A la recherche du temps perdu

Mademoiselle de Paris

Paris, 45 years on .....

We arrive at the Gare du Nord on a crisp and sunny winter's day to celebrate our 45th wedding anniversary in Paris, the city where we inadvertently became embroiled in the dramatic events of May 1968 when the student riots escalated into civil unrest.  The taxi queues are long and the Metro heaving with luggage laden people, so we walk from the station to our hotel in the Ile St Louis. By the time we arrive, we really feel we are in Paris.  The Hotel Lutece is a charming, tall, narrow building in a street filled with shops, restaurants and galleries,  their windows sparkling for Christmas and all much smarter than when we last stayed there. Our spacious room is right at the top, with large windows overlooking rooftops, domes and spires. Unlike Lindsay Duncan in Le Weekend, we are very happy with our choice.

This evening we are invited to dinner by our Finnish friend Jorma and his French wife Sylviane who live in the 16th arrondissement. After celebratory champagne,  Jorma unveils a selection of wines from his formidable cellar,  chosen to relate to our wedding anniversary and beginning with a 1970 (the nearest he has to 1968), followed by 1978, 1988 and 1998. We are invited to choose which to drink with the saddle of boar (shot by Jorma in Fontainebleu Forest!) and which to drink with the cheese. On a higher culinary plane than madeleine cake - and certainly far more sophisticated than the food we enjoyed all those years ago -  the meal and companionship triggers a Proustian stream of reminiscence.

We share memories of being in Paris in May 1968 - the seriously scary riot police, the noise, the shutdown of banks, airports and railways, the general strike. We tell our tale of getting a Hertz car (by dint of our journalist accreditation and determination), taking two and a half hours to drive along the Champs Elysee and then setting off to Brussels via country roads, gambling that petrol would be more available than in the cities. We learn from Sylviane that we made the right decision - she too set out by car to escape the rioting city, but was forced to return because she could not find any service stations with fuel. Meanwhile we arrived in Brussels to find no seats on flights to London for days, so we drove on to Ostend to catch a ferry - we had jobs to hold down at a time when the economy was challenging.

And challenging it certainly was in the UK back in 1968. Harold Wilson was trying to increase British competitiveness by asking workers to do more without getting paid,  Enoch Powell was dismissed from the Cabinet after making his Rivers of Blood speech about the consequences of uncontrolled immigration. There were severe storms, killing seven people and resulting in The Great Flood which inundated large areas of the south east of England. Like Paris, the capital saw major unrest,when 91 policemen were injured and 200 people arrested in protests against the war in Vietnam, outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square. And more ominously, a civil rights march in Londonderry revealed the full spectre of sectarianism in Northern Ireland that triggered the events that resulted in The Troubles. Despite all this doom and gloom - or perhaps as an antidote - we decided to get married.

The Dagenham Ladies

And then I recall celebrating another significant event from 45 years ago, just a few weeks earlier in October 2013. In the Intercontinental Hotel ballroom,  surrounded by extraordinary individuals at the Women of the Year lunch, I join the huge applause for the winners of the Outstanding Achievement Award.  Up on to the stage go eight of the women who took part in the strikes for equal pay and recognition of skill that took place in 1968 at the Ford car plant in Dagenham, Essex.  Machinists Vera Sime (83), Eileen Pullen (84), Gwen Davis (81), Sheila Douglass (77), Dora Challingsworth (74), Pamela Brown (59), Sarah Kavia (60) and Bharti Patel (64). They won their battle - but the fight for equal pay for women is not over yet. Plus ca change.....

Cocktales

Alex Katz, The Cocktail Party, 1965 

Conversation over New Year drinks with a chap from a global project management and cost consultancy company is wide-ranging and interesting. Dark matter,  opera, searching for the Higgs Boson – certainly more than small talk.  Just as I finish recounting how an Italian scientist working at CERN suggests that the reason so many women in his country study physics is because it is seen as metaphysical or philosophical rather than mathematical, our host joins us. My fellow guest turns to him and says, "I thought the reason there are more women studying physics in Italy is because they have big t**s, but this lovely lady tells me that there is a different reason."

