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Between 1939 and 1945, | 0:00:18 | 0:00:21 | |
a remarkable band of 168 women helped keep Britain in the war. | 0:00:21 | 0:00:27 | |
They were pioneers in aviation and equality. | 0:00:27 | 0:00:30 | |
I think we were extraordinarily lucky. | 0:00:30 | 0:00:33 | |
The best part of my life, I'm sure. | 0:00:33 | 0:00:35 | |
It was fantastic. | 0:00:35 | 0:00:38 | |
These trailblazers were part of the Air Transport Auxiliary, the ATA, a thousand-strong organization | 0:00:38 | 0:00:45 | |
that delivered 300,000 aircraft to the frontline RAF during Britain's darkest hours. | 0:00:45 | 0:00:52 | |
I just loved flying, I'd much rather be up in the air than down on the ground. | 0:00:54 | 0:00:58 | |
Without them, the Battle of Britain may never have been won, and Britain's dominance in the air that | 0:00:58 | 0:01:05 | |
paved the way for ultimate victory would never have been achieved. | 0:01:05 | 0:01:10 | |
But their war wasn't all cramped cockpits and oily rags. | 0:01:10 | 0:01:14 | |
If the RAF fighter pilots were the Hollywood stars of World War II, | 0:01:14 | 0:01:18 | |
then these women were their leading ladies. | 0:01:18 | 0:01:21 | |
No women in Britain in the war were more admired | 0:01:21 | 0:01:25 | |
for doing their bit or for their uniform than the women of the ATA. | 0:01:25 | 0:01:29 | |
Whether they liked it or not, they were the glamour girls of the war. | 0:01:29 | 0:01:33 | |
We had lots of boyfriends, because at that time we were called the Glamour Girls. | 0:01:33 | 0:01:39 | |
I don't know why, but there were always plenty of escorts around. | 0:01:39 | 0:01:46 | |
If anybody pinched my behind, I was only thankful I was attractive enough to have my bottom pinched. | 0:01:46 | 0:01:54 | |
But the pressure of keeping the RAF supplied with planes made it one of the most dangerous jobs in the war. | 0:01:54 | 0:01:59 | |
The only time I frightened myself out of my wits was coming face to face with one of the Cotswold Hills. | 0:01:59 | 0:02:07 | |
They didn't just need bags of courage to fly, they faced a constant struggle for recognition. | 0:02:07 | 0:02:14 | |
I landed to pick him up and he said, "I never fly with the women. | 0:02:14 | 0:02:18 | |
"Get out, I'm going to fly this aircraft." | 0:02:18 | 0:02:21 | |
But their determination shone through, and they finally won the | 0:02:21 | 0:02:24 | |
ultimate aviation prize of World War II - they flew the Spitfire. | 0:02:24 | 0:02:30 | |
You could go up and play with the clouds, you know, and have great fun. | 0:02:33 | 0:02:38 | |
It was so light, it was so with you. | 0:02:38 | 0:02:40 | |
You were part of it. | 0:02:40 | 0:02:41 | |
It was wonderful. | 0:02:41 | 0:02:44 | |
Some of them look quite young, don't they? | 0:03:03 | 0:03:06 | |
But they were! That's why they look quite young. | 0:03:06 | 0:03:09 | |
At a Cotswolds country house, an elite group of ladies in their 80s | 0:03:11 | 0:03:16 | |
have come together to discuss old times. | 0:03:16 | 0:03:19 | |
They have one thing in common - they were all aviation pioneers. | 0:03:19 | 0:03:23 | |
In World War II, they flew for the Air Transport Auxiliary, the ATA, | 0:03:23 | 0:03:29 | |
delivering aircraft from factory to the RAF, and from a very early age, they needed no encouragement to fly. | 0:03:29 | 0:03:36 | |
I was always saving up to try and go up and fly. | 0:03:36 | 0:03:39 | |
I was always going to have a lucrative job. | 0:03:39 | 0:03:42 | |
I don't know what at, make lots of money and learn to fly. | 0:03:42 | 0:03:45 | |
Did you take all these with your camera? | 0:03:45 | 0:03:47 | |
No idea. | 0:03:47 | 0:03:48 | |
'I always wanted to fly.' | 0:03:48 | 0:03:49 | |
I almost broke my neck twice | 0:03:49 | 0:03:51 | |
jumping off a fence following a bird! | 0:03:51 | 0:03:54 | |
In the 1920s, flying became something anyone who was rich and male could do. | 0:03:54 | 0:04:01 | |
When women weren't supposed to venture out of the kitchen, one woman was to be their inspiration. | 0:04:01 | 0:04:06 | |
Amy Johnson was Britain's pioneering aviatrix. | 0:04:06 | 0:04:10 | |
She would also become an ATA girl in the war. | 0:04:10 | 0:04:14 | |
It started in 1930, with this extraordinary flight from Croydon | 0:04:14 | 0:04:19 | |
to Darwin, Australia in 12 days flat by a woman nobody had ever heard of. | 0:04:19 | 0:04:25 | |
By the time she got to Darwin on Empire Day, there was a huge crowd to welcome her. | 0:04:25 | 0:04:31 | |
She was a megastar for life. | 0:04:31 | 0:04:34 | |
She's been described as the Posh - as in Becks - | 0:04:34 | 0:04:38 | |
of her time, and that just about sums up the extraordinary | 0:04:38 | 0:04:43 | |
vortex of fame that descended on her. | 0:04:43 | 0:04:46 | |
It was the start of flying as a fashionable pursuit for the rest of the '30s. | 0:04:47 | 0:04:52 | |
Amy Johnson inspired the women aviators, but it was | 0:04:52 | 0:04:56 | |
defying gravity for the first time that hooked Freydis Sharland when she was just 10 years old. | 0:04:56 | 0:05:02 | |
My brother Derek, who was up at Trinity College, | 0:05:02 | 0:05:05 | |
Cambridge, rang me up one day and said there was an air display | 0:05:05 | 0:05:10 | |
near us, would I like to go? | 0:05:10 | 0:05:13 | |
And then he contacted my father, | 0:05:13 | 0:05:16 | |
who gave us each 10 shillings because he presumed we'd want to | 0:05:16 | 0:05:20 | |
go in a flight, which hadn't entered my head but, anyway, there it was. | 0:05:20 | 0:05:26 | |
It was a demonstration flight, they told us, | 0:05:26 | 0:05:30 | |
which meant we demonstrated all sorts of aerobatics | 0:05:30 | 0:05:35 | |
and... | 0:05:35 | 0:05:36 | |
after the first lot of flick rolls, my brother managed to strap me in | 0:05:36 | 0:05:42 | |
and we did all sorts of different aerobatics, | 0:05:42 | 0:05:47 | |
and at the end of it | 0:05:47 | 0:05:49 | |
we did a great side slip down to the ground and landed, | 0:05:49 | 0:05:54 | |
and when I got out, I said to Derek, I said, "If there's a war, that's what I'd like to do." | 0:05:54 | 0:06:00 | |
Molly Rose fell so in love with flying, she took a job | 0:06:09 | 0:06:14 | |
as an aircraft engineer after finishing school in Paris. | 0:06:14 | 0:06:17 | |
It helped that her father owned the Marshall engineering and aviation empire. | 0:06:17 | 0:06:22 | |
I was the only woman working on the hangar floor | 0:06:22 | 0:06:26 | |
and I have to say that the chaps were extraordinarily kind to me. | 0:06:26 | 0:06:29 | |
If I got stuck with a bolt, a jolly old nut I couldn't get off, there was usually someone | 0:06:29 | 0:06:35 | |
around that you could say "help" and they would come and do it for you. | 0:06:35 | 0:06:38 | |
I was bent double over a cockpit, rewiring this Tiger Moth, | 0:06:38 | 0:06:43 | |
and suddenly I had a clip over the bow-hind, and so I gradually got | 0:06:43 | 0:06:50 | |
myself out of this and looked around and there wasn't anyone to be seen. | 0:06:50 | 0:06:54 | |
And so I just roared with laughter and went back into the cockpit. | 0:06:54 | 0:06:58 | |
If I'd been very prim about it then I think they would have discarded me, | 0:06:58 | 0:07:03 | |
but as it was, I was happy to work with them and they were happy to work with me. | 0:07:03 | 0:07:08 | |
Ruined my hands for life but apart from that, it was fine. | 0:07:08 | 0:07:13 | |
But it wasn't all chapped hands and tight nuts. | 0:07:13 | 0:07:16 | |
