Spitfire Women of World War II

Constance Babington Smith, Johnson’s first biographer, insists that the ‘Revolt of the Straw Hat Brigade’ ended up a humiliating solo effort. (The evidence from Johnson herself tends to support this: ‘The majority of schoolgirls have no gumption at all,’ she wrote later to her younger sister, Molly.) But there was no place for solitary gumption in They Flew Alone, shot in wartime as a propagandist piece. Everybody needed it. So everyone at the school shows up in Panamas and Amy is the Boulevard’s Boadicea.

In fact she was a loner, quick to brood and slow to smile, especially after losing her two front teeth to a cricket ball and having them inexpertly replaced. As a teenager she may have been shy, though this was not the same as being afraid of boys – or men. On the contrary, by the time she was sixteen she was infatuated with one of the more exotic creatures to have graced Hull society before the war. Babington Smith, writing in the 1960s, spared his blushes by referring to him as ‘Franz’. His real name was Hans Arreger. He was Swiss, sarcastic, rather squat, full in the lips and twenty-four years old. Johnson’s aunt Evelyn had met him at her tennis club and invited them both to one of her parties. She was his ticket to better English and, eventually, to furtive encounters in London hotels. He was her Rudolph Valentino.

By later, wartime, standards their affair was not wildly adventurous. But for years it teetered on the brink of scandal, and it did not end happily. In the summer of 1928, seven years after the party at Aunt Evelyn’s and almost as many since Johnson had made plain her wish to marry him, Arreger turned up unexpectedly at the London flat she was sharing with a girlfriend, to tell her he had married someone else – a BBC researcher based in Manchester. She flung herself on her bed and sobbed her heart out.

Part of her anguish was over having ceded the initiative at the last moment to someone she insisted she no longer loved. That spring she had sent him a devastating 2,000-word sign-off letter chiding him for stringing her along, chiding herself for her naivety and chiding men in general for their ‘staring, desiring eyes’. ‘I no longer want you, sexually or any other way,’ she wrote. ‘I don’t believe we could for a single moment be happy together, and if you came to live in London I should probably leave …’. Just in case he concluded that she was seeing someone else, she added in a postscript: ‘I do not want men and have no intention now of ever getting married.’

She would modify that position soon enough. In the meantime, reaching for something that might satisfy her yearning for excitement, and shock Arreger at the same time, she learned to fly.

To fly. Three quarters of a century later it is hard to think of any activity that comes close to the phenomenon of flying in the late 1920s in terms of danger, newness, glamour or the power to liberate and thrill. Pilots in 1928, like computer scientists in 1978, knew their machines were going to change the world. The difference was that every time the pilots went up in theirs they set themselves literally apart from the uninitiated throng, and risked their lives.

Johnson’s first close encounter with this new world of daring and defiance came after a long bus ride to the London Aeroplane Club at the De Havilland aerodrome at Stag Lane, near Edgware. In April 1928 Stag Lane was London’s launchpad to the skies, or at least to the clouds. Naturally inclined to push things until told to stop, Johnson walked onto the aerodrome without a membership card, found a deck chair and watched, enthralled, as the cream of the flying set practised circuits and bumps. Eventually she plucked up the courage to talk to one of them, who told her teaching could be had for 30 shillings an hour. That evening she wrote briskly to her parents: ‘It is too good to be true … I’m going up one evening next week to sign the papers, and I’ll probably have my first lesson next weekend.’

In twenty-five months she would be taking off for Australia with a thermos and a packet of sandwiches. The appearance of an epic journey accomplished on a whim was part of its extraordinary appeal, but in reality Johnson was fiercely driven – and not just by a desire to prove how much Arreger had underestimated her. She was also in search of powerful distractions from grief, for in the summer of 1929 her sister, Irene, had committed suicide by putting her head in the oven at her new marital home. Ultimately Amy was stubbornly convinced that whatever life threw at her she was destined for what came to be known as ‘stardom’.

Not many women pilots in the ATA shared this conviction. Most considered it vulgar to court publicity or were actually scared of it (as some still are, in their late eighties, self-censoring at the sight of a tape recorder out of modesty and a lifelong allegiance to the Official Secrets Act). But all of them understood Johnson’s love of flying as an escape from the wretched trap that faced adventurous young women in the 1930s. They had been handed the vote and a few seats in Parliament. They had won sullen recognition that a man’s work could sometimes be done quite well by women (though not yet – Heaven forbid – for the same pay). Yet in practice almost as soon as they applied for work they were thrown back on the mercy of men.

