Never Fear

by Ian Strathcarron

  He gradually worked his way up to Rotorua, the town famous for its boiling mud and geysers. There he stayed in Brent’s Hotel, which old photographs in Rotorua Public Library show to be a one-floor rambling clapboard building. It had originally been a ‘temperance hotel’ but had mended its ways by the time Francis stayed there. As a kind of homage, we stay at the modern and nondescript Millennium Hotel built on the same site. In his autobiography Francis recalls how one evening he was helping a friend build an extension in a shack nearby when suddenly a geyser burst through and blew off the newly laid roof. I go to see one of the famous geysers, which at the time looks annoyingly un-geyserlike. Under a sign saying ‘Largest Natural Blow Hole in the Southern Hemisphere’ I ask a young lady how likely it is to perform. ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘10.30 every morning and 4.30 every afternoon.’ ‘Ah,’ I say, ‘so you have an on/off switch?’ ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘that’s pretty much it these days.’

  It was at Brent’s Hotel that Francis met a man who indirectly changed his life. ‘Harold Goodwin was a queer cuss,’ he wrote, ‘very quietly spoken; he really ought to have been a Maori chief because he was so adept at grunting. We used to laugh at his views on women; the girls thought them a great joke. He was like a public schoolboy in the way he regarded women as a nuisance and a useless hindrance to enjoyment of life. He was an excellent companion for me, and we went on many expeditions together. In Wellington he introduced me to his brother Geoffrey in the bar of the Cecil Hotel.’ The Cecil Hotel was demolished in the 1950s and is now another mid-rise bank building of no particular distinction and minimal use to mankind.

  Brent’s Hotel, Rotorua; now the site of a nondescript chain hotel

  It’s a recurring theme that striving young businessmen meet a kind of mentor or booster who give them that first big break. Geoffrey Goodwin was Francis’s booster.

  ‘Geoffrey Goodwin was a man about seven years older than me, taller and very strong. He had amazingly strong wrists, covered in ginger hair. He had a freckled face, and looked somewhat like Chairman Khrushchev, with his baldish, roundish cranium and upper eyelids hooding the outer corners of his eyes, which indicated his shrewdness. He said to me, “What are you going to do?” And when I told him I was thinking of heading for Australia he said, “Why don’t you join me in a little business I’ve started and become a land agent?” “What is a land agent?” “Oh, he sells land and houses and things.” “All right,” I said. I became a partner of Goodwin & Chichester Land Agents. My savings of the previous years went into a half share of the furniture and assets.’

  Throwing his £400 savings in with Geoffrey was the best decision the young Francis made, the cornerstone of his confidence and prosperity, which led directly to fortune and indirectly to flying, Sheila and sailing. They were the perfect twosome, Geoffrey with the experience, shrewdness and local connections that Francis lacked and Francis with the can-do salesmanship and raw vitality that Geoffrey needed. Even their handwriting complemented each other’s. In the first year they had gone from being what we would call estate and land agents with a shack office in the nowheresville known as Lower Hutt to property developers with smart offices in Courtenay Place in the capital, Wellington.

  A young and assertive Francis, far left, with the land team. Geoffrey Goodwin, far right

  They bought fifty acres north of Wellington, divided it up into fifty plots and built houses with gardens on each of them. From the profits they bought 1,100 acres of virgin scrubland above Silverstream, about 20 miles north of Wellington. Francis takes up the story:

  We developed this property in two ways. First, we planted it with pine trees. Geoffrey was an enthusiastic tree-grower, and believed in forestry as a profitable investment. I like trees too, so we got cracking. I raised the first 40,000 trees in my backyard from seeds collected from pine cones; it was fun watching the little pine-needle seedlings emerge with the seeds on their backs.

  The beds were protected from the sun’s heat by scrim stretched across wooden frames. We planted out these experimental seedlings on a hill in rows six feet apart, with nine feet between seedlings. They took well, so we started a nursery of our own, and soon had several planting gangs at work. Overall, we planted a million trees.

