Never Fear

by Ian Strathcarron

  By Francis’s time, nine months later, the air service started at Alexandria, part of a gradual improvement to make the route more continuous. Likewise, at the other end the route now stretched from Karachi to Delhi; thus with the de Havilland DH.66 Hercules – to all appearances a scaled-up Gipsy Moth – Imperial Airways was spreading its wings at the end of the 1920s. The middle part of the route stayed the same: from Cairo to Gaza, Rutbah Wells (now Ar-Rutbah), Baghdad, Basra, Bushire (now Bushehr), Lingeh, Jask, Gwadar and Karachi. Due to the difficulties navigating across the featureless desert, British engineers build an enormous furrow from stop to stop, still the longest furrow ever built, even if now reclaimed by the shifting sands. We’re going to pick Francis’s passage up at Rutbah Wells, an oasis on the old caravan route from Damascus to Baghdad.

  Francis had noticed the low compression on the Gipsy’s no. 2 cylinder becoming dangerously lower during a routine check at Gaza and knew he had to work on the valves as soon as he could. Luckily, at Gaza he met Major Herbert Brackley, the head of Imperial Airways, who was flying back from the inaugural flight to Delhi. Brackley suggested to Francis that if Elijah could hang on just a few hours longer, the Imperial Airways base at Rutbah Wells would be better equipped to help.

  Francis would later write that he was

  extraordinarily intrigued by the whole outfit at Rutbah Wells, a romantic spot in the middle of the desert, a large square fort with building backed up inside its high walls. There were camel caravans inside, and a squad of Iraqi infantry. It is a stopping place also for the motor caravans which run from Baghdad to Damascus. These are owned by Nairn Brothers, who are New Zealanders.

  Rutbah Wells airfield a few years later

  I enjoyed reading that, as in our kitchen in Hampshire is a most atmospheric Nairn Brothers poster we bought in Ramallah, Palestine. Under the banner ‘Overland Desert Mail to Iraq, India, etc.’ it shows two of the desert trucks, one for mail and the other passengers, leaving a large, square fort with palm trees and camels scattered about. The lower banner says ‘Direct Cross-Desert Service; Haifa – Beirut – Damascus – Baghdad’. Looking at Francis’s route and the available options, it’s not too fanciful to hope that the large square fort was the oasis of Rutbah Wells.

  Back to Francis. He soon found the Imperial Airways mechanic promised by Brackley. At first the mechanic wasn’t too keen to help, as it would mean working into the night. Then he declared that he was only trained to service the Imperial Airways DH.66s’ Bristol Jupiter radial engines – massively large and complicated units compared to Elijah’s five-litre four-cylinder engine. But somehow he melted and between them they folded Elijah’s wings and pushed her through the barbed wire surrounding the fort, across the parade ground and up besides the mechanic’s bedroom window. They found an extension cord, clipped a spotlight onto one of the prop blades and Francis told the mechanic how to strip off the manifold and cylinder head while he tried to snatch a quick respite in the arms of Morpheus.

  Francis was shown his quarters in the officers’ block and what seemed the pleasing prospect of some sleep soon soured when the Iraqi officer in charge entered and ‘ruined it by snorting and sniffing, sniffing and snorting and asking silly questions in French. Of course time means nothing to people living out there; they cannot understand anybody finding such an absurdly small unit of time such as an hour being of any value’. But bit by bit Francis drifted off to sleep, accompanied by the imaginary soothing sound of tinkling bells and flowing flutes and ‘outlandish instruments’ he had not heard before. But still, that night, the nightmare.

  After a 5 am breakfast of desert grouse, they tried starting the restored Gipsy engine. Nothing doing; it was ‘exceedingly cold and had frozen during the night’. By 7.30 am the sun solved the problem. Francis took off and headed off across the desert towards Baghdad. Navigation was no longer by furrow but by a trunk road, the old caravan route to Damascus, so crowded that Francis saw two motorcars in the first 100 miles, as well as several black-tented Arab caravanserai.

  If the thought of flying for up to ten hours a day in an open biplane, cramped and noisy, windswept by hot and dusty air, always living on the edge and on wits over terra incognita, if the very thought of all this seems tiring enough for the rest of us, for Francis the really trying part of the enterprise was after landing, the dealing with officials and well-meaning well-wishers. He complained of ‘the continual conversation and negotiation with your host for the night, with acquaintances and officials, together with the considerable amount of work that has to be done on the engine every day’. This was not a quick routine of checking the dipstick and heading off for the bar, but rather involved ‘changing or cleaning the eight sparking plugs, removing and cleaning the petrol filter, drain and replace the oil and filter, check and adjust the tappets, grease all moving parts and fill up all tanks with petrol’. And that was if petrol was ready and waiting; quite often he would have to arrange supplies or even go and find petrol himself – which meant even more time dealing with inquisitive strangers. When all that was done, he had to make sure Elijah was safe for the night, in itself not the work of a moment in far flung aerodromes.

  Then of course he had to refuel himself. He was usually too tired after landing to service the engine, preferring to take a short nap first, when he could, officialdom permitting, then returning to work on the engine later. Most nights he had no more than four hours sleep, often interrupted by that nightmare. As he preferred to leave before dawn, he had to arrange for the next day’s food and drink before turning in. Even this required care and attention, as the last thing he needed was diarrhoea aloft. And even turning in was subject to the vagaries of officialdom, availability and transport from and to the aerodrome.

