Follow the fortunes of a P&O engineer as he rises through the ranks and sees the world. In this promotional…
Elsie Mackay was the glamourous and wayward daughter of P&O Chairman James Mackay, 1st Earl of Inchcape. An aristocrat, actor and aviator, Mackay brought a female aesthetic to the design and decoration of P&O’s liners in the 1920s.
Elsie Mackay was born in Shimla, India in 1893, the third of Lord Inchcape’s four daughters. During the first world war she volunteered in the small hospital for wounded officers in the family’s Mayfair home. Here she met, nursed, and fell in love with one of the patients: Lieutenant Dennis Wyndham, a South African actor serving with the Wiltshire Regiment.
Actor and Aviator
Wyndham’s career on the stage failed to impress Lord Inchcape who refused to consent to their marriage. Undeterred, and characteristically defiant, the pair eloped to Scotland where they wed in secret in May 1917.
After the war, Mackay joined Wyndham on the stage using the name Poppy Wyndham. She was the leading lady in several silent films, performing “hair-raising stunts with the utmost nonchalance and success”. But in 1922 Mackay’s marriage and film career ended just as dramatically as they had begun.
The wayward daughter returned to the family fold reclaiming her maiden name and place in aristocratic society. But Mackay was not finished with adventure. In August 1922, she was one of the first British women to obtain her flying certificate from the Royal Aero Club.
Aristocrat and Advisor
Meanwhile at sea, Inchcape had long suffered his wife and daughters’ advice on the (lack of) comforts of shipboard accommodation. An ambitious ship building programme gave Inchcape the perfect excuse to involve Mackay in the design and outfitting of two new classes of steamers for the Indian and Australian Mail Services.
She was formally employed by the company with a salary of £600 a year (the equivalent of £30k today) with her own office at Tilbury docks. Unknown to Mackay, her salary was paid not by the company but directly by her father.
What Mackay lacked in training and experience she made up for in energy and dedication. The Daily Express reported that “she frequently arrived to begin work at 6 o’clock in the morning – and Heaven help the members of staff who were not equally early.”
Mackay injected colour, comfort, and convenience. Large mirrors, wardrobes, shoe racks, umbrella stands, and dimmable reading lights were all added to the CATHAY and RANCHI cabins. Period public rooms were lightened and softened with cheerful paint, prints, silk hangings and, to the consternation of one old captain, a plethora of cushions and footstools.
Mackay’s efforts struck a chord with female passengers. When CATHAY arrived in Australia on her first voyage, the Geelong Advertiser noted approvingly that “Australian women were delighted to find that the interior graces of the vessel are not due to mere man, but to one of their own sex.”
VICEROY OF INDIA was Elsie’s legacy: luxurious, excessive, and redolent of the transatlantic liners she once frequented.
The secret aviator
While Mackay furnished her father’s liners, she secretly planned another adventure: to be the first woman to fly the Atlantic. She enlisted the help of wartime ace and career pilot Captain Walter Hinchcliffe as her co-pilot. If successful, they would be the first to fly across the Atlantic from east to west.
With her parents blissfully unaware of their daughter’s deception, Hinchcliffe and Mackay took off from RAF Cranwell in Lincolnshire at 8.35am on Tuesday 13th March 1928. What began in secrecy ended in tragedy and mystery when as both plane and pilots were lost in the icy waters of the Atlantic.
A year later, the VICEROY OF INDIA entered service with a small but poignant reminder of its young, glamourous, daring, decorator: a portrait perched on the period fireplace.
Mackay was brave, capable, adventurous, thoroughly determined and driven; pushing at the boundaries of what was possible physically, and acceptable socially, for a young aristocratic woman in the 1920s. At P&O she would always be remembered for being the first woman employed in liner interiors, injecting energy, modernity, and a distinctly feminine touch into the Company’s fleet.
