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For these women, the RAF meant purpose, travel and life experience. Now the Benevolent Fund has given them a community again
If one thing unites Sybil Piper, Irene Strange and Daphne Washbrook, besides their indefatigable spirit and can-do nature, it’s that when they were young women growing up in the South of England during the mid-20th century, they all sought a little extra excitement from life. Now aged 98, 90 and 82 respectively, they can heartily agree they found it.
In 2024, the Royal Air Force (RAF) will mark 30 years since Flight Lieutenant Jo Slater became the service’s first female operational pilot. Many have followed in her contrails, but before her, women had been playing just as crucial – though slightly less conspicuous – roles in helping to keep our skies safe for decades.
Piper, Strange and Washbrook were three of them. They each had their reasons for joining what was the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and the Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF), yet found the same camaraderie and sense of belonging once they got there.
Piper, the eldest of the three, is the only one who joined at a time of war. In 1944, at the age of 19, she began work at RAF Medmenham in Buckinghamshire, before becoming a special duties clerk at Bletchley Park during one of the busiest times for the code-breaking centre. Throughout World War Two, some 7,500 women worked at Bletchley, making up around 75 per cent of the workforce.
“We specialised in photographic intelligence at Medmenham, so it was all top secret and very demanding, an exacting job,” she says. “It was my role to coordinate maps for the plotters, we had to work together, but it was like stepping into another world, the discipline and demands of it. But it stood me in good stead for the rest of my life.”
When VE Day came, she experienced relief as well as a strange sense of loss. Suddenly, the job had changed. “Times were different. I shouldn’t say this, but in wartime we were there for a purpose. When it finished we wondered what would happen. We won the war, then suddenly it was all over. So peacetime I found different. In wartime, we were on duty, in service for the country. That wasn’t there after.”
She moved to RAF Odiham in Hampshire, near her home in Farnborough (and current home in Aldershot), where she was allowed to fly in an RAF aircraft of her choice, as a treat. “I chose the Spitfire, obviously, and went up around Hampshire with one of the flying aces… Fantastic.”
It was “a different life in peacetime, more relaxed. Where once we used to be flying every hour of every day, now that wasn’t the case”. She continued clerical work at Odiham, but left in 1947 aged 22 for a new career working in education, and married three years later. Her husband James died 15 years ago.
