Sports Photographer and Aviator, known as ‘the flying feminist’.
Lilian Bland was born in 1828 in Kent, moving to Carmoney, north of Belfast in 1900 at the age of twenty eight. She was returning with her widowed father to his home to live with her Aunt Sarah.
Bland was unconventional in Belfast of that time –– wearing trousers, smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol –– and engaging in the traditional male pursuits of hunting, shooting and fishing.
In 1910, her free time was occupied in constructing a homemade bi-plane glider, called the Mayfly, taking her first short glides from Carmoney Hill.
She subsequently attached a two-stroke engine and managed to rise 30 feet into the air and to fly for short distances, thereby becoming the first woman in Ireland and the British Isles to fly an aircraft.
Worrying about his daughter’s escapades, her father offered to buy her a car –– a Model T Ford. She accepted the offer, taught herself to drive and within a year was running the first Ford dealership selling cars in Belfast.
In 1911, she married her cousin, Charles Loftus Bland. He had become a lumberjack in Canada, and she emigrated to Vancouver Island with him on a farm. There also, boats were the principal mode of transportation and she became a marine engineer. Their one child, a daughter, died at 16 years.
Bland returned to England in 1935 and died in Cornwall in 1971, aged 92.
For further reading see:
http://womensmuseumofireland.ie/articles/lilian-bland
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