Jean Batten, the New Zealand aviator who set the world’s records and then disappeared for forty years
A deep-dive profile by NEWS WIRE
On 16 October 1936, just before five in the afternoon, a small green-and-silver Percival Gull rolled to a stop on the grass at Mangere aerodrome, south of Auckland. The pilot stepped down. She was twenty-seven years old. She had been flying for eleven days and forty-five minutes. She had flown alone, from Lympne in Kent to Mangere in New Zealand, the first person of either sex to make the journey direct. She had crossed the Tasman in nine and a half hours through cloud, without a radio. She walked across the field in a pressed white flying suit, lipstick fresh, hair set, holding a posy of wildflowers a child had handed her at the fence. The Mayor of Auckland made a speech. The crowd, by every contemporary newspaper account, was the largest the aerodrome had ever seen.
Forty-six years later, on 22 November 1982, in a hospital ward in Palma de Mallorca, an elderly woman registered as Jean Gardner Batten died of bronchial complications from an infected dog bite she had at first refused to have treated. Two months later, when no relatives could be traced, she was buried in a common grave in the city’s municipal cemetery. The grave was unmarked. New Zealand learnt she was dead in 1987.
There has never been another New Zealand life quite like it. For a few years in the middle of the 1930s, Jean Batten was the most famous person this country had ever produced. She was photographed obsessively in the world’s newspapers, decorated by three governments, elected to honorary membership of the world’s most exclusive aviation clubs, and used as a model for everything from cigarette cards to ceramic figurines. And then, before she was thirty, she stopped flying. She walked out of public life and spent the next forty-five years deliberately and successfully erasing herself — first into an English seaside town with her mother, then into the Canary Islands, then into Mallorca, where she died in conditions of such anonymity that her own country did not know for half a decade.
This is the story of how that happened, and of the woman the records have always slightly hidden.
Rotorua, 1909
Jean Gardner Batten was born on 15 September 1909 at her parents’ home on Hinemaru Street in Rotorua, the only daughter of a dentist named Frederick Batten and his wife Ellen, née Blackmore. She had three older brothers. The Battens were a comfortable provincial family. They were also, by the standards of small-town Edwardian New Zealand, a strange one. Frederick was conventional, professionally absorbed, and increasingly remote from his marriage. Ellen was a woman of unusual capacity who had, in private, no intention of being conventional at all.
Ellen Batten read everything. She admired the British suffragettes. She kept a portrait of Louis Blériot, the first man to fly the English Channel, pinned above her infant daughter’s cot, an act of editorial ambition not entirely common in 1910 Rotorua. By the time Jean was eight, the family had moved to Auckland. Frederick set up a dental practice in the city; Ellen and the children settled in Mt Eden. By 1918 the marriage was effectively over, although Frederick and Ellen would not formalise their separation for several more years. From the time Jean was twelve, the household that mattered to her was the one her mother ran.
Jean was educated at Auckland girls’ schools, ending at Ladies’ College in Remuera, the institution that would later become Diocesan. She was clever, painfully shy, an excellent pianist. Her teachers expected she would go to a conservatorium. Ellen had different ideas. In a household with the Blériot photograph still on the wall, Jean was steered, without much resistance from anyone, towards a different category of ambition.
The mother
It is impossible to write seriously about Jean Batten without writing about Ellen. The two of them were, for the next forty years, a single working unit. Where Jean went, Ellen went. Where Ellen could not go, Ellen wrote letters. The flights and records that we now associate with the daughter were, in every important sense, conceived, financed, supported and then jealously curated by the mother. Ellen sold her own jewellery to pay for Jean’s first flying lessons. She moved with her to England. She managed the press. She handled the money. She decided which engagements her daughter would and would not accept. When Jean wrote her own first book, in 1934, the dedication ran: “To my Mother.” This was not a formality.
The arrangement was unusual. It was probably also necessary. Jean was, in person, an awkward and reserved young woman with a steady gaze and a frame of mind that found small talk torture. The persona that the world saw — charm, composure, immaculate self-presentation, never a curl out of place — was a project. Ellen, who had read enough by then to understand exactly what kind of project it had to be, helped construct it. The persona, in turn, made Ellen’s own life consequential in a way nothing else had. Their critics would later call this a folie à deux. It was certainly more than ordinary mother-and-daughter affection. It was a partnership in which the two halves understood, almost without saying so, that they could not function alone.
London, 1929
The decisive moment came in February 1928, when the Australian aviator Charles Kingsford Smith flew his Fokker trimotor Southern Cross across the Pacific from California to Brisbane and then on, in due course, to New Zealand. Eighteen-year-old Jean was in the crowd at Mángere when the Southern Cross arrived at Auckland for the first time. She talked her way to a brief introduction with Kingsford Smith. He took her up for a half-hour flight a week or so later. By the time the plane landed she had decided what she was going to do. The pianist’s career, gently shelved, never came back.