  

Struck dumb, I turn to our host, who shows no sign of embarrassment, and briefly repeat my explanation. Our companion carries on conversing in a normal manner and I shortly move away to talk to others, wondering if I imagined the crude remark. Some fifteen minutes later, I am engaged in conversation with a small group when he materialises again at my elbow.  Someone politely introduces me to him, when he responds  that of course he knows me - and that ‘we have a love child together.’ 

We certainly do not, I snap, and leave shortly afterwards. I fulminate all the way home, wondering whether my failure to respond more forcefully was due to shock or simply a reluctance to be rude at an industry social event in a prestigious venue. This evening the ten o'clock news is full of ageing media personalities defending charges of sex abuse, and a major political figure denying allegations of inappropriate behaviour. Commentators question why women take time to bring these charges, women talk about the difficulty of being taken seriously, others ask what is so bad about a hand on the leg or a bit of lighthearted banter.

I know that misogyny is alive and well in the property sector and Spearmint Rhino remains a popular entertainment venue, but it is a long time since I experienced such behaviour. Did this Neanderthal think I would be flattered by his claim? How I should respond should such an incident happen again?  After a few hours calm reflection, I decide that the next time lighthearted banter indicates that a chap's brain has taken residence in his trousers, that is the place to empty my glass. Whoops....

Time to call that spade a shovel

Image from National Portrait Gallery

Under the steely eye of Good Queen Bess, a crowd of property industry clients and consultants gather to hear about the launch of the DTZ Curzon Group at the National Portrait Gallery in London. An appropriate setting for an initiative to attract and retain more women in the sector, yet I can't help wondering how Elizabeth 1 - the monarch with the 'weak and feeble body of a woman but the heart and stomach of a king' - would have regarded the need for such an event half a millennium after she had ruled a country for so long. 

But then as Colin Wilson, head of DTZ in the UK and Ireland says in his address, for organisations like his who can trace their origins back a few hundred years, "it is difficult to judge the point at which things like this need to change  - largely because that is the way it has always been."  So the DTZ initiative is welcome, particularly as the plan is to roll it out throughout the EMEA region. 

Interestingly, as 2013 draws to a close, the DTZ event is one of a veritable flurry looking at attracting and keeping more women in engineering, construction and property. Listening to the familiar litany of problems, proposals for more research, earnest statements about fishing in only half the pool, I raise my metaphorical hat yet again to the campaigners who repeat their storytelling with new minted, smiling freshness.  But it seems that the demographic and economic arguments have finally got through, not to mention that whilst the UK slides down the global table when it comes to the number of young people studying science and engineering, the relatively few girls tackling these subjects achieve higher grades than the boys. 

Student Award finalists 2013,  run by the Association of Women in Property

However there is an interesting dichotomy appearing. We might have moved from a culture of avoiding putting gender on the agenda to a cry of 'please tell us how to resolve it' but there is still quite a degree of wriggling when it comes to terminology. Colin Wilson confesses to being uncomfortable with words like gender or ethnicity, preferring to talk about people. 

The language  issue arises again the following week when the redoubtable Dorte Rich Jorgensen hosts a CIC Constructive Diversity event at the Building Centre. We hear Kate Lloyd of the CITB telling us how difficult it is to attract women (generating heated interventions about the loss of successful training organisations such as Women's Education in Building) and how one of the problems is that diversity is a word that turns off construction industry employers, particularly SMEs. 

We then hear veteran change manager Ian Dodds telling us about his time at ICI back in the 1970s and his more recent work with legal firms. Quoting a US report from 2007 that reported growing concern about white men beginning to feel vulnerable and alienated, he suggests that  the word inclusion rather than diversity generates a more positive reaction.  

Perish the thought that we are using language that makes men feel uncomfortable, I muse, recalling trying to convince report and contract writers that it is not enough to assure everyone that when referring to 'he' and 'him' they mean women too. Not to mention a sales director  telling me a few years ago that his ideal candidate for a customer relations manager is a blonde with large bosoms (well not exactly those words).  

And this year - for those who think times have changed - we saw astonishing personal attacks against Australia's first woman prime minister.  For example, a dish at a Liberal party fundraising dinner was called Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail, was described on the menu as 'small breasts, huge thighs and a big red box.'

Cartoon found on deliberatelybarren.blogspot.com

We should certainly use livelier language to engage on complex issues, to generate open and honest  discussion - and a good dash of humour helps too - and this does not mean being personal, offensive and hurtful.  But it is a dangerous game, as Julia Gillard found out when she delivered a blistering speech on the misogyny that dominates politics in her country.  As Allison Pearson said in the Daily Telegraph, "The boys’ club will never let you get away with that, " and indeed, she lost the premiership.  

