Pioneer aviatrix: epic flight ‘by guess and by golly’

Press, 19 April 1989, Page 21

Pioneer aviatrix: epic flight ‘by guess and by golly’

By

CHRISTOPHER MOORE

ON an English autumn day in 1931, Aline Barton spread her- wings and launched herself into high adventure.

During a single 8500 km flight from Heston to Nairdui Kenya, the 31-year-old New Zealander became the first New Zealand woman to achieve a transcontinental, flight. Aline Barton’s achievement was made five years before Jean Batten flew from London to Sydney. While Batten became an internationally recognised name in aviation history, Aline Barton made her one and only trans-continental flight before retiring out of the public eye.

Today, Mrs Aline Quin lives in Christchurch. She remains modest about her epic flight but her ninetieth birthday later this month has been celebrated with a new biography by local author Peter Maling.

The book’s title is “Wanderlust” — an appropriate word to describe the life of a woman born with several kilos of shifting sand in her shoes. Aline Quin has always suffered from terminal wanderlust. She has explored New Zealand, travelled across North America and Europe, lived in the West Indies and built a home on the Mediterranean island of Elba. She enjoyed a long affair with cars and planes. Her flying achievements were made during the Golden Age of the amateur flier, a time when character, a sense of adventure and a certain self-confidence was considered more important than regulations, frontiers and news media coverage. It was the era of Lindbergh, Batten, Earhart and Johnson, and Aline Barton was very much part of the flying years. There were two facets to her life, both illustrated in family photographs. The first is the picture of the society girl, photographed in the soft haziness fashionable during the 19205. Wearing a fashionable crepe de chine dress and the single obligatory string of pearls, she gazes out at the toorld with a firm mouth and level stare.

Five years later, Aline Barton was photographed at Heston Airport with her Gypsy Moth. The crepe de chine and the pearls have been replaced by a stylish fur-lined flying suit and a pair of stout but fashionable shoes. Her hand rests on a propeller blade and she smiles broadly at the camera obviously ready to begin her adventure.

Ironically, the London-Kenya flight was the last time she piloted a plane. Shortly after reaching Nairobi, she sold the aircraft and vanished from the public eye. A flurry of press stories included references to “mysterious flights” by a young New Zealand girl across the Balkans and down the Nile. The “Daily Mail” described the flier as a 19-year-pld schoolgirl who had decided to fly back to the Dominion. Wellington’s morning newspaper the “Dominion” later ran the story on its women’s page under the heading, “In strange lands — New Zealand girl’s flight.” During the years after the headlines, Aline Barton married

and began a naval officer’s wife’s migrationary life. Britain, the West Indies, South Africa became her temporary homes. She lost all her possessions in World War Two when the ship carrying them back to Britain was torpedoed in the Mediterranean. She toured Africa by car, and built a home on the island of Elba before eventually returning home to New Zealand. Alexandra Mabel Barton came into the world in the last year of the nineteenth century, one of six daughters born to the former barrister, William Barton and his wife, Lucy. The Bartons and the Studholmes were wellknown New Zealand colonial families. For Aline Barton and her sisters, childhood at “Fareham,” the family property near Featherson and White Rock Station was secure, comfortable and filled with adventure. On her maternal side were the Studholmes, an old Canterbury family. The Bartons had arrived in Wellington during the early 1840 s, taking up land near Cape Palliser, and building the White Rock Station. A vein of energy, determination and initiative ran through fhe branches of both family trees.

Her childhood was spent with nurses and governesses in the two-storey wooden home near Featherston. The Barton sisters explored the surrounding countryside, attended lessons in the schoolroom, entered local gymkhanas and flower shows, and spent the long Christmas holidays at White Rock Station.

They were the sunset years for New Zealand’s great landowners — a period which Aline Quin now describes as “privileged” for the daughters and sons of the squatocracy. In 1913, together with her sister, she left Fareham

and became a boarder at Woodford House School at Havelock North. At the end of World War One, she left to take up the social round — golf, motoring, entertaining, and being entertained.

