The witness whose evidence helped preserve the Pearse story
Born 1876; death year unresolved
Louie Johnson’s importance to New Zealand aviation history rests not on flying an aircraft, but on describing what she believed she had seen.
Ellen Lavinia Eliza Clarke, born at Waimate in 1876 to William and Ellen Clarke. The family later moved to Seadown. Miss Louie Clarke was a pupil teacher at Seadown School in 1891 and later married farmer Thomas Johnson and lived near Waitohi, where Richard Pearse was experimenting with powered aircraft.
Years afterwards, she provided a statement describing Pearse’s machine leaving level ground, moving through the air with an uneven motion and coming down on a high gorse hedge. THer affidavit is held with evidence gathered by aviator George Bolt at MOTAT’s Walsh Memorial Library.
Louie’s account belongs within a wider and contested body of eyewitness testimony. Authoritative histories place Pearse’s powered take-offs or “long hops” sometime between 1902 and 1904. They do not describe them as the sustained, controlled flight achieved by the Wright brothers in December 1903.
Louie’s recorded what she remembered seeing, giving later researchers another account to compare with technical evidence, other witnesses and the uncertain chronology.
Read the existing WuHoo story: The Day I Found Out My Family Was Part of Aviation History