The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt

It was her humanitarian work in saving the lives of twins that evinced uncharacteristic praise from Mary Kingsley and the two formed an immediate if unlikely partnership, for they were both intent on promoting better understanding of tribal customs. Local animists believed that each person was born with a guardian spirit – an invisible companion. When a woman gave birth to twins, however, the Efiks – among whom Mary Slessor was living – believed that the spirit companion had been displaced and its place taken instead by the human child. There could be only one explanation, the Efiks believed. The woman must have secretly mated with the devil. The punishment was horrific. Both children must be killed – for who could be sure which was the devil-child and which the good one? The mother too must be banished, driven out of her home and away from the tribe. The whole thing, as Mary Kingsley noted, was seen ‘as a sort of severe adultery’. Mary Slessor devoted herself to saving the lives of both the babies and their mothers, doing so with such tact and understanding that she was soon able to set up a refuge for the unhappy victims.

Hers was a lonely life, far from family and home, living in the bush surrounded by her African helpers. Her red hair was shorn to a boyish crop and the climate took its toll on her health. At the age of thirty-two, another missionary appeared on the scene and the two formed a friendship that looked as if it might end happily in permanent companionship, but circumstances forced them apart and she devoted the rest of her life to her beloved Africans, to whom she was known simply as Ma. Mary Kingsley, despite her dislike of missionaries, afforded her the highest praise: ‘The sort of man Miss Slessor represents is rare.’

Mary Kingsley herself, of course, was something of a rare bird, and through her studies of local customs and beliefs she too hoped to make the African better understood. She drew attention, for instance, to the damage she observed being done in girls’ schools in Calabar by ill-informed missioners. It was the custom for the girls to wind a long strip of cloth round their waist and to leave a part of this to trail behind them on the ground to be held by their guardian spirit In the safety of their homes, this train could be caught up and tucked into their skirt but outside in a public place, where danger lurked, the cloth had to trail along the ground. The missionaries briskly forbade this practice, seeing it as yet another example of the lazy, slovenly habits of the Africans. The girls were torn between the two: no respectable girl would go about without the protection of her guardian spirit; if she did, she must be bad. It was a war, Miss Kingsley noted, between native and Presbyterian respectability and it is not difficult to imagine which practice she favoured.

While she found the work done by Slessor admirable, Mary Kingsley would have found it difficult to applaud the zeal with which Annie Taylor, another of her contemporaries, pursued her missionary work in China and Tibet, for Annie’s arrogance fed upon her ignorance: ‘I was shocked to see men and women near Ta’ri’si,’ she wrote, ‘prostrating themselves the whole length of the road … Poor things, they know no better; no one has ever told them about Jesus.’ How different was Alexandra David-Neel’s objective and careful observation of the same scene some fifty years later, written with the intention of understanding, not dismissing, the custom:

Many of the pilgrims [she wrote] went round the mountain, prostrating themselves at each step, that is to say, stretching their arms as they lay on the ground, and marking with their fingers the length they had covered with their bodies. They would get up and stand at the exact place which their fingers had touched, after which they would again prostrate themselves and measure their length once more, and so on, all the way round.

Annie’s was the fixed and limited view of the missioner whose commitment prevented her from appreciating the culture and beliefs of those she wanted to save. But it was that very commitment that led her to journey across China and into Tibet, hopeful of finally entering Lhasa. After Africa, China had become the next focus for nineteenth-century missionary activity. British traders made important economic links there, and in 1878 the first woman missionary was sent into the interior. The fact that the economic links had been forged on the sale of opium – in 1839 British ships were bringing in 2000 tons of opium annually – seems not to have bothered the missionary ladies. Their task was to bring God, not change, to the Chinese millions.

Annie Taylor was accompanied on her journey by her faithful servant, Pontso, and the two of them disguised their true identity by dressing as Tibetans; Annie also cut her hair to look like a Buddhist nun. For the length of their 1300-mile trek they had to ward off bandits and robbers, sleep out in the open and seek sanctuary wherever they could. The rivers they had to cross were often flooded and swollen, posing a considerable obstacle. ‘The river is quite impassable, so they say, barring our way, but we are waiting until tomorrow to see if it will be lower in the morning. The Lord can do this for me. My eyes are unto him who made a passage in the Red Sea for the children of Israel.’

