The Spectacular Story of Harriet Quimby

On May 11 1875 a girl was born into poverty in rural Michigan. She went on to make her mark on journalism, the cinema and finally in the air. The spectacular, and very American, story of pioneer flyer Harriet Quimby

I’m writing this on Harriet Quimby’s 150th birthday. She was probably born at the family farm in Arcadia, Michigan; we don’t know for certain as the local records were destroyed in a fire not long afterwards. We don’t even know how many siblings she had; there were at least three, and possibly as many as nine, who were stillborn or died in infancy. She never spoke of them. We do know there was one older sister – Kittie, born in 1870 – who did survive to adulthood. But biographers agree about two things.The Quimbys were poor. And William Quimby, her father, failed at everything except marriage.

Born in upstate New York, William Quimby was from a humble background but married middle-class Ursula in 1859 when they were both 25. During the Civil War he served in the 188th Infantry Regiment, but his service was undistinguished – he had a disability that prevented front-line service so served as a cook, but was invalided out with dysentery. After the war, he was one of the ex-soldiers who obtained title to land on the frontier on the understanding that he would clear and farm it within five years. In the Quimbys’ case this was 160 acres at Arcadia on Lake Erie.

The Quimbys left little record of their lives in Michigan. In later years Harriet would hide her Michigan origins and give her birth date as nine years later, and the place as California. Only in the 1990s did careful research by a local historian, Bonnie Hughes, locate the family farm at Arcadia and establish that they were there when Harriet was born. But we do know, from the diaries and memories of others, what their lives would have been like. According to Quimby’s biographer Don Dahler (Fearless: Harriet Quimby A Life without Limit, 2022), they would have been constantly hungry. Quimby attended a one-room schoolroom. Her mother Ursula was a strong influence. Dahler describes her as “a diminutive force of nature, from an educated and enterprising family …who simply refused to accept the cruel randomness of life.” She supplemented the family income by selling a patent medicine concocted by her father, Quimby’s Liver Invigerator (sic). God knows what was in it. But Ursula would want her daughter to achieve everything she had not.

Harriet was born in an America that was only just taking shape. In 1875 the United States wasn’t quite a century old and the Civil War, and slavery, had finished just 10 years earlier. The battles with Native Americans were not yet quite won. Rural Michigan was, in a sense, on the frontier. Everything was difficult, but as Quimby was to prove, nothing was impossible. The story of Harriet Quimby was to be a very American one indeed.

*

Sometime in the 1880s (some sources say 1884, others after 1887), the family gave up on the farm and headed west in search of a better life. They settled in Arroyo Grande, between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

William Quimby worked at odd jobs with limited success and Ursula eventually sent him off up the Pacific seaboard to sell Liver Invigerator. Meanwhile some point soon after their arrival in California older sister Kittie, still a teenager, eloped. Neither Harriet nor her parents ever spoke of her again. Dahler says an 1898 pension application completed by William Quimby gives her married name (Rasmussen) and states that she lived in Oakland. But no-one knows what became of her. Meanwhile the family continued to struggle; the 1890s were a depressed time and many Americans were out of work. Sometime around 1900 they wound up in San Francisco. Leslie Kerr, in her biography Harriet Quimby: Flying Fair Lady (2016), says they were living in what was basically a hovel. Dahler says it was a one-room apartment in Montgomery Street, near Chinatown and the red-light district. But Harriet did finish high school. After that she worked as a clerk.

She had grown up to be a young woman of quite startling beauty, tall and slim with dark hair and, according to one source, striking green eyes (others say grey or blue). And she was starting to meet people.  At night, she started moonlighting in the theatre, wanting to be an actress. She got mixed up in the Bohemian Club, still a famous San Francisco institution; it had been founded in 1872 and early members had included Jack London, Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce. We don’t know who she knew there, but it seems likely she was at least acquainted with London and Bierce. We do know she knew the German-born photographer Arnold Genthe, who would become famous for his shots of San Francisco in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake. Both Dahler and Kerr say that Genthe shot a nude photo of her that hung behind the bar at the club until the latter was destroyed in the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906.

Kerr goes farther, reproducing an early-colour autochrome of a beautiful young nude that she says is the portrait. It may be, but maybe not. The Library of Congress, which has it now, does attribute it to Genthe but doesn’t identify it as her. Genthe started experimenting with the autochrome process in 1905, by which time Harriet had already left San Francisco. The Library of Congress dates it to after 1911. In that year Genthe himself moved to in New York but Quimby was by then quite well known, and it seems unlikely she would have posed nude then. But Quimby did pose for him, for publicity shots for a 1900 production of Romeo and Juliet she mounted with her friend Linda Arvidson. The latter later wrote in her own book, When the Movies were Young, that he did them for free because of her beauty. Whoever the woman in the mysterious autochrome is, she is lovely. And it does look like her.

The play was a bold move and got some kind reviews, but did not lead anywhere. Dahler says that Quimby herself decided that she wasn’t a very good actress and should try journalism instead. According to Kerr, Ursula had wanted her to do that anyway. Meanwhile the Invigerator had paid for some nice clothes, so Ursula had chopped some years off Harriet’s age and invented a past for her of private tutors in Europe for her. For her husband, she concocted a past in the US consular service.

