THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF LEAPING LILY
Her parachute harness came free and she plunged to the ground. But did the Edwardian skydiving pioneer really panic... or was it all a cruel cover up?
SHE was billed as “Leaping Lily”, heroine of the skies and an Edwardian parachuting pioneer. But when Lily Cove plunged to her death on the West Yorkshire moors in front of a gaping crowd of onlookers, her fate became a cause célèbre and led to a bid to ban women from airborne adventures.
The tragedy that took place on a hot June evening in 1906 in Haworth, near Keighley, saw the 20-year-old blamed for her death, apparently having suffered a blind panic in the air before plummeting to the ground minus her parachute.
Yet more than a century after her sensational demise in front of thousands of horrified spectators, new clues point to the real culprit behind Lily’s dreadful death.
She was born Elizabeth Mary Cove in the East End slums of Victorian London.
An only child whose mother died or left her, Lily’s early life was blighted by poverty – and a criminal for a dad. She was raised by Hackney bootmaker Thomas Cove, who served a string of prison sentences for indecent assault.
While he was in and out of Wormwood Scrubs jail, she ran away to join the flying circus, where she met barnstorming balloonist
Captain Frederick Bidmead and reinvented herself as “Leaping Lily”.
Female parachutists were all the rage and Bidmead recognised a crowd-puller when he met one. He dubbed Lily “a jolly girl” who “had a joke and a jest for everyone”.
By the time she was booked to leap from a balloon 700ft above the annual Haworth gala on Saturday June 9, she was portrayed (possibly falsely) as an experienced skydiver.
Spectators arrived in their droves but the show was a flop after the balloon failed to ascend. An agitated Bidmead tried to blame the local coal gas supply but later admitted there was a tear in his balloon. The ascent was hastily rescheduled for two days later, on June 11.
Leaping Lily and her moustachioed manager returned to the showground amid cheers and whoops from a 7,000-strong crowd. A brass band played as the flying showgirl whipped off her skirt to reveal a daring outfit of velvet tights.
But was the outwardly “jolly girl” really as confident as she seemed? One gala-goer remarked that Lily seemed “somewhat pale” as Bidmead helped her into her parachute harness and she took her place beneath the newly-patched balloon.
She took off amid whistles and hats thrown in the air. Perched on a swing beneath the airbag, her parachute attached to the side of the balloon, she soared into the summer sky. Lily fluttered her hankie at her sea of fans as the earth fell away and she floated out towards the moor.
Captain Bidmead travelled below in a pony and trap, followed by large crowds on foot, craning their necks to the sky.
Just nine minutes later, something went catastrophically wrong.
Lily dropped from the trapeze… but somehow came free from her parachute.
A nightmare unfolded in the sky and the crowd watched in sick disbelief as she hurtled towards the ground, cartwheeling helplessly in the air and crashing into a field near Ponden reservoir at Stanbury.
Her parachute lay almost 20 yards away. One eyewitness, Cowling Heaton, said the balloon had “exploded”.
He raced to Lily’s side and found her eyes open but blind with shock. He took her into his arms and said: “My good woman, if you can speak, do!”
Two sobs escaped her lips. Her legs and skull were broken, blood was running from her mouth and nose. Moments later, she died where she fell, never speaking a word, never able to explain what had gone so fatally wrong.
A cart carried her body back to town. Onlookers sobbed or watched in appalled silence as she was carried inside an inn and the coffin maker called.
“The news was staggering,” wrote one reporter. “Many could scarcely credit that the blithe, vivacious, fearless young lady who a very short time before had ascended, full of hope for a successful performance, now lay lifeless.”
Haworth was feverish with speculation. All eyes were on Bidmead and he wasted no time in sidestepping the blame.
“Captain Bidmead emphatically declared that the affair was a pure accident,” reported the local paper. “He attributed Miss Cove’s terrible fate to her horror of water.”
LILY might have feared landing in the reservoir, he said, and claimed she had ignored his instructions about where to jump. Now Bidmead had to convince the inquest jury. He took the stand and insisted Lily had unhooked the parachute harness rings.
