Sophie – My Story

The cool air of the autumn day grazes my skin and twists in my hair as I extend my legs and pull on the ropes. My skinny legs straining, hoping to make the swing go ever higher higher.

If I can only see above the wall, catch a glimpse of the bustling town square, the cool grey limestone buildings that surround it, the ancient walls of Desmond Castle, see the faces of the children I can hear beyond laughing, singing, bickering.

How I long to be over the wall, in the town with them, running, jumping, skipping through the streets of Newcastle West.

As I grew taller, almost to 6 ft by the time I’m twelve I have learned to climb the tree to catch glimpses of that busy town life, still kept ‘safe’ behind my garden walls though. Only my holidays in Ballybunion offer me the chance to run and play with other children, exploring sea caves and running my fingers through the long grasses on the cliff side with my cousins. Here too the first time I experience real fear, swimming at night in a grotto, unable to find an air pocket, the get out of the thrashing waves, it instils in me a fear of the water for the rest of my life.

Finally I get released from my limestone prison on the square in Newcastle West but alas to a jail of another kind. My childhood has made me love freedom of every kind.

Boarding school after Boarding school where I was to be turned out and ‘finished’ as a proper young lady. Even then my instinct was to run, jump and free myself from the rules, the uniforms, the restrictions. My aunts moving me whenever they caught word that I was involved in sports, playing hockey, against girls or heaven forbid against boys! My instinct has always been to do battle with nature, to overcome her vastness or to wrest her treasure from her!

At 17 I’m finally unleashed from my keepers, a small inheritance promised to me and the world at my feet. Attending the Royal College of Science I finally make friends, find my voice, debate, argue, campaign and write articles for our student paper, I am carried away with it all. Is it any wonder that given my carefully coddled and cotton wool childhood I would search for adventure the first chance I got!

As a newlywed with my first motorbike, a Harley Davidson, my pride and joy I could finally embark on the life of adventure I dreamed of, however if I thought that Captain Elliott Lynn would be by my side on a Battlefield I soon learned he was not the man I thought. While I was determined to get to the front he was doing everything to avoid it. Initially I served with the women’s auxiliary corps in Salisbury and the later sent to France as an ambulance driver. I got to do my part for King and Country!

How could I then be expected to return to the life of a housewife, embroidering cushions and pinching pennies with the housekeeper over a meagre budget, my ambition was greater then than ever!

My first attempt, to further my education was knocked back, a married woman it seems could not expect to receive the training grant available to men, left me no choice but to take a position in Scotland as a zoology demonstrator, but even this was not enough for me, I craved excitement, adventure, a challenge!

Athletics for a while occupied me, both the winning of prizes and then battle for equal treatment of women in sport, excluded from the Olympic games because of our sex we had to hold our own. I could see in athletics a role for myself as campaigner, advocator, writing a book on Athletics for Women and Girls, and publishing my advice columns in the papers so that women and girls the world over could have some informed information on furthering their own athletics careers.

And it was through my time in athletics, travelling home from the Olympic Congress in Prague May of 1925, I discovered my true passion, my life’s calling – Aviation. Taking to the skies for the first time was like realising all my childhood fantasies of escape at one, to be so free, clear above the skies, above the clouds and all the people in the world, able to transport myself anywhere I wanted, to leave behind everything I knew, everyone and their expectations, to explore this brave new world of flight. This was the feeling I had been searching for my whole life.

Becoming one of the inaugural members of the London Aeroplane Club I began my training immediately!

20 half hour flight lessons, is all it takes and I have my private licence but am dismayed to learn that I am not eligible to become a commercial pilot and start earning money from my new career. As a woman I am prohibited from taking fee paying passengers and barred from flying for money as a transport pilot. To make ends meet and support my lessons, and the cost of my aircraft, I sell signed pictures of me in it, each purchase of a signed picture comes with a free flight. Ha! I even go so far as to write to the authority, telling them what I am doing. After all the ban on female’s in the commercial sector is ridiculous! In these canvas and wood framed craft, saving space and weight is key to longer flights, women, as the smaller daintier sex, are much more suited to the conditions of flight than men. After all no brute force is required to fly!

The authorities response is that women are considered too emotionally and physically fragile at ‘certain times of the month’. My response is that I am happy to be examined at any time of the month to prove them wrong. Ideally they wouldn’t have called me for examination on a day when I’d been out till 3.00am dancing but how and ever I presented myself and soon after was permitted to begin training for my commercial B Licence. The ban had been rescinded, aided in no small part by my putting myself forward to prove them wrong!

