Free Spitfire Women of World War II by Giles Whittell Page A

dissolving into a montage of uniformed women marching purposefully in all directions, the film ends with the dedication:
    â€˜To all the Amy Johnsons of today’.

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Queen Bee
    Could the ATA have managed without its women pilots? Sixty years after its demise I put the question to Sir Peter Mursell, the organisation’s only surviving senior administrator. He replied without hesitation: ‘Yes’ – and there was certainly never a shortage of qualified male applicants eager to join the ATA.
    Nor was there a shortage of female ones: Amy Johnson had inspired a generation of rich, or at least resourceful, women to follow her into the air. But they might never have flown in the war without the skilled and tireless lobbying of Pauline Gower.
    Prominent progressives such as Captain Harold Balfour had offered enthusiastic predictions of a role for women pilots in the coming conflict as early as 1938. But the RAF’s opposition was granite, and at that stage no-one had even thought of handing the job of ferrying military aircraft to civilians. Subsidised flying training in the Civil Air Guard – a belated effort to match Germany for ‘air mindedness’ – had helped to swell the ranks of civilian pilots and instructors, women as well as men, but when war was declared all civil aviation was grounded, and most of these new pilots melted away in search of other work.
    It was on her own initiative that Gower requested meetings, first with Pop d’Erlanger and then with the Director General of Civil Aviation, Sir Francis Shelmerdine, in September 1939. D’Erlanger’s instinctive answer to the question ‘Why women?’ was ‘Why not?’. He accompanied Gower to the meeting with Shelmerdineon 21 September. It went well. Gower knew Shelmerdine through Amy Johnson, whose wedding he had attended as best man, and as a trailblazer in her own right. Gower came away with permission to recruit twelve women pilots and an understanding that she would be in charge of them.
    There were hiccups. In late 1939 the RAF was still using its own pilots for most of its ferrying, and the whole plan to recruit women to the ATA had to be put on ice for three months while the RAF high command and its allies in the Air Ministry fought a rearguard action against the attachment of women to existing RAF ferry pools. Shelmerdine made several tactical retreats, assuring the RAF top brass that their men would never have to fly with women, insisting on a minimum of 500 hours solo experience for women candidates – far more than was required for men – and cutting Gower’s initial quota, without explanation, from twelve pilots to eight.
    There was also the Treasury’s standard stipulation, uncontested at this point by Gower or anyone else, on women’s pay. While they would be expected to perform exactly the same duties and work exactly the same hours as male ATA pilots, female ones would earn 20 per cent less. And there was one other thing, which may even have put a smile on the faces of the air vice marshals in their stalwart defence of gender apartheid. While their fighter boys would be arcing over Europe in sleek new Hurricanes and even sleeker newer Spitfires, these crazy women, initially at least, would be flying only Tiger Moths, with nothing to protect them from the elements except their clothing and a comical crescent of Perspex fixed to the front edge of the cockpit – and in the worst winter for almost fifty years.
    As the New York Times reported two weeks after the first women pilots reported for duty at the Hatfield aerodrome north of London in January 1940 (and the time lapse is significant):
    Now it can be told. For the first time since the war began, British censors today allowed that humdrum conversational topic, the weather, which has been a strict military secret in Britain, to be mentioned in news dispatches – providing the weather news is more than fifteen days