

were killed.

0:34:030:34:05

Yes.

0:34:050:34:07

But that was part of the game really, wasn't it?

0:34:090:34:14

You couldn't always get away with murder.

0:34:140:34:17

SHE SIGHS

0:34:190:34:22

By 1942, Britain's position was still perilous and ever more recruits were needed for the ATA.

0:34:260:34:33

The United States had just entered the war

0:34:330:34:36

and would now provide the largest contingent of foreign women fliers.

0:34:360:34:40

Nancy Stratford travelled to England in 1942 not knowing what to expect.

0:34:400:34:46

We got over to Liverpool

0:34:460:34:50

and the first night,

0:34:500:34:52

there was an air-raid siren.

0:34:520:34:55

I didn't know what to do so I got under the bed.

0:34:550:34:58

I realised it was a war zone

0:34:580:35:01

and that it was difficult, and it was going to be difficult,

0:35:010:35:07

but I wanted to help.

0:35:070:35:09

The most difficult thing Roberta Leveaux had to cope with was an English breakfast.

0:35:090:35:15

We were served kippers.

0:35:150:35:18

Do you know what kippers are?

0:35:180:35:20

The whole darn fish with its eye open!

0:35:220:35:28

Greasy!

0:35:280:35:29

Oh, dear.

0:35:330:35:35

It was very hard to eat,

0:35:350:35:39

but we did not

0:35:390:35:41

want to offend the English.

0:35:410:35:43

Roberta needn't have worried about upsetting her hosts.

0:35:430:35:47

The American who recruited her would soon be doing that.

0:35:470:35:51

Jackie Cochrane was a flamboyant American flier not known for her modesty.

0:35:510:35:56

Jackie Cochrane had an extraordinary rags-to-riches story.

0:35:560:36:00

Born an orphan, she picked her own name from the phone book.

0:36:000:36:04

Married a billionaire,

0:36:040:36:05

became a millionaire in her own right

0:36:050:36:08

with a chain of cosmetics stores

0:36:080:36:10

all over the United States which she serviced by air.

0:36:100:36:14

She was a fanatical pilot, and she made it her mission to show the American flying

0:36:140:36:19

establishment that women could fly and should fly in the war.

0:36:190:36:22

And to that end she recruited 25 women pilots,

0:36:220:36:25

took them over to Britain, and got them places in the ATA.

0:36:250:36:30

She had a hard way, speaking was intolerant, a lot of profanity.

0:36:300:36:37

We were a little in awe

0:36:400:36:44

of her, and kind of embarrassed by her.

0:36:440:36:48

Jackie Cochrane came swanning around like Queen Bee in her Bentley and a fur coat.

0:36:480:36:53

The Americans brought something different, I think, to ATA.

0:36:530:36:59

They brought American informality and American,

0:36:590:37:04

shall we say, difficulty with stuffy Britishness.

0:37:040:37:09

They had a ball, and some of the Brits, I don't think, could cope with this.

0:37:090:37:14

At our headquarters, which was called White Waltham,

0:37:150:37:21

I remember saying they look at us as if we were a bad smell.

0:37:210:37:28

One person in particular turned her nose up at the Americans.

0:37:280:37:32

Lettice Curtis.

0:37:320:37:34

And she just didn't waste any time talking with us.

0:37:360:37:41

She was really horrid to a lot of the young people

0:37:410:37:45

when they came into ATA.

0:37:450:37:47

I could have kicked her sometimes, she was so beastly, but she couldn't help it.

0:37:470:37:52

She was just born like that, I think!

0:37:520:37:55

Cochrane's newly-arrived Americans were on a collision course with the British.

0:37:550:38:00

They might have thought that they would be welcomed with open arms and gratitude.

0:38:000:38:06

They were, instead, read the rule book at a meeting in London

0:38:060:38:11

when they finally got down from Liverpool,

0:38:110:38:14

taken out to White Waltham and asked to strip...

0:38:140:38:17

..because the doctor there, Arthur Barber,

0:38:190:38:22

who turned out to have a predilection for 16mm adult films,

0:38:220:38:26

insisted that all ATA recruits, male and female,

0:38:260:38:31

strip for their medicals.

0:38:310:38:33

Jackie Cochrane wasn't about to let the Brits get away with it.

0:38:350:38:39

When Jackie Cochrane found out about this, she tore down from

0:38:390:38:43

London to White Waltham and said, "Where is it written that my pilots have to be examined in the buff?"

0:38:430:38:47

And because she was a pal of Roosevelt's, they backed down

0:38:470:38:52

and the American recruits had their medicals with their clothes on. But that's an example

0:38:520:38:57

of the scant respect shown to these women who had taken

0:38:570:39:02

their lives in their hands to come and fly for the ATA.