When the river finally abated, they had to force their way through biting waters which froze to icicles on the spot. Pressing on along the tea road from China, Annie’s difficulties continued. One of the three men she had hired to carry her goods and care for the horses turned troublesome and threatened to reveal her identity. This was dangerous, for Tibet feared invasion both from Britain and China and justifiably viewed all foreigners with suspicion. Another of her men died along the way and a third turned back shortly after the journey had begun. Although armed with a pistol, her real trust lay in the Lord.

Undeterred by the icy nights made worse by the altitude, she sold her tent in order to buy another horse. So high up did the route take them that you could plunge your hand unscathed into a saucepan of boiling water and when she put her Christmas pudding on to boil – for certain traditions after all had to be maintained – its centre was still cold after two hours of cooking. Nevertheless, on that Christmas day in 1892, far from the blazing log fire and roast turkey of childhood days in Egremont, she was cheerful and optimistic, doing what she had chosen to do: ‘Quite safe here with Jesus,’ she wrote happily in her diary. Her seven-month long journey to Lhasa proved fruitless in the end; she was apprehended within twelve miles of her goal, tried by the local elder and arbitrarily expelled from Tibet. What a long way this rocklike and forceful woman had travelled from a Victorian childhood plagued by heart trouble.

Annie Taylor was a simple, solid soul, well suited to the sort of work which the Inland Mission to China required of its members. She plodded her way through some of the most intriguing places in Tibet, totally unaware of their significance, intent only on revealing to the impoverished peasants the golden gates of heaven through which they could walk one day if only they embraced the Bible. The town of Kum Bum is clustered round the famous Buddhist settlement – then the third largest monastery, housing three thousand lamas – and there the stalwart Annie braved the annual Butter Fair, distributing her evangelical leaflets and urging the holiday crowd to forsake their ancient religion and follow the Lord.

What would have happened to Annie had she been forced to stay at home in England? Perhaps she would have found some satisfaction in evangelical work among the wretches who worked the dark satanic mills of the Midlands. Those places, after all, were every bit as godforsaken as Lanchow or Shanghai, or even Kum Bum. Instead, she chose to set out for the most impenetrable of countries, circled as it is by a fortress of snow-covered peaks. Like scores of travellers before and since, she was drawn towards Lhasa as if mesmerized by its inaccessibility. Her motivation was religion, but it was a drive fuelled by the challenges which her chosen life had laid before her – challenges to which her brave and adventurous spirit rose with stoical determination.

Consumed by the same missionary zeal was the aptly named Evangeline French. With her sister Francesca and friend Mildred Cable, the three, known as ‘the trio’, spent fifteen years dining the 1920s and 1930s evangelizing in China; they crossed the Gobi Desert five times during that period. Wearing Chinese dress and learning the local dialects, the three women brightly and happily revealed the treasures of the Bible to the nomad tribes until forced to leave by the vagaries of the Chinese/Japanese war.

Sublimely indifferent to their supposed weaknesses, Victorian women missionaries breached the wall of prejudice and proved themselves to be as vigorous and as tenacious as any man, giving practical expression to their spiritual message by setting up schools and hospitals, drawing attention to the difficulties under which the indigenous women laboured, and making representations to governments and royalty on behalf of the poor, the sick and the forgotten.

Four years younger than Annie Taylor, Kate Marsden was caught up in the same wave of religious fervour that swept through Victorian England. After only eight months’ training as a missionary nurse, she was sent to Bulgaria in 1877, to tend to Russian soldiers injured in the Russian/Turkish war. The sights she saw were terrifying, for she was still only eighteen and until then had been sheltered by a middle-class upbringing. Especially traumatic was her first and unexpected meeting with two men whose bodies had been hideously eaten away by leprosy. It was this meeting, however, that was to give a focus to her religious zeal and a sense of mission to her life.

