Felicity Peake

Air Commandant Dame Felicity Hyde, Lady Peake ( Watts; 1 May 1913 – 2 November 2002) was the founding director of the Women's Royal Air Force (WRAF) She started flying when her first husband took up the hobby in 1935, but in 1946 became the first director of the WRAF. She was Honorary Aide-de-camp to King George VI from 1949 to 1950. Peake spent much of her youth at Haslington Hall, an Elizabethan house near Crewe, bought by her father after the First World War. Her father, Colonel Humphrey Watts, was a prosperous Manchester-based industrialist whose family's wealth derived from S & J Watts, a textile business founded in 1798. Peake was educated at St. Winifred's, Eastbourne, but left before taking her school certificate to go on to a finishing school outside Paris. She met Jock Hanbury, a member of the Truman, Hanbury, Buxton & Co brewing family (whose hobby was flying), while on a cruise to the West Indies. They were married at St Margaret's, Westminster in 1935 and she was known as Felicity Hanbury; that same year she qualified for her pilot's licence. With war looming, Jock Hanbury joined the auxiliary air force as a fighter pilot, but Felicity was prevented from joining the Air Transport Auxiliary after it was formed in 1940 by her lack of solo flying hours. She volunteered for No. 9 Auxiliary Territorial Service company of the RAF. Called up on 1 September 1939, she became a company assistant (the equivalent of a Pilot Officer), just a month before her husband was killed when his plane crashed in Surrey during a night-flying exercise. After a short spell as a code and cipher officer, in May 1940 she was posted to Biggin Hill where she was responsible for 250 officers. On 30 August 1940 she had the task of recovering from an attack when a bomb fell off an air raid shelter and 39 people died. Her experience here was used as the basis of Susannah York's character, Maggie Harvey, in the 1969 film Battle of Britain where the character counts the bodies of WAAF members.