Lilian Bland

In 1909, most women in Britain and Ireland were still more than eight years away from being allowed to vote. Lilian Bland was building an aeroplane. Not buying one, or sitting in one while someone else flew it. She was building one and when the fuel tank failed to arrive, she improvised with a whiskey bottle and her aunt’s ear trumpet.

I think you’re going to like Lilian.

Lilian Emily Bland was born in Kent on 28 September 1878, the youngest of three children. Her father, John Humphrey Bland, came from an established Irish family in County Antrim, and after the death of her mother she eventually moved with him to Carnmoney, near Belfast.

Lilian was never particularly interested in behaving as a respectable Edwardian woman was expected to behave. She wore practical clothes and worked as a photographer and journalist at a time when neither profession was exactly overflowing with women. Lilian specialised in sporting events and became an accomplished press photographer. She was also fascinated by birds and the mechanics of flight.

Lilian was also a keen horsewoman, although her particular equestrian talents apparently extended beyond simply staying on the horse. She wrote for Badminton Magazine, and in 1906 contributed a wonderfully titled piece called “The Art of Falling Off” – and it wasn’t a metaphor.

Lilian had fallen from horses often enough to develop definite opinions on how the thing ought to be done. Rather than treating an unscheduled departure from the saddle as an embarrassing failure, she approached it almost as another sporting skill: if you were going to fall off a horse, you might as well learn to do it properly. There is something wonderfully Lilian about that. This was a woman who could take the prospect of being unexpectedly launched towards the ground and turn it into an instructional article.

Then there was jujitsu. At a time when the martial art was still decidedly unusual in Britain and Ireland, Lilian learned that too – and reportedly taught it to boys in the local village. So, before we even get to the aeroplane, we have an Edwardian woman who smoked, shot, photographed sporting events, wrote articles about the correct technique for falling off horses and taught village boys jujitsu.

Frankly, it almost seems inevitable that she decided to build an aeroplane

Then, in 1909, Louis Blériot flew across the English Channel.

It must have been one of those moments when the world suddenly feels bigger. Powered flight was still very new. The Wright brothers has made their famous flight at Kitty Hawk only six years earlier. Aeroplanes were fragile, experimental machines and nobody really knew what they were eventually going to become but Lilian was fascinated by them.

She attended an aviation meeting in Blackpool and studied the machines closely, making notes while she watched. Apparently, some of the men thought she was someones secretary. She wasn’t. She was working out how to build one. A postcard showing Blériot’s aircraft and it’s dimensions helped her experiments, and she began constructing models of her own. When those worked, she decided there was really only one sensible thing to do: Build a full sized aeroplane. In a stable. At home. So, using timber, bamboo, fabric, wire and whatever else was available, Lilian constructed a biplane glider with a wingspan of more than twenty feet. She named it the Mayfly… because it may fly or it may not.

Initially there was no engine. Lilian took the Mayfly to Carmoney Hill and experimented with it as a glider. It worked well enough for her ambitions to increase considerably. Now she wanted an engine. before spending money on one, however, she needed to know if the aircraft could carry the additional weight and her solution to this problem was wonderfully straightforward. She got severel blokes she knew to hang onto it. Accounts describe four members of the Royal Irish Constabulary and her father’s garden boy being used as human ballast. If the mayfly could lift five men, Lilian reasoned, it could lift an engine. And, fair enough. you can’t really argue with that.

Scientific research completed, Lilian then proceeded to order a 20-horsepower engine from A.V Roe and Company in England and, impatient with delays, travelled across to collect it herself. She brought it home by train, balanced on two spars.

Then another problem arose. She had an engine but she didn’t have a fuel tank.This apparently struck Lilian as an inconvenience rather than an actual reason to stop. Her solution was magnificently improvised. With no proper fuel tank available, Lilian used an empty Jameson’s whisky bottle, feeding petrol from it to the engine. And because she also needed suitable tubing to complete the makeshift arrangement, she borrowed her aunt’s ear trumpet.

So there she was in an Irish field in 1910, attempting to get her homemade aeroplane into the sky with a 20-horsepower engine being fed from a Jameson’s bottle through part of an elderly relative’s hearing apparatus. And it worked.

Sort of.