0:39:020:39:06

Jackie Cochrane's abrasiveness upset her more stuffy British hosts.

0:39:060:39:11

She never really settled in Britain.

0:39:110:39:13

After a few months, she returned to the US to set up an American equivalent of the women's ATA.

0:39:130:39:20

I know Cochrane wanted to prove the fact that we could do it.

0:39:200:39:24

The British women did the job, we just kind of went over and helped a little bit.

0:39:240:39:31

In 1942, with war planes still pouring out of the factories, ATA

0:39:320:39:37

had enough women pilots to establish two women-only ferry pools.

0:39:370:39:43

The first was at Hamble near Southampton, close to one of the Spitfire factories.

0:39:430:39:47

There were about 30 pilots down there and a tremendous variety

0:39:470:39:53

of nationalities,

0:39:530:39:54

and so it was really almost a sort of league of nations down there.

0:39:540:40:00

Hamble restroom, I think, would make a very good television programme

0:40:000:40:04

in itself, because there were several nationalities.

0:40:040:40:07

There was Spanish being spoken in one corner, Polish in another.

0:40:070:40:12

High-pitched chattering...

0:40:120:40:14

..and yes, a very nice atmosphere. We were all friends.

0:40:160:40:20

People doing yoga in one corner.

0:40:200:40:23

People with perhaps, material spread out on the floor, cutting something out that they were making.

0:40:230:40:29

Knitting, darning stockings!

0:40:290:40:32

HE CHUCKLES

0:40:320:40:34

Make do and mend, I do like that!

0:40:340:40:37

Others playing bridge, I used to play a lot of bridge and that was good.

0:40:380:40:42

When the weather was bad, you could settle down

0:40:420:40:45

and hope that the weather would stay bad

0:40:450:40:49

so you could spend the day, and then suddenly the weather would change and you'd all have to go and fly -

0:40:490:40:55

the last thing you wanted to do having been playing bridge all day,

0:40:550:40:59

but anyway, you had to, so that's that.

0:40:590:41:01

With its entirely female crew, Hamble was nicknamed The Lesbian Pool -

0:41:050:41:11

despite the lack of any evidence.

0:41:110:41:13

But one girl, Joy Ferguson, certainly wasn't interested in men.

0:41:130:41:18

She actually wanted to become one.

0:41:180:41:20

Joy had a sort of masculine brain, I always thought.

0:41:200:41:26

She thought like a man, though she appeared to be a perfectly ordinary woman.

0:41:260:41:30

But after the war, she had to decide whether she would go through all the palaver of becoming a man

0:41:300:41:38

and she did that, I think, hoping that

0:41:380:41:41

she would become a proper man and get married and that sort of thing.

0:41:410:41:44

She was a very brave person.

0:41:440:41:47

She did talk to me about it, and I was rather shocked I think to start with.

0:41:470:41:52

And then eventually, she died

0:41:540:41:56

not having achieved what she wanted to achieve, though she'd...

0:41:560:42:00

done a lot, been a lot.

0:42:010:42:04

And a lot of people respected her very much for what she had achieved, both as a man and as a woman.

0:42:040:42:10

The Hamble girls often vied to fly the best and newest planes.

0:42:130:42:18

Occasionally that friendly competition spilled over into open rivalry.

0:42:180:42:24

I think that Chile said that she became fairly anti Anna Leska,

0:42:240:42:30

who was one of the Polish girls.

0:42:300:42:32

On one occasion, I was in a Fairchild with Anna and Chile,

0:42:320:42:39

and one of them turned to the other and said, "How many petrols

0:42:390:42:43

"did we got?" And the other said, "You don't say that, you say 'how many petrols HAVE we got'."

0:42:430:42:49

And so, which was really very sweet, and I sat

0:42:490:42:51

in the back thinking, "As long as we've got petrol, we'll be all right!"

0:42:510:42:56

For some reason they didn't hit it off, and on one occasion, actually

0:42:560:43:01

became involved in what seems to be the only all-female dogfight

0:43:010:43:06

of the war above Hamble.

0:43:060:43:09

It's tempting, isn't it, to call it a catfight.

0:43:090:43:13

It was basically a jostling for position

0:43:170:43:20

before coming in to land.

0:43:200:43:21

Basically queue-barging by the Chilean of the Polaka, as she called her, the Pole.

0:43:210:43:26

The incident between the Chilean, Duhalde, and the Pole, Anna Leska,

0:43:260:43:31

was reported to their commanding officer, Margot Gore.