I wonder if Harriet really needed that sort of help. To get into journalism, she did what she was always to do in her short life; she kicked down the front door. She walked into the office of Will Irwin, editor of the San Francisco Call (he almost certainly knew her from the Bohemian Club). He gave her a try and in October 1901 her first piece appeared, a description of the artists’ colony in Monterey. It was rather good. It seems she really did have a flair for ‘slice of life’ stories; moreover she went out and got her copy in person. This description of a trip on a fishing boat had meant a 2am start; it was published only a week or two after her first meeting with Irwin:

Have you ever heard orders given from hurried men in Italian-French-American? If not you have missed a treat for those sons of the seas all have musical voices, strange to say. …As it neared the noon hour everybody found a comfortable seat and waited for “breakfast”; did not wait very patiently either for the salty air gives one a royal appetite. Great round loaves of bread were brought out and …Upon them, about an inch thick, were placed good-sized rounds of beefsteak.

Harriet Quimby realised she was a good journalist. She never looked back, and in January 1903 she decided to try her luck in New York.

*

Quimby’s biographers describe, in some detail, what her arrival in New York would have been like, but both are using their imagination – in reality, they can’t know. Kerr has her arriving at Penn Station in the snow, and making her way to a hotel, where she is looked at with a certain suspicion. Dahler has her arriving in Manhattan by ferry and disembarking at the 23rd St ferry terminal. Kerr’s version sounds more likely, but from something Quimby later wrote it seems Dahler is right. It’s all part of the challenge they have writing about Quimby; she left plenty of good journalism, but no personal correspondence. Neither did she live to write an autobiography. One suspects that had she done so, it would have been rather good – but would have left out a lot; as we’ve seen, she and her mother were not frank about their past.

What we do know is that she once again kicked the front door down, but with charm. She called on John Foster, editor of Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly. Founded by Frank Leslie in 1855, it was no longer run by the family but had retained the name, and was an important weekly news magazine with a circulation of probably 60-70,000. Foster was not, at first, very friendly but agreed to give her a try; her first piece, about Chinatown, impressed him and from then on she worked for the paper.

In 1906 she decided she wanted to be a theatre critic as well, so went to the theatre, wrote a review and got the job. She would be quite influential in this role. She could be quite a rough critic; she was also a witty one and some of her barbs must have hurt. Kerr quotes one review as follows: “The production of The Foolish Virgin fell as flat as an overdone omelette souffle. The same may be said of the acting of Mrs. Campbell, who, in my opinion, has been highly overrated.” Ouch.

Blink and you'll miss her: Quimby in
Lines of White on a Sullen Sea (1909)

But there seems also to have been some campaigning journalism. Quimby was not the first American woman investigative reporter; Ida Tarbell had recently published damaging revelations about Standard Oil, and 20 years earlier Nellie Bly had famously gone undercover to expose conditions at the insane asylum on Roosevelt Island. But Quimby did write of social matters – including an investigation into prostitution, an article that caused quite a bit of trouble at the time. What she did not do was campaign directly for women’s equality. She did say that she was in favour of women’s suffrage (although she contradicted herself on this later). But in the main this was something she avoided. Whether this was because she was not committed, or because it was a bad career move to get involved, is not clear.

By now quite successful, Quimby was able to bring her parents from San Francisco. She was also able to give friends a helping hand. In April 1906 the San Francisco earthquake devastated the city and Quimby’s friend Linda Arvidson and her fiancé, also an actor, found themselves homeless. They decided also to try their luck in New York. Not all went well at first; Arvidson would later remember an occasion when Quimby came to see how they were doing. She was very well-dressed and on her way to a social occasion by the sea, and the contrast upset Arvidson’s fiancé, by then her husband. He in the meantime had been forced to get bit parts working for the Biograph Company, a movie maker – at that time actors did not regard this embryonic industry as respectable. But it caught his imagination. The Biograph Company gave him a chance to move behind the camera. His name was D.W. Griffith.

Between 1908 and 1911 he directed an enormous number of short films for Biograph, and seven of them were scripted for him by Harriet Quimby. They were silent, with almost no dialogue, and her scripts are perhaps better described as film treatments. In Harriet Quimby – Flying Fair Lady, Leslie Kerr reproduces the handbills for all seven; these would have been distributed, presumably, to cinema managers and include an order number for each production. They give a detailed description of the plot. Given that Quimby was very beautiful, you wonder at once whether she was ever tempted to move in front of the camera. Her biographers suggest she did appear in a 1911 D.W. Griffith film that she had scripted for him, Fisher Folks. But she doesn’t appear in the cast lists, even as one of the 11 known extras.

Oddly, neither Dahler nor Kerr mention another Griffith film for Biograph in which she is known to appear very briefly, though she didn’t write it. It is Lines of White on a Sullen Sea (1909), which like Fisher Folks is a romance set in an imaginary fishing community. Blink and you will miss her, but she is there. She was in good company, as at least two other extras in the film would go on to bigger parts: Mary Pickford and Mack Sennett. The film can be streamed on the website of the Library of Congress. It has been said that Quimby was romantically involved with Griffith, and he and Arvidson did separate in 1912 (though they did not divorce until 1937). But the only real evidence, apart from rumours at the time, is a scarab ring that Griffith wore that Quimby gave him.

The ring had been bought in Egypt. In 1907 Quimby went there and to Palestine via London, Ireland and various places in Europe that she toured by car. She had already been to Cuba in 1906. Other destinations included St Thomas, Panama and Trinidad. She wrote pieces for Leslie’s – but did not just write. Genthe may or may not have taken a nude portrait of Quimby but he did teach her photography. It is hard to find her pictures now, but some were published in a series of compilations by Leslie’s journalist John Schleicher called Around the World with a Camera; the first came out in 1910 and includes quite a number of photos by Quimby – again, Leslie Kerr has managed to find them and includes some in her book. These show Quimby was an at least competent photographer, and maybe a very good one.

