THE BRAIN WHO ARMED THE WARRIORS
‘Queen of the Hurricanes’ helped secure victory in Battle of Britain
In the patriarchal iconography of war, heroic male figures predominate. But this slender, bespectacled disabled woman — an important Canadian feminist — deserves to share that pedestal. Elizabeth Muriel Gregory “Elsie” MacGill wasn’t the brawn — she was the brain who armed the warriors. “Queen of the Hurricanes,” she organized mass production of the aircraft that saved Britain from the Nazis in 1940.
The Spitfire gets the glory, but the Hawker Hurricane, slightly slower but more manoeuverable, shot down more than 1,500 German bombers and fighters (60 per cent of the kills) during the Battle of Britain. Yet it had been far from a sure thing. The Royal Air Force was slow to adopt single-wing aircraft. Then, after losing hundreds during the fall of France, it was desperate for replacements.
MacGill, aged 35 and chief aeronautical engineer at the Canadian Car and Foundry Company in Ontario, retooled the plant to produce 60,000 different parts — ingeniously, parts were designed to be interchangeable so mechanics in the field could repair aircraft easily — and mass-produced Hurricanes for the RAF.
She was born in Vancouver on March 27, 1905, to James Henry MacGill, a lawyer, and Helen MacGill. Her mother, a suffragist and journalist, was the first woman to graduate from the University of Toronto, received an MA, and in 1917 became the first female judge appointed in British Columbia.
Elsie became the first woman to graduate with an electrical engineering degree. She then became the world’s first woman to earn a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering. In 1929, she contracted polio. While convalescing, she designed aircraft. In 1938, now walking with canes, she was appointed chief aeronautical engineer at Canadian Car and Foundry.
After the war, she continued working, but also represented Canada on the International Civil Aviation Organization, was a technical airworthiness adviser on public aviation policy, and fought for women’s rights, including decriminalization of abortion. She was president of the Canadian Federation of Business and served on the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. She won many engineering awards, was appointed to the Order of Canada, earned the Amelia Earhart Medal from the International Association of Women Airline Pilots, and is in Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame, the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame and Women in Aviation’s International Pioneer Hall of Fame.
She died on Nov. 4, 1980, in Cambridge, Mass.