This St. John's woman sharpened our view of historic Alcock and Brown flight
In 1919, Margaret Carter had a camera and a car — and access to history-making pilots Alcock and Brown
A few weeks ago, in a bright room in Memorial University, a remarkable collection of photographs that changed the way we see the world's first-ever non-stop transatlantic flight was officially handed over to the Archives and Special Collections department.
It was tough to tell who in the room was most excited.
It may have been Peter A. Carter, the great-nephew of Margaret Carter, the St. John's woman who took most of the pictures. The collection has been kept by her family since she first carefully put it together in a large black scrapbook 100 years ago.
"I can now close that chapter of my life knowing that the people that came before me and entrusted me with this material can rest peacefully. As can I, knowing that I did the right thing with it," he said of his family's donation.
It may have been Colleen Quigley, head of MUN's Archives and Special Collections, wearing protective white gloves as she gently lifted the pages in the century-old book.
"To actually engage with these materials in person is incredibly emotional," she said.
"Some of these photographs, when I brought aviation historians to look at these, they have never seen them before."
But the most intense emotion in the room could be seen in the photos themselves, on the faces of the pilots who, in 100 years ago, travelled to St. John's from the United Kingdom to attempt the world's first non-stop transatlantic flight, risking their lives for a top spot in the history books.
The London Daily Mail newspaper had offered £10,000 to anyone who could pull it off, and four teams arrived in the province in the spring of 1919 to give it a shot.
Most of Carter's pictures are of the winning team: John Alcock and Arthur Brown, two young British men who took off from what is now Lester's Field in a Vickers Vimy biplane.
She also has shots of their closest competitors, Australian pilot Harry Hawker and his navigator Kenneth Mackenzie-Grieve, who nearly claimed the prize but crashed into the ocean.
"You can feel the excitement, the anxiety, it's just palpable. But you can also the connections between Hawker, between Grieve, between Alcock and Brown and all the field people, and also the people of the province," Quigley said.
"It's really a story about people."
A close connection
According to Peter, Margaret was a fearless, independent, fun-loving woman who came from a family of merchants.
Remarkably for the time, she had access to a car — and to these pilots.
Man of her photographs catch them at intimate moments, allowing the audience a glimpse at the real people behind the legends.
"She really snapped them at a point when they're in thought or maybe when they're more of their true selves than some of these posed pictures," Quigley said.
"What's more true than seeing somebody roll a cigarette as they're getting ready to cross the Atlantic?"
She was so close to Alcock and Brown, she wrapped up a sandwich in a cloth and gave it to them before they took off.
The day after they landed, they signed the cloth for her and mailed it back.
Wearing rubber boots and jewels
Quigley said it was particularly special to connect to this piece of history through a woman's story.
"I was really taken by Margaret, the person, because often we don't hear about the women that were involved, or the women that were involved form a different perspective as someone literally the sidelines," she said.
"I really identified with Margaret's fabulousness … with her independence of having access to a car, and going out with her friends and her family. That was something I didn't connect with this story of planes and machinery."
In the collection are photographs of Margaret herself, looking elegant on the mucky fields in her long fur coat, laughing with the pilots as they tend to their planes — or, as she called them, "the machines."
"Margaret was comfortable in her rubber boots as well as her jewels," Peter Carter said, smiling.
Aerial shots and album covers
Some of her shots are so expertly framed and charged with feeling, Quigley jokes that if the pilot teams were bands, these pictures could be their album covers.
In what feels like a prescient nod to GoPros, Margaret had the pilots take a camera with them during test flights, so they could take pictures from the air.
She also captured Hawker and Grieve testing out their life raft in a nearby lake.
They wound up needing their raft during their own transatlantic attempt, when engine trouble and bad weather forced them to land in the sea, where they were rescued by a Danish freighter ship.
Alcock and Brown were ultimately successful, crash-landing in Connemara, Ireland, 16 hours after taking off from a field on Blackmarsh Road on June 14, 1919.
The last supper
One of Peter Carter's favourite picture in the collection is one Margaret called "The Last Supper," taken at a dinner held at the Cochrane Street Hotel before Hawker and Grieve took off.
At the dinner, the pilots all signed a one-pound note to commemorate their history-making efforts.
Another of his favourites? A shot of Margaret with her equally fabulous friend standing in next to one of the planes.
"I think that's very cool that these two ladies were very comfortable among these machines and were able to leave this gift for us," he said.
He says he hopes this gift inspires other people to look around their homes for pieces of their own family histories and donate them to an archive where they can be taken care of and added to the story of Newfoundland and Labrador.
"You may not think that they're important, but they are," he said.
Margaret Carter's photo collection and fur coat, as well as the cloth from Alcock and Brown's sandwich, is on display at the Admiralty House Communications Museum in Mount Pearl, as part of an exhibit commemorating the 100th anniversary of the race to complete the first nonstop transatlantic flight.