Some of Quimby's photographs from the Caribbean
in 1906 or 1907,reproduced in Around the World
with a Camera in 1910

Journalist, critic, screenwriter, photographer; even, perhaps, actress – there seems no end to what this dazzling woman could do. But in the end, she would fly too close to the sun.

*

Motoring was in its infancy in the 1900s but Harriet Quimby had Mr Toad tendencies early on. Kerr suggests that she was the first woman in the States to get a driving licence and to buy her own car. I doubt if either is true; the first is sometimes attributed to Anne Rainsford French in 1900. In any case, many states did not require a licence to drive until long after Quimby’s death, and in the early years many issued them solely for identification; they did not require a test. Dahler suggests she had had a car of her own, a yellow convertible, as early as her San Francisco days. That seems surprising, given that the family was struggling and in 1903 cars were still very rare. Kerr says Quimby acquired her first car, and her licence, in New York in October 1908.

We do know that in 1906 she went for a ride out on Long Island with the racing driver Herbert Lytle, who was practicing for the Vanderbilt Cup driving a Pope-Toledo (he didn’t qualify that year). They reached speeds of 70MPH and Quimby lost her hat. But she clearly enjoyed herself, as her report in Leslie’s confirms:

You feel the swift currents of air produced by the mad flight of the machine... A curve and a sharp angle …and the car careens virtually on one wheel, and the whole machine seems lifted up in the air and comes down to earth again with a jump. …You think, if indeed you think at all, that if it goes much faster you will topple right over, but soon you begin to slow down, seventy, sixty, fifty. Why you seem to actually crawl along at fifty an hour, and although every nerve in your body is quivering and you have just enough strength to hang on to the strap, you manage to shout an answer to Lytle, who asks with exquisite sarcasm, at the top of his voice, "Was that fast enough?" and you enjoy the satisfaction of seeing him nearly fall over with surprise as you fire back "Twasn't very fast; can't you make one hundred and twenty?"

October 1908: With Herbert Lytle, the Pope-Toledo,
and still (for the moment) with hat

But then Quimby became interested in aviation.

The first significant airshow in America took place at Dominguez Field near Los Angeles in January 1910, and Dahler thinks she was there, maybe with a feature article in mind. The second such meeting was the Harvard-Boston meet in September, and at least one source thinks this gave Quimby the flying bug, but we don’t know if she went. However, the third major American airshow of the year was on a racetrack at Belmont Park, Long Island, in the last week of October. And this time we do know Quimby was there.

The contestants in the competitions at Belmont included some of the best pilots of the day, including America’s Glen Curtiss, France’s Roland Garros and Britain’s Claude Grahame-White. They also included a colourful American called John Moisant. His family, French-Canadian in origin, had settled in Illinois, where he was born in 1868. In the 1890s Moisant and his brothers moved to El Salvador to open a plantation. Moisant tried to overthrow the government in El Salvador twice, with some loss of life. He had eventually been told to back off by the US government, which was finding him a nuisance. Back in the States he read about the new science of aviation and wondered if planes might come in handy for coup attempts, so went to France to learn to fly. After a slightly farcical attempt to build and fly his own plane, he sensibly got Louis Blériot’s aviation school to teach him. He became so enamoured of flying that he lost interest in coups; this was a more interesting hobby. On his return to the States he started to build monoplanes of his own based on Blériot’s designs. At Belmont he won an important trophy against strong competition from Grahame-White.

Quimby was among the spectators. Exactly what took her there is not clear. Some accounts, including Kerr’s, say that she went there with her friend Matilde Moisant, John’s younger sister. Quimby and Matilde Moisant did become friends later but Dahler’s account suggests that Quimby may not have known her at that stage; she went alone and, fascinated by what she saw, decided she must learn to fly and that Moisant was going to teach her. If Dahler is right, she then found out where the Moisant family were dining that night and did what she did best – kick down the front door, but with charm; she marched up to their table and told John Moisant that he must teach her to fly.

Matilde Moisant in 1911 or 1912

Not all early aviators approved of women flying. The Wright Brothers would not teach women and they were not alone. But John Moisant and his elder brother Alfred were planning to open a flying school and, perhaps surprisingly, Moisant agreed there and then that she would teach her. At this point Matilde Moisant seems to have decided he would teach her to fly as well. Moisant insisted that they wait until the spring when the weather in the northern US was suitable. In the meantime John Moisant would be travelling the warmer States for the winter, giving lucrative flying displays.

He did not return; on New Year’s Eve he was flying for a crowd near New Orleans when he was caught by a gust of wind and thrown from his aircraft. He survived the impact and was taken to hospital, but was pronounced dead on arrival.

*

Harriet Quimby was not put off. More surprising, neither was Moisant’s sister Matilde. After some thought, Alfred Moisant proceeded with the flying school, and that spring the two women began to fly, Quimby driving out to Long Island in the very early hours to begin lessons at 4.30am. They were taught by André Houpert, a Frenchman who had himself qualified in France just the year before (at the time France was the world’s leader in aviation, and the best pilots often were French). Dahler and Kerr both say she snuck off in the early morning so that no-one would find out that Leslie’s most glamorous reporter was learning to fly. But I suspect she (and Leslie’s, which had paid for the lessons) always meant it to leak and of course it did, with Quimby being spotted by a reporter from the New York Times.

