Soon after the end of the Second World War, Third Officer Margaret Frost of the Air Transport Auxiliary was told to fly a Spitfire to an airstrip from which it would be towed away for scrap.
Frost had been flying in uniform for three years for the only wartime organisation in Britain that would accept women pilots. Not about to disobey an order, she delivered the Spitfire as instructed. However, before leaving it to its fate she scribbled on her flight chit: “This is a beautiful aeroplane and should not be broken up.”
Flying had been a consuming passion for Maggie Frost since childhood. The Spitfire in particular had transformed what might have been an ordinary schoolgirl’s experience of peace and war into a love affair with speed and high technology. It also made her appear something of a conjuror. By the time of her gloomy final flights as a delivery pilot she had flown 700 hours in 25 different aircraft types including Hurricanes and Mustangs as well as Spitfires, and had left RAF ground crews across Britain slack-jawed with amazement as the person who climbed out of aircraft that had landed apparently without a pilot. For the same reason she would attract the attention of BBC commentators when, flanked by towering guards officers, she laid wreaths in later years at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sundays. For Maggie Frost cut a petite figure.
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Born in 1920, the daughter of a Sussex vicar, she was smitten with the idea of flying, from the age of ten. By then, Amy Johnson had made history by becoming the first woman to fly to Australia. Johnson had broken a record set by a man and established aviation as an escape from the strictures of polite society for young women, as long as they were brave and rich, or stubborn.
Frost did not come from money, but she was brave and stubborn. Having watched her mother try a joyride at a Shoreham flying display in 1931 she demanded to go up too. “You know how children are,” she told an interviewer in her 89th year. “I wailed on.”
Her first turn in a cockpit came when she was 11. From then, all her energies went into saving up for helmets, goggles and lessons. She flew solo for the first time in 1938 and politely badgered her way into a training position in the Civil Air Guard the following year. Her timing looked perfect. Thanks to her subsidised training and a gift for flying she had a licence within months. “You just had to get up to 2,000ft, close the throttle and do a dead stick landing, and that wasn’t very difficult,” she said with a characteristic excess of modesty.
At first the war upended her plans. The RAF would not think of letting women in its planes, and the ATA would allow only eight. Frost initially joined the Wrens instead. Then, in two weeks at the height of the Battle of Britain, the RAF lost a quarter of its fighter pilots and Churchill demanded to know what reserves were available. There were none. In these circumstances no able-bodied male pilots could be spared for ferrying duties, and Air Marshal Sir Christopher Courtney allowed the ATA’s women’s section to expand. Frost was offered a place at her second attempt, in 1942, and the congratulations heaped on her cautious father persuaded him to let her accept it.
In the coveted dark blue uniform of the ATA, she made up for lost time. Posted to the all-female ferry pool at Hamble on the Solent, Frost delivered Spitfires by the dozen from the Supermarine factory in Southampton to RAF bases along the south coast during the build-up to D-Day. At 5ft 4in, she was not the shortest woman pilot in the ATA — a distinction that probably went to Joan Hughes, who needed wooded leg extensions to reach the pedals on some four-engined planes. Even so, in a Spitfire her head barely came above the rim of the cockpit.
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At Hamble, Frost came to know many of the 25 American women pilots who braved the U-boat blockade to join the ATA, among them Ann Wood, a future vice-president of Pan-Am who once flew a Spitfire under the Severn railway bridge at high tide. Frost was not so fond of stunts or aerobatics. It was dangerous enough flying in cloud and haze without being trained to fly on instruments — an omission that was partly to blame for a casualty rate of nearly one in ten women pilots over the course of the war. Consciously or not, she kept fear at bay by concentrating on the job, and she protected herself from the heartache of lost friends by keeping herself to herself.
There were limits to the number of hours that could be flown each day, in principle but not in practice. “You just flew until you couldn’t fly anymore,” she said. This left little time for a social life even had she wanted one: “I don’t know that you made close friends.”
Self-effacing to a fault, Frost once broke ranks with some of her comrades to venture that the case for women flying in the ATA was weak. “But I didn’t care,” she said. “I just wanted to fly.”
She lived until the 1970s in Henfield, West Sussex, before moving to Lampeter in central Wales. She always gave time to interviewers and historians out of a conviction that the accomplishments of the men as well as the women of the ATA should not be forgotten. She never married, but kept in close touch with fellow veterans of the ATA for nearly 70 years after the war.
Margaret Frost, ATA pilot, was born on November 26, 1920. She died on August 4, 2014, aged 93