The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt

After going up in a balloon basket the next thing was to jump out of one, and the organizers at Alexandra Palace, the Londoners’ playground, soon realized that the sight of an apparently vulnerable female figure with nipped-in waist and small, buttoned boots was more likely to produce a delicious sense of danger than was a burly, male aeronaut. To that end, and certainly to her own delight, Dolly Shepherd, daughter of a detective in the London Metropolitan Police, was chosen to become part of a parachute team.

In 1903, the 17-year-old Dolly was a smart Edwardian miss, with a good steady job as a waitress at the Ally Pally – steady, that is, until offered the chance of joining Bill Cody’s parachute team. Undeterred by the circumstances of the offer – the death of another girl parachutist in Dublin – she seized the chance and was soon being billed all over the country. In her breeches, knee-length boots and brass-buttoned jerkin, Dolly was soon the darling of the Edwardian crowd, who turned up to see her hitched to a trapeze bar and carried thousands of feet into the air by a balloon from which she then freed herself to float gracefully back to earth. Paid £2 10s for each ascent – a lot of money when a portion of fish and chips cost a penny halfpenny – her reputation was hard earned for she frequently took her life in her hands. Apart from a few unrehearsed landings on rooftops, she once drifted helplessly two miles above the earth and was only released from her ethereal prison by the unexpected deflation of the balloon. She came closest to death when, making a spectacular dual ascent, her partner’s parachute broke. Eight thousand feet up, she had to swing across to her partner, and strap the other girl to her own parachute so that they could make the dangerous descent together. She escaped with her life but badly injured her back on impact.

Dolly was the last of an era for the skies were now being invaded by a noisier sort of aerial creature – the flying machine. In 1903, the same year that young Dolly made her first ascent in a balloon, the Wright brothers made their first wavering flight at Kitty Hawke. From then on, the skies of Europe and America were filled with machines taking off like feverish gnats and before long, women were up there among them, not only flying but also building their own aircraft.

By 1909, the first fatal air accident had happened, Blériot had flown the Channel and Lilian Bland, granddaughter of the Dean of Belfast, had built and flown her own machine, known as the Bland Mayfly. Constructed of steamed ash, piano wire, bicycle pedals and treated calico, the Bland Mayfly sold for £250 – or £350 with an engine. Lilian’s first ad hoc fuel tank consisted of a whisky bottle and an ear trumpet. ‘It was not a good engine,’ she noted, ‘a beast to start and it got too hot … as the engine is English, its sense of humour is not developed sufficiently.’ An issue of Flight Magazine shows her flying her magnificent machine across a foggy, frosty field.

It would be unusual these days to read of a woman building her own aircraft but the style, in those early days of flight, was strictly trial and error and anyone who had the inclination and the money could have a go. Surprisingly, for one who had worked so hard and achieved so much, it all came to an end in what seemed, for her, an uncharacteristic way. ‘As a consequence of the marriage of Miss Bland,’ read the notice in Flight in 1911, ‘we learn that she is disposing of her aeroplane engine, propellers, plant and machines.’

Although Lilian Bland threw it all up for love, there were countless other young women following her who took to the air with equal joy and alacrity. In 1909, Madame la Baronne de Laroche of France was the first woman ever to gain a pilot’s licence. Three years later, on the day following the shattering loss of the Titanic, a young American journalist, Harriet Quimby, flew solo across the English Channel, taking less than an hour to do so.

In the States, during the recession, many young people – mostly men – found they could earn a living wing-walking and performing other aerial stunts. For a tired and dispirited populace, these dangerous exploits provided some sort of relief, the contemplation of others in danger somehow lessening the boredom and misery of their own dull or inactive lives. For women fliers, the practice served another, useful purpose. Generally thought not to be such good fliers as their male counterparts, anything which offered them a chance to display their skills could not be ignored. For one woman, at least, the strategy paid off. Phoebe Omlie, a talented and daring wing-walker, became the first person in the States to get a transport licence. For the spirited woman who liked excitement and adventure, flying provided an opportunity for both and once she had access to a plane, she could attain a freedom in the skies not available to her on the ground at all.

By the mid-1920s, however, state bureaucracy had begun to assert itself – almost always a bad omen for women. In 1924, the International Commission for Civil Aviation resolved that ‘women shall be excluded from any employment in the operative crew of aircraft engaged in public transport’. Another resolution stated categorically that candidates for such posts ‘must have use of all four limbs, be free from hernia and must be of the male sex’. Although these restrictions were later removed, the attitudes which prompted them were not. Some twenty years later, Jacqueline Cochrane, the first woman to break the sound barrier, was ‘allowed’ to deliver a bomber to England, as part of the war effort, provided that the take-off and landing were done by a male pilot.

