Before Amelia (10 page)

Writers question whether patriotism inspired Marthe or pure enjoyment of adventure and sensual pleasure. Marthe never told, but the French government was sufficiently impressed with her work to award her the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor in 1933, which, according to one writer, created “the loveliest effect on her Chanel suit.”

Richer was married before World War II to Thomas Crampton, a Briton and the director of the Rockefeller Foundation, who left her a widow within a few years. When France was conquered by Germany, Marthe returned to espionage work with the Résistance. She loved the life and found it an adequate replacement for the excitement of flying, reportedly her first love, yet she never resumed flying after World War I.

When World War II ended, Marthe was elected to the Paris municipal council and worked to pass a law to close the brothels regulated by the police, earning her the sobriquet Madame la Vertu in the press. Very quickly, despite her concern for the women workers, she realized she had made a mistake; unregulated prostitution, without any health controls, flourished in broad daylight. Until she died in 1982, Marthe regretted her misplaced morality. Closemouthed to the end, she never revealed the secrets of her other life in intelligence. A 1937 movie, starring Edwige Feuillère, hinted at the talents of this unusual aviatrix–turned–spy, but Richer herself died with her secrets. She remains a fascinating mystery.

Carmen Damedoz won license No. 1449, dated September 5, 1913, flying a Sommer biplane. Her tests were not uneventful. On her first try flying figure eights on an old machine, the twenty–five–horsepower motor lost speed and the aeroplane slipped to the ground. Carmen fractured two ribs. When she was ready again, she flew a Sommer with a fifty–horsepower Gnome motor and passed her tests “brilliantly,” according to
Flight,
the aviation journal. Sometime later she won the prized gold medal for altitude for women pilots, offered by Senator Reymond, for reaching 1,020 meters.
L'Aérophile
in 1913 described her as one of the most visible women fliers; her energy and tenacity were “exceptional.” Carmen was a member of the Stella society (she also made balloon trips); the organization's social and political clout rose even higher when Mme. Raymond Poincaré, wife of the French president, became a member.

Before the thunder of guns began, two more women won their brevets in 1914 from Aero Club of France: Hélène Caragiani, No. 1591 (February 6), and Gaétane Picard, No. 1653 (July 10). About Hélène, reportedly Romanian, little is known. Gaétane, a resident of Buc, trained at the Blériot school there, where her rapid progress was reported regularly in the aviation journals. When she soloed for the first time, she volplaned down with her motor off and had a perfect landing. Her right turns, often tricky for aviators because early rotary motors revolved right to left and their weight, coupled with thrust, could overturn the lightweight aeroplanes, were well executed. Gaétane had trained with a group of male fliers who brought out the best performance from their machines. They tested and delivered aeroplanes to the military as the buildup for war accelerated. Gaétane was a small woman, but she handled the Blériot machine expertly. On July 2, the Ministry of Public Works had issued her brevet No. 76 for aeroplanes and hydro–aeroplanes, a separate category from civil pilots, signed at Versailles by the local prefect. She was unquestionably a talented flier.

Within a month, the war began; dreams of flying achievements ended. Gaétane did as the women of France did; she volunteered to fill a man's place and drove ambulances and trucks as needed. The Army of the North and North–East commended her for courage and devotion during the perilous period from March 21 to April 2, 1918, when, under continual bombardment, she assisted in the evacuation of the wounded from the front to a place of greater safety. Unfortunately, Gaétane did not resume flying after the war.

A Florencia Madera is listed in Bernard Marck's book
Les Aviatrices
as winning license No. 1421 on September 5, 1913, but the staff at the Musée de l'Air et l'Espace is unfamiliar with her.

Four long years took their toll. The cost of retraining on new machines, or beginning new lives with new responsibilities, all made climbing into an aeroplane again a difficult prospect. Raymonde de Laroche was the only aviatrix aside from Marie Marvingt, who worked tirelessly for the air–rescue service, to renew her aviation career. The first and in some ways the most exceptional of the group, Raymonde proved that flying was natural for women because it did not require physical strength as much as mental coordination. A new generation of French women would testify to that in the 1920s and 1930s.

