They searched for her everywhere. They searched for her across Europe. They searched as far as the Canary Island of Tenerife. Nobody knew where she was. Very few people seemed to care, and yet the lady was the great Jean Batten, one of the British Empire’s greatest aviators.
People had grown accustomed to her disappearing for years at a time. There was no one to miss her until after she had died.
She died on 22nd November, 1982, just five weeks after leaving London for the last time. She had booked herself in to a cheap hotel in Mallorca. She was like any other anonymous, lonely guest. An infection developed in a leg after she had been bitten by a dog. She had refused to see a doctor. She refused to see anyone, in fact, except the little lady who ran the cheap hotel. She died, as she had lived for so many years, alone.
Jean Batten spent sixteen of those absent years in the Canary island of Tenerife, having arrived there with her ageing mother in 1966. They took an apartment in the coastal village of San Marcos. Not long after that, Jean's mother died.
Many of those who met Jean Batten would criticise her aloof nature. Perhaps most people never got close enough to Jean to understand the reasons behind her distant, peculiar ways. Few British residents in Tenerife managed to get remotely close to Jean. When they did, they realised she rarely opened up any windows for people to peep inside.
One of those people was Annette Reid. During an interview for a New Zealand Television documentary, Annette Reid, the wife of the last British Honorary Vice Consul in the town of Puerto de la Cruz, said she didn't think Jean Batten had any close friends. A generous and observant lady, Annette could not have put it better, when asked to describe the aviator.
“She seemed to be like a wonderful star that shot across the firmament and then burnt itself out like a comet, until there was nothing left”.
Things could have been so very different for Jean Batten. Born in New Zealand in 1909, her interest in flying began as a child when she would watch the old flying boats land and take off at a local flying school. The pattern of her life began to take shape when her mother, Ellen, arranged for Australian flying hero, Charles Kingswood Smith, to take her for a spin. Jean knew immediately what she wanted in life but her father, Frederick, was bitterly opposed to her ambitions. He had dreamed of his girl becoming a concert pianist.
Ellen took Jean to England, supposedly to study music at the Royal College of Music. Mother and daughter had other plans. Within days of arriving in the United Kingdom in 1930 Jean Batten was learning to fly at a Harrow aerodrome.
When news of the mother-daughter conspiracy reached Frederick Batten in New Zealand, he promptly cut off her allowance and that of her mother’s. The two women were left stranded and penniless. Her father and mother, a failed actress, had been separated for a number of years. It was believed he had numerous girlfriends. They were not precisely the best of friends.
In spite of a disconcerting nature and her rapid decline in years to come, Jean Batten was without doubt a remarkable individual. With just twenty hours of flying hours noted in her log book Jean announced she was going to attempt to fly solo to Australia. She wanted to beat the record set by the great Amy Johnson.
Jean Batten was attractive and sometimes charming when she needed to be. On one voyage to New Zealand, she met Flying Officer Fred Truman. At the time, he was serving in the RAF in India. She persuaded him to lend her five hundred pounds. It was all he had, and it was quite a sum in those days. Truman was one of the many men to fall for Jean's charms. With his money she was able to negotiate sponsorships for her flight and promptly lost interest in the poor man. A number of years later Fred Truman wrote and asked if she would pay him back. She told him to join the queue. He had been one of her stepping-stones.
Back in New Zealand, Jean Batten made some inroads into restoring her relationship with her father, who also gave funds for her new adventures.
On her return to England, Jean was provided with a second hand De Havilland Gipsy Moth by another hopeful courtier. She made her first attempt to fly solo to Australia in April 1933. She was lucky to survive a horrifying experience when caught up in a vicious sandstorm over the Syrian Desert. The little biplane got into a spin which she just managed to control within feet of the ground. A few hours later she made two forced landings, near Bagdad and then close to Karachi when her engine blew up and the Gipsy Moth ended up in pieces. Miss Batten stepped out unscathed. Any ordinary mortal may have given in, but she was not ordinary.
Her incredible determination attracted more money. On her returned to England Jean immediately received the sponsorship she was hoping for, this time from Lord Wakefield and Castrol Oil. She had become potential publicity material.
Only one year after nearly losing her life on that first attempt to fly solo to Australia, Jean set off again. The second flight also ended in disaster due mainly to her familiar, stubborn refusal to accept sound advice. Not heeding warnings from the French authorities, Jean Batten crossed the Mediterranean against a strong headwind. The aircraft ran out of fuel close to Rome and crashed. What a fool I have been, she later noted. Again, she was extremely lucky and escaped with just a cut lip and a black eye.
The whole world realised now that Jean was ruthlessly tenacious and she attracted huge admiration. On her third attempt to fly to Australia she made it. Her record-breaking flight took 22 hours and 30 minutes. It was an astonishing achievement, especially as she had flown through the wall of death, a ferocious monsoon over Burma.
Pilots flying larger aeroplanes were later to describe similar experiences as penetrating a dense, black wall of water. Soon after arriving in Australia, Jean Batten sent a cable to the only person to ever have a hold on her, a very strong hold indeed. It was to her mother.
