On 9 January 1940, in the depths of a bitter winter and in the middle of the Phoney War, the office of Pop d’Erlanger contacted the news desks of the major Fleet Street titles, the BBC and most of the foreign newsreel companies represented in London to inform them of a ‘photographic opportunity’. The following day, members of the Air Transport Auxiliary would be available for pictures and to answer reasonable questions at the Hatfield aerodrome north of London (recently relinquished to the ATA for the duration of hostilities by Geoffrey de Havilland and his aircraft company). There would be aeroplanes. There would be take-offs and landings. And there would be a bevy of interesting young women in uniform.
For this unusual and welcome photocall – the country may have been at war but there was no fighting – the press turned out in force. They were not disappointed. Rumours that women were to be allowed to ferry RAF aircraft, albeit only low-performance machines such as Tiger Moths, had first surfaced at the beginning of December 1939 and been widely reported. D’Erlanger rightly considered it a sensitive subject and had released no details except the name of the commanding officer of the women’s section, Pauline Gower. Ever since, Fleet Street had been badgering him for more. Initially, there hadn’t been much more to give. It was not until 16 December that Gower had even invited candidates to lunch and a flight test at Whitchurch, where the first male recruits had been assessed three months earlier. Twelve of the country’s most experienced women pilots had attended, all with at least 500 hours in their logbooks, and from them eight were selected. Their names were kept under wraps over Christmas but come the New Year, d’Erlanger and Gower decided to relent.
Hatfield aerodrome had been owned and operated by De Havilland’s until the war, and had been chosen as headquarters of the women’s section because it was already home to many of the Moths they would be flying. The idea in inviting the press was to give them everything they wanted in one concentrated dose and hope they would be sated until something more momentous came along. In principle, it was a sound and modern strategy for managing the news. In practice it ignited a fascination with the women of the ATA that hardly faded throughout the war. To the chagrin of some of the male ATA pilots, who outnumbered the women by six to one, it also created an enduring public impression that this was an all-female outfit.
Luckily the First Eight had been well briefed and were cooperative. It was vital for both d’Erlanger and Gower that their new recruits struck the right balance between enthusiasm and seriousness – enthusiasm for a job that needed absolutely every hand on deck (including, as Gower later put it, ‘the hand that rocks the cradle’), and seriousness because the slightest hint of frivolity would bring down an avalanche of harrumphing from the air vice marshals who considered their aircraft the sacred preserve of men.
That balance was duly struck. One of the pilot-mannequins on 9 January described the demands of the photographers:
They said, ‘Pick up your parachutes and run to your aero planes.’
We said, ‘What, scramble? To Tiger Moths?’
They said, ‘Yes.’
And so we did. We ran in our new creaking flying suits and our new stiff fur-lined flying boots carrying our 30 lb parachutes. Then when we came panting back they said, ‘We didn’t get that very well, please do it again.’
They also wore their dress uniforms. The order of that day appears to have been an hour or two’s gallivanting in oversized greatcoats and Sidcot flying suits, followed by a change into the navy worsted suits and forage caps for which these women were to become famous. They posed, exhausted, one final time on a stone patio outside the aerodrome’s main building. In this picture, a classic of its kind, the pilots and the press reached a new and sullen equilibrium. In the background, the two propellers of a gawky De Havilland Flamingo point towards an opaque sky; a tractor nuzzles under its port wing. On the left, four of ‘the Eight’ sit demurely on a low wall. On the right, the remaining four, together with Gower, her adjutant and Lois Butler, sit in folding chairs round a trestle table laid with a white cloth and tea service. All but one of the group deign to look at the camera, but most of them do so with suspicion as well as weariness. If this is fame, they are determined not to look as if they care for it.
Only two raise anything like a smile. One of these is Joan Hughes: the youngest and least composed of the group, her hands next to her thighs on the wall. She is 5 foot 2 inches tall, 21 years old and has already been an instructor for three of them. In due course she will fly Lancasters to Lakenheath and a Tiger Moth under a bridge on the M40 as Lady Penelope’s stunt double in a 1968 Thunderbirds film. For now, she looks as if she is about to push herself up from the wall and make a playful run for the camera. The other smiler sits at the tea table with her hands on her lap and her right shoulder raised in something like a shrug. She is Rosemary Rees, acrobat and daughter of Sir John Rees, Bt, MP. She has short, dark curly hair and a wit that one of her operations officers says could ‘tear the husk of an argument or person with a very few words and leave the bare bones’.
Strictly speaking, Rees is more dancer than acrobat. Her only formal training to date, other than in the cockpit, has been at Mme Astafieva’s ballet studio in Chelsea. But unlike most of Mme Astafieva’s pupils, Rees has put her endless hours at the barre to commercial use. She has hit the road, touring Britain in the early 1930s with a kitschy review ensemble called ‘Catlin’s Royal Pier-rots’. She has been unmasked by her fellow performers as minor gentry, and nicknamed the ‘Bloody Duchess’ (mainly to give local reporters an angle). But even for toffs, membership of the Royal Pierrots requires acrobatics.
It was while dancing in Llandudno in the early summer of 1930 that Rose Rees became aware of Amy Johnson. ‘Wonderful Amy’ was the hit song of the season and it was played every night at high volume in the interval between the two halves of the Royal Pierrots’ show. ‘Amy, wonderful, Amy,’ went the refrain, ‘how can you blame me/For Loving you?/Believe me, Amy/You cannot blame me, Amy,/For falling in love with you.’
Eleven years later, Rees and Johnson were colleagues and comrades, both stuck in south-west Scotland in grim weather, waiting to fly south. Johnson was in Prestwick, at the Orangefield Hotel; Rees was in Dumfries. They had arranged that Johnson would pick Rees up if no taxi planes were moving from Dumfries, and apparently none was. So a call was booked to Prestwick to confirm that First Officer Mollison (Amy Johnson was still using her married name) would have to stop for a passenger en route to Kidlington as planned. But before the call went through the crew of an RAF Avro Anson walked into the watch office at Dumfries and offered Rees a lift.
‘So I cancelled my call and went with them,’ she told a stunned collection of women pilots later in the war. ‘I wonder what would have happened if I had got through, and she had picked me up … Poor Amy! How she must have hated not finding that hole in the clouds.’
Datelined ‘Somewhere in England’, newspaper articles about the First Eight began appearing on 10 January 1940. They stressed accomplishment and lineage, not looks, and accomplishment is what marked these women out. They were doers par excellence; action ladies in the Johnson mould. They had to be. Even for those with money, to amass at least 500 hours flying time as a woman took dedication bordering on obsession.
When Joan Hughes had her first flying lesson at