Margaret Gore

Margaret Wyndham Gore (24 January 1913 – 20 August 1993), known as Margot Gore, was a leading British aviator and osteopath. She was appointed MBE for her service as a commander in the Air Transport Auxiliary. She may have been the first woman to pilot a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. After the war she trained to be an osteopath rising to teach and then sit on the board of the British School of Osteopathy.

Early life Gore was born in Worthing in 1913, and her loves were medicine and flying. Her family moved to Ireland, where she spent her childhood running free with the local hunt and obtaining little formal education. A family maid secretly took her to view Michael Collins' body when he was laid out. When she was sixteen her family moved back to England, and at Bedford High School for Girls she realised her lack of qualifications. Gore was not amongst the first eight but she was the tenth and in the next batch to be recruited in June 1940.

Gore rose to head the Hamble ATA ferry pool in 1941 with Rosemary Rees as her second in command. Ida Veldhuyzen van Zanten, the only Dutch woman pilot in the ATA, flew under her command, as did Maureen Dunlop, an Anglo Argentinian pilot. Gore was now a flight captain with all female recruits, delivering aircraft as they were manufactured to operational units around the country. She was one of eleven women to train on the Halifax bomber and she is believed to be the first woman to pilot an American Flying Fortress. In 1945 she was still at Hamble.

Later career Gore still wanted to enter medicine and she studied physics, chemistry and biology in order to enter a course in Osteopathy. She was given the gold medal as the best student in 1954 after three years at the British School of Osteopathy. She went on to teach at the school and rose to be on the board of the school. In 1968 she was vice-chairman of the Osteopathic Educational Foundation.

Gore died in Nettlebed in 1993, aged 80.