red mum

FIRSTLY I must apologise for not getting back to this series before now, I’ve been aware of the time that has lapsed since the last one but I just haven’t had the time.

Since my last entry (and before) I’ve been given loads of tips (as well as a great book from Sinead) on who I should include, enough in fact to have this series run for a very long time indeed. And certainly enough to put an end to any notion of there being no great Irish women.

This time the title goes to Mary Field Rosse, a pioneer in photography which was a massive pull for me to choose to write about this time.

Many people may not be aware of the impact women had on the early days of photography. And yes it is a class thing. You probably wouldn’t have found many women photographers in the working class areas of Dublin in the 1850s but I will be writing about more great women who had poverty to overcome as well as the multitude of barriers placed in front of them in the weeks to come and I promise this will be the main criteria for choosing the next one.

It was because of affluence that there were so many women pioneers in the early days of photography but that doesn’t lessen their achievements any.

Mary Rosse, nee Field, was born in Bradford, the eldest child of John Wilmer, in 1813. After marrying William Parsons in 1836 the couple were invited to live in Birr Castle by William’s father.

Held in high regard by the people of Birr, Mary made many improvements to the interior of the castle. During the Great Famine 1845 -1847 Mary financed many relief works and employed 500 men in construction work around the castle.

Birr Castle at that time was also the home to the largest telescope in the world until in 1917 the Mount Wilson telescope was built in Southern California. The telescope and its users uncovered secrets of Jupiter and the nebulae.

Not only was Mary a leading light in the early days of photography which I will be going into but she was also an accomplished blacksmith and was responsible for iron work on the great telescope as well as the magnificent gates to the Birr Castle estate, which are still in use today.

In fact Mary’s experiments with photography probably started the beginning of the end of the great telescope as it was not suitable for celestial photography due to the nature of how the telescope was mounted.

In June 1842 Mary’s husband began to experiment with a photographic process daguerreotypes, she began to work with stereoscopic photography. This type of photography was invented in 1848 and made it possible to buy stereo photographs of places from all over the world. There are still some of Mary’s stereoscopic works in good condition archived by Birr Castle.

At that stage photography was definitely more science than art with lots and lots of chemistry and a darkroom was built in the 1850s in one of the rooms of Birr Castle. At that time photographers made their own sensitised plates from glass slides with silver nitrate.

I find it astounding and wonderful, and how I wish I had been there, that the darkroom was only rediscovered since the mid-nineteenth century in 1983. WOW. Seriously wow, when the room in the castle was uncovered virtually intact, how was it not found? they found equipment, chemicals and prints. Described as a photographic time capsule its discovery was an exciting date in the history of photography.

The darkroom

At the time her husband was in regular contact with William Fox Talbot who invented negative/positive photography and during one correspondence he said: “Lady Rosse has just commenced photography, and I enclose a few specimens of her first attempts, presently she will do better.”

Fox Talbot replied: “Surely there are portions exhibiting the details of the telescopes that are all that can be desired.”

Eventually through his help her photographic documentation of the famous telescope was exhibited at the Photographic Society’s first show in London. She was honoured with the Society’s Silver Medal in 1859, the first person and indeed woman to be bestowed with such an honour. She was also a founder of the Irish Photographic Society (I have hunted high and low to find out when it was founded and came up with nothing on the internet, if anyone can enlighten us please do!).

Mary’s work documented Birr Castle and it’s environs and they proved invaluable in the castle’s restoration in recent years. In fact her photographs of the telescope enabled it to be rebuilt more than 150 years later.

Sadly she lost seven of her eleven children but her intellectual but strict childrearing enabled one of her sons Charles Parson to become an imminent engineer.

Some of Mary’s amazing work

The sources for this can be found here, here and here and do check out Birr Castle here.

That’s it for now, maybe I should do a straw poll on which fantastic Irish woman I should do next? Would you like a list of proposed subjects?

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I MEANT to post this before now about receiving a very cool email last month regarding my Great Irish Women – Nellie Cashman post, and wow.

Greetings from Alaska! I was doing some research on Nellie Cashman and landed on your blog site. I thought I’d just send a quick email.

My name is Peg and my husband and I live just outside of Fairbanks. We have a kennel of 33 sled dogs and 8 sled puppies we’re looking after for the winter. This spring I’ll be retracing Nellie’s 350 mile supply journey from Fairbanks to Nolan Creek (in the Koyukuk region). It will be a historical journey and we’ll be using traditional sleds, equipment and clothing.