In December 1929, with five hundred pounds raised by selling Jean’s piano and one of Ellen’s properties, mother and daughter sailed for England. Jean joined the Stag Lane Aerodrome flying school north of London — the same field at which Amy Johnson had learnt to fly — and sat for her A-class private pilot’s licence in 1930. She earned a commercial B-class licence in 1932, one of the first women in the United Kingdom to do so. By then she was studying meteorology, navigation, and engine maintenance with the same methodical seriousness she had once brought to scales and arpeggios. She was not, anyone who watched her later agreed, a natural in the cockpit. She was something more useful: a careful pilot who never panicked, who calculated everything, and who understood her own aircraft to the bolt.
The plan, by 1933, was to break the women’s solo speed record from England to Australia. Amy Johnson had set it in 1930 at nineteen and a half days. Jean believed she could halve it.
Karachi, and then Rome
The first attempt left Lympne on 9 April 1933 in a second-hand de Havilland Gipsy Moth, registration G-AARB, that Ellen had bought outright for the purpose. Jean got as far as Karachi, in what was then British India, in five days. There the engine, which had been sluggish for two days, finally lost compression in a cylinder. The aircraft was unflyable. She turned around and went home, swallowed her disappointment in public, and started saving for a second attempt.
The second attempt left Lympne on 21 April 1934. She was over Italy, at low altitude, when the engine seized. The Gipsy Moth went down hard in a field outside Rome. The aircraft was destroyed. Jean was concussed, cut about the face and lip, and bruised from collarbone to hip. The papers in London, who had been mildly interested in her project up to this point, ran the photographs of the wreck and concluded politely that she had been brave but that the project was over.
The papers had not understood Ellen Batten. Within a fortnight of the Rome crash, the two women were in correspondence with the second-hand-aircraft trade in London. Within five weeks they had bought a third Gipsy Moth, also G-AARB — the registration carried over from a wreck. Jean was at the controls of it on 8 May 1934, taxiing at Lympne for a third attempt. She landed at Darwin on 23 May, fourteen days, twenty-two hours and thirty minutes after leaving England. Amy Johnson’s record had fallen by four and a half days. Jean Batten was twenty-four. She was, suddenly, the most famous woman in aviation.
The South Atlantic, 1935
The Australia flight produced two things at once. It produced the world record Ellen had pencilled in for it. It also produced an income. Jean was given the Harmon Trophy in New York, the Britannia Trophy by the Royal Aero Club, and the freedom of half a dozen cities. She lectured on three continents. She published her first book, Solo Flight, in late 1934, and saw it translated into French, German and Spanish within a year. The Battens, who in 1928 had pawned a piano, were by 1935 commercially viable.
What Ellen and Jean wanted next was a faster, longer-range aircraft, and they bought one with the money. The Percival Gull Six, registration G-ADPR, was a low-wing four-seater monoplane with a Gipsy Six engine and a cruising speed close to a hundred and fifty miles per hour. It had two-way fuel transfer and a range, with auxiliary tanks, of more than two thousand miles. Jean took delivery in October 1935. By the second week of November she had flown it from Lympne to Casablanca, on to Thiès in West Africa, and from there across the South Atlantic to Port Natal in Brazil, in a single solo flight of thirteen hours and fifteen minutes. The Atlantic crossing was the fastest by any pilot, of any sex, ever recorded. She was the first woman to make it solo. The British aviation press, struggling to keep up with what their own subject was doing, began to call her, with mild bewilderment, “a phenomenon”.
The world record, 1936
The flight that mattered most to her, and that mattered most to her mother, was the one neither had yet attempted. No-one had flown solo from England to New Zealand. The route was longer than the Australia flight by a thousand miles of open Tasman Sea, on which a forced landing meant drowning. The aircraft did not yet exist that could carry the necessary fuel and a single pilot all the way without serious risk. The Percival Gull, refitted with extra tanks, was the closest there was.
Jean left Lympne early on 5 October 1936. She flew across the Mediterranean to Marseille, on to Brindisi, Athens, Aleppo, Baghdad, Basra, Bushire, Karachi, Allahabad, Akyab, Penang, Singapore, Soerabaja, Koepang, Darwin, Cloncurry, Charleville and Sydney, in a series of long single-day legs broken by the absolute minimum of sleep. The Tasman crossing, from Richmond near Sydney to Auckland, she flew alone in cloud. She had no radio. The aeroplane had a single engine. Halfway across she could not see the sea or the sky. She held altitude on instruments for nine and a half hours, navigated by dead reckoning and a single sun-sight, and brought the Gull out of cloud over the New Zealand coast roughly where she had calculated she would. Mangere was an hour’s flying south. She landed at 5pm on the 16th. The total elapsed time, eleven days and forty-five minutes, broke the absolute solo record for the route, which until that afternoon had not existed because no-one had ever finished the journey at all.
