The name on the top of the job application was ‘Jackie Moggridge’; the air experience listed over 1400 flights in 70+ types of aircraft and the request was for a job with Channel Airways. Naturally, Jack Jones agreed to an interview, but he was in for a surprise! Arriving at the Southend Head Office in a dress, 5′ 2″ Jackie left her young daughter, Jill, outside the airline boss’s office and, with some trepidation, stepped inside to explain that she had applied for a job as a pilot. At this juncture, an earlier potential employer had exclaimed, ‘But you’re a woman!’ (1). However, Squadron Leader Jones appears to have been swayed by the extensive air experience recorded in Jackie’s logbooks and agreed to give her a trial flying DH Rapide passenger schedules from Portsmouth. This made her the first female commercial pilot to fly passenger routes within the UK – a very suitable job for a woman of her abilities and accomplishments.
(1) Jackie’s book ‘Spitfire Girl’ attributes the remark ‘But you are a woman’ to an earlier employer who interviewed her for a flying job carrying courier packages and spare parts across the Channel in Austers. She got that job too but left after half a dozen flights when she decided that her cargoes might not be 100% legitimate.
Jackie was born on March 1st 1920 in Pretoria, South Africa, and christened Dolores Theresa Sorour. As the only girl out of three children, she grew-up to be a tomboy with a keen interest in motor bikes and aircraft. She disliked ‘Dolores’ as a name and selected ‘Jackie’ in honour of South African hockey legend Jackie Rissik. For her 15th birthday, her mother arranged an air experience flight in what may have been quite a new Dragon Rapide. Unfortunately, the flight left Jackie feeling air sick as a passenger but, undaunted, she returned for a second flight a year later on her sixteenth birthday. This flight, in a DH Moth, was a more individual experience and left her convinced that she wanted to become a pilot (2). At 17 she gained her ‘A’ license and also became the first woman to make a parachute jump in South Africa. The latter exercise led to her breaking her ankle upon landing, curtailing her flying training for six months. Three months after her eighteenth birthday Jackie departed to Britain by boat in order to train for her ‘B’ license at Witney, Oxfordshire.
A year after commencing training in Oxfordshire, World War II broke out and Jackie attempted to join the Air Transport Auxiliary as a ferry pilot. Initially spurned, she joined the WAAF and was trained in the nascent art of radar observation at an early-warning station near Rye. Eventually, her piloting talents led to her transfer to the ATA at Hatfield where she was mentored by the famous aviatrix Pauline Gower and worked alongside Amy Johnson. Her wartime service featured many superlatives: she was the youngest ATA pilot and flew the most delivery flights for them during her career as a wartime ferry pilot. Operating on a daytime-only basis, ATA pilots such as Jackie sometimes completed as many as five deliveries in a day before returning to the service pool by Anson ‘taxi’ or, less expediently, by train. Jackie married army officer Reg Moggridge in January 1945 and continued flying with the ATA until November of that year. She gave birth to her first daughter, Veronica Jill, in March 1946 but remained keen to fly. On the military side, she was commissioned into the WRAF Volunteer Reserve in August 1949 and added night flying, instrument flying and fast jets to her CV. Although her full RAF wings were granted in August 1953, her ambition to be the first woman to fly faster than sound was thwarted by the authorities and she looked to commercial flying opportunities.
(2) Details from ‘A Woman Pilot’, by Jackie Moggridge, 1957, Michael Joseph, reprinted with additions in 2014 as ‘Spitfire Girl, My life in the sky’, published by Head of Zeus.
Completing her commercial pilot’s licence in the early 1950s at Southend probably acquainted her with the early operations of East Anglian Flying Services. However, commercial employment was hard to find for a woman, even such a consummate pilot as Jackie Moggridge. After an early flirtation with dubious cross-channel package deliveries, Jackie was employed by Field Aircraft Services on a Ministry of Supply sponsored project to deliver ex-Israel Defence Force Spitfires to the military in Burma. The thirty fighters were ferried in groups of three or four on the 7500 km journey from, initially, Cyprus to Rangoon. Starting in 1956, the operation lasted over nine months and involved many risks and adventures not usually experienced by a married mother in her thirties.
Late 1957 saw Jackie swapping her tropical flight overalls for a rather chic pale-coloured pilots uniform and the right-hand seat of LEC Refrigeration’s Anson G-AHIB. LEC liked to use their own aircraft for sales missions and the Anson had been bought in June 1957 in preparation for a journey to Southern Africa. Jackie was employed for both her extensive flying experience and her South African background to fly alongside LEC’s Chief Pilot, George Farley. The route encompassed many stops where sample fridges and freezers were show-cased to potential wholesalers. Jackie would have been kept busy flying the relatively primitive twin-engined aircraft on stages across the Continent. The return leg was not without incident either; at Gibraltar, Jackie was unfortunate enough to strike a runway marker which punched a hole in the Anson’s wooden tailplane. The damage was fixed by a cabinet maker.
