The Fabulous Flying Mrs Miller

by Carol Baxter

  Mary’s name was familiar to Chubbie. In 1930 and 1931, she had been the first woman to fly solo ‘around the world’, solving the problem of crossing the world’s oceans by loading her plane onto a ship. In 1932 she had failed in three attempts at breaking the world flight-refuelled endurance record, assisted by a co-pilot, Flight Lieutenant John Barnard Walter Pugh.

  The two women soon became friends. One day, Mary asked if she would be interested in accompanying her on her African trip. John Pugh, who was now her business partner, was to escort her across the Sahara in a de Havilland Dragon, accompanied by a wireless operator and engineer. Chubbie could join them as a passenger.

  Chubbie had never fulfilled her promise to search for Bill. While the desert was too large for her to have any chance of finding him, she could at least gain a sense of what he had experienced, to feel connected again to her one-time best friend and lover.

  They left Lympne aerodrome on 25 November 1934 but didn’t travel far. Mary crash-landed in Nîmes, France, and her damaged aircraft had to be shipped back to England for repairs. Chubbie and the three men found themselves fog-bound in Lyons. There, she and John Pugh became friends over evening games of bridge.

  After the repairs were completed, Mary asked Chubbie if she would be interested in obtaining a slow plane and accompanying her to Cape Town. Mary couldn’t risk flying her tricky aircraft across Africa’s deserts without an escort and John couldn’t spare any more time from their businesses.

  Chubbie obtained a small two-seat Robinson Redwing biplane and organised finance to pay for maps and extra fuel tanks and all the other costs associated with a long-distance flight. Shortly before their departure though, Mary phoned to say she had a lecture engagement and couldn’t make the trip. Chubbie was heartbroken. Not only would she miss out on her opportunity to privately farewell Bill, she had been left with a large debt and a plane so slow it was incapable of setting any records.

  She visited all her financiers and said that she could repay some of the money, but would have to earn the rest. All responded, ‘Go out by yourself and the best of luck.’

  Business-minded as always, she set her mind to working out what she could do with her meagre financial resources—two shillings and threepence halfpenny—and a slow plane. She decided to fly to Cape Town as a commercial traveller. She approached manufacturers and pitched her idea. Some rebuffed her while others were intrigued and supportive. As she wrote in an exclusive for The Sunday Referee, which was helping fund her trip, ‘After all, why shouldn’t there be flying commercial travellers? And flying women commercial travellers at that.’

  She set off from Croydon on 4 January 1935 with the names of her sponsor companies emblazoned over the Redwing. Carrying samples of British goods—whisky, wristwatches and other items—she planned to visit lonely trading outposts in central Africa to obtain orders. Fog, rain and snow dogged her across France, forcing her to land in a field, where she was promptly arrested for spying. Mistrals held her up for a week in Marseilles, while strong gusts across the Pyrenees nearly blew her out of the plane.

  She took the short Gibraltar-to-Tangier hop across the Mediterranean then flew south-east towards the Transsaharienne Company motor track. She too would follow the track on her own Sahara crossing. At Colomb Béchar, Algeria, where she was to pick up the track, the entire military personnel came out to watch the Redwing land. The looks of astonishment on their faces when she pushed up her goggles and called out, ‘Bonjour, messieurs, parlez-vous Anglais?’ left her chuckling.

  Treated as if she were royalty, she left Béchar with her plane fully serviced and bearing the squadron’s insignia, and with a supply of desert rations including pâté de foie gras and a three-gallon container of water. She also had explicit instructions from the commandant: if she lost sight of the track, she must immediately land and go to sleep and he himself would fly out to find her.

  Nothing anybody had said had prepared her for the horror of flying for hundreds of miles over flat sand with nothing to break the monotony. And she could understand why the commandant had issued his instructions. Following the motor track sounded easy, but it wasn’t. It kept disappearing under the sand.

  She thought about Bill as she flew mile after interminable mile. He was out there somewhere, perhaps only a short distance away. Would she ever find out what had happened to him?

  When she caught sight of the Niger River, she yelled for joy.

