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By SafetyThird
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1885081
My mother in law has written a biography of Britain's first female pilot, Hilda Hewlett. Not only was she the first licensed female pilot in the UK, and only the 9th in the world, she was the first woman to own her own flying school - Hewlett & Blondeau - the first to teach her son to fly and the first to own and operate her own aircraft manufacturing company, which produced hundreds of aircraft during World War 1.

I thought it might be of interest to a few folks on here. The book blurb is below and I've linked to Amazon in case you'd like to read her story. She was an amazing woman that everyone called 'The Old Bird'.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Old-Bird-Irrep ... 755&sr=8-1

"For a mother to teach her son to drive is perhaps not so unusual, but for her to teach him to fly? Given that the year was 1911, that was most likely a first. But Hilda B. Hewlett had already achieved a first in the world of aviation. Three months earlier she had become the first English woman to gain a pilot's licence. How was it that the middle-aged wife of a well-known author came to be counted among the early aviation pioneers? A daughter of the vicar of an impoverished parish in South London, Hilda Beatrice Herbert was born in 1864 and married Maurice Hewlett, a barrister in Antiquarian Law, in 1888. He aspired to be a writer and Billy, as Hilda was affectionately known, encouraged him. When, ten years later, he published his best seller, a romantic historical novel, The Forest Lovers, the Hewletts began to enjoy unimaginable prosperity and Maurice was on his way to becoming a full-time writer and a member of the literary London scene. Billy, meanwhile, was acquiring a reputation for unconventionality. She already drove and maintained her own car, but it was whilst watching a new-fangled contraption of an aircraft rise and fly above a muddy field that Billy was fired with an all-consuming desire. To own and fly just such a machine she was prepared to endure cold and hunger, boredom and poverty. It was a venture that was to take her into aircraft manufacture throughout WWI and to settle her, eventually, as Old Bird her grandchildren only ever knew her as Old Bird in New Zealand."
Flyin'Dutch', JAFO, Dave W and 5 others liked this
#1886910
Ms Hewlett is duly commemorated, along with the second British aviatrix (Cheridah Stocks), on the 1910-1920 decade frame of the 'Women in Aviation' timeline at JAM :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheridah_ ... oir_Stocks


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T6Harvard, SafetyThird liked this