ADVENTUROUS CAREER

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 234, 1 July 1939, Page 6 (Supplement)

ADVENTUROUS CAREER

Woman Flying Pilot

The adventurous career of Airs. G. A. R. Williams, an air pilot who became well known as Mrs. Elliott-Lynn and Lady Heath, ended recently with her death in hospital at Shoreditch at tbe age of 43. She had received serious injuries in falling from a London tramcar.-

Of Irish birth, she originally intended to become a doctor. When the Great War broke out she enrolled for service, driving mechanical vehicles. At the end of the war, she married Major Elliott-Lynn, this -marriage being subsequently dissolved. A good athlete, she claimed the women’s record for the high jump. She later became secretary of the Women’s Amateur Athletic Association and the Ladies’ Athenaeum.

In 1925 she became one of tbe first members of the London Aeroplane Club, and in November of that year gained her certificate as a pilot. Two years later she made an attempt on the light aeroplane height record for women, and by an extraordinary coincidence reached the exact height, 17,283 feet, with which Lady Bailey had previously set up the record. Five, days later, in October, 1927, she became the third wife of Sir Janies Heath. They sailed to South Africa for their honeymoon. Lady Heath had taken an aeroplane with her and in this machine she made a lengthy tour of South Africa flying clubs before returning to England by air in the spring of 1928.

She thus gained the distinction of being the first woman to pilot an aeroplane from Cape Town to London, and the first pilot to fly solo from the Cape to England. In the following August she became a commercial air pilot and in that capacity flew in K.L.M. air liners as “second pilot” on trips from Amsterdam to Paris and Croydon. Early in 1929 she went to the United States as a pilot and lecturer. In August-of that year she crashed badly, her machine falling on to the roof of a house at Cleveland. Ohio.

Her injuries were of a serious kind and for three weeks she lay unconscious. but, though her life was despaired of, she eventually recovered and came back to England. Her marriage to Sir James Heath was dissolved and she became the wife of Mr. Williams.

MILTON’S RAREST WORK