At half past four on the morning of 16 October 1936, standing beside a single-engined monoplane at RAAF Richmond outside Sydney, a 27-year-old New Zealander gave the assembled press a clear instruction. If she went down in the Tasman Sea, nobody was to come looking for her.

Then she took off and flew 1,200 miles of open water alone, mostly below a thousand feet.

Nine and a half hours later she was over New Plymouth. Just after five that afternoon she landed at Māngere in front of about six thousand people, having flown from England to New Zealand in 11 days and 45 minutes. It was the first direct flight ever made between the two countries. The record stood for forty-four years.

Two crashes first

The record-breaking is the part people remember. The two failures that came first are the part that explains her.

Batten sailed to England with her mother Ellen in 1930, learned to fly at the London Aeroplane Club at Stag Lane, and got her commercial licence at the end of 1932. The money came from wherever she could find it: a loan she never fully repaid, four hundred pounds borrowed by a suitor from his own mother, sponsorship from Castrol.

Her first attempt on the England to Australia record left Lympne on 9 April 1933 and ended when a connecting rod let go and she put the Moth down on a road near Karachi, 4,775 miles out. Her second left Lympne on 21 April 1934, ran out of fuel over Rome in the dark, and ended in a crash-landing at a wireless station with her face cut open.

Seventeen days after that second crash she started again.

Darling, we have done it

She left Lympne on 8 May 1934 and landed at Darwin at half past one in the afternoon on 23 May: 14 days, 22 hours and 30 minutes for 10,500 miles. Amy Johnson's 1930 women's record had stood at about nineteen and a half days. Batten had taken more than four days off it.

The cable she sent from Darwin was addressed to the person who had made the whole thing possible.

Ellen Batten was not a bystander. She had sold her piano to help pay their fares to England, travelled with her daughter, managed her, and remained her closest companion until she died in Jean's arms in Tenerife in 1966.

Across the South Atlantic in a wooden aeroplane

In November 1935 she flew the silver Gull from Lympne to Brazil. She left Thiès in Senegal at 4:45 in the morning on 13 November and made Port Natal in 13 hours 15 minutes, the first woman to fly the South Atlantic solo.

The detail that got the headlines was different. Her England to Brazil time of 2 days 13 hours 15 minutes beat Jim Mollison's record by nearly a full day, and her Atlantic crossing was the fastest anyone had made by any means, beating a four-engined Air France aircraft by twenty-two minutes. She did it alone, in a single-engined wooden aeroplane, over water.

The girl who beat all the men

In October 1937 she flew Darwin to Lympne in a little under five days and nineteen hours, becoming the first person of either sex to hold the solo record in both directions between England and Australia. One British front page ran the headline: the girl who has beaten all the men.

She was made CBE in 1936 and invested by Edward VIII. She took the Britannia Trophy twice and the Harmon Trophy three times, sharing the 1935 award with Amelia Earhart. Brazil gave her the Order of the Southern Cross, France made her a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur, and in 1938 she became the first woman awarded the FAI gold medal. New Zealand asked London to make her a Dame. London declined.

The five years nobody noticed

The war ended the era of solo record flights, and Batten simply stopped. She and Ellen lived quietly abroad for decades. After her mother died she moved between Tenerife and Spain, and in October 1982 she went to Majorca.

On a walk in Palma she was bitten by a dog. She refused to let the hotel call a doctor. The wound became septic and she died alone in her hotel room on 22 November 1982, of a pulmonary abscess, at 73.

Nobody notified her family or the New Zealand government. On 22 January 1983 she was buried in a paupers' mass grave in Palma cemetery under her middle name, Gardner, alongside about 150 other people. Her estate was worth nearly a hundred thousand pounds.

For five years no one knew. Official searches were abandoned by early 1987. It was Mackersey who finally worked out what had happened, in September 1987, while researching a television documentary about her. A bronze plaque was placed at the grave in 1988.

Her Percival Gull survived her. Pressed into RAF service in 1940, sold back to Percival after the war, given to the Shuttleworth Collection in 1961, and bought by Auckland Airport in 1995. The international terminal there carries her name.

She flew further, faster and more often alone than almost anyone of her generation, and then died in a hotel room where nobody knew who she was. Both halves of that belong in the same story.

Sources: Ian Mackersey, Batten, Jean Gardner, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Te Ara; Ian Mackersey, Jean Batten: The Garbo of the Skies; Jean Batten, Alone in the Sky (1979); London Gazette 34296; British Pathé, British Movietone and Archives New Zealand film records. Where Wikipedia and Te Ara disagree on dates, Te Ara has been preferred.