My grandmother, Audrey Pratt, who has died aged 100, was a talented illustrator and made a great contribution to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force during the second world war.
As a specially trained tracker of missing aircraft, her skills were called upon throughout the night of 6 June 1944, D-day, to plot the course of Royal Navy boats during the Normandy landings.
Audrey was born in Liverpool to James Upton-Prowse, an architect and keen watercolourist, and his wife, Phoebe (nee Mackrell). She was the eldest of three children. By 1927 the family had moved to Leeds, where Audrey attended Chapel Allerton girls’ school. Her love of art developed on holidays to Whitby, where she would join her father sketching on the cliffs.
In 1938 she won a scholarship to Leeds Art College, but at the same time was offered a position at the local library, which she decided to take up. She fell in love with a fellow library assistant, Gordon Rogers, but he joined up in 1939 and the following year was killed during the evacuation of Dunkirk, aged 20.
In 1942 Audrey received a visit from an army officer, Gordon Pratt, who had served alongside Rogers and had written to her at the time of his death. As it was Audrey’s half-day, they spent a few hours together. Audrey described much laughter on that afternoon, and although they did not meet again for almost four years, they wrote to each other often. By the time they were reunited in 1945, they had been engaged to be married for a year.
In August 1942 Audrey began training at RAF Innsworth for the WAAF, and from there went to Leighton Buzzard as a special duties clerk. She developed a flair for “dead reckoning”, where she was able to interpret the whereabouts of aircraft using the controller’s instructions to the pilot together with the Craig computer, which made allowances for wind speed and direction.
This plotting was vital for the radar stations if the planes they were monitoring disappeared due to interference. Because of her skills in this area, Audrey was transferred to the radar station at RAF Kingswear, where she worked through the night on D-day.
In 1945, Audrey was sent to a base in Patrington, near Hull. There she won a competition to design and decorate the officer’s canteen and was then commissioned to paint other murals, including the bar of the officers’ mess at RAF Church Fenton, near Tadcaster.
After the war, in 1946 Audrey and Gordon married and moved to Merseyside. They had three children.
In 1966 Audrey began work for the Liverpool regional hospital board, as a research assistant on a patient survey. Her flair for visual art was again put to good use providing graphs and illustrations to analyse the data.
Audrey and Gordon both retired in 1979 and began travelling abroad. In 1986 Gordon was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease; he died in 1991.
Audrey constantly sought out new challenges, doing U3A courses, attending WAAF reunions, taking part in quizzes and volunteering at her local amateur dramatic society.
She is survived by her three children, Stephen, Paula and Richard, six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
