Spitfire Women of World War II. Giles Whittell
to say the wedding was set for 10 o’clock the following morning and that she and Mollison were ‘trying to keep it as quiet as possible‘. Her parents were patently not invited. But something in the senior Johnsons snapped. They drove all night, left their car in Golders Green at 9.40 a.m. and took the tube and then a taxi to St George’s Church in Hanover Square, arriving as the service ended. As the bride walked out in a black coat and white gloves, she failed to notice them. By the time she learned that her parents had made the trip they were inconsolable, and on their way back home.
Mollison’s best man had been Sir Francis Shelmerdine, the Director of Civil Aviation, who managed to straddle the new world of Mayfair aviation crazies and the older ones of civil service and landed gentry. Yet when fate began to sour on Amy Johnson, even he couldn’t help. Her marriage suffered from the start from Mollison’s inability to resist other women – chief among them Beryl Markham, who had been seducing the Duke of Gloucester at the Grosvenor House Hotel even as Johnson was fêted there on her return from Australia. (Markham, who grew up drinking cow’s blood and curdled milk on her father’s Kenyan farm, later became the first person to fly non-stop from England – rather than Ireland – to North America. She was as fearless as Johnson, and, some say, a more natural pilot.)
Johnson, now being squeezed off the aviation pages by wilder, more glamorous upstarts, began a defiantly elegant descent from stardom. In 1934, she and her husband entered a race from Suffolk to Melbourne as favourites. They lost it to Charles Scott, a preening ex-RAF officer who, four years earlier as an envious escort pilot on her victory tour of Australia, had taunted her unsubtly about her dreadful period pains. The race ended for ‘Jim and Johnnie’, as the Mollison pair were known to the press, with a seized-up engine and a furious, whisky-fuelled argument in their cockpit in Allahabad.
By this time they had in any case been eclipsed in the publicity stakes by none other than Jackie Cochran, the New York beautician and pilot who had hauled herself into the air by her proverbial bootstraps – and by marrying a multi-millionaire. In the race itself, she fared even worse than the Mollisons, running out of fuel over the Carpathians, but she had already beguiled reporters by emerging from her plane at Mildenhall wordlessly and in full make-up, with a printed press release drafted by her lawyer.
Two years later, Amy Johnson was back in the air to publicise a doomed business venture that she and a putative French backer (and lover) were calling Air Cruises. She climbed aboard a Percival Gull in a woollen suit and newsprint scarf designed for her by Elsa Schiaparelli, bound once again for Cape Town. She got there eventually, but only after botching a take-off in North Africa and restarting the whole flight a month later. Even then, far from being fêted at her refuelling stops in Italian-occupied East Africa, she ‘could not shake off the feeling that I was a trespasser, and a nuisance at that’. She had been turned down by the News of the World, but a deal with the Daily Express let her pay off her overdraft and a debt to her father. It failed to rescue her marriage, though. She and Mollison were divorced in 1936, and the approach of war found her broke again and desperate for work. In June 1939, after a brief stint as editor of The Lady Driver, a decidedly earthbound new monthly, she accepted her first full-time flying job, shuttling day and night between Hampshire and the Isle of Wight for a local airline known as the Solent air ferry. The Daily Mirror considered it a story. ‘Folks, you’ve got a chance of being flown by a world-famous air pilot for five bob a time,’ it announced. It was honest work, but it ended abruptly with the outbreak of war and failed to serve as a springboard to the job she really wanted: the head of the ATA.
Johnson already knew and liked Pauline Gower. They had met at the London Aeroplane Club in 1931, when Gower was immersed there in the improvised sort of aero-engineering apprenticeship that Johnson had glamorised the year before.
Years later, she spent a weekend at the Gower family home near Tunbridge Wells, where Pauline and her friend Dorothy Spicer invited Amy to join their two-woman firm providing joyrides in the sky to crowds who would queue up at fairgrounds across the country for a taste of the fad that was changing the world. Johnson considered them ‘nice girls’, but declined. Theirs was a raucous, retail sort of flying, taking off from new airfields for new crowds every day of the summer. Johnson considered it several steps beneath her. But as far as the aviation establishment was concerned, she was beneath them.
