Mary Heath

Sophie Eliott-Lynn
nation	United Kingdom
birthday	November 10, 1896
place of birth	Knockaderry, Ireland
job	Zoologist
date of death	May 9, 1939
Place of death	London
Career
discipline	high jump
Best performance	1.48 m (1923)
Medal table
1923 Women's Olympics bronze high jump 1.40 m bronze Javelin throw 43.56 m bronze Pentathlon Women's World Games 1924 silver Long jump WAAA Championship 1923 gold Javelin throw silver Hurdles bronze Shot put

Mary, Lady Heath , also Sophie Eliott-Lynn (born November 10, 1896 as Sophie Catherine Theresa Mary Pierce-Evans in Knockaderry in County Limerick ( United Kingdom ), † May 9, 1939 in London ), was an Irish aviation pioneer and sportswoman. She won medals at women's Olympics , set world records in sport and as a pilot, and flew from Cape Town to London in 1928 . As a functionary, she campaigned for the athletes and their participation in international competitions.

Life

education

Sophie Pierce-Evans grew up with her grandfather and two aunts. When she was a year old, her father beat her mother, Teresa Dooling, who was a housekeeper, to death. He was convicted of murder and spent the rest of his life in an asylum. Sophie attended schools in Cork , Belfast and Dublin . She played hockey and tennis . Her passion for the sport was nurtured by her aunts.

Pierce-Evans was one of the few women who studied at the Royal College of Science (now UCD) at the National University of Ireland in 1914 . She graduated with a science degree with a major in agriculture . She also played on the college's hockey team and wrote articles for the student newspaper The Torch .

Military service and sports

In 1916 Pierce-Evans married Major William Eliott-Lynn. When he cured a malaria , she took a leave of absence from studies and signed up for military service in the First World War . She served as a dispatch rider for the Royal Flying Corps in England and France. Sophie Eliott-Lynn had Sir John Lavery portray her there. In 1919 she graduated. Her husband set up a farm in East Africa and "ordered" her to find paid employment. She worked briefly as a lecturer in animal science in Aberdeen before moving to London.

Eliott-Lynn co-founded the Women's Amateur Athletic Association (WAAA) in 1922 . In April 1923, she took three third places at the last of three Women's Olympics in Monaco. Her disciplines were high jump (1.40 meters), two-handed javelin throw (the mean of her best throws with the left and right hand was 43.56 meters) and pentathlon . On August 6, 1923, she set the high jump world record of Elizabeth Stine (USA) with 4 feet 10 1⁄2 inches (1.485 meters) . Twelve days later, in 1923 , Eliott-Lynn became the first British champion in two-handed javelin throw in London. When hurdling over 120 yards she finished second, the shot put third parties.

At the Women's World Games Eliott-Lynn won silver in the long jump in London (Women's International and British Games) in 1924 and fourth in the javelin throw in Gothenburg (II. Internationella kvinnliga idrottsspelen) . Since 1923 Vice President of the WAAA, in 1925 and 1926 she was a delegate to the International Olympic Committee and the IAAF , where she campaigned for the participation of athletes in international competitions.

Her book Athletics for Girls and Women , published in 1925, is one of the first on the subject to be written by a woman. She visited her husband in East Africa for several months in 1922/23 and 1924.

Aviation

Photo by Mary Heath (top center, around 1928)

Despite financial difficulties, Eliott-Lynn became a member of the London Airplane Club in August 1925 and obtained her private pilot's license on November 4th. Two years later, she was the first woman to receive a British commercial pilot's license and undertook several world record flights with small machines and seaplanes. With an Avro Avian II biplane , she undertook a sightseeing flight in England in July 1927, during which she covered around 2,100 kilometers in 21.5 hours and made 79 landings. Then Elliott-Lynn flew 4800 kilometers to Breslau and back. On October 8, 1927, she set a new altitude record for light aircraft with passengers at 5852 meters, but then had to abort the flight due to fog. On October 11, 1927, Elliott-Lynn married Sir James Heath, 1st Baronet (1852-1942). He was forty-five years older than her, made wealth through a coal mine and foundry, and in 1904 had received the hereditary title of Baronet , of Ashorne Hill in the County of Warwick. Only 18 days later she was able to register the Avian III “G-EBUG”. As the wife of a baronet, she henceforth carried the courtesy title of Lady Heath .

