It is 80 years since my mother’s sister Joan left the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). I was always proud and a little in awe of her but never more so than last week while visiting the RAF Museum in Hendon. Situated behind a huge Lancaster bomber, my aunt’s photograph sits alongside those of Winston Churchill and Air Chief Marshal Dowding as some of the most important people to fight in the Battle of Britain.
Even more moving, Joan is one of the few people featured in the permanent exhibition whose picture can be opened up to reveal a biography.
The text begins: “Joan Myers was born in 1918, the youngest of three daughters, to a Jewish family in Stamford Hill, north London...”
My own memory of my mother’s younger sister was of her elegance, love of shopping, high heels, zest for life, passion for animals —especially dogs — and her expert driving skills, which she employed almost to the end of her life. When she died in her sleep in April 2011, she had just come back from the hairdressers! I also remember my aunt as a very kind family member who helped me house-hunt the home where me and my family still live.
At your service: Joan Myers[Missing Credit]
In 1940, when she was 22, Joan joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), was trained as an operations room plotter and subsequently posted to the Royal Air Force Station at Biggin Hill. Her job was as part of a team to track the size and direction of incoming German raids through information from radar stations and the Observer Corps, and then plot them on a huge table grid map using wooden blocks. Each block showed the name of the raid and its possible strength and direction and was colour-coded to show how up to date the information was. To do this work, Joan would have worn earphones connected to a cluster of observation posts.
Back then, radar was only in its infancy, but could be used to detect and locate incoming enemy aircraft. It worked by sending out radio waves which would bounce off solid objects at a distance, enabling operators to estimate the four important things about approaching aeroplanes: their distance, their direction, their numbers, and their height above the ground. This gave fighter defences vital time to prepare for and intercept attacks.
What really gave Britain the edge was that Germany failed to recognise how important this information was to the country’s defences, which, in turn, is why the RAF went to extraordinary lengths to conceal its radar.
In fact, to prevent the Germans discovering it was using radar to intercept bombers on night raids, Britain issued press releases stating that British pilots were eating lots of carrots to give them exceptional night vision. This fooled both the UK public and German Armed Forces High Command, and confirmed the conventional but fictional wisdom that the root vegetable improves one’s night vision.
A child at the exhibiton in Hendon[Missing Credit]
While I was at the museum, I looked for other obvious Jewish names in this Battle of Britian commemoration. I found some when I went to the upstairs art gallery where many commissioned war paintings and sketches are on display. They include Olga Lehmann’s study of British Aircraft Company’s underground factory, Jacob Kramer’s sketch of his friend Percy Dalton, a rear gunner who was shot down over France in 1942, and David Bomberg’ s charcoal sketch of an underground bomb store.
After my visit to the museum, I asked Joan’s two daughters, my first cousins Jane and Prudence, for their stories of Joan’s wartime experience. They said she originally joined the WAAF because she thought it would make her parents proud and that although she always spoke happily about her work in later years, that during her service, she frequently wrote to her family to say she felt homesick. They also said that she was happily married to their father Louis Ufland and that she left her work when she became pregnant with Jane, their first child.
Most fascinating, is that Joan came from a religious family. Her mother was an artist, Millie Schier, (later Millie Myers) and her father, Simon, was Chief Investigating Officer of the Shechita Board. She was very close to both her sisters, especially my mother, although they both had strong personalities which sometimes led to friendly, but also less-than-friendly, disagreements. However, they always calmed down and forgave each other a day or two after the quarrel. Meanwhile, we children learnt early on not to get involved in any of their wars of words.
So, there she is my aunt Joan, forever commemorated in London’s Royal Air Force Museum London, located on the former Hendon Aerodrome, her face next to Churchill’s famous line:
“Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few”.
What an unforgettable privilege to see my aunt publicly honoured as one of those “few”.
