Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Gracia Marguerite Lethbridge, British journalist, 1st woman to circumnavigate the planet in a Zeppelin


She was married in 1920 to Sir Robert Hay Drummond-Hay at the age of 25, her husband being nearly fifty years older, even his children from a previous marriage were over 15 years older than her. Rhip.

 Sir Robert was born in Tangier, Morocco and had been the British consul-general for years in Beirut, Lebanon.

After six years of marriage, Sir Robert died. Lady Drummond-Hay then was 31 years old. As a young aristocratic widow she lived in her apartment in London.

Although she was not an aviator herself at first, she certainly contributed to its glamour and the general knowledge about her aerial adventures by writing articles about it in mainstream US newspapers in the late-1920s and early-1930s.

As a star journalist, she wrote articles for The Chicago Herald and Examiner, edited by the Hearst Press, as one of the passengers aboard the first transatlantic flight of the civilian passenger Graf Zeppelin in 1928, which was also the first one to circumnavigate the world in 1929.

This trip around the world took place in August 1929, taking off at Lakehurst, New Jersey and arriving there again 21 days later, after stops in Germany, Tokyo and Los Angeles. Lady Drummond-Hay was the only female passenger.

Lady Drummond-Hay gained fame after she arrived in New York, her career as a journalist being consolidated for the next decade.

During World War II, Lady Drummond-Hay was interned in a Japanese POW camp in Manila, Philippines. When freed in 1945, she was very ill and died of coronary thrombosis in the Lexington Hotel upon her return to New York.

http://www.mujeresviajeras.com/gracia-marguerite-1a-en-dar-la-vuelta-al-mundo-en-un-zeppelin/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Marguerite_Hay_Drummond-Hay

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