It is three-thirty A M,
twenty-first of April, 1934, Marseilles aerodrome and though she has called,
‘Contact!’ none of the ground crew will swing New Zealand aviatrix Jean
Batten’s propeller for her. The Meteorological Officer has begged her to delay
as the weather reports for the Mediterranean are discouraging to say the
least. So the ground crew lined up
as she ran up G-AARB’s engine and linked arms to prevent her from taking off.
Batten killed the engine, went and
spoke to the men.
Somehow Batten persuaded the very
alarmed Marseilles ground crew to unlink their arms. But they were so concerned
for the welfare of this beautiful young woman they refused to help her by
swinging the prop. So she did it herself and bolted into the Gipsy Moth to take
to the air.
With uncharacteristic humility she
later confessed she should never have defied a Meteorological Officer and never
did so again.
She flew into a headwind that made
every mile she had to fly to get to Rome fatally slow; storms meant she could
not cross the mountains of Corsica and fog prevented her turning back.
In any case turning back would have
meant humiliation for her and, probably worse, have disappointed her mother.
Mrs Batten was and remained the overwhelmingly significant other in Jean
Batten’s life.
The flying time from Marseilles to
Rome was supposed to have been five hours. She had been flying all day and now
it was dark again. She was almost out of fuel. She nursed the faithful G-AARB
on. Lights! It was the Ostia seaplane base. She persuaded the Moth on by
putting the plane’s nose up in order to drain the remaining petrol from the
tank. Much was at stake.
On her previous attempt to fly to
Australia Batten had crashed at Karachi when the connecting rods snapped and
penetrated the crank case of her first plane, the Gipsy Moth G-AALG. The plane
was a virtual write-off. She was stranded with no money and no prospects.
Staring our of the darkened hotel room to which she had been confined for three
days for concussion, utterly despondent and seemingly without recourse to
assistance, Batten saw a local man beating something white against a white
stone in the courtyard below – he was washing her flying suit. This vision
replenished her resolve.
She had the tropical frock she
carried ironed, applied lipstick and went to see the Castrol Oil rep in
Karachi. Her first attempt at the England Australia flight the previous year in
the ill-fated G-AALG had attracted attention. She had become the first woman to
fly solo non-stop from England to Rome. On the strength of that, Castrol
coughed up the money in Karachi and she was soon on a ship back to England,
determined to make it this time.
And here she was again, dazzled by
the blurred lights of Rome after the darkness of the endless Mediterranean, now
completely out of fuel, gliding through the pouring rain, scanning the dark for
some vacancy where a plane might be put down. What was that nothingness over
there? It would have to do.
She manoeuvred the not very
manoeuvrable Gipsy Moth in for a landing on whatever lay in the darkness below.
Suddenly she saw a red light above her. Above
her? Then another and another. Radio masts. With astonishing skill she
slipped the plane between the masts, high tension wires and trees, floated it
down to a landing. It rushed forward – towards a river, hit the bank and went
up on its nose.
Batten was thrown into the
windshield with great force but extracted herself from the cockpit, rushed to
the tail, jumped up, caught the tail strut and pulled G-AARB back onto the
ground. Men were rushing towards her with lanterns. What were they saying? She
could not leave the plane – her plane. She had to get it repaired and into the
air as soon as possible, she had to get through Southeast Asia ahead of the
monsoons which were imminent.
They said, ‘Come, come Signorina,
you are lucky not to be drowned in the Tiber.’ When one of them, a hunchback,
promised to stay and guard the plane she agreed to leave with them.
They took her to a shed with a big
red cross painted on it. She realised she was covered in blood and still
bleeding. What was wrong with her mouth?
A doctor came and stapled her lower
lip, which had been torn almost off, back on.
An old lady came and persuaded her
into sleep. It was after midnight.
At first light she was out
inspecting her plane. Its undercarriage had been torn apart and the lower wings
looked very bad.
At the Rome Aero Club they told her
they were beyond repair. No, they had none to lend her. There were no Moth
spares in Rome. She should just rest and go back to London on the train. She
might be able to sell the wreckage for spare parts after she’d freighted it
back. Not to worry.
Still in shock, she began to drift
around the place. Did they mind if she had a look in the hangars?
‘No, of course Signorina, then we
will go to the club house and have lunch. The food is good, the wine will make
you better.’
It was not a golden shaft of light
from some fortuitous hole in the roof which led Batten to her discovery but
obdurate determination.
‘And what is in this?’
It was a dusty crate in a dark
corner. It could only have contained wings.
‘Oh yes, them. But they need
repairing and he will never lend them to you.’
It took two lunches but he did,
driving a hard bargain. She must pay two thirds of the cost of reconditioning
the wings and they must be returned immediately she arrived in England.
This was the pivotal moment in
Batten’s life.
She had already failed once. She
was not like the others, rich and well connected. She was a colonial struggling
to make ends meet in England. Many would have considered her prospects for a
career in aviation well and truly over. Amy was doing well, Amelia was doing
very well. What had Jean Batten done? Crashed in Karachi.
The Italian Air Ministry leant Jean
Batten two compression legs for the undercarriage. Six days later, as soon the
staple had been taken out of her lower lip, she flew G-AARB back to Brooklands,
her home aerodrome, returned the borrowed lower wings, persuaded her boyfriend
(who thought he was her fiancé) to lend her his wings and two days later took
off again for Australia.
Yes, she was too late and the first
monsoons caught her. But somehow she got through and dashed on just ahead of
them to Darwin then beyond their reach across the inscrutable Australian
Outback which had reduced Amy to tears and utter exhaustion so that she crashed
in front of the crowd waiting for her in Brisbane. Even Kingsford-Smith had
been lost in the Outback.
Though she always denied her
intention had been to break Johnson’s record, Batten did so - by four days.
Then she flew back to London, the
first woman to make the more difficult return flight.
Jean Batten was now very, very
famous and had the resources to buy the Percival Gull in which she set, amongst
many other records, the England/New Zealand which stood for an astonishing
forty-four years and in which she searched in vain for Beverley Shepherd.
Shepherd had persuaded the scheduled co-pilot to let him fly the Stinson
Airliner from Brisbane to Sydney so he could meet Batten at the wharf when the
SS Awatea berthed that day after its Tasman crossing. Sydney society
expected them to marry. Shepherd was one of those killed in the Stinson crash.
Batten exhausted herself in reconnaissance flights for the missing plane. Then
on her mother’s orders pulled herself together by planning another attempt on
the Australia – Britain record. She secured it.
Aviators who had known her spoke of
her long after her decline into obscurity as ‘the most brilliant’ of the pioneering
aviators. Her abilities are now beyond imagining but her greatest moment gives
some idea of her chief attribute – dauntless mettle.
Ian MacNeill
article derived from Batten’s book Alone in the Sky and Ian Mackersey’s
biography Jean Batten Garbo of the Skies.
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