Well aware of the problems faced by women in the field of aviation, Stella Wolfe, a journalist specializing in flying in the 1920s, made some points about the suitability of women which might now make us smile but which obviously needed stating then. Women, she said, were eminently suited to flying because they were lighter in weight and could endure cold better than men. Nor did they drink or smoke as much as men. Further, she believed that women, when able properly to sublimate their sex instincts, could use their maternal powers as a driving force in other fields. ‘Deprived of the right of motherhood and doomed to enforced celibacy by the ravages of war … she can put all that marvellous creative power, that tremendous endurance that enables the mother to undergo the agony of childbirth’ into flying. It was unfortunate that she should then have cited Lady Bailey as an example of a woman who had raised a large family and still had energy left for other activities. The privileged Lady Bailey only had surplus energy because she could afford to pay other women to look after her family and home. The Wolfe argument is not one that would appeal to the more independent-minded women of today but it was representative of the feminist thinking of the 1920s.

It was not until a few years later, in the early 1930s, that the public got the full benefit of America’s bright star: Amelia Earhart, that stalwart flier whose views on women and their place in society were as clear and determined as her own attitude to flying. ‘Unfortunately,’ she wrote, ‘I was born at a time when girls were still girls.’

Amelia Earhart was brought up in the early years of the century, in a large, pleasant clapboard house in Kansas. Her childhood years were happy and carefree although she learned early on that certain activities were considered ‘rough’ for a girl. Her father, an amiable man whose weakness for drink eventually led to the break-up of his marriage, made a living as a poorly paid lawyer on the railroad. Any extras the family might need were provided by Amelia’s maternal grandfather, who was a judge. Life for the small girl was unruffled and unexciting and there was nothing in her formal education nor in the girls’ literature of the day to stimulate a spirit of adventure. ‘… who ever heard of a girl – a pleasant one – skipping on an oil tanker, say, finding the crew about to mutiny and saving the captain’s life while quelling the mutiny? No, goings on of this sort are left to the masculine characters …’

If there was to be any excitement in her own life then clearly she herself would have to generate it. She enrolled as a medical student in New York but threw this up after a year. Unsettled, she moved to live with her parents in Los Angeles, then the centre of America’s aircraft industry. Soon, she had found the activity that was to dominate her whole life – flying. She took a job with a telephone company to pay for her flying lessons and with financial help from her mother, the judge’s daughter, she bought a second-hand plane. By 1922, at the age of twenty-four, she not only had her pilot’s licence but had also set a women’s altitude record for 14,000 feet. When her parents’ marriage finally broke up she drifted back across the States and took a job working with deprived children. Her life still had no clear direction. What was she, people asked, a social worker or a woman pilot?

‘Personally, I am a social worker who flies for sport,’ she tried to explain. ‘I cannot claim to be a feminist but do rather enjoy seeing women tackling all kinds of new problems, new for them, that is.’

Then, in 1928, everything fell into place. Could she, someone asked, take part in a flight across the Atlantic? She wouldn’t have to fly or anything, just simply be a passenger. The backer, a woman, was financing the flight in order to cement the friendship between America and England and wouldn’t it be nice, she said, to have a woman on the plane? Amelia was now thirty and had been drifting for too long. She accepted with alacrity. When a great adventure is offered, she said, you don’t refuse. But on this first Atlantic crossing Amelia was merely the token female taken along because the woman sponsor thought it a good idea. Not everyone shared that point of view. Commenting on the landing at Burryport in Wales, a Flight editorial said: ‘… in these days of sex equality such a feat should not arouse any particular comment Compared with the solo flights of such lady pilots as Lady Heath and Lady Bailey, the crossing as a passenger does not appear to us to prove anything in particular.’ Such a comment, ungainly as it was, had some justification and Amelia herself felt her presence had added little to aviation history: ‘All I did was to sit on the floor of the fuselage like a sack of potatoes.’

To add insult to injury, when the sponsorship money was being handed out, the pilot received $20,000, the mechanic received $5000 and she got nothing. Already an accomplished flier, it must have infuriated her to realize she had allowed herself to be used, and the experience spurred her on to reclaim what she felt she had lost ‘Some day,’ she said, ‘I will redeem my self-respect. I can’t live without it.’

