Headlines from the Sky

This new biography of Lady Grace Drummond Hay follows her extraordinary life, from a London working class family to the British aristocracy, through her leading journalist's career of the 1920s and '30s, and involvement in all the key airship flights of that era. She joined a select number of women to gain a pilot's licence in the early 1930s, and her impressive journalism saw her interview key figures of the day, including Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, Haile Selassie, Goebbels, Mahatma Ghandi and Madame Chiang Kai-Shek. Travelling widely, her stories from Moscow included a report on the Russian air force and from Berlin on Germany's rapid build-up of new aeroplanes in the 1930s. She enjoyed a lasting romance with an American journalist until her death at just fifty-one, after their time in prisoner of war camps in Manila and Shanghai. This fascinating new book includes a wealth of stories on Grace’s involvement in the flights of the famous Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg, and the drama as she became the very first woman to circumnavigate the world by air in 1929.