In due course Houpert decided she and Moisant should be tested for their pilot’s licences. The Aero Club of America was not keen on testing women but were eventually persuaded, and on August 1st she passed. Unfortunately another candidate then damaged the plane, delaying Matilde’s test for 14 days; but she too then passed with flying colours. Quimby was the first American woman to obtain her licence, and only the seventh in the world; the first had been Raymonde de Laroche in France the previous year.

This should be put in context. The US didn’t actually require pilot’s licences until 1928; the Aero Club of America issued Quimby and Moisant’s licences on behalf of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. In the meantime, at least a few women flew anyway. Blanche Stuart Scott, then the best-known, and perhaps the first, American woman flyer, never bothered to get a licence. This had not stopped her thrilling spectators by diving steeply from 4,000ft and pulling out 200ft from the ground. (Despite this, she lived until 1970.) Even so, Quimby was the first American woman to gain an internationally recognised pilot’s qualification.

Quimby poses with one of the Moisant monoplanes
in 1911, probably at an aviation meet on Staten Island
in September but possibly in Mexico later that year 

The next step was to make money out of it. The girl from the hardscrabble farm never did feel secure, and she wished to provide for her parents. She went exhibition flying. Blanche Stuart Scott already did this, working first for Glenn Curtiss and then for Glenn Martin. Quimby teamed up with the Moisants. Soon afterwards the family were invited to hold flying exhibitions in Mexico, to introduce Mexicans to aviation and to celebrate the inauguration of President Francisco Madero. In November 1911 Moisant’s flying circus arrived in Mexico City. It included André Houpert, Roland Garros, Matilde Moisant and Quimby. Houpert became the first man to fly over Mexico City; Quimby, the first woman. Meanwhile Matilde Moisant decided to love-bomb the new President by dropping flowers for him on the Chapultepec Palace. The two women also delighted a crowd by flying over the city side-by-side.

And then Quimby bailed out of the whole enterprise. She did not say why. In fact she had her eyes on a bigger prize: First woman across the English Channel, and was afraid someone else would beat her. She slipped away from Mexico, where things were about to go wrong – Madero faced an armed insurrection led by Emiliano Zapata and the rest of the aviators, caught up in the chaos that followed, were lucky to get away in one piece.

How Matilde Moisant felt about this is not clear; it is said her enthusiasm for flying faded somewhat after her friend’s defection. Besides, she had lost her brother – and had had various near misses of her own. “The earth is bound to get us after a while,” she said later. “So I shall give up flying before I follow my brother.” She decided to bow out with a final exhibition in Wichita Falls, Texas on April 13 1912. The following day the crowds rushed the field, forcing her to crash-land. The aircraft exploded and caught fire but Houpert and another man dragged her from the flames without serious injury.

Moisant was just five feet tall, slim, energetic, and if pictures are to be believed, madly attractive with a direct gaze and a cheeky smile. She may also have been an even better flyer than Quimby (Houpert considered her a natural pilot). She did not return to flying and died in 1964.

Also left behind was André Houpert. He, like Griffith, is said to have been Quimby’s lover. Apparently the Houpert family did later believe this, but the only real evidence is a locket Quimby gave her with her picture. It was dated August 1911, which is the month Quimby passed her FAI licence examination; it could be a love token but could also simply be in thanks for Houpert’s training. If there was a romance, Houpert never spoke of it. He died in New York in 1963.

*

In any case, Quimby had moved on. On Sunday, April 14 1912 – the day on which Matilde was dragged from her burning plane – she was in England. To be precise, she was on the ground near Dover with one A.L. Stevens.

The latter was a pioneer balloonist and had also developed the manual parachute. His ballooning escapades had included landing on the spire of Notre Dame Cathedral in Montreal and landing in the Atlantic. He was born in Cleveland but no-one seems quite sure when – in 1912 he was probably 41. His name at birth was probably not Stevens (his parents were Czech). He had become Quimby’s business manager. He is also said to have been her lover, though again there is no proof – and he was in fact married, though his wife divorced him in 1921. Whatever he was to Quimby, he had helped her in her negotiations with Louis Blériot, who had agreed to lend her a plane on the understanding that she would order one of her own. He also helped her secure a sponsorship deal with the Daily Mirror.

Quimby in her Blériot about the time of her
Channel flight

And the weather on that Sunday was ideal. But Quimby refused to go. She always refused to fly on a Sunday. This may have been for her parents, but perhaps she herself was superstitious. She carried charms for luck (though other flyers, including Matilde, also did this). She also had an odd fear that her body might be used for medical research after her death, and had left instructions for it to be protected from grave-robbers.

For whatever reason, the day passed and with it the weather; Monday was awful. Tuesday April 16, however, was just good enough. At 5.30am, she went.

Henry Holden, in Her Mentor was an Albatross (1993), quotes her as saying: “I started climbing steadily in a long circle, and soon reached an altitude of 1,500ft. As I looked down, Dover Castle was in a veil of mist. I could barely see the tugboat filled with reporters sent out by the Mirror… The fog quickly surrounded me like a cold, wet, gray blanket.” The mist made it hard to see: “I had to push my goggles up to my forehead. I could not see through them. I was traveling at a mile a minute and the mist felt like tiny needles on my skin.” She could see very little - but she had with her a compass. She had never had one before but an English flyer, Gustav Hamel, had given it to her and insisted that she use it. It would have been easy to become disoriented and be lost at sea; it had happened to others. Hamel himself would be lost flying the same route two years later.

