‘Dear Ella’ by Lily Ford
This feature is from Lily Ford, a historian and long-time producer at the Derek Jarman Lab. Lily did her PhD in Birkbeck’s History of Art department and published an illustrated history of aviation, Taking to the Air, with British Library Publishing in 2018. She’s currently researching a series of women from behind the scenes of British aviation in the first half of the twentieth century. Find out more about Lily’s research and work at lilyfordresearch.com. This post was first published as a ‘scrapbook’ feature in May 2020, for Birkbeck Arts Weeks.
It started with a quick Google. I was working on my illustrated history of flight, a book looking at aviation from the perspective of the spectator. As I’d found researching my thesis, a history of airmindedness and the view from above, there were too few women populating the annals. Idly, I typed ‘female glider’ into the search engine of my computer, expecting to see images of aviators. Instead, there appeared a gallery of small fluffy marsupials. Women’s place in the history of gliding was so underdocumented that these little sugar gliders trumped female human gliders in my search results.
This short film tells the story of one such human, Ella Pilcher, who came close to powered flight just a few years before the Wright brothers. She bowed out of the early aviation scene when her brother died flying a gilder they had made together, and was thenceforward forgotten. She lived on for decades in obscurity, and died 61 years ago this week, at around seventy. Not long before, she had been running down hills teaching her great nephew to fly a kite.
Ella’s contribution to aviation was not completely ignored: she features in Philip Jarrett’s biography of her brother Percy. But Jarrett’s research, published in 1983, is offline. I was so grateful to have found her, to have my hunch that women must have been involved in flying during this crucial period confirmed, that the least I could do was ensure her story is remembered in our digital world. So I wrote her a Wikipedia entry.
Wikipedia’s volunteer contributors and editors are majority male and this is reflected in its coverage to date. For years there has been a ‘Women in Red’ campaign to populate the entries of women mentioned in passing in the encyclopedia. Ella Pilcher wasn’t even a woman in red, because she had never been named on Wikipedia. But now she’s there, linked up and ready to deploy.
I’m always interested in sharing the experience of research through film, whether archival or desk-based, and in using the audiovisual as a way of engaging more creatively with my subject. In this case, as there weren’t any images of Ella making wings, I decided to evoke the process by doing some sewing myself. I collected footage for this film over a year and only found the time to finish it in March 2020. As I edited I let in a little of my own domestic lockdown environment – more noise than usual from my children, and less from the flight path above us. I found the janglingly catchy American tune ‘Just One Girl’ cranked out on an enthusiastic collector’s pianola in a YouTube search for 1890s music. Ella loved to sing. She may not have heard this particular song, but I love its raw jolliness, its oom-pa-pa rhythm, and its lyrics which inadvertently reflect Ella and Percy’s close collaborative relationship.
I meet her each morning quite early
Rain or sun, rain or sun.
To work we go walking together,
Just as gay as can be.
We’re truly two birds of a feather
Just one girl, and me.
Further links:
More on Ella Pilcher.
How to contribute to Wikipedia.
Film historian Luke McErnan wrote an interesting blog on the Pilchers and early cinema technology, in which he animates seven frames of Percy in flight which were published in Nature in 1897.
National Museums Scotland recently renovated the Pilcher Hawk glider, a fascinating process documented on film here, and hung it in the National Museum of Scotland’s Science and Technology hall.
For more on the gliders, see this short illustrated publication by Philip Jarrett, Percy Pilcher and the Challenge of Flight, National Museums Scotland, 1999.