  We built thirty-five miles of road, and at one time had three teams of surveyors at work. We had to sell off small lots of land as sites for weekend cottages in order to pay for the whole scheme. We bought another property alongside, and cut that up as well. We built up a sales force of thirty salesmen, selling only our own land.

  Soon we owned three private companies operating in land which were doing well. By the time I was twenty-six my income was £10,000 a year.

  Google suggests that this is about £450,000 a year in today’s money. What Francis didn’t say, and what Geoffrey’s grandson Ralph tells me in Wellington, was that the government had a highly incentivised tax relief scheme for tree planters at the time. Geoffrey may have been an enthusiastic tree grower but that also meant that Goodwin & Chichester Land Agents paid virtually no tax on the considerable profits.

  Like modern developers, they gave their sites romantic, halcyon names such as Pinehaven and Blue Mountain. Nowadays Pinehaven is a rural suburb, while Blue Mountain has more remote, single properties across it. It is while visiting the first of these that I become mightily impressed by one of Francis’s achievements for the first time. Pinehaven is actually rather wonderful and he co-created it from nothing. Firstly, the scale is impressive: the eventual 1,900 acres are spread over half a dozen hills. There are still a million pine trees, mostly newly grown as Pinehaven is also a commercial timber venture, run by the current generations of Goodwin & Chichester, Ralph and Giles respectively. And here and there, and by now enormous, stand the original pine trees planted by Francis and Geoffrey ninety years ago.

  I am lucky enough to be shown round by Gordon Wilson, who lived at 20 Chichester Drive for many years and now lives nearby, still in Pinehaven. The roads, like Chichester Drive, are named after the Goodwin & Chichester partners and Geoffrey’s children and extended family. Most of the original homes have been replaced but the plots and settings remain. Ralph Goodwin shows me the original development scheme, a metre-square layout on heavy paper, with each plot subdivided. Even now it looks remarkably ambitious, especially when considering that each of the fifteen hundred plots had to be carved out of scrubland, landscaped, planted and built upon, roads and water added and communities formed.

  Francis’s own home is one of the most impressive, at the top of Avro Road, named after the aeroplanes that Geoffrey and Francis used when founding the Goodwin Chichester Aviation Co. On this peak the pine milling is difficult and it is still surrounded by the original – and now venerable – pine trees that Francis planted himself. Ralph points out that some are so old that the local varieties are growing back among them; all are subject to preservation notices.

  Goodwin & Chichester flyer

  Nowadays it is easy to view all property developments as a step for the worse, property spivs paving paradise for greed, but what Francis created at Pinehaven is really wonderful, as is the thought that he did all this in his mid-twenties, just a few years after arriving penniless in a new world the other side of the world.

  Francis’ high mountain hideaway in Blue Mountain, now on Avro Road

  If materially Francis was on top of the world, romantically he was in the pit. Every night was a lonely night. Geoffrey had his own family to return to at the end of the day; Francis had rented a bachelor flat at the top of a house behind the Terrace in Wellington. The wonderful night-time views over the bustling harbour were bittersweet, full of the romance of distant shores yet empty with no-one with whom to share them.

  Bachelor boy

  New Zealand society was layered in ways that Francis struggled to understand. To him people were people; some you liked, others not, and those were layers enough. The chances of a single young man with no local family connections, no church affiliations, not an easy mixe
r and no natural romantic expression finding a girlfriend were, to all intents and purposes, zero. Public mixing was impossible too: the pubs closed at 6 pm to encourage men to return home. All that happened was that they drank as much as they could before 6 pm and although they then had no option but to return home, most were well past their best by the time they did so. Either way, by 6.30 pm the pavements were rolled up; there may as well have been a curfew.

  Francis thus began a series of what he called ‘love affairs’, although in fact they were merely fantasy flirtations. He met a girl at work and found out where she lived. It was 40 miles away, so he drove out there one night, dimmed his lights and stared into her shack from a distance. He stayed in the car all night, then drove home at dawn. This was one of his ‘affairs’.