Somewhere around mid-Channel, her nerves torn by the fog, she suffered a near engine failure, but was able to restart the three-cylinder Gnome radial engine and in due course saw the vague outline of the French coast.  “It was all tilled land below me, and rather than tear up the farmers’ fields, I decided to drop down on the hard and sandy beach. I did so at once, making an easy landing.” She had landed not at Calais as intended but 30 miles (about 50km) away at Hardelot, oddly enough where Blériot had his own base. She received a warm welcome from the fishing community, who quickly manhandled her plane up the beach to protect it from the rising tide. She sent a telegram to Calais, where the Mirror reporters and photographers were waiting; they arrived quickly, with a bottle of champagne.

The champagne soon went flat. The Daily Mirror had promised her $5,000 for her story after the Channel flight but went back on its word when another woman made the crossing two days earlier, albeit only as a passenger (flown in fact by Hamel). Moreover the Sunday when Quimby should have flown was, it turned out, the day the Titanic hit the iceberg; the two days’ delay meant the news had broken and she was not on the front pages. The Mirror’s own report the day after her crossing was relegated to two columns on page eight.

Quimby returned to the States and took delivery of the plane she had ordered from Blériot – a Type XI-2 “Artillerie”, a two-seater designed for possible military use. Stevens managed to get her a few deals for exhibition flights, paying $1,000 or more – a huge sum in 1912. They also clinched a sponsorship deal for a popular soft drink, Vin Fiz, a grape soda that happened to match Quimby’s famous purple flying suit. One journalist, says Dahl, described it as “a cross between river water and horse slop”. Still, business was good. The press, charmed by her pale skin and delicate beauty, dubbed her “the Dresden China aviatrix”.

But she may not have enjoyed it. Exhibition flying was a ruthless business and despite the high fees, the cost of mechanics and transport for the aircraft ate into profits. Henry Holden quotes Houpert as saying that Quimby had become less enthusiastic about flying. She still needed the money; she had to take care of her parents. But she seems to have told friends that she intended to give it up when she could, and pursue a dream of writing a novel. She may also have realised, as Matilde Moisant had, that the earth was bound to get her after a while. In fact she may have been in a thoughtful mood when she arrived for the Boston Air Meet at Squantum, Massachusetts.

On July 1 she made a number of flights at the meet and at 6pm, after competitive flying had finished for the day, she took the meet organiser, William Willard, for a flight across the harbour and around the Boston Light. As she descended towards the landing strip on her way back, the Blériot’s nose pitched downward and Willard was thrown out. Quimby appeared to be fighting to bring the nose up but was herself thrown out after Willard. They fell into the mud flats at the edge of the harbour. Both died at once. There is a poignant photo of Quimby’s body in its stylish flying suit, slung across the shoulders of the man who is carrying her to the shore.

*

Harriet Quimby lived a very public life. But she left no correspondence, and never talked of private matters. We don’t know who Quimby’s lovers were (at least, not for certain). We're not even sure how many siblings she had. That was not an accident. In 1907 she had interviewed Rose Stahl, an actress of some years’ standing who had just broken through in a big way in a play called The Chorus Lady. Stahl gave Quimby a piece of advice – to keep her private life just that: “The less the public knows of your private life the better it likes you.” It was advice she clearly did not forget. All we really know is that she was intelligent, confident and charming. She was also probably rather decent; she seems to have had no known enemies and some good friends.

Quimby (left) with Matilde Moisant

And she was very beautiful. Her pictures confirm this. Matilde Moisant would later recall her as “tall and willowy…the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. She had the most beautiful blue eyes, oh what eyes she had.” Perhaps that is what makes her story so resonant today; her charm and her beauty, combined with her awful sudden death.

But there was something else too. Quimby was born on the American frontier, in a country that was less than 100 years old, to a father who was a veteran of the Civil War. She was also born into poverty on a hardscrabble farm. She could have lived and died that way, but decided she wouldn’t. All her life, she lived her own life and no-one else’s. If she wanted something, she kicked the front door down. To be sure, she did it with charm. But she did it. Nothing was impossible. Harriet Quimby’s story is about as American as it is possible to be.

Mike Robbins's book On the Rim of the Sea is available as a paperback or ebook. More details here. Follow Mike on Bluesky or X or browse his books here.

 

 

Flash fiction: Parallel Worlds

Heat pumps and lentils. And a nice glass of Marsala

“It’s as if we inhabited completely parallel worlds,” said Jane.

“I didn’t really hear what happened,” said her brother John, who was reading the paper at the kitchen table.

“He wanted to bring some garden waste through the passage.”

“So?” John looked up. “You said the neighbours have access to the side-passage through your garden. I believe that’s quite common in these terraces.”

“Well, yes but these guys are busy working in our garden.”

John nodded; he was aware of that. They had been hammering and drilling all day and the back garden was a mass of pipes, unions and screws. In fact he had heard most of the encounter. The neighbour, Trevor, had opened the wooden door from his own garden and appeared dragging a large plastic bag of garden waste. He had looked put out to see his way blocked. “What’s going on here?” he asked. ”I’m having a heat pump installed,” said Jane. “Couldn’t you come through tomorrow instead?”

“A heat pump? Silly green nonsense,” said Trevor.

“You mean you don’t care about climate change?”

“It’s all a myth. You’re just wasting money.”

“You’re selfish and ignorant, Trevor.”

John had overheard this; he had groaned inwardly and poured more coffee. He had earlier spilled a quantity of ground arabica after trying to open the packet, which was impossible to open; it was a special brand from a Ugandan cooperative that Jane bought online at great expense. He now looked through the back window; Trevor and Jane were standing on the deck so he could only see their bottom halves, Trevor in long shorts and trainers, Jane in skinny jeans and large Doc Martens.