A short time later, the couple left for Cape Town by steamboat . From there, Lady Heath took off on February 12, 1928 with the “G-EBUG” for her south-north crossing of Africa and landed on May 18 at Croydon Airport . Instead of the planned three weeks, she had needed more than three months for the 14,500 kilometer flight. After suffering from heat stroke , she crash-landed in Southern Rhodesia . Nevertheless, she managed the first solo flight in a small open plane on this route. For this achievement she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society . The American aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart flew “G-EBUG” test and crossed North America with this machine in August 1928 on her first long solo flight in both directions.

Mary Heath flew for a few weeks in July 1928 as co-pilot for the airline KLM . Her hope of becoming the second female flight captain in the world to fly on the Batavia route remained unfulfilled. She was also elected a member of the Royal Aeronautical Society , but as a woman was not allowed to attend the meetings. In the USA she was one of the first women to train as an aircraft mechanic . As an agent for Cirrus - flight engines , with lectures, long-haul flights and participating in air races Heath was her fame at the peak. As “Britain's Lady Lindy” she was on par with Charles Lindbergh (“Lucky Lindy”) and Amelia Earhart (“Lady Lindy”). Prior to the National Air Races, Heath collided with a chimney in Cleveland on August 29, 1929 . She suffered serious injuries from falling into a factory roof, from which she never fully recovered, and was in a coma for several weeks .

Heath had their marriage annulled in Reno, Nevada in 1930 for "cruelty". In November 1931 she married her third husband, GA Reginald “Jack” Williams, a Jamaican rider and pilot. In the mid-1930s she temporarily ran her own company, Dublin Air Ferries, at Kildonan Airfield near Dublin. As a flight instructor, she trained pilots who later flew for the Aer Lingus .

death

On May 9, 1939, the presumably unconscious Mary Heath fell from her seat down the stairs in a double-decker tram and hit the driver's control panel with her head. She died in St Leonard's Hospital in Shoreditch, London . An old blood clot was found to be the cause of the accident during the autopsy . According to newspaper reports, her ashes were scattered by her husband on a flight over Surrey .

Honors

The Irish Post issued a postage stamp honoring Lady Heath in 1998.

As “Sophia Heath” she found its way into the visual arts of the 20th century. The feminist artist Judy Chicago dedicated one of the 999 gold inscriptions on the “Heritage Floor” to her in her work “ The Dinner Party ” . For example, Heath is assigned to the table setting of doctor Elizabeth Blackwell with Amelia Earhart, Sophie Blanchard , mother and daughter Curie .

Works and essays (selection)

• As Lady Heath with Stella Wolfe Murray: Woman and Flying . J. Long, London 1929.
• As Sophie Eliott-Lynn: Athletics for Girls and Women . 1925.
• As Sophie Eliott-Lynn: Women's participation in athletics . 1925. Also in: Journal of Olympic History . (2005) Volume 13, 14.
• As Sophie C. Eliott-Lynn: The Zurich International Flying Meeting . In: Flight . September 1, 1927. pp. 608-616.
• As Mary Heath: Is Flying Safe? In: Scientific American . July 1929.

literature

• Lindie Naughton: Lady Icarus. The Life of Irish Aviator Lady Mary Heath . Ashfield, London 2004. ISBN 1-901658-38-4 .
• Alain Pelletier: High-Flying Women. A World History of Female Pilots . Haynes, Sparkford 2012. ISBN 978-0-85733-257-8 .
• HJ Lenskyj: Sophie Eliott-Lynn . In: Jon Dart, Stephen Wagg (Eds.): Sport, Protest and Globalization. Stopping play. Springer, 2016. p. 48ff.
• Lora O'Brien: Lady Heath. In: Aviation History . March 2016. p. 15.

Web links

• Photo by Mary Heath (around 1928)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Sophia Heath . (English, accessed September 15, 2019)