If you were well-off, the thing to do was buy a plane of your own. | 0:07:16 | 0:07:20 | |
Flying was the skiing of the interwar period for the very wealthy. | 0:07:20 | 0:07:26 | |
At the controls of a plane, they could go to the Magyar pilots' picnic in Budapest, | 0:07:26 | 0:07:31 | |
could be in Berlin for lunch. | 0:07:31 | 0:07:34 | |
They could be entertained in Stockholm in the afternoon and, as Gordon Selfridge, | 0:07:34 | 0:07:39 | |
the department store heir, told Rosemary Reiss, you won't have any fun without a plane. | 0:07:39 | 0:07:43 | |
Wendy Sale-Barker learnt to fly so she could travel to South Africa | 0:07:45 | 0:07:49 | |
with a friend for Christmas and ski in the Alps in the same season. | 0:07:49 | 0:07:53 | |
They ran into a tremendous storm, | 0:07:53 | 0:07:57 | |
outside Mount Kilimanjaro, | 0:07:57 | 0:08:00 | |
and they crashed into a bush. | 0:08:00 | 0:08:03 | |
The girls were missing and believed to have come down | 0:08:03 | 0:08:07 | |
in lion-infested territory, but she wrote a message | 0:08:07 | 0:08:11 | |
in lipstick, and a Maasai warrior took this message | 0:08:11 | 0:08:14 | |
to the British Commissioner and help was sent. | 0:08:14 | 0:08:19 | |
And this is the actual message. | 0:08:19 | 0:08:22 | |
"Please come and fetch us. | 0:08:22 | 0:08:25 | |
"We have had an air crash and are hurt." | 0:08:25 | 0:08:29 | |
And it's signed Sale-Barker and Page, which were their surnames, in fact | 0:08:29 | 0:08:34 | |
Audrey Sale-Barker was her real name, but she was always nicknamed Wendy, | 0:08:34 | 0:08:39 | |
because in Peter Pan, Wendy had flown away and somehow that nickname always stuck. | 0:08:39 | 0:08:45 | |
Wendy went on to become one of the first ATA girls. | 0:08:51 | 0:08:55 | |
She also captained the British women's skiing team at the 1936 Olympics. | 0:08:55 | 0:09:01 | |
It was here that another future ATA girl witnessed what Nazi Germany was like. | 0:09:01 | 0:09:05 | |
Freydis Sharland's father won a gold medal for sailing at Kiel on the Baltic Coast. | 0:09:05 | 0:09:12 | |
My mother and I, and my brother Derek were taken out each day | 0:09:12 | 0:09:17 | |
in a tug or something to follow the racing, which was very exciting. | 0:09:17 | 0:09:22 | |
One place we saw three U-boats launched in one day. | 0:09:23 | 0:09:30 | |
We thought that surely nobody would be so stupid as to start another war. | 0:09:30 | 0:09:36 | |
Having been brought up just after the First World War we could see the | 0:09:36 | 0:09:42 | |
devastation and the awful mourning of all the people who'd lost things. | 0:09:42 | 0:09:49 | |
Hitler came over one day to Kiel and there was this enormous crowd to greet him. | 0:09:49 | 0:09:56 | |
And in the middle of it, everyone was saying, "Sieg heil, sieg heil," | 0:09:59 | 0:10:03 | |
and they all lifted up their arms, you know, and I was longing to put up my arm. | 0:10:03 | 0:10:10 | |
I felt the power of it all but my mother looked at me daggers and, | 0:10:10 | 0:10:14 | |
you know, I knew that I couldn't, because I would be going against my father and everyone. | 0:10:14 | 0:10:20 | |
So I didn't, but it was very powerful. | 0:10:20 | 0:10:24 | |
It was certainly a tremendous feeling of solidarity | 0:10:24 | 0:10:29 | |
for him, and you could see what | 0:10:29 | 0:10:32 | |
an influence he was. | 0:10:32 | 0:10:34 | |
By the time war came, Freydis Sharland, then aged 18, had become less enchanted with Hitler. | 0:10:37 | 0:10:44 | |
She wanted to fulfil her childhood ambition of flying for Britain, | 0:10:44 | 0:10:48 | |
but the RAF and the flying establishment was rather against it. | 0:10:48 | 0:10:51 | |
There were various articles written in the press saying that the women | 0:10:51 | 0:10:57 | |
really ought to be staying in the kitchen, because if they didn't know | 0:10:57 | 0:11:01 | |
how to cook their husbands dinner, | 0:11:01 | 0:11:03 | |
how the heck could they fly an amazing high speed aeroplane? | 0:11:03 | 0:11:07 | |
Women anxious to serve their country should take on | 0:11:07 | 0:11:10 | |
work more befitting their sex instead of encroaching on a man's occupation. | 0:11:10 | 0:11:14 | |
When the Air Transport Auxiliary, the ATA, was formed in 1939 to ferry | 0:11:14 | 0:11:20 | |
aeroplanes from factory to the front line bases, it was, naturally, a male-only club. | 0:11:20 | 0:11:26 | |
But they hadn't reckoned on the determination of one female trailblazer. | 0:11:26 | 0:11:31 | |
Pauline Gower was a well-connected MP's daughter with a penchant for aerial acrobatics. | 0:11:31 | 0:11:37 | |
Her daddy was an MP, so she moved in all the right circles. | 0:11:37 | 0:11:41 | |
She had flown for a living in the 1930s, giving joy rides | 0:11:41 | 0:11:46 | |
at the flying circuses, and she'd made a business out of flying. | 0:11:46 | 0:11:50 | |
By the time war broke out in 1939, she had over 2,000 hours flying time, which was very high, and had | 0:11:50 | 0:11:57 | |
safely flown tens of thousands of passengers on five-minute joy rides | 0:11:57 | 0:12:03 | |
in a three-seater aeroplane her daddy bought her. | 0:12:03 | 0:12:05 | |
It was Gower who first proposed that women might fly as part of the war effort. | 0:12:07 | 0:12:12 | |
Pauline Gower was an establishment figure and knew, crucially, Gerard d'Erlanger, who set up the ATA, | 0:12:12 | 0:12:19 | |
and Sir Francis Shelmerdine, | 0:12:19 | 0:12:21 | |
Minister of Civil Aviation at the start of the war. | 0:12:21 | 0:12:23 | |
There was one crucial meeting in September 1939 when Pauline Gower comes up | 0:12:23 | 0:12:28 | |
to London to meet Gerard d'Erlanger and she says to him, "Why not women? | 0:12:28 | 0:12:34 | |
"Why not women pilots?" To which his natural response is, "Why not?" | 0:12:34 | 0:12:37 | |
And from that point they're both able to go on to meet | 0:12:37 | 0:12:40 | |
with Sir Francis Shelmerdine, Minister of Civil Aviation. | 0:12:40 | 0:12:43 | |
She has d'Erlanger's support and it's practically a done deal. | 0:12:43 | 0:12:47 | |
She will be allowed to hire, initially, they tell her 12 pilots, | 0:12:47 | 0:12:51 | |
but Shelmerdine cuts that to eight because of opposition from the RAF. | 0:12:51 | 0:12:56 | |
The RAF insisted the first eight needed 500 flying hours, far more than was required for the men, | 0:12:56 | 0:13:03 | |
but the press knew a good thing when they saw one. | 0:13:03 | 0:13:06 | |
In January 1940, the first eight were introduced to the public. | 0:13:06 | 0:13:11 | |
NEWSREADER: These women are in the news at home | 0:13:11 | 0:13:13 | |
because they've undertaken a somewhat unusual war job. | 0:13:13 | 0:13:17 | |
Miss Pauline Gower is their leader, and their work is to ferry | 0:13:17 | 0:13:20 | |
new aircraft to the Royal Air Force from factory to aerodrome. | 0:13:20 | 0:13:23 | |
The very first women pilots became known as the first eight. | 0:13:23 | 0:13:27 | |
They were basically the eight women with the most hours, the most experience | 0:13:27 | 0:13:31 | |
in the country, and seven of them were instructors. | 0:13:31 | 0:13:34 | |
The main reason for the photo call was that the press had got wind of the fact that the ATA was hiring | 0:13:34 | 0:13:39 | |
women, it was the middle of the Phoney War, there really wasn't much else to report, | 0:13:39 | 0:13:44 | |
certainly nothing good or glamorous, so they flocked to Hatfield, it was a big deal. | 0:13:44 | 0:13:48 | |
