WAAF radio operator turned glamorous BOAC air hostess
FAITH JENK, who has died aged 96, served as a WAAF radio officer during the Second World War and subsequently became one of the first postwar air hostesses recruited by the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC).
Faith Sisman, as she then was, enlisted in the Women’s Auxiliary
Air Force in September 1940 at the height of the Battle of Britain, and initially served as a radio operator on the fighter base at Hornchurch, Essex. From March 1941 she worked at various Signals Wings before spending seven months training radio operators. In January 1944 she was commissioned as a section officer.
For almost two years she served at HQ No 10 (Fighter) Group at Rudloe Manor near Bath, in the underground control centre which was responsible for controlling fighters in the southwest of England. In 1946 she moved to Bletchley Park and was released from the WAAF in November 1946.
In 1948 she joined BOAC on a salary of six pounds a week. Good-looking and glamorous in her uniform, over the next decade she became the corporation’s most photographed, interviewed and experienced air hostess.
The immediate postwar years were a time of luxury air travel with levels of cabin service resembling those of a high-class hotel, but for the aircrews it was hard work. A transatlantic flight could take 17 hours; the journey from London to Sydney took 72 hours (with stops) for the passengers, while the crews did it in stages spread over 18 days.
As new routes opened up and new aircraft were introduced, celebrities and royalty took to the air. Faith was the senior stewardess on many such flights. She was on duty when the Prime Minister Anthony Eden took a break in Jamaica at the height of the Suez Crisis, and when the Queen was on board Faith tried on the monarch’s sable coat at the back of the plane in her cramped cabin.
In a 1956 radio broadcast soon after she made her 150th Atlantic crossing, Faith Sisman described the role of an air hostess: “She must be a Jill of all trades. She must learn how to serve a seven-course dinner to 60 people from a galley four foot by six: open a magnum of champagne with a deft flick of the wrist: make beds, wash up, tend to babies’ needs, and help mothers amuse their restless children. I have – on a mother’s insistence – pulled a child’s tooth.”
In a newspaper article she recalled that trainee air hostesses had to become experts on “air sea rescue, first aid crash-landing drill as well as what fish are safe to eat, what jungle plants are useful and how to keep people alive if they are stranded in the Arctic”.
Once she even allowed herself to be “sawn in half ” at 19,000ft, by a conjuror passenger to amuse the children on a flight to Hong Kong.
Faith Mary Sisman was born on August 25 1923 in Calcutta, where her father was working in the oil industry. The family moved to London, where 17-year-old Faith lied about her age to join the WAAF. At the end of the war she did resettlement work in Germany before joining BOAC.
Her career as an air hostess ended after her marriage in 1959 to Jørgen Jenk, a decorated Danish war hero, with whom she lived in India, Switzerland and America, before returning to England, where she enjoyed a second career working for the NHS.
Her husband died in 1988 and in 2000 she married Ian Jeffrey, a former BOAC pilot, who died in 2011. She is survived by three sons and a daughter from her first marriage.
Faith Jenk, born August 25 1923, died October 18 2019