It is hard to convey, eighty-nine years later, what this meant in 1936 New Zealand. The country was still a long ship-borne month from England. To watch a single small monoplane land at Mangere in October, with a New Zealander at the controls, having flown over thirteen thousand miles in eleven days, was to see the future of the country’s connection to the rest of the world arrive on the grass. Jean was driven from Mangere into central Auckland in an open car. The crowds in Queen Street were so thick that the procession could only inch through them. The Prime Minister, Michael Joseph Savage, met her at the steps of the Town Hall. She looked, in the photographs from that afternoon, faintly alarmed.
The white flying suit
What followed for the next year was the closest thing to mass celebrity that this country had so far seen. The press called her the “Garbo of the skies”, after Greta Garbo, in tribute to her composure and her looks rather than her famous reclusiveness, which was still in the future. She was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. France made her a chevalier of the Legion of Honour. Brazil gave her the Order of the Southern Cross. The Royal Aero Club elected her to honorary membership and gave her a second Britannia Trophy in successive years, an honour they had given to almost no-one before. She lectured in twenty-six cities. She put her face on a Royal Doulton figurine, on commemorative postcards and on the lids of biscuit tins. The fan mail arrived in volumes that her mother had to sort, by hand, into separate sacks.
What anyone who actually met her in those years remembered was a different person from the one in the photographs. The press persona was elegant and unflappable. The woman was guarded, formal, almost rigid. She spoke in measured, almost rehearsed sentences. She did not enjoy parties. She drank tea, not alcohol. She refused to fly with copilots; she preferred, by every account, to do everything herself, in silence, with her mother waiting at the destination. The white flying suit, the lipstick reapplied immediately on landing, the calm composure for the photographers were, in retrospect, a discipline. They were how she got through the part of flying that involved other people.
She told an interviewer in 1937, in one of the few candid quotations she ever gave, that she felt at home only when she was alone in the air. It is the truest thing anyone ever recorded her saying about herself.
The last flight
Her seventh and final world record was set on 19 October 1937. She flew the Gull from Darwin to Lympne in five days, eighteen hours and fifteen minutes, breaking the solo Australia-to-England mark by more than a day and becoming the first person to hold the records in both directions on the route. By the time she landed at Lympne the press were as exhausted by her as she was by them. She gave a brief, gracious statement on the runway. She made no announcement of her future plans. She did not, in fact, ever fly publicly again.
She was twenty-eight years old. She had set seven recognised world records in three years. She had won every major prize in civil aviation. She was at the peak of her powers as a pilot and at the peak of her marketability as a public figure. There was no obvious reason — ill health, lost nerve, financial necessity — for her to stop, and contemporary accounts make it clear that her sponsors and her public assumed she would not. She did. The exact reasons have never been fully explained, by her or by anyone else, and probably never will be. The most plausible reading is the simplest one: she had done what she and her mother had set out to do, and she preferred, having done it, to leave.
War, and after
The Second World War did not return her to the cockpit. She volunteered for the Air Transport Auxiliary, the British civilian organisation that ferried aircraft for the RAF, and was politely turned down on the grounds that her record-breaking experience was not, in the bureaucracy’s judgement, immediately convertible to twin-engined service flying. She drove an ambulance for a time, then took a job in a munitions factory in Poole. Ellen worked beside her, behind the same workbench. The Gull was donated to the RAF, repainted in camouflage, and used briefly as a courier aircraft before being retired in 1946.
What the war began, peacetime confirmed. Jean and Ellen sold their flat in London in 1948 and moved to Jamaica for several years, then to Madeira, then to Tenerife, in each case settling at a remove from anywhere a New Zealander would normally find them. Jean took up sea-bathing and watercolour painting. She read. She walked. She did not give interviews. She wrote a brief autobiography, My Life (1938), and a third volume, Alone in the Sky, which she revised over and over in private and only published, after Ellen had insisted, in 1979. By the standards of the postwar celebrity industry, she had ceased to exist. By her own standards, she was, finally, free.
Tenerife and Mallorca
Ellen Batten died in Tenerife on 13 July 1966. She was eighty-seven. The closest of Jean’s few remaining friends — people from the English aviation world who had stayed in occasional letter contact with the two of them — report that something in Jean simply broke down at the news. She had lost the only person in her life with whom she had ever fully shared anything. She buried her mother in Tenerife and, after a few months on her own there, moved to a small flat in Palma de Mallorca. She told almost no-one in New Zealand where she was. The few people who corresponded with her in those years remember her using small variations of her own name — Miss J. Gardner Batten, Mrs Gardner, sometimes simply “J.B.” — in a way that suggested she preferred not to be quite findable.