I think, really, that photo call was bowing to pressure and hoping that that would be an end to it. | 0:13:48 | 0:13:55 | |
Of course, it ignited an appetite for the women of the ATA | 0:13:55 | 0:13:58 | |
on Fleet Street that lasted throughout the war. | 0:13:58 | 0:14:01 | |
But the first eight were allowed to pilot training planes, not state-of-the-art fighters. | 0:14:05 | 0:14:10 | |
Over the next five years, the women struggled to overcome ingrained prejudice. | 0:14:10 | 0:14:15 | |
Freydis Sharland was once asked to give a senior RAF officer a lift. | 0:14:15 | 0:14:20 | |
I landed to pick him up | 0:14:20 | 0:14:22 | |
and he said, "I never fly with the women. Get out! | 0:14:22 | 0:14:26 | |
"I'm going to fly this aircraft." | 0:14:26 | 0:14:27 | |
I felt furious about it all, but nothing I could do. | 0:14:27 | 0:14:32 | |
Most people were glad to fly with me because I was a safe and good pilot. | 0:14:32 | 0:14:38 | |
By June 1940, after defeat in the Battle of France | 0:14:41 | 0:14:45 | |
and with the threat of invasion looming, pilots were in ever shorter supply. | 0:14:45 | 0:14:50 | |
The second group of women were recruited in the summer of 1940. | 0:14:50 | 0:14:55 | |
Well, that's Dunkirk, | 0:14:55 | 0:14:58 | |
isn't it? It's about to be the Battle of Britain. | 0:14:58 | 0:15:01 | |
The factories are churning out aeroplanes like a sausage machine, and they've all got to be moved. | 0:15:01 | 0:15:07 | |
All arguments based on prejudice frankly went out the window, | 0:15:07 | 0:15:10 | |
and when Churchill and those who reported to him | 0:15:10 | 0:15:13 | |
understood those arguments, | 0:15:13 | 0:15:17 | |
the lingering chauvinists in the RAF hierarchy really had... | 0:15:17 | 0:15:21 | |
could only make a fool of themselves by continuing to resist the recruitments. | 0:15:21 | 0:15:26 | |
Freydis Sharland had faced rejection when | 0:15:27 | 0:15:29 | |
she first applied to join the ATA, but her cousin, a bomber pathfinder, had encouraged her to try again. | 0:15:29 | 0:15:37 | |
He said, "Freydis, are you in the ATA yet?" and I said, "No, not yet." | 0:15:37 | 0:15:41 | |
He said, "Why not? Write to them again. | 0:15:41 | 0:15:43 | |
"It's the one thing you want to do." | 0:15:43 | 0:15:45 | |
Which I agreed, | 0:15:45 | 0:15:47 | |
so I did write again, and I must have written a better letter or | 0:15:47 | 0:15:50 | |
something because they wrote and invited me to come for a flight test | 0:15:50 | 0:15:56 | |
and after that, I was offered a place in ATA. | 0:15:56 | 0:16:00 | |
Like many of the ATA girls, Freydis' contemporaries in her family served in the front line forces. | 0:16:00 | 0:16:07 | |
Her brother Derek forewarned her of what fate might have in store. | 0:16:07 | 0:16:11 | |
Derek was a very mature young man, | 0:16:11 | 0:16:15 | |
and at the start of the war | 0:16:15 | 0:16:19 | |
he'd been in Germany, he spoke German. | 0:16:19 | 0:16:22 | |
He'd seen all the things we'd seen at Kiel and everything | 0:16:22 | 0:16:26 | |
and he realised it was going to be a big battle. | 0:16:26 | 0:16:29 | |
And he took me aside one day and said, "Once I get into action, | 0:16:29 | 0:16:35 | |
"I'll be lucky enough to have a month or two, | 0:16:35 | 0:16:38 | |
"but you must realise this will happen." | 0:16:38 | 0:16:41 | |
Freydis joined a new wave of women recruits. They included volunteers from all round the globe. | 0:16:43 | 0:16:50 | |
ATA became almost a Foreign Legion of the air. | 0:16:50 | 0:16:53 | |
Their pilots came from 28 different countries. | 0:16:53 | 0:16:57 | |
From Azerbaijan to South Africa, with everywhere in-between. | 0:16:57 | 0:17:01 | |
The four girls who came from New Zealand | 0:17:01 | 0:17:04 | |
paid for their own passage to England to join the ATA. | 0:17:04 | 0:17:08 | |
And from South America came two different ladies, one from each side of the Andes. | 0:17:08 | 0:17:14 | |
Maureen Dunlop came from Argentina, Margot Duhalde came from Chile, | 0:17:14 | 0:17:19 | |
and nobody could say her name so they called her Chile. | 0:17:19 | 0:17:22 | |
The 19-year-old Chile spoke no English and was briefly interned on her arrival in Britain. | 0:17:22 | 0:17:27 | |
The language barrier would get her arrested again when she began to ferry planes. | 0:17:27 | 0:17:32 | |
She had a false landing somewhere near Hatfield, | 0:17:32 | 0:17:36 | |
I think in the first week, actually. | 0:17:36 | 0:17:38 | |
And of course the police couldn't begin to understand why this woman | 0:17:38 | 0:17:42 | |
who couldn't speak English was flying one of our aircraft around and so she | 0:17:42 | 0:17:49 | |
was taken off to the police station and it did take ATA about, sort of, almost 24 hours to get her back. | 0:17:49 | 0:17:57 | |
So ATA then decided she really better learn | 0:17:57 | 0:18:01 | |
some English, so she went to work in the hangars and, of course, | 0:18:01 | 0:18:06 | |
she took on board all the swear words the chaps had got. | 0:18:06 | 0:18:10 | |
And so I think I learnt all my swear words from her. | 0:18:10 | 0:18:15 | |
When I occasionally after all said, "bloody hell", it was always absolutely straight from Chile. | 0:18:15 | 0:18:21 | |
The leading factions in the exotic women's section | 0:18:24 | 0:18:27 | |
split into two separate types, the head girls and the it girls. | 0:18:27 | 0:18:31 | |
Who attracted the attention? | 0:18:31 | 0:18:33 | |
Who led the women's section of the ATA? The head girls. | 0:18:33 | 0:18:36 | |
Young women with an extremely developed sense of duty, | 0:18:36 | 0:18:40 | |
responsibility and the work, the sheer work they would have to put in | 0:18:40 | 0:18:45 | |
to continue to persuade the male establishment they were up to the job. | 0:18:45 | 0:18:49 | |
And then on the other hand from all over the world, but especially from her father's large estate in Surrey, | 0:18:49 | 0:18:55 | |
Diana Barnato Walker led the contingent of it girls. | 0:18:55 | 0:19:01 | |
The extraordinary Diana Barnato Walker died in 2008. | 0:19:06 | 0:19:10 | |
Her son Barney is clearing out her house. | 0:19:10 | 0:19:13 | |
It's packed with memories of her time flying in the war when Diana lived life to the limit. | 0:19:13 | 0:19:19 | |
I don't know how they did it, | 0:19:19 | 0:19:20 | |
I don't know how they found time to A, have a robust social life and B, | 0:19:20 | 0:19:24 | |
do the serious bit about flying, | 0:19:24 | 0:19:26 | |
but they seemed to, and so I think they led a very full life. | 0:19:26 | 0:19:30 | |
At the end of a hard day's work, when she had done her job as professionally as she could, there | 0:19:30 | 0:19:34 | |
was nothing amateur about her when she was flying, | 0:19:34 | 0:19:37 | |
then she was off to London almost every single night. | 0:19:37 | 0:19:40 | |
I don't think many of the others could keep up the pace. | 0:19:40 | 0:19:44 | |
After partying all night in London, Diana would catch the early morning | 0:19:51 | 0:19:55 | |
milk train down to Southampton and be in the air by 9am. | 0:19:55 | 0:19:59 | |
She was always used to taking her own decisions and doing her own thing, and I suppose in ATA | 0:19:59 | 0:20:06 | |
she tried to conform, but she did occasionally, you know, | 0:20:06 | 0:20:11 | |
fly down to Cornwall to have lunch with a friend or something like that | 0:20:11 | 0:20:15 | |
instead of delivering her aircraft straight away. | 0:20:15 | 0:20:18 | |
Dear Diana, she generally got away with things like that. | 0:20:18 | 0:20:21 | |