IF EVER SOMEONE lived by Polonius's advice “To thine own self be true,” it was Melli Beese, Germany's first woman aeroplane pilot. Some inner voice propelled her on a course from which there was no turning back. Destiny, a particularly German obsession, shadowed an aviation career that began with great promise. Melli herself would have said that some people are born under a lucky star, others are not. Talent, ability, worth have nothing to do with what happens. The star is the determinant.

Amélie Hedwig Beese was born on September 13, 1886, the second daughter of an architect, Friedrich Karl Richard Beese, who lived at 84 Hauptstrasse (today Ostereicher Strasse) in a suburb of Dresden. Besides her sister, Hertha, and an older brother, Kurt, the children of Richard's first marriage, Melli had a younger brother, Edgar. Their mother, Alma Wilhelmine Hedwig Beese, was a traditional woman of her day— a good housewife, an excellent manager of family affairs. The family was solidly middle class—the father a gifted stone artist as well as an architect, two professions that influenced Melli's future career. The family address was in an area where financially secure government workers and officers lived; the family was comfortable, if not well to do. (A German family's address is still an accurate gauge of the family's financial and social status.)

Melli, as she was known all her life, was a precocious child. Reportedly she was using her father's materials to make creditable drawings at three; at six, she was playing the violin and later the piano, among other instruments. She had a talent for languages and spoke several, including Swedish. No doubt, her parents worried about her future when Melli began to have her own ideas about life.

Properly brought up young girls of Melli's time did not work—that was the unhappy fortune of poor girls. They married, had a family, and prided themselves on managing a household with efficiency and being a good mother. Attendance at a girls' school for the daughters of upper class families reinforced these ideas. Finding a husband who would be a good provider was a consuming preoccupation for most young girls, but not for Melli, whose interests were totally different from those of her peers. Marriage wasn't a consideration for her at that time. As a result, the bright, talented young girl had few close friends of her own age. She was too atypical for her time.

In the early 1900s, women were beginning to question a society that limited their activities, to demand rights they were denied. Why shouldn't women receive higher education? Why not pursue a career and have the right to vote? Above all, why should marriage limit these rights?

These ideas undoubtedly had some influence on Melli, who decided to become a sculptor. From her early years, she had been drawn to art, and her ability with her father's tools confirmed a talent with her hands. The decision was easier made than finding a school for training. In the years before World War I, not one woman student had been accepted to study sculpture at the academies of Dresden and Berlin. Luckily, Sweden was more progressive—women were accepted at the Royal Academy of Free Art—and in the fall of 1906, Melli went off to Stockholm to study.

Stockholm opened the door for Melli in many ways. She enjoyed working with other young women and men, and the freer environment in Sweden. She made good friends, among them Allen Egnell, a painter. A bronze bust of him is among remaining pieces of her work. Classes in model studio, monument sculpting, and figure study opened new ways of viewing subjects, which influenced her work. She did a group sculpture of soccer players in clay and plaster; a full–size nude in plaster; and a bust of John Forsell, later head of the Royal Opera, also in plaster. Her group sculpture,
The Soccer Players,
won a prize in 1908 from the academy and praise in the press, following the customary display of work by upper–class students for the newer students.

The open seas beckoned, and Melli discovered the joy of sailing—of skimming across water under a sail more like a large wing than part of a boat, of ice sailing, when the wind drove sailboats across the ice at enormous speed. A stray thought came to her. If she had wings, she could . . . But the thought remained unfinished, a restless, teasing idea that would reoccur.

In 1908, news of Wilbur Wright's flights in France caught Melli's attention; the new ideas and technology springing up every where intrigued her. She read the stories in the press avidly, and, inevitably, art had less appeal—the world of technology beckoned.

