Atagirl! Farewell Mary Ellis, last of the RAF’S wartime female flying aces
Last summer I crossed the Solent from Southampton to the Isle of Wight to meet Mary Ellis. She greeted me with a gentle ticking off, I recall, for fussing with the handle of the conservatory door.
A few months earlier she had turned 100 and on the bookshelf was a birthday card from the Queen. “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.
She possessed remarkable poise and powers of recollection and sat ramrod straight as she recounted her wartime tales over tea and rock cake.
She claimed to still have scars on her face from when she once crashlanded 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 told me 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 RAF.
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 aeroplanes.”
They married in 1961 and designed and built their beautiful home together on the edge of the airport where she lived to the end.
Her niece Rosemarie Martin, 78, who was Mary’s closest confidant in her final years (Donald died in 2009 and they had no children) yesterday told me: “She was energetic until the last and died in her home – and that was all she ever wanted.”
She will be cremated and her ashes placed alongside her husband’s at Springwood Woodland Cemetery in Sandown – fittingly, below the airport’s flight path.
Her house contained a treasuretrove 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 as when she was in her early 20s.
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 re-shaped 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’.”
She abhorred violence and admitted it was a relief never to be called into a dog fight. 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.”
Mary’s passing means the country has lost its last three “Spitfire Women”
‘They thought I was this schoolgirl but I wasn’t worried. I took off and thought, this is absolute heaven’
in as many years – Molly Rose died aged 95 in 2016 and Joy Lofthouse last December at the age of 94.
The deaths of her friends and family over the years took their toll, yet Mary was determined to enjoy life to the very end.
Every Thursday afternoon, after catching up on correspondence, she and her niece would swap stories over a bottle of white wine and a bowl of crisps.
Even in her final month she remained as busy as ever. On July 9 she attended the premiere of the film Spitfire at the Curzon in Mayfair, London, and wore her old uniform to walk the RAF blue carpet.
When her name was mentioned at the end she received a standing ovation and at 1am was still going strong at the after-show party at the RAF Club.
In his book about pioneering military jet pilots, Tom Wolfe, the US author, called it simply: The Right Stuff.
Whatever it was, Mary Ellis had it in buckets.