If the name Harriet Quimby escapes you, you can easily be forgiven; hers is not exactly a household name despite the fact the she deserves all the accolades that she have been heaped upon her for almost exactly a century now. I would estimate that many reading this piece would know the name Louis Bleriot with instant recall as the pioneering French aviator lauded for being the first man to fly the
English Channel single-handed, but I would wager a sizeable sum in estimating that not many of the same readership would know that Harriet Quimby was the first woman to achieve the same feat. Harriet Quimby seems to have been a woman of great spirit; born in 1875 in Arcadia, Michigan, her parents moved to San Francisco when she was in her twenties and there she found work as a journalist working for Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly and enjoyed a successful career with over 250 known published articles. In 1911 she moved to Hollywood and had seven scripts made into silent films by the film director D.W.Griffith, even having a minor role in one of the movies herself. It would seem that Harriet’s life changed forever the previous year when she went to the 1910 International Aviation Tournament in Belmont Park, New York. There she met John Moisant, one of the biggest names in early American aviation and owner of his own flying school. In looking back on her life, it would appear that Harriet fell in love with flying, because she completely changed her life to accommodate the exciting new sport and take on the challenges that all early fliers faced. On August 1 1911 Harriet became the first woman to be granted a pilot’s licence in the United States, followed a few days later by Matilde Moisant, John Moisant’s sister. With a natural eye for flamboyance, Harriet had a bright purple leather flying suit bespoke made for her, and within a short space of time had become an iconic figure to many American women who were in the process of emancipation much the same as women in Europe were doing at around the same time. She became the advertising image for Vin Fiz, a popular grape soda soft drink of the time, and the purple flying suit adorned advertising hoardings across the continent. It seems that the beautiful, dashing and intelligent all-American woman who took to the skies was indeed one of the A-list stars of her time. In March, 1912, Harriet boarded the Hamburg-America Line vessel Amerika bound for England set on becoming the first woman to emulate Louis Bleriot’s feat three years earlier of being the first man to fly the English Channel. She visited the Bleriot monument in Northfall Meadow, in the shadow of Dover Castle, where Bleriot landed heavily on 25th July 1909 and became an instant celebrity; he claimed the £1000 prize offered by the Daily Mail for being the first man to fly a heavier-than-air aeroplane across the Channel and ensured that his name was to be etched into the history books. The Bleriot monument stills exists to this day, the outline of his aeroplane set into the slope where he came to a stop; Northfall Meadow is no longer a meadow, rather it is now a dense wood and the memorial is set in a clearing in the wood with seating around it to while away a few moments and remember what an achievement it was just over a century ago. There is a photograph that exists of Harriet Quimby standing beside the Bleriot memorial with some friends taken a few days before her own momentous flight; it is poignant in the context of the story of the rest of her life in as much as that she herself was never feted in the same way that Louis Bleriot had been, an injustice that the organisation I am Secretary of seeks to put right. On 16th April 1912 Harriet Quimby took off from Whitfield aerodrome, near Dover, in a Bleriot XI monoplane that she borrowed from Bleriot himself and headed south east towards Cap Gris Nez in the Pas De Calais, France. Navigation errors and cloud cover combined to make her unsure of exactly where she was, but as soon as she spotted land beneath her, she took the machine down and landed at Hardelot, a small village on the Cote Opale a few miles south of the port of Boulogne, just over an hour after taking off from the Kent coast. A photograph taken shortly after her landing shows Harriet being carried shoulder high by the villagers who had realised just what a moment in history this was - or should have become. Fate had been unkind to Harriet Quimby; with the high speed of communications that we are accustomed to today, a breaking news story is flashed across our television screens within a few minutes. A century ago, breaking news was history often before it had been reported. It transpired that one of the biggest news stories in history had happened the day before Harriet Quimby took off: the tragic sinking of the RMS Titanic, with the huge loss of life and terrible circumstances of the sinking. The story of Harriet Quimby becoming the first woman to fly the English Channel single-handed, which would ordinarily have been front page news on newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, was lost as the story of the loss of the Titanic hit the press. It is recorded that the story of Harriet Quimby did make the inside pages of one British newspaper, but otherwise the story went unreported. Harriet Quimby was destined to be a name that time passed by. Fate, however, saved the coup de grace for later in 1912; on July 1st, just a matter of weeks after returning to the United States, Harriet was flying in clear conditions at the third annual Boston Aviation Meet with William Willard, the event organiser on board as a passenger when the Bleriot XI monoplane pitched forward in level flight and threw Mr Willard out of the plane into Boston Harbour where he drowned. Momentarily the plane righted itself and flew on in level flight for a short while before it pitched forward again, this time ejecting Harriet herself. By now the plane was over land again, and Harriet fell to her death, whilst the plane glided back to earth harmlessly.
2012 will almost certainly be dominated by news stories that can be easily foreseen: the London Olympics, the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, probably turmoil in the money markets of Europe – all these spring to mind as events that are looming on the horizon. The Harriet Quimby Centenary Project is launching, by means of a small ceremony in Dover on April 15th, a year-long campaign to make the name of Harriet Quimby much more of a name that is familiar to us. Fund raising has already begun to raise the money to place a statue overlooking the Channel and thus give Harriet Quimby the place in history this extraordinary woman deserves. When thinking of early pioneering female aviators, the names of Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson readily come to mind; after the coming year we hope that the name of Harriet Quimby will be added to that list and no longer will it be a case of Harriet who?
