Dolly Shepherd

Shepherd was born in Potters Bar, Middlesex, England. At the age of 16, she got a job as a waitress at the Alexandra Palace in North London so that she could see the composer John Philip Sousa. She overheard two men discussing the loss of a target for an act in which they shot an apple off a girl's head; she volunteered on the spot.[1]

In 1905 she ascended on a trapeze slung below a hot-air balloon to a height of two to four-thousand feet before descending on a parachute.[2] On one occasion both the balloon and the parachute malfunctioned, and she found herself rising to 15,000 feet. At this height, both the cold and lack of oxygen were threatening to make her lose her grip and fall to her death. Fortunately, the balloon returned to earth before it was too late.

The mishap foreshadowed a later, more serious incident during an exhibition jump in July 1908. Shepherd had ascended with another female parachutist, Louie May. During descent May's, leading Shepherd to implore May wrap her arms and legs around Shepherd so that they could descend on one parachute. Weighed down by May, Shepherd's descended too rapidly and was left paralyzed from the impact of her landing.[3] She lay in bed, unable to move, for weeks. A doctor prescribed a course of electrical shock treatment. The doctor accidentally gave Dolly an excessively powerful electrical shock that resulted in her being ejected from the bed, but the powerful jolt realigned the vertebrae in Dolly's back and healed her. She then returned to her act and first flew again at Ashby-de-la-Zouch.

Edith Maud Cook died from injuries sustained following a jump from a balloon at Coventry on 9 July 1910 when her parachute collapsed after a gust of wind blew her on to a factory roof. Shepherd had been due to make the jump at Coventry but Cook had taken her place.

According to BBC History magazine she liked to "go high because I had it in my head that if I had to be killed, I’d like to be killed completely: good and proper!" She recalled that on one occasion she almost landed on a steam train "That driver, he had some forethought: he blew the steam and just blew me off into a canal at Grantham."[4]

In 1912, she thought she heard a voice telling her to "[not] go up again"[5] and she never did.

She was not done with flying, though. She joined the Women's Volunteer Reserve during WWI, where she drove a munition's truck. It was at that time that she met Captain Percy Sedgwick, the man whom she chauffeured. Shepherd later married him, (married name Elizabeth Sedgwick), but still managed a flight with the Red Devils display team a few years before she died at the age of 96.

There has now been a road named after Shepherd in the town where she first flew again (Ashby-de-la-Zouch); "Dolly Shepherd Close" is off Philip Bent Road approximately 0.6 miles due West of the town centre.

• Edith Maud Cook
• Rossa Matilda Richter

• Shepherd, Dolly, Hearn, Peter, and Sedgwick, Molly, When the 'Chute Went Up . . . The Adventures of an Edwardian Lady Parachutist, Robert Hale, (London), 1984.

• Profile and Photographs
• Ashby-de-la-Zouch Museum.