Name Maie Baroness | Role Aviator | |
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Died January 20, 1983, Berwick, Australia | ||
Ethel Marian Sumner "Maie" Casey, Baroness Casey AC, FRSA (nee Ryan; 13 March 1892 – 20 January 1983) was an Australian pioneer aviator, poet, librettist, biographer, memoirist and artist. Richard Casey was her husband.
Biography
Ethel Marian Sumner Ryan was born in 1892, younger child of Victorian-born parents, Sir Charles Snodgrass Ryan, a prominent Melbourne surgeon, and his wife, Alice (nee Sumner) Lady Ryan. She became known as "Maie" at an early age. Rupert Ryan was her brother. She was related by blood or marriage to leading Victorian families; one of her father's sisters married Lord Charles Montagu Douglas Scott, son of the 5th Duke of Buccleuch.
Her brother Rupert, a member of the House of Representatives 1940-52, married Lady Rosemary Hay, daughter of the 21st Earl of Erroll. Maie wanted to go to university, but was blocked by her father. During World War I, she served as a VAD nurse.
Maie Ryan married Richard Casey on 24 June 1926, at St James's Parish Church, Westminster, London. She supported him in his public life. The couple had two children. His career saw them live successively in Canberra, Washington, Cairo, and India, where, during the last years of the Raj, she was Vicereine of Bengal. In Washington, D.C. she was an eloquent advocate of the United States joining the Allied cause.
In Egypt, she was a confidante of wartime leaders Winston Churchill, Field-Marshal Lord Montgomery and Harold Macmillan as well as an indefatigable war worker; in Bengal she fought to raise the status of Indian women, discussed political affairs with Mahatma Gandhi and became an intimate friend of Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten.
Her writings include a biography of Dame Nellie Melba, three autobiographies, and the libretto to Margaret Sutherland's opera The Young Kabbarli. She became the patron of the Australian Women Pilots' Association (AWPA) at its inaugural meeting at Bankstown on 16 September 1950. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She was a member of the International Committee appointed to judge a work of sculpture to honour the "Unknown Political Prisoner", and she had a long association with the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
In January 1960, Richard Casey was made a life peer of the United Kingdom House of Lords, and she became Baroness Casey. After his retirement as Governor-General of Australia (1965–69), they purchased a house built by Eugene von Guerard in East Melbourne, and her last years were spent in Berwick. Lady Casey was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) in 1982 and died in January 1983, aged 90.
Glittering Surfaces, a detailed biography of Casey, based on extensive archival research and featuring a critical assessment of her personality and achievements and candidly surveying her relations with her children, husband and other colleagues and intimates, was published by Diane Langmore in 1997.