Lettice Curtis obituary | Second world war

Lettice Curtis obituary

In 1942, during a "hustle tour" of Britain, Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the US president, arrived, with Clementine Churchill, wife of the prime minister, at White Waltham Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) station. It was late October, and rain poured down on Berkshire. Sheltering under the wing of a four-engined Halifax heavy bomber was Lettice Curtis. Thus did the first lady shake hands with one of the most formidable of the 166 female ATA pilots who, like their male colleagues, delivered warplanes around Britain, and beyond, between 1940 and 1945.

As Curtis, who has died aged 99, wrote in her 2004 autobiography, the day after the Roosevelt meeting, "the papers latched on to this and, regardless of the fact that I had not yet even gone solo, published headlines such as 'Mrs Roosevelt Meets Girl Pilot' and 'Girl Flies Halifax'". Curtis was, in fact, already flying both single- and twin-engined planes, but as an extremely competitive person – "to me second place in anything was a failure" – she was dissatisfied with her progress as the first woman training on four-engined aircraft.

By the time the ATA was dissolved, on 30 November 1945, the bombers she had delivered, in a relentless 62-month flying schedule, included 222 Halifaxes and 109 Stirlings, plus Liberators and Lancasters. With fighters and other planes, she handed over almost 1,500 aircraft.

Curtis was raised in Denbury, near Newton Abbot in Devon, the fourth of seven children whose father was a sometime barrister. After attending West Country boarding schools from the age of six, she went to the newly founded girls' public school Benenden, in Kent, where she excelled at sport.

Had she known it was feasible, she would have read engineering at university; she recalled that "Meccano was my favourite toy". Instead, in 1933 she began mathematics at St Hilda's College, Oxford. A triple blue, she captained women's tennis and fencing, played lacrosse for the university, and was named a "woman of the year" and an "Isis idol" by the student magazine.

Career opportunities for female graduates in 1937 were sparse, but, motoring past Haldon airfield in Devon in her Lancia Augusta, Curtis, after observing a plane landing, fell into conversation with its pilot. Could women, she asked, be aviators? By 1938 she had qualified, and worked on Ordnance Survey aerial mapping until the outbreak of war.

Then, in June 1940, as the Battle of Britain began, Curtis received a letter of invitation from Pauline Gower, daughter of a Conservative MP and organiser of the ATA women's section. If the ATA's creation had met with scepticism – the letters, to some, stood for "Ancient and Tattered Airmen" – the idea of female flyers was greeted with even greater resistance. The women were rich dilettantes, newspapers hinted; ATA meant "Always Terrified Airwomen".

"The menace," the editor of the Aeroplane, CG Grey, had written, "is the woman who thinks she ought to be flying a high-speed bomber when she really has not the intelligence to scrub the floor of a hospital properly." Curtis, meanwhile, headed off in the Lancia from Southampton to Hatfield, where the ATA women were then based.

Soon after, she made her first solo flight as an ATA pilot, in a Tiger Moth biplane. "The cockpit of the Tiger was my world," she wrote. "Control of it lay in my own hands, this was an entirely satisfactory state of affairs."

Attempts by the authorities to restrict women to biplane and training aircraft deliveries had collapsed by summer 1941. By then, Curtis told the Guardian 30 years ago, "they didn't mind if you were a man, a woman or a monkey".

"The men did not allow women to fly some new types right away," wrote another ATA flyer, Diana Barnato Walker. "There was a lot of humming and hawing before Lettice Curtis, a tall, blue-eyed blond girl, an excellent pilot … was allowed to ferry a Typhoon on 24 June 1942."

With the end of the war, and the ATA, she joined the civil aviation ministry and then, having applied for a job as a government test pilot, was called, as "EL Curtis Esq", to interview in 1947. In the waiting room an attendant asked whether she knew it was "a board for test pilots". She did. "When he returned to the boardroom," she wrote, "a roar of laughter went up."

Curtis did, eventually, pass her test flight but, while backed by the chief test pilot, did not get the job, since "all hell broke loose". Instead she was appointed as a flight-test observer, work that extended into tropical aircraft testing and an intercontinental mission, co-piloting a Lincoln bomber to the missile-testing station in Woomera, Australia. From 1953 into the 1960s she was employed, briefly, by Folland and then Fairey Aviation before joining the Civil Aviation Authority, where she stayed until 1976.

In August 1948, flying a Spitfire XI, Curtis set an international women's record for the 100km closed circuit at the Lympne handicap. Forty-four years later she qualified to fly helicopters. She gave up flying in 1995. In 1998 she helped unveil a memorial to the women's air services at Elvington, Yorkshire, and in 1999 featured in Forgotten Pilots, a BBC2 documentary.

As well as the autobiography, her books included an ATA history, Forgotten Pilots (1971), and Winged Odyssey (1993). She was a founder and life member of the British Women Pilots' Association.

Eleanor Lettice Curtis, pilot, born 1 February 1915; died 21 July 2014

This article was amended on 31 July 2014. Lettice Curtis was not the second of five children, as we originally stated, but the fourth of seven. This has been corrected.

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