“And where’s my son’s ball?” Trevor was asking.

“It’s quite safe. He shouldn’t let it fly into my garden like that. He can have it when he comes and asks me politely,” said Jane.

John sank a little further down in his seat. He put some more sugar in his coffee, which was rather bitter.

Later, in the evening, Jane went out to her community self-help group, where they discussed promoting tolerance. “I’ll be back about nine and we can heat up those lentils for supper,” she called out.

“How lovely,” said John.

He sat on the deck, enjoying the warm evening air and sipping a glass of Marsala while reading the Book of Revelation, which always afforded him a certain amusement. Some time after Jane had left, the door to the next-door garden scraped open and Trevor appeared, dragging two large bin liners of bindweed. He did not notice John at first but struggled through the narrow gap between the deck and Jane’s back wall, then suddenly stopped. “Hallo, Father. I’m sorry to disturb you; I thought there was no-one here,” he said. He sounded a little abashed.

“My sister has gone out,” said John. “Don’t mind me. I’m staying with her while I’m on leave.” He stood up. “May I take one of those? They look rather awkward.”

Together they took the bags through the passageway and loaded them into the boot of an elderly Mercedes saloon with tinted windows, metallic black paintwork and stylised wheels.

“I’ll take them down the tip in the morning,” said Trevor. “Bless you for helping, Father.”

John chuckled. “John will do,” he said. “Come and have a glass of wine.” He sat Trevor at the small wrought-iron table on the decking, and poured him a glass of Marsala. “It’s a little sweet but very drinkable. Supplies from Father Godfrey at St John’s down the road. He buys his communion wine in bulk.” Trevor looked a little startled, so he went on: “Don’t worry, it’s not consecrated. If it was we’d go straight to hell, of course.”

“We’d meet some interesting people there, though,” said Trevor. He picked up the book John had been reading. “Any good?”

“Oh yes,” said John. “That’s our company instruction manual. It’s a free download if you’re interested.”

Trevor flipped the book open at the passage John had had open. “And I looked, and behold a pale horse,” he read, “and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” He put the book down. “What does that even mean?”

“It means we’re all stuffed,” said John. He chuckled and poured a little more Marsala into Trevor’s glass.

“It sounds like the sort of thing your sister says about climate change,” said Trevor.

“Ah well, she might not be wrong there,” said John. “Please take my sister as you find her, Trevor. She has a good heart.”

“I am sure. What on earth does she make of you being a priest?”

Wikimedia Commons/Tarquin

“She doesn’t know what to make of it, to be honest with you,” said John. “I think she feels I live in a strange parallel world.”

Trevor looked back at him with a thoughtful expression. “And do you?”

“No, I live in Haringey,” said John. “My sister is all right, Trevor. She is three years older than me. When we were children she dressed me and took me to school. She had to. Our father had gone and Mum was a drunk.”

“Oh,” said Trevor.

“Dinner’s ready, Trev,” called his wife from next door.

He stood up. “I’d better go. Have you eaten?”

“Don’t worry about me,” said John. “But thanks.”

When Trevor had gone he sat back in his chair, squinting to read in the gathering dusk.

“And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them,” he read. He sighed, and went into the kitchen for more Marsala. As he entered he saw Trevor’s son’s football in the corner. He hesitated for a moment; then he took it outside and rolled it through the gate to the garden next door.

More flash fiction from Mike:

Another Time A tear in the fabric

Evolution The world is turning

When Time Stands Still A hurricane lashes Pershing Square

A Man For All Seasons Net zero.The Stranger's Bar. And a three-line whip

A History Lesson Why do we study it?

The Creatives Meeting a tech bro

Homecoming A sort of love story

Solitude A Cold War memory

Rhodri Hactonby's Maps A question of social geography

Hiraeth A yearning…

Strange Places A spirit in the sky 

A Sideways Journey Things might have been different

Displaced Encounter on E94th Street

Belonging Do you? Where?
Leaving Home A house has memories

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

 

Flash fiction: A Man For All Seasons

Net Zero. The Stranger’s Bar. And a three-line whip

Ned wobbled a little as he crossed the Lobby. But he managed a bow to the Speaker’s chair as he entered the chamber and made his way safely to his usual seat. From this he looked down on the orderly scalp of the Shadow Environment Minister, whose hair had been coiffed with precision for tonight’s debate; it had, like her staff, learned to do as it was told.

“Old Ned Fiddler looking a bit unsteady,” a young MP had muttered back in the lobby. “Does he hit the sauce often?”

Sir Thomas More

(Hans Holbein the Younger)

“Never did much,” said the lobby correspondent with him. “Too busy shagging research assistants. But I think the new party leadership is getting to him.”

It was. One of the Whips had called into his office in Portcullis House that morning to discuss the Environment debate for later.

“We’re a little anxious about you, Ned,” he said. “We need to land some punches on the government tonight. Need to show all those Reform voters that we don’t like Net Zero either. Are you going to speak?”

“If I’m called,” said Ned.

“You see, when it comes to Net Zero, you’ve been a little…” The whip looked up at the ceiling and down again. “A little unsound, if I may say so. We were a little concerned after the select committee… at your comments on wind energy for example. A little too approving. Our voters do not want these ugly things in their back yards.”

“You would prefer me to tilt at windmills?” asked Ned.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Never mind. Fear not, I am sure I shan’t disappoint you.” He picked up a sheaf of notes and waved it at the whip, who had, he noted, cut himself shaving. “I have written a paean to fossil fuels that will warm the cockles of your heart.”

