Not many women have ever been as brave and as beautiful as Maureen Dunlop, whose Second World War flying experience knocks the pioneering hops of her older near-contemporaries Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson into a cocked hat.

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Dunlop flew far faster planes than they did, including Spitfires, Lancasters, Hurricanes and Mosquitos, and proved the dream of Picture Post's photographer when, on emerging from the cockpit of a Fairey Barracuda, the sun on her hair, she made the cover shot that sold thousands of copies to an astonished world in autumn 1944.

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She was one of the 164 female members of the wartime Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), of which one in ten pilots died doing their duty of transporting planes between factories and military airfields. The women pilots shared equally in the losses – many having to call the "Mayfair 120" search, rescue and salvage number, or never being heard from again – but not in their pay-packets, until a Parliamentary campaign led by the Conservative MP (later Dame) Irene Ward late in the war achieved parity.

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Dunlop mastered the controls of 28 different single-engine and 10 multi-engine aircraft types, which also included the Hawker Typhoon, Hawker Tempest, Avro Anson, Mustang, Bristol Blenheim and Vickers Wellington.

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Dunlop, like many of her female colleagues, said she wished she could have flown in combat:

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"I thought it was the only fair thing.

Why should only men be killed?"

Maureen Dunlop, the second of three children of Eric Chase Dunlop, an Australian farm manager employed by a British company in Argentina, and his English wife, Jessimin May Williams, began flying at the age of 15, when she joined the Aeroclub Argentino. Two years later she had obtained her pilot's licence.

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Living with her parents, older sister Joan and younger brother Eric on estancias in Patagonia, she was educated by a governess and briefly attended St Hilda's College, an English school at Hurlingham in Buenos Aires.

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The example of her father's British military experience as a volunteer with the Royal Field Artillery in the First World War, together with an article in Flight magazine, inspired her to sail to England and offer her flying skills to the ATA.

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She came through the war uninjured, but once had to make a forced landing when a faulty engine developed heavy vibration (an incident for which she was absolved of responsibility), and once was flying a Spitfire when a badly fitted cockpit cover blew off.

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After the war she qualified in England as an instructor and, returning to Argentina, flew for the Argentine Air Force and taught its pilots, as well as flying commercially.

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In 1973 she and her husband, Serban, a retired Romanian diplomat she met at a British Embassy function in Buenos Aires, returned to England, where for the rest of her life, on a farm in Norfolk, she followed her second love – breeding Arab horses. Dunlop built up an outstanding knowledge of bloodlines.

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Yet nothing could help her when on the expiry of a Second World War permit, she had to take the British car driving test.

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The male chauvinists who had derided women's abilities in the ATA might have triumphed to hear how driving examiners failed her four times. Though she succeeded at her fifth try, her son Eric, himself a qualified aircraft pilot, wrote: "Afterwards her children were perhaps surprised it did not require further attempts."

 

 

Source: Wikipedia - www.independent.co.uk

Images: Believed to be in the Public Domain or used with permission