“She must have unfastened them on account of being afraid of dropping into the reservoir,” Bidmead told the coroner’s court. Lily could not swim, he told the court, and had
“a perfect horror of dropping on water”.
Lily probably thought she could hold on to the straps, he continued, but lost her grip around 60ft from the ground.
Though stunned that anyone would willingly remove their parachute, the coroner accepted the Captain’s theory and recorded a verdict of accidental death.
At Lily’s funeral, the Reverend Thomas Story remarked that “strange and unexplainable things happen”.
Lily was laid to rest locally at
Haworth cemetery but the controversy around her death rumbled on. On the day of her funeral, several politicians leapt to their feet in Parliament to demand a ban on women performing airborne stunts.
MP Sir Arthur Fell said: “I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether his attention has been called to the death of Miss Cove when descending from a balloon in a parachute on June 11 and whether he proposes to take any steps to prohibit such exhibitions in future.”
Home Secretary Herbert
Gladstone was only too happy to oblige.
“My attention has been called to this shocking case. I have prepared and hope to introduce shortly a Bill extending the Dangerous Performances Acts to all women whatever their age may be,” he told the Commons.
His solution was to bracket women with children.
Lily’s case even crossed the Atlantic when the New York Times warned England against banning every entertainment performed by daring women. Subsequently, female stage, circus and flying performers held a series of protests across Britain – including a march in London’s Hyde Park – and the bill never made it into law.
The furore died down, but the mystery of Lily Cove’s last moments was never solved. She had been blamed for her own death and the world moved on.
When I took a closer look at Bidmead’s version of events, however, something did not add up. Several things, in fact, fell short of the facts.
BIDMEAD claimed Lily had made 20 previous ascents and six successful parachute jumps. But the only performance on record is the one that killed her.
He also claimed that, “as recently as Whit Monday she made a very successful parachute descent at Carmarthen”.
Yet contemporary newspapers make no mention of her.
Bidmead also said Lily’s most recent ascent had been the week before in Cambridge. Again, there is only a record of Bidmead having been there, and it was in January that year when he was sued for a failed ascent the previous August. He blamed another “unforeseen accident”.
Bidmead also claimed to have worked with Lily for two years. Yet he had taken out an advert in a theatrical newspaper just seven weeks before the Haworth jump, stating: “Captain Bidmead has a few vacant dates... Lady parachutists write immediately.”
Bidmead’s case rested in part on Lily’s supposed fear of water. Yet one juror said “a report had been current in Haworth during the day that she could [swim], and that she expressed a desire to drop into the dam”.
Most damningly, Bidmead’s insistence that his safety checks were all “first class” was at odds with his own history of calamities. In 1895, he fell almost 80ft and crashed on to a roof. In another plunge his parachute failed to open at 3,600ft and he was only saved when a gust of wind slammed him sideways. Three years later, his parachute became tangled with his balloon ropes and he was dragged for miles before crashing into a hedge.
Mishaps, court cases and death, it seems, followed Captain Bidmead around.
Yet he wasn’t the only manager of the time who put female performers in danger. In 1896, another young parachutist working with famed aeronaut Auguste Gaudron suffered a horrific death. Bristol-born Louisa Evans was little more than a child when she reinvented herself, calling herself “Mademoiselle Albertina”.
She drowned in the sea when a leap over Cardiff went wrong and Gaudron was criticised so harshly at the inquest, he wept. Louisa was only 14 and a complete novice. Her parachute was never found.
A cynic might note that from the moment poor Lily hit the ground, Bidmead was free to portray the whole thing as accident, suicide or failure to follow his instructions.
But there is no evidence Lily was an experienced parachutist. Nor is there proof Bidmead’s equipment or checks were adequate. There is only the word of a veteran of endless crashes, torn balloons and failed parachutes.
We can never be certain he had blood on his hands. But if the disaster-prone huckster was not telling the truth, it throws a chilling new light on his words to a reporter after poor, brave Lily’s shocking death.
“Last night I saw it in a dream,” Bidmead confessed. “It haunts me.”
‘The furore died down. Lily had been blamed for her own death, and the world moved on’