“STOWAWAY” by BETTY DREWRY (Served in ATA from 02/06/1942 To
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“STOWAWAY” BY BETTY DREWRY (Served in ATA from 02/06/1942 to 17/01/1945) Elizabeth Drewry Recollections (The Stowaway) [2013.35.2.1] FOREWORD BY CHRISTOPHER DREWRY (Betty’s half-brother) In November 1943 a 24 year old English girl hit the headlines of the national and international press. In the years immediately preceding the Second World War she had received a comfortable and privileged upbringing and had started a career as a ballet dancer but from the outbreak of war she had been desperately trying to learn to fly so that she could contribute to the war effort by becoming a female pilot ferrying military aircraft for the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA). Every conceivable form of prevarication, bureaucracy and discrimination had been applied to frustrate her attempts to secure a flying course in Britain but she was determined not to be beaten. She had become an aviation mechanic servicing Liberator bombers while she waited in vain for the promised flying training which never materialised. Finally her frustration boiled over and, hearing that the prospects for being trained to fly were better on the other side of the Atlantic, she stowed away one night in the nose-wheel of a bomber leaving Scotland and climbed out into a hangar at Montreal, Canada 19 hours later. The first anyone knew about it at home was when the press descended onto her parents’ doorstep. Having managed to avoid deportation by the skin of her teeth, she succeeded in working her way across Canada and, after appealing to no less a person than President Roosevelt’s wife, into America where she eventually acquired a civil pilot’s licence. By that time it was 1944 and neither the Americans, the British, the Free French or even the Chinese were so desperate for pilots that they were prepared to take on women to do the job. But the Russians might be interested, she heard. All attempts to go to Russia legally were blocked. So she stowed away again, this time on a Russian ship heading from Vancouver to Vladivostok, remaining concealed for 5 days under a lifeboat on the deck. I knew this story because the girl in question, Elizabeth (Betty) Drewry, was my half-sister. She was born in March 1919 as the first of two children from my father’s first marriage and from an early age I had read and re-read the various paper cuttings and correspondence which my father had kept but I understood little about what had motivated her to undertake such an extraordinary adventure. Both she and my father died in 1954 at which point I was only 7 years old. So there was no opportunity to delve deeper into the story at first hand. The story re- emerged briefly in 1976 as a chapter in a book on aviation exploits (Survival in the Sky by Ralph Barker) but this revealed nothing more than could have been gleaned from the original paper cuttings. And there the story would have remained if I had not been cleaning out old papers from a cupboard at home in 1997 - 54 years after the event - when I discovered a manuscript of 14 chapters, some of it in faded type held together by rusty paper clips, some of it in barely legible pencilled handwriting which I immediately recognised as Betty’s. Here, from the dim distant past of half a century ago, was her own unpublished account, her autobiography. Elizabeth Drewry Recollections (The Stowaway) [2013.35.2.2] From her own narrative the motivation for her exploits stands out loud and clear. It was first and foremost a simple but deep passion for flying - something which is less explicable at this distance in time when flying is now a common experience to most people, if only as passengers rather than pilots. But in the days when flying held the same attractions as driving must have done for those lucky enough to use the first motor cars, the appeal is easily understandable. Her second and perhaps equally strong motive was to prove that, in times of national crisis, women were just as capable as men of doing those jobs for which they had the same technical and physical competence. The ardour of what would now be called feminism shines through her pages as well as the rage at being condemned to menial tasks at lower rates of pay and conditions than her male counterparts. This would have been an unfashionable view at the time but one which grew in the consciousness of women, many of whom were called upon to assume roles traditionally assigned to the male in the exigencies of wartime and it was a view which led to the wider emancipation of women after the war in terms of employment, status and equality of rights. She was thus pioneering a role which few would now find surprising. By today’s standards there are many passages of justifiable outrage but there is none of the aggressive feminism which could make her judgement unattractive. Indeed she had a touching and wry, self-deprecating sense of humour which somehow leavens what was no doubt deep- felt criticism. She was clearly driven too by a determination to deliver the most she believed she could achieve for the benefit of her countrymen and women and their allies in a world war which directly and personally threatened the freedom of them all in a way of which subsequent generations can have no comprehension. She did not need to bother with any of this. She could have had a comfortable war entertaining the troops in her professional capacity as a ballet dancer but she opted to do something radically different. Such circumstances explain only too well her frustration with the pettiness of a bureaucracy which failed to exploit these simple virtues, which put barriers in the way of national and self fulfilment and which hampered international co-operation between allies even to the point of preventing their citizens from crossing mutual borders. She was undoubtedly an adventurer and much of her account resembles that of an early 20th century traveller exploring previously unopened parts of the globe, explaining them to a sedentary but curious audience at home. To a modern audience, whose porthole on the world has been extensively opened by the power of television and regular travel, this may seem humdrum and perhaps patronising. But the innocent perspective of a traveller in the 1940s is a revelation in its own right, calling into question our modern blasé and stereotyped outlook on the global village. Her account is pitched unashamedly at the American and Canadian literary market, pandering to the modernity of the trans-Atlantic attitude at the expense of the Old World and expressing comparisons wherever possible in dollars. There is obvious sincerity in Elizabeth Drewry Recollections (The Stowaway) [2013.35.2.3] her love affair with the New World but it displays a budding commercial awareness at the same time! There was, I suspect, one further motive on which her narrative is completely silent. She had a younger brother, Frank, whom she mentions only in passing as the harbinger of the facts of life in her days as a schoolgirl in a sheltered education at Margate. During the war Frank joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve and became a navigator flying numerous hairy missions in a Beaufighter fighter-bomber over the Atlantic and occupied France in 1940-1941 before being posted with his squadron to North Africa in 1942. On the 1st September 1942 and at the still tender age of 21 his aircraft was declared missing in action whilst strafing behind enemy lines on the third day of the battle of Alam Halfa in the North African desert. She would no doubt have poured over the letter of condolence from the squadron commander to our father, the terse notification from the Air Ministry, the simple but sincere and routine message of gratitude for the supreme sacrifice from the King and the correspondence with the father of his fellow crew member who had some evidence that the Beaufighter had come down less than catastrophically, thereby allowing for the possibility that they had survived and been taken prisoner. She would have waited with our father for further news in vain and, a year later in 1943, her resolve may have been even further stiffened by this personal tragedy which had deprived her of her brother. The absence of any mention of this incident in her narrative speaks louder than anything she might have said about it. What is unique about her manuscript is that it remains a faithful commentary on her times, a vignette taken straight out of the time-warp of the 1940s without any of the distortion of hindsight. I had no hesitation in avoiding the temptation of putting it into modern idiom, ‘correcting’ her idiosyncratic 1940s terminology, concealing the patent naiveté of a girl in her early 20s or modifying the strength of her youthful convictions. What you see hereafter is her version of events, warts and all. Had she sought to publish it at the time, it would have met with much resistance; would have been seen as irresponsible and even scandalous. After the passage of time we can view it in a different light - at once honest and moving; inspiring pathos, admiration and disbelief. The strength of her narrative lies in the extent to which her pleas from the 1940s remain unfulfilled and in the thought that, for quite different and insidious reasons, her exploits could not be repeated in the modern age.