Sophie Mary Pierce-Evans was born into a privileged Protestant background in Newcastle West, County Limerick, and attended a boarding school in Dublin. She was a classic high achiever with a low boredom threshold, and her speciality was performing apparently unfeminine physical feats of derring-do. Thus Mary, as she was known, was a despatch rider in World War I, a graduate in agricultural studies, a university lecturer, an author, a champion high-jumper and javelin-thrower and a pioneering aviator – all before she was thirty years of age.
As an all-round athlete herself, Mary was interested in the lot of women in sport; she co-founded and became vice-president of the British Women’s Amateur Athletic Association (BWAAA) in 1922. At the World Championships in England in 1923, she competed in the long jump, shot putt, discus and 100m hurdles, and broke the women’s world high-jump record and British javelin record. Her 100m hurdle time of sixteen seconds stood, in effect, as an all-Ireland record for forty-one years. Becoming more and more high-profile in sport, she addressed the Olympic Committee in Prague in 1925 and successfully campaigned for women to be allowed to compete in the 1928 Olympics. She also wrote a very successful coaching manual, Athletics for Women and Girls.
Meanwhile, Mary’s personal life was turbulent. In her early twenties, she married an army officer, William Elliott-Lynn, and went to live on a coffee plantation in Kenya. But life out there was too quiet for Mary – a loud character with a big personality, she had become addicted to being a celebrity. After a couple of years she left her husband and took up residence in England.
Like many Bright Young Things of the inter-war years, Mary was continually looking for the next new craze – and the world’s latest high-risk activity for the filthy rich was aviation. In 1925 Mary became the first woman in Britain to qualify for a pilot’s licence. However, her licence was theoretical because in 1924 the International Commission for Air Navigation had bluntly stated that the first requirement for the physical part of the test was ‘being a man’.
At nearly 6ft (1.85m) and eleven stone (70kg), Mary was hugely insulted by the Commission’s assumption that women were too frail to fly. She campaigned vigorously to overturn this injustice by pointing to her own steely nerves and excellent physical condition – aside from her sporting exploits, she was the first woman in Britain to make a parachute jump – and by repeatedly demonstrating her impeccable landing technique. In 1926 the Commission lifted its ban on women and Mary started earning money as a commercial pilot.
But Mary’s competitive streak was still very much to the fore. In 1927 alone she entered and won several races, set an altitude record of 16,000ft (4,880m) and performed aerial stunts. She also lectured on aviation all over Britain. In November she married her second husband, Sir James Heath, who was wealthy enough to keep her in planes. The attraction of commercial flying palled, but Mary already had her sights set on another goal.
She wanted to make the first solo flight from Cape Town to London, a trip of more than 8,000 miles (12,870km). She could not be the first to do the London–Cape Town route because this record had already been set, in 1927, by a lieutenant Dick Bentley. However, Bentley had taken his new wife with him on the return trip, thus disqualifying himself from achieving the solo flight record. In early 1928 it was still wide open for Mary, and she wanted to go for it.
At the same time, there was yet another rich, titled Irishwoman who was challenging Mary’s position as queen of the sky: Lady Mary Bailey. The friendly rivalry between the two had started a few years earlier at the London aerodrome at Stag Lane when Mary had helped teach Lady Bailey to fly. Since then they had been competing in races and taking turns in holding the altitude record. Now Lady Bailey decided that she too wanted to fly the distance between England and South Africa.
They settled it amicably. In her book, Woman and Flying (1929), Mary Heath wrote that she wanted to do the Cape Town–London route not just to set a record but also to prove that it was possible to organise such a trip from ‘the colonies’. A shocking and patronising imperialist, Mary was very keen to develop commercial flying in Africa. ‘We in England,’ she wrote grandly, ‘do not realise that the greater part [of Africa] is ours and that her …wealth is ours if we like to take it and use it.’ In a contemporary newspaper interview, Mary Bailey claimed she was not even trying to set a record, but just wanted to have a ‘rest cure’ and ‘blaze a trail’ from London for commercial use at the same time. Neither lady was being honest: Heath was desperate to be a pioneer aviatrix and be the first person to fly Cape Town–London solo; Bailey was more than happy to outshine this achievement the following year by being the first person to fly the round-trip solo.