Back in England, she continued her nursing career, see-sawing between rationality and periods of disabling self-doubt culminating in a mental disorder which eventually engulfed her. When she recovered, she felt ready to begin her life’s work, and started off across Russia to set up a hospital for lepers in the outer reaches of Siberia.

Kate Marsden, above all else, had a sense of humour which got her through many terrible experiences. Her description of her journey across Siberia, undertaken in 1891 before the Trans-Siberian railway had been built, would be unbearable even to imagine were it not for the black humour with which she managed to invest it She and her woman companion travelled by sledge at night, through forests peppered with the gleam of wolves’ eyes. The manic speed at which the sledge was driven was usually due to the intoxicated state of the driver and, on one occasion at least, the company was unceremoniously tipped out into the snow. ‘… we hardly knew whether to laugh or cry,’ wrote Kate, ‘and chose the former alternative and merrily awaited events.’

The journey soon began to resemble a descent into hell. The dark nights of ice and snow gave way to days of suffocating heat. On horseback now, they traversed a region which trembled beneath them, shaken with subterranean fire: ‘Blinding clouds of smoke every now and then swept into our eyes and the hot, stifling air almost choked us. We had to go through the fire: there was no escaping it, unless we chose to turn back. After looking on, aghast, for some time, and trying to prevent our terrified horses from bolting, we moved slowly forward, picking our way as best we could in and out of the flames …’

Her journey took her another 1000 miles and led to hell itself where lepers crawled out from the forests, dragging themselves painfully towards this foreign woman who had come to help them. Dressed as she was in trousers to the knee, bag slung over her shoulder, riding whip in hand and the whole thing topped off by her London deerstalker, no one could possibly have mistaken her origins. To the leper colony, she must have seemed like some god-sent apparition. She unpacked her medical supplies, distributed gifts among the stricken people and naively offered up a prayer for the health of her Imperial Majesty the Empress of Russia, noting – no doubt with approval – that the poor lepers joined in heartily. Like the Light Brigade, hers was not to reason why.

It is hard to believe that in her twenties Kate Marsden had suffered so badly from a lung disease that she had been pensioned off from her job in a hospital. She had proved that she would stop at nothing. Bureaucracy, war, the icy wastes of Siberia – all were mere stumbling blocks to be demolished in her personal campaign to bring help to the lepers whose banishment to Siberia was effectively a way of removing such an unwelcome sight from the public eye.

The Victorian women missionaries formed a travelling brigade that was as unique as it was misguided, but whatever the consequences of their ill-advised activities, we cannot but admire the manner in which these delightful ladies dispensed tea, sugar and the Word of Life.

CHAPTER 3 Flights of Fancy

On a spring day in 1928, a small light aircraft taxied along the runway at Cairo Airport and drew to a halt. Out of the cockpit door swung a slim leg clad in a silk stocking followed by the rest of the pilot dressed in white gloves, necklace, an elegant coat fur-trimmed at neck and wrist, and a natty little cloche hat. 28-year-old Sophie Pierce, who came to be better known later as Lady Heath, news-conscious as well as fashion-conscious, posed for the cameramen before climbing down from the wing of her Avro Avian III aircraft having completed part of her historic flight from South Africa to London – the first woman to fly solo from the Cape to Cairo.

The silk stockings had been put on in rather a hurry, for the last lap of the journey had taken less time than she had expected, largely because it had been relatively trouble-free – unlike the unpropitious start. Setting out from South Africa on 17 February, she had fallen victim to a dangerous attack of sunstroke and, landing in a feverish daze in what she later found was a region of Bulawayo, she immediately blacked out.

Africans are nothing if not flexible and are rarely surprised by the strangeness of European behaviour. The local girls who rescued her cared for her and in a few days she was off again. Flying over Nairobi there were more problems, this time with the engine, and although she was forced to jettison her tennis racquet and a few novels to lighten the load she hung on to six dresses, her Bible and a shotgun.

