If asked to name a female aviator, the first name to come to mind is often Amelia Earhart, or perhaps Amy Johnson (both of whom, incidentally, disappeared). Yet, despite her achievements being on a par with theirs, Jean Batten is someone whose name has faded into obscurity, like so many women throughout history. Part of this is due to Batten’s reclusive lifestyle – despite her initial fame, in later life she retreated away from the press, and even her death went undiscovered by her family and the general public for five years after the fact.
There have also been suggestions that her performance of gender, which differed to that of Earhart and Johnson, contributed to the way she was perceived by both her contemporaries and now in the present day. That is to say, in her day, Batten was seen as breaking gender boundaries – flying was considered a man’s ‘hobby’ despite the many women who were entering into the field. Yet, she also presented a very polished, feminine aspect to the public, which has seen her somewhat dismissed by feminists of today. Indeed, Batten never spoke about women’s issues as such, and she dedicated her career to being the best, rather than the best woman.
Yet, it is often difficult to separate gender in these matters, and so it proved for Jean Batten. She became known as the ‘Greta Garbo of the air’, and headlines such as ‘The Girl Who Has Beaten All The Men’ ran after her feats. Given Batten was a year older than her closest male competition (she being 28; Jimmy Broadbent, 27) at the time of that headline, ‘Girl’ is certainly an interesting choice of words.
Batten’s autobiography opens with: ‘I was born in New Zealand on 15 September 1909, six weeks after Blériot’s historic flight across the English Channel’. Here, she references Louis Blériot, a Frenchman who set the first solo flight record over a body of water, and thus constructs her life around the desire to fly and explore.
Yet, originally, Batten studied music and ballet, intending to pursue a career in one of these fields. She even attended Ladies’ College in Auckland, a preparatory school for girls who were expected to marry and run a household. She did not, however, complete her education there, refusing to return for her fifth year in 1924.
Her interest in aviation began at a young age when her mother – with whom Batten had a close relationship for her entire life – took her to watch the flying boats at the flying school in Kohimarama. In May 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew nonstop over the Atlantic, resparking this enthusiasm, and the turning point came two years later when she flew with Australian aviator Charles Kingsford-Smith.
She later recalled: “Cruising high above the Blue Mountains, I had felt completely at home in the air and decided that here indeed was my element.”
Kingsford-Smith gave Batten two pieces of advice if she was going to pursue a career in flight: ‘Don’t attempt to break men’s records—and don’t fly at night’.
Batten’s response? ‘I made a point of ignoring both of them’.
Batten’s father was not supportive of his daughter’s new endeavour, but her mother became her strongest supporter. The pair moved to England (Batten’s parents having discretely separated by this time) and Batten began taking flying lessons at the London Aeroplane Club. She was not a natural pilot, but she refused to give up on her dream, and ended up earning her ‘A’ (private) license in 1930. Her ‘B’ (commercial) license came in 1932, at a great financial expense.
Batten struggled financially for much of her early career; being a record-breaking aviator was hardly conducive to earning a steady income. She had to seek sponsorships, which only came reluctantly, and with certain conditions. For example, a deal with Lord Charles Wakefield – the so-called ‘patron saint of aviation’ who sponsored many pioneering flyers of both sexes – meant she had to endorse his product, Castrol oil. This in itself was not unusual; all aviators sponsored by Wakefield had to do this, but it was different for Batten and for his other female patrons. Glamour shots began appearing, turning Batten into something akin to a sex symbol. Indeed, Harold Getty, a fellow New Zealand flyer, who declared that women were unfit to be pilots, considered Batten the exception to his rule because ‘she was easy to look at’.
Alongside sponsorship, Batten also gave passenger flights, undertook lecture tours, and did some broadcasting and writing to raise funds for her numerous endeavours. This was a difficult task, not least because women seeking to capitalise on their achievements were seen as, in her words, ‘unbecoming’; even Earhart and Johnson came under fire for their own efforts to this end.
