NigG (your #241),
...All women who happen to come across this post, please don't get confused. I am the one who thinks women have been under-rated for centuries. Danny is the one who doesn't! (Danny is also a lot more courageous than I am... a quality that's fully counter-balanced by his tendency to chauvinism!)...
How could I have overlooked this bait for so long, and not risen to it ? (only excuse, there was a lot on at the time, what with Everest and Darjeeling and padres and buried booze and all that).
Now don't get me wrong. I do not denigrate women
per se. "many of my best friends have been women" (after all, I married one !) and have a mother and a daughter, too. Nor do I question their suitability for many rôles in the RAF. In my own speciality (Air Traffic Controller), I saw the first wave of their reintroduction in the early sixties, instructed several of them (and mentored one ot two) during my three years on the School at Shawbury. Subsequently, on my last tour at Leeming, I watched three or four of the Shawbury alumnae blossom into alert and competent young Local, Approach and Radar Controllers, fully equal to the young gentlemen who had taken short-service Commissions in the Branch at the same time as they.
Only trouble was - we didn't get the length of service in return for the time and expense of their training (nor should we have expected to). I cannot think of one of ours who served out her full Commission - they were all married off before then. On the contrary, one of the young men at Leeming made a full career and finished as a Wing Commander, as did another who had been through Shawbury in my time. Others transferred to General List and served to pension age. Some left the RAF to make their way in Civil ATC.
Our ATC WRAF were simply uneconomic. As for the pilots we now train, words fail me ! The cost of training an RAF Pilot must now be astronomic; if she then calls it a day and resigns on marriage, the taxpayer carries the loss.
As for a paean to misogyny, I can only recommend: "The Earl oF Chesterfield's Letters to His Son" (your local librarian will order it for you after she has recovered from the shock). In the days when "Male Chauvinist Pig" was all the rage, I found a very effective riposte to be to ask the scoffer what a "Chauvinist" actually
was (Most had no idea).
Stand by for incoming !
Danny.