Diana always emerged from her plane with fresh war paint on. | 0:20:21 | 0:20:26 | |
She always used to do her lipstick and powder her nose before she landed | 0:20:26 | 0:20:29 | |
so she turned up looking, sort of, A1, | 0:20:29 | 0:20:33 | |
but I mean, that was her way all the way through, to look glamorous. | 0:20:33 | 0:20:38 | |
Glamour was the order of the day, but for most, sex was still a mystery. | 0:20:38 | 0:20:44 | |
We hardly knew what sex was, let alone sexism in those days. | 0:20:44 | 0:20:48 | |
And if anyone pinched my behind, I was only thankful | 0:20:48 | 0:20:52 | |
I was attractive enough to have my bottom pinched. | 0:20:52 | 0:20:56 | |
I didn't rush off and report it to someone but, no, | 0:20:56 | 0:21:00 | |
I don't think there was too much, we were just all blokes together, if you like. | 0:21:00 | 0:21:07 | |
If the majority didn't know what sex was, others were getting plenty of practice. | 0:21:07 | 0:21:11 | |
Most of them don't seem to have had a great deal | 0:21:11 | 0:21:14 | |
of sex during the war and probably wouldn't tell you if they had. | 0:21:14 | 0:21:18 | |
Helen Harrison was one of the Americans that came over and vowed | 0:21:18 | 0:21:22 | |
that she was going to have sex with every officer in the American army who she could lay her hands on. | 0:21:22 | 0:21:29 | |
And she went about it with some gusto. | 0:21:29 | 0:21:32 | |
Dorothy Hewitt was a very high-performance seductress, | 0:21:33 | 0:21:38 | |
married three times, and one of those she wooed and married | 0:21:38 | 0:21:45 | |
was Lord Beatty, | 0:21:45 | 0:21:46 | |
the son of Admiral Lord Beatty of Jutland. | 0:21:46 | 0:21:49 | |
And she subsequently had a scandalous affair with Sir Anthony Eden, | 0:21:49 | 0:21:54 | |
which, had it become public, would have changed the course of history. | 0:21:54 | 0:21:58 | |
But most of them | 0:21:58 | 0:22:02 | |
were, I think, taking the work very seriously | 0:22:02 | 0:22:06 | |
and certainly, on weekdays that ruled out sex. | 0:22:06 | 0:22:11 | |
But even the most fun-loving ATA girl couldn't avoid the tragedy of war. | 0:22:11 | 0:22:16 | |
Diana met 22-year-old squadron leader Humphrey Gilbert | 0:22:16 | 0:22:21 | |
when she was forced to land in bad weather at his RAF base. | 0:22:21 | 0:22:25 | |
Gilbert had the spark plugs removed from her plane. | 0:22:25 | 0:22:28 | |
This kept her grounded long enough for them to fall in love. | 0:22:28 | 0:22:31 | |
They were engaged within three weeks. | 0:22:31 | 0:22:34 | |
The affair was going along swingingly | 0:22:34 | 0:22:37 | |
and one day she didn't hear from him and she began to fear the worst, like you did in those days. | 0:22:37 | 0:22:42 | |
You never knew when death was round the corner. | 0:22:42 | 0:22:45 | |
Diana flew over, on a subsequent flight, | 0:22:46 | 0:22:49 | |
the airfield where she thought he was, looking out for his Spitfire, which she knew had a blue nose. | 0:22:49 | 0:22:54 | |
It wasn't there. | 0:22:54 | 0:22:56 | |
On landing at her destination, Diana rushed to a telephone box | 0:22:58 | 0:23:02 | |
to be told that Gilbert had been killed in his Spitfire. | 0:23:02 | 0:23:05 | |
There, in a nutshell, you have the glamour of flying for the ATA | 0:23:17 | 0:23:22 | |
and the tragedy of doing so in the middle of a war. | 0:23:22 | 0:23:24 | |
By 1941, the girls were still restricted | 0:23:26 | 0:23:32 | |
to flying antiquated planes, | 0:23:32 | 0:23:35 | |
but that year, Pauline Gower, the head of the ATA's women's section, | 0:23:35 | 0:23:39 | |
finally made the revolutionary breakthrough that allowed the girls to fly state-of-the-art fighters. | 0:23:39 | 0:23:44 | |
There's a key moment in ATA history when | 0:23:44 | 0:23:48 | |
Pauline Gower attends a party in May 1941 with Gerard d'Erlanger, | 0:23:48 | 0:23:53 | |
and the question of whether or not women are ever going to be allowed to fly fighters comes up. | 0:23:53 | 0:24:00 | |
She buttonholed d'Erlanger when he was a little bit harassed and asked | 0:24:00 | 0:24:06 | |
him if there was any reason why the ladies shouldn't fly the Hurricanes and Spitfires just like the men. | 0:24:06 | 0:24:12 | |
And he said, "Well, I don't suppose so." So she said, "When can we start?" | 0:24:12 | 0:24:17 | |
Winnie Crossley, who was the first woman to fly a Hurricane, performed a perfect loop, | 0:24:43 | 0:24:49 | |
climbed out and said, "It's a lovely little aeroplane, darlings." | 0:24:49 | 0:24:52 | |
I believe it was a Friday but, either way, they pool their | 0:25:01 | 0:25:07 | |
ration coupons and petrol money, drive down to London | 0:25:07 | 0:25:10 | |
and have a slap-up dinner at the A L'Ecu de France, | 0:25:10 | 0:25:13 | |
which I think then is the finest French restaurant in St James's. | 0:25:13 | 0:25:18 | |
Then, in August 1941, the girls got their hands on the ultimate flying prize, | 0:25:21 | 0:25:27 | |
the Spitfire. | 0:25:27 | 0:25:29 | |
It was just a marvellous aeroplane. The aeroplane and you were just one | 0:25:38 | 0:25:42 | |
together, and it would do just anything you wanted it to do. | 0:25:42 | 0:25:49 | |
You were there with the cockpit around you. | 0:25:49 | 0:25:52 | |
It was the nearest thing to flying oneself, because the slightest touch on the stick and it responded. | 0:25:52 | 0:25:57 | |
Absolutely marvellous. | 0:25:57 | 0:25:59 | |
It was a woman's aeroplane. | 0:25:59 | 0:26:02 | |
It was poetry. | 0:26:02 | 0:26:06 | |
It seemed kind of like riding a good horse. | 0:26:06 | 0:26:11 | |
One ATA girl was already showing the men what a special Spitfire pilot she was. | 0:26:13 | 0:26:20 | |
Lettice Curtis had been recruited in the second wave. | 0:26:20 | 0:26:23 | |
In September 1941, shortly after she joined the ATA, Lettice Curtis took | 0:26:23 | 0:26:27 | |
off in a Spitfire from Prestwick near Glasgow, destination White Waltham, the base of the ATA. | 0:26:27 | 0:26:34 | |
It's a miserable day for flying. | 0:26:34 | 0:26:36 | |
She knew the countryside, | 0:26:38 | 0:26:42 | |
the mountains, the rivers, | 0:26:42 | 0:26:45 | |
so she would wind her way | 0:26:45 | 0:26:50 | |
up the valleys and... | 0:26:50 | 0:26:55 | |
find a route to get to her destination | 0:26:57 | 0:27:01 | |
when a lot of pilots, and particularly the Americans, | 0:27:01 | 0:27:07 | |
who were used to wide open spaces, | 0:27:07 | 0:27:10 | |
would say, "We'll wait till the weather will clear." | 0:27:10 | 0:27:17 | |
There's no-one else in the air that day. | 0:27:17 | 0:27:20 | |
When she lands at White Waltham there's a bunch of American pilots, all men, | 0:27:24 | 0:27:29 | |
who have been on the ground all day because they'd decided it was a washout | 0:27:29 | 0:27:35 | |
and Lettice says, "There must have been some consternation among those American men that a woman had | 0:27:35 | 0:27:40 | |
"not only taken off from Prestwick, but got all the way down there in one piece." | 0:27:40 | 0:27:45 | |
Consternation doesn't even begin how to say how upset the men would have | 0:27:45 | 0:27:49 | |
been and how satisfied Lettice would have been to have achieved something that they couldn't. | 0:27:49 | 0:27:54 | |
Lettice was the ultimate head girl, getting through with the plane in | 0:27:54 | 0:27:58 | |
one piece using the most direct route. | 0:27:58 | 0:28:01 | |
But some of the girls couldn't resist the temptation to have fun with the Spitfire. | 0:28:01 | 0:28:07 | |
You could go up and play with the clouds, you know, and have great fun. | 0:28:07 | 0:28:12 | |
