Royal Air Force News Friday, November 15, 2019 P23
Obituaries
WWII radar operator who became the face of BOAC A
FTER ATTENDING the funeral of her 19year old brother who had been killed flying a Blenheim at RAF Digby on July 1, 1940, 17-year old Faith Sisman lied about her age and applied to join her mother and sister in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). In September, at the height of the Battle of Britain, she enlisted and after six weeks of ab initio training at Harrogate she left for RAF Yatesbury to train as a radar operator where she was the youngest of 60 young women on the camp amongst almost 2000 men. After qualifying she served on the fighter base at Hornchurch in Essex. In March 1941 she began a series of appointments at various Signals Wings in Britain and was soon promoted to Corporal before spending seven months training radar operators. In January 1944 Faith went to the WAAF Officer Cadet Training Unit at Windermere, graduating as a section officer. For almost two years she served as a signals officer at HQ No. 10 (Fighter) Group at Rudloe Manor near Bath, in the underground control centre, which was responsible for controlling fighters in the southwest of England. In 1946 she moved to Bletchley Park and later in the year was sent to Germany to discuss resettlement arrangements for the WAAFs serving overseas. She was released from the WAAF in November 1946. In her later life she acknowledged that women played a major role during the war particularly in the radar field where the skill of the WAAFs allowed more men to take up overseas postings. Faith described her wartime service as: “A marvellous experience. I learnt about life from a schoolgirl to a young woman. Discipline, responsibility, very interesting work and meeting so many people and there was always the social life.” Faith was offered a job by IATA on the technical side because of her wartime experiences. However, her determination to travel led her to join BOAC as an air hostess in 1948 on a salary of six pounds a week. Very attractive and glamorous in her uniform, she became the airline’s most photographed, interviewed and experienced air hostess. The immediate post-war years were a time of luxury air travel when the service resembled that of a first-class hotel. Journeys across the North Atlantic took 17 hours and the flight from London to Sydney took 72 hours (with stops) for the
GLAMOROUS: Faith Sisman in uniform
passengers, while the crews did it in stages spread over 18 days. As new aircraft were introduced celebrities and royalty were regular passengers and Faith was the senior stewardess on many such flights. She was on duty when Prime Minister Anthony Eden went to Jamaica at the height of the Suez crisis in 1956, and The Queen was
a regular traveller. By 1956, Faith had made 150 Atlantic crossings. In a radio broadcast soon after this flight she described the role of the air hostess: “She must be a Jill of all trades. “She must learn to serve a sevencourse meal to 60 people from a galley four foot by six; open a magnum of champagne with a
deft flick of the wrist; make beds, wash up, tend to babies’ needs and help mothers amuse their restless children.” In a newspaper article Faith recalled that trainee air hostesses had to become experts on ‘air sea rescue, first aid, crash landing drill, as well as what fish are safe to eat, what jungle plants are useful and
how to keep people alive if they became stranded in the desert or the Arctic’. Her career as a hostess ended in 1959 after her marriage to Jorgen Jenk, a decorated Danish war hero. He died in 1988 and in 2000 she married Ian Jeffrey, a former Coastal Command and BOAC pilot. She died in October, aged 96.