On May 16, 1936, in Epsom, England, Jessie married Flight Lieutenant John Barnard Walter Pugh, a well-known British pilot, who one year earlier had been rescued from the English Channel after his plane was forced down by engine trouble. From that point on, Jessie was known as Mrs. Jessie Pugh. She and her husband had met in 1935, when Jessie worked for him as manager of the Commercial Air Hire Company’s office at Heston Aerodrome, just west of London. After they announced their engagement, Jessie told the press there would be “no more flying stunts for me. . . . My wild days are over. I’ve had my fun. I’m just going to sit back and let John do the piloting for both of us now.”
Now, after lengthy stints in both Singapore and Spain—they had been living in the former when the Japanese invaded during World War II—the happy couple resided in a cozy apartment in Berkshire. They had been married for a quarter century when, on the morning of February 19, 1962, the phone rang in their downstairs hallway. When John Pugh answered, he was greeted by the voice of their next-door neighbor telling him that Jessie was in the newspaper.
John walked out to the mailbox to get that morning’s Daily Express. As he settled back in the dining room to peruse it, Jessie heard him exclaim, “My god!” The startling discovery of the wreck of the Southern Cross Minor, along with Lancaster’s sun-bleached skeleton and the diary he had so assiduously kept during his ordeal in the Sahara, had just been reported. It was a “most appalling shock,” Jessie remembered later. “I didn’t know what to think. What can one think? It was the most colossal shock that anyone can imagine.”
Though Jessie no longer wore the bomber jackets or flying helmets that she sported in her twenties, she retained the vigor and trim, dark looks of her youth, mixed with an air of contentment that stemmed from decades of agreeable partnership with her husband. Now, as she read the news of the French Camel Corps’ discovery, a wave of acute grief swept over her as she thought of Lancaster perishing in the desert. But in the weeks to come, as the media swarmed over the story, this pathos was replaced by apprehension, as Jessie worried that the diary might contain scandalous information about her past—a past she had worked for decades to put behind her.
In April 1962 Jessie picked up the diary from her lawyer. She could scarcely believe what she held in her hands. Though she had been warned by French officials that the document was almost unbearably poignant, she was ill-prepared for the emotions that roiled her as she read through the pages. Her husband, seeing her turmoil, asked her what was wrong. Jessie had planned on putting forward a brave face, but she couldn’t help herself: she began reading the diary out loud. When she had finished, John Pugh declared that Lancaster’s story had to be told. “Anyone who has the guts to die like that deserves to be heard,” he said. Six months later, in October 1962, the Daily Express presented the whole of the diary’s contents, with an added foreword by Jessie.
“I had never forgotten Bill Lancaster,” Jessie wrote in her foreword. “The world we had known together, the roaring ’twenties, the death-or-glory record flights in tiny biplanes, the Depression, when there wasn’t much in the way of picking for pilots like us, then drama, headlines, and Bill’s tragic exit from it all; it was half a lifetime away.
“The passing years had taken the sharp edges off the memories. Sometimes it seemed like a different world. But it hadn’t been another world. The headlines that said his body had been found told me that. I have been happily married for 26 years. Then suddenly the past reaches out and takes hold of the present.”