She travelled round the country campaigning on behalf of women pilots but in the midst of it all took a surprising step. Marriage had never appealed to her and in any case, as she remarked to her sister, having babies took up too much time. She had had a suitor, however, for a number of years. George Putnam, the publisher, had been involved in her first transatlantic flight and found himself attracted by the slight, serious young woman with her open, gamine face and gap-toothed smile. He himself was married but on his divorce offered himself to Amelia. She refused over and over again and then, to his surprise, in the middle of her feminist campaign, she agreed to marry him.

There were now a number of people in the States all sharing Amelia’s desire to promote women fliers but it was a difficult time of social change and the women, well aware of the dangers of projecting a feminine image that might be damaging to their reputation as serious pilots, carefully chose to dress without any show of female frippery. The press, reflecting the prejudices of the time, saw only the stereotype woman and not the individual, constantly referring to these early fliers as Petticoat Pilots, Ladybirds and Sweethearts of the Air. It was an uphill struggle and perhaps it was this continuing battle that finally led Amelia Earhart to make her momentous decision – she would fly solo across the Atlantic. It was five years since Charles Lindbergh had made his great flight across to Paris and since then, although a number of women pilots had tried the transatlantic flight, none had succeeded.

On 20 May 1932, flying a red Lockheed Vega, she set out from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, on her long and lonely journey – not altogether sure why she was doing it. ‘To have a purpose,’ she wrote, ‘is sometimes a deadening thing.’

Things went wrong from the start. Within hours of take-off the altimeter failed. If she went too high she risked the wings icing up and if she flew too low she was blinded by sea fog. She flew on, trying to strike a balance between the two. In the dark Atlantic night, her engine was suddenly illuminated by an eerie blue light. Exhaust flames were beginning to lick out of a broken weld in the engine manifold. There was nothing she could do except watch with horror – and fly on, listening to the increasing noise the manifold made as it started to vibrate in a dangerous manner. On and on through the lonely night until, fifteen hours later, she landed in a boggy field in what she hoped was Ireland. It was. You’re in Derry, said Mr Gallagher, the farmer whose cows had been so startled by her noisy arrival.

Her earlier London critics remained unimpressed:

Miss Earhart is reported to have made the flight for no other reason than that she had long thought she could do it … Very probably, Miss Earhart would never have rested content until she had proved to her own satisfaction whether or not she was, if we may use the expression, man enough to do it. She has succeeded and we may congratulate her on her success. But her flight has added precisely nothing to the cause of aviation.

An American reporter was more generous in his praise:

… she isn’t a bit pretty but if you can be with her without being conscious of something quietly beautiful you are a peculiarly dull fellow and wholly insensitive. There is a charm there and a sense of perfect control over self and that delightful quality infrequently found in the workers of the world – a rare sense of humour.

Calm and undisturbed by the differing responses she seemed to generate, she smiled her way through the razzmatazz of civic welcomes and tickertape hysteria. She had done it, she said, just for the fun of it. Later she offered something more: ‘It was a self-justification, a proving to me and to anyone else interested that a woman with adequate experience could do it.’

With Putnam, she was now leading the life of a socialite, fêted wherever she went Soon, her face was as well known as her name for, although a non-smoker herself, she appeared in cigarette advertisements to help finance her many flying projects. These advertisements produced a spate of criticism as did her uncompromising stand on feminism but, with her usual single-minded commitment, she refused to allow herself to be distracted.

Her solo transatlantic flight had been a vindication of all the women fliers before her who had set out to do the same and perished in the attempt, and she exulted in her achievement: ‘There is no telling now,’ she wrote, ‘where the limitations to feminine activities, if any, will be henceforth.’

Sadly, she encountered her final limits when her plane disappeared mysteriously in 1937 during her attempt to become the first woman to fly round the world.

In the year that Amelia Earhart agonized over her decision to enter the ‘attractive cage’ of marriage, a very different young woman set out to make another famous solo flight.

Born in Hull in 1903 – an auspicious year for a flier – Amy Johnson was five years younger than her American counterpart. After taking an Arts degree from Sheffield University she found life in the north of England unexciting and moved to London where she took a job in the silks department of a large store, earning £5 a week. Amy Johnson’s life till then had been taken up with the ephemera of the 1920s: jazz, college rags and a love affair that lasted through her twenties. Despite the three hundred love letters – skittish and innocently provocative – which she wrote during that time, the affair ended dismally; by then, however, she had discovered another passion: flying.

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