Lady Mary Heath

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Lady Mary Heath (1896 - 1939), the Irish aviator, was born Sophie Catherine Pierce in Knockaderry, County Limerick, in the town of Newcastlewest, near her birthplace, after a sensational local scandal when her father bludgeoned her mother to death. She was one of the best known women in the world for a five year period from the mid-1920s.

1 Life
2 See also
3 External links
4 References

[edit] Life

Before becoming a pilot Lady Mary had already made her mark. During the First World War, she spent two years as a dispatch rider, based in England and later France, where she had her portrait painted by Sir John Lavery. By then, she had married the first of her three husbands and as Sophie Mary Eliott-Lynn, was one of the founders of the Women's Amateur Athletic Association after her move from her native Ireland to London in 1922. She was Britain's first women's javelin champion and set a disputed world record for the high jump. She was also a delegate to the International Olympic Council in 1925, when she took her first flying lessons.

The following year, she became the first women to hold a commercial flying licence in Britain and along the way, set records for altitude in a small plane and later a Shorts seaplane, was the first woman to parachute from an aeroplane (landing in the middle of a football match). After her great flight from the Cape, she took a mechanic's qualification in the USA, the first woman to do so.

In an era when the world had gone aviation mad, due to the exploits of Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, Mary was more than able to hold her own. "Britain's Lady Lindy," as she was known in the United States, made front page news as the first pilot, male or female, to fly a small open cockpit airplane from Cape Town to London. She had thought it would take her three weeks; as it turned out, it took her three months, from January to May 1928. She wrote about the experience later in a book Woman and Flying, that she co-wrote with Stella Wolfe.^[1]

Unfortunately, just when her fame was at its height, with her life a constant whirl of lectures, races and long distances flights, Lady Mary (she married Sir James Heath in 1928) was badly injured in a crash just before the National Air Races in Cleveland, Ohio in 1929.

She was never the same after, though she returned to Ireland with her third husband GAR Williams, a horseman and pilot of Caribbean origin, and became involved in private aviation, briefly running her own company near Dublin in the mid-1930s. She died destitute in 1939 after a fall from a tram car in London.