Wednesday 3rd September 2025. Our first speaker of the season is Caroline Speirs, with her talk ‘My mum flew Spitfires’.

Speaker Caroline Speirs will give a brief history of the formation of the Air Transport Auxiliary and the vital role it played during the Second World War. Early in the War it became obvious that our Royal Air Force needed its pilots for combat and defence, not for collecting the planes from the factories. This task was passed to a group of civilian pilots, initially male, and later, female. Her mother was one of the 168 female pilots, the only one from north Staffordshire. The work of the ATA was key to the defeat of Germany, yet its history is largely forgotten.