  A few days later, everything went belly-up. Huge clouds of billowing smoke blinded her while a strong headwind emptied her fuel tanks. Spotting a deserted road, she touched down safely and was slowing when she saw four locals standing on the road in front of her, gaping at her still-moving plane instead of diving into the bushes. When she swerved into the bushes, the impact broke the Redwing’s back. Her marketing trip was over, along with her dream of a commercial travelling business.

  Upon her return to England, word spread about her piloting and map-making abilities and she was approached by another aerial survey firm interested in West Africa. After financial issues kept delaying them, Mary Bruce said, ‘Those fellows are never going to get anywhere. You’d be much better off working for me. Would you manage my Heston office?’ When Chubbie agreed, she found herself office manager for Luxury Air Tours, Air Dispatch, and Commercial Air Hire, the three companies owned by Mary Bruce and John Pugh.

  In July 1935, the press caught up with her there, describing her as the woman who had once earned £2000 per year but was now a typist. She said that there were few opportunities for female aviators in England, but that there must be something for her. One way or another she would find it.

  There was indeed something, although it wasn’t quite what she had expected. The press interviewed her again a year later, when she married John Pugh on 16 May 1936 at the Epsom registry office. ‘From now on there will be no more flying stunts for me,’ she said, charming everyone again with her sparkling eyes and beaming smile of old. ‘My wild days are over. I have had my fun. I’m just going to sit back and let John do the piloting for both of us now.’

  And she did.

  Epilogue

  In 1962, a French motorised patrol was on a reconnaissance mission in Mali, exploring Signal du Tanezrouft, a hundred miles west of Bidon 5 on what is now called the Trans-Saharan track. Tanezrouft, or the ‘land of thirst’ as the locals called it, was a desert within the Saharan desert, one in which even the desert-dwellers chose not to dwell. Few westerners had ventured into the area. Barren, featureless, waterless, it lay a few hundred miles south of Reggane, where France had exploded its first atomic bomb in 1960.

  Finding little but prehistoric tombs, the platoon headed north on a course parallel with the motor track. On 12 February, having found nothing to add to their maps, they decided to return to the motor track. The soft sand proved incapable of supporting a heavy vehicle so they drove north for a further twenty-five miles until the sand firmed enough for them to turn east. The patrol was around forty-five miles from the track when the men spotted something in the distance.

  No date palms, no rock outcrops, not even a ripple of a sand dune broke a vista so flat it was almost unnerving. Except for this lump. They steered towards it. The air was so clear the men could identify the object from a mile away: a crashed plane. They looked at it with horror, wondering if one of the four atomic bombs exploded in the Reggane vicinity had downed a lost pilot.

  As they drew closer, they saw that it was a small biplane, a model from the 1920s or 1930s. It was so severely damaged it looked little more than a shell and appeared to have been there for decades. Lying near the plane, partly covered with sand, was the mummified corpse of its pilot. His forehead was marked by an ugly gash. His hand was drawn up towards his throat as if to tell them he had died of thirst.

  They found a diary and other personal objects attached to the wing. The diary informed them that the pilot’s name was Captain William Lancaster and that he had crashed on 12 April 1933. In heartbreaking detail, i
t described the events that followed.

  ‘Thursday morning, April 13th [1933], 5 am: I have just escaped a miraculous death. Why?’ Plopping onto his knees, Bill thanked God he was alive and begged for assistance in his hour of need.

  He struggled to remember what had happened. Gradually, it came back to him.

  He had left Reggane at 6.30 pm and had followed the motor track until the last of the sun’s golden rays disappeared. Above and around him, the sky was filled with pinpricks of light. Below, there was nothing. Pure blackness, as if his eyes were swathed in a thick dark cloth. Until the moon rose, he would be unable to see the motor track or the aerial beacons. He would be flying blind.

  Around 8.15 pm, his engine coughed. Five minutes later, it coughed again. Then it missed a beat.

  His now struggling engine could no longer keep his plane in the air. Surrounded by impenetrable gloom, he lost all sense of his altitude as he tried to guide the Avian down safely. It slammed into the ground sooner than he had expected. Bouncing into the air, it crashed down again and flipped over.