Back at the National Portrait Gallery, beneath the portrait of the Virgin Queen, I am reminded that Julia Gillard was not only attacked for her personal appearance but also for being 'deliberately barren' to pursue her career. I step up to the platform, on behalf of the Association of Women in Property,  to congratulate Colin Wilson on establishing the Curzon Group and tell the assembled crowd that I prefer to talk about   'Age, sex and leadership', rather than diversity or inclusion - and that people usually stay to listen rather than making a quick exit for coffee.  

If we are going to increase the recruitment and retention of women in construction, property and engineering we need to take an up-front,  rather than simply a politically correct approach. Calling a spade a spade may cause some discomfort, but calling a spade a shovel might get the job done quicker. 

Peasant man and woman digging, Vincent Van Gogh

Walking with Matilda, spinning with Old Nick

Made to last in the mountains - hobnailed boots and wooden clogs

Nearly a thousand years ago, high on the Apennine ridge that separates the Tuscan provinces of Lucca and Modena, a hospice was established at the little village of San Pellegrino in Alpe to give shelter and sustenance to travellers on the difficult and dangerous road across the mountains, a route known from pre-Roman times.  Today the hospice is a museum of rural life and the village trattoria and bars provide shelter and sustenance for the hikers, bikers and skiers who flock to the area, including us (part of our holiday regime is a daily 90 minute walk).

 A rake for gathering myrtles

The museum is a beautifully arranged homage to the way people in this rugged landscape lived and worked for centuries, before the dramatic changes in agriculture and crafts of the 1960s. Local priest Don Luigi Pellegrini spent 20 years gathering out-dated tools and objects from attics and store rooms in the local villages, arranging them in a series of thematic rooms from cobbler to weaver, wine-maker to miller and then in 1987 handing the whole museum over the Province of Lucca to run and promote.

A striking aspect of the collection is the use of wood, particularly a huge wine vat hewn from a single chestnut trunk, pasta presses, spinning wheels and what looked like giant combs for Afro hairstyles but which were used by villagers to gather wild myrtles (bilberries). 

Emerging from the museum along the old mule track we stop at a large sign showing the original map of the hospice round 1110, and which tells us that in the Middle Ages the road travelling through San Pellegrino became a ‘great communicating artery between the north and south of the pensinsular, and along which Matilde di Canossa wielded her power over the Tuscan territories.’  Who was Matilda of Canossa, I wonder, making a note to consult Google on return to the house.

Then off we stride through the sun-dappled beech woods, which open into lush alpine meadows filled with flowers and thick carpets of those myrtle berries, still providing rich harvests of vitamin C. More surprisingly there are also swathes of sweet and juicy wild raspberries as far as the eye can see,  and promise of a rich harvest of blackberries too.

Giro del diavolo

The track twists and turns higher until we find ourselves on a peak that gives a spectacular panorama of the Apuan Alps. According to the fingerposts, we are 1,636 metres above sea level and have reached the Giro de Diavolo (the Devil’s Spin).  Legend has it that when St Pellegrino (the rather vague founding figure of the village who is not recognized by the Church) was tempted in vain by the devil, Old Nick gave him such a slap that the saint whirled round in a spin three times. Subsequently pilgrims visiting the site would crawl round the field three times, in addition to the ritual of carrying large stones in penance to mark the spot. 

We stick to our own ritual -  never returning on the same route - and make our way down the mountain on another track, emerging into the village by a shop selling chestnut flour biscuits,  dried mushrooms and, irrestistibly, punnets of freshly gathered myrtle berries. We also succumb to cold beer and a plate of bruschetta. Next to the trattoria is a shop selling foraging equipment on an impressive scale, including myrtle berry rakes, but unlike the beautiful hand carved wooden ones saved by Don Luigi Pellegrini, these efficient and rather grim tools are factory punched out of aluminimium. 

Matilda of Canossa, 1046-1115

And what about Mathilde di Canossa?  Quite a woman, I discover.  Known as the Tuscan Countess, she outlived her father, brother and older sister to inherit the title at the age of six and became an ardent defender of the extensive family lands in the Po Valley against the attacks of Henry IV.

