Women of Intelligence: Winning the Second World War with Air Photos Read Online Free Page A
Author: Christine Halsall
the First World War, it had been employed principally for battlefield use rather than strategic planning. This was largely due to the technical limitations of cameras and the restrictions on the range of aircraft. Through the interwar years little thought was given to PI by the RAF other than as a means of estimating bomb damage, and the aircraft assigned for reconnaissance were slow, low flying and of relatively short range. The army was sufficiently interested, as a result of their experiences in the Great War, to run advanced photo-reading courses. While not giving full PI training, these at least provided a nucleus of people who could be quickly trained up when the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) moved into France in 1939.
Flight Officer Constance Babington Smith headed the Aircraft Section at RAF Medmenham.
Meanwhile, the interwar years saw the civilian world go ‘aviation mad’ and many of the men and women flyers who had the money to pursue the new craze became celebrities. Amy Johnson and Amelia Earhart became two of the best-known pilots of the era, the former for being the first woman to fly solo in 1930 from England to Australia, and the latter for making the fastest crossing of the Atlantic on record in 1932. In Germany, Hanna Reitsch was the first woman to qualify as a civil and military aviation pilot, the first to fly a helicopter and, at the outbreak of war, the rocket-propelled fighter, the Me 163 Komet. A woman who was not an aviator herself during the 1930s, but acquired a great deal of technical knowledge on aircraft and aviation was Constance Babington Smith. Writing as ‘Babs’, she attended air shows and aviation meetings in Europe as a staff journalist and photographer for the British journal, The Aeroplane . Constance was the PI who identified the Me 163, a great threat to Allied aircraft, in 1943 on an air photograph at RAF Medmenham.
Photography also took great strides forward between the wars, with many women able to earn their living in various forms of the art. Dorothy Wilding, who concentrated on portraits, attracted film stars and celebrities to her studios in Bond Street, London, and in New York. In 1937 she was awarded a Royal Warrant to be the official photographer at the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, the first such award presented to a woman. Ursula Powys-Lybbe was a professional photographer who set up a studio in Cairo in the 1930s, moving to London later on to establish a business called the ‘Touring Camera’. Instead of photographing her subjects in a studio, she photographed ‘Society at Home’ on visits to country estates and town mansions, where her sitters positioned themselves in their everyday clothes among favourite objects. In 1937 Ursula walked into the offices of the society magazine Tatler with a composite portrait of Lady Mary Lygon, surrounded by images of beloved pets and the family home of Madresfield Court in Worcestershire. Mary was the third daughter of the 7th Earl Beauchamp and was considered to be one of the great beauties of the age. It was claimed that her beauty was such that it once caused the band to stop playing when she entered a ballroom. The Tatler promptly commissioned Ursula to produce a series of similar portraits that ran until the outbreak of war in 1939, when she joined the WAAF and became a PI. 7 By coincidence, Lady Mary’s younger sister and devoted companion, Lady Dorothy, also became a WAAF PI and served with Ursula at Medmenham.
In 1938, with war on the horizon, a brash unconventional Australian named Sidney Cotton was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) to pioneer new methods of reconnaissance to investigate the build-up of German armaments. Cotton had First World War flying experience and had spent the interwar years in various entrepreneurial activities such as seal spotting in Newfoundland, setting up aerial survey companies in Canada and buying up a controlling interest in a colour
Flight Officer Constance Babington Smith headed the Aircraft Section at RAF Medmenham.
Meanwhile, the interwar years saw the civilian world go ‘aviation mad’ and many of the men and women flyers who had the money to pursue the new craze became celebrities. Amy Johnson and Amelia Earhart became two of the best-known pilots of the era, the former for being the first woman to fly solo in 1930 from England to Australia, and the latter for making the fastest crossing of the Atlantic on record in 1932. In Germany, Hanna Reitsch was the first woman to qualify as a civil and military aviation pilot, the first to fly a helicopter and, at the outbreak of war, the rocket-propelled fighter, the Me 163 Komet. A woman who was not an aviator herself during the 1930s, but acquired a great deal of technical knowledge on aircraft and aviation was Constance Babington Smith. Writing as ‘Babs’, she attended air shows and aviation meetings in Europe as a staff journalist and photographer for the British journal, The Aeroplane . Constance was the PI who identified the Me 163, a great threat to Allied aircraft, in 1943 on an air photograph at RAF Medmenham.
Photography also took great strides forward between the wars, with many women able to earn their living in various forms of the art. Dorothy Wilding, who concentrated on portraits, attracted film stars and celebrities to her studios in Bond Street, London, and in New York. In 1937 she was awarded a Royal Warrant to be the official photographer at the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, the first such award presented to a woman. Ursula Powys-Lybbe was a professional photographer who set up a studio in Cairo in the 1930s, moving to London later on to establish a business called the ‘Touring Camera’. Instead of photographing her subjects in a studio, she photographed ‘Society at Home’ on visits to country estates and town mansions, where her sitters positioned themselves in their everyday clothes among favourite objects. In 1937 Ursula walked into the offices of the society magazine Tatler with a composite portrait of Lady Mary Lygon, surrounded by images of beloved pets and the family home of Madresfield Court in Worcestershire. Mary was the third daughter of the 7th Earl Beauchamp and was considered to be one of the great beauties of the age. It was claimed that her beauty was such that it once caused the band to stop playing when she entered a ballroom. The Tatler promptly commissioned Ursula to produce a series of similar portraits that ran until the outbreak of war in 1939, when she joined the WAAF and became a PI. 7 By coincidence, Lady Mary’s younger sister and devoted companion, Lady Dorothy, also became a WAAF PI and served with Ursula at Medmenham.
In 1938, with war on the horizon, a brash unconventional Australian named Sidney Cotton was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) to pioneer new methods of reconnaissance to investigate the build-up of German armaments. Cotton had First World War flying experience and had spent the interwar years in various entrepreneurial activities such as seal spotting in Newfoundland, setting up aerial survey companies in Canada and buying up a controlling interest in a colour
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