Claudia Parsons

Claudia Sydney Maia Parsons (15 August 1900 – 5 June 1998) was a British engineer, writer and traveller. One of the first three women to graduate as engineers in England, she also wrote several books and was the first woman to circumnavigate the world by car. Early life and education Parsons was born in the Shimla hill station, British India in 1900 into an Anglo-Indian family. Her father was in the Indian Army and her mother came from a family with generations of employment in the East India Company. At the age of two Claudia and her older sister Betty were taken to Britain to be cared for by their grandmother and aunt in Guildford. Their mother returned to India and had a third daughter, Avis. Parsons attended Tormead School, an independent girls school in Surrey. She attended Guilford Technical Community College, where she completed a course on the auto-cycle engine. She read about the formation of the Women's Engineering Society, and went with her mother to meet the organisation's Secretary, Caroline Haslett, who alerted them about a technical course at Loughborough University. During World War I, Loughborough had served as an instructional factory for the Ministry of Munitions. In 1919 Parsons enrolled on an automobile engineering course at Loughborough University. She was one of four women, "lady engineers", who were studying engineering out of three hundred students, and graduated in 1922. Her fellow students were Dorothea Travers (one of the first women to be elected to the Institution of Automobile Engineers), Patience Erskine and the mechanical engineer Verena Holmes. After graduation, Parsons was accepted as a probationary graduate of the Institution of Automobile Engineers.