By the summer of 1909, Melli had finished her course, said farewell to Sweden and her friends, and returned to her parents in Germany, who were now living in a new house designed by her father in Blasewitz, close to Dresden. The house was a large villa with a garden and numerous trees behind. For Melli, despite the studio her father had built for her, the house was gloomy. Richard Beese understood his daughter without asking a lot of questions. He spent time with Melli discussing matters of interest to her; occasionally this would include flying, which was just then beginning to make an impression on the German public consciousness.

On July 25, 1909, the French flier Louis Blériot flew across the English Channel from Calais to Dover, a flight that fired imaginations everywhere and changed the way people viewed the world. English newspapers hailed his achievement, observing at the same time that England was no longer an island and the time had come for England to awaken to the military and commercial realities of aviation. The aeroplane was no longer a toy.

Melli was so moved by the news of Blériot's success that she determined she would learn to fly. It was new, part of the changing world of invention, and she longed to be part of it. Her parents were less enthusiastic; this new sport was not as genteel as art. The Beeses played for time. The news that French women were taking part in aviation, as the new sport was called, did not make the idea acceptable in Germany. French women through history were known for doing the unusual.

Richard Beese persuaded Melli to attend the polytechnic school in Dresden, arguing that it was the right step in preparation for becoming an aviator, with the hope that she would soon tire of the idea. Melli spent less than a year on technical studies before she convinced her father of the seriousness of her intentions. He knew he had lost and, being a supportive parent, he gave Melli a sizable check to cover studies and living expenses at a flying school near Berlin.

Johannisthal, outside of Berlin, was then the center for German aviation activity, such as it was. In 1910, the airfield was primitive—a wide, flat space with a distant stand of pine trees to the north and east, which hid the village behind. A high wall that looked like a dark string from the air enclosed the field, its wide expanse pockmarked here and there by rabbit holes, which were a constant threat to the chassis of any vehicle, auto or aeroplane, lest it end up as kindling. At the south end stood a few wooden hangars where aeroplanes were being built; alongside was a grandstand left over from automobile racing.

Hans Grade, inventor and early aviation pioneer, had flown his own construction in October of 1909—a graceful one–winged machine resting on bicycle wheels that looked too fragile to endure a strong wind— signaling the arrival of aviation in Germany. Grade, Karl Jatho, and Hermann Dorner, a talented trio, were the earliest German aeroplane builders of inexpensive sport machines, flimsy creations of bamboo and wire with little to recommend them in the way of security, but they carried men aloft. By 1910 the aeroplane was a marvelous new plaything for those who could afford one. Those who lacked the necessary wherewithal did the same as enthusiasts elsewhere in Europe and America— they built their own.

In addition to building aeroplanes, Grade was known for training ninety–nine civilian pilots before the First World War, using principles he had learned from experience. After an introductory flight, students followed a sequential training routine. First, they learned to clean and repair a motor; then, they proceeded to “dry training,” learning which levers to use while seated in the aeroplane, followed next by practice with the motor running. Rolling over the ground taught students to increase and regulate gas while steering; making short starts, or hops, gave them practice in getting up a little, then down again. Finally, students used all the exercises to take off and fly straight within the enclosure of the flying field. Flying a circuit was the ultimate step, but it depended upon a machine with the proper equipment. The Wright machine would turn, and, in France, once Henry Farman flew a closed circuit, aeroplanes quickly developed maneuverable wings for turning. Grade's step–by–step training approach was highly successful, and safe.

November 1910 was gray and cold when Melli arrived at Johannisthal, but there was activity at the field in spite of the weather. The grandstand and wine restaurant were boarded up, but on the side where a row of hangars stood, men were at work at the Albatros site, the Rumpler Works, and the building where the German flying ship
Deutschland
was under construction. Hermann Dorner was busy building a new monoplane with the help of young Bruno Hanuschke, and the Wright Brothers' enterpr ise was active. In each hangar, construction of aeroplanes and training of young would–be pilots went on side by side. Official aviation schools were yet to come. If you were male and enthusiastic, the chances were good you would be taken on for training, but you did your turn working in the shop.