Diana Barnato Walker MBE

Diana Barnato was born in London on 15 January 1918, the younger daughter of Woolf Barnato, chairman of Bentley Motors and a celebrated racing driver, and Dorothy Maitland Falk, an American from White Plains, New York. Her paternal grandfather was Barney Barnato, co-founder of the De Beers mining company. Presented as a debutante to King Edward VIII at Buckingham Palace in 1936, she was educated at Queen's College, London.

She fell in love with flying at twenty, learning in Tiger Moths at the Brooklands Flying Club in Surrey and going solo after just six hours of dual instruction. When war came she volunteered with the Red Cross, nursing in France before the evacuation from Dunkirk and driving ambulances in London through the Blitz.

In 1941 she was accepted into the Air Transport Auxiliary, the civilian service that ferried military aircraft from factories to front-line squadrons. Flying solo and without radio or instruments, she went on to handle 80 different types of aircraft, delivering 260 Spitfires along with Hurricanes, Mustangs, Tempests, Mosquitos, Mitchells and Wellingtons, until the ATA was disbanded in late 1945.

Her personal life was shadowed by loss. Her fiancé, Squadron Leader Humphrey Gilbert, was killed in a Spitfire crash in 1942. In 1944 she married Wing Commander Derek Walker; he died flying a Mustang between two UK airfields in bad weather just eighteen months later. She never married again. For thirty years she shared her life with racing driver and pilot Whitney Straight, with whom she had a son, Barney, in 1947.

After the war she earned her commercial licence and gave freely of her time to the Women's Junior Air Corps, flying teenage girls to encourage them into aviation. On 26 August 1963, aged 45, she flew an English Electric Lightning T4 to Mach 1.6 (1,262 mph) with Squadron Leader Ken Goodwin as her check pilot, becoming the first British woman to break the sound barrier and setting a world air speed record for women.

Diagnosed with cancer shortly afterwards, she came through three operations. She was appointed MBE in 1965 for services to aviation and elected a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society. Her memoir, Spreading My Wings, was published in 1994. She died in Surrey on 28 April 2008, aged 90.