My favourite | 0:28:15 | 0:28:17 | |
was a vertical eight. | 0:28:17 | 0:28:20 | |
You dived, come up, | 0:28:20 | 0:28:23 | |
dived, turn, so you do a figure-8. It's graceful. | 0:28:23 | 0:28:29 | |
This was the plane that you wore. | 0:28:31 | 0:28:33 | |
The throbbing engine, | 0:28:33 | 0:28:36 | |
the dancing through the air, the joy, the tremor in the wings... | 0:28:36 | 0:28:43 | |
..it's perhaps more loyal than a man as well. | 0:28:45 | 0:28:47 | |
But the joy of flying wasn't without its dangers. | 0:29:00 | 0:29:03 | |
There's no doubt that weather was our worst enemy. | 0:29:03 | 0:29:08 | |
I think we had about 136 casualties, and I would think that 75% of them were to do with the weather. | 0:29:08 | 0:29:16 | |
This is a cloudy country, it's a hilly country, | 0:29:16 | 0:29:19 | |
and the fear that | 0:29:19 | 0:29:22 | |
engulfs you as quickly as the cloud is you'll simply fly into a hill, or a tree, or a church tower. | 0:29:22 | 0:29:27 | |
The women were expected to fly using only landmarks on the ground to guide them. | 0:29:27 | 0:29:32 | |
They were unarmed and without radios. | 0:29:32 | 0:29:36 | |
I frightened myself out of my wits coming face to face with one of the Cotswold hills. | 0:29:36 | 0:29:41 | |
Fortunately I'd got enough power | 0:29:41 | 0:29:43 | |
to actually put pressure on to go up over it. | 0:29:43 | 0:29:45 | |
Cloud meant death, or as good as. | 0:29:52 | 0:29:55 | |
You had to be very lucky to fly into cloud and get out of it alive. | 0:29:55 | 0:29:59 | |
This morning, there were five of us flying Spitfires. | 0:30:01 | 0:30:06 | |
The weather was not good. | 0:30:06 | 0:30:09 | |
I decided that I could cope. | 0:30:11 | 0:30:15 | |
Dora Lang, my friend, decided she could cope. | 0:30:15 | 0:30:21 | |
The other three decided that they wouldn't. | 0:30:21 | 0:30:23 | |
We were both going to the same place. | 0:30:27 | 0:30:30 | |
When I got to this place, | 0:30:32 | 0:30:36 | |
I could hardly see the aerodrome, and as I landed, | 0:30:36 | 0:30:41 | |
I was whistling down the runway and to my horror, | 0:30:41 | 0:30:46 | |
another Spitfire coming in the opposite direction | 0:30:46 | 0:30:50 | |
doing exactly the same as I was doing, rushing down the runway | 0:30:50 | 0:30:54 | |
and there we were, two Spitfires | 0:30:54 | 0:30:57 | |
landed exactly the same time in the opposite directions. | 0:30:57 | 0:31:03 | |
It was an absolute miracle that we didn't touch each other, | 0:31:03 | 0:31:09 | |
and didn't even see each other until we actually passed on the runway. | 0:31:09 | 0:31:16 | |
That was very frightening, afterwards, thinking about it. | 0:31:16 | 0:31:20 | |
We tended to keep to the left side of the runway, so I was on my left | 0:31:24 | 0:31:31 | |
and she was on her left, and that saved our lives. | 0:31:31 | 0:31:35 | |
If I ever started having nightmares that I was crashing my aeroplane or something, then I'd know that | 0:31:49 | 0:31:56 | |
I'd been pressing on too much and frightening myself, I suppose. | 0:31:56 | 0:32:01 | |
But nightmare and reality were never very far apart. | 0:32:02 | 0:32:06 | |
Mary Wilkins-Ellis and her friend Dora Lang had survived one near miss. | 0:32:06 | 0:32:11 | |
Dora wasn't so lucky when she was ferrying a twin-engine Mosquito with a female engineer. | 0:32:11 | 0:32:18 | |
She was about to land, and for some reason, the aeroplane suddenly shot | 0:32:18 | 0:32:25 | |
up into the air and then fell down onto the runway, burst into flames, | 0:32:25 | 0:32:32 | |
and that was the end of everything. | 0:32:32 | 0:32:35 | |
So, Dora was killed | 0:32:36 | 0:32:39 | |
and so was the pretty little engineer girl. | 0:32:39 | 0:32:44 | |
Very sad. | 0:32:44 | 0:32:46 | |
There was something rather brutal about the way that deaths were reported in the ferry pools. | 0:32:49 | 0:32:55 | |
The operations officer would simply erase the name on the blackboard | 0:32:55 | 0:33:01 | |
that all the women would look at to know where they were supposed to be flying the next day. | 0:33:01 | 0:33:06 | |
I missed her terribly. | 0:33:07 | 0:33:09 | |
She was a very nice person, | 0:33:09 | 0:33:13 | |
and for two days I was not allowed to fly. | 0:33:13 | 0:33:19 | |
I didn't want to, but after that, one realised there is a war on, | 0:33:19 | 0:33:26 | |
we must get on with our jobs, and we did. | 0:33:26 | 0:33:31 | |
The most famous woman flier of all was ultimately to become an ATA fatality. | 0:33:32 | 0:33:39 | |
Amy Johnson, the inspiration for British | 0:33:39 | 0:33:42 | |
women fliers, got lost in cloud whilst ferrying a plane in 1941. | 0:33:42 | 0:33:47 | |
She bailed out over the Thames Estuary and was lost at sea. | 0:33:47 | 0:33:51 | |
Nearly one in ten of the women fliers were to lose their lives, | 0:33:52 | 0:33:56 | |
making it one of the most dangerous jobs in the war. | 0:33:56 | 0:34:00 | |
Yes, quite a few of our friends | 0:34:00 | 0:34:03 | |
were killed. | 0:34:03 | 0:34:05 | |
Yes. | 0:34:05 | 0:34:07 | |
But that was part of the game really, wasn't it? | 0:34:09 | 0:34:14 | |
You couldn't always get away with murder. | 0:34:14 | 0:34:17 | |
SHE SIGHS | 0:34:19 | 0:34:22 | |
By 1942, Britain's position was still perilous and ever more recruits were needed for the ATA. | 0:34:26 | 0:34:33 | |
The United States had just entered the war | 0:34:33 | 0:34:36 | |
and would now provide the largest contingent of foreign women fliers. | 0:34:36 | 0:34:40 | |
Nancy Stratford travelled to England in 1942 not knowing what to expect. | 0:34:40 | 0:34:46 | |
We got over to Liverpool | 0:34:46 | 0:34:50 | |
and the first night, | 0:34:50 | 0:34:52 | |
there was an air-raid siren. | 0:34:52 | 0:34:55 | |
I didn't know what to do so I got under the bed. | 0:34:55 | 0:34:58 | |
I realised it was a war zone | 0:34:58 | 0:35:01 | |
and that it was difficult, and it was going to be difficult, | 0:35:01 | 0:35:07 | |
but I wanted to help. | 0:35:07 | 0:35:09 | |
The most difficult thing Roberta Leveaux had to cope with was an English breakfast. | 0:35:09 | 0:35:15 | |
We were served kippers. | 0:35:15 | 0:35:18 | |
Do you know what kippers are? | 0:35:18 | 0:35:20 | |
The whole darn fish with its eye open! | 0:35:22 | 0:35:28 | |
Greasy! | 0:35:28 | 0:35:29 | |
Oh, dear. | 0:35:33 | 0:35:35 | |
It was very hard to eat, | 0:35:35 | 0:35:39 | |
but we did not | 0:35:39 | 0:35:41 | |
want to offend the English. | 0:35:41 | 0:35:43 | |
Roberta needn't have worried about upsetting her hosts. | 0:35:43 | 0:35:47 | |
The American who recruited her would soon be doing that. | 0:35:47 | 0:35:51 | |
Jackie Cochrane was a flamboyant American flier not known for her modesty. | 0:35:51 | 0:35:56 | |
Jackie Cochrane had an extraordinary rags-to-riches story. | 0:35:56 | 0:36:00 | |
Born an orphan, she picked her own name from the phone book. | 0:36:00 | 0:36:04 | |
Married a billionaire, | 0:36:04 | 0:36:05 | |
became a millionaire in her own right | 0:36:05 | 0:36:08 | |
with a chain of cosmetics stores | 0:36:08 | 0:36:10 | |
all over the United States which she serviced by air. | 0:36:10 | 0:36:14 | |
She was a fanatical pilot, and she made it her mission to show the American flying | 0:36:14 | 0:36:19 | |
establishment that women could fly and should fly in the war. | 0:36:19 | 0:36:22 | |
And to that end she recruited 25 women pilots, | 0:36:22 | 0:36:25 | |
took them over to Britain, and got them places in the ATA. | 0:36:25 | 0:36:30 | |
