6 days ago
Marguerite Weyer, air mechanic with the WRNS who worked on the Seafire and Bristol Beaufighter
Marguerite Weyer, who has died aged 96, was a Wren air mechanic who helped keep the Fleet Air Arm flying from remote coastal stations in the postwar years.
Many young women who volunteered for the Women's Royal Naval Service towards the end of the Second World War and afterwards were assigned as air mechanics, specialising in engines, airframes, electrical or ordnance. Marguerite Warden (as she was before marriage) was an art student in Hull in 1946 when she spent an 18th-birthday present of £5 from her father on a train ticket to Newcastle, where she signed on at a naval recruiting office – and told her parents afterwards.
Trained to service the Merlin (and later Griffon) engine of the Supermarine Seafire – an adaptation of the Spitfire fighter for use on aircraft carriers – she was posted first to RNAS Dale, also known as HMS Goldcrest, facing the Celtic Sea on the Pembrokeshire coast.
Self-made entertainment on the base included amateur dramatics, with productions of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit and Hay Fever; as their leading man, the Wrens co-opted 'a pink-faced schoolie [education officer] fresh from Cambridge' with theatrical connections – the young David Attenborough on National Service. After her eyesight faded in old age, Marguerite invariably greeted television's most unmistakable voice with: 'Ah, my old friend David…'
In her four years as an air mechanic she also worked on the heavier Bristol Beaufighter, occasionally taxied aircraft between apron and hangar, and was promoted to Leading Wren. At HMS Nuthatch, a 'receipt and dispatch unit' which prepared new aircraft for operational use at Anthorn on the Solway Firth, and at Evanton (HMS Fieldfare) on the Cromarty Firth, winter was harsh and quarters were spartan; a bout of pneumonia and pleurisy in early 1949 gave Marguerite welcome respite in a warm sickbay.
She left to marry the following year but the camaraderie of service remained a vivid memory, and her gang of Wren friends, of whom she was the last survivor, were in touch for the rest of their lives.
Marguerite Warden was born on June 19 1928 at Hornsea on Yorkshire's east coast and was brought up in Bridlington. She was the fourth child of Laurence Warden, an insurance manager in Hull and a noted watercolour painter, and his wife Daisy, née Jobson, whose antecedents were Danish.
When German bombs began falling on Bridlington, Marguerite spent an idyllic summer of 1940 evacuated to Kirkbymoorside in the North Riding with her mother and sister, their father joining at weekends for painting expeditions on the North York Moors. She returned to complete her school certificate at Bridlington High School for Girls, and towards the end of the war she was allowed to join Saturday dances at the Spa Ballroom, with servicemen billeted around the town.
She recalled the heel-clicking gallantry of a Polish cadet called Zbicek and the frisson of teenage romance with William Franklyn, a Parachute Regiment soldier later famous as the velvet-voiced actor of the 1970s Schweppes tonic water adverts ('Schhh… you know who').
A promising artist, she enrolled in 1945 at Hull College of Arts and Crafts but found its old-fashioned focus on still-life drawing too staid; she would have preferred the more avant-garde Leeds school, but her mother would not let her go into lodgings.
Instead Marguerite opted for the adventure of the Wrens until her marriage in 1950 to Deryk Vander Weyer – a Bridlington neighbour, wartime Green Howards officer, and at that time a junior bank official. When he asked for her hand in the traditional way, her father was sufficiently impressed to remark that 'this young man could be a branch manager one day.'
In fact Deryk rose to be deputy chairman of Barclays and British Telecom and a director of the Bank of England. Their 40-year marriage involved 10 house moves and, in later years, a full diary of receptions, City banquets and global travel. Marguerite rose with style to every occasion, but was always happiest amid friends, flowers and dogs, and absorbed in her love of art history.
Deryk Vander Weyer died in 1990. In a widowhood of almost 35 years, Marguerite made a new life as an elegant grand dame of the town of Helmsley in North Yorkshire, where she made a lovely memorial garden (within the public Helmsley Walled Garden) for their daughter Linda, an artist and teacher who died in 2006. She is survived by their son, the Spectator columnist Martin Vander Weyer.
Marguerite Weyer, born June 19 1928, died May 12 2025
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