0:43:310:43:34

Margot Gore has Leska and Duhalde in and says, "One of you

0:43:380:43:42

"has got to apologise and Duhalde, it's you, otherwise you're out."

0:43:420:43:46

And so she does, she says, "Anna, I'm very sorry."

0:43:460:43:49

And then on the way out of the room, by her own accounts,

0:43:490:43:52

she says, "After the war, I'll knock your teeth out."

0:43:520:43:55

Chile and Anna Leska got on with the important work of

0:43:560:44:00

delivering planes from the factories around Hamble to the front line.

0:44:000:44:05

The daily routine started with the handing out of the delivery chits.

0:44:050:44:09

Suddenly, they would come out, and if were painting our nails

0:44:090:44:14

we had to rush off into

0:44:140:44:16

the locker room to do something about our nails.

0:44:160:44:21

It was like a schoolgirl's place, really!

0:44:210:44:25

SHE LAUGHS

0:44:250:44:27

Unlike RAF pilots, they weren't just flying one plane, often they flew several in a day

0:44:270:44:33

and those planes could vary from state-of-the-art fighters to heavy four-engine bombers.

0:44:330:44:39

That was the most exciting part about it.

0:44:390:44:41

You didn't know what you were going to do that day.

0:44:410:44:44

We'd say to each other, "Oh, look what I've got! Look what I've got!"

0:44:440:44:49

And that was terribly exciting.

0:44:520:44:55

It was sometimes frightening as well, because the aeroplanes were all different.

0:44:550:45:03

You'd get out of a Tiger Moth

0:45:030:45:06

into a Wellington Bomber and then into a Spitfire.

0:45:060:45:12

And so, one had to know what one was doing.

0:45:120:45:16

This was August, on the 1st, I flew a Spitfire and a Hellcat.

0:45:190:45:24

On the 2nd, I flew a Firebrand and a Warwick.

0:45:240:45:29

On the 4th, I flew a Fairchild, a Walrus and a Reliant.

0:45:290:45:36

You weren't very busy, then?

0:45:360:45:39

No, that was not a very busy time.

0:45:390:45:43

When one looks back at it,

0:45:430:45:45

you think it couldn't have been possible,

0:45:450:45:47

but it was, and we did it, and I enjoyed it.

0:45:470:45:53

Often, they hadn't trained on the plane they were about to fly.

0:45:530:45:57

Their only instruction would be the Ferry Pilots Notes they consulted in the air.

0:45:570:46:02

You got a list of them on the front page, and when you were flying a new type,

0:46:020:46:07

you opened the page

0:46:070:46:09

and it gave you the salient features, and you stuck that in the top of your

0:46:090:46:13

flying booth, and so when you were coming in to land

0:46:130:46:17

or anything else,

0:46:170:46:19

-you could look it up.

-It was like a Bible.

0:46:190:46:22

It was all there.

0:46:220:46:25

The women's section of the ATA was by now thriving.

0:46:290:46:33

But the girls were still on 20% less pay than the male pilots.

0:46:330:46:37

It was time for Pauline Gower to step in once again and sort things out.

0:46:370:46:42

Her natural sense of justice made her think women should receive equal pay for equal work.

0:46:420:46:48

How she arranged it was typical Pauline Gower.

0:46:480:46:51

She had a friend who was a woman Tory MP.

0:46:510:46:56

She put her up to asking a question in the Commons of Sir Stafford Cripps, the then Aviation Minister,

0:46:560:47:03

"Is it the case, sir, that henceforth women ATA pilots will be paid the same as men?"

0:47:030:47:09

And she let it be known that there would be a fuss if the answer was no, and the answer was yes,

0:47:090:47:16

and to my knowledge, it's the first instance of equal pay for equal work for women in British history.

0:47:160:47:22

Not only had the ATA girls arrived, the press still couldn't get enough of them.

0:47:270:47:32

In 1944, Maureen Dunlop became a pin-up girl when she appeared on the front cover of Picture Post.

0:47:320:47:40

I didn't know they were actually taking it when they took it,

0:47:400:47:44

because they had come to take photographs and I said,

0:47:440:47:46

"I'm busy, I want to put this away,"

0:47:460:47:48

and I was doing this or something or other and they...

0:47:480:47:51

Maureen was an unlikely glamour girl.

0:47:530:47:55

She preferred solitude to celebrity.

0:47:550:47:58

Flying meant more to me than most things.

0:47:580:48:01

What I didn't like later on was, when you had a turn - you had to

0:48:010:48:05

fly the taxi aircraft collecting all the people and dropping off.