"As children we had to stand on our own feet. It was a privileged upbringing but an isolated one. I hardly knew anyone outside the family before I went to school. I suppose that Father was always toughening his daughters up, telling us that if we weren’t observant in life, we would never succeed. We had to stand independently. “I was always a bookish child, always reading. I loved to be alone.' I didn’t need people. The funny thing is that today I do. “My upbringing was perhaps not ideal. The danger always existed that you assumed that you were somebody. But you cannot go continually through life thinking that you are the kingpin. I soon discovered that.” Throughout the 19205, she travelled widely, entertaining a growing fascination for cars and motoring. By 1930, she was exploring a new hobby in New Zealand flying. The early flying lessons took off from a Martinborough airfield and she was hooked by the euphoria of flight.

After five hours dual and seven hours solo flight, Aline Barton became the eighth woman in New Zealand and the first in the Wairarapa to receive a pilot’s licence. With licence number 199 safely in her log book, she flew throughout the North Island. She flew from the Wairarapa to Christchurch, 250 miles hugging the coastline in fine weather. She battled a Canterbury nor’easterly during another flight to visit her sister at Mt Torlesse. In 1931, carrying a fur-lined flying suit made by a local seamstress, she left for England and further flying experience.

Several months later, she announced that she intended to buy a second-hand Gipsy Moth and fly to Kenya to see the wildlife. “I didn’t ask anyone’s permission to undertake the flight. I simply bought the plane and flew it. The only problem was that I couldn’t pay for it. I went to the Bank of New Zealand in London to borrow £6OO but they told me that I had no security. Finally I cabled Father. He was away but my youngest sister told the bank to send the money ... “I was always doing dreadful things and regretting them later. I suspect that poor Father was rather glad when I got married and settled down.”

After the Gipsy Moth and Aline Barton became acquainted in the skies over France, she settled down to equipping the plane for the flight to Africa. The aircraft was fitted with an alti-

meter, a rev counter and an airspeed indicator. A compass had to be installed. The fuel tank contained 19 gallons of fuel sufficient for a maximum of 3y 2 hours flying time. The aircraft’s maximum level speed was 100 m.p.h., with a stalling speed of 40 m.p.h., with normal cruising level of 1900 revs. It carried no parachutes, no radio and no emergency equipment. It would carry a navigator, Bunny Richards, who joined Aline Barton shortly before the flight.

“I might lack imagination but I never considered the risks involved in the flight. They never worried me,” Mrs Quin remarks. “I never thought of taking sandwiches or coffee. I assumed that we would always get something to eat when we arrived at our destination. “I didn’t think of the distances involved. I wanted to get to Nairobi and I was going there. I belonged to the Royal Auto-

mobile Club but it told me that it couldn’t help me with maps or routes. The Automobile Association had an air department which could organise petrol and maps.” On October 20, 1931, watched by a small group of friends and a journalist from the “Daily Mail,” Aline and Frank cranked the Gypsy Moth into life, taxied along the runway and took off into the familiar English skies. During the following days, they hopped from London to Brussels, to Cologne, across southern Germany and down the Danube to Vienna for lunch and Budapest for the night. Then on to Belgrade where problems with refueling and approaching darkness meant an unscheduled stop before the 330 km flight to the Bulgarian capital, Sofia. Buffeted and pushed back by strong headwinds, the small aircraft took four hours to cover 80km. Confronted by a rapidly emptying fuel tank and the inhospitable Balkan highlands beneath them, Aline Barton decided to land in a remote mountain valley. They became an immediate attraction for a growing crowd of peasants.

While Frank Richards was dispatched to search for fuel, Aline attempted to foster closer

New Zealand-Balkan understanding with the curious but unintelligible crowd. Ten gallons of fuel eventually returned but it was too late to take off. Night was' spent in the mountains, eating black bread, boiled eggs and whey in the Balkan darkness. The next day, the pair took off into a lowering sky, racing against the gathering storm clouds to reach Sofia. They won the race by a few hours. Another night before the journey to Constantinople and Asia Minor, across the Anatolian Plateau and into Syria, flying against all advice through the Taurus Gap, a narrow corridor in the mountain ranges, a short cut but an, aviator’s graveyard in high winds. Aline Barton’s luck held but French officials at Aleppo were horrified when they were later told of her route. The route then took Aline and Frank to Damascus and Cairo — the gateway to Africa.

