Pauline Gower by Alison Hill

Author:Alison Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

NO. 5 FERRY POOL HATFIELD

These first eight women were billeted around the Hatfield Aerodrome and were based in a small wooden hut on the airfield. It was a notoriously freezing winter, and they were flying open-cockpit training aircraft, mostly up to Scotland. Long arduous trips, which could take several days in bad weather, interspersed with short delivery trips to Lyneham in Wiltshire or Kemble in the Cotswolds. They would only know on the day where they were going and initially Pauline took details over the phone, before a more established system was in place. They had fur-lined Irvin jackets and leather flying boots, and they certainly needed them that winter! Yet every plane was delivered safely.

In her autobiography Happy to Fly, Ann Welch clearly recalled her first day in the ATA:

I reported to No. 5 ATA Ferry Pool at Hatfield on a cold 11 November 1940 to find the aerodrome and buildings dulled with camouflage and netting. After a brief, apprehensive interview with the famous Pauline Gower, Commandant of the unit, I was handed over to Margaret Cunnison for a flight test on a Tiger Moth.

She goes on to describe the early days, the freezing open-cockpit flights, the hazards of following another pilot on her first few long trips. And the potential dangers wrought by weather, always waiting in the wings.

Rosemary Rees felt the cold to an extreme and would layer on her coats and scarves to fend off chills. Before the war she had even made a ‘coat’ for her plane, but that was more to fend off pigeon droppings in the hangar. But on those endless trips up to Lossiemouth or Cumbria, especially that long, hard winter, she was often so cold she had to be helped stiff and freezing from the plane. She would send someone else to drop off her chit, or delivery papers, but after a while the duty officer demanded to see ‘that fellow Rees’ in person, so she had to take off one of her layers in order to climb down from the cockpit, thus revealing her gender. Tea was the eternal saviour, there for comfort, but mostly a welcome means to defrost your hands. That and the electric fire that was usually turned on in the worst of the winter weather, just as the taxi Anson arrived with a group of frozen pilots. It was always a team effort.

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