Lilian described the engine as sounding like an enormous cat fight, while local people apparently wondered whether a mill had exploded before deciding the racket must be a thunderstorm. Meanwhile, her mechanic became so fascinated by the proceedings that he managed to pour petrol over the aeroplane rather than into the improvised fuel system. Remarkably, nobody seems to have gone up in flames. Eventually a proper fuel tank arrived.

Which was probably for the best.

The Mayfly was moved to a larger area of parkland at Randalstown in County Antrim and on 31 August 1910, Lilian climbed aboard. There was no enclosed cockpit, no sophisticated instrument panel or reassuring array of modern controls. The Mayfly was a lightweight wooden framework covered in fabric, with Lilian sitting exposed inside it. And she had designed and built the whole thing herself. The engine started, The Mayfly moved across the field. Then the wheels left the ground and Lilian Bland was flying.

She made several powered flights, reportedly reaching around thirty feet in height and eventually covering roughly a quarter of a mile. She later recalled running back afterwards to inspect the tracks in the grass. almost unable to believe that the wheels had left the ground. They had, and Lilian Bland had become the first woman to fly a powered aircraft in Ireland and is widely credited as the first woman in the British Isles – and possibly the world – to design, build and fly her own aeroplane.

Women had flown before Lilian. Women were beginning to learn to pilot aircraft, but Lilian hadn’t just learned how to pilot someone else’s machine. She had studied flight, experimented with models, designed an aircraft, sourced the materials. constructed it, tested it as a glider, fitted an engine, solved the inevitable engineering problems and then climbed into it herself. In 1910. She even considered turning the whole thing into a business, She advertised gliders for £80 and powered biplanes for £250.

Sadly, Lilian’s father was considerably less enthusiastic about having an aeronautical engineer for a daughter than Lilian was about being one. he worried that she would eventually kill herself and reportedly offered her a Ford Model T if she would give up flying. Lilian accepted, which sounds like the end of the adventure until you realise what she did next. She taught herself to drive, collected the car in Dublin and drove it back to Belfast. Then she became a motor dealer.

By 1911 she was selling Ford cars in Belfast and has been described as Ford’s first agent in Northern Ireland. Because apparently just inventing and flying an aeroplane wasn’t enough for one lifetime. That same year Lilian married her cousin, Charles Loftus Bland, who had been living in Canada. In 1912 she joined him on Vancouver Island, where the pair attempted another sort of pioneering life, establishing a farm in fairly unforgiving surroundings. Their daughter Patricia was born in 1913 but sadly died from tetanus aged just sixteen. Lilian’s marriage eventually broke down, and in 1935 she returned to Britain.

She settled in Cornwall, where she turned her attention to gardening, painting and the considerably safer pursuit of gambling. She lived until the age of ninety-two, dying on 11 May 1971.

For decades, Lilian Bland received little recognition for what she had achieved. Maybe because the history of aviation became dominated by the enormous technological developments that followed. Within a few years, the fragile machines of Lilian’s generation had evolved into military aircraft. Within decades there were passenger airlines, jet engines and humans heading towards space. The little Mayfly was easily swallowed up in all that noise.

Or maybe there was another reason.

Lilian was a woman operating in a world where engineering, motoring and aviation were overwhelmingly regarded as male territory. She didn’t fit comfortably into the expected story of an Edwardian woman, and history has a rather unfortunate habit of misplacing women who refuse to fit nicely into the boxes provided for them.

But recognition has finally begun to catch up. There is now a park named after Lilian Bland near Carnmoney, complete with a statue commemorating the Mayfly, and the Ulster History Circle records her achievement with a plaque at Tobercorran House. Aviation historians have also worked to restore her place in the story of early flight.

And what a place it is.

Lilian Bland didn’t wait for someone to tell her that women could build aeroplanes. She didn’t even wait for aeroplanes to become particularly good aeroplanes. She looked at one of the newest technologies on Earth, worked out roughly how it functioned and decided to give it a go.

When she needed to know if it could carry an engine, she got the local coppers to hang on to it as ballast. When her fuel tank didn’t turn up, she found a whiskey bottle that would do the job. When she needed tubing, she borrowed an ear trumpet. And when it was finally ready, she climbed aboard the machine she had built with her own hands and she flew it.

The Mayfly may have been promitive.

Lilian Bland was anything but.