Spitfire Women of World War II. Giles Whittell

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      The ice hockey international and ‘Mayfair Minx’ Mona Friedlander told the journalist from the Daily Mail at the photocall that she had taken up flying in 1936 as a cure for boredom. Over the next three years, she gained a private and commercial pilot’s licence, a navigator’s licence and the staggering wage of £10 an hour towing targets for anti-aircraft gunnery units.

      Winnie Crossley, ‘party-minded’ to her friends but poker-faced behind the tea table in the Hatfield photograph, had what was then a unique claim to fame. Her father, a Dr Harrison, had delivered the world’s first surviving naturally conceived quadruplets in St Neots, Cambridgeshire, in 1935. Winnie had flown him there. She had also flown five seasons as a stunt pilot for C. W. A. Scott’s air circus.

      Next, but curiously absent in other photos of the First Eight, as if airbrushed out, or called away or gone to powder her nose, was Marion Wilberforce, daughter of the ninth Laird of Boyndlie, graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, mountaineer, ju jitsu enthusiast and all-round tomboy. This did not mean she was unable to attract members of the opposite sex, as a deportment teacher had once warned her. But before her fiancé would commit himself to marrying her in 1932, he spent six months in a monastery to be sure he did not want to go into the Catholic priesthood instead. Marion was waiting for him at the monastery gates when he came out.

      By this time Marion was the proud owner of a De Havilland Cirrus Moth. She would later upgrade this to a Hornet and use it to carry livestock to and from her Essex farm at Nevendon Manor, and to explore Europe with friends or by herself, sometimes roaming as far as Budapest. She had logged 900 hours before joining the ATA.

      Margaret Cunnison, the daughter of a Glasgow University professor, had earned her private licence at eighteen and worked before the war as an instructor at the Renfrew aerodrome on Clydeside. Gabrielle Patterson, too, was a flying instructor – the first British woman to earn an instructor’s licence. She was married with a young son, and came from Walsall in the West Midlands.

      All but one of the sitters for this portrait of uncommon womanhood survived the war. The one who didn’t was the one who most obviously refuses to say cheese, sitting side-on to the camera and staring straight ahead.

      This is Margaret Fairweather – the Cold Front – supremely capable, supremely self-effacing, and the epitome of what Pop d’Erlanger and Pauline Gower had been looking for in their First Eight. It did not hurt Margaret that she was born into the governing class. Not only was her father, Viscount Runciman of Doxford, a frontbench Liberal politician who had entered the House of Commons aged twenty-nine by defeating Winston Churchill for the constituency of Oldham; her mother also entered the Commons in 1928, making them the first husband-and-wife team of MPs in the history of Westminster. Her brother, Air Commodore the Hon. Leslie Runciman, and managing director of BOAC, was the person who had authorised d’Erlanger to set up the ATA. Even so, it seems that Margie preferred to get ahead the hard way. She had dropped out of Cambridge in order to study singing in Paris, but never sang professionally. She married at twenty-four and had a daughter, but later divorced. At thirty-five she was an upper-class single mum with means, motive and a serious case of wanderlust. What else could she do but learn to fly? Like Amy Johnson six years earlier, she even set her heart on soloing to Australia. But having divorced the son of one baronet, she married the son of another and altered her travel plans.

      In the summer of 1938, by way of a honeymoon, Margie and Douglas Fairweather flew to Prague to meet her father, who was trying unsuccessfully to mediate between the German and Czech governments to forestall war. On the way back they gave themselves an extensive aerial tour of Germany, noting the locations of new airfields being built for the Luftwaffe in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, and hiding the details in jaunty letters home in a code of Margaret’s own devising. The letters were addressed to her younger brother, the historian Steven Runciman, who gave them back to her on her return. He never found out what she did with them. ‘It was of course pure espionage and entirely hush-hush,’ he wrote, years later, in response to an inquiring letter from Margaret’s daughter by her first husband, Ann. ‘But I suppose they may have acquired some useful information.’

      The amateur spies became professional pilots, instructing at an airfield outside Glasgow. Their personalities complemented each other. Douglas was eleven years older than Margie, and as ebullient as she was reserved. As a late convert to aviation he was also an ardent believer in its usefulness for his peacetime job as a patent agent. He would shuttle between client inventors in his own plane in double-breasted blue suits rendered light grey by a steady rain of cigarette ash. For a year or so, life at the Fairweather home in Stirlingshire, and in the skies above it, could not easily have been improved on. But then Ann had to start at boarding school in Oxford and a war that everybody knew was coming, came.

      Perhaps the reason for the bleak look on Margie Fairweather’s face at the Hatfield tea party was the prospect of a dangerous new life, apart from her beloved daughter and husband. But it might also have been the knowledge that a golden age of flying had passed into history, and so had the world that made it possible.