  Another time he met a girl who was sailing to England via Sydney. He bought a ticket for this first leg and hid in his cabin until the boat sailed. His beloved was unimpressed when she discovered him on board. Waiting for the return ship to Wellington, Francis went to the theatre where he heard her distinctive laugh from the circle above.

  It was a distinctive laugh, a ringing melody; it may have been too loud, but it slashed my heart in two that night. What a brutal thing modern love can be; how I wished I had been living in the Stone Age so that I could have grabbed her by the hair and dragged her off, or been killed in the process by a rival.

  And so it continued. But Francis did find his cavegirl and married her. Muriel Blakiston was a sweet and totally innocent late teenager, one of eight children living in near-poverty with a widowed mother. She was very pretty and in demand. Francis knew that the only way he was going to bed her was to marry her, so he proposed. I imagine that Muriel’s family was delighted: Francis would almost certainly have been the richest suitor and Muriel, knowing nothing of the world at all, would have gone along with them. Even before they were married Francis felt it was a mistake; but he was so in lust that his groin got the better of his brain. ‘Sex at last! Whenever I like!’ Muriel didn’t see it that way and once the double bed became twins, Francis lost interest in her and regained interest in all his other activities. Muriel wanted a domesticated husband and Francis would never be that. Francis wanted a female Francis and she would never be that. She had their baby, George, and within three years had returned to her mother. Francis had lost his virginity, Muriel had lost her innocence, George had lost a father – and the world of aviation had found a favourite son.

  It has to be said that Francis had shown no interest in aviation when in September 1928 Geoffrey suggested they start the Goodwin Chichester Aviation Co., just as he had no interest in sailing after Harold Goodwin took him sailing in Auckland. But Geoffrey was an intuitive businessman and rightly spotted that aviation was the next big thing. He arranged to take the New Zealand agency for the English aircraft maker A.V. Roe and bought two of their new model Avro Avian light aircraft. Next he hired four ex-military pilots and advertised joyrides. Over the next three years the four pilots and two aircraft took over six thousand passengers up for quick thrills but, as Francis noted, ‘We were lucky that we only lost ten shillings a head’.

  The problems were twofold. First, the Avian had a fragile undercarriage and the pilots were more used to landing heavier bombers. Inevitably there were crash landings – partly caused by the second problem: no fixed airfields from which to operate. Farmers’ fields had ditches and fences, and the pilots always seemed to be finding them. When they started the Goodwin Chichester Aviation Co. there was only one aerodrome in New Zealand, at Sockburn (later renamed Wigram) in Christchurch on the South Island and the archives are full of newspaper reports of Geoffrey’s attempts to convince the Wellington authorities of the need for at least a landing strip, if not an airfield, in the city. Eventually they agreed to the occasional use at Lyall Bay, now, perhaps inevitably given Geoffrey’s nous, the site of Wellington International Airport.

  Geoffrey and Francis’s first plane, an Avro Avian.

  Geoffrey was a keen air passenger and was soon training to be a pilot in his own right. Rub by rub, his enthusiasm infected Francis, so in early 1929 Chich set off for Christchurch to learn how to fly himself. He had a ready-made flying instructor, the Goodwin Chichester Aviation Co. chief pilot, George Bolt. Luckily for us George later wrote his autobiography, albeit never published, from which we learn that Francis was not a natural flyer:

  Towards the end of 1928 I joined Goodwin & Chichester, who obtained the agency for AVRO aeroplanes. I was taken on as Chief Pilot and they had rather grand ideas they were going to sell three or four of these a month. It did not take long to realise this was not going to occur, so we started joyriding with the Avians all over New Zealand.

  Mr Chichester was very keen to learn to fly and the Air Force loaned me a 504K with which I gave him some training. He had no trouble learning to fly the aeroplane but I had difficulty in getting him to land properly as he wore very powerful glasses and had difficulty with his judgment in putting the aeroplane on to the ground. He therefore did not go solo there.

