Rediscovering Amy’s Egyptian Gold among the Pyramids and Kings
- Graham Walker
- May 22
- 8 min read
Now that our ‘Resurrecting Ancient Egypt’ exhibition has completed its run in Beverley, the lovely comments left in the visitors’ book have made all that hard work so worthwhile. And not only was it wonderful to work with the Egyptomania Museum who allowed us to borrow so much of their collection (thanks guys!), the team at East Riding Museums kindly gave us access to their own fascinating collections, revealing quite a few new discoveries as part of our ongoing ‘Egypt in Yorkshire’ Project.
And tracking down yet more examples of Egyptomania and Egyptian-inspired architecture across East Yorkshire, so too the stories of local people, like the men of the East Riding Yeomanry stationed in Egypt during the Great War whose evocative photographs around the pyramid sites of Giza and Memphis (below) revealed some wonderful details (especially in light of last month’s blog subject ‘Beneath the Pyramids of Egypt and Yorkshire’ https://www.immortalegypt.co.uk/post/beneath-the-pyramids-of-egypt-yorkshire).
Yet the biggest surprise was finding out that Yorkshire’s legendary pilot Amy Johnson had unexpected connections to Egypt, not only to its earliest pyramid but to its king.
Born in 1903 in Hull, where her great-grandfather was mayor and her father’s family wealthy fish merchants of Danish descent, Amy gained a degree in economics from the University of Sheffield before returning to Hull to do a secretarial course. And it was then she first went flying in 1926, paying 5 shillings for a pleasure trip but admitting that “I would have liked to have done some stunts".
By 1927 she was working as a solicitor’s secretary in London, but everything changed the following year when one Sunday afternoon she caught the bus to Edgware aerodrome, home of the de Havilland Aircraft Company, and at a cost of most of her £3 a week wages began flying lessons with the London Aeroplane Club. She then left her secretarial job to work full-time at de Havilland, and having gained her pilot’s license by 1929 became the first woman in Britain to qualify as a ground engineer (below left), indeed, “the world's first fully qualified female aviation mechanic” according to some sources.
Back in Yorkshire her friend Frederick Slingsby, himself a decorated RAF pilot, had set up his own aviation company in 1920, making gliders on Scarborough’s Queen Street (coincidentally the venue of our forthcoming talk ‘The Queens of Egypt’) and in 1930 co-founded Scarborough Gliding Club. Launching flights from the town’s Castle Hill then later Sutton Bank, the club expanded into the Yorkshire Gliding Club of which Amy became a member (above right), later declaring this ‘the safest form of flying’.
Determined to pursue a flying career, she felt the best way to counter the huge prejudice against women pilots was to try and beat the existing 15-day record for flying from Britain to Australia, despite having only 85 hours flying experience and no plane of her own. So her father helped her raise enough money to buy a second-hand de Havilland Gipsy Moth, a red biplane made of wood and canvas, repainted in her ‘lucky colour’ green with additional silver lettering spelled out Jason (below left) - not after the ancient Greek hero but the trademark of her father's business, since the name was simply a contraction of ‘Johnson’. For as Amy herself noted, “Jason isn’t half getting talked of already, but I don’t think anyone connects it with kippers!” And only a few weeks later, she and Jason set out on the journey that made her an international superstar, the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia covering some 11,000 miles when the furthest she’d then flown was the 140 miles from London back home to Yorkshire.
With her journey all laid out in her logbook now in the East Riding collection (above), she set off from Croydon aerodrome on 5th May 1930, seen off by little more than a dozen people and with no form of radio communication had only the most basic of maps. The only other supplies were a bag of meat paste sandwiches, a thermos flask and her small leather flight bag, also part of the East Riding collection while her iconic leather flying helmet is housed at the Croydon Airport Society (below).
Yet in five days she reached Karachi, setting a new world record and making headlines around the globe. Then on towards Australia, where despite monsoons, extreme heat and technical problems she arrived at Port Darwin on 24th May, receiving a hero’s welcome from the massed crowds and telegrams of congratulation from around the world, including messages from King George V who awarded her the CBE. As the newly crowned ‘Queen of the Air’ was then ordered to rest after medical attention for exhaustion, celebrating her 27th birthday on 1st July, she then began her return journey home on 7th, this time by sea aboard P&O’s Naldera which sailed into Egypt’s Port Said at the end of the month. And taking advantage of her stopover to visit some of Egypt’s ancient sites, this included Egypt’s earliest pyramid, the Step Pyramid of Djoser, where she sat atop a camel, her flying helmet replaced by a chic cloche hat and of course, most sensibly, carrying a parasol (below).
As documented in one of the wonderful photographs donated to the East Riding collection by Amy's father in 1958, one of many other items he presented was a gold medal with a ribbon of purple silk. According to the museum records, it was “engraved with Arabic characters” and “presumably presented to Amy Johnson in connection with one of her record-breaking flights in 1930, 1932 or 1936”. So working on the possibility the medal was connected to Egypt given the photo at Sakkara, we discovered the source of Amy’s gold: none other than Fuad I, king of Egypt, who’d awarded her this medal for valour presented in recognition of ‘meritorious acts’. In many ways the modern equivalent of the huge gold flies of valour presented to Amy’s ancient counterpart Queen Ahhotep c.1550 BC, it was a privilege to feature the medal in our recent exhibition in Beverely and an honour to be allowed to hold it (below).