I stumbled on a book about Nellie at the library and became fascinated with her story. She was an extremely tough woman. Your blog told about her exploits in the lower 48 and the Klondike but her greatest journeys and achievements were when she lived in the Koyukuk area. This region is so forbidding that Alaska’s indigenous people didn’t live there. It doesn’t support healthy animal or fish populations. It’s very tough country.

For a woman in her 60s and 70s to live and travel through this region is remarkable. She became known as the only white woman to journey in some of the toughest regions of this state.

This year I’ll be doing the 350 mile journey and next year will be re-enacting the 750 mile trip from Nolan to Anchorage. Should be lots of fun! (Now there’s an understatement!)

Well I must run. Dogs are looking for food and the puppies need their walk.

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The next installment of Great Irish Women features Susan Jocelyn Bell, who was born in Belfast in July 1943 and was the first person to discover pulsars.

Susan Jocelyn Bell among the antennae

Her interest in astronomy was massively influenced by her father and his library of books on the subject. He was an architect who designed Armagh Observatory. Despite failing the Northern Irish equivalent of the 11+ she continued her studies in a Quaker Boarding School in England where she discovered a love for physics.

She later attended university in Glasgow and then Cambridge where she made her groundbreaking pulsar discovery.

In 1967 while at Cambridge under Anthony Hewish she assisted in constructing a radio telescope to track quazars. Her role was to operate the telescope and analyse the charts produced by the telescope. During this analysis she noted unusual data or scruffs on the chart recorder data.

Scruff

She ruled out interference from the ground and the signals were initially called LGM or little green men. It was later identified as a rapidly rotating neutron star and named them pulsars, for PULsating radio stARS.

This discovery led to a 1974 Nobel prize in the newly introduced Astronomy prize for her supervisor Anthony Hewish and a controversy over her exclusion in the prize.

According to Ken Howard who writes in Physics for all mind-sets where she points out that science is seen as more collaborative, and shared Nobel prizes are more common.

During an after dinner speech in 1977 she spoke of not being included in the prize:

“It has been suggested that I should have had a part in the Nobel Prize awarded to Tony Hewish for the discovery of pulsars. There are several comments that I would like to make on this:

“First, demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve. Secondly, it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project. We hear of cases where a supervisor blames his student for a failure, but we know that it is largely the fault of the supervisor. It seems only fair to me that he should benefit from the successes, too. Thirdly, I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them.

“Finally, I am not myself upset about it –after all, I am in good company, am I not!”

Despite not getting the recognition she deserves (in my non-scientific opinion) by the Nobel Prize she has totted up more than enough prestigious awards such as the J.R. Oppenheimer Prize, the Michelson Medal from the Franklin Institute, the Tinsley Prize from the American Astronomical Society for “especially innovative research” and the Royal Astronomical Society’s Herschel Medal.

Speaking to Starchild website, Nasa, on the question of whether astronomy is more inviting for women today in comparison to 30 years ago she said:

“Yes, I believe it is and I believe it’s getting better all the time. We are becoming more conscious of the differences between men and women, the different ways they work, and the contribution of women is becoming more and more recognized. It’s still got a bit to go, but it’s coming along very nicely.”

Now retired Susan has held senior posts with the Open University, the University of Bath, the Royal Astronomical Society, Oxford University and Princeton University.

Talking to students

“I was 24 when we discovered pulsars. It made a very dramatic end to my doctoral studies. I get cross when people say ‘What are you going to discover next?’ Very few people make that kind of discovery.”

Sources: Here, here, here, here and here.

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Lady Icarus – Lady Sophie Mary Heath (1896-1939)

Considering United Irelander’s (asinine) comments on the last post I feel the next paragraph or two I am going to write would be blatantly obvious to most of us, but apparently it needs explaining to others. In many cases women’s achievements have been passed over because a male-dominated society has not deemed them as important as male achievements.

We should also ask the question ‘who writes the history books? Who documented events, who were the reporters? Who were the decision makers. What about the fact that women were not allowed to do what many men took for granted. So for those women who did rise above the parapet of a male-dominated society their achievements are all the greater because of the multitude of barriers placed in their path which their strong spirits still shone above. Barriers those great men never had to contemplate.

I am not writing a paper on woman’s struggle to be treated equally because I have done enough arguing over the years with people who do not hold my views to realise that some people are so bound in their ignorance they are not for swaying. Well neither am I in this. To paraphrase and rewrite some of one of United Irelander’s commentators Irishwomen are not rubbish just because a blogger’s straw poll threw up few women.

Consider that even on a basic level some of our great Irishmen have been great because they have had a great Irishwoman behind them whether their lover, wife, sister, mother or daughter.

