Thanks for posting that, sad to learn of her passing, but a life lived.
ATA members were certainly an extraordinary group of people, all individuals barred from combat service due to contemporary attitudes towards age, ‘disability’ and gender. Whilst class analysis is always interesting and pertinent it’s no more so than race and gender; at the time it wasn’t enough simply to be wealthy if one wished to live a full life, ‘tho, as ever, it helped. It’s often forgotten how many appalling values had an ordinary, common currency in the UK of the 30s & 40s: snobbery, sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia. Aside from a desire to make a contribution, many in the ATA may have felt that they had something more personal to prove which found expression through their service.
Certainly the women had to fight very hard against ingrained prejudices at all levels in order to be permitted to do the job they did so well. They accomplished this at some cost in lives lost and I imagine, for many, in their lives postwar. Attached are images from the contemporary logs of one such woman, Veronica Volkersz; wealthy, but a person who found expression through her ATA service that would very likely have eluded her simply because of gender. The entries for Aircraft Flown at the end of her Form 414 for 1945-46 vividly illustrate the wide range of types routinely flown by all ATA pilots.
– and on September 15th 1945, Ms. Volkersz very quietly made history as the first woman anywhere in the world to fly an *operational* jet fighter, a thirty-minute flight in a Meteor III from the Gloster factory to RAF Molesworth, a small event touched on nicely in Giles Whittell’s recent book.
Clear skies.
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