Batten, Jean
(1909–1982)
Ian Mackersey
https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/65609
Published in print: 23 September 2004
Published online: 23 September 2004
This version: 06 January 2011
Batten, Jean (1909–1982), aviator, was born on 15 September 1909 in Rotorua, New Zealand, the youngest child and only daughter of Frederick Batten, a dentist, and his wife, Ellen Blackmore (1876/7–1966). Frederick was the son of an English immigrant surveyor, James William Batten, from Reading; Ellen's father, John Blackmore, from Devon, was an ex-British army sergeant-major drill instructor who went to New Zealand in 1869.
From the moment of Batten's birth, her mother, a formidable and ambitious woman with unusually emphatic feminist views for her day, determined that her daughter would be encouraged to achieve and compete in a masculine world. After Blériot flew across the English Channel, she pinned a newspaper picture of the French pilot on the wall beside the cot. When, in 1913, the Battens moved to Auckland, where Jean, at the age of five, was sent to Melmerley Ladies' School, Ellen began regularly to take her down to the harbour to watch the flying boats at a pilot training base. When Batten was eleven, in 1920, her parents permanently separated. She lived thereafter with her mother, with whom she formed an excessively close lifelong bond. At the Ladies' College in Auckland she excelled academically but gained a reputation as a loner—an intelligent, solitary person who made few friends.
In 1924, aged fifteen, Jean Batten went to secretarial school in Auckland and began to study the piano and ballet, hoping to make a career in both. However, the news of Charles Lindbergh's non-stop flight from New York to Paris in May 1927 led her to change her mind. The exploit inspired her to learn to fly. Early in 1930, having sold her piano to pay the fares, she and her mother went to England. At the London Aeroplane Club, Batten obtained first her private and then her commercial flying licences. To pay for the flying she borrowed from Fred Truman, a young New Zealand pilot about to leave the RAF. Anxious to marry her, he gave her his entire gratuity of £500. When it was spent she dropped him for another benefactor, Victor Dorée, who also wanted to marry her, and bought her a Gipsy Moth whose previous owner was the prince of Wales. In this aircraft (G-AALG) she set off in April 1933 to try to fly to Australia faster than Amy Johnson's 1930 time of nineteen and a half days. She got only as far as Karachi, where she suffered catastrophic engine failure and crashed, wrecking the aeroplane, but escaping uninjured.
Back in England, Batten turned to Lord Wakefield, head of the Castrol Oil Company. Impressed by her pluck and beauty, he agreed to provide her with another second-hand Moth. In this aircraft (G-AARB) Batten, now engaged to a London stockbroker, Edward Walter, set out in April 1934 to fly to Australia. This flight also ended in disaster. Running out of fuel on the outskirts of Rome she flew into a cluster of radio masts, crash-landing among them in the dark and almost severing her lip.
On her third attempt, made in the repaired Moth, now fitted with replacement lower wings borrowed from Edward Walter's own aeroplane, Batten finally made it to Australia. Her flight of fourteen days and twenty-two and a half hours shattered Amy Johnson's 1930 time to Darwin by more than four days. The feat made her an overnight international celebrity. In Australia and New Zealand she was lionized. Lecture tours brought her prosperity. She revelled in the adulation, impressing the crowds with her glamour and charm and carefully prepared speeches—in all of which she heaped extravagant praise, for her support, upon her mother.
In Sydney, Batten fell in love with an Australian airline pilot, Beverley Shepherd, and broke off her engagement to Edward Walter; he was so angry he sent her a bill for his aeroplane wings. Secretly engaged to Shepherd, she flew the Moth back to England in April 1935, becoming the first woman to fly from England to Australia and back. In search of new records, she was now able to afford a Percival Gull cabin plane (G-ADPR), in which, in November 1935, she flew from England to Brazil, crossing the south Atlantic in a brilliantly accurate feat of navigation aided only by a watch and a compass. Her England–South America and Atlantic crossings were world records. In Buenos Aires she received a cabled offer from Charles Lindbergh to fly up and make a coast-to-coast lecture tour of the United States. It would greatly have increased her celebrity and prosperity, but she was persuaded by her mother to refuse and returned to England. The two women retired to a Hertfordshire cottage.
In October 1936 Batten emerged from seclusion to make the longest of all her great journeys—the first-ever direct flight from England to New Zealand. But the flight and the stress of fame took its toll. In New Zealand she suffered a nervous breakdown. After her recovery she went to Sydney by sea to marry Beverley Shepherd. However, on the day of her arrival he was killed in an air crash. Stricken with grief, she dropped out of public view again. In October 1937 Batten flew the Gull back to England. The flight of five days and eighteen hours established a solo Australia–England absolute record. It was her last long-distance flight: her brief years of fame had lasted only from 1933 to 1937. During the Second World War she worked first as an ambulance driver, then in a munitions factory, and finally as a fund-raising lecturer with the National Savings Committee. She fell in love again, this time with an RAF bomber pilot whom she identified in her unpublished memoirs only as Richard; he was killed on operations over Europe.
In 1946 Batten and her mother moved, first to Jamaica, then to Spain, before going to Tenerife. Aged eighty-nine, her mother died in Tenerife in 1966. At the end of 1969 Batten made a dramatic return to public life, following face-lift surgery and having dyed her hair jet black. From her small apartment in Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, she travelled the world during the 1970s, persuading the airlines to give her free first-class tickets and offering herself for radio and television interviews.
However, despite her return to the limelight, Jean Batten was now a sad, lonely, and increasingly eccentric figure, self-absorbed with her fame of forty years earlier. In 1982, disillusioned, she sold her Tenerife apartment and flew to Majorca, intending to buy a new home there. It was not until September 1987 that a New Zealand documentary film-maker, researching her life, discovered that she had died in Palma on 22 November 1982—less than six weeks after arriving on the island. Infection from a dog bite had caused a fatal pulmonary abscess. Through a bureaucratic blunder the New Zealand government and her relatives had not been notified. In January 1983 she had been buried in an unmarked paupers' mass grave in Palma cemetery. Although she had appeared to live her last years in poverty, she left an estate valued at nearly £100,000. A memorial plaque now identifies her grave. A bronze statue stands beside Auckland airport's international terminal, which now bears her name and in which her Gull is on permanent display.
A stunningly attractive brunette of film-star glamour and poise, Jean Batten used her seductive charm to persuade a series of men to fund her flying ambitions. She was ruthless, determined, and, in the air, seemingly fearless, taking huge and unnecessary risks on many of her flights. Behind her daring lay the powerful driving force of her mother. As a record-seeking long-distance pilot she was spectacularly successful, openly competing with men and becoming one of the most remarkable woman aviators of the 1930s.
Sources
J. Batten, Solo flight (1938)
I. Mackersey, Jean Batten: the Garbo of the skies (1990)
private information (2004)
Archives
Film
BFINA, documentary footage
Sound
BL Sound and Moving Image Catalogue, oral history interviews
Likenesses
photographs, 1934–7,
Hult. Arch.
Wealth at Death
approximately £100,000
External resources
Bibliography of British and Irish History
Dictionary of New Zealand Biography
Oxford University Press
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