She had a hard way, speaking was intolerant, a lot of profanity. | 0:36:30 | 0:36:37 | |
We were a little in awe | 0:36:40 | 0:36:44 | |
of her, and kind of embarrassed by her. | 0:36:44 | 0:36:48 | |
Jackie Cochrane came swanning around like Queen Bee in her Bentley and a fur coat. | 0:36:48 | 0:36:53 | |
The Americans brought something different, I think, to ATA. | 0:36:53 | 0:36:59 | |
They brought American informality and American, | 0:36:59 | 0:37:04 | |
shall we say, difficulty with stuffy Britishness. | 0:37:04 | 0:37:09 | |
They had a ball, and some of the Brits, I don't think, could cope with this. | 0:37:09 | 0:37:14 | |
At our headquarters, which was called White Waltham, | 0:37:15 | 0:37:21 | |
I remember saying they look at us as if we were a bad smell. | 0:37:21 | 0:37:28 | |
One person in particular turned her nose up at the Americans. | 0:37:28 | 0:37:32 | |
Lettice Curtis. | 0:37:32 | 0:37:34 | |
And she just didn't waste any time talking with us. | 0:37:36 | 0:37:41 | |
She was really horrid to a lot of the young people | 0:37:41 | 0:37:45 | |
when they came into ATA. | 0:37:45 | 0:37:47 | |
I could have kicked her sometimes, she was so beastly, but she couldn't help it. | 0:37:47 | 0:37:52 | |
She was just born like that, I think! | 0:37:52 | 0:37:55 | |
Cochrane's newly-arrived Americans were on a collision course with the British. | 0:37:55 | 0:38:00 | |
They might have thought that they would be welcomed with open arms and gratitude. | 0:38:00 | 0:38:06 | |
They were, instead, read the rule book at a meeting in London | 0:38:06 | 0:38:11 | |
when they finally got down from Liverpool, | 0:38:11 | 0:38:14 | |
taken out to White Waltham and asked to strip... | 0:38:14 | 0:38:17 | |
..because the doctor there, Arthur Barber, | 0:38:19 | 0:38:22 | |
who turned out to have a predilection for 16mm adult films, | 0:38:22 | 0:38:26 | |
insisted that all ATA recruits, male and female, | 0:38:26 | 0:38:31 | |
strip for their medicals. | 0:38:31 | 0:38:33 | |
Jackie Cochrane wasn't about to let the Brits get away with it. | 0:38:35 | 0:38:39 | |
When Jackie Cochrane found out about this, she tore down from | 0:38:39 | 0:38:43 | |
London to White Waltham and said, "Where is it written that my pilots have to be examined in the buff?" | 0:38:43 | 0:38:47 | |
And because she was a pal of Roosevelt's, they backed down | 0:38:47 | 0:38:52 | |
and the American recruits had their medicals with their clothes on. But that's an example | 0:38:52 | 0:38:57 | |
of the scant respect shown to these women who had taken | 0:38:57 | 0:39:02 | |
their lives in their hands to come and fly for the ATA. | 0:39:02 | 0:39:06 | |
Jackie Cochrane's abrasiveness upset her more stuffy British hosts. | 0:39:06 | 0:39:11 | |
She never really settled in Britain. | 0:39:11 | 0:39:13 | |
After a few months, she returned to the US to set up an American equivalent of the women's ATA. | 0:39:13 | 0:39:20 | |
I know Cochrane wanted to prove the fact that we could do it. | 0:39:20 | 0:39:24 | |
The British women did the job, we just kind of went over and helped a little bit. | 0:39:24 | 0:39:31 | |
In 1942, with war planes still pouring out of the factories, ATA | 0:39:32 | 0:39:37 | |
had enough women pilots to establish two women-only ferry pools. | 0:39:37 | 0:39:43 | |
The first was at Hamble near Southampton, close to one of the Spitfire factories. | 0:39:43 | 0:39:47 | |
There were about 30 pilots down there and a tremendous variety | 0:39:47 | 0:39:53 | |
of nationalities, | 0:39:53 | 0:39:54 | |
and so it was really almost a sort of league of nations down there. | 0:39:54 | 0:40:00 | |
Hamble restroom, I think, would make a very good television programme | 0:40:00 | 0:40:04 | |
in itself, because there were several nationalities. | 0:40:04 | 0:40:07 | |
There was Spanish being spoken in one corner, Polish in another. | 0:40:07 | 0:40:12 | |
High-pitched chattering... | 0:40:12 | 0:40:14 | |
..and yes, a very nice atmosphere. We were all friends. | 0:40:16 | 0:40:20 | |
People doing yoga in one corner. | 0:40:20 | 0:40:23 | |
People with perhaps, material spread out on the floor, cutting something out that they were making. | 0:40:23 | 0:40:29 | |
Knitting, darning stockings! | 0:40:29 | 0:40:32 | |
HE CHUCKLES | 0:40:32 | 0:40:34 | |
Make do and mend, I do like that! | 0:40:34 | 0:40:37 | |
Others playing bridge, I used to play a lot of bridge and that was good. | 0:40:38 | 0:40:42 | |
When the weather was bad, you could settle down | 0:40:42 | 0:40:45 | |
and hope that the weather would stay bad | 0:40:45 | 0:40:49 | |
so you could spend the day, and then suddenly the weather would change and you'd all have to go and fly - | 0:40:49 | 0:40:55 | |
the last thing you wanted to do having been playing bridge all day, | 0:40:55 | 0:40:59 | |
but anyway, you had to, so that's that. | 0:40:59 | 0:41:01 | |
With its entirely female crew, Hamble was nicknamed The Lesbian Pool - | 0:41:05 | 0:41:11 | |
despite the lack of any evidence. | 0:41:11 | 0:41:13 | |
But one girl, Joy Ferguson, certainly wasn't interested in men. | 0:41:13 | 0:41:18 | |
She actually wanted to become one. | 0:41:18 | 0:41:20 | |
Joy had a sort of masculine brain, I always thought. | 0:41:20 | 0:41:26 | |
She thought like a man, though she appeared to be a perfectly ordinary woman. | 0:41:26 | 0:41:30 | |
But after the war, she had to decide whether she would go through all the palaver of becoming a man | 0:41:30 | 0:41:38 | |
and she did that, I think, hoping that | 0:41:38 | 0:41:41 | |
she would become a proper man and get married and that sort of thing. | 0:41:41 | 0:41:44 | |
She was a very brave person. | 0:41:44 | 0:41:47 | |
She did talk to me about it, and I was rather shocked I think to start with. | 0:41:47 | 0:41:52 | |
And then eventually, she died | 0:41:54 | 0:41:56 | |
not having achieved what she wanted to achieve, though she'd... | 0:41:56 | 0:42:00 | |
done a lot, been a lot. | 0:42:01 | 0:42:04 | |
And a lot of people respected her very much for what she had achieved, both as a man and as a woman. | 0:42:04 | 0:42:10 | |
The Hamble girls often vied to fly the best and newest planes. | 0:42:13 | 0:42:18 | |
Occasionally that friendly competition spilled over into open rivalry. | 0:42:18 | 0:42:24 | |
I think that Chile said that she became fairly anti Anna Leska, | 0:42:24 | 0:42:30 | |
who was one of the Polish girls. | 0:42:30 | 0:42:32 | |
On one occasion, I was in a Fairchild with Anna and Chile, | 0:42:32 | 0:42:39 | |
and one of them turned to the other and said, "How many petrols | 0:42:39 | 0:42:43 | |
"did we got?" And the other said, "You don't say that, you say 'how many petrols HAVE we got'." | 0:42:43 | 0:42:49 | |
And so, which was really very sweet, and I sat | 0:42:49 | 0:42:51 | |
in the back thinking, "As long as we've got petrol, we'll be all right!" | 0:42:51 | 0:42:56 | |
For some reason they didn't hit it off, and on one occasion, actually | 0:42:56 | 0:43:01 | |
became involved in what seems to be the only all-female dogfight | 0:43:01 | 0:43:06 | |
of the war above Hamble. | 0:43:06 | 0:43:09 | |
It's tempting, isn't it, to call it a catfight. | 0:43:09 | 0:43:13 | |
It was basically a jostling for position | 0:43:17 | 0:43:20 | |
before coming in to land. | 0:43:20 | 0:43:21 | |
Basically queue-barging by the Chilean of the Polaka, as she called her, the Pole. | 0:43:21 | 0:43:26 | |