Educated and cultured (she could speak several languages) she was also skilled in military arts,   successfully fighting a number of battles. She was a key player in the dramatic struggle between Church and State, known as the Investiture Controversy.  She had two politically chosen husbands, first her step brother Godfrey the Hunchbacked, and then at the age of 43 she married the 17 year old Welf V of Bavaria - a union that lasted only six years.

But her real love, which was consummated according to some scholars, was for Pope Gregory VII. During one of the most famous and episodes in the war between Church and State, Henry IV travelled across the Alps in a bitter winter of 1077 to do penance before the Pope Gregory at Matilda's fortress at Canossa - where he was made to wait three days in the snow before being admitted. Henry never recovered his influence in Italy after this humiliating defeat.

The Investiture Controversy diminished after the death of Pope Gregory and Matilda turned to governing her territories, donating lands to churches and monasteries, supporting building projects (including the beautiful Ponte della Maddalena bridge across the River Serchio, which we pass often on our way to Lucca)  and supporting the developing school of canon law at Bologna.

In 1635, some five hundred years after her death, her remains were removed from the cathedral in Mantua to St Peter's Basilica in Rome (one of only five women to be interred there) and her tomb marked with a monument by the great Baroque sculptor, Bernini.  I am sure that if the devil had met Matilda rather than St Pellegrino on that mountain top, he would have been the one sent round in a spin.

Matilda, The Countess of Tuscany. Bernini's sculpture in 1635)

Physical attraction

Fabiola Gianotti - huntress of the god particle

 

Fabiola Gianotti, world-famous particle physicist, is interviewed in the Weekend edition of the Financial Times, reminding me not only of the fascinating trip I made to CERN in April but also of my quest to find out why there are more women physicists in Italy than in any other European country.

Described as the defining face of the hunt for the Higgs Boson, because of her lucid performance as the spokeswoman and co-ordinator of the Atlas experiment that made the breakthrough in detecting the so-called God particle in the summer of 2012, Milan-born Gianotti has become a role model for many young would-be scientists, especially female ones.

I was visiting CERN as one of a small group from the Friends of Imperial College invited to see the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment masterminded by Imperial's Professor Tajinder Virdee. Click here for more about the trip. The CMS is, with the Atlas experiment, a key part in the search for the Higgs Boson. It is the point on the 27km Large Hadron Collider running deep in the ground around Geneva where the cataclysmic collisions take place, replicating the big bang of the birth of the universe.

Before visiting the CMS experiment, we are given an introductory presentation. Amongst the facts and figures about this extraordinary collaborative venture, I spot that of the 6,000 or so scientists at CERN, there are currently twice the number of Italian scientists (1455) than from the UK (728). The presentation is being given by Dr Mario Campanelli, so who better to ask why physics is such an attractive subject for his fellow countrymen - and women?

He ponders for a few moments. "It is a cultural thing, I think," he says. "In Northern Europe, it is regarded as a technical or engineering discipline and it is people with scientifically inclined minds that tend to study it. In Italy and  much of southern Europe, we see physics as a philosophical or even metaphysical discipline."

Dr Campanelli then reels off the names of women colleagues who are leaders in their field including  Lisa Randall a theoretical physicist and expert on particle physics and cosmology at Harvard; Dr Ilaria Segoni, particle physicist, and - hooray - Tara Shears, Professor of Physics at Liverpool University. She began working at CERN on the OPAL experiment, measuring the lifetime of the tantalisingly named beauty quarks, before joining the team at CMS and seeking answers to why there's so little antimatter in the universe.

Visible women at CERN

Later, as we emerge from the lift that has taken us 100m below ground to see the extraordinary engineering of the Large Hadron Collider, we are confronted by a huge photographic collage of the people working on the project - and it is refreshing to see how many of them are women. Yet despite this, there is an active group of women at CERN who believe that the current rate of 18 per cent female amongst the scientists is nowhere near good enough - and seized a golden opportunity to raise the issue.

Long way down - and up

When CERN was given observer status at the UN General Assembly in April this year, it dedicated its first act to highlighting the disparity between women and men who build careers in science. Kate Pachal of the University of Oxford, Barbara Millan Mejias of the University of Zurich and Sarah Saif El Nasr of the University of Bristol delivered, via web conference, a set of 10 recommendations to bring about change. See the CERN newsletter.