0:48:050:48:09

That was terribly social

0:48:090:48:11

and terribly chatty, but I didn't do that very often, possibly.

0:48:110:48:14

Maureen was the most beautiful girl.

0:48:180:48:20

You don't think about it in those days, you accept people as they are,

0:48:200:48:23

but looking back on it, she had this wonderful sort of...

0:48:230:48:26

it wasn't auburn - almost auburn - hair, very heavy and long.

0:48:260:48:30

She was really beautiful.

0:48:300:48:32

Even though the girls were now officially equals, some still

0:48:340:48:38

found it hard to accept that women were flying combat planes.

0:48:380:48:42

Mary Wilkins-Ellis once delivered a heavy Wellington Bomber to an RAF base.

0:48:420:48:47

There on the ground was the RAF waiting...

0:48:470:48:53

with a car...

0:48:530:48:55

..looking around, and I said, "Are you taking me to the Control?"

0:48:550:49:01

And they said, "No, we're waiting for the pilot."

0:49:010:49:05

And I said, "I AM the pilot",

0:49:050:49:08

and, do you know, they didn't believe me.

0:49:080:49:12

They actually went inside the aeroplane and searched it

0:49:120:49:18

to try and find the pilot!

0:49:180:49:20

But, of course, there was none so they eventually took me to

0:49:200:49:25

the control tower, and everybody was flabbergasted

0:49:250:49:31

that a little girl like me could fly these big aeroplanes all by oneself.

0:49:310:49:38

The Hamble girls flew daily over the Solent.

0:49:420:49:46

In 1944, this meant they were uniquely amongst the few who knew

0:49:460:49:50

the invasion of Europe was about to take place.

0:49:500:49:54

You took off from Hamble and you could see Southampton Water, so you had a very good view,

0:49:540:50:00

and it just got more and more ships of all types.

0:50:000:50:03

I was flying over and I thought, "Well, how extraordinary.

0:50:030:50:07

"All those ships!"

0:50:070:50:11

It was just a mass.

0:50:110:50:13

You could have walked from one side to another on the ships.

0:50:130:50:16

The next morning, I flew over and there was not a single ship to be seen anywhere.

0:50:160:50:24

They'd all gone off in the night.

0:50:240:50:28

The Hamble river was absolutely covered in little boats.

0:50:280:50:33

Then you woke up one morning...

0:50:330:50:36

..and they'd all gone...

0:50:370:50:39

..and you realised D-day was happening.

0:50:400:50:43

I was given a Spitfire to fly from somewhere down there up to Oxford,

0:50:530:51:00

and I think I wept all the way.

0:51:000:51:02

I felt very sad because of all my friends

0:51:020:51:06

who weren't able to join in it.

0:51:060:51:09

Freydis Sharland lost seven cousins in the war, and her brother, Derek.

0:51:090:51:15

Derek had forewarned her of the loss she would endure, and of his own death.

0:51:150:51:20

It was very typical of him, trying to soften the blow for me, really.

0:51:200:51:26

He could see how...

0:51:260:51:29

upset I was by losing...

0:51:290:51:32

such dear friends and...

0:51:320:51:36

he wanted to prepare me...

0:51:360:51:39

for the awful things that were going to happen...

0:51:390:51:42

and he did really, like that.

0:51:420:51:45

I thought it was very kind of him, you know...

0:51:460:51:50

to...

0:51:500:51:51

..make the effort to tell me what he'd thought about.

0:51:510:51:57

Molly Rose's husband, Bernard, was a tank commander on D-day.

0:52:080:52:12

He was in the first wave of tanks to go in at Arromanches.

0:52:120:52:17

Seven days later, our Churchill tanks

0:52:170:52:19

were no match for the German Tigers, and his tank was blown up.

0:52:190:52:24

And the first thing I got down at Hamble was a letter saying that

0:52:240:52:31

no way could anyone have got out of it, and...

0:52:310:52:35

that was really a very nasty letter to arrive.

0:52:350:52:38

But Molly couldn't accept that Bernard was dead.

0:52:400:52:43

I felt I would know if anything had happened to Bernard, and I felt

0:52:430:52:47

he was all right, but it was very... It helped me enormously to feel that.

0:52:470:52:52

Following the wartime slogan, "Keep Calm And Carry On", Molly decided to continue flying.

0:52:550:53:03

It was a tremendous help during that period to have my own concerns to worry about.

0:53:030:53:09

You know, it was very character-forming, I think.

0:53:090:53:12

And then about...

0:53:120:53:14

two months later, I got a card from him from Brunswick...

0:53:140:53:19

from the POW camp there...