“Splendid.” The whip got up to go. In the doorway, he turned. “We realise of course that your seat is a little vulnerable to Reform. You may wish to be a little surer of your place in the Lords. Should anything untoward happen at the neck selection. After all, it’s a three-line whip.”

“Fear not,” said Ned, and added quietly:

“And, as time requireth, a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of as sad gravity. A man for all seasons.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It was written in 1520, of Sir Thomas More.”

“Oh.” The whip looked confused. ”Well, I’m sure we can rely on you.”

He went. Ned regarded his retreating back with distaste. Over thirty years in the House, he thought, and I’m expected to endure threats from these smarmy little creeps. He looked again at his notes, in which he had collated all the threats to birdlife from wind turbines and bemoaned the loss of farmland to solar panels. He thought for a moment. Then he picked up the wad of papers and dropped it in the bin. Next he opened his desk draw and took out a very old brown envelope from which he drew several sheets of foolscap paper, yellow with age. He placed them in a clear plastic folder. 

Then he went to the Stranger’s Bar and had two gin and tonics and a Glenlivet.

 

*** *** ***

“Mister FIDDLER!”

He swayed slightly as he rose to his feet.

“Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.” He looked round the chamber. “I need not long detain you …Bustards!”

Trevor Littlewood/Wikimedia Commons

A ripple ran through the chamber. The Environment Minister raised his eyebrows. Madam Deputy Speaker seemed about to intercede on a point of parliamentary language so he continued hastily: “Great bustards, to be precise. As the House will know, these birds have been reintroduced to these islands and it has been put to this House that wind turbines are a risk to them. Are we to let the planet fry because of the infinitesimal risk that some silly bustard might fly into the blades? I am reminded that, a few days after the destruction of the Möhne dam, The Times received a letter that purported to be from some learned academics concerned at the fate of some rare crested ring-tailed lesser-spotted Nubian warbler or the like thought to have been breeding on the reservoir. Still, this is not about bustards. Is it?”

He paused for a moment, then grasped the yellowed sheet of foolscap. “I should like, Madam Deputy Speaker, to read briefly from the diary of my great-uncle Christopher. He writes, on a day in June:

I have been thinking of the seasons and their immutability, which is a comfort in these times; one knows, doesn’t one, that in England, some morning in late February or the start of March, one will step out and feel the wind cold, harsh even, but not so raw as it was; and the sky will be a sort of washed blue with bright white clouds scudding across it, bisected by branches that are still bare but somehow not as barren as before. One knows then that it is early Spring. Then some weeks later that the buds arrive, the hawthorn breaks out and the trees are suddenly a very vivid green that you won’t see later in the summer, when they are duller, jaded.

We’re in that vivid time now; the sky’s a deep blue, not the livid grey-white of August, and the fields are coming alive – I can see them quite well beyond the perimeter fence, stretching across the Lincolnshire Wolds with their gentle folds and hedgerows. The blossoms are everywhere. I woke quite late today – we landed at four last night, and then there was debriefing and breakfast – when I got up I opened the window of my quarters and the world outside looked exactly like early June. Then just now the chaps were bombing up and some clot miss-set a circuit and let a 4,000-pound cookie drop from a bomb bay onto the tarmac. It didn’t go off, or we wouldn’t be here. I could hear the maniacal laughter of the crew and I thought, the world is in flames from Singapore to the Channel coast, and we have just been near-blown to eternity; yet the seasons feel exactly as they should, and there is something we cannot destroy, and that comforts me.

Ned lowered the page. “I read today that the Woodland Trust have detected changes in the seasons. Nothing has brought the reality of climate change home to me quite as that has done.” Two or three members began to rise, but he shook his head. “No, I shall not give way. Madam Deputy Speaker, I realise that my great-uncle could not now be comforted by the immutability of the seasons, as he wrote that he was in that dark time – a week or so before his death on active service. That is a reality almost beyond my grasp. Am I to deny that reality today because if I do not, a few thousand votes may go to fools?

“Madam Deputy Speaker, I have been a member of my Party for fifty years and a member of this House for thirty. But tonight I must defy the whip. I cannot vote against the Government motion and, for all its flaws, I commend it to the House.”

A wave of noise broke over him; cries of “Oh! Oh!” and “For shame!” and “Bravo!”. He did not hear them; he left the chamber and crossed the lobby, only dimly aware of the two or three lobby correspondents striding to keep up with him. They fell back, but one of them called out: “Is your career over?” And another called: “What season is it now, Ned!”

He stopped and thought for a moment. “I think,” he said, “that it’s early spring.”

More flash fiction from Mike:

Another Time A tear in the fabric

Evolution The world is turning

When Time Stands Still A hurricane lashes Pershing Square

A Man for All Seasons Net zero. The Stranger's Bar. And a three-line whip

A History Lesson Why do we study it?

The Creatives Meeting a tech bro

Homecoming A sort of love story

Solitude A Cold War memory

Rhodri Hactonby's Maps A question of social geography

Hiraeth A yearning…

Strange Places A spirit in the sky 

A Sideways Journey Things might have been different

Displaced Encounter on E94th Street

Belonging Do you? Where?
Leaving Home A house has memories

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

Flash fiction: A History Lesson

Why do we study it? 

