1826: Britain's First Female Balloon Pilot

Margaret Graham's perilous trip over Islington.

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I was sucked in by the wicker work.

This gravestone, in Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington, is not like the others. It stands in isolation, protruding from a wicker basket. Why?

Closer inspection reveals all. This is the grave of somebody who spent a good deal of time in baskets. A famous balloonist. Or, rather, a balloonist who had once been famous. Margaret Graham was once a household name, but who now remembers this aeronautical pioneer?

IN MEMORIAM
MARGARET GRAHAM
1804-1864
CELEBRATED AERONAUT
-AND-
FIRST BRITISH WOMAN
TO FLY SOLO
IN 1826
BURIED NEARBY
WIFE OF AERONAUT AND CHEMIST
GEORGE GRAHAM 1784-1867

I was intrigued. Who wouldn’t be intrigued by such a headstone? The first British woman to fly solo? Why had I never heard of her?

In fact, I had heard of her. A while back, I wrote a feature about Rosine Simonet, the brave 14-year-old who became the first woman (well, girl) ever to fly in England, as a passenger in a balloon launch from Barbican in 1785. Margaret Graham was a footnote in that story. I’d forgotten all about her until I stumbled across this gravestone.

Margaret Graham, I’ve since learned, was a remarkable woman. Not only was she the first woman to pilot a balloon in Britain, but she did so in her early 20s. She played an equal role with her husband in managing their balloon flights, and she even engaged in what we’d now call PR, spinning her aerial adventures to an eager press.

This is her story…

Alone over Islington

Mark the date: 28 June 1826. This would be the occasion on which a woman first flew alone through the skies of London. It was not the most reassuring of days to make a solo flight. Thunderstorms had troubled the London region, and the wind remained blustery. No balloonist would take off in these conditions today.

Margaret Graham, however, was a plucky 22-year-old with no fear. She’d made several balloon flights by this point, accompanying her husband George in a hydrogen balloon. A lovely sketch of the couple can be viewed here, though I’m unable to ascertain the copyright status.

The pair had narrowly cheated death a few months earlier, when they’d ditched their craft in the English Channel near Plymouth. Undeterred, Margaret was back for more. Adverts were placed in the press, to attract a paying audience to White Conduit Gardens, close to present-day Chapel Market in Islington. This was never intended to be a solo flight. Graham was to be accompanied by Miss Jane Stocks. Aged around 20, Stocks was also a veteran of several balloon flights, including one in 1824 in which the pilot was killed during a crash landing.

From the Morning Herald, 27 June 1826, via the British Newspaper Archive

The present balloon ascent was being sold on its novelty: this would be the first time that an all-female crew had flown from British soil. We might draw comparisons with the recent all-woman spaceflight of Katy Perry et al. However, Margaret Graham would need to use considerable skill to pilot her hydrogen balloon, whereas the millionaire space-hoppers were simply passengers.

As it happened, Miss Stocks turned up 20 minutes late to the gathering. She’d supposedly lost track of the time while taking tea with friends. By now, the balloon had been sitting around full of hydrogen for longer than anticipated. The brisk wind had caused it to oscillate, and lose its expensive gas. The diminished balloon could now only carry the weight of one occupant, and the tardy Miss Stocks was dismissed.

And so it was that Margaret Graham ascended into the heavens alone, with a strong south-westerly wind to carry her over Islington.

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We should note at this point that Graham was not the first lady to fly solo. That honour goes to Jeanne Labrosse, who achieved the feat in France as early as 1799 (coupled with the first parachute landing by a woman). Nor was she the first woman to fly in Britain. As we’ve seen, that honour went to the 14-year-old Rosine Simonet, who took to the skies over the Barbican in the company of Jean-Pierre Blanchard in 1785.

Graham was, however, the first woman to fly over British soil without company. This also made her Britain’s first female pilot, more than 80 years before Hilda Hewlett became the first woman to gain a pilot’s licence (for aeroplanes).

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As flights go, it was a mere hop. You might walk it in an hour. Yet it was filled with incident right from the take-off. Graham’s under-inflated balloon struggled to clear the adjacent trees. She had to drop much of her ballast to avoid snagging. And this was only the beginning of her problems, as she later told the press:

“The car became entangled with the coping of a house, but, by pushing my foot against it, it was disengaged, and I then passed down a street, the car being as low as the second floor windows, and the monstrous machine, swaying from one side of the way to the other. I now anticipated immediate death.”

The embattled pilot threw out all her remaining ballast and eventually lifted above the rooftops. The wind carried her north-eastwards, over Liverpool Road and Upper Street, after which she tracked north-eastwards alongside what is now Essex Road (then Lower Street). All the while, her husband followed behind in a horse and cart. Here’s a period map (Greenwood, 1828) which I’ve annotated to show the route:

Click or tap for larger version. The route east of Islington church is speculative

I can’t be sure, but I suspect the street Graham describes travelling along was Richard Street, now Ritchie Street, immediately east of the gardens. It lines up with the reported trajectory.