But let's return to that philosophical v scientific debate in relation to  physics. Fabiola Gianotti's schooling was focused almost exclusively on the classical humanities. It is a cliche she says, that scientists are only interested in data and hard facts. An accomplished pianist, she sees many links between physics and mathematics,  art, architecture and music. Lisa Randall, the Harvard professor, has written an opera.

The words of Arlene McConnell, The Institution of Engineering & Technology's Young Woman Engineer of the Year come back to me. Speaking at the launch of the Smith Institute report Unlocking Potential last year, she bemoaned the fact that so few women make the transition from  engineering study into engineering careers. Observing that many young women are taking combined courses such as engineering and music, she comments, "While engineering provided an outlet for their problem-solving and analytical passions, they felt that music quenched their creative thirsts."

This should not be a surprise. From Leonardo da Vinci through to Professor Sir Robert Winston (musician, film maker and writer as well as world famous medical man) there have been many examples of Renaissance man. Now is the time to encourage and nurture more Renaissance women, with persuasive arguments demonstrating the artistry of mathematics, the philosophy of physics and the humanity of engineering.

Sandi and Rod go underground

 

STEMinists: your country needs you!

Picture: Birmingham Mail

Just before leaving the office for a conference, I glance at the Daily Telegraph and notice a letter from Sir James Dyson highlighting (not for the first time) the critical need for more engineers and bemoaning the fact that he has struggled to fill the 200 jobs on offer in his company this year.

Moments later,  EngineeringUK's 2013 report The state of engineering arrives, hot off the press.  It has the same message. Engineering companies are projected to have 2.74 million job openings between now and 2020, of which 1.86 million will need engineering skills. Satisfying this demand means, in rough figures, a doubling of recruits to the sector. The report also points out that the average starting salary of £25,762 for engineering and technology graduates is nearly 16 per cent higher than the average for all graduates.

All very timely, as I am off to deliver the keynote speech at Engineer your future, the first STEMinism event for women engineering students, hosted at the Shell Centre in London. At least I won't be castigated for advising them to go into a dead end career,  remembering the time I was speaking at a construction conference in the late nineties. One delegate was vociferous in his disapproval of efforts to encourage women into the building trades "because they'll all lose their jobs when the inevitable downturn comes." 

Warming up at Engineer your future

The Shell Centre is humming when I arrive. More than one hundred young women, selected from the 600 who applied to attend, have made the journey from around the UK, overcoming floods, cancelled trains and stringent Shell security. All are studying engineering in various disciplines, all are bright-eyed, articulate and keen to make the most of the day. Organised by Targetjobs, the event is sponsored by EDF Energy, Shell, TFL, TubeLines, Microsoft, Cisco, Caterpillar, National Grid and MBDA.

Concentration

My speech Motivation, innovation and self-preservation seems to go down well and over lunch a stream of students come up to talk, with questions ranging from the work/life juggle (balancing the demands of a two year old son and a career) to concerns about a new course combining engineering with architecture (will I be employable or should I plump for straightforward civil engineering) to the best ways of helping mid-career women engineers to progress.

Sitting round a table with a workshop group, one young woman describes how she is studying engineering for all the reasons that I have highlighted - the excitement, the wonder and the sense of achievement - but says that the teaching at her top rank university has sucked all that out of her. She has decided to go into management consultancy. In striking contrast another waxes eloquent about her course. "It’s brilliant," she says. "Really interesting and we work on real projects and I can’t wait for my year in industry.”

Tomorrow's engineeers

Three others talk about how inspirational their maths and physics teachers were at school, but many say that they had little support and encouragement to take up an engineering career. This underlines some of the dispiriting findings of EngineeringUK’s  report. Whilst 87% of teachers agree that providing careers guidance is part of their role, eight out of ten base that guidance on their own knowledge and experience. Even worse,  21% of STEM teachers think a career in engineering is undesirable. And on top of all this,  49% of state co-educational schools in England did not send any girls to study physics at A level in 2011.

There is good news, however. EngineeringUK’s two main programmes, The Big Bang Science and Engineering Fair and Tomorrow’s Engineers, are producing encouraging results.  Impact evaluation reveals that the proportion of 12 – 16 year olds expressing knowledge of what people in engineering do has almost doubled, from 11% to 19.8% this year. Moreover the likelihood of this group seeing a career in engineering as desirable has risen year-on-year from 29% to 38%. Even more importantly, of the 56,000 young people and their teachers attending the Big Bang Fair this year, 54% were female. 

