The life of a daring lady - Dolly the Parachute Queen (From Gazette & Herald)

The life of a daring lady - Dolly the Parachute Queen

ON the stairs of the educational section of the Beck Isle Museum, in Pickering, is a fascinating display about a women called Dolly Shepherd, who was a pioneer of the sport of parachuting.

She was not the very first of her sex to take to the air, though she was amongst the earliest in this country.

Balloons have been around since 1788, when the Montgolfier brothers sent up a sheep, a cock and a duck in a hot air balloon. Only a year later, the first woman, Madame Theble, followed suit. By the end of the 18th century, people in France were combining balloon ascents with parachute descents. A woman called Eliza had achieved this 39 times.

Thomas Baldwin brought the sport to Alexandra Palace 100 years later, on a hill on the outskirts of London. By 1899, there were regular displays at the palace, organised by a Monsieur Gaudeon.

It was there that Dolly Shepherd began her career. Born in 1886 in Potters Bar, she was introduced to Monsieur Gaudeon at the age of 17 in 1903, when he casually asked her if she'd like to try a parachute. She eagerly accepted - took to it like a bird.

A year later, he asked her if she'd like to be one of his regular team to take the place of a Maud Brookes, who had died following an accident in Dublin. Not the strongest of inducements, one would have thought!

At that time a parachute was not strapped to the back, carefully folded so as to open out perfectly when you fell. It was attached, loose and limp, to the balloon by which you ascended. Under the parachute was a sort of trapeze bar to which you hung by the hands. Cords and straps of webbing passed between the legs and took the weight.

In this fragile contraption, you would be lifted under the balloon 1000, 5000, sometimes 10,000 feet into the air. At a suitable height, you tugged on a cord that released you and the parachute from the balloon.

Hopefully, the parachute would open after you had dropped, like a stone, about 280 feet. You would then try to manoeuvre the thing so as to land softly. There was very little means of doing so.

Dolly Shepherd landed once on a rooftop, and several times on top of a tree. Once the balloon dragged her up through the branches of a tree. There was one occasion when bad timing led to the balloon rising into a thunderstorm.

At one show in Lincolnshire, she was swept over the LNER railway, so close to the ground, and so close to an oncoming train that she was enveloped in a cloud of hot, smelly air, which caught the parachute like a sail and blew it to one side. It finally landed her in lopsided fashion, just short of the Nottingham-Grantham Canal. A few feet more and she would have been in it. A few feet less and she would have been under the wheels of the train.

Before her first attempt, Dolly Shepherd had just half an hour's instruction. She seems to have been without nerves - even revelling in the danger. In fact, according to her autobiography, published when she was 90, she found it wonderfully peaceful, yet exhilarating, to be floating several thousand feet up in the air.

Soon, she was travelling with the team all over the country, at £2-10s-0d a jump. She was elegant, as well as daring. A photograph in the Beck Isle Museum shows her in the costume she wore whilst parachuting.

It looks very Edwardian, but daring for the times, with baggy breeches, high boots, a tight-fitted jacket with a sailor collar, a nautical looking cap with a balloonist's badge, and a parachutist's badge on her lapel. A sash round the waist seems liable to tangle with the apparatus! She stands astride the webbing sling, holding the trapeze bar in one hand, very nonchalantly. In the other hand, she holds a small Union Jack to wave at spectators.

By 1911, when she came to Pickering, Dolly was a star turn, billed as 'Miss Dolly Shepherd, the Parachutist Queen'. Monsieur Gaudeon was known as the 'Parachutist King.'

For the gala of Wednesday, July 26, the advertisement read: "Near the romantic ruins of the castle there will be balloon ascents and parachute descents, morning and afternoon."

The small, comparatively primitive, balloon used by Dolly Shepherd was filled with hot air by a simple process. The fabric was laid over a trench full of burning timber and straw, covered by a sheet of corrugated iron, in turn, covered by earth. The end of the trench was left open to allow the hot air that was produced to escape into the balloon.

Prior to her successful performance that July, the Parachute Queen had already made over 200 such descents. Once she had been so seriously injured that paralysis was feared. She recovered however, and resumed the shows, apparently undeterred.

Yet in the spring of 1912, less than a year after her jump in Pickering, she retired. She announced her decision after a performance at the Alexandra Palace, perfect both up and down and as enjoyable as ever. On reaching the ground, as she handed her Union Jack to an admirer, her cap to another, her badge to a third, she informed Monsieur Gaudeon: "I shan't be jumping again!'

"Oh, you will. You can't resist it!" he laughed. But she had meant what she said. Apparently, as she floated up in the air, high above the palace, she had heard a voice saying: "Don't do this again, or you will be killed."

And so, still only 25, as casually as she had begun, Dolly Shepherd ceased to be the queen of parachutists.

She had a long life before her still. She married, had a family, and died aged 97 in 1983.

About 1987 a picture of her caught my eye in The Guardian. Beside her was a picture of her daughter, called Molly Sedgwick, in mid-air, in her first 'free-fall' parachute descent. She had jumped from 12,000 feet, strapped to her instructor. Evidently a chip off the old block!

Updated: 10:36 Thursday, June 06, 2002