0:53:190:53:22

saying, you know, he hadn't been damaged, he was all right, and that there he was.

0:53:220:53:27

Bernard survived his experience as a POW.

0:53:300:53:34

He and Molly remained together until Bernard's death in 1996.

0:53:340:53:39

After D-day, ATA girls were initially banned from

0:53:430:53:47

ferrying planes to the continent, but one girl was to break that rule.

0:53:470:53:51

The trailblazer who ensured that women would fly to Northern Europe

0:53:530:53:58

was Diana Barnato Walker, who else?

0:53:580:53:59

She was, by this time, married to

0:53:590:54:02

Derek Walker, Wing Commander Derek Walker, who was stationed

0:54:020:54:08

with the Allied Headquarters in Brussels, and arranged for

0:54:080:54:13

his Commanding Officer to provide a letter allowing him to bring

0:54:130:54:19

his newlywed wife to Brussels.

0:54:190:54:22

It was vague as to whether she was flying her own Spitfire,

0:54:220:54:26

but she was, and they flew wingtip to wingtip out over the cliffs of Dover in October 1944.

0:54:260:54:31

And then the Mail got wind of this, the Daily Mail,

0:54:420:54:45

and said that Derek Walker had taken his wife to Brussels for a honeymoon

0:54:450:54:50

and he was docked three months' pay,

0:54:500:54:53

so that might have at least paid for the fuel.

0:54:530:54:56

Diana's honeymoon was short-lived.

0:54:580:55:01

This is a piece of Derek Walker's Mustang 5, in which he crashed

0:55:030:55:10

on November 14th, 1945 and was killed.

0:55:100:55:15

Diana, the epitome of the fun-loving ATA girl, remained single

0:55:240:55:29

and devoted to flying for the rest of her life.

0:55:290:55:32

By 1945, the Allies had achieved total dominance in the air.

0:55:350:55:40

Fewer planes needed to be delivered.

0:55:400:55:43

As war ended, the ATA was wound down.

0:55:430:55:47

I was very wicked, I never wanted the war to end, so I could

0:55:470:55:50

go on and on and on, but whenever possible I'd get near enough to pat a Spitfire and a Hurricane,

0:55:500:55:56

and look into it, too...

0:55:560:55:59

..still amazed at how tiny the cockpit is.

0:55:590:56:02

I wondered how I did it,

0:56:020:56:05

but then I was young at the time.

0:56:050:56:07

For many, it was the end of the best years of their lives.

0:56:110:56:15

The ATA was the main thing in my life, I'm sure it was...

0:56:170:56:23

It was difficult to get into...

0:56:230:56:26

and...

0:56:260:56:29

a lot of hard work to get going in it and...

0:56:290:56:33

..Yes, I was sad to leave it.

0:56:340:56:37

Very...

0:56:370:56:39

..The best part of my life, I'm sure.

0:56:390:56:41

Mmm...

0:56:410:56:43

For Pauline Gower, heading the Women's Section was to be the achievement of her life.

0:56:440:56:50

She died in childbirth in 1947.

0:56:500:56:53

Lettice Curtis, the most accomplished of the women fliers, dreamt of becoming an airline pilot,

0:56:560:57:02

but all the de-mobbed RAF boys put an end to that.

0:57:020:57:07

I think she dreaded whatever was to come.

0:57:070:57:10

She remained unmarried, except to aviation, she worked for

0:57:100:57:14

the Fairey Aircraft Company, but she was never a civilian pilot.

0:57:140:57:19

There was never any question that...

0:57:190:57:22

that opportunity would come along.

0:57:220:57:25

One of the pilots, Jackie Sorour, did become Britain's first commercial airline pilot.

0:57:250:57:30

Was it BOAC to Paris or New York?

0:57:300:57:32

No, it was from Bristol to the Channel Islands,

0:57:320:57:36

I think, and she was constantly mistaken for a flight attendant.

0:57:360:57:40

The unique moment when women fliers almost gained equality with their male counterparts soon disappeared.

0:57:410:57:48

For women to be flying the whole range of aeroplanes, from ancient

0:57:480:57:53

bi-planes to super-fast Spitfires and lumbering great Lancasters, is just unbelievable stuff.

0:57:530:58:00

It could never, never happen again, where girls could fly all these

0:58:000:58:05

military aeroplanes without any aids whatsoever,

0:58:050:58:10

and go from one aeroplane to another without any instruction...

0:58:100:58:15

because I flew 76 types...

0:58:150:58:20

My days of glamour have gone now...

0:58:220:58:26

I'm just trying to get safely through old age!

0:58:260:58:30

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

0:58:440:58:48

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0:58:480:58:51

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