Lady Eleanor Georgiana Shelley-Rolls
1872-1961
Motoring pioneer, flying and engineering enthusiast, and president of Women’s Pioneer Housing 

Lady Shelley-Rolls was a major investor in Women’s Pioneer Housing who first served on the Committee of Management (1923-1930) before becoming President of the organisation in 1931. During her time on the committee she assisted with publicity and helped organise fundraising dinners, a key source of income for Women’s Pioneer Housing - in 1924, one such dinner party raised over £1000 in investments.  

Shelley-Rolls was often absent from London – usually moving between her two country residences and yacht – but she regularly chaired Women’s Pioneer Housing’s annual general meetings and played an important role in its organisation. When the Committee of Management were considering asking Etheldred Browning to resign in 1937, they consulted Shelley Rolls as a matter of high priority. Her rather brief note on the subject confirmed their decision and, in it, she pointed out some of the errors in Florence Lily Carre’s defence of Etheldred, such as that the successful results Etheldred claimed to have achieved at Women’s Pioneer Housing were not entirely due to her, and the finance deficiency in her original budgets.  

Born into an aristocratic family in 1872, Shelley-Rolls lived an exhilarating, pioneering life. Her youngest brother was the Hon. Charles Stewart Rolls (1877-1910) a motoring and aviation pioneer who was the first person to fly the Channel non-stop in both directions. In 1904, Charles began a partnership with Henry Royce that would result in the famous British car manufacturing company Rolls-Royce Limited. Unfortunately, Charles’ love of speed and modern technology would end in tragedy: in 1910, he became the first British person to be killed in an aeroplane accident. On 23 April 1898 Eleanor married Sir John Courtown Edward Shelley, 6th Baronet, of Castle Goring, Sussex (1871 – 1951) a great-nephew of the poet Percy Shelley. Following the death of her two remaining brothers in World War One, Eleanor and her husband assumed the surname Shelley-Rolls.  

Throughout her life, Shelley-Rolls demonstrated a keen interest in ballooning, motoring, and aviation. In the early decades of the twentieth century, she was frequently photographed taking trips in hot air balloons and Zeppelins. In 1919, she co-founded the Women's Engineering Society (WES) alongside Rachel Parsons; Lady Katharine Parsons; Janetta Mary Ornsby; Margaret Rowbotham; Margaret, Lady Moir (later a Women’s Pioneer Housing investor) and Laura Annie Willson. She remained on the Women's Engineering Society Advisory Council and was part of the Women's Engineering Society's 1925 Conference of Women. She acted as the Women's Engineering Society's representative on the Electrical Association for Women board and was a member of the Council Industrial Co-partnership, of the Air League and the Executive League of Empire.  Other members of WES included Women’s Pioneer Housing member Ray Strachey. As Vice President of WES in 1919, she wrote an article ‘Random Notes on early motoring’ for their journal The Woman Engineer in 1922 in which she describes driving ‘while up at Cambridge’ based on her brother’s experiences of undertaking what was at the time a marathon drive from Cambridge to Monmouth in one of the earliest cars. In 1920, Shelley Rolls and Katherine Parsons also co-founded the Atlanta Co Ltd factory, with the notable early woman engineer Annette Ashberry as the works manager. Atalanta Co Ltd only employed women and utilised the skills women had acquired during the War. It functioned until 1928.    

After an active and eventful life spent championing aero engineering and women engineers, Shelley-Rolls died on the 15th September 1961.