Honour for MacGill delights family
‘Queen of Hurricanes’ inspired three generations of engineers, pilots
The ‘Queen of the Hurricanes,’ Elsie MacGill, may yet inspire a new generation of girls in Montreal when they learn of why the city is about to inscribe her name on a street sign in St-Laurent borough.
But within her own family, MacGill, who was the first woman in the world to become an aircraft designer in the 1920s, has already inspired three generations of pilots and engineers.
“I’m delighted,” Rohan Soulsby, MacGill’s step-grandson, an engineer, said on Monday after learning from an article in the Montreal Gazette on the weekend that the city plans to designate a new street in the Bois-Franc neighbourhood as “rue Elsie-MacGill.” His stepgrandmother passed away in 1980 at age 75.
Soulsby contacted the newspaper after reading that the city said it had been unable to find any descendants of MacGill to let them know it plans to honour her.
City council will vote on a resolution on the street name, along with four other new place names with an aeronautics theme in the BoisFranc neighbourhood, on Sept. 26. The area was once the site of the Cartierville airport.
Soulsby, who was born in Montreal and now lives in Vancouver, said he will contact the city to let them know that MacGill has living descendants. Coincidentally, he’s planning to visit Montreal in October, he said.
“I think it’s totally appropriate,” he said of the honour planned for his step-grandmother. “We need to celebrate the accomplishments of women in business and in the sciences, in particular.”
Soulsby’s daughter, Nicole — MacGill’s step-great-granddaughter — is about to graduate from mechanical engineering at University of Victoria.
Meanwhile, Soulsby is a pilot as well as a mechanical engineer. And his father, John — who was MacGill’s stepson — was a recreational pilot who learned to fly at Cartierville airport.
MacGill was born in Vancouver, but spent part of her early career working for Fairchild Aircraft, based in Longueuil, in the 1930s.
It’s in Montreal that MacGill first met her future husband, E.J. (Bill) Soulsby. He was a widower with two children, one of whom was Rohan Soulsby’s father, when he and MacGill married in Ontario in 1943.
Aside from being the first woman in Canada to graduate from electrical engineering, MacGill was the first woman in North America, if not the world, to earn a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering.
During the Second World War, she became chief engineer for the Canadian Car and Foundry Company in Ontario and earned the nickname “Queen of the Hurricanes” for her role in overseeing the production of the Hawker Hurricane.
MacGill was declared a Person of National Historic Significance by the Canadian government in 2007. Her mother, Helen Gregory MacGill, who was the first judge in British Columbia and active in the suffrage movement, received the honour in 1998.
It’s high time the Montreal phase of MacGill’s life have a spotlight on it, said Richard Bourgeois-Doyle, secretary general of the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa. He wrote a 2008 biography of MacGill entitled Her Daughter the Engineer: The Life of Elsie Gregory MacGill.
“She’s iconic of the reason why Montreal became an aerospace centre,” he said.
The St-Lawrence River in the 1930s served as a hub for the bush plane era, Bourgeois-Doyle said. When MacGill arrived to work for Fairchild in 1934, she worked on that type of aircraft. However, Fairchild was making a transition toward developing unique Canadian designs, he said.
“Elsie was there for a pivotal point that pushed the dominoes to lead to the innovative and robust research and development-based aerospace sector we have in Montreal,” Bourgeois-Doyle said.
Later, MacGill served on aeronautical research and regulatory committees for the National Research Council and the United Nations.
She was also a member of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women.
Soulsby said he used to go to his grandfather and step-grandmother’s home in Toronto for Sunday dinners while he was attending boarding school there. It felt like a bit of a chore to visit his grandparents when he was younger, he recalled.
By Grade 13, however, “I just couldn’t wait for Sunday to come because every Sunday I would go over there and listen to stories that Elsie and Bill would tell about their life, their careers or politics. I was just spellbound by the knowledge they had.”