  When he recovered consciousness, he found himself upside down and imprisoned in his cockpit. Blood from a forehead wound had congealed in his eyes, forcing him to prise them open. Petrol fumes filled his nose. He had to get out. Twisting like a corkscrew, scraping sand away with his nails, he extricated himself from the plane.

  He thought about walking to the motor track, calculating that it was only about twenty miles away. But he had promised Chubbie he would remain with the plane. And she had promised she would search for him.

  He decided instead to ration his water to a pint a day which would enable him to survive for seven days—so long as injuries didn’t cause blood poisoning or he didn’t go mad with thirst and guzzle the whole lot down in one go.

  To pass the time, he began a diary in his logbook. ‘I wonder where everyone thinks I am,’ he mused. ‘I think mostly of my mother and Chubbie. I love them both. Chubbie is my own sweetheart but mother is such a darling. They both were proud of me before I set out.’

  Later in the day, he wrote: ‘People who haven’t been in the desert have no real idea of thirst. It’s hell! Will hold out as long as possible but loss of blood has made me weak. I realise that this period of agony in the Sahara desert is going to be as long to the mind as my whole lifetime. Truly am I atoning for any wrong done on this earth.’ He added that he didn’t want to die, that he had the love of a good mother and father and a sweetheart he adored.

  As the heat gradually eased, he made some rough flares by cutting strips of fabric, rolling them and putting them on the flying wires. He would use the petrol to burn one every twenty minutes throughout the night. Monsieur Borel had promised to send out a rescue car if he hadn’t reached Gao by 6 pm. He knew that the rescue cars wouldn’t be able to see him but he hoped they might see a fire or a flare. ‘Let me pray so. The day seems never ending and this is only the first.’

  He ignited the fire at 10.30 pm, which helped keep him warm. The temperature had dropped even faster than it had risen until it was near freezing point. Every fifteen to thirty minutes, he put a match to a flare which lit the sky brilliantly for about sixty seconds.

  No one came.

  Day after day, he calmly noted down his experiences. Four days after his crash, on Monday, 17 April, he wrote: ‘Not a breath of air. I am resigned to the end if it has to be. I think I can last until the day after tomorrow—but no longer. Oh for water, water.’

  As the sun set that day, he admitted, ‘I can see I shall not be rescued unless a miracle happens. Chubbie, remember I kept my word, I “stuck to the ship”. I hope it will not be too hard to bear—the end I mean. I have lain gasping with thirst today—but I stuck to my guns and think I can survive two more days. Am getting a bit weak for I have had no food of course. I only feel thirsty.’ He asked his mother to kiss his daughters and to tell Kiki that she could now really forget him.

  When he woke the following morning, it was a week since he had set off. The air was smotheringly still and flies buzzed around his wounds. He lay there listening for the noise of an engine, thinking it would sound like music to his ears.

  No one came.

  The next day, Wednesday, 19 April, he wrote: ‘My water will give out today. It cannot be made to last longer. It is then just a matter of a few hours and please God a quick end.’ Realising that this would be his last diary entry, he had a few final words to say. He told his darling Chubbie to give up flying, to collect any money that was available and pay what was just to his parents. Then she should take a passage to Australia and be with her sweet mother. ‘You will always think of old Bill as a good scout. Too bad I had to go like this—think of me occasionally and write your book—I’d like to think it would be dedicated to me.’

  It shouldn’t have taken so long to find him. The rescue authorities had ordered two planes to search for sixty miles either side of the motor track. In a clear sky, at a height of 1500 feet, a pilot could see nearly fifty miles in either direction. Bill’s plane had crashed on flat terrain only forty-five miles from the track. He should have been found alive.

  Chubbie was standing in the kitchen of her cottage in Hurley, Berkshire, on the morning of Monday, 19 February 1962, when the telephone rang. A neighbour told her that her name was in the papers again. After twenty-nine years, Chubbie finally had an answer to the mystery of Bill’s death.

