Details You Didn t Know About Mary Heath Hulton Archive/Getty Images
By Emilia David/Dec. 30, 2020 5:00 pm EDT
Women pioneering in anything should be celebrated, and the life of Mary, Lady Heath is not an exception. But, like many other groundbreaking women, people may not have heard of her.
Heath, born Sophie Catherine Theresa Mary Peirce-Evans, is the first woman to hold a commercial flying license in Britain and the first pilot to fly from Cape Town to London. She became Lady Heath when she married her second husband, Sir James Heath, in 1927.
Even before she became an adult, Mary Heath already faced trauma. When she was a year old, her father bludgeoned her mother to death. Charged with murder and declared insane, he was sent to an asylum, and Heath was taken in by relatives, wrote SP s Aviation. She was a big athlete, but her aunts discouraged her from pursuing it. Heath ignored her aunts and represented the United Kingdom in the 1923 Women s Olympiad and 1