‘Believe nothing to be impossible'

‘No harder than dancing the Charleston’, according to Lady Heath, flying planes was all the rage for the women of the 1930s, explains Charles Harris

- Charles Harris

THE 1930s were a golden age, for dance bands, dictators—and aviation. Flying small planes was fashionable, air races were popular and records were constantly broken. It was a time when the desire swiftly to link distant lands coincided with the ability to do so. Pilots were stars and many of the brightest were women.

The first to get a pilot’s licence (and possibly the first to fly a plane) had been French actress ‘Baroness’ Raymonde de Laroche, in 1910. She flew 300 yards with the aircraft’s maker, Charles Voisin, running alongside shouting, having forbidden her to take off. She perished in a crash in 1919.

Also in 1910, American musician and painter Bessica Raiche built herself a delicate small aircraft of bamboo and silk, which she flew with no instruction at all. Lilian Bland did the same in England, but used ash, spruce, bamboo and elm. Raiche became a distinguished gynaecologist; Bland took up motoring.

‘Barnstorming’ air shows were Bessie Colman’s metier. Of Afro/Cherokee heritage, she qualified in France in 1921—the first black woman to obtain a pilot’s licence. Sensational as ‘Queen Bess’, she flew a war-surplus Curtiss biplane with reckless skill to entertain huge American crowds. In 1926, she fell to her death from a plane after the controls jammed on a loose spanner.

In April 1928, two titled amateur aviators —Mary, Lady Heath, flying in the hope of fame from South Africa to England, and the Hon Mary Bailey, going in the opposite direction ‘to see my husband’—met at exotic Khartoum in Sudan. The welcoming hospitality was telegraphed around the world. Lady Heath had an evening dress in her plane; Lady Bailey had not, but did not mind.