Before flying over Sudan, she set about making arrangements to find a man to escort her northwards. The number of people flying the African sky was on the increase, as was the number falling out of it. An accident, were the pilot lucky enough to escape death, could be costly. Ransoms were often exacted by locals, and European governments, landed with the task of searching for their own nationals, often found themselves picking up a hefty bill. It was for reasons of safety and economy, therefore, allied to the belief that the sky was really no place for a woman, that women were refused permission to fly over the country. Not at all put out by this restriction, Sophie wrote later: ‘… the Sudanese had forbidden women to fly alone owing to recent outbreaks among the natives who killed a District Commissioner last December … an entirely sensible regulation.’

Shortly before setting out from South Africa on her flight northwards, she had waved goodbye to a young man and his bride who were spending their honeymoon flying up through Africa. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, England was gripped by flying fever and pilots were setting out like swallows for destinations which grew more and more distant with each year. Lieutenant Bentley had gained fame the previous year by being the first person to fly solo from England to Cape Town and no doubt this was a spur to Sophie’s flight.

Catching up with the honeymooners in Uganda, she now sought Bentley’s aid. Chivalry took second place when he was persuaded – or perhaps he even volunteered – to escort the Lady Heath as far as Khartoum. Once they were in the air, however, and all the regulations had been strictly observed, the two planes lost sight of each other and Sophie happily flew on alone. From Khartoum to Cairo the journey was relaxed and carefree. Since maps were a bit dodgy in those days, she navigated by following the course of the Nile.

The gallant Bentley, meanwhile, now back in Khartoum, found his services again required, this time to escort a woman pilot who was flying in the opposite direction. No doubt a trifle exhausted by the excitements of his honeymoon as well as having to escort Sophie up through Sudan, he nevertheless took on the task of escorting the indefatigable Lady Mary Bailey who was on her way south to Juba on her historic flight – the first solo round trip between England and South Africa to be made by a woman.

It is interesting to observe the similarities and differences between these two pioneering fliers. They were both Anglo-Irish and had married titled men with enough money to keep their wives in planes and fuel. Lady Mary Bailey – herself the daughter of an Irish peer – married a South African millionaire, and Lady Heath’s husband contributed to her fleet of four planes. Apart from their love of flying and their fearlessness, however, the similarities end there.

Lady Mary, the elder by ten years, was the mother of five children – a scatty individual, easy-going in the extreme. Described by those who knew her as a disorganized will o’ the wisp, her flight to South Africa was made simply to pay a visit to her husband there – or so she said. Obviously an astute woman, whatever the impression she gave, she may simply have offered this explanation in order to fend off curious journalists, for she was certainly no stranger to ambition. The first woman to gain a certificate for flying blind, she also broke a number of records including an altitude one for light aircraft. As if to promote further her scatter-brained image, she set out for Africa in a Cirrus II Moth not altogether sure of her precise route and without all the necessary maps. Coming in to land at Tabora in order to enquire the way, she miscalculated her speed and the plane did a spectacular somersault. Not at all deterred, she waited while her compliant husband arranged for a pilot to fly up another Moth – at a cost of about £300. The round trip was completed early the next year, 1929, and newspaper photos show her muffled in leather and scarves with a hat jammed unceremoniously on her head, being welcomed back by two daughters at Croydon Aerodrome.

If Lady Mary Bailey presents a picture of a woman living in comfortable harmony with the many aspects of her life, Lady Heath was a different matter altogether. Born and brought up in Limerick, she went to Trinity College, Dublin where she took a science degree before moving to lecture at Aberdeen University. She began flying at twenty-two and, having taken her A Licence in 1925, she got her commercial B Licence the following year which allowed her to carry paying passengers. An energetic exhibitionist, she took up aerobatics and parachuting and on one occasion, when the engine failed, stood on the wing of the aircraft as it came in to crash land.

She was a courageous person who rushed at life full tilt. Her father was something of an eccentric, given to playing practical jokes on the local Irish constabulary. There had been no joke, however, about the murder charge brought against him when his wife was found dead in their home. Sophie, then a small girl, was put in the care of her paternal grandfather.

By the time she made her historic flight up through Africa, she was married for the second time, to a rich industrialist who was able to finance her flying. The year after the flight, however, tragedy struck. Injured in a flying accident in the US, she suffered severe brain damage which, allied to an increasing drink problem, led from one disaster to another. By the time she made her third and final marriage, to an American flier, things were going badly wrong.