For despite the most minimal of paper trails, a single entry on the front page of an Australian newspaper had announced that on 1 August 1930 a government luncheon had been held in Alexandria in Amy’s honour, the Egyptian Prime Minister Sidky Pasha presenting her with a gold medal from King Fuad ‘in memory of her flight from Britain to Australia’. And never one to miss an opportunity to push the things closest to her heart, Amy had responded: “Miss Johnson urged Egypt to encourage light plane clubs as an incentive to aviation. This would assist Egypt to seize the opportunity of becoming an important air junction between East and West”.
And unsurprisingly, planes feature in a second photograph within the East Riding collection (below). Entitled ‘Amy Johnson at Heliopolis Egypt, on return from her record-breaking flight to Australia in 1930’, this could have referred to a tourist visit to Heliopolis aka ‘City of the Sun’, home to the great temple of the sun god Ra dating back to the Pyramid Age and its Middle Kingdom obelisk still standing. Yet conveniently situated on the outskirts of Cairo, Heliopolis was also home to Egypt’s first airport, the first in Africa in fact, established in 1910 as a military airfield, by 1914 named ‘RAF Heliopolis’ and the first air base for the Royal Egyptian Air Force (REAF), ultimately serving as Egypt’s major airport until 1963. And certainly a biplane and what appears to be an aircraft hangar appears behind Amy, so the photo was most likely taken just as she left Egypt for the UK, now flying as a passenger with Imperial Airways at a time flights back from Egypt required two overnight stops.
Arriving home on 4th August 1930 as a national hero, she was greeted by 200,000 people at Croydon Airport and brought South London to a standstill as an estimated one million people lined the 12 mile route to the Grosvenor House Hotel in London. And as she waved to them from an open-topped car, many more could now access the celebrations through newsreel films. In addition to her medals from kings Fuad I and George V, Amy was given prizemoney of £10,000 by the Daily Mail and feted by the fashion and beauty industry. Women asked their hairdressers for the ‘Amy Johnson wave’, and with her glamorous image further enhanced by the latest designs from Chanel, fellow designer Elsa Schiaparelli made Amy a ‘flight collection’ of outfits (below left), this relative of Egyptologist Ernesto Schiaparelli who’d discovered the tombs of both Queen Nefertari and Kha and Merit often giving her creations an Egyptian twist with their themes of stars, eyes and insects (below right).
Yet far more than a fashion icon, Amy Johnson was the ultimate role model for women across the globe around which she travelled so frequently. Making more record-breaking flights throughout the 1930s, she was at the forefront of a legendary group of female pilots including Dame Mary Bailey DBE, who worked with pioneering Egyptologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson to take some of the earliest aerial photos of Egypt’s ancient sites, and Amice Calverley, heading the Egypt Exploration Society’s expedition to the temple of Abydos and taking up flying lessons in 1935 in her plans to cut down travel time to the remote site.
Yet it is Amy who is best remembered by the public. Immortalised in at least ten songs, the best known of which was performed by Jack Hylton in 1930, ‘Amy, Wonderful Amy’ (listen below) was further promoted with small enamel badges of biplanes bearing her name across their wings in an early example of mass marketing (above).
With her own countless awards, medals and trophies ranging from the King of Egypt’s gold medal to a superb silver platter presented by Hull’s fishing industry, these are now part of the East Riding collection, divided between Beverely’s Treasure House Museum and Sewerby Hall in Bridlington, taken over by the local authorities in 1936 when it was officially opened to the public by Amy herself (below).
Only a few years later at the outbreak of the Second World War, Amy, now Flight Officer Johnson, joined the Air Transport Auxiliary. But on 5th January 1941 her plane went missing in snowstorms over the Thames, a rescue attempt by HMS Haslemere and its Captain Lieutenant-Commander Walter Fletcher ending in his own tragic death and posthumous medal for gallantry. Amy’s logbook and flying bag were washed up near the crash site, but her body was never found.
Presumed dead aged only 37, her first plane Jason remains on permanent display in the Flight Gallery of London’s Science Museum while the ‘Amy Johnson Cup for Courage’ (above) housed in Hull’s Guildhall is still awarded to any local child displaying exemplary bravery after Amy herself recognised that “children can be brave too” when providing funds for its creation. Like so many of her personal treasures still right here in Yorkshire, her name has great meaning within our family with its own links to early aviation, and with Amy an affectionate family name for another great hero Amelia Edwards, ‘Queen of Egyptology’ (as discussed at https://www.immortalegypt.co.uk/post/celebrating-the-founding-mother-of-egyptology-amelia-edwards), how fitting that Yorkshire’s ‘Queen of the Air’ has such special links to Egypt too.
For even more ‘Queens of Egypt’, Jo will be at Scarborough’s Queen Street venue on 6 June as part of the Books by the Beach Literary Festival, details at: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/whats-on/scarborough/queen-street-methodist-church-scarborough/books-by-the-beach-2025-joann-fletcher/e-lklxra; she’s also appearing at Bolton Archaeology & Egyptology Society on 17th June https://www.boltonaes.co.uk/current-programme/ with news of a very special event coming to Bolton Museum soon to be announced on Immortal Egypt’s social media!
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