Ella Pilcher

Ella Pilcher was born in Harrow to a Scottish mother, Sophia (née Robinson), and Somerset-born father, Thomas Webb Pilcher. Her father was on his second marriage, having had a previous life as curator of a British gallery in Rome and husband of an Italian marchioness. He was in his sixties for most of his children's births and died in 1874. Sophia took Ella and her siblings Thomas, Ada Violet and Percy to Germany but then herself died only three years later. The orphans returned to England, the charges of the eldest brother Thomas Pilcher, who at 19 joined the army to pay for the schooling of his sisters. Percy was enrolled as a naval cadet at the age of 13 and upon graduation pursued an apprenticeship in the engineering department of a Glasgow shipyard. Ella went with Percy to Glasgow as his companion and housekeeper, while Ada Violet stayed south with Thomas. Ella and Percy lived in a flat in Byres Road, Glasgow, and were remembered by friends as bright, clever and attractive. Ella was, according to friends and family, a great singer. ==Gliding==

Ella supported her brother's passionate interest in aeronautics which, she remembered, he had had since childhood. At Byres Road they kept birds in order to observe them in flight and landing. Percy followed the experiments of German pioneer glider Otto Lilienthal closely, and made scale models of gliders which he would fly around the apartment. In early 1895 the siblings decided to make a full sized prototype of what they called a 'soaring machine'. Percy did the design, carpentry and tensioning. Ella was in charge of the fabric. They moved house to Kersland Street, Glasgow (the landlady at Byres Road objected to the birds and the models), and began constructing the aircraft in five sections. They used the best materials they could get with their limited funds: pine, sailcloth, steel plates, piano wire and bamboo. It was difficult to lay out the fabric in order to cut and sew it at home, and they were lent a room at Glasgow University by its principal, the physicist Lord Kelvin, despite his friendly scepticism towards aeronautical progress. Ella was helped by Iris Biles, the daughter of the professor Percy assisted.The demonstration also saw a (possibly unplanned) flight by Dorothy Rose Pilcher, Ella's cousin, who was given a tow by Percy but then crashed into the cinematograph camera which had been set up to take stills of the glider in flight. Neither the aviator nor the apparatus was damaged. While it did not yield an investor, the demonstration was impressive enough for Percy to start up a company with a colleague, Walter Gordon Wilson. At this point Ella probably stepped back from her role as Percy's collaborator, and may have begun training as a nurse. Nonetheless, she still accompanied Percy on his most important trial flights, and helped him prepare for lectures. In the late summer of 1899 another demonstration was planned, at Stanford Hall in Leicestershire, for the benefit of prospective investor John Henniker Heaton and a few others. Despite bad weather, Percy insisted on making a flight in the Hawk and suffered an accident. He died from his injuries three days later, Ella at his side. Within a month Ella had embarked for Cape Town to serve as a nurse in the Second Boer War. Five weeks later, she was voted an honorary member. == Later life ==

Ella married Colonel Edward C. Tidswell in the autumn of 1902, and accompanied him on his stationing in Kumasi, now Ghana. Over a decade later she corresponded with the society again in order to offer more material and information about Percy, whose legacy she feared was being forgotten On her husband's retirement from military service, the couple moved to Jersey, where they lived at St Brelade's Bay. According to her niece, Ella was still running down hills in her seventies, teaching her great nephew to fly a kite, months before she died in 1939. ==References==