She lived, by every account, with extraordinary frugality. She had a small private income that she had managed carefully since 1937. She rented modestly. She had two or three friends in Mallorca, at most. She read English biographies, kept watch on the cricket, and watched the small fishing boats from her windows. The journalists who began, in the early 1970s, to wonder where she had gone occasionally tracked her down. She agreed to one or two interviews and gave to each of them roughly the same answer, which was that she had done what she had wanted to do and now wished only to be left alone.
The dog
What killed her was a stray dog. In early November 1982, walking to the post office near her flat in Palma, she was bitten on the ankle by a dog whose owner could not be traced. The bite was small. She declined, at the time, to seek treatment. By the third week of November the wound had become infected and the infection had spread to her chest. She was admitted to Son Dureta hospital, where she was registered, on the basis of her passport, under the name Jean Gardner Batten. She died on 22 November 1982. She was seventy-three.
What followed was a small administrative tragedy. Her body lay in the hospital morgue for some days while the authorities tried to contact her next of kin. There was no next of kin. They tried the British consulate in Palma, who searched their records and could find no British national of that name registered as resident. They concluded that the dead woman was indigent and arranged for her to be buried in a common grave at Palma’s municipal cemetery on 22 January 1983. The grave was marked with a small concrete number plate. There was no name on it. New Zealand was not informed. England was not informed. Her old aviation friends in Auckland and London continued, for some years, to send her Christmas cards.
It was 1987, almost five years later, before any of this was known. The English biographer Ian Mackersey, who had been working on a life of her since 1985, traced her last known address through her aviation pension and through the hospital records. He travelled to Palma. He found, with some difficulty, the cemetery officer who had recorded the burial. He found the grave. He arranged, with assistance from a small group of British aviation historians and the Royal Aero Club, for a proper headstone to be paid for and laid. The headstone records her name, her birthplace and her dates. It is the marker she did not, in life, leave for herself.
What lives on at home
The Percival Gull, G-ADPR, is in a glass case at Auckland Airport, in the international terminal that was named for her in 1977. There is a Jean Batten Place in central Auckland. There is a memorial drive at Auckland Airport. There is a 1990 biography by Ian Mackersey, Jean Batten: The Garbo of the Skies, which remains the standard work and which is principally responsible for what we now know about her later years. There is no national monument and no public statue.
If New Zealand has been slow to know what to do with her memory, that is partly Jean’s own work. She made it difficult to know her in life. She made it impossible to know her in her last decades. The fairness of her later disappearance — whether to call it dignified privacy or an avoidable kind of solitude — is not really for anyone outside the story to settle. What can be said is that she did, in the years she chose to be visible, more than almost any New Zealander before or since. She flew further, faster and more often alone than any other woman of her generation. She was the first person of any nationality to fly direct from England to New Zealand. She held both directions of the Australia route at the same time. She crossed the South Atlantic faster, in a single small monoplane, than the airline industry of the day was managing to do with crews of three. And she did all of it, by every account that has survived, in a state of focused, somewhat lonely, almost monkish concentration that the public glamour of the white flying suit has always slightly obscured.
The image we have of her is the woman climbing out of the Gull at Mangere on 16 October 1936, with the wildflowers in her hand. The truer image is probably the one no photographer ever caught: a young woman alone in cloud over the Tasman Sea, on instruments, nine hours in, with no radio and a single engine, calculating her way home. That is who she was. The cameras rarely got to see it.
Forty-six years later, in a hospital in another country, she was registered for the last time under a name almost no-one knew was hers. The grave that was eventually marked for her in Palma now reads, simply, “Jane Gardner Batten, Rotorua, New Zealand, 1909–1982”. It took until 1987 for that to be true.
Sources and further reading
- Ian Mackersey, Jean Batten: The Garbo of the Skies (Macdonald, 1990; reissued 2009) — the definitive biography, including the original investigative work that established the circumstances of her death
- Jean Batten, Solo Flight (Jackson & O’Sullivan, 1934)
- Jean Batten, My Life (Harrap, 1938)
- Jean Batten, Alone in the Sky (Airlife, 1979) — her own retrospective account, the only book she completed in her last decades
- Te Ara — Batten, Jean Gardner (Dictionary of New Zealand Biography)
- NZ History — Jean Batten
- Auckland War Memorial Museum — Batten papers and memorabilia collection
- MOTAT — aviation collection notes on the Percival Gull
- Royal Aero Club archives, London — Britannia Trophy citations 1935 and 1936
Have a memory of Jean Batten, or a thought on how a country should remember someone who chose so deliberately to be forgotten? Drop a comment below — we read every one.