After clearing the early streets, Graham passed alongside Islington Church (St Mary’s). Here, a crowd of people had ascended the spire to get a prime view. “[They] hailed me as I passed,” Graham tells us, “many attempting to shake me by the hand”. Rather wonderfully, it’s possible to ascend the spire today, courtesy of tours put on by Islington Guided Walks. This is the view you get:

View from the steeple of St Mary’s Islington. I was 197 years too late to shake Margaret Graham’s hand. Image: Matt Brown

Graham describes the “delightful” view, which included St Paul’s and every other church spire in the City. Sadly, that’s been lost to us from this vantage, as a wall of skyscrapers overwhelms the old Wren skyline.

After passing Islington church, Graham crossed the New River, where a “great number of persons… huzzaed”. She travelled about a mile up Essex Road towards Newington Green, where she made a premature landing:

“When I got near Mr. Barr's nursery [shown on the map above], a gust of wind passed over the top of the balloon, which caused it instantly to descend, and in a very short time I touched the earth, falling amongst some beans in a garden. The balloon immediately ascended again, and passed through a tree, and descended in an adjoining field, when, to my delight, the first person that caught hold of the car was my husband.”

And so the very first solo flight by a woman in Britain concluded. This was not to be the end of the peril, however. Mr Graham subsequently got into dispute with a group of bricklayers, who’d offered to convey the balloon to the nearby Green Man pub in exchange for beer. It seems that the labourers damaged both the balloon and the pub when they didn’t get as much beer as they’d expected. The Green Man’s landlord then took Mr Graham to court over liabilities. It would not be the last time that the Grahams would find themselves in legal difficulties.

The ups and downs of an aeronaut

Margaret Graham would go on to make hundreds of further ascents. Flying became a career, at a time when few women had such a thing. Among many successes, she made the first female balloon ascent at night, rising by moonlight from Vauxhall Gardens in 1850. Remarkably, the Grahams found time to have at least 10 children, most of whom lived into adulthood. The family lived at various addresses across London, including Poland Street in Soho, Newington in Walworth, King Street in St James’s and Eastcheap in the City.

Ballooning was a hazardous enterprise, however, and Graham came close to death on many occasions. In 1836, for example, she was seriously injured after falling from the basket near Doddinghurst in Essex. The aeronaut estimated her drop at 1,000 feet. That’s over 300 metres, or a similar height to the Shard, and seems unlikely. She was left insensible for two weeks, but somehow made a full recovery. The following year she was once again thrown from the basket, along with her husband, after colliding with Reigate suspension bridge. The pair fell 50 feet (15 metres) but landed on a sloping bank and escaped serious injury. Then, in 1850, she came close to immolation after a naked flame ignited the balloon’s gas supply shortly after a landing near Edmonton. Graham escaped with only minor burns (pencil sketch here).

1851 found Mrs Graham making a number of ascents with her husband around the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. On one occasion, her balloon careered into the Crystal Palace, snapping flag poles. The incident could have been far more serious. The balloon’s grappling hooks came dangerously close to snagging the building’s frame, which may well have caused a collapse. Thousands of people were inside the glass structure at the time. In a parallel universe somewhere, the Great Crystal Palace Ballooning Catastrophe of 1851 is a tragic landmark in national history.

Graham might have survived her various scrapes, but her balloon escapades would prove fatal for at least one other person. On 28 June 1838, Graham and a Captain Currie ascended from Green Park, as part of the celebrations marking Queen Victoria’s Coronation. While hovering over Mayfair, a sudden gust caused the balloon to descend rapidly. It crashed down on a house in Marylebone Lane near Wigmore Street. Graham and Currie were unhurt, but falling debris struck a man called John Fley (age 26) on the head. He later died from his injuries.

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Graham’s final flights came in 1854. She then seems to have fallen into some legal difficulties and, eventually, poverty. Having survived so many high-profile scrapes, she slowly deflated into obscurity. Her pauper’s burial in 1864 was in an unmarked grave in Stoke Newington, a short walk from the landing point of her first solo flight. And there she lay for 150 years, one of the country’s most celebrated aeronauts, almost entirely forgotten.

No longer. In 2022, the new headstone was unveiled close to the site of Graham’s previously unmarked grave. It came after a successful campaign by the Abney Park Trust and author Sharon Wright, who’d researched the story for her book The Lost History of the Lady Aeronauts. “It’s taken 158 years to get Mrs Graham a gravestone, said Wright at the time, “but it’s never too late to celebrate women who make history”. May Margaret Graham ascend once more into the the starry firmament of great Londoners.

To find Margaret Graham’s grave, visit Abney Park cemetery in Stoke Newington, and consult the information boards at either entrance. The cemetery contains many other notable graves worth seeking out, with full information given on-site.

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Thanks for reading. As ever, please do leave a comment below, or email me any time on matt@londonist.com