Before Amelia (17 page)

In August of that year, the
New York Times
printed a story on Luba. Citing her sixteen years as a pilot, the article noted that she was planning an Atlantic flight simply “for the glory of it and to show that what man can do woman can.” She had signed a contract for one year with Oliver Morosco, a theatrical producer; there were two backers for the venture who preferred to remain anonymous. Luba had sole responsibility for all technical arrangements, including the type of aeroplane. She favored a single-engine Fokker, since she was familiar with that model. While the venture was strictly noncommercial, the contract was specific about picture rights.

Luba's plans failed to materialize. Finances and time were both factors, and Lindbergh's success made another flight less newsworthy, even if a woman made it. Luba's aviation career ended.

When next in the news, she was a beauty-parlor specialist at the Hotel Ansonia in New York City. In 1930 she made headlines with a suit against Vladimir Rachevsky, a fellow Russian émigré, who allegedly owed her money from years before in St. Petersburg. The suit's result is unknown, but the defendant was connected to former Russian nobility and married to the daughter of a prominent American hotel owner. At the time of her death in 1959, the
New York Times
reported that Luba had been a taxi driver since 1942. Possibly, the legal suit did not end well.

Luba apparently never looked back on her early flying career, which earned her an international reputation as a knowledgeable flier and a charmer.

Helena P. Samsonova was the fourth woman to receive a Russian pilot's license, No. 167, dated August 25, 1913, which she obtained at the Imperial Moscow Aviation Association Flying School. Born in 1890, Helena was interested in sports and raced automobiles, winning third place in a speed race sponsored by the Moscow Automobile Club, before switching to aeroplanes. Her teacher, Lev Uspensky, noted that her training was quick; already, after a few flights, Helena had control of the Farman biplane.

When World War I began, she was studying at medical school, but volunteered for service as a nurse in a military hospital. Stationed in Warsaw, she changed to chauffeuring for a general at Ninth Army headquarters. From there she won a transfer to an aviation unit, the Fifth Corps Air Detachment, as a reconnaissance pilot. Her stay was brief; her commander found her flying ability less than satisfactory, and she was removed.

When Alexander Kerensky, head of the Provisional Government following the revolution, permitted women to join the army, Helena enlisted in the Twenty-sixth Corps Air Detachment. Her duties were that of observer for artillery spotting and reconnaissance. At the end of the civil war, Helena became a sports and physical-culture teacher. She died in 1958.

Two more early Russian women fliers are worthy of mention: Sophie A. Dolgorukaya, who claimed the title “Princess,” and Nadeshda Degtereva for whom the claim “combat pilot” is made. Sophie started training in France with Léon Delagrange but received her pilot's license in Russia, No. 234, dated June 5, 1914. In the late stages of the First World War, Sophie served as a pilot, then, like Helena, she joined the revolutionary army as a pilot and/or an observer with the Twenty-sixth Corps Air Squadron. Little is known of that service or of her life after the civil war.

Nadeshda, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, was from Kiev. At seventeen years of age, she joined the air service. Although there is no record of her receiving a pilot's certificate, she apparently was successful in hiding her sex and in qualifying as a combat pilot.

Posted to the Galician front, she flew active combat missions as the pilot of reconnaissance aeroplanes. On one mission in 1915, her machine crossed enemy lines and was attacked by Austrian fighters. The pilot and obser ver defended themselves valiantly and, although wounded, the aeroplane and its crew made it back to base safely. When Nadeshda was hospitalized, her true sex was revealed. Her valor won a promotion to the rank of sergeant and the Cross of Saint George, Fourth Class.

When she fully recovered, Nadeshda was transferred to the Caucasus front, where her story ends. Nothing more is known about her, but she had won fame of a sort: “the first woman pilot wounded in combat.”

D. I. Kuznetsova, like women elsewhere, learned to fly but never earned a pilot's certificate. She flew frequently with her husband, Pavel A. Kuznetsov, a well-known Russian aviator, and was recognized as a talented pilot who flew solely for her own enjoyment. There were probably others like her, but more research is needed on the subject.

