Story of a photograph
When pioneering pilot Jean Batten flew to Cyprus in 1934, Diran Der Avedissian was there to record the moment
A little-known thread links Cyprus today with one of the most daring and spectacular flights undertaken by a pioneering woman pilot in the 1930s.
The thread exists in the form of award-winning amateur photographer Diran Der Avedissian and an historic picture that he took at Nicosia airfield in 1934.
The other day, Diran, who has just turned 92, dug through his lifetime’s collection of prints to find a black-and-white picture of a lady pilot, smiling coyly and standing in front of her biplane.
The lady was Jean Batten. She landed at Nicosia airfield after a flight from Athens in her Gipsy Moth aircraft and spent the night with an English couple in the city in May 1934. She took off the next day for Damascus on the next leg of her record-breaking solo flight from England to Australia.
Diran, at the time an 18-year-old student at the British Institute in Nicosia, had already developed his passion for photography.
“I remember the word went round that a plane had landed at the airfield outside Nicosia,” he recalls. “So I took my camera and cycled from the Paphos gate all the way out to the airfield” – the site of the abandoned Nicosia airport in the UN buffer zone.
“There was nothing there at that time,” Diran says. “No buildings or anything, just a field.” But there in the field was a biplane and its pilot, Jean Batten.
“I asked her if I could take her photograph, and she said: ‘why not?’” Diran smiled at the memory of the moment.
In her autobiography, New Zealander Jean Batten did not mention having her photograph taken by Diran Der Avedissian. But she had clear memories of Cyprus.
“Seven hours out from Athens,” she wrote, “a faint smudge on the horizon resolved itself into the island of Cyprus… Crossing the limestone hills of Kyrenia I flew inland over the large plain of Mesaoria, which looked dry and parched for want of rain.”
Like all who fly small planes in Cyprus she had to deal with the heat rising from the sun-baked land: “It was extremely hot, and strong upward currents made the flight to Nicosia unpleasantly bumpy. On one occasion the Moth gained over a thousand feet in less than a minute, only to bump down hundreds of feet the next.”
Jean Batten described Nicosia airfield as “a really natural landing-ground, and the red earth surface, blending with that of the surrounding country, would make it very difficult to distinguish were it not for the white corner markings and circle.” The surface, she continued, was “sparsely covered with scrub, but there were no trees or buildings to hamper the approach.”
A small crowd of people had gathered to greet the Gypsy Moth pilot who “felt very hot and dusty” and was “tempted to retire to some cool, shady spot with an iced drink.”
In this latter respect, Jean Batten would have been out of luck. Even fours year after her arrival in Nicosia, according to British colonial records, fresh water was not available at the airfield: “Nearest source of supply is at Makedonitissa near Kykko Monastery 2-and-1/2 miles distant.”
But before being taken into the city for refreshment and rest, Jean Batten had to make sure that her plane would be safe and secure for the night. When setting off from England, she had requested that a windsock be put up (“for which I had incidentally to pay an extra ten shillings”) and that “a police guard [be put] over the aeroplane at night, as there was no hangar.”
As night fell, Jean Batten was driven into Nicosia by “Mr and Mrs Ridgeway, who proved good friends and at whose charming home I spent the night.” Mr Ridgeway, the agent for Shell oil, had personally refuelled the Gypsy Moth “with sixty gallons of fuel from four-gallon tins, which were handed up to him as he perched precariously on the wing.”
At dawn the next day, Jean Batten took off and headed eastward, passing over Famagusta “with its palms and Byzantine churches. I saw the ancient citadel known as Othello’s Tower.”
Jean Batten set a women’s solo record of 14 days, 22 hours and 30 minutes in her flight from England to Australia. During the subsequent three years, she made other flights around the world that prompted front-page headlines. In her day, she was as well known as Amy Johnson and Amelia Earhart.
But thereafter she faded from the limelight, chaperoned by a domineering mother, moving from one country to another, with dwindling financial resources. Although she made brief public appearances in the 1970s, she died alone and almost penniless in a hotel in Majorca in 1987.
While Jean Batten may be largely forgotten, the thread linking her to Cyprus is not lost, thanks to the meticulously labelled archive of a passionate photographer who, as a student, cycled out to Nicosia airfield on a hot May day in 1934 to take her photograph.
