Joan Daphne Mary Pearson was born at Christchurch, Dorset, near Bournemouth. When her father was appointed as vicar of a parish in St 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 Royal Navy. She boarded at St Brandon's School, Bristol, away from her parents who lived in the parishes her father looked after. After leaving school, she worked as a photographer and photographic assistant, with her own studio, before giving it up because of ill health. She then had a variety of jobs while learning to fly in her spare time.
Pearson joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force as a medical orderly shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. In the early hours of the morning on 31 May 1940, Avro Anson bomber R3389 of No. 500 Squadron RAF undershot on approach to an airstrip near the WAAF quarters 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 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.For her deeds, Pearson was awarded the Empire Gallantry Medal. The full citation for the award was published in the London Gazette on 19 July 1940 and reads: After the revocation of the EGM, King George VI invested Pearson on 31 January 1941 with its replacement, the George Cross. She was the first woman to receive the new award. A portrait of Pearson at the time of the incident was commissioned and painted by the artist Laura Knight. Several weeks after the incident, Pearson was commissioned as an officer in the WAAF and served in RAF Bomber Command until the end of the war, working mainly as a recruiter.
Later life
After demobilisation in 1946, Pearson 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. She 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 attended reunions of the Victoria Cross and George Cross Association until her late eighties. Pearson's attendance of a meeting of the Victoria Cross and George Cross Association led to a report about her in a Sunday newspaper in 1995, and eventually to her meeting the pilot whose life she had saved, after his son recognised the circumstances surrounding his rescue. Pearson died on 25 July 2000, aged 89, in Melbourne, Australia. She was interred in "The Garden of No Distant Place" located in the grounds of Springvale Cemetery, in south-east Melbourne.