When the turmoil of the First World War and Russian civil war subsided, women would find a place in Russian aviation just as they did in professions previously thought to belong to men. The first women who responded to Kerensky's call for military service in the air proved aviation was not exclusively a male activity.

When the need for pilots arose in World War II, the Soviet government organized three women air regiments for combat in 1942. Unlike the American WASPs, who did not fight, these pilots flew bombing missions at night and earned a reputation for deadly accuracy that won them the name “Night Witches.” Theirs was the distinction of being the only women to fly in combat in World War II.

IN 1864, ENGLAND was firmly settled in the formality of Victorian behavior. Among the accepted tenets guiding the activities of proper women was that a woman's place was in the home, under the benevolent instruction of her husband. The queen herself took pains to follow that rule; loyal citizenry could do no less. But in 1864, a girl was born to the Reverend George W. Herbert and his wife, Louisa, who would prove to be a remarkable individual, one who pursued her own interests in total disregard of conventional female behavior and pointed the way for the new woman emerging in the twentieth century.

Hilda Beatrice Herbert was born on February 17, the second child in a family of six daughters and one son. The family was unusual for its time in its active concern for the poor and working-class families filling up the area of south London that was formerly the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. Reverend Herbert had considerable wealth, thanks to his father, who had come to London and established a successful building and carpentry firm, and he used some of that money to build a modern church, St. Peter's Vauxhall, that became part of a complex to help the poor of the neighborhood. There was a school, an orphanage, and a training center for the young people, who would then work in the Royal Doulton works on the South Bank in Lambeth. Both parents were involved in parish life, and their children were expected to assist in the office or surgery. Good Christians could do no less. Louisa Herbert used her connections with wealthy women to foster the work at the center and help with adoptions, much to Hilda's annoyance, who considered time spent on social activity with snobbish people a waste. However, her strong-willed parents created a haven for the needy in the squalid South Bank area. When Reverend Herbert died, the streets were lined with local people who gave him a rousing send-off to his last resting place.

Hilda showed unusual talents early; she was imaginative, mischievous to the point of troublemaker, confident, and very practical—her small, clever hands could make anything. She was probably a trial to the Herbert family because she did what she wanted, when she wanted, much to the dismay of the governess in charge of the children. She was especially fond of her brother, George, with whom she played all kinds of wonderful games, which were much more fun than doing lessons and memorizing French verbs. As a young lady, she attended the South Kensington Art School, where she did wood carving, metalwork, and sewing, and designed and made tiles. Anything that interested her, she could turn her hand to and do well. She trained as a nurse in Berlin for a year. She was a free spirit in a very conventional age.

On her return to England, she met and married Maurice Henry Hewlett, a young lawyer working in his family firm, who longed to write—a man the complete opposite of Hilda: a lover of nature, artistic, a dreamer in the world of romantic literature who cared little for money or position. Perhaps it was their differences he found intriguing. The couple first met at a Shakespeare reading, which Hilda's daughter always thought highly unlikely of Hilda. However, James Knowles, publisher of
The 19th Century,
was a friend of both the Herberts and the Hewletts, and the young people, invited to a literary gathering at Knowles's home in Clapham, a common form of entertaining, apparently liked what they saw in each other.

Maurice courted Hilda with eloquent letters when legal business kept him from seeing her. In his own way, he was as unusual a personality as Hilda. He assured her in one letter that he did not see why “obedience” should follow “loving and honouring in the Marriage Service at all.” St. Paul's dictum to wives to submit to their husbands was not part of his belief. This understanding was the solid basis for what was apparently a happy, if unorthodox, marriage. In 1888, when Hilda was twenty-four and Maurice was twenty-seven, the two were married. Two years later, Maurice succeeded his father as His Majesty's Keeper of Land Revenue Records, which entailed a good bit of traveling about the country.

