Biography: From Icarus to Challenger and beyond, defying gravity has always been hazardous, sometimes fatal. Amy Johnson's Icarian ambition raised her to dazzling heights of international celebrity as a pioneer aviatrix. Photographs in this book show her smiling with Charlie Chaplin, George Bernard Shaw, Amelia Earhart and President and Mrs Roosevelt. But Amy Johnson's hubris and navigational incompetence plunged her by parachute to death by drowning,. writes Patrick Skene Catling.
Midge Gillies's account of this vertiginous moth-to-the-flame career, published on the 100th anniversary of her subject's birth, is relentlessly comprehensive. As in so many other posthumous biographies these days, nothing of privacy is left uninvaded.
Gillies tells of Johnson's surrender of her virginity at the age of 21 to one Hans Arregger, a German dealer in vegetables, whose "short, stocky physique instantly attracted her" (he married someone else and, by the way, lost money speculating on potatoes); her menstrual discomforts; her hysterectomy; her unsatisfactory marriage to Jim Mollison, a famous pilot, philanderer and drunkard who called her a "horse-faced hag" (she was no beauty but wasn't ugly); her family's suicidal tendencies (two of her three sisters killed themselves); her fear of heights, and her difficulties in directing planes from A to B. Miscalculation of distances, times and fuel reserves sometimes forced her to land at C.
Aviation offered Johnson escape from Hull, the Yorkshire port where her father was in the profitable but unglamorous trade of selling fish (wholesale), and her mother seemed to be on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Johnson abandoned a boring job as a typist in a solicitor's office to move south. At 24, she discovered the London Aeroplane Club and the De Havilland School of Flying, at Stag Lane aerodrome, a small field that became great in aeronautical mythology.
She had her first flying lesson, in a De Havilland biplane, in 1928. She found the training expensive, passed from one instructor to another, and did not fly solo until the following June. At the same time, she became the first woman in the world to qualify for the licence of an aircraft ground engineer. About planes, she was both romantic and earnestly determined.
Gillies relates in exhaustive detail how Johnson prepared her first major aerial enterprise, to be the first woman to fly alone from England to Australia. Short of funds, she bought a DH Gipsy Moth, with 36,000 miles on the clock, for £200 down. She renamed it Jason, the telegraphic address of her father's fish business. With the installation of extra tanks, the plane carried 80 gallons of fuel. At 90 miles per hour, in fair weather, it could stay airborne for 13 hours, causing the pilot to experience what the author calls "the loneliness of the long-distance flyer".
Commercial sponsors supplied her with free petrol and oil, a propeller, two sets of spark-plugs, a flying suit and a parachute. With Fleet Street's enthusiastic help, she was able to reward them with lavish publicity and endorsements.
In her investigation of other ways of paying for the flight, "one of the most outlandish schemes that she gave serious consideration to", Gillies writes, "was delivering an Irish setter to the Maharaja of Patula in Allahabad. Johnson, who loved dogs, told her mother that the animal was well behaved and had been trained by the same handler who had coached Rin Tin Tin", of Hollywood fame. "He would certainly make the trip less lonely, and if I had a forced landing anywhere would be invaluable."
For protection on the ground, she had lessons in ju-jitsu, a Japanese system of unarmed combat.
Her epic journey from London to Darwin took 20 days. Gillies describes it day by day. The most frightening day of all was the last one, when she flew over the Timor Sea, notorious for sharks. After all the ordeals of fund-raising and physical and psychic endurance, Johnson suddenly found herself honoured and pampered as some new kind of royalty. She was, indeed, the "Queen of the Air". All around the world, millions adored her. The fame and fortune were almost overwhelming. Fashionable couturiers gave her clothes. A horticulturist named a rose after her. Songs were dedicated to her, notably Amy, Wonderful Amy.
There were many proposals of marriage;unfortunately, she accepted the wrong one. Jim Mollison and she flew together westward across the Atlantic. On arrival in America, after an in-flight navigational dispute, they ran out of fuel and crashed together. After their divorce, Johnson reverted to her maiden name by deed poll.
There were other arduous, record- breaking flights, but long-distance air-speed records are ephemeral. Perhaps her greatest accomplishments were to dramatise the potential of worldwide commercial aviation and to serve the cause of equal rights for woman pilots. As a feminist, she probably attracted more sympathetic attention than those suffragettes who martyred themselves chained to the railings of Buckingham Palace. Women now may fly as fighter pilots and cosmonauts.
In the second World War, Johnson ferried military aircraft for the Air Transport Auxiliary in England. One January day in 1941, she proudly insisted on flying solo when a snowstorm was forecast, got lost, and bailed out over the Thames Estuary. Her body was never recovered.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic
Amy Johnson: Queen of the Air. By Midge Gillies, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 384pp, £20