Spitfire Women of World War II (10 page)

Gower was right. The early ATA women were not snobs. Far from it; they were ardent meritocrats. They just happened to be meritocrats in a discipline for which one hour's instruction cost roughly what the average shop worker could expect to earn in a fortnight. This made them a self-selecting elite in terms of daring to risk their necks and ignore social conventions, but first of all in terms of money. Rose Rees's idea of ‘poor' was most people's rich. Amy Johnson was practically blue-collar by ATA women's standards, because she was from Hull and her father was in trade – but he was still one of the city's most prominent businessmen.

So it surprised no one that the ninth recruit to the ATA women's section was Lois Butler, wife of the chairman of De Havilland; nor that the tenth was Lady Bailey, the daughter of an Irish peer and wife of Sir Abe Bailey, an indulgent South African millionaire.

In 1929 Lady Bailey had won the admiration of millions, and the Britannia Trophy for the year's most outstanding air performance,
by flying solo to Cape Town and back on the pretext of meeting her husband. It took her ten months. Unlike her friend and rival, Lady Heath, who had taken off from Pretoria for London the previous year with a shotgun, fifty rounds of ammunition, a tennis racquet, high-heeled satin shoes, a black silk evening dress and a fur coat, Lady Bailey travelled light. In addition to undergarments and a tweed flying suit she carried only a pair of mosquito-proof boots, some tinted goggles and a flying helmet. She crashed on both legs of the trip: outbound, she turned her plane over on landing in Tanganyika and had to wait there while Abe replaced it. Apologising to him for her late arrival at the Cape, she said she had got ‘muddled in the mountains'. On her return she landed heavily soon after leaving Cape Town and had to wait four months for spares and repairs. Geoffrey de Havilland, who knew her from Stag Lane, said she ‘knew much more about the technique of navigation under almost impossible conditions than most people were prepared to credit'. But Amy Johnson said she never seemed to plan her flights or even to have any clear idea where she was going.

That apart, the trouble with Lady Bailey's appointment to the ATA was that she was aged fifty. Even by the standards of the ‘Ancient and Tattered' this was pushing it. The National Men's Defence League and readers of
Aeroplane
resumed their eruptions about women encroaching on men's work, and rather than endure public accusations of pulling rank, Lady Bailey resigned within a week.

For a few days she had epitomised the ATA's defining ethos: quietly brave, deceptively casual, defiantly eccentric. But any void she left was quickly filled by a stream of new recruits infused not just with Bailey's limitless enthusiasm for flying but also with the energy of youth. And few combined these quite so strikingly as Audrey Sale-Barker.

When the Sale-Barker name began appearing in aeronautical dispatches in the summer of 1940, it had a certain resonance. Skiers would have remembered her as captain of the British
women's team at the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria, and the winner before that of a string of alpine trophies as fabulous as their names – the Lady Denman Challenge, the Kandahar Ladies Ski Club Championship, the Donna Isabella Orsini Cup – all fought for on the precipitous east face of the Schilthorn above Mürren (which Ian Fleming would later rename the Piz Gloria for the purposes of James Bond's imprisonment by that most unscrupulous brainwasher of young women, Ernst Stavro Blofeld).

Society types would have known of Sale-Barker as an elegant fixture of the London season and its satellite events in Paris and Le Touquet. They would have recognised her delicate features and slightly upturned nose. They might have heard her charming lisp at parties, and they might even have heard her name linked with the impossibly dashing Lord Knebworth (who would later die in an air crash).

Hardcore aviation buffs would have recalled her winning free flying lessons in a competition sponsored by National Aviation Services at the 1929 Aero Exhibition, Olympia, for her performance on a ‘Reid pilot indicator'. This was an elaborate contraption that supposedly measured pilot aptitude with coloured discs connected by a maze of push-rods to pedals and a joystick. Sale-Barker scored higher on it than all other competitors, male or female, and having won those flying lessons she shone from her first touch of the control column. Then nineteen, she earned her private ‘A' licence after just seven hours of instruction at the new Hanworth aerodrome near Twickenham. And on her first solo, spectators – including a man from the
Daily Express
– were surprised to see this ‘pretty, dark haired society girl' climb to nearly 3,000 feet and loop the loop, then plunge into a spinning dive.

Like Rosemary Rees, Sale-Barker was not ‘rich', but neither was she ‘poor'. She was the daughter of a doctor and an actress and lived in one of the smart new mansion blocks behind Sloane Square. As a teenager she was such a fine and fearless skier that her winters in the Bernese Oberland were sponsored by the
Kandahar Ski Club (of which Lord Knebworth was president). Since she did not have to pay to learn to fly either, the question of whether she would have been able to afford to on her own did not arise. As the diarist for the
Daily Sketch
put it after a visit to Hanworth aerodrome, she simply ‘excels in all manly sports'. She could not quite love them all equally, however. After that first solo loop and spin she confessed to finding flying even more exciting than skiing, which might have dulled her competitive edge on snow. In 1931, after years as the dominant women's racer in the Alps, she lost the women's downhill at Mürren. And when she came into an inheritance at the age of twenty-one, she spent it on a Gipsy Moth.

Friends started calling her Wendy, after Wendy in Peter Pan, who learns to fly. For her own part she started whispering about South Africa. She told her mother she planned to spend Christmas in Cape Town with their friends Lord and Lady Clarendon – not to make any headlines, but as a holiday. Her mother forbade it unless she could find a chaperone. Audrey produced one in the form of Miss Joan Page, fellow pilot and daughter of Sir Arthur Page, Chief Justice of Burma.