But, like she did her entire life, Batten persevered. She was determined to break the England-Australia record (previously held by Amy Johnson), but her first two attempts ended in disaster due to poor flying conditions, sandstorms, and difficulties with her Gipsy Moth plane. Her unsuccessful flights led her to be dubbed ‘the try again girl’ by the media – and not in a positive way. Batten, however, took it as a challenge, and, less than a month after her second failure, she was fixing up the Moth and heading off on her third try.
She was still beset by difficulties and her cockpit almost flooded at one point due to a severe storm. But, miraculously, she made it. On 23rd May, 1934, Batten touched down in Darwin, Australia, 14 days, 22 hours, and 30 minutes after leaving England, beating Johnson’s record by more than four days.
She was greeted as a heroine (partially due to her gender and her beauty) and soon embarked on tours of Australia and New Zealand. While in New Zealand, Batten was the guest of honour at a Maori celebration, at which she was presented with a tribal chief’s feather cloak and christened Hine-o-te-Rangi – ‘Daughter of the Skies’.
Her fame continued to grow, as did her list of records. In 1935, she became the first woman to fly solo across the South Atlantic, and a year later she made the first ever direct flight from England to New Zealand. In so doing, she once again broke the record from England to Australia, making a time of five days and 21 hours, beating Jimmy Broadbent’s time of six days and 21 hours.
Batten experienced a slight delay in Australia due to weather, but after 2 and a half days, she pressed on to New Zealand. Her time of eleven days and 45 minutes was a record that would stand for 44 years – when it was finally broken by Judith Chisholm in 1980 (she took three days and eleven hours), Batten was there to greet her in Auckland.
‘I closed the throttle and glided down to a landing, and as the wheels of the Gull came to rest felt a great glow of pleasure and pride. This was really journey’s end, and I had flown 14,000 miles to link England, the heart of Empire, with the city of Auckland, New Zealand, in 11 days 44 minutes, the fastest time in history. With this flight I realized the ultimate of my ambition.’
Jean Batten, in her autobiography ‘My Life’ (1938), recalling her England-New Zealand flight
Batten described the moment in which she landed in Auckland as ‘the greatest moment of my life’. A crowd of 6000 people was there to greet her, including her father, who had some years since come around to the idea of his daughter as an aviator.
Just a few months after her record-breaking flight, Batten’s career came to an end. She moved sporadically in and out of the public eye, and during World War II, she applied to join the Air Transport Auxiliary – a volunteer organisation of women ferry pilots. Oddly, she was rejected, and so instead she became an ambulance driver for the Anglo-French Ambulance Corps.
She never flew again.
After the end of the war, Batten retreated to Jamaica with her mother, then later they moved to Tenerife. Her mother died in 1966, and three years later, Batten re-emerged into public life, travelling around the world for a decade. In 1982, she moved to Majorca. The last anyone heard from her was a letter to her publisher informing him of her new address, dated 8th November 1982.
Not until September 1987 was it discovered that Batten had died on 22nd November 1982 aged 73, alone in her apartment, her body discovered by a cleaner. She had suffered a pulmonary abscess as a result of a dog bite which she had refused treatment for. Due to the fact she had not been living in Majorca for very long, no-one knew who she was, and so she was buried in a paupers’ mass grave under her middle name, Gardner.
In front of the cameras and the public, Batten projected an image of perfect femininity, always emerging from her cockpit in a pristine white flying suit and remaining the elegant lady on the ground. The reality was that she was an intelligent, capable woman, who wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty – though rare, photos exist of her carrying out repairs on her plane, comfortable in her oil-stained overalls.
Jean Batten led an incredibly solitary life; that loneliness has since extended into her death. Yet she belongs up there in historical memory with the likes of Amy Johnson and Amelia Earhart, her achievements just as momentous for aviation as a whole, and not just women’s aviation.
Sources:
- Hull, Michael D, ‘’Daughters of the Skies’: Jean Batten Put New Zealand on the Map During Aviation’s Golden Age, Then Faded into Obscurity’, Aviation History, 25.4 (2015), 44-49
- Collett, Anne, and Clive Gilson, ‘Jean Batten and ‘the Accident of Sex’’, Women’s History Review, 18.2 (2009), 219–42
- Jean Batten | NZHistory, New Zealand history online
- Jean Batten | New Zealand aviator | Britannica