Daphne Pearson Government College was an English Women"s Auxiliary Air Force NCO and later officer during World World War II and one of only thirteen women recipients of the to date, the highest medal for gallantry not in the face of an enemy that can be awarded to a citizen of the United Kingdom.
Background
Joan Daphne Mary Pearson was born at Christchurch, Dorset, near Bournemouth. When her father was appointed as vicar of a parish in Street Helens, Isle of Wight, her family moved there, to a house facing France across the English Channel. She later said that was the first time in her life she considered joining the Navy.
She boarded at Street Brandon"s School, Bristol, away from her parents who lived in the parishes her father looked after.
Career
After leaving school, she working as a photographer and photographic assistant, with her own studio before giving it up because of ill health. She then did a variety of jobs while learning to fly in her spare time. She joined the WAAF as a medical orderly after war broke out in 1939.
In the early hours of the morning on 31 May 1940 a bomber of Number.
500 Squadron Royal Air Force undershot on approach to an airstrip near the WAAF buildings in Detling, Kent, crashing into a field Upon landing, a bomb exploded, killing the navigator instantly, and leaving the pilot seriously injured.
Corporal Pearson entered the burning fuselage, released the pilot from his harness and removed him from the immediate area around the aircraft. After she was 27 metres (30 yards) from the aircraft, a bomb exploded.
She flung herself on top of the pilot to protect him.
After medical staff had removed the pilot she went back to the plane to look for the fourth crew member, the radio operator. She found him dead. Several weeks after the incident, she was commissioned as an officer in the WAAF and served in Royal Air Force Bomber Command until the end of the war. A portrait of Pearson at the time of the incident was commissioned and painted by the artist Laura Knight.
Pearson was a Corporal at the time of her courageous action.
A month later, she was commissioned as a section officer Foreign the remainder of the war she served mainly as a recruiter.
After demobilization in 1946 she became the assistant-governor of a women"s Borstal. She later worked at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew and owned a shop in Kew, selling gardening equipment, produce and flowers.
Pearson visited Australia in November 1969, on the first flight of the Comet IV on the Heathrow to Darwin route, and decided to emigrate there, working in the Victoria region as a horticulturist first at the Department of Agriculture and later at the Commonwealth Department of Civil Aviation.
She died in 2000, aged 89, in Melbourne, Australia. Pearson Government College is interred in "The Garden of Number Distant Place" located in the grounds of Springvale Cemetery, south east Melbourne.