ATLANTIC FURIES by Midge Gillies: Femme fatales who conquered the skies in style
ATLANTIC FURIES by Midge Gillies (Scribe £25, 416pp)
When Ruth Elder arrived back in New York in 1927 after attempting to cross the Atlantic in her monoplane American Girl, the crowds were dazzled.
The ‘Flying Flapper’ looked like a chic society woman with her Parisian suit, fox-fur coat and bobbed hair.
It didn’t matter that American Girl was downed into the sea several hundred miles north of the Azores. As far as the newspapers were concerned, ‘Miss’ Elder was a new kind of femme fatale.
Bessie Coleman – pioneer of the skies
In this compulsive book – part Barbie movie and part Wacky Races – social historian Gillies tells the story of six women who competed to cross the Atlantic in the late 1920s.
Charles Lindbergh had been the first pilot to succeed non-stop solo in 1927, but now the race was on for the first ‘girl’ flyer to make the 3,000-mile journey.
In an age of female emancipation, women were flying high.
Gillies’ half-dozen heroines hail from a wide background. There is peer’s daughter Hon. Elsie Mackay, African-American Bessie Coleman whose mother had been born into slavery, and Amelia Earhart who became the first female pilot to cross the Atlantic solo and non-stop.
As for Ruth Elder, she turned out to be on the run from a scandalous romantic past.
It wasn’t all larks. Four of Gillies’ Atlantic Furies failed to return from their expeditions, the most famous being Earhart who set off in 1937 in a bid to be the first woman pilot to circle the Equator.
Following several crackly radio messages received on July 2, her bright silver Lockhead Electra disappeared from the skies over the Central Pacific. It has yet to be found.
Gillies’ great skill lies in giving us a bone-shaking sense of what it must have been like to sit high in the skies, munching on chocolate and trying to screen out the propeller noise.
Flying through freezing fog involved terrifyingly low visibility, yet straining to get a better view could prove fatal.
In 1926 Coleman unhooked her safety belt to peer over the fuselage just as her plane dipped, with the result that she somersaulted to earth in front of horrified bystanders.
Not everyone believed that a woman’s place was in the skies. One doctor specialising in aviation medicine reported that having a period put a woman pilot at risk of crashing her plane. Meanwhile, Major Oliver Stewart, ex RAF, writing in The Tatler, declared darkly that women ‘will be persuaded to mend their ways only when they have learned the truth that the lipstick is mightier than the joystick’.
Gillies makes short work of this historical misogyny, arguing that the daredevil women who competed to cross the Atlantic were never going to put up with a man telling them what to do. (It is surely no coincidence that her heroines had 15 marriages between them.)
By the end of this thrilling book, it is impossible not to cheer for these magnificent women in their flying machines.