It was the last lesson of the day. Mr Balcombe donned his mortarboard and his gown. White chalk powder adorned the latter. This was from the Latin class after Assembly; he had flung the blackboard wiper at Brockley Minor, an especially dense member of the Remove who failed to conjugate the verb manere. The missile had missed, hitting the rear wall of the classroom with a dull thud and releasing a white cloud that caught the morning sunshine as it streamed in through the high sash window. “Since you cannot conjugate manere, you will, er, remain in detention after supper this evening,” said Mr Balcombe, delighted with his own wit.

Perhaps he’d been a little hard on Brockley; after all, the boy was a useful fly-half. He sighed, and entered the classroom where Mr Lawless was teaching the fifth form History. Mr Lawless had joined the school at the beginning of the term. He was a slim, rather quiet man in his 30s who said little in the staff room although he was always polite. But Mr Balcombe had noticed that when he supervised a table at suppertime, the conversation was a little louder, a little brighter, and sometimes the boys were laughing.

He also had the overpowering sensation that he had met him, at least briefly, years before.

“I understand, Balcombe, that his lessons are a little – er, unorthodox,” the Headmaster had said before lunch. “Sir Rodney Bush and one or two others have enquired. It seems their boys have mentioned them.”

“The lessons worried the boys in some way?” asked Mr Balcombe. He sipped his sherry.

“Well, no,” said the Headmaster. “They said they enjoyed them. So you might sit in on a lesson or two and check he is teaching properly.”

If Mr Lawless thought this unusual, he gave no sign of it. Mr Balcombe seated himself by the window and watched his colleague write on the blackboard, then turn to the class. On the board he had chalked:

EMERGENCE

And in a smaller hand:

Of what? When? Why? What happened? Then:

DID WE KNOW?

“Last week I asked you to consider these, with reference to a change, or incident, of your choice,” said Mr Lawless. “You have written essays. Bush. Tell us of an age and its emergence.”

“I thought of the Black Death, sir,” said Bush.

“Very good. The emergence of – what? A disease yes, but of what new phase or age?”

“Men asked more for their labour, sir,” said Bush. “So farming changed.”

“It did. The Acts of Enclosure, the arrival of sheep – what is emerging, Bush?” 

“A prosperous new world, sir.”

“Indeed. For some. But as the plague raged, none knew of that; only of the terror they felt. So. Thorpe. Your essay. Most original. Tell the class what emerged.”

“The age of steam, sir. Newcomen’s engine.”

“Yes. But did we know what was happening?”

“A few Cornish miners may have done, sir.”

“Exactly. The rest did not know,” said Lawless. He was walking back and forth before the class, stroking his chin. “That was in the 1690s. Two hundred years later, we cannot imagine life without the train. The cotton mill. And now the Dreadnought.” He looked around the class. “Now, someone – Bush, I think – asked me earlier this term why we study history.” He looked at a spotty youth at the back of the class. “Grimbly, tell me why we study history.”

“So that we can spot it happening, sir?”

“Precisely,” said Mr Lawless. “Tell me, everyone; is an age emerging today? Now? In this year of our Lord nineteen hundred and twelve? And how shall we know?”

No-one answered, for there was a hullabaloo from an adjoining classroom; and then a noise appeared from outside, a clawing, ripping sound, and doors banged as boys poured through the corridors and out onto the terrace that led to the playing fields. All turned their heads upwards, eyes shielded against the late afternoon sun; the noise grew louder and a shadow crossed the First Form cricket pitch and there it was, an assemblage of sticks and wires and stretched doped linen, a trail of black smoke behind it, drawn across the sky by two spinning discs that caught the sun. It drifted past them, perhaps a hundred feet above, the ripping, tearing sound assaulting one’s eardrums, the boys cheering and tossing their caps in the air.

“Well I’ll be damned!” Mr Lawless chuckled. “I do believe it’s the Daily Mail aeroplane!”

“It must be,” said Mr Balcombe. “I did hear it might come this way; how splendid! I suppose that’s that Grahame-White chappie conducting it.” The latter’s hunched figure was just visible as the aeroplane passed over the Headmaster’s house and proceeded in the direction of Great Billingham. In the quad a horse neighed and whinnied between the shafts of the Chaplain’s dogcart and Cook craned her neck at the sky saying “Well I never! Well I never!” over and over again, twisting her apron between her hands.

When the aeroplane was out of sight the two men rounded up their charges and chivvied them back to the classroom. As they followed the last stragglers across the terrace, Mr Balcombe said: “I did say I was sure I had met you before you joined us and now I fancy I know when. Were you ever in the Cape Colony?”

The other frowned. “Yes. That was some years ago.”

“Indeed. During the South African War. Were you serving there? I met you, I think, on a visit to the Second Hampshires.”

“Yes, I served with them. I remember now. We left for the Transvaal about then.”

“How was the Transvaal?”

“We were engaged in farm clearances,” said Mr Lawless. He was silent for a moment, then said: “I resigned my commission not long afterwards.”

“Oh.”

As they reached the door Mr Lawless paused for a moment, then turned and looked at the sky. “I wonder, Balcombe. What has just emerged… and what sort of new beastliness will we commit with the machine we have seen today?”

More flash fiction from Mike:

Another Time A tear in the fabric

Evolution The world is turning

When Time Stands Still A hurricane lashes Pershing Square

A Man for All Seasons Net zero. The Stranger's Bar. And a three-line whip

The Creatives Meeting a tech bro

Homecoming A sort of love story

Solitude A Cold War memory

Rhodri Hactonby's Maps A question of social geography

Hiraeth A yearning…

Strange Places A spirit in the sky 

A Sideways Journey Things might have been different

Displaced Encounter on E94th Street

Belonging Do you? Where?
Leaving Home A house has memories

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.