When the cycling craze hit England, the young Hewletts took it up and whirled around London and far afield enthusiastically. By 1900 they had moved to 7 Northwick Terrace, London, which had ample room for their growing family. Next, Hilda took up motoring and drove about the city and the surrounding countryside during “the red flag” era, a time when motorists were responsible for hiring a man to walk before the automobile with a red flag to prevent collisions with another vehicle or wagon on narrow dirt tracks. Not only was Hilda adept at driving, she also could repair a motor, from watching the family chauffeur at work. In 1906 she accompanied Miss Hind, the only woman entrant in the grueling Land's End to John O'Groats Trial, as passenger and mechanic. Driving a Singer Tricar, they made the trek successfully, a remarkable achievement considering there were few roads in existence. Hilda attended meetings and rallies all over the country. Two children had not slowed her down a bit. Maurice, in the meantime, was writing full-time and was widely known as a romantic novelist. His success paid for a country retreat, where Maurice wrote and Hilda busied herself with grapevines, one of Maurice's hobbies.

Years later, Mrs.W. K. Clifford, writing in the
Saturday Review of Literature,
recalled her first impressions of Hilda: “She was as clever as she could stick, and as unconventional as himself [Maurice]; she decorated their beautiful rooms in Moorish fashion; there were few things of this sort she could not do.” Mrs. Clifford had not met the Hewletts until one day Hilda appeared at the door and explained they had read one of her books, her husband wrote poetry, they were neighbors—and “would we know them?” It was typical of Hilda to waste no time on the usual social pleasantries.

In 1909, at one of the motor meetings, she met a talented Frenchman, Gustave Blondeau, a qualified engineer who had designed bridges, sugarbeet factories, and other plants, besides inventing a two-stroke engine to power a bicycle used for racing. He had worked with the Farman brothers, helped in early trials with aeroplane propellers, and believed firmly in the future of aviation. His enthusiasm rubbed off on Hilda, with whom he shared flying magazines and reports, which increased her interest. Throughout the years of their association, Hilda always spoke French to Blondeau.

Shortly after they met, the two motored to Blackpool for the October aviation meeting. Despite dreadful weather, they were impressed by the work of Hubert Latham, whose courageous flight on his Antoinette monoplane, battling wind gusts that brought him almost to a standstill in the air, was a revelation. Critics said he was showing off in a foolhardy flight. To Hilda, the sight of Latham's machine lifting from the ground as the space under it widened was so exciting that she “wanted to cry or else to shout.” She felt in her bones that Latham and his machine stood for a new power and a great discovery. The image of the big white bird stayed with her; she would find a way to take part in aviation.

Her friends and relatives thought it was Hilda's newest high jinks, not realizing herseriousness. A few months later, she met Blondeau again and learned he had given up his other interests to devote himself to aviation. There was one problem: money. At that time there were no flying schools in England or France; there were only builders of aeroplanes, who gave instruction on their machines in order to sell them. The price of an aeroplane had to be paid up front. The two wrote to builders in France and received only vague answers about building or flying an aeroplane. The price was even more depressing. (The reported price of an aeroplane in the American press was fifty-six hundred dollars; the course of flying, five hundred dollars. The course ended when the pupil could fly ten kilometers alone.) The two enthusiasts agreed to become partners. Hilda would put up the thousand pounds to buy a machine, Blondeau would learn to fly it and then teach her to fly.

Hilda spent the next three months thinking of ways to raise money until she had scraped together the needed sum. How she did it was best left a mystery, she once said. The next question was: What machine to buy? Hilda dreamed of a graceful Antoinette flying in the wind, but Blondeau, who was in Paris making inquir ies, wrote that the Farman machine was considered the safest and most dependable. That decided it. The partners would buy a Farman and go to the Camp de Châlons at Mourmelon to learn all they could about aeroplanes. So as not to embarrass her husband, now a prominent name in literary circles, Hilda called herself Mrs. Grace Bird.

Châlons, a vast military training camp that stretched for miles to the horizon, was ideal for flying. Farman's original 1908 shed along the western perimeter of the field was now a factory with numerous buildings, where he was building machines and teaching would-be pilots to fly them. Other aeroplane builders followed his lead, so that a line of hangars marked the western end of the plain. The Antoinette monoplane company was there, as were the Voisin brothers, and the Blériot school had opened a branch along with Roger Sommer and MM. Koechlin and Saulnier. The local authorities in Mourmelon blessed the name of Farman, who had attracted hundreds of residents to the village and rich men from everywhere.