The incident between the Chilean, Duhalde, and the Pole, Anna Leska, | 0:43:26 | 0:43:31 | |
was reported to their commanding officer, Margot Gore. | 0:43:31 | 0:43:34 | |
Margot Gore has Leska and Duhalde in and says, "One of you | 0:43:38 | 0:43:42 | |
"has got to apologise and Duhalde, it's you, otherwise you're out." | 0:43:42 | 0:43:46 | |
And so she does, she says, "Anna, I'm very sorry." | 0:43:46 | 0:43:49 | |
And then on the way out of the room, by her own accounts, | 0:43:49 | 0:43:52 | |
she says, "After the war, I'll knock your teeth out." | 0:43:52 | 0:43:55 | |
Chile and Anna Leska got on with the important work of | 0:43:56 | 0:44:00 | |
delivering planes from the factories around Hamble to the front line. | 0:44:00 | 0:44:05 | |
The daily routine started with the handing out of the delivery chits. | 0:44:05 | 0:44:09 | |
Suddenly, they would come out, and if were painting our nails | 0:44:09 | 0:44:14 | |
we had to rush off into | 0:44:14 | 0:44:16 | |
the locker room to do something about our nails. | 0:44:16 | 0:44:21 | |
It was like a schoolgirl's place, really! | 0:44:21 | 0:44:25 | |
SHE LAUGHS | 0:44:25 | 0:44:27 | |
Unlike RAF pilots, they weren't just flying one plane, often they flew several in a day | 0:44:27 | 0:44:33 | |
and those planes could vary from state-of-the-art fighters to heavy four-engine bombers. | 0:44:33 | 0:44:39 | |
That was the most exciting part about it. | 0:44:39 | 0:44:41 | |
You didn't know what you were going to do that day. | 0:44:41 | 0:44:44 | |
We'd say to each other, "Oh, look what I've got! Look what I've got!" | 0:44:44 | 0:44:49 | |
And that was terribly exciting. | 0:44:52 | 0:44:55 | |
It was sometimes frightening as well, because the aeroplanes were all different. | 0:44:55 | 0:45:03 | |
You'd get out of a Tiger Moth | 0:45:03 | 0:45:06 | |
into a Wellington Bomber and then into a Spitfire. | 0:45:06 | 0:45:12 | |
And so, one had to know what one was doing. | 0:45:12 | 0:45:16 | |
This was August, on the 1st, I flew a Spitfire and a Hellcat. | 0:45:19 | 0:45:24 | |
On the 2nd, I flew a Firebrand and a Warwick. | 0:45:24 | 0:45:29 | |
On the 4th, I flew a Fairchild, a Walrus and a Reliant. | 0:45:29 | 0:45:36 | |
You weren't very busy, then? | 0:45:36 | 0:45:39 | |
No, that was not a very busy time. | 0:45:39 | 0:45:43 | |
When one looks back at it, | 0:45:43 | 0:45:45 | |
you think it couldn't have been possible, | 0:45:45 | 0:45:47 | |
but it was, and we did it, and I enjoyed it. | 0:45:47 | 0:45:53 | |
Often, they hadn't trained on the plane they were about to fly. | 0:45:53 | 0:45:57 | |
Their only instruction would be the Ferry Pilots Notes they consulted in the air. | 0:45:57 | 0:46:02 | |
You got a list of them on the front page, and when you were flying a new type, | 0:46:02 | 0:46:07 | |
you opened the page | 0:46:07 | 0:46:09 | |
and it gave you the salient features, and you stuck that in the top of your | 0:46:09 | 0:46:13 | |
flying booth, and so when you were coming in to land | 0:46:13 | 0:46:17 | |
or anything else, | 0:46:17 | 0:46:19 | |
-you could look it up. -It was like a Bible. | 0:46:19 | 0:46:22 | |
It was all there. | 0:46:22 | 0:46:25 | |
The women's section of the ATA was by now thriving. | 0:46:29 | 0:46:33 | |
But the girls were still on 20% less pay than the male pilots. | 0:46:33 | 0:46:37 | |
It was time for Pauline Gower to step in once again and sort things out. | 0:46:37 | 0:46:42 | |
Her natural sense of justice made her think women should receive equal pay for equal work. | 0:46:42 | 0:46:48 | |
How she arranged it was typical Pauline Gower. | 0:46:48 | 0:46:51 | |
She had a friend who was a woman Tory MP. | 0:46:51 | 0:46:56 | |
She put her up to asking a question in the Commons of Sir Stafford Cripps, the then Aviation Minister, | 0:46:56 | 0:47:03 | |
"Is it the case, sir, that henceforth women ATA pilots will be paid the same as men?" | 0:47:03 | 0:47:09 | |
And she let it be known that there would be a fuss if the answer was no, and the answer was yes, | 0:47:09 | 0:47:16 | |
and to my knowledge, it's the first instance of equal pay for equal work for women in British history. | 0:47:16 | 0:47:22 | |
Not only had the ATA girls arrived, the press still couldn't get enough of them. | 0:47:27 | 0:47:32 | |
In 1944, Maureen Dunlop became a pin-up girl when she appeared on the front cover of Picture Post. | 0:47:32 | 0:47:40 | |
I didn't know they were actually taking it when they took it, | 0:47:40 | 0:47:44 | |
because they had come to take photographs and I said, | 0:47:44 | 0:47:46 | |
"I'm busy, I want to put this away," | 0:47:46 | 0:47:48 | |
and I was doing this or something or other and they... | 0:47:48 | 0:47:51 | |
Maureen was an unlikely glamour girl. | 0:47:53 | 0:47:55 | |
She preferred solitude to celebrity. | 0:47:55 | 0:47:58 | |
Flying meant more to me than most things. | 0:47:58 | 0:48:01 | |
What I didn't like later on was, when you had a turn - you had to | 0:48:01 | 0:48:05 | |
fly the taxi aircraft collecting all the people and dropping off. | 0:48:05 | 0:48:09 | |
That was terribly social | 0:48:09 | 0:48:11 | |
and terribly chatty, but I didn't do that very often, possibly. | 0:48:11 | 0:48:14 | |
Maureen was the most beautiful girl. | 0:48:18 | 0:48:20 | |
You don't think about it in those days, you accept people as they are, | 0:48:20 | 0:48:23 | |
but looking back on it, she had this wonderful sort of... | 0:48:23 | 0:48:26 | |
it wasn't auburn - almost auburn - hair, very heavy and long. | 0:48:26 | 0:48:30 | |
She was really beautiful. | 0:48:30 | 0:48:32 | |
Even though the girls were now officially equals, some still | 0:48:34 | 0:48:38 | |
found it hard to accept that women were flying combat planes. | 0:48:38 | 0:48:42 | |
Mary Wilkins-Ellis once delivered a heavy Wellington Bomber to an RAF base. | 0:48:42 | 0:48:47 | |
There on the ground was the RAF waiting... | 0:48:47 | 0:48:53 | |
with a car... | 0:48:53 | 0:48:55 | |
..looking around, and I said, "Are you taking me to the Control?" | 0:48:55 | 0:49:01 | |
And they said, "No, we're waiting for the pilot." | 0:49:01 | 0:49:05 | |
And I said, "I AM the pilot", | 0:49:05 | 0:49:08 | |
and, do you know, they didn't believe me. | 0:49:08 | 0:49:12 | |
They actually went inside the aeroplane and searched it | 0:49:12 | 0:49:18 | |
to try and find the pilot! | 0:49:18 | 0:49:20 | |
But, of course, there was none so they eventually took me to | 0:49:20 | 0:49:25 | |
the control tower, and everybody was flabbergasted | 0:49:25 | 0:49:31 | |
that a little girl like me could fly these big aeroplanes all by oneself. | 0:49:31 | 0:49:38 | |
The Hamble girls flew daily over the Solent. | 0:49:42 | 0:49:46 | |
In 1944, this meant they were uniquely amongst the few who knew | 0:49:46 | 0:49:50 | |
the invasion of Europe was about to take place. | 0:49:50 | 0:49:54 | |
You took off from Hamble and you could see Southampton Water, so you had a very good view, | 0:49:54 | 0:50:00 | |
and it just got more and more ships of all types. | 0:50:00 | 0:50:03 | |
I was flying over and I thought, "Well, how extraordinary. | 0:50:03 | 0:50:07 | |
"All those ships!" | 0:50:07 | 0:50:11 | |
It was just a mass. | 0:50:11 | 0:50:13 | |
You could have walked from one side to another on the ships. | 0:50:13 | 0:50:16 | |
The next morning, I flew over and there was not a single ship to be seen anywhere. | 0:50:16 | 0:50:24 | |
They'd all gone off in the night. | 0:50:24 | 0:50:28 | |
