Britain’s last ‘Atagirl’
Last year when Mary Ellis turned 100, she received a birthday card from the Queen. She tucked it away on a bookshelf in her home on the Isle of Wight, one of the few acknowledgments to age.
“I didn’t want to celebrate it,” she deadpanned. “I’m trying to grow old gracefully.”
Graceful, formidable and with a wickedly dry sense of humour: all that and more describes Britain’s last surviving female Second World War Spitfire pilot, who died on Tuesday at the age of 101.
Mary Ellis possessed remarkable poise and powers of recollection and sat ramrod straight as she recounted her wartime tales over tea and rock cake during an interview last year.
She claimed to still have scars on her face from when she once crash-landed an aircraft into a field of cattle, but her skin remained unblemished by age. In fact, the only sign of any physical decline was that her hearing was beginning to fade. Hardly surprising, considering the roaring engines of the 76 different types of aircraft she flew during her military and civilian career. Mary Ellis didn’t just love flying, she loved flying fast. Spitfires, Hurricanes, 47 different Wellington bombers — she piloted them all single-handedly. She proudly declared she was also the only woman left alive in the world to have flown a Gloster Meteor, the first jet aircraft to enter service with the Royal Air Force.
Following the war, she became the commandant of Sandown Airport on the Isle of Wight where she met her husband, Donald. “He was a gliding instructor,” she recalled. “I told him I didn’t like gliders because they got in the way of airplanes.”
They married in 1961 and designed and built their home together on the edge of the airport where she lived to the end.
Her niece, Rosemarie Martin, 78, who was her closest confidante in her final years (Donald died in 2009 and they had no children) said: “She was energetic until the last and died in her home — and that was all she ever wanted.”
Her house contained a treasure-trove of memorabilia from her flying days, including her old log books and Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) jacket with two gold stripes on the shoulder denoting her final rank of first officer.
When she pulled the flying jacket on it still fitted her as snugly.
During the height of the war in 1941 she heard an advertisement on the wireless requesting anybody with flying experience to join the burgeoning ranks of the ATA, to help it deliver aircraft to RAF bases across the country.
She had twice been airborne — once aged eight when Sir Alan Cobham’s Flying Circus rolled into rural Oxfordshire where she lived, and later as a schoolgirl where she persuaded her teachers to allow her to take flying lessons rather than play hockey. Her family were farmers, but somehow she said she had flying in the blood. Once accepted she became one of the “Atagirls”: pioneers not just for the aircraft they flew but in the manner they reshaped British society.
They were not even allowed radio — to keep the airwaves clear — and yet mastered their fighter planes as well as any RAF ace.
The first time she ever flew a Spitfire was when she was asked to deliver one from South Marston to RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire, 12 miles away. When the ground crew discovered it was her first mission they responded with horror. “They thought I was this schoolgirl but I wasn’t worried,” she said. “I took off and thought, ‘this is absolute heaven.’”
Flying a Spitfire one day over Birmingham she crossed paths with a Luftwaffe pilot.
“I didn’t wear anything on my head so he knew I was a woman,” she said. “I waved to him and he waved back. Eventually he just peeled off.”