Darling, we have done it, the aeroplane, you and me.
The welcome Miss Batten received in Australia was overwhelming. Mission accomplished. She had obtained the fame which she and her mother had yearned for. Her extraordinary determination also helped them become economically independent.
Jean very quickly learned to behave like a heroic celebrity. She also forgot how to behave like an ordinary woman, if she ever was an ordinary woman. That failing was perhaps to become her worst enemy in future years.
As researchers discovered, very few people were ever able to break through Jean's glamorous exterior. She became totally self-interested. After a while, she began to bore people. Many could not understand what appeared to be an obsession for pleasing her mother. After flying back to England, so becoming the first woman to make a return flight, she crossed the South Atlantic to Brazil in a Percival Gull monoplane in 1935.
Charles Lindberg, the great American aviator, was fascinated by her. Jean was only 26, with the world at her feet and the promise of a wonderful life ahead. He invited Jean to tour the USA with him. Her mother said don’t accept, so she didn’t accept the invitation. Nobody could ever find the reason for such a compulsively possessive relationship.
Jean and Ellen Batten retreated to the English countryside, and Ellen would rarely allow anyone to even speak to her daughter, the outstanding young lady aviator. Jean was also distancing herself from people. She was on a pedestal and didn’t know how, or was unwilling to get down off it. Her manner also began to betray an extraordinary and sad insecurity. If only she could have been free again, in the sky or simply untied to her beloved mother.
Jean Batten caught a fleeting glimpse of freedom, of happiness or of emotional independence after another record-breaking flight from England to New Zealand in 1936. She was the heroine once again. She also met Beverly Shepherd, an airline pilot in Australia. He asked her to marry him and she accepted, but kept their engagement quiet until she could speak to Mummy. Soon after their secret engagement, a small passenger plane disappeared during a flight between Brisbane and Sidney. The co-pilot was among those killed. It was Beverly Shepperd.
Although she tried to recover from this tragedy in 1937, by flying solo back to England again in just five days and eighteen hours, Jean Batten now clung on even more to her mother. Her days of fame fast began to cloud over. Described as the Empire’s Queen of the Skies, this beautiful girl with dark black hair and ivory skin, she hung up her white flying suit for the last time in 1939. The news was all about war. Jean became a thing of the past.
She tried and failed to enlist as a woman ferry pilot. She was desperate, as all loyal citizens were, to do her bit. She made a few speeches to raise money for the war effort. There was a brief glimmer of hope. She fell in love again, this time with a bomber pilot. Unfortunately he was killed on a mission. She fell deeper into her mother's life. She would only ever be absolutely happy when flying high in the sky, tempting destiny with her achievements.
The two ladies lived in Jamaica for a while, where they might have mingled with other celebrities like Noel Coward or Ian Fleming who was inventing James Bond, but they kept themselves to themselves. Dr. Jacobs, a famous psychologist in Jamaica said Jean Batten came across as a celebrity waiting for applause. It was a similar tale wherever she went. They left Jamaica almost secretly and lived out of a suitcase, travelling through Europe for the next seven years. They then bought an apartment in a small village near Malaga called Los Boliches. In English this means the marbles.
Nobody was ever given an address and before long they moved to Tenerife, taking an apartment in the beautiful coastal village of San Marcos.
San Marcos was considered the gem of the north. Fishermen still hauled their boats up onto the sand, and sold some of their catch to the popular old fish restaurants on the sand. To the locals Jean was just an anonymous foreigner, a slightly odd señora with an old mother who died.
Without her mother, Jean Batten’s growing eccentricity became more acute. She tried a comeback and flew to England where she died her hair jet black, bought a mini skirt and had a couple of face-lifts. She attracted temporary public interest and died her hair blonde. She was sixty. The world no longer knew who she was and really wasn’t concerned.
So our record-breaking heroine aged alone in Tenerife. One day she must have understood that her star was indeed burning out because she suddenly sold her flat in Puerto de la Cruz and flew to London where she began to leave her possessions and memorabilia at strategic places like the RAF Museum in London. After that, she disappeared for good.
The truth about her death, registered in Palma on 22nd November 1982, was not discovered until 1987. The local authorities had sent notice of Miss Batten’s death to the New Zealand Embassy in Madrid. But there had never been a New Zealand Embassy in Madrid. Nobody claimed to know the lonely old foreigner. She was buried in common grave with fifty other angels. At least she would not be alone any more.
In honour Jean Batten a small aircraft rally took place in 1989 from Britain to Tenerife and a plaque was unveiled in Puerto de la Cruz. It seems to have been removed but visitors today who walk along the pier from their cruise ships in the port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife will see a reference to her in the avenue of illustrious visitors.
By John Reid Young, author and Canary Island tour
guide.
Books by John include:
The Skipping Verger and Other Tales, a collection of
short stories.
A Shark in the Bath and Other Stories, a collection of
short stories.
El Hombre
de La Guancha y Otras Historias, a collection of short stories in Spanish.
The Journalist, a novel.
For more
information, or if you would like to read any of my books, please click on the
images to the right of this page.
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