When the two young pilots realised that Sir Arthur and Lady Page would be passing the South of France in late October 1932 in a steamer bound for Rangoon, they had the makings of a plan: a surprise call on Joan's parents in Marseille, a stimulating aerial potter down the Nile in the cool of the Egyptian autumn, and a warm African Christmas in relative comfort (Lord Clarendon was South Africa's Governor General). If the skiing season still held any appeal after all that, there would, thanks to the invigorating miracle of private aviation, be plenty of time to get back for it.

Audrey and Joan told Mrs Sale-Barker not to breathe a word of their plan to anyone. They told the chaps from the
Express
, the
Mail
and the
Mirror
to keep quiet too. The whole thing was secret, they insisted. It was a holiday, after all. No records would be broken and in any case they loathed publicity. Even so, someone managed to persuade them to pose for a cheerful-looking
pre-flight portrait in front of Audrey's new machine at Heston, and the papers entirely misunderstood their intentions with regard to coverage. Their ‘secret' trip, less ambitious and ostensibly less newsworthy than those of Amy Johnson, Lady Bailey, Lady Heath and others before them – except, of course, in being secret – was extensively reported from day one.

Even the
Tatler
columnist known as ‘Eve' betrayed them: ‘I was sworn to secrecy,' she wrote as the agencies flashed back the news of their safe departure from Marseille for Corsica: ‘[Miss Sale-Barker] particularly dislikes the publicity given to women, just because they happen to be women, for attempting or accomplishing feats which would be quite ordinary for a man.' But Eve could not resist plugging someone so ‘eminently paragraph-worthy', and added that Sale-Barker was ‘an extremely attractive person with a lovely figure' who ‘happens to be one of the best ski runners in the world'. The
Tatler
added that Sale-Barker hoped to be back in time for the season at Mürren.

But she didn't make it. All went well as far as Benghazi. The women put in an 800-mile day worthy of Johnson herself, following the Libyan coast and descending, tired and after dark, towards Cairo's Almaza aerodrome. The runway was unlit. Sale-Barker was at the controls in the Moth's rear seat. According to one report, the ground crew heard the engine and scrambled to create a makeshift flarepath with car headlights. Sale-Barker skilfully swerved to avoid a house seconds before landing but came to rest against a windsock pole, which put the aircraft out of action for at least four days.

The Cairo press corps picked up the story. They reported – or concocted – a rumour that the RAF had agreed in advance to escort the defenceless young aviators across the Sudanese desert to Khartoum, and had then reneged on the plan. True to their professed abhorrence of publicity, Page and Sale-Barker never explained how they got to Khartoum. At Malakal, Nairobi and Bulawayo they had no comment for reporters. (Even on her return to England six months later, all Sale-Barker would tell
Aeroplane
magazine was that the question of RAF desert escorts was never discussed.) Into this news vacuum an increasingly intrigued and desperate Fleet Street inserted at least three male chaperones, among them a mysterious American pickle salesman who took Page's seat from Wadi Halfa on the upper Nile to Khartoum; a second passenger for Audrey from Khartoum to Juba; and a third man to accompany Miss Page upriver by boat.

When they reached Cape Town the ‘Air Girls' continued their stonewalling. In the absence of usable quotes, one paper printed a quite pitiful fictional transcript of the encounter that ended with:

But it was not quite over. The press left Page and Sale-Barker alone for Christmas at the Governor General's Cape Town residence, then picked up the story again as they began their homeward journey. For 1,200 miles it was uneventful. The first indication that something was wrong reached London in time for the evening papers on 16 January 1933 in an excited Reuters cable datelined Nairobi and with almost limitless scope for embellishment.

In this version, from the
Birmingham Mail
, the lead pilot then hurtled past the the dauntless women, forty yards from their wing-tip but heading already in the opposite direction and waving frantically at them to follow him,

Overnight, in Fleet Street, Nairobi and along the thousands of miles of fizzing telegraph wires between them, all hell broke loose. For any ‘special correspondent' brave enough to head out into the bush south of Nairobi, or, better, to pretend he had, there would be scoops aplenty. By the morning of the 17th, the
Daily Mail
had the stricken Moth upside down, a complete wreck and definitely ‘Among Lions' – the aircraft having been spotted in ‘desolate wilds' just forty miles from Nairobi by a Captain Tanner of the Rhodesian Aviation Company. That night, the London
Evening Standard
put the pilots – almost anticlimactically – in a Nairobi nursing home where they were said to be ‘very cheerful'.

At least Sale-Barker had a badly gashed head. Page, with a compound fracture to the leg, had been carried by her rescuers through two miles of rough scrub to a waiting aircraft on a stretcher improvised from a section of the wrecked plane's wing. The rescue plane had flown her to Nairobi and landed ‘by the light of flares'.

The
Express
had been biding its time – but not wasting it. The following morning it surpassed itself, and the competition, with an eyewitness exclusive that occupied most of the inside front page. It was the pilots' ‘Own Story of Their Jungle Ordeal'; it told of ‘Food and Water Exhausted' and a ‘Poison Arrow Threat'; of the Moth flying smack into a hillside and somersaulting to a halt in
the dark; of the ‘notorious Lions' only a mile away. And above it all, the headline: ‘Injured Girl Flyers Send lipstick SOS.'

According to the
Express
, after two hideously painful nights without food, water or human contact, Miss Sale-Barker spotted a Masai herdsman who was so alarmed by this pale apparition that he stopped her approach by threatening to use his bow and arrow.