by Logan Walker
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Molly Rose, 1942 (Photo: UK Daily Express) [/caption] It was a chilly day in the waning years of the 1920s and it may have been an altogether more sensible idea to stay grounded inside by a fire, but Molly Rose was fortified by an excitement that defied reason. “I remember how cold it was,” she would remember years later and well into adulthood, “but when your big brother invites you on a flight, you don’t run into the house to get a cardigan!”
As a young girl, Molly often watched her brother take off in his Tiger Moth airplane from the windows of the Rose family home; now, as he led her to where it was parked in a field behind the house she could barely contain her excitement. As she recalled, “I was one of a large family, and as a little girl I thought anything my brother did was terrific…I very much enjoyed going anywhere he was prepared to take his little sister.” It was the first of several trips that would confirm for the young Molly that her aspirations pointed squarely to the pilot’s seat of an aircraft.
In many ways Molly’s passion for flying was either extremely lucky or somewhat inevitable; planes were after all the family business. One of seven children born to Maude and David Marshall, Molly’s father founded the Cambridge company Marshall Aerospace in 1909. The business would later be taken over by Molly’s brother and sometime flying escort Arthur who would expand it to include aircraft construction and servicing. Educated for much of her youth at a local school near her hometown of Cambridge, Molly spent a year at finishing school in Paris before returning to England to work in the family business. By age 17 she had obtained both a driver’s and pilot’s license, and soon after began training as Marshall Aerospace’s first female airplane engineer.
Molly’s personal life had begun to blossom as well; in 1938 she met a young music scholar at St. Catherine’s College named Bernard Rose during a party in Cambridge and the two began dating. A year later, Bernard, was called up to join the war effort as preparations for WWII swept the country. The two were barely married before Molly’s new husband was shuttled off to command tanks in North Africa, Italy, and Normandy, where he would later be captured and imprisoned near Germany.
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Molly Rose (left) and fellow ATA pilots. (Photo: The Telegraph) [/caption] It wasn’t long before Molly would receive her own army summons of sorts. In 1942 Rose received an invitation to join the ATA (Air Transport Auxilary), an organization founded by Sir Gerard Regis Leo d’Erlinger. Constructed on the belief that those not qualified to join the countries’ RAF (Royal Air Force) should be put to work transporting aircraft so that RAF members could focus on combat flying, the ATA started off accepting only men who for various reasons could not ordinarily qualify for Air Force service. Eventually, the ATA opened its doors to women, a historic development as Britain had never before allowed a woman in a military aircraft (the women of the ATA also had the distinction of receiving an equal wage to their male peers). In the end, about a fifth of the ATA pilots would be female, and collectively the organization would deliver over 309,000 planes over the course of the war. A natural choice for the job, Molly was seasoned in the world of aviation and a qualified pilot to boot, but despite her knowledgeable background she had spent only 57 hours in the sky (and just 18 of those as a solo pilot).
Molly's training with the ATA demonstrated her natural aptitude for flying, and she soon progressed from piloting the light Tiger Moth planes that she had taken her first taste of flight in, to more substantial single engine planes. Finally, she graduated to the cockpits of aircrafts like the Hurricane fighter and the infamous Spitfire, a piloting experience that Rose herself labeled “a thrilling moment.”
Expanding on her favorite aircrafts, Molly later commented that, “I didn’t like things like Walruses very much, which we had to fly sometimes. I think I liked all those gaudy aircraft that we flew, I mean particularly the twin engine light bombers, which were lovely to fly. And a Wellington was very nice, a reliable aircraft to fly.” Post-training she was stationed at Luton, then White Waltham, and finally in September of 1943 to Hamble airfield near Southhampton, an exclusively female unit that she would remain at for most of her time in the ATA.
Flying for the ATA was a difficult job by any standards. Aetheris avidi, or “eager for the air” read the ATA motto, and true to the description, on any given day Molly and her fellow pilots might be tasked with flying three to four different types of planes. Significant preparation and resourcefulness were needed for these flights, especially when operating a new kind of aircraft; checklists and aircraft notes where utilized in the absence of flight radios, which were not supplied, and often airfields where disguised and hardly perceptible from the sky. “If you were taking a new type of aircraft that you hadn’t flown before, you got the book out of the library, and if you got the chance you read it,” Rose remembered. “But equally you had a small, hard, loose leafed book which you could turn up to the page of the aircraft you were flying, and you stuck it in your flying boot. It became a joke to all the air force pilots in the we always had these. And when you were coming in to land you looked up any salient features of that aircraft.”