While I waited for the legislation allowing me to carry passengers to come through, I occupied my time flying, giving aerobatics demonstrations, and generally showing off! Remind me to tell you later how I once had engine trouble while trying to be the first woman to jump from an aircraft with a parachute and landed instead, hanging on to the wing with my pilot struggling to gain control smack bang in the middle of a football match!

I was flying hither and tither, giving lessons to fellow Irish women and aviators Lady Bailey and Sicele O’Brien, competing against them in air races through Europe and the British Isles, having a jolly old time when the news came of Captain Elliott Lynn death, and I found myself a widow, though we were estranged when he died, having grown apart during our time in Africa I think fondly of our early days together in Dublin.

It was shortly after I found myself engaged to be married again to an old and dear friend, Sir James Heath. What luck that I should fall in love with a man wealthy enough to support my interest’s rather than Captain Elliott Lynn who had resented my spending on aviation, Sir Heath encouraged me. Finally I could fully drop the name of Ms. Sophie Peirce-Evans or Mrs Elliott Lynn and finally become not Lady ‘Hell of a Din’ but Lady Mary Heath, a title that far better fitted my place in the world, Sophie Elliott Peirce may have had a spotted past but Lady Mary Heath would be known the world over as a leader amongst women!

It was with Sir Heath I returned to Africa once more and there my plan for an epic journey was born! 9,000 miles, I was going to fly, Cape Town to London, solo in my Avro Avian packed with 42 gallons of fuel and the essentials: a few ball gowns, tennis whites and racquets, my trusty fur coat (I never fly without it), and a special supply of strychnine should I find myself in trouble somewhere with no hope of rescue. I set off on February 25th, hoping to make the journey in three weeks, but of course the continent of Africa is so vast, has so much to see it may have taken me a shade longer. Through day after day of scorching heat, engine troubles, illness, endless red tape and navigating the complex politics of several African colonies I fly. The best days are spent watching the animals, giraffes, elephants, lions roam the landscape below me. I’m almost more comfortable in the tents of nomadic tribes than in the soft feather beds of the Colonial Governors, still it’s part of my tour, to entertain the press and assembled dignitaries with my tales of adventure in the skies.

All too soon I am in Cairo, arguing my case to be allowed cross the Mediterranean into Italy, if only they knew it was my greatest fear, flying over the open water and yet I argued to go on. Finally in the warm spring days of may I make my approach landing home once again in Croydon. Finding myself a record breaker once again, the first woman to fly across the equator, the first woman, first person even, to make a solo flight from the African continent. But those heady early days of flight records were being broken almost every week, barely a month later an American is stealing my thunder, the first woman to cross the Atlantic, even though she was just as a passenger. Nice girl though, Amelia, I took her up for a spin while she was in London, impressed her so much with my skill she bought my aircraft from me the minute we landed and had her shipped directly back to America.

America! Now there’s a place, a woman can succeed there, I’m one of the first women in the USA to get an aircraft mechanics certification, can you believe it?! But my fun across the pond was short lived when I took a spill at Cleveland and crashed through the Mills Company factory concrete roof.

Hell of a time that was, 2 weeks unconscious in a hospital bed, and longer still to recover, broken nose, broken jaw and my head it just doesn’t feel quite right since. It took me months to get back in the saddle so to speak, and to add insult to injury Sir Heath decides to call it quits. Well good riddance, I finally find myself an airman to marry, a pilot. Jack Williams and I marry in 1931 and honeymoon in Mexico, where the President himself makes a military plane available for me to fly, only the 2nd woman ever to be granted a licence to fly in that country!

Since the accident it’s harder though, to fly, to get my bearings up in the clouds, or on land. I bring Jack home to Ireland, settle in the north of Dublin and open Irelands first Women’s school for Aviation and Aerodrome. Even here I can’t quite settle, I want to be away, to escape again and sometimes the only place I can do that is in a bottle. More crashes, more fights, more trouble and I’m my father’s daughter. Drinking and brawling and shouting the world down.

But that day I wasn’t, I was clear headed and on my way back to myself, climbing to the top of the tram because where else would I be but the top. The simplest thing, a misstep, a lost footing, and I who watched my mother die on the kitchen floor in Knockaderry at my father’s hands, who jumped 1500ft out of aircraft and survived, who crash landed into the concrete roof of the Mills Company factory and survived, who flew alone up through the continent of Africa and survived, I fall, and bang my head, and quietly slip away.