Jean Batten CBE

Jane Gardner Batten, always known as Jean Batten, is the greatest aviator New Zealand has ever produced, and over those gruelling 11 days in 1936 she completed the first ever direct solo flight from England to New Zealand. It was by no means her first airborne achievement, mind: she’d flown a Gipsy Moth biplane from England to Australia solo in 1934 in 15 days, and then flew it back again to take both records for a woman. In November 1935 she became the first woman to fly herself over the South Atlantic, which at the time was also the fastest ever crossing of that ocean. The England-New Zealand endeavour of ’36, though, in a modified Percival Gull monoplane proved very punishing. Jean snatched a few minutes’ sleep at each of her frequent refuelling stops, and pressed on regardless of weather or visibility, despite a mounting nervousness. She was so exhausted afterwards that her post-flight publicity tour was cancelled. Batten had qualified as a pilot in England in 1930, supported by her divorced mother and later sponsored by Castrol. After the Second World War, Jean and her mother lived a peripatetic life between Jamaica and Spain, but the dashing aviator died in obscurity in Majorca in 1982, following an infection from a dog bite; her demise remained virtually unknown to the outside world for five years.