OLD LADY’S FLIGHT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 February 1939, Page 3

OLD LADY’S FLIGHT

LONG DISTANCE JOURNEY. AUSTRALIA TO ENGLAND. A grandmother aged 69, who sui prised her relatives not long ago by deciding to voyage to and fro across the Empire by flying-boat, has just set oft from Southampton on a 13,000-miles flig through to Sydney, Australia This flying grandmother is Mrs Maurice Harcourt, wife of a retired official in Brisbane, Australia. It was towards the end of last yeai, after watching the flying-boats passing to and fro above her home in Brisbane, that Mrs Harcourt suddenly decided to travel by air in one of these big machines to visit some of her relatives in It seems that some of her children and grand-children, thinking such an adventure might prove too much for at her age, were rather inclined to aismade Mrs Harcourt from undertaking the flight. But although she had,, not put foot outside her Australian shores for 50 years, she was not to be deterred by any of the arguments brought forward by the younger generation. It was last October that she set oh alone for England in one of the flyingboats she had watched so often from her Brisbane home. And now she is homeward-boound by the same aerial route. , , ~ . Mrs Harcourt is proud of the iaci that she has flown across the Empire before any of the younger people ot her family have done so, and she says she thinks flying is a wonderfully comfortable method of travel for old people. •’Afraid?” she said in answer to one questioner. "Why, I felt safer in my chair in the flying-boat than in my armchair at home!"