  The press besieged her after the discovery of Bill’s remains. Journalists camped outside her house. Her phone rang for days. But Chubbie couldn’t bring herself to comment. While the discovery should have closed a door that had long refused to shut, it instead pushed it wide open.

  The memories of that terrible period flooded through her again. And they remained strong in the years that followed. Bill had signed a will in her favour before flying to Africa so his diary soon came into her possession. She allowed the press to publish its contents—with Johnny’s approval. Her beloved husband had been so moved by Bill’s courage and calm acceptance of his dreadful fate, he had urged her to make the diary entries available to the public. In the aftermath, she was interviewed extensively for a book about Bill and the book’s publication kept the story alive both in the public’s mind and in her own.

  Chubbie died in a London hospital in 1972, ten years after the discovery of Bill’s remains. Her death went unremarked by the press.

  The irony is hard to miss. Chubbie’s aviation achievements and popularity had eclipsed Bill’s in life but Bill eclipsed her in death.

  Southern Cross Railway Station: at the end of nowhere. The photo dates from around the time Chubbie was growing up in the Western Australian town. (E.L. Mitchell / State Library of Western Australia, b2940835_3)

  Chubbie, Bill and the Red Rose on 14 October 1927, as they prepared for their 12,000-mile journey.

  Chubbie packing her bags: ‘The smallest amount of luggage ever taken by a woman on a journey of this length.’

  Running to catch her flight. (George Rinhart / Getty Images)

  The ‘ship’ that was to carry Chubbie and Bill halfway around the globe. (Flight magazine, courtesy Dave Robinson, Aviation Ancestry)

  A personal farewell between Bill and his wife, Kiki.

  Rutbah Wells: wind and rain in the sands of Iraq.

  The Red Rose survives the flight to Darwin. (Peter Spillett Collection / Northern Territory Library)

  Flying across New South Wales. (Fairfax, FXT288665)

  An unceremonious arrival at Sydney’s Mascot aerodrome. Chubbie’s husband (standing behind Chubbie) was there to greet her. (Fairfax, FXT165646)

  A 100,000-strong crowd at the Australian Air Derby at Mascot on the day of the Red Rose’s arrival.

  Chubbie and Bill considering their options. (Fairfax, FXT283256)

  Socialising with the crew of the Southern Cross at St James’ Theatre, Sydney. Chubbie is at the far left of the box; Kingsford Smith is leaning on the pillar. (National Library of Australia)

  An advertise
ment for Bill and Chubbie’s speaking tour of the eastern states of Australia. (Hobart Mercury)

  Standing on the deck of the Sonoma before their departure from Australia: (front row, from left) Bill Lancaster, Charles Kingsford Smith, Harry Lyon, Chubbie Miller, Charles Ulm and James Warner. (Call-News Pictorial, National Library of Australia)

  Ten of the competitors in the National Women’s Air Race (the Powder Puff Derby), 1929: (from left) Mary von Mach, Chubbie Miller, Gladys O’Donnell, Thea Rasche, Phoebe Omlie, Louise Thaden, Amelia Earhart, Blanche Noyes, Ruth Elder and Vera Walker. (Courtesy of the Women’s International Air and Space Museum, Cleveland, Ohio)

  One of the rudimentary landing fields on the route of the Powder Puff Derby. (Courtesy of the Women’s International Air and Space Museum, Cleveland, Ohio)

  After each leg of the derby, the aviators were driven to a function. Chubbie (far right) wears her usual high-heeled shoes. (Courtesy of the Women’s International Air and Space Museum, Cleveland, Ohio)

  Competitors in the Powder Puff Derby. The all-female event was followed with interest by every major US newspaper. Pancho Barnes, the stunt pilot, is second from left in the central row.

  Marvel Crosson, one of the youngest but most experienced competitors in the race, posing with her new Travel Air.

  Chubbie was thrilled to land at Cleveland, Ohio, at the finish of the Powder Puff Derby. (Fox Movietone News Story 3-485); (inset) The bracelet presented to each participant in the first ever women’s air race. (Courtesy of the Women’s International Air and Space Museum, Cleveland, Ohio)