This feature first appeared in March 2024 on Londonist: Time Machine, our much-praised history newsletter. To be the first to read new history features like this, sign up for free here.
Say “female British aviator” and Amy Johnson would be the name most people would alight upon. But Hilda “Billy” Hewlett was ticking off aviation firsts while Johnson was still learning her ‘three Rs’. Born in Vauxhall in 1864, Hewlett was approaching her 40s when the Wright brothers first demonstrated heavier-than-air flight in 1903. But this remarkable character was determined to join them in the heavens.
Hewlett could already drive a motor car — one of only a handful of women to get behind the wheel at this early stage. (Having married the barrister-turned-successful-novelist Maurice Henry Hewlett, she wasn’t short of money in her middle age.) She even drove competitively. In 1906 she received an award for riding a motorcycle on a non-stop 125 mile trial around Uxbridge. It seemed almost inevitable that she would graduate on to aircraft. Hewlett attended her first aviation meeting in 1909, then never looked back.
Perhaps her most noted achievement was to become Britain’s first officially qualified female pilot in August 1911, just a few months after licensing was brought in. By that point, Hewlett was already a familiar figure on the airfields around London. In 1910, she’d set up Britain’s first flying school at Brooklands in Surrey, with her business partner Gustav Blondeau. Among her pupils was the great aviation pioneer Thomas Sopwith. Another was her son, Francis, who became the first man to get a flying lesson from his mum.
It’s a remarkable career path when you think about it. A 46-year-old mother of two does not fit our preconceptions of the sort of person who might open a flying school on the fringes of Edwardian London. But, then again, women made huge contributions to the early years of aviation, as can be seen at a glance from this timeline.
The Vauxhall connection
I can’t prove it, but I suspect Hewlett might have been inspired by her early upbringing in south London. Hilda Beatrice “Billy” Herbert (as she was called before marriage) was a vicar’s daughter, born into the south London district of Vauxhall in 1864.
This was not the most salubrious suburb, yet there could scarcely be a more apt place for a future aviator to take her first breath. Until a few years before, Vauxhall had been famous for its pleasure gardens, which served as the epicentre of London’s ballooning scene. It was from this then-small village in 1836 that the “Royal Vauxhall Balloon” had carried Charles Green and crew some 480 miles to Germany — a distance record that held for over 80 years, and well into the age of powered flight.
The area was so popular with balloonists that it regularly drew the attention of cartoonists. I’ve always loved this illustration from 1856, which projects forward to 1950 when people in silly hats await aerial transport to Bombay from an airfield said to be in “Vauxhall New Town”. (More on the illustration here.)
The balloon ascents had stopped a few years before Hilda arrived on the scene, thanks to the closure of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in 1859. But she must have met many locals who remembered the flights. Her father was, after all, vicar of St Peter’s, a church built right on top of the old Pleasure Grounds. Its font is said to be on the site of the resort’s famous Neptune Fountain. Many of the parishioners would have witnessed the local balloon flights only a few years before. Perhaps these stories of aerial adventure from her own back yard sparked dreams of flight in the young Hilda?
Mrs Hewlett goes to war
But back to the adult aviator. Besides setting up a training school at Brooklands, Hewlett and Blondeau also used the airfield to build aircraft commercially. Their start-up grew quickly. Needing more space, they moved out to Battersea area in 1912, where a plaque marks the site of their ‘Omnia Works’. Just two years later, in May 1914, they moved out to Leagrave near Luton. Business was booming, but it was about to explode.
August 1914 brought the onset of the First World War. The British Government leaned heavily on Hewlett’s firm, eventually ordering more than 800 aircraft for the war effort. 700 staff were recruited to meet the demand. It boggles the mind to consider how quickly Hewlett had risen in the aviation world: from her first taster in 1909 to managing a leading aircraft factory in a global war just five years later.
The factory did not last long after the war, and Hewlett eventually emigrated to New Zealand, where she died in 1943 aged 79. She’s commemorated by the plaque in Battersea, a Hewlett Road in Luton, and the Hilda B Hewlett Centre for Innovation at Wittering. Otherwise, she remains a relatively obscure figure from the dawn of powered aviation.
Read more
I’ve only skimmed the surface here. The authoritative account is a 2010 biography, Old Bird — the Irrepressible Mrs Hewlett — written by the aviator’s granddaughter-in-law, and based on Hilda Hewlett’s unpublished autobiography. I discovered latterly that the Women Who Meant Business website has a deliciously detailed mini-biography of Hilda, which has much more on her personal life and early flight training than I’ve touched upon here.