Delivering the keynote: Motivation, innovation and self-preservation

As a non-executive director of EngineeringUK I have direct experience of the Big Bang Fair and the extraordinary buzz it creates with all ages. The event includes the finals of the National Science & Engineering Competition, with its impressive and determined young contenders.

Jessica Jones, electronics inventor

For the first time, the winner at this year’s event in March was a woman student.  Jessica Jones and her co-winner Wasim Miah, both 17 and from St David's Catholic College, Cardiff, devised an Optical Foetal Monitor that indicates to pregnant women when they are about to go into labour. 

Jessica is now studying Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Cardiff University. She is also in the process of patenting a form of fibre optic sensing technology and setting up a limited company to market this product. Recognising this youthful talent, on 6 December at the IET’s Young Women Engineer awards, Jessica was announced winner of the 2012 Intel Inspirational Award for Entrepreneurship.

Back to the need for engineers. Sir James Dyson thinks that more students should be encouraged to come to the UK to study engineering and then stay here. EngineeringUK believes that we should be growing our own, encouraging more young people - particularly girls -  in the UK to stick with the maths and physics to go on to take up careers in engineering.

One of the slides I show when promoting women in engineering is a photo collage of the women who have recently become presidents of professional engineering institutions.  I highlight the fact that they all run their own businesses and also point out that we have yet to see a woman president of an electrical engineering professional body. Looking at Jessica and the other finalists at the IET, it will surely not be too long before that gap is filled.

 

Flight of fancy

Gertrude Bacon on Waterbird

The last weekend of October is spent in the Lake District, combining a reunion dinner with a couple of days hiking in the hills. As we check into the Windermere Hydro hotel at Bowness, a clutch of sepia tinted photographs catch my eye. One shows a woman in Edwardian dress, with high neck and leg of mutton sleeves. She is Gertrude Bacon, the first British woman to fly as a passenger in an aeroplane, and is seated behind pilot Herbert Stanley Adams in Waterbird, Britain’s first successful seaplane that made its historic maiden flight on Lake Windermere in 1911.

The picture to the right of the doughty pair shows an aerial photograph of the town of Bowness, taken by Gertrude in July of the following year.  In her book Memories Of Land and Sky, published in 1928, Gertrude wrote, “Windermere held no secrets from us that afternoon: fishers, bathers, lovers in secluded corners, all were revealed. Somehow, the word had got around of our intended flight and everywhere were waving handkerchiefs and friendly greetings.”

Intrigued, I sit in front of the log fire in the hotel lounge with my laptop and set about finding out more. The daughter of a clergyman who gave up his ministry to concentrate on his scientific interests, Gertrude was educated at home, and clearly relished helping her father with his experiments – particularly ballooning and astronomy. In 1899, the 25 year old Gertrude took off with her father and experienced aeronaut Stanley Spencer in a hydrogen balloon, from Newbury in Berkshire, to view a predicted spectacular meteor shower.

After several hours of enjoyable flight in the darkness, the trio discovered that the balloon showed no signs of descending as planned. Moreover, because of a decision to dispense with the usual butterfly valve, relying instead on natural leakage, there was no way of letting off the gas. The balloon reached 9,000 ft and the trio found themselves over the Bristol Channel. Concerned that when day came, the sun would add to the problems by causing the balloon to rise even higher, they came to the conclusion that they were doomed to a fatal end in the Atlantic or a crash landing by using the ripping cord to puncture the balloon. 

Reverend Bacon seems to have taken a rather philosophical approach, his main concern being the composition of his message to the flight’s sponsors, The Times newspaper. Gertrude and Stanley Spencer made rather more practical use of his copious supply of telegram forms. “We wrote and posted over the side three dozen or so neatly folded notes, labelled Important, and bearing the following message within.  ‘Large balloon from Newbury overhead, above clouds. Cannot descend. Telegraph to sea coast (coastguards) to be ready to rescue.’” 

Eventually, after ten hours of flight, the balloon began to descend of its own accord, tossed by gale force winds, crashing into an oak tree and then finally coming to rest in a barbed wire fence in a field in Neath, Wales. Gertrude suffered a broken arm and her father a lacerated leg.

