‘I have felt the
need for a change of scene and interest lately.’
Lady Bailey on the eve of her London-Cape Town flight, March
1928.
Mary Westenra, born in 1890,
was the daughter of Derry Westenra, the fifth Baron Rossmore
of Rossmore Castle, Co. Monaghan, a famous sportsman and rake.
After a youth of much hunting, shooting and fishing, and little
formal education, at the age of twenty she married Sir Abe Bailey,
a South African tycoon of British extraction. Shuttling between
England and South Africa with a much older man whose interests
were very different from hers, and cut off from her beloved life
of horses and hounds, Lady Bailey began to take flying lessons
in secret. With astonishing rapidity, she became one of the world’s
most celebrated aviators, before setting out on the journey that
would make her name: London to Cape Town and back.
Flying in her De Havilland Moth,
she was detained for several days in Cairo, where the authorities
didn’t want to let her continue without a man in the plane.
Eventually she prevailed, and flew down the eastern flank of
the African continent to Cape Town – and then turned back,
en route for London up the western flank of the continent. Lady
Bailey’s riveting journal of this return flight has survived
and is reproduced in its entirety here. Lacking a radio, she
often lands in unknown places to ask directions, and recounts
in unruffled prose her encounters with friendly Africans and
unhelpful French colonials.
The remarkable businessman-imperialist
Abe Bailey, who bankrolled his wife’s adventures and always
supported her despite a lack of warmth in the marriage. Lady
Bailey was one of the most remarkable Irishwomen of the 20th
century. |