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Molly Rose during a visit to RAF Brize Norton in August 2013. (Photo: raf.mod.uk) [/caption] The urgency of their missions, regardless of the hazards they sometimes posed, was never lost on the women of the ATA. “I was never challenged, but we all absolutely knew that we had our backs to the wall,” said Rose of the tense political climate of WWII Britain. “If Hitler had cared to do an invasion immediately after Dunkirk, he could have walked in. But everyone was doing what they could to help. There was tremendous camaraderie.” In other ways, the experience of flying was freeing; As Rose recalled, “In those days. You did not have to keep to flight paths and heights. You just got into the air and had the fun of those powerful machines in the sky.” Throughout it all, Rose and her fellow pilots maintained a no-nonsense work ethic and practicality that cut through any irreverence or air-stunts; “I think we were all very conscious of the fact that aircraft were special and you didn’t want to break any. I mean if you read Giles [Whittell’s book “Spitfire Women of WWII”] you would feel that everyone was larking about the sky having great fun doing aerobatics. In fact it really wasn’t like that, it was a serious job of work. And we would all realize that aircraft were very rare and very special, and if you could you were going to preserve it. And equally, fuel was very, very, very scarce.”
Over the course of her career as a pilot, Rose transported 486 aircraft of 86 different varieties; among them the Hurricane, Anson, Mustang, Gladiator, Beaufighter, and Wellington Bombers, as well as the notoriously difficult Mosquito aircraft. Each of these were delivered to RAF or Royal Navy airfields and maintenance units where they would await combat assignments, after which Molly and other fliers of the organization would hitch a ride from one of their fellow pilots to the next transportation job. Ever busy with delivery duties, it became common for the women of the ATA to re-label their acronym as “Anything to Anywhere”.
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Molly poses in front of a Spitfire. (Photo: Oxford Mail) [/caption] Molly’s hands were kept perpetually full flying out of her primary base of Ferry Pool No 15 , and in her most hectic year, 1944, she transported 253 planes from one location to another. Her hard work eventually earned her a promotion to first officer (the equivalent of a flight lieutenant). Located near the busy naval centers of Woolsten and Itchen, she also had close exposure to the large scale D-Day preparations happening around her. The immediate aftermath of that event would have a heavy impact on Molly’s personal life; her husband Bernard was captured in the wake of the invasion and reported dead, news that Rose herself refused to believe. Throughout that tense time, she relied on her work to focus her mind and distract her from the uncertainty of Bernard’s fate; “At least during the daytime, I was busy with my own skin. And you know, you do worry about yourself first, however much you love somebody. You’ve got to concentrate on what you’re doing, you’re trying very hard not to break airplanes.” As fortune would have it, she was proven correct when he was verified alive just weeks later.
Hazards abounded for Molly as well, who had her closest brush with disaster in the skies over Shropshire when the engine of the Swordfish she was piloting failed and sent her spiraling toward the ground below. Crash landing on a slanted field she narrowly missed hitting a farm worker before landing upside in her cockpit, hanging precariously from her safety harness.
The return of her husband signaled the end of Molly’s three year tenure with the ATA, and the last of her days as a pilot. Remembering the close of her flying career, Rose remarked that ““When he came back I came out of the ATA. I was much more needed to look after him. I think the war changed both of us, but we were fortunate in that we both liked each other, and we had a very happy marriage of 57 years.” Post-war the Roses settled in Bampton, Oxfordshire and raised three sons. In 1952 Molly was appointed as a magistrate on the Bullingdon circuit, while Bernard became an organist and choirmaster at Oxford’s Magdalen College. In the early sixties the couple to Appleton Manor, a 13th century estate near Abingdon. There Molly set to work hosting choristers, indulging in games of bridge and snooker, and raising funds for charity, a pursuit which earned her an OBE in 1989.
While her husband retired in 1981, Molly was appointed a deputy lieutenant for Oxfordshire two years later, and in due time became an active representative of the ATA in the media. Although her son stated that his mother spoke little of her work as a pilot during his childhood, Molly gained a higher profile as the organization gained new recognition circa the mid 2000s in the wake of developments like Giles Whittell’s WWII biography of the ATA and Gordon Brown’s official awarding of 50 surviving ATA veterans.
Appearing in televised interviews and broadcast programs such as BBC's “The Great British Menu: The D-Day Banquet,” Molly spent her later days active in raising awareness of the previously largely forgotten female pilots of WWII. Commenting on modern flight techniques during a visit to RAF Brize Norton in 2013, Rose stated that “It was much more interesting in my day because one was entirely in control of the airplane. They do not really fly it these days- it’s all computers.”
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Molly Rose pictured with one of the Hurricane planes she once flew. (Photo: airspacemag.com) [/caption] In October 2016 Molly passed away during a trip to Scotland. At 95, she was one of the last surviving members of the ATA, and one of the few living reminders of a time when circumstances briefly allowed women to serve alongside men in an unprecedented military context, years before such opportunities became standard procedure. Whether as a child riding behind her brother on a freezing English morning or a woman flying through the air over a war-beset country with only an old map and her own resourcefulness to guide her, Molly Rose’s courage, cleverness, and sense of adventure never failed her. As a pilot and a women, she did what few before but so many after her could, which is at the least the sign of a trailblazer, and at the most perhaps the sign of an exceptional person.
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