She always made a point of dressing stylishly but never succeeded in totally disarming her critics – the press nicknamed her Lady Hell of a Din because of her feminist stand. She was the sort of pioneer with whom society is ill at ease – daring, outspoken and demanding – and the establishment turned with relief to the less threatening Lady Mary Bailey whose heroic image as an intrepid flier was tempered by her motherly dottiness. It was she who was made a Dame of the British Empire while the vociferous and lively Sophie went without official recognition.

In 1939, eleven years after she had delighted the world’s press with her glittering and triumphant flight to Cairo, she fell down the steps of a London bus and died of her injuries.

Flight has preoccupied and delighted the human mind for centuries. The Queen of Sheba’s lover promised to give her anything she asked for including of splendid things and riches … a vessel wherein one could traverse the air and winds which Solomon had made by the wisdom that God had given unto him.’ In 1020, Oliver, a Benedictine monk, took off from a tower in Malmesbury and was lucky to break only a leg, and in 1507, John Damian broke his ‘thee bane’ jumping off the tower of Stirling Castle. Where, you might ask, were the women while their menfolk were flinging themselves into oblivion with such misplaced optimism? Sensibly, they stayed at home by the hearth for, though without the benefit of da Vinci’s aeronautical knowledge, they nevertheless shared with him the commonsense view that inspiration and genius must be wedded to appropriate technological development before the body can break free and follow the spirit into the blue.

Until the Age of Reason, the longing to fly had been fulfilled only in myths and legends. Hermes, Icarus and Wayland the Smith soared to the skies while below, earth-bound by reality, women were left to languish, taking to the air only as discredited and troublesome witches. When eventually women did take to the skies, it was with a burst of spectacular and daring exhibitionism.

In 1783, the first balloon went up and the following year the first woman made her ascent. By 1810, Napoleon’s Chief of Air Service was the noted balloonist Madame Blanchard. Described as combining ‘a rugged character and physique with the charity and delicate exterior demanded of femininity of that period’, she was dedicated to ballooning, often staying up all night and descending only at dawn. Appointed by Louis XVIII, she planned for him one of the spectacular aerial firework displays for which she was famous. The Parisian crowd watched enraptured as she ignited a surprise rocket which sprayed a bright light across the sky, unexpectedly, however, sending the balloon with its solitary passenger on a rapidly descending course across the rooftops. The Parisian crowd roared its delight as the balloon disappeared from view. Madame Blanchard’s battered body was picked up later by passing workmen. While igniting what was to be her final firework, a rush of hydrogen had escaped from the envelope and the soaring flames had set the balloon alight.

Women, if not actually born managers, must quickly learn the skills of management in order to run their homes, and many found they had great aptitude for organizing public aeronautical displays. The public itself was more than happy to enjoy the intriguing sight of a woman elegantly clothed in empire dress and bonnet leaning langorously over a soaring gondola, one hand graciously scattering rose petals upon the awed, upturned faces, the other waving the national flag.

In England an astute mother of seven built up a whole career for herself as a balloonist. The posters, devised by herself, naturally gave her top billing:

Mrs. Graham, the only Female Aeronaut, accompanied by a party of young ladies … in the balloon The Victoria and Albert, will make an ascent at Vauxhall on Thursday July 11, 1850.

Intrepid and resourceful, Mrs Graham understood well the psychology of theatre. To whip up the anticipatory excitement, she had the preparations for the flight take place in public. Barrels of acid and old iron were set to bubble near the balloon to form the gas that was piped into it For a heightened effect she used illuminating gas which she bought from the local gas works. Then the balloon, bedecked with ribbons, streamers, plumes and silks and often filled with delightful young girls chaparoned by the matronly Mrs Graham herself, would waft slowly heavenwards. A keen businesswoman, her capacity for self-advertisement was matched only by her ability to stay alive in this dangerous business. She continued performing for forty years, spanning both the rise and the decline of ballooning in Britain.