The Hamble river was absolutely covered in little boats. | 0:50:28 | 0:50:33 | |
Then you woke up one morning... | 0:50:33 | 0:50:36 | |
..and they'd all gone... | 0:50:37 | 0:50:39 | |
..and you realised D-day was happening. | 0:50:40 | 0:50:43 | |
I was given a Spitfire to fly from somewhere down there up to Oxford, | 0:50:53 | 0:51:00 | |
and I think I wept all the way. | 0:51:00 | 0:51:02 | |
I felt very sad because of all my friends | 0:51:02 | 0:51:06 | |
who weren't able to join in it. | 0:51:06 | 0:51:09 | |
Freydis Sharland lost seven cousins in the war, and her brother, Derek. | 0:51:09 | 0:51:15 | |
Derek had forewarned her of the loss she would endure, and of his own death. | 0:51:15 | 0:51:20 | |
It was very typical of him, trying to soften the blow for me, really. | 0:51:20 | 0:51:26 | |
He could see how... | 0:51:26 | 0:51:29 | |
upset I was by losing... | 0:51:29 | 0:51:32 | |
such dear friends and... | 0:51:32 | 0:51:36 | |
he wanted to prepare me... | 0:51:36 | 0:51:39 | |
for the awful things that were going to happen... | 0:51:39 | 0:51:42 | |
and he did really, like that. | 0:51:42 | 0:51:45 | |
I thought it was very kind of him, you know... | 0:51:46 | 0:51:50 | |
to... | 0:51:50 | 0:51:51 | |
..make the effort to tell me what he'd thought about. | 0:51:51 | 0:51:57 | |
Molly Rose's husband, Bernard, was a tank commander on D-day. | 0:52:08 | 0:52:12 | |
He was in the first wave of tanks to go in at Arromanches. | 0:52:12 | 0:52:17 | |
Seven days later, our Churchill tanks | 0:52:17 | 0:52:19 | |
were no match for the German Tigers, and his tank was blown up. | 0:52:19 | 0:52:24 | |
And the first thing I got down at Hamble was a letter saying that | 0:52:24 | 0:52:31 | |
no way could anyone have got out of it, and... | 0:52:31 | 0:52:35 | |
that was really a very nasty letter to arrive. | 0:52:35 | 0:52:38 | |
But Molly couldn't accept that Bernard was dead. | 0:52:40 | 0:52:43 | |
I felt I would know if anything had happened to Bernard, and I felt | 0:52:43 | 0:52:47 | |
he was all right, but it was very... It helped me enormously to feel that. | 0:52:47 | 0:52:52 | |
Following the wartime slogan, "Keep Calm And Carry On", Molly decided to continue flying. | 0:52:55 | 0:53:03 | |
It was a tremendous help during that period to have my own concerns to worry about. | 0:53:03 | 0:53:09 | |
You know, it was very character-forming, I think. | 0:53:09 | 0:53:12 | |
And then about... | 0:53:12 | 0:53:14 | |
two months later, I got a card from him from Brunswick... | 0:53:14 | 0:53:19 | |
from the POW camp there... | 0:53:19 | 0:53:22 | |
saying, you know, he hadn't been damaged, he was all right, and that there he was. | 0:53:22 | 0:53:27 | |
Bernard survived his experience as a POW. | 0:53:30 | 0:53:34 | |
He and Molly remained together until Bernard's death in 1996. | 0:53:34 | 0:53:39 | |
After D-day, ATA girls were initially banned from | 0:53:43 | 0:53:47 | |
ferrying planes to the continent, but one girl was to break that rule. | 0:53:47 | 0:53:51 | |
The trailblazer who ensured that women would fly to Northern Europe | 0:53:53 | 0:53:58 | |
was Diana Barnato Walker, who else? | 0:53:58 | 0:53:59 | |
She was, by this time, married to | 0:53:59 | 0:54:02 | |
Derek Walker, Wing Commander Derek Walker, who was stationed | 0:54:02 | 0:54:08 | |
with the Allied Headquarters in Brussels, and arranged for | 0:54:08 | 0:54:13 | |
his Commanding Officer to provide a letter allowing him to bring | 0:54:13 | 0:54:19 | |
his newlywed wife to Brussels. | 0:54:19 | 0:54:22 | |
It was vague as to whether she was flying her own Spitfire, | 0:54:22 | 0:54:26 | |
but she was, and they flew wingtip to wingtip out over the cliffs of Dover in October 1944. | 0:54:26 | 0:54:31 | |
And then the Mail got wind of this, the Daily Mail, | 0:54:42 | 0:54:45 | |
and said that Derek Walker had taken his wife to Brussels for a honeymoon | 0:54:45 | 0:54:50 | |
and he was docked three months' pay, | 0:54:50 | 0:54:53 | |
so that might have at least paid for the fuel. | 0:54:53 | 0:54:56 | |
Diana's honeymoon was short-lived. | 0:54:58 | 0:55:01 | |
This is a piece of Derek Walker's Mustang 5, in which he crashed | 0:55:03 | 0:55:10 | |
on November 14th, 1945 and was killed. | 0:55:10 | 0:55:15 | |
Diana, the epitome of the fun-loving ATA girl, remained single | 0:55:24 | 0:55:29 | |
and devoted to flying for the rest of her life. | 0:55:29 | 0:55:32 | |
By 1945, the Allies had achieved total dominance in the air. | 0:55:35 | 0:55:40 | |
Fewer planes needed to be delivered. | 0:55:40 | 0:55:43 | |
As war ended, the ATA was wound down. | 0:55:43 | 0:55:47 | |
I was very wicked, I never wanted the war to end, so I could | 0:55:47 | 0:55:50 | |
go on and on and on, but whenever possible I'd get near enough to pat a Spitfire and a Hurricane, | 0:55:50 | 0:55:56 | |
and look into it, too... | 0:55:56 | 0:55:59 | |
..still amazed at how tiny the cockpit is. | 0:55:59 | 0:56:02 | |
I wondered how I did it, | 0:56:02 | 0:56:05 | |
but then I was young at the time. | 0:56:05 | 0:56:07 | |
For many, it was the end of the best years of their lives. | 0:56:11 | 0:56:15 | |
The ATA was the main thing in my life, I'm sure it was... | 0:56:17 | 0:56:23 | |
It was difficult to get into... | 0:56:23 | 0:56:26 | |
and... | 0:56:26 | 0:56:29 | |
a lot of hard work to get going in it and... | 0:56:29 | 0:56:33 | |
..Yes, I was sad to leave it. | 0:56:34 | 0:56:37 | |
Very... | 0:56:37 | 0:56:39 | |
..The best part of my life, I'm sure. | 0:56:39 | 0:56:41 | |
Mmm... | 0:56:41 | 0:56:43 | |
For Pauline Gower, heading the Women's Section was to be the achievement of her life. | 0:56:44 | 0:56:50 | |
She died in childbirth in 1947. | 0:56:50 | 0:56:53 | |
Lettice Curtis, the most accomplished of the women fliers, dreamt of becoming an airline pilot, | 0:56:56 | 0:57:02 | |
but all the de-mobbed RAF boys put an end to that. | 0:57:02 | 0:57:07 | |
I think she dreaded whatever was to come. | 0:57:07 | 0:57:10 | |
She remained unmarried, except to aviation, she worked for | 0:57:10 | 0:57:14 | |
the Fairey Aircraft Company, but she was never a civilian pilot. | 0:57:14 | 0:57:19 | |
There was never any question that... | 0:57:19 | 0:57:22 | |
that opportunity would come along. | 0:57:22 | 0:57:25 | |
One of the pilots, Jackie Sorour, did become Britain's first commercial airline pilot. | 0:57:25 | 0:57:30 | |
Was it BOAC to Paris or New York? | 0:57:30 | 0:57:32 | |
No, it was from Bristol to the Channel Islands, | 0:57:32 | 0:57:36 | |
I think, and she was constantly mistaken for a flight attendant. | 0:57:36 | 0:57:40 | |
The unique moment when women fliers almost gained equality with their male counterparts soon disappeared. | 0:57:41 | 0:57:48 | |
For women to be flying the whole range of aeroplanes, from ancient | 0:57:48 | 0:57:53 | |
bi-planes to super-fast Spitfires and lumbering great Lancasters, is just unbelievable stuff. | 0:57:53 | 0:58:00 | |
It could never, never happen again, where girls could fly all these | 0:58:00 | 0:58:05 | |
military aeroplanes without any aids whatsoever, | 0:58:05 | 0:58:10 | |
and go from one aeroplane to another without any instruction... | 0:58:10 | 0:58:15 | |
because I flew 76 types... | 0:58:15 | 0:58:20 | |
My days of glamour have gone now... | 0:58:22 | 0:58:26 | |
I'm just trying to get safely through old age! | 0:58:26 | 0:58:30 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:58:44 | 0:58:48 | |
E-mail [email protected] | 0:58:48 | 0:58:51 |