Marion Wilberforce (22 July 1902 – 17 December 1995) was a Scottish aviator and one of the first eight members of the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA).

[1][2] She was born on 22 July 1902 to Anne Ogilvie Forbes (née Prendergast) and John Ogilvie-Forbes, the 9th Laird of Boyndlie, she was one of seven children.

At the age of 12 her father ceased to take an interest in the running of the house and estate, entrusting her with its management, two years later she would be seen riding round on horseback to collect the rent from the tenants.

While there she acted in the French Club on one occasion performing the role of chambermaid in Les Deux Pierrots, and was a member of the university's Women's Mountaineering Team.

She bought her first aircraft, a de Havilland Cirrus Moth, in 1937 from money made on the stock exchange as a child, having been taught how to invest on it by her uncle Reginald Prendergast.

They were used to ferry poultry about in, as well as Dexter cattle which she bred at Nevendon Manor in Essex precisely because they would fit into the aeroplanes.

Marion Wilberforce, who knew her well, was often asked for recollections of her, which irritated her since she considered her to be overrated and a poor flyer prone to panic.

In the early days she also had to fly civilian aircraft that had been impressed, including her own Hornet Moth which was later lost on a reconnaissance flight.

They were otherwise variously used for the invasion of Madagascar, for bomber crew training, anti-submarine duties, air sea rescue and the spectacular attack on the Gestapo Headquarters in Oslo in 1942.

On 27 October 1944 she delivered to Armstrong Whitworth at Baginton a particularly interesting Lancaster which was to be fitted with the company's first axial flow turbojet.

At the cessation of hostilities she flew to Europe with the ATA Air Movements flight, going as far afield as Pilsen in Czechoslovakia.

[4] Disliking the noise, she refused to install a radio in her aeroplane until required to by the law, and on one occasion as a result disrupted a NATO exercise.

If she wanted to land she would circle the airfield waving her wings and wait for someone to step onto the airstrip showing a flag indicating that she could do so.

In peacetime she was best known in aviation as someone who did was she was not meant to do, whether it was skirting the ground at two hundred feet to avoid radar when on a route she shouldn't have been on, or disrupting that NATO exercise.

Her husband-to-be was for some time undecided between the state of matrimony and a vocation to the priesthood, eventually deciding to test the strength of the latter by spending six months in the monastery at Ampleforth Abbey.

[5] A blue plaque was unveiled at Nevendon Manor in Marion Wilberforce's honour on 9 August 2023 as part of the Essex Women’s Commemoration Project.