The April speaker was Emma Easterbrook, whose subject was Richarda Morrow-Tait (1923-1982), the first woman to fly around the world. She explained how she came to discover Richarda from the redevelopment of St Regis flats by Clare College as this was where Richarda lived.
Richarda had distinguished ancestry. Her paternal grandfather, Edward Routh was a Cambridge contemporary of James Clerk Maxwell and Senior Wrangler in their year. Some of his love letters to Richarda’s grandmother have recently been donated to Peterhouse. Both he and his wife died before Richarda was born, but the local connection came through them as Richarda’s grandmother was born at Norman Hall in Ickleton and the family later moved next door to the Mill House. Her father was Arthur Routh who had married Caroline Tetley, from the north of England in 1913. She was born in Ickleton, the third of three daughters and her father’s disappointment at not having a son may be reflected in her name, a feminine form of Richard. However, her paternal great grandmother, who was married to the seventh Astronomer Royal and lived at Greenwich Observatory, was also Richarda.
Like her two older sisters she was educated at the Perse School for Girls, where, incidentally, she would have overlapped with Mary Challis who was born in 1925 and also had a feminised name in Alfreda, although she did not use the name. While at school Richarda became interested in flying and the female pioneers of the 1930s such as Amy Johnson and Amelia Earhart. Her home circumstances changed dramatically as her mother died in 1941 and her father in 1945 while her eldest sister had married and left home. In 1945, at the age of 21 she married Norman Morrow-Tait aged 40, a civil engineer. He encouraged her to obtain her civilian flying licence and, despite being pregnant, she began to plan her round the world flight. She needed a navigator and found one in a family friend, Michael Townsend who had RAF experience. He was a mature student at Fitzwilliam College and expected the flight would simply occupy the Long Vac. She also faced problems with the bureaucracy in getting permission to use both RAF and civilian airfields. The USSR refused to allow her to land or fly over Russian territory. She bought a Percival Proctor Mark IV plane which had to be adapted to carry sufficient fuel. She called the plane Thursday’s Child as she was born on a Thursday and, in the old rhyme, Thursday’s Child had ‘far to go’.
She left from Cambridge on 18 August 1948, with only 80 hours flying experience and no chance of a test flight as she was refused petrol coupons, rationing still being in force. She went from Croydon to the south of France, then via Malta and Cyprus to Iraq and Bahrein and by early September had reached India. Here essential repairs to the aeroplane delayed her for some weeks and she arrived in Japan on 25 October, flying despite this being a time of the year for bad weather and there being no air-sea rescue available. By the end of November, she was in Anchorage, Alaska, but her navigator had to return home to pursue his studies.
By this time the plane was too damaged to fly further and she bought a BT-13 Valiant, partly funding it by singing in night clubs, and found a new navigator for the flights across Canada and the US, until Michael Townsend, who had now graduated, could join her. They flew to Montreal, then up the Labrador coast to avoid a long Atlantic crossing, to Greenland, Iceland and thence to Prestwick and back to Croydon arriving on 19 August 1949. The flight had taken a year and a day, rather than a few months.
In spring 1950 she gave birth to a son, whose father was Michael Townsend and she divorced her husband to marry Townsend in 1951. This gave her some adverse publicity and probably was the reason why she did not complete or publish the book she had written about her flight. She died in 1982, but the book was eventually finished by her husband and published in 2001 as Thursday’s Child. A blue plaque to commemorate her was unveiled at Marshall’s Airport on 19 August 2024, the 75th anniversary of the completion of her flight. It is permanently installed on the new St Regis building.
Mary Dicken