"Kate Orchard, who has died just short of her 103rd birthday, worked for the RAF in India during the Second World War. In 1942, together with two of her sisters, the 20-year-old Kate Hillier (as she then was) joined the Women’s Auxiliary Corps (India), which had been created earlier that year to release men for other duties. She was allocated to the RAF for air defence duties – the only operational role undertaken by WAC (I) – and posted to the No 5 Filter Centre, RAF Guindy, close to Madras (now Chennai)... She was born in April 24 1922 to James and Jess Hillier, the sixth child in what was to be a large Anglo-Indian family of five boys and eight girls. Her father was a chief telegraph inspector on the Indian railways which entailed a lot of moving from one state to another and so she spent much of her childhood attending boarding school. She trained as a governess and worked for an Army officer’s family; she was about to travel with them to South Africa but the war intervened. In 1944 she met her future husband Sergeant Bill Orchard, who was serving in the Royal Artillery and on leave from the Burma front. They were married within two weeks of meeting and in 1946 Kate moved to a very different life in the United Kingdom, settling in Cornwall." Kate Orchard, plotted Japanese aircraft for the RAF near Madras during the Second World War