‘Flying is really absurdly easy,’ chirrups Mary Heath in Woman and Flying, her own personal love poem to the skies. ‘And then flying is so safe,’ she claims, somewhat disingenuously, before going on to make unfavourable comparisons with driving. And then, finally, with the customary nonchalance of the very rich, ‘flying is so cheap,’ – she had worked out that travelling expenses were less than tuppence a mile, though she admits that this, of course, was only if you had the wherewithal to run your own ‘little machine’.
For her journey from Cape Town to Croydon, Mary’s little machine was a Mark III Avian, which she had taught herself to fix and maintain (later, in the USA, she would qualify as a ground engineer). Unfortunately, Dick Bentley had lost his invaluable maps and notes, so Mary had to start from scratch and work out her route from borrowed atlases. She checked climate patterns, ground conditions and the fuel situation, but her main problem was insurmountable: while flying, she would have no radio contact with the ground. Such lack of communication was downright dangerous – it meant she knew nothing about the location of other aeroplanes in her vicinity, nor about the quality of the landing surface, nor about any new local features, such as potentially lethal telegraph lines. But there was no help for it; Mary had to push on.
Mary started out from Cape Town on 12 February 1928, flying a zigzag route. As well as the usual aircraft paraphernalia – spare wheel, shock absorbers, sandbags and so on – her luggage included a fur coat, a silk evening dress, six pairs of silk stockings, one white flannel skirt, one pair of black satin shoes, a tennis racket and tennis shoes. To someone of Mary’s background, one could not possibly fly the length of Africa without stopping en route for dinner and the odd spot of tennis at the local manor.
Mary touched down in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. Not all of her stopovers were intentional. On one leg of the trip over Central Africa, she realised, at 8,000ft (2,440m), that she was suffering from sunstroke. Just before passing out she managed to crash-land in the bush. She awoke in the harem of a native kraal, being washed and nursed by tribal villagers and fed on boiled chicken and milk. The following day, as she wandered about deliriously, she was spotted by a woman in a passing car who sensed all was not as it should be, picked her up and brought her to the local hospital.
On another occasion, when taking off from Nairobi, Mary realised she had to take prompt action if she did not want to crash into some unexpected hills, so she was forced, while in the air, to jettison some cargo – including most of her famously beautiful clothes and the precious tennis racket.
When Mary got as far as Uganda at the end of March, she heard that the governor general of Sudan, Sir John Maffey, had forbidden her to fly across the troubled southern part of Sudan without a chaperone. Maffey was nothing if not consistent in this matter – he had also forbidden Lady Bailey, who was coming in the opposite direction, from crossing the territory alone. The obliging Dick Bentley came to the rescue. He and his wife chaperoned Lady Heath from Uganda as far as Khartoum in central Sudan where they all waited for Lady Bailey to fly in from Egypt. Lady Bailey was late – she had spent hours stranded in the Nubian desert trying to fix her engine, and Lady Heath was full of praise for her friend and rival’s ‘gallant and plucky attitude’. The four aviators spent a few days partying, and then the Bentleys chaperoned Lady Bailey over southern Sudan, while Lady Heath continued north to Egypt.
Mary had been forbidden to fly across the Mediterranean alone, but this time she ignored the authorities and did it anyway. She had stopovers in Malta, Italy (which she particularly enjoyed owing to her admiration of Mussolini) and France, before successfully reaching Croydon Aerodrome on 17 May 1928. After a 10,000 miles (16,000km), three-and-a-half-month journey, Lady Mary Heath had become the first person to fly solo from Cape Town to Croydon.
Unfortunately, the rest of Mary’s life did not live up to the glory of this achievement. The following year she claimed an altitude record that she could not verify and this damaged her reputation in Britain. She successfully toured and lectured in the USA, but in August 1929, while giving a flying demonstration in Cleveland, Ohio, she had a serious accident, which destroyed both her health and her flying career at the age of thirty-four. At this point her second marriage failed.
Mary returned to Ireland in 1931 and, still fascinated by aviation though she could no longer fly, she bought Iona National Airways. The airline went bankrupt within four years and Mary lost all her money. By now, she was estranged from her third husband, a professional aviator, and looking for work in London, where she gradually sank into obscurity, ill-health and alcoholism. In spring 1939, aged forty-two, Lady Mary Heath fell over in a London bus and died as a result of her injuries.