Rosemary Rees

Rosemary Rees

Rees joined the ATA on New Years Day 1940, one of the ATA's first eight female pilots alongside Joan Hughes, Margaret Cunnison, Mona Friedlander, Gabrielle Patterson, Marion Wilberforce, Margaret Fairweather, and Winifred Crossley Fair, under the command of Pauline Gower.

In September 1941 she took on her role as deputy to Margot Gore at the all woman ferry pool at Hamble-on-Solent.^[9] She left the ATA in November 1945. By the end of the war she was one of only 11 women who had flown the 4-engine bombers and had flown 91 different aircraft types. In 1946 she started her own charter company called Sky Taxi.

Rees was one of the few ATA pilots that received a MBE.

Life after flying

On 3 November 1950 she married Sir Philip Harvey Du Cros (1898–1975) becoming Rosemary, Lady du Cros. She moved to live with him in Parkham, Devon, where she became involved in politics, eventually becoming chairman of the Bideford area Conservative Association.

Death

Rees died at Little Bocombe, Parkham, on 8 March 1994, aged ninety-two.^{[10][11][12][13][14][15][16]}

Legacy

A bus company in Hatfield named its eight buses after the "first eight" of the Tiger Moth pilots in the ATA, including Rees.^[17]

Fourteen years after her death in 2008, the fifteen surviving women members of the ATA (and 100 surviving male pilots) were given a special award by the Prime Minister Gordon Brown.^[18]

In December 2020, six pilot’s logbooks belonging to Rosemary Rees, were sold at auction for £7400, well above the expected estimate. The logbooks dated from June 25, 1933 to June 23, 1947, and were sold together with a leather flying helmet, leather gloves, two photograph albums, photographs of Rees as a dancer and related ephemera and books on flying.^[19]

References