The female WWII pilot who risked life and limb
As part of an elite wartime flying squad, Mary Ellis, now 100, risked her life delivering aircraft to RAF bases. Joe Shute reports
Mary Ellis was only eight years old when Sir Alan Cobham’s Flying Circus rolled into rural Oxfordshire where she lived. The circus, which toured Britain in the 1930s displaying the glorious new aviation machines of the era to a breathless public, was offering pleasure flights and Mary managed to persuade her father to let her clamber aboard.
“I was so small they had to strap me in with cushions,” she recalls. “But when we went up it was lovely.”
Little did the farmer’s daughter know, as the engine roared and the green fields spiralled below her, that she had discovered the calling that would come to define her life.
Mary, who turned 100 this year, is one of the last surviving members of the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA)
– the female pilots who risked life and limb delivering Spitfires, Hurricanes and bombers to RAF bases in the Second World War.
Nicknamed the “Atagirls”, they were pioneers not just for the aircraft they flew but in the manner they re-shaped society. They mastered their fighter planes and bombers as well as any RAF ace. In 1943, as a result of a campaign led by Irene Dunlop, a Tory MP, the women of the ATA became among the first in the country to achieve equal pay with their male counterparts. Today, at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, the Royal British Legion is celebrating 100 years of women in the British military. The event is being held to coincide with the centenary of the formation of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (the first time women were formally enrolled in the Armed Forces) and to honour the valour of all those who served in their footsteps.
“I don’t feel proud in particular but I still can’t quite believe everything I did,” she says. “I came so close to death so many times flying these fast aeroplanes. I still don’t know why I’m here.”
Mary Ellis lives in a beautiful house on the edge of the Isle of Wight’s Sandown airport, which she ran as commandant after the war. Her conservatory, where we’re sitting, is stocked with a fascinating array of memorabilia from her flying days, including her log books and ATA jacket with two gold stripes on the shoulder denoting her final rank of First Officer. A birthday card from the Queen occupies pride of place. She possesses remarkable poise and powers of recollection for her age, sitting up ramrod straight as she tells her war stories.
Her husband, Donald, a pilot whom she married in 1961, died a decade ago and they had no children. Her sister and three brothers have also died. “I have no family left,” she says.
The second time Mary took to the skies was at school where, due to her unwillingness to join in with the other girls playing hockey, her teachers agreed to allow her to have flying lessons at nearby Witney Airfield.
The first plane she was taken up in was a Tiger Moth. She then honed her skills in a yellow British Aircraft Swallow. No sooner had she got her licence than war broke out and all civilian flights were cancelled, and Mary returned to the family farm. “I thought that was the end of my flying,” she said. But a few years later she was listening to the wireless at home when an advertisement came on requesting anybody with flying experience to join the burgeoning ranks of the ATA.
It was 1941, shortly after the Battle of Britain: the race for aerial supremacy between the RAF and German air force was hotting up and the ATA’S male pilots were being transferred into the fighting ranks.
“I wrote off and they invited me in for an interview,” Mary recalls. “I did a circuit of Hatfield Aerodrome [in Hertfordshire] in a Tiger Moth and they said, ‘My goodness, we want you immediately, can you come?’ I had to prepare my parents for the shock.”
Mary was posted to the ATA HQ at White Waltham near Maidenhead, Berks. Her job was to collect aeroplanes – often fresh off the factory floor – and fly them to RAF bases all over the UK. The catch was they were not allowed any communication equipment in their aircraft in order to keep the radio airwaves free for the RAF. As a result, ATA pilots were forced to memorise the contours of the ground and fly by sheer intuition. In total, 15 ATA pilots, one in 10 of the women, were killed, including some of Mary’s close friends. “There was a war on so we were hardened to the fact we had to go on,” she says.
Mary and her fellow pilots were billeted near the airbase with civilian families. Each morning they would collect a “chitty” instructing them what plane they would be flying and where. Her immaculate log book records show sometimes she would fly up to five times a day.
Mary says she flew 76 different type of aircraft, including Spitfires, Hurricanes and Wellington bombers (the latter she once landed at an airbase where the male crew were so incredulous a woman could fly it single-handedly they searched the plane). She similarly recalls with a smile the first time she flew a Spitfire from South Marston to Lyneham in Wiltshire. “One of the crew asked how many I had flown and I told him it was the first one,” she says. “He was horrified that this schoolgirl was flying an aeroplane she had never seen. I taxied out and thought ‘This is absolute heaven’, did several manoeuvres and off I went.”
While she never had to use the parachute she carried, there were some hair-raising moments, and she crash-landed on more than one occasion. Once, flying in thick fog, Mary and another pilot both touched their Spitfires down on an airstrip at the same time in different directions, almost crashing head on. “It doesn’t bear thinking about but we somehow didn’t hit each other,” she shudders.
Another time she found herself over the Midlands in a Spitfire alongside a Luftwaffe fighter pilot. “I looked out through the window and saw this aeroplane with a swastika on it. I didn’t wear anything on my head so he knew I was a female. I waved to him and he waved back. Eventually he just peeled off.”
Mary said she and her fellow Atagirls never regarded themselves as pioneers. “I suppose we were changing things,” she says. “In your early 20s and when there is a war on you don’t think too much about anything else apart from flying.”
Like many veterans, it is only in recent years that she has started to open up about her wartime experiences. Earlier this year, a plaque dedicated to Mary and another Oxfordshire ATA pilot, Molly Rose (who died in 2016), was installed at RAF Brize Norton.
Mary was flown over especially and even in her 100th year still gets taken up in Second World War aircraft by volunteer pilots. “Being in those planes again is just lovely,” she says.