On another level it is not just about recognition of fabulous feats of some people, in many instances in Irish life and in the not too distant past the fact that mothers were at the very core base of society insuring food was on the table and clothes on people’s backs. Without that strong matriarchal presence many people, men and women, would not have achieved a fraction of what they have.

Right with that out of the way, let me introduce Lady Sophie Mary Heath or Lady Icarus as she was also known.

Lady Sophie Mary Heath arriving Croydon, UK from Capetown, 1928

Born in Knockaderry in County Limerick in 1896, Lady Mary Heath was one of the most famous women in the world in the 1920s. She became the first person, not just the first woman, to fly a small open cockpit plane from Cape Town to London starting in January and finishing in May 1928.

Born Sophie Peirce Evans, her early life had a traumatic beginning after her father murdered her mother.

Her epic trip from Cape Town to London was made with a Bible, a shotgun, a couple of tennis rackets, six teagowns and a fur coat, in a time when men flew with boiled eggs and ham sandwiches. She was the first woman to make a parachute jump, and was the holder of two altitude records for light airplanes.

She cut her aviation wings during the First World War when she spent two years as a dispatch rider in England and France where Sir John Lavery painted her portrait where she was dressed in the uniform of an air force driver.

A graduate of Science from the University of Dublin she moved to London in 1922 but before she did she took up athletics and had competed in events all over Ireland and even set an unverified world record in the High Jump in Galway.

When she moved to London she was a founding member of the Women’s Amateur Athletic Association and was a delegate to the International Olympic Council in 1925. She won the first ever British javelin title and travelled with British teams to Sweden and France several times helping to introduce women’s track and field to the Olympics.

However it is her pioneering interest and passion for aviation that she is better known having qualified for a private or ‘A’ license but a woman’s right to earn a commercial license to earn a commercial or ‘B’ license was revoked by the International Commission for Air Navagation in 1924.

Lady Heath fought this ban and the commission ruled that if she attended flight school and passed she would be granted a commercial license. She did and the ban was revoked.

A regular visitor to her aunt she is said to have landed her plane on every flat field in Ireland and is said to have taken many locals from Ballybunion for short trips in her plane for a small fee.

She was badly injured in a crash just before the Cleveland, Ohio, National Air Races in 1929 and returned to Dublin with her third husband in the 1930s. She died destitute in 1939 in London after falling from a tram car.

On flying she said: “a woman can fly across Africa wearing a Parision frock and keeping her nose powdered all the way”. My kind of woman.

A biography of her life is available written by Lindie Naughton, you can read Lindie’s blog here. Other sources from this post come from here, here and here.

Technorati tags: redmum irishblogs Great Irish Women aviation aviation pioneers olympian pioneers

TO COUNTER and compliment United Irelanders top Irish people which featured few Irish women (for shame) I thought I would do an ongoing series of great Irish women. Hopefully I can feature some women you have never heard of but should have and I am open to suggestions of women you think I should include in the series.

First up is the Angel of Tombstone Nellie Cashman. Nellie was born in Midleton, County Cork in the 1840s before emigrating to the United States in the 1860s. It is believed she worked as a bellhop in a prominent Boston Hotel before being urged by General Ulysses S.Grant to go West.

She set out to San Francisco in 1869 where she became a cook in various mining camps. Money she saved from these jobs enabled her to open the Miner’s Boarding House in Nevada in 1872. She joined some miners heading to the Cassiar gold strike in northern British Columbia and gained her reputation as the Angel of Tombstone by organising and taking part in a rescue of 100 miners by completing a 77-day journey through horrendous weather carrying 1,500 pounds of supplies and medicines.

There are many more amazing things about Nellie, her generosity of spirit for one but for me it was her journey to the Klondike gold rush in 1898 which is absolutely awe-inspiring. Bear in mind 100,000 people made the trek to the Klondike, half of which never made it. During that time she became famous as one of the great figures of the gold rush and was renowned by miners and mine owners.

Even into old age Nellie was still prospecting at the Artic circle and mushing her huskies well into her seventies. “Last week I came over the mountains on a fast dog train and the sled only turned over once. I had a little roll in the snow, but I am travelling light and feeling fine after the long trip. I’m still a long way from the cushion rocker stage. Those prospectors up north need me, and that is the country I expect to live out the rest of my days”.

When asked by a reporter why she never married she said: “Why child, I haven’t had time for marriage. Men are a nuisance anyhow, now aren’t they? They’re just boys grown up.”

Sources here, here and here.

EDIT: December 8 to include Wikipedia page.

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