Skilled aviator who flew Spitfires as a wartime “Atagirl”
Mary Ellis 1917-2018
Mary Ellis, who has died aged 101, was one of the last surviving women to have served in the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) during the Second World War. The “Atagirls” (motto: Anything to Anywhere) didn’t take part in combat duties: their task was to deliver new aircraft to the front line, and fly damaged ones in for repair. This work required considerable skill and courage: flying without radio (to keep the airwaves free) ATA pilots had to find their way using only a map, compass and stopwatch, often in perilous conditions. Around 15 female ATA pilots were killed in the line of duty (including the pioneering aviator Amy Johnson). Ellis flew 76 different types of plane, from Spitfires and Hurricanes to Wellington bombers, usually solo. She endured two crash landings; narrowly avoided being shot down by “friendly fire” over Bournemouth; and over Birmingham, had a close encounter with a Luftwaffe pilot. He flew alongside her for some time, then waved, and peeled away.
Born Mary Wilkins in 1917, she grew up on a farm in Oxfordshire, and discovered her love of flying aged eight, when she was taken to Sir Alan Cobham’s airshow. Her father let her go up in an Avro 504, a First World War biplane, sitting on cushions in the rear cockpit. “From that moment I was hooked,” she said. She took flying lessons while still at school, and by the late 1930s was flying BA Swallows for fun. When war broke out, civilian flying was banned. She assumed her airborne days were over – until she heard a radio ad, calling for anyone with flying experience to join the ATA, to free up combat pilots for combat duty. (The men who flew with the ATA were pilots who’d been debarred from RAF service by reason of age or disability: they named themselves the Ancient and Tattered Airmen.) Admitted in October 1941, Ellis trained in Tiger Moths before being sent to an allfemale base at Hamble, near the Supermarine factory in Southampton, to learn to fly fighter planes and bombers. It was there that she flew a Spitfire for the first time: “As I taxied to the runway, it took only a few seconds for me to feel completely at home in this beautiful aircraft,” she recalled years later. “I was already in heaven before I’d taken off.” From that day, “I felt my life was one driven by adrenaline and purpose”. In 1943, said The Daily Telegraph, Sir Stafford Cripps agreed that the female pilots were doing the same job, and taking the same risks, as the men in the ATA, and should receive equal pay. Even so, people were sometimes surprised to see women in the cockpit. Once, as Ellis clambered out of a new Wellington bomber that she had just delivered to an RAF airfield in East Anglia, the controller came over and demanded to know where the pilot was. “I am the pilot,” she told him – but he refused to believe her until he’d searched the plane.
By the time the ATA was disbanded in 1945, Ellis had clocked up over 1,100 hours of flying time. She was then briefly seconded to the RAF, to fly Meteor jets. After the War, she moved to the Isle of Wight, where she ran Sandown Airport and married a fellow pilot, Donald Ellis. Small (five foot two) and lean, she stood ramrod straight, even when she was 100. By then, she and other surviving Atagirls had begun to be celebrated for their war-work. To mark her centenary, she was taken up in a two-seater Spitfire that, some 70 years earlier, she had delivered to Brize Norton, and briefly took the controls. “Wizard! This is wizard,” she cried, as the plane soared over West Sussex. Last month, she was invited to attend the premiere in London of a new documentary film, Spitfire, in which she appears. At the end, she was given a standing ovation.