In Johnson’s case these men included Vernon Wood, partner in a City law firm. He gave this Sheffield University graduate, with her second-class degree in Economics, French and Latin, the best job she had before becoming famous – in his typing pool. There was also Jack Humphreys, sinewy chief mechanic at Stag Lane, who every evening after her day job taught her how to dissect and reassemble Tiger Moth engines. And there was her father, who sent regular envelopes of bank notes to his daughter, and boxed herrings to those who helped her.

For the women who followed Johnson into the air the war would give them a purpose. Johnson had to find her own. From the moment she first considered flying to Australia her best hope of sponsorship lay in persuading Lord Wakefield she could boost his sales of Castrol lubricants. She wondered about delivering an Irish setter to the Maharaja of Patula, since they both loved dogs, but eventually, less than a month before that misty Croydon takeoff, Wakefield came through with a promise of petrol and £300 towards the cost of a plane.

The flight to Australia launched her into a new, blindingly public life that had the rhythm of a professional boxer’s. Every few months, slackening gradually to every few years, she would hatch a new plan to risk her neck, grab some headlines and secure a fat purse with which to fund a lifestyle of sometimes prodigious extravagance. Her first goal after Darwin was Peking, but she got no further than Moscow after crash-landing in a snowbound field sixty miles north of Warsaw. (In Moscow, she found her fame transcended ideology and immunised her against internment: Lenin’s widow hailed her as a model for Soviet womanhood.) She then flew to Tokyo and sat there for tea and photographs with General Nagaoka of the Japanese Imperial Aviation Society. In 1932 she smashed the London-Cape Town-London record in a De Havilland Puss Moth by taking a wild western route over the Sahara and Fernando Po. And the following year she made it ‘backwards’ over the Atlantic, against the prevailing westerlies, and joined the American aviatrix Amelia Earhart and the Roosevelts for tea.

Earhart apart, Johnson was the leading woman in an elite corps of aviation fanatics. Theirs was a golden age of record-breaking in which the right route, written up with the right sort of understatement and to deadline, could net a newspaper deal worth six figures in modern money. There was stiff competition for front-page treatment, but Johnson stayed in contention by means of the second most audacious stunt of her career. Over lunch at Quaglino’s in Soho, on a spring Monday in 1932, she agreed to marry her most formidable and flamboyant rival.

This was Jim Mollison. More than anyone, Mollison drew Johnson into the ‘Mayfair set’ that epitomised 1930s style and superficiality, and from which the ATA eventually offered her relief. He was photogenic and knew all about the paralysing exhaustion of long-distance flying. Otherwise he wasn’t her type. He was short-tempered and addicted to liquor and adrenalin. Scottish by birth, he had flown some of the earliest airliners to have entered service in Australia. It was there he met Johnson while escorting her to Sydney on her post-flight publicity tour in 1930. They Flew Alone depicts that meeting as the dreamy work of fate; an instant connection in a softly lit cockpit pushed through the night by four rumbling great piston engines. He asks for two dances at the Governor General’s ball to which he is taking her, but when he seeks her out there the host himself, in cockaded hat and tails, declares her taken.

In reality, Mollison rates no mention in Johnson’s diaries until 1932, when she met him in Cape Town and began to fall for him. Earlier that year she had had a hysterectomy, apparently to put an end to debilitating period pains that were interfering with her flying. At any rate, whoever married Amy Johnson would not have to be a model father, and when the press learned it was to be Mollison, this incomparably racy couple was adopted as story fodder with no sell-by date.

They lived together at once, not in a house or flat but in a succession of suites in the Grosvenor House Hotel. Their views were of Park Lane and the sky. Their public relations were handled by William Courtney’s Aviation Publicity Services, which had a branch office in the lobby. Their shopping trips would often take in Selfridges – a short walk away on the far side of Oxford Street – which had its own aeroplane department.

Mollison was bad company. He was not quite a monomaniac: adulation and money interested him as much as flying. But he brought out the monomaniac in his new wife, and she drifted rapidly away from the emotional moorings her long-suffering father had provided. After years of regular correspondence in which she would trail her schemes, their costs and their potential returns and he would offer cautious encouragement and money, they fell out of touch. Will and Ciss Johnson would read of their daughter’s flights and fancies in the papers, or hear of them from neighbours and have nothing to add.