Francis Shelmerdine and Pop d’Erlanger favoured Gower for the ATA job on the grounds that she had never been an aviation record-seeker like Johnson, ‘with all the publicity which is attached to that role’. This may have been sensible: the idea of putting women in RAF aircraft in wartime was an invitation to scarlet-faced apoplexy in the RAF’s own high command, especially if they were to be led by the curious, chippy creature who had pioneered the heretical unisexing of the cockpit. But d’Erlanger’s verdict was also a simply coded confirmation that Gower was ‘One of Us’. Johnson, with her flat, Humberside vowels and undisguised need for recognition – not to mention money – clearly was not.
But Pauline Gower didn’t forget about her. On the contrary, after she was appointed head of the ATA’s women’s section she sent Johnson a formal letter inviting her to apply to join up. Johnson did, and was put on a waiting list. In May 1940 she agreed to take a flying test that Gower assured her would be a formality, but Johnson appears to have been simultaneously revealed as a clumsy lander (which she was) and repelled by the idea of mucking in with the other hopefuls. She described one of them in a letter home as ‘all dolled up in full Sidcot suit, fur-lined helmet and goggles, fluffing up her hair etc. – the typical Lyons waitress type … I suddenly realised I could not go in and sit in line with these girls (who all more or less look up to me as God!), so I turned tail and ran’.
It was true, or true enough. The younger pilots did revere her, but when Johnson eventually enrolled in the ATA in May 1940 she found she didn’t mind. One of her admirers was Jackie Sorour, a tungsten-tipped South African who affected a ditzy innocence but would later pull off an extraordinary aerial hitchhike to Pretoria and back. Sorour, a qualified instructor by the age of twenty despite her mother’s dogged opposition to her flying, was interviewed by Gower at Hatfield in July 1940, and immediately admitted to the ATA. From Gower’s office, she wrote later:
I went to the crew room to find the pilot who was to give me a brief refresher on the Tiger Moth. There were four or five women lounging on chairs and tables. One was laughing as I entered. I looked at her dumbfounded as I recognised the face that had inspired me during my brief flying career and had flitted on the world’s headlines for a decade. I rushed over to her and gushed: ‘Miss Johnson, may I have your autograph?’ She stared at me. There was a painful silence. Oh God, I wished the floor would open up and devour me. How could I have behaved so inanely? Suddenly she grinned: ‘My dear child, I’ll swap it for yours.’
There was something else that gradually endeared Johnson to the ATA besides the return of the old adulation – the prospect of flying Spitfires. For all her experience, Wonderful Amy had never flown anything faster than a De Havilland Comet, maximum speed 200 mph. The war was forcing up speeds. By the summer of 1940, when Fighter Command’s precious Hurricanes and Spitfires were being tested daily to destruction by the Luftwaffe’s formidable Messerschmitt 109s and Focke-Wulf 190s, the Vickers Super-marine factories in Southampton and Castle Bromwich were already turning out Mark V Spitfires capable of 400 mph when straight and level and no-one knew quite how fast in a dive.
Johnson never flew one. She died too soon. One reason for her death, oddly, was national security. Before the war the Lorenz company in Germany had devised a beautifully simple radio navigation system based on corridors of land-based transmitters. The transmitters on one side of the corridor would broadcast, continuously, only the Morse signal for A – a dot and then a dash. Those on the other side would broadcast only the signal for N – a dash, then a dot. Suitably equipped aircraft flying straight along the corridor would know they were on course because of antennae mounted at opposite ends of their fuselages: one tuned to the N signal and one to the A. As long as each antenna was the same distance from its signal’s source, the dots and dashes would overlap into a continuous tone, dull but infinitely reassuring. If the plane drifted off this radio ‘beam’ in either direction, its antennae would slip in relation to their sources. The overlapping would become imperfect,