Jane Trefusis Forbes

Air Chief Commandant Dame Katherine Jane Trefusis Forbes, Lady Watson-Watt, DBE (born 21 March 1899 – died 18 June 1971 ), known as Jane Trefusis Forbes, was the first Director of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) from 1939-43.

Career
Jane Trefusis Forbes had been Chief Instructor, ATS School of Instruction in 1938. In 1936, Forbes, Helen Gwynne-Vaughan and Kitty Trenchard launched the Emergency Service, to train women and organize them to be prepared in case of war. There were probably fewer than 100 women in the organization which was not officially recognized. On 1 July 1939, three months before the beginning of World War II, she was appointed as Director of the WAAF in order "to advise the Air Member for Personnel on questions concerning the WAAF".

By 1943 there were 175,000 women in the ranks of the WAAF. In October 1943, she toured Canada to assess the Women's Division of the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF). She also toured India to investigate the possibility of employing women in the South East Asia Command. She retired in August 1944.

Honours
In January 1944, she was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE). She had always been known by her second name, Jane, but on discovering that it would cost her a half crown to change her first name in order to become Dame Jane she decided that she would become Dame Katherine.

Personal life
The youngest of six children of Edmund Batten Forbes and Charlotte Catherine Agnes (née Wauchope), she was born in Chile where her father, the son of James David Forbes, eminent physicist, glaciologist, and principal of the University of St Andrews, was an engineer building the railroad from the coast to the interior. At one time engaged to a cousin who died mountaineering, she was unmarried until 1966, when she and Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt, who is credited with inventing radar, married in London. They lived together in London in the winter, and at "The Observatory" – Trefusis Forbes' summer home in Pitlochry in Perthshire which had been built by her uncle, the distinguished physicist George Forbes, during the warmer months, until her death in 1971. They had first met during the second world war when the WAAF was responsible for managing radar installations.

Death
She died in London in 1971, aged 72. Her husband died two years later. Both are interred in the churchyard at Pitlochry.