Lilian Emily Bland was born at Willington House near Maidstone, Kent, England, on 28 September 1878.
Lilian Emily Bland was born on 28 September 1878 at Willington House, near Maidstone in Kent, England, into an Anglo-Irish family of some social standing. Her father, John Bland, was a landowner and artist, and her mother, Emily, died when Lilian was young, leading her to be raised in part by an aunt.
From childhood, Bland displayed an independent and unconventional spirit, rejecting the restrictive expectations placed on Victorian and Edwardian women. She rode astride rather than side-saddle, wore trousers, hunted, and worked as a press photographer and sports journalist — professions rarely open to women of her era.
This early defiance of gender norms set the stage for her later renown as an aviation pioneer. Her upbringing between England and Ireland, particularly her family's later move to County Antrim, would prove pivotal, as it was there that she would go on to design, build, and fly her own aircraft, the Mayfly, in 1910. Her birth date is consistently documented in modern biographical and encyclopedic sources.