54
Jean Batten
* This is an excerpt from 100 Nasty Women of History by Hannah Jewell
If you’ve ever been on a plane, you’re probably aware that they make no sense. How do they get off the ground? How do they know which way to go? How do they stay up? They’re so heavy. These are just some of the questions that mankind will never be able to answer.
Jean and her mother were laser-focused on their goal: for Jean to attain international superstardom by hurtling across oceans in tiny tin cans in a state of constant peril. And to do so while maintaining a glamorous image. Just how glam are we talking? Well, Jean would carry a make-up bag in her tiny planes so that her lipstick would be camera-ready as soon as she got out of her plane after each heroic feat. Jean would have been amazing at Instagram, and her mother would have been the first to comment each time she posted.But none of this bothered Jean Batten, the mega glam 1930s aviator from New Zealand who set multiple world records for her daring long-distance solo flights around the world. Jean was born in Rotorua, New Zealand, in 1909. She was a gifted musician and ballet dancer, but what she really wanted, like all teen girls, was to fly planes. And so she moved with her mother to London to join the London Aeroplane Club, learn to fly, and find out how to make planes stay up.
Jean’s first feat was to try and break the record of Amy Johnson, the British aviator who was the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia. Jean wanted to do the same, but faster. On her first attempt, she flew into a sandstorm and went into a terrifying tailspin, but managed to pull out in time to make a safe landing near Baghdad. Back in the air, she carried right on, as if she hadn’t just nearly died – and hit ANOTHER sandstorm, this time forcing her to land in Balochistan, in what is now Pakistan. At this point, her tiny plane was knackered, and the engine gave out entirely. She crashed near Karachi, but crawled out of the wreck just fine, presumably with her make-up looking absolutely 10/10.
A word on planes in the 1930s: Jean was flying a plane known as a Gypsy Moth. It wasn’t even enclosed, guys. Have you ever been on a motorway and had to roll up the windows because the wind was getting a bit much? OK, now imagine flying through a series of sandstorms in an open-top plane, alone, from England to Australia. Also, you have no way of communicating with anyone on the ground. Also, your lipstick looks great.
Jean, instead of deciding after her first failed attempt that the ground was actually a quite nice place to be, decided to give it another go. On her second attempt, Jean ignored warnings not to try and fly against a strong headwind across the Mediterranean Sea, and ran out of fuel. She knew it was her own silly fault, and recorded thinking at the time: ‘A watery grave is what I deserved.’
If it’s what she deserved, she didn’t get it, instead crash-landing on the outskirts of Rome without breaking a bone, and even finding a kind Italian gentleman to lend her some spare wings to get her plane back to England.
Still, Jean thought to herself that, yes, she’d quite like to try it again. She wasn’t, after all, enough of an international superstar yet. And so, in 1934, Jean finally made it from England to Australia, through a monsoon in Burma, in just under 15 days – breaking Amy’s record by four and a half days. She was the world record holder, and a media sensation. The headline of the Daily Express read: ‘THE GIRL WHO HAS BEATEN ALL THE MEN’. To drum up continued press for herself and her sponsors, she undertook tours across Australia and New Zealand with a little black kitten named Buddy.
Jean’s next feat was becoming the first woman to fly herself across the South Atlantic, and then in 1936, incredibly, to fly the first direct-ish flight from England to New Zealand. A flight from England to New Zealand nowadays is punishing enough, and at least you get to watch a few movies and have a look through the skincare section of the duty-free catalogue. Jean, meanwhile, had to stay focused all that way on the difficult task of not plummeting to her death. At least by this time she was flying a plane with a top.
The last leg of the New Zealand feat was the most dangerous, crossing the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand. ‘If I go down in the sea,’ she said, ‘no one must fly out to look for me.’ This was a 1,200-mile crossing with only a watch and a compass to guide her, and yet she was such a keen navigator that she managed to land within 100 yards of where she’d planned.
To sum up: Jean Batten was a madwoman who escaped death over and over flying teeny tiny planes through perilous storms that would make most people shit themselves in terror. But shitting yourself in terror is not very glam, and Jean was a very glam woman.
Here’s the other thing about Jean, though, that comes up in anything you watch or read about her. Beyond her nutso solo flights in tiny tin-can planes, Jean Batten was also famous for charming men, taking their money to buy planes, crashing those planes, returning the bits of broken plane to the men, and then dumping the men. This, and the fact that she became a recluse and died alone, having never married, always ends up as the shameful denouement in the telling of her life story. Her critics will stress that she was too vain, too aloof, and too cruel to the men who loved her. And she cared too much about her lipstick, after all.
One man gave her his life savings, £400, to buy her first plane. He wanted to marry her, and clearly saw this as the deal – a deal which she reneged on. A quick word to my gentlemen readers: if you give someone £400 to buy a plane, it doesn’t oblige them to marry you.
What Jean loved was flying. She loved ‘the intoxicating drug of speed, and freedom to roam the earth’. If she wanted to be remembered and beloved as a legend, I propose that we let her. It may be a tired line of argument, but truly, would history begrudge a man for his vanity at wanting to be a legend? Would we judge a man to be cold, and deserving of a lonely death, rather than remember him as a romantic and enigmatic confirmed bachelor, if he had wronged a few lovers in his 20s?
The truth is, Jean did want to marry, once – a fellow aviator named Beverley Shepherd. But one day, his plane went missing. Jean took off in her plane to help in the search, to no avail. While some of those in the plane survived, Beverley did not. Jean remembered reading the news: ‘I bought a newspaper and forced myself to read it. It was almost as if I deliberately drove a dagger into my heart.’
Later, she fell in love again, with an RAF pilot. He died, too, in World War II, which also marked the end of her flying career.
Is a woman not allowed to be cold after suffering all that? Or do women have to keep smiling to their graves? Do even the great female adventurers have to end up domesticated in order to earn the well wishes of history?
Wait, don’t go! Come back. I’m done ranting. Mostly. My point is, if Jean Batten was an asshole, let her be an asshole. Nobody cares that Winston Churchill was an asshole. So many famous men of history were probably assholes, but we remember their assholishness as their not giving a damn, their romantic rejection of the social pleasantries that would have held them back on their quest to greatness.
OK. That’s Jean. You have heard her story, and if you’d like to criticise her for not marrying some men who made some poor financial decisions, please do so after setting a world record and crash-landing in a sandstorm. Then go right ahead.