On 22 July 1932 they received a rare letter from Amy posted from the Grosvenor House Hotel saying there was nothing to the printed rumours that her wedding to Mollison was imminent. But a week later a telegram arrived in Hull, at 9 p. m., also from Amy, 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, the tone interrupted, and the pilot would be snapped out of her daydream or funk.

If you had an ordinary voice radio you could also call up the nearest radio-equipped aerodrome and ask it where you were. Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown, the finest test pilot Britain ever produced, once did this over a fogbound patch of Kent, and it probably saved his life. But in that Airspeed Oxford at Squire’s Gate, with her chit for Kidlington in Oxfordshire, Johnson had no radio of any kind, and nor did any other ferry pilots. As the spliced-in newsreel puts it in They Flew Alone: ‘No radio of course. Too useful for Jerry.’

The other reason Johnson would never fly a Spitfire was the weather that was keeping her on the ground at an aerodrome near Blackpool on that miserable Sunday in January 1941; the weather that would have made the radio navigation option something of a life-saver; the sodden, all-pervading, bloody-minded British weather.

Johnson finally lost patience and took off at 11.49 a.m. Not many others ventured up that day, but Jackie Sorour did. ‘That same afternoon I took off from South Wales in a twin-engined Oxford aircraft bound [like Johnson] for Kidlington,’ she wrote in Woman Pilot.

The weather … lay like a blanket over the Southern Counties. Drizzle and low cloud was forecast for most of the route to Kidlington but with a promise of improvement. Reluctantly I headed into the curtain of rain and, a few hundred feet above the ground, searched for the promised improvement. It was non-existent. I should have turned back but valleys beckoned invitingly. I flew into one and peered ahead but the trap had sprung. The other end of the narrow valley was blocked with a wall of cloud. I rammed open the throttles, pulled the control column back and climbed steeply. With unnerving suddenness the ground vanished as the clouds swirled around the Oxford in a cold embrace and forced me to climb on instruments … I tried to keep the angle of climb constant. Suddenly at four thousand feet the clouds splintered into bright wintry sunshine; beneath me the clouds stretched to all horizons like a soft woollen blanket. Desperately lonely and frightened, I searched for a gap. There was none. Whilst I stayed above I was safe. Like a spotlight the sun cast a shadow of the Oxford on the top of the clouds and circled it with a halo of rainbow hue. I had the odd thought that I was the shadow and the shadow was me. Curiously I watched it to see what it was going to do next; silly thing, it was going round in circles.

The petrol gauge drooped inexorably. I had to go down … Reluctantly I throttled back and eased the nose down. The clouds embraced me like water around a stone as I slowly descended. Two thousand feet. Fifteen hundred. One thousand. Six hundred. It’s no good, prompted experience, get back. Ignoring the urgent warning I eased lower with the altimeter ticking off the altitude like a devilish clock. If I were lucky I would be over the hill-less sea. If not, I had not long to live. Suddenly the clouds broke, revealing, just beneath, the grey, sullen waters of the Bristol Channel. I pulled off my helmet and wiped the sweat from my face before turning towards the Somerset coast faintly visible to the east.

I looked at the petrol gauge. Twenty minutes left to find an aerodrome. Absently I worked out the little problem. Twenty times sixty. Two sixes are twelve. Add two noughts. That’s it. One thousand two hundred seconds before I wrecked the aeroplane and paid the penalty for not turning back. But all the luck in the sky was with me that day. Soon after crossing the coast an aerodrome blossomed out of the ground like a flower from the desert. Pulling the Oxford round in a tight circuit I landed on the glistening, rain-soaked runway.

Next day on returning to Hatfield I learned that Amy Johnson was dead.

There is not much that can be said with any confidence about Johnson’s last flight, though it must have droned on against an appalling crescendo of fear. For those left to reconstruct it over the years there is also the knowledge that, for all her fear, she had every reason to believe until the last second of her life that she would survive this scrape as she had so many others.

Did she, in fact, kill herself? She did once tell a friend that she was sure she’d finish up in the drink. And it was alleged by Jimmy Martin (later Sir James, an aircraft builder who never quite finished an aircraft for her to fly) that she told him her first impulse on learning years earlier that Hans Arreger had married someone else had been to end it all by finishing her flying training and then crashing. But the idea that her doomed run down to Kidlington was a suicide mission is even less plausible than the more popular conspiracy theory that she was carrying a mystery passenger on a clandestine or illicit trip (some speculated she was smuggling the faithless Arreger back to Switzerland, even though there is no evidence that she was still in contact with him) – and had to bale out because of a catastrophic malfunction or even after being hit by friendly fire.