Undeterred by this hair-raising flight, Gertrude Bacon went on to become a highly regarded balloonist and aeronautical engineer, permitted to accompany the British Astronomical Association on various expeditions to India, the USA and Lapland. She was noted for her speaking abilities, with one newspaper full of praise for a lecture which “was illustrated with lantern slides, experiments and – as far as the possibilities of the Parish Rooms would admit – of working models, including a non-rigid type of dirigible balloon, which floated successfully over the heads of those present”.

Gertrude was not only intrepid, but a talented photographer and author with a precise yet witty writing style. Her account of the hair-raising balloon flight is a joy to read.  (The Record of an Aeronaut, her biography of her father, published in 1907). Yet despite being a pioneering and confident woman, one of her best selling titles was How men fly.

Golden October on Lake Windermere

Back to the present. The next day dawns bright and clear and we are promised that rare event in the Lake District, a dry day. After a wonderful four-hour walk, wearing my new Salomon boots that replaced the venerable Italian pair that so spectacularly parted company with their soles in the Arizona Rim Country (see The Great Arizona road trip) we take the ferry back to  Bowness across Lake Windermere, with glorious golden sunlight burnishing the brilliant crimson, copper and yellow trees along the shoreline. 

Woman at the helm

In charge of the wooden ferry is a young woman, with a ready smile and a sure hand on the wheel.  She has worked for the company for eight years, she tells me, promoted to driving the boats three years ago. She loves the work.

We return to the hotel to find headlines announcing the departure of Cynthia Carroll from Anglo American, after six years as Chief Executive. A geologist by training, US born Cynthia Carroll was the first woman and the first non-South African to be appointed to the role when she was given the top job in 2007.

Earlier in the month Dame Marjorie Scardino (Canadian) announced her decision to step down from publishing giant Pearson after 16 years.

That leaves just two women at the top of FTSE 100 companies in the UK, of whom only one is British - accountant Alison Cooper who has been Chief Executive of Imperial Tobacco since 2010. The other is Angela Ahrends (American), who restored the upmarket credibility of Burberry from the excesses of WAG over-exposure.

The news has resurrected the calls for quotas in boardrooms and the arguments that this will result in a flood of mediocre appointments and the blight of tokenism. “We just need more women in the pipeline, not special treatment,” goes the cry, “and then it will all happen naturally."

And while we are talking about special treatment, Cherie Blair reminded us at the Women beyond leadership 2012 event held this week in London that the Davies Report revealed that only 5 per cent of Non Executive Directors appointed to company boards go through due process.

Meanwhile an engineering friend reports yet another example of the Catch 22 facing senior women in construction. She was told by a headhunter just last week that FTSE board appointments will only be a reality for her if she can demonstrate FTSE experience. 

On a more positive note, it is good news that women are driving boats, trains and planes in peacetime, and some are venturing higher. A century after Gertrude Bacon made her pioneering flight, the first  Chinese woman astronaut, Liu Yang, joined two others aboard the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft that lifted off from the Gobi Desert for a 13 day mission in July this year. Liu is a 33 year old fighter pilot, one of the cohort that completed their training in 2009 and were rewarded with special Anti-G flight suits for women that took 15 months to develop.

A far cry from the outfit devised by another redoubtable woman, Edith Berg, who was so captivated by seeing Wilbur Wright demonstrating his flying machine in France in 1908 that she persuaded him to take her up for a ride. As she set off, she tied a rope around her skirt to stop it blowing in the wind during the flight, becoming not only the first American woman to fly as a passenger in an aeroplane but also the originator of the fashionable ‘hobble skirt.’

Today’s astronaut Liu, from the poor and populous central province of Henan, has been praised in state media for her nerves of steel after safely landing her fighter jet after a bird strike that left the cockpit glass covered with blood. Speaking to the official Xinhua new agency Liu said she "yearns to experience the wondrous, weightless environment of space, see the Earth and gaze upon the motherland".  

Sentiments rather similar to Gertrude Bacon’s introduction to her book All about flying, published in 1915, in which she says, “Who in this world of ours has not envied the birds their wings, and longed like them to soar their way through the free pure vault of heaven!”

China's first female pilots in new flight suits, Tangshan, August 2009