  Chich, as he was familiarly known, had a very quiet and studious nature. He had a very mathematical mind and would give considerable study to any project he had in his head. He was to make quite a name for himself a year or two after this. I heard that in England he was quite a worry to his instructors because during his solo flights he would disappear for considerable periods, in some cases in very indifferent weather, much to the concern of those who were supposed to be looking after him.

  Francis’s instructor, George Bolt, and a company plane

  In all fairness the ex-First World War training aircraft, the Avro 504, was more than difficult to fly. It had a rotary engine, which meant the engine and propeller rotated together. Thus there was no throttle as such, rather an engine and propeller that acted like an on/off switch. Coming in to land, the pilot had to judge his glide angle once the engine was turned off and if he undershot the landing field he had to hope that it would restart again. It didn’t always comply. Furthermore, the engine ran on castor oil and leaked generously, so goggles always had a good smear on them, and the engine fumes always smelt foul.

  But I believe that overwork had something to do with Francis’s lack of progress too, as flying training, especially in such unfriendly machines, is not something that can be fitted in around a busy life. Francis remembers:

  I struggled away trying to learn, but was a hopelessly bad pupil. By December 1928 I had had eighteen hours fifty minutes of dual instruction, and still could not fly. I think this was partly because of trying to mix flying with an intensely active business life. Geoffrey and I were running five private companies at full blast, besides our partnership, and I was ruthlessly trying to make money for twelve hours a day or more.

  At least that part of his life was flying high.

  But in spite of his difficulties in learning how to fly – in fact, with knowing Francis a little better now, possibly because of them – the flying bug had taken hold of him. He had found a new way to soar. A plan was forming. He was already planning a visit to the old country. Why not finish his flying training there, where the whole aviation world was far more advanced, and fly a plane back to Wellington? The savings on transport and taxes might just about make the whole adventure cost-effective. And they would have a better plane than the Avian with which to make money. Geoffrey could see that too. A whole new adventure, a whole new life, was just about to take off.

  Every flight is moulded into a perfect short story; for you begin – and you are bound to lead up to a climax.

  CHAPTER 4

  Gipsy Moth

  FRANCIS ARRIVED BACK IN ENGLAND on 22 July 1929. He had been away for nine years and four months. He must have felt a sense of ‘mission accomplished’ as he stepped off the liner Berengeria at Southampton docks. He had left with £10 in gold sovereigns all those years go, with only one thing on his mind: to make his fortune – and his fortune he had made. That mountain climbed, he set his sights on a
new one: the dream of a record-breaking solo flight to Australia on his way home to New Zealand.

  The journey from his new home back to his old home also had aviation at its heart. He had left Auckland for Los Angeles in April 1929 and planned to cross the country test-flying suitable aircraft. But it wouldn’t be a Francis journey without struggles to overcome. Almost immediately he became ill and had to spend two months in hospital. He never mentions it and the hospital stay only comes to light through a throwaway line in wife-to-be Sheila’s autobiography. I can only assume that he was attacked by some sort of virus, for he was as tough and fit as they come, with will-power and determination to spare. It must have been something extraordinary, a bug caught in California or on the voyage there, to lay him low for so long.

  By June he felt strong enough to leave hospital and start the test flights. He wrote:

  I had demonstration flights in an American Eagle with a 180 h.p. Hispano engine, a Ryan six-place Brougham, with a Wright 300 h.p., a Whirlwind six-place Kuntzer Aircoach with three 90 h.p. Le Blonds, a Curtis Robin three-place, with a Curtis 180 h.p. Challenger, a Curtis Fledgling two-place trainer, and a Fairchild seven-place plane with a Pratt and Whitney Wasp. Three other types I never tried out because in each case the aeroplane crashed between the time of my making an appointment and reaching the airfield. None of the types I flew in was really suitable, and my visit was aeronautically a flop.