“It never struck me that Frank could be frightened. I wasn’t but there were moments when he must have become extremely nervous. He was fairly courageous to have travelled with a woman on this sort of flight,” she remembers.

“A Gipsy Moth was a foolproof plane. It was like a Baby Austin. You could throw it around the sky and it would usually hold together. You could land it at 35 m.p.h. if you had good eyesight and judgment.” After a two-night stop-over in Cairo, the Gipsy Moth was flown south along the broad blue-green band of the River Nile and above the low mud brick villages and villagers working the fields. Luxor and Wadi Haifa slipped away under the plane’s wings.

Aline had been instructed to follow the railway line from Wadi Haifa to Atbara, landing at the sixth railway station to refuel. High headwinds buffeted the aircraft while Aline struggled to land at Station Six. Bouncing to a halt on the rough dirt strip, she faced a long wait for the fuel to arrive, sitting in the shade of the plane wing and sipping tea.

Onto Khartoum in the Sudan where Royal Air Force ground crews inspected the plane while Aline Barton inspected the place where the White and Blue Niles meet and Kitchener met his death. By 5 a.m. the next day, they were in the air again, flying due south towards Malakal.

During the approach to the riverside paddock which served as an airstrip, Aline reached down to release the throttle and reduce speed for landing. She was horrified to discover that the throttle was stuck. As the plane circled she struggled against the obstinate metal and wood. It remained firmly stuck. “The plane was going at full speed. I assumed that Frank might have had his elbow on the throttle but he didn’t. I eventually gave the thing a tremendous tug and somehow released it.

The mechanic who inspected the aircraft later told me that it simply needed blackleading. But it was the single worst moment during the entire flight.” Bouncing to a halt on the thorn bushes which covered the airstrip, the Gypsy Moth’s engine spluttered to a halt in the fur-nace-like heat. Aline and Frank faced an overnight stay in a primitive guesthouse on the fetid borders of a mosquitoridden swampland. They left Malakal with few regrets the following day, flying on to Bor and Juba, inching deeper into the African sub-continent along the White Nile to Lake Albert and south-east to the Rippon Falls and Lake Victoria-Nyanza.

At Jinja, wallows of hippos watched impassively as the New Zealander prepared for the last stage of the flight —475 km against strong winds which had dogged the entire flight. They faced the last barrier, the Mau Mountains. Landing at Kisumu, she lightened the aircraft before being told to spiral directly up to 9000 ft to clear the peaks. Taking off into the African sky, the faithful Gipsy Moth responded, wheeling upwards and carrying Aline Barton and Bunny Richards clear of the mountains and down into the great Rift Valley and on to Nairobi. The welcome at Nairobi Airport was low-key: the local game warden and his wife. No journalists from the “Daily Mail,” no familiar faces. The adventure

ended when Aline gently touched her aircraft’s nosewheel on to the red African dirt a month after leaving London. She had kept no log or journal of the flight. The only written record was contained in her letters to New Zealand, a few newspaper articles, and her own vivid memories of a remarkable journey. Aline Barton never flew again. Bunny Richards disappeared from her life together with the route maps. Engineers discovered that the Gypsy Moth’s right wing had been badly warped during the flight. The cost of repairs was too high and the aircraft which had made Aline Barton part of New Zealand’s aviation history was sold to a Nairobi flier for £450. It was later destroyed in a crash into the African bush. "The trip was frightfully interesting. I have done and seen so much, it is worth the expense every time. But now I feel that I have done it and must be content to stop flying for a bit," she wrote to her parents shortly after reaching Kenya. “I never intended to go anywhere else and the object of the flight was purely for the sake of having a holiday,” she told a reporter from the “East African Standard.”

"The 1931 flight was by guess and by golly. I was lucky. That’s all — and it’s nonsense to make so much of it,” Aline Quin said in Christchurch last week. “People make a fuss simply because I am a woman. Jean Batten went Into everything professionally and deserved every bit of success. But I could never have stood the public attention and the speechmaking. I would have died ...”

Distances not comtemplated

No log or flight journal