Following her interview with Jack Jones, Jackie commenced the shakedown period with Channel in late 1957. Her initial flights were at the controls of one of Channel’s DH89A Rapides, probably G-AKRN, between Portsmouth and Sandown on the Isle of Wight. Here, she was able to visit her ex-ATA friend and colleague Mary Ellis who was the airfield manager (3). Lea Field was owned by a flying farmer, J.P.Stephenson-Clarke, and Mary Ellis moved sheep onto the grass airstrip until a flight was imminent. Jackie’s pre-arrival radio or phone call would alert Mary and ensure that grazing sheep were ejected and the kettle switched-on. Mary and Jackie would have plenty to talk about as they had both belonged to the same aero club in 1939 prior to becoming colleagues in the ATA.
Having completed her probationary period, Jackie progressed to Channel Island routes from portsmouth flying the ex-WAAC twin-engined DH Doves. As a working mother, she often took her 11-year old daughter along on flights, seating her in any available seat or behind the pilot. Legend has it that Jackie wasn’t allowed to make PA announcements to the passengers in case her female tones frightened the nervous! It would be difficult for Dove or Rapide passenges to misidentify their pilot but it is possible that this would have been the case if she had flown the airline’s Vikings or Dakotas (4). In uniform, Jackie was often mistaken for an air stewardess despite the presence of the esteemed gold wings. To add to the confusion of some passengers, Jackie now had a drivers licence (5) and was sometimes tasked with collecting passengers from their homes for a speedy transfer to the departure airport, where Jackie re-emerged as the Pilot in Charge.
(3) Detail from https:// solentaviatrix.wordpress.com
(4) It is often reported that Jackie flew Channel Dakotas – this could only have been for a short time as the first C-47 arrived at the end of February 1960 and, by the summer, Jackie had left to work for Meridian Air Maps.
(5) For many years Jackie held commercial pilots licenses and a motor cycle license but was unable to drive a motor car.
By the summer of 1960, Jackie had left Channel Airways and, pregnant with her second daughter Candida, briefly flew aerial mapping sorties for Meridian Air Maps in Scotland. The Shoreham-based company owned and Airspeed Consul and an Auster Autocar in 1960 but were in the process of acquiring another aircraft familiar to Jackie, an Avro Anson. Jackie continued to combine her role as a mother-of-two with flying projects during the sixties and seventies, intent on keeping up enough hours to maintain her Instrument Rating. She reprised her role as a DH Dove pilot for the West Country-based Trak Air, an outfit which also flew a Rapide, a Tri-Pacer and an Auster from Dunkeswell in Devon, conveniently close to Jackie’s home in Taunton. Trak operated between autumn 1968 and 1970.
Pleasure flights were another source of income although, as Jackie had said of similar earlier projects in her autobiography, the pleasure ‘was confined to the passengers’. In April 1969, she was also part of the news when the aircraft she was piloting on a press mission for the Sunday papers was the first to spot Robin Knox-Johnston’s yacht Suhaili as it approached Falmouth at the end of the epic solo round-the-world voyage.
On April 29th 1994, Jackie made a notable final flight in Carolyn Grace’s Spitfire ML407. The fighter had been delivered, as a single-seater, directly from the factory to 485 (New Zealand) Squadron exactly fifty years earlier by one Dolores Teresa ‘Jackie’ Sorour – one of two Spitfires she delivered on April 29th 1944. During the preceding two days in 1944 she had delivered a Beaufighter twin-engined fighter bomber, a Typhoon fighter, a Spitfire and had also flown an Airspeed Oxford and an Avro Anson. The old Supermarine had passed an eventful fifty years and had now been converted to dual seating. Restored to flying condition between 1979 and 1985 by design engineer Nick Grace, the Spitfire’s operation had been taken over by Nick’s wife Carolyn following his untimely death in a car crash in 1988. Carolyn Grace had been in touch with ML 407’s original squadron pilot, Flying Officer Johnnie Houlton, for an earlier documentary film about the aircraft. She now arranged to fly the Spitfire, with Jackie in the second seat, from the Battle of Britain airfield at North Weald to Duxford where they would meet with Johnnie and an amazing twenty members of the original 485 Squadron ground crew. During the flight, Carolyn tricked an initially unwilling Jackie to take control of the Spitfire and, upon reaching Duxford, Jackie flew a low formation pass along the runway before landing and signing the fighter over to Johnnie….a second time.
Jackie’s husband, reg, died in 1997 and Jackie joined him on January 7th 2004. She made her last flight on August 1st 2004 when, appropriately, Carolyn Grace scattered her ashes from ML 407 over Dunkeswell Airfield.
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