Outranked The Man She Married

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31011, 17 March 1966, Page 2

Outranked The Man She Married

Dame Felicity Peake, who was at first intimidated by her employer, a Mr Harald Peake, later outranked and married him

She now takes her orders from her husband and puts his interests first as she did many years ago when he was her employer in Air. Force public relations and she was a junior officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.

! “He was very senior and I was rather frightened of him,” she said in Christchurch.

At that time she had no thought of marrying him, for she was just a young woman of 24 who had a feeling that the “Munich Agreement was not all it was cracked up to be” and in case the worst happened she wanted to be prepared. She joined the Royal Air Force as an aircraftwoman tn 1939, months before the war. She and her first husband had both flown as a hobby.

She said she would have liked to have joined the Air Transport Auxiliary in which men and women collected aircraft from factories and delivered them to the stations.

Dame Felicity Peake had only 25 flying hours to her credit and the job demanded 250 hours’ solo flying so she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Her first husband, who was a fighter pilot, was killed on active service in 1939.

Because of her previous training she soon became an officer and at 24 she was responsible for 250 girts in the W.A.A.F. station at Biggin HiU

It was at Biggin HIU, during the daylight bombing of the fighter station in the Battle of Britain, that Dame Felicity Peake commanded the first three women in history to receive a Military Medal for gallantry. As their com-

manding officer, Dame Felicity Peake was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire. During the war she served in the United Kingdom, the Middle East, Belgium, Palestin, Greece, Italy and Austria. Just after the war Dame Felicity Peake became director of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. For some time she held “an interesting position'' while she was working out the conditions for the permanent force which was to become the Women's Royal Air Force. As director in 1949 she was made an air commandant while her husband was still

an acting air commodore. In the same year she was created a Dame of the Order of the British Empire for her valuable contribution to the services.

After she retired from the Women’s Royal Air Force in 1950 she became an executive director of the board of an old-established London brewing firm owned by her first husband's family. Her work involved the redecoration of hotels.

She was preparing for a career in politics when her old employer from the Air Ministry, Mr Harald Peake, then chairman of Lloyd’s Bank, asked her to marry him. She now devotes her time to her husband and her son Andrew, aged 10 next month, on their 1500-acre farm in Oxfordshire. She is a council member of the R.A.F. Benevolent Fund, the Union Jack Services Clubs and a trustee-of the Imperial War Museum. For the past nine years she has been governor of the Dominion Students Hall Trust. She is chairman of the management committee responsible for single women post-graduate students and married students. She is a justice of the peace in Oxfordshire. While in New Zealand she has been contacting the families of the New Zealand students in her hall, and inspecting army museums.