Catherine “Kate” Gorham was born at Dauntsey Park, Wiltshire on 3 March 1903. A willful and precocious child, Kate took an early interest in exploration and aviation. Miss Elliot, her fourth (and still beloved) governess, provided Kate with a highly eclectic education that included learning French and German and reading Das Kapital and Freud in the original.

Kate first flew when she was 15, and in 1920, she became the youngest licensed female pilot in Britain. She bought Buster, her Martinsyde Buzzard demobbed fighter airplane, at auction in 1922. Frank Conklin, the Royal Flying Corps pilot who gave her her first flight, taught her aerobatics from her first flight lessons until she had learned all she could from him. Soon she was giving flight instruction to local women whom male instructors refused to train.

After a prolonged courtship, Kate married Viscount Phillip DeWitt, a World War I veteran six years her senior, on Valentine’s Day of 1923. They were happy at first. She delivered a son, Michael, in June 1924. Kate had never considered motherhood in her future and was as surprised as was everyone else who knew her that she took to it rather well.

Viscount DeWitt’s untreated shell shock led him into psychosis, addiction, and violence. When he nearly killed Kate with his army sword in Fall 1927, she fled Langley House with Michael. She always described what followed as a “spectacularly hideous” divorce that played out partly in the national press. She lost her reputation, custody of Michael, and–because her father disowned her for divorcing Viscount DeWitt–her home. She grudgingly handed Michael back to his father in January 1929.

Desperate for money, Kate talked her way into the Cornwall Aviation Company’s Flying Circus for its 1929 and 1930 seasons. Touring through England was a grueling and often primitive experience, but it kept her busy so she wouldn’t dwell on losing her son. It also gave her a high tolerance for alcohol and a budding addiction to cocaine. In 1931, she joined the Knights of the Sky, a multinational troupe of pilots that cris-crossed Europe and North Africa from April to November.

After the Knights went bankrupt in November 1936, leaving her stranded in French Algeria, Kate entered the least documented part of her busy life. Newspaper articles place her in Spain during that nation’s civil war. Declassified security files first made available in 2012 suggest she did what she called “government work” in Ireland, the South of France, and Berlin before WWII broke out. In 1937, she founded a charter-only airline, Continental Air Transport (CAT). When war came, CAT managed to be one of only two British airlines to escape absorption into the RAF, leading to rumors that Kate was working for one of Britain’s intelligence agencies.

Kate and CAT stayed active through the Berlin Airlift before decamping to Kenya in 1949. Kate stayed in Africa for two years before selling her airline to its pilots and returning to England, where she lived for the rest of her life except for a period in the South of France. She continued to teach young women how to fly and was a regular fixture at air exhibitions, performing aerobatics in a WWI-vintage Avro 504 trainer she inherited from Frank Conklin in 1937.

Singing was Kate’s other great love. Trained by a music tutor as was usual for young girls at the time, her first public performance was at the Chippenham Volunteer Aid Detachment Hospital at Christmas 1915. As her voice matured, she took up performing popular songs in cafes and nightclubs to supplement her flying circus pay.

Though Kate never remarried, she maintained a busy love life into her late sixties. She was romantically linked to a number of notable men and a few notable women, including the legendary American foreign press correspondent Clark MacInnes and (though not confirmed) Josephine Baker.

Queen Elizabeth made Kate Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1981 for “outstanding service to the Realm in many sensitive matters yet untold.”

Kate DeWitt died on 18 April 1989 in her home outside Oxford in the presence of her son and grandchildren.