  It’s no wonder that Francis felt relief every dawn as he opened up Elijah’s revived and rested engine, gathered speed along the runway and left all the troubles of the world on the ground behind him.

  We pick up his flight again in Bima on what is now the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, at that time still part of the Dutch East Indies. Why there rather than anywhere else en route across the Indonesian archipelago? Only because we are short of space, his experience there was not untypical – and because it rang a large and sonorous bell: I was shipwrecked off the southern coast of Sumbawa and taken without clothes, passport or money by horse relay to Bima and spent a happy month staying in the very house in which Francis had stayed while the authorities worked out what to do with me.

  After Baghdad, Francis had continued imperially east: to Delhi following the Imperial Airways route and then stopping at Raj military airfields on to Calcutta. It must have been a wonderful flight across the Indian Plains, navigating by the Ganges and the Grand Trunk Road, in the perfect climate of the north Indian winter. After Calcutta, things became somewhat leery, organisationally and meteorologically, but on Elijah flew, through monsoons like waterfalls, across what seemed unlimited jungle with no emergency landing options and confused officialdom at recognised landing options.

  Sometimes the monsoon rain was so dense that Francis was forced down to sea level, which of course brought its own dangers when the rain and sea became an amorphous, horizonless mass of grey pain and gloom. He would slow down as much as he dared to ease the pain of the ‘flying needles of hail’ and came as close to crashing as ever when he stalled Elijah at 80 feet above sea level, lost flow over the wings and felt the joystick to be like ‘shaking a dead man’s hand’. He only just recovered flight as the wheels skimmed over the sea. ‘Hades!’ as he put it, ‘there is nothing funny about stalling at 80 feet over the sea’.

  The scenes following our respective crash landings on exotic beaches were unchanged by the forty years between 1930 and 1970. Francis’s was caused by trying to avoid a wall of water from the sky, mine by trying to avoid a fury of water from the sea. Inexperience on both our parts, really: the golden rule of flying is ‘If in trouble, head high’; of sailing ‘If in trouble, head out’; but we were both young
and foolish. On landing there is exhaustion, gratitude, a jumble of conflicting priorities, resignation and a sense of ‘now what?’. Soon ‘at the other end of the aerodrome a curious sight: a stream of humanity like a swarm of ants issuing from the woods flowed in my direction. I sat tight and was presently the centre of a hundred or so Malays. Both Francis and I had a few words of Bahasa Malay, the world’s simplest language, spoken in Malaysia and Indonesia. Francis’s were from a guidebook, mine from having lived there for a few months. Eventually a head man arrives, takes charge, throws open the doors of hospitality in a wooden-floored, leaf-roofed, open-plan shack on stilts – and, with chickens and women clacking around in the compound, all is well.

  And thus to Bima, the capital of Sumbawa. For those not shipwrecked or force-landed thereabouts, the Indonesian archipelago heading south goes Sumatra, Java, Bali, Lombok, Sumbawa – and then on east, island to island, to Timor, the jumping-off point for Darwin. Francis landed in Bima by plane in short order; I, shipwrecked off the southern coast, arrived a week later by pony relay though a Garden of Eden that lay across the island.

  In the Dutch-ruled days each island capital had the equivalent of a British Raj Resident, a European whose job was not so much to rule but to advise, but whose advice it would be unwise for the sultans to ignore. Francis somehow managed to pick a fight with the island vizier. Seeing one of the natives making a self-important nuisance of himself, Francis gave him a screwdriver and told him to open a can of oil. Not a good idea. The vizier took great exception and demanded that Francis pay for twenty of his tribesmen to guard Elijah overnight. Francis noted: ‘Fortunately wealth for him was represented by a quarter of a guilder per man. No doubt he collared the lot.’

  And like the Raj, the Dutch regime built government guest houses, or ‘rest houses’, to accommodate their own officials and visiting dignitaries. It was in the one in Bima that Francis and I stayed. In his Dutch days and my Indonesian days they were called Pasangraham. I remember there was one suite with a balcony on the first floor and smaller bedrooms with patios on the ground floor. I imagine that Francis, like me, was given the VIP suite overlooking the mayhem of the main street. This had not changed either:

  You pay so much for a bed, and the man in charge buys food, which he cooks for you at a very reasonable charge. There is some sporting uncertainty as to what you will get, considering that he understands you no better than you understand him. Sleeping is quite simple: you have a bed netted off against mosquitoes, a hard mattress covered over with a sheet, a pillow for your head and a long bolster, the use of which I am not quite certain about. Apart from pyjamas you do not have any covering. As I had no pyjamas, it was simpler for me.

  Again that night, the nightmare: ‘The lizards must have woken with a start’.

  The stories end well. The Resident drove Francis to the airfield the next morning. ‘He had been extremely polite and pleasant to me, so when he asked me to fly over his house for the edification of his wife I gladly agreed’. I flew out too, in an Indonesian Air Force helicopter to Bali, then on to the British embassy in Djakarta for a new passport, some money and some clothes – and the first meeting with a life long wife.

  Francis would later say that the question most people wanted to ask about his flight to Sydney concerned the 320-mile, so just over four-hour, crossing of the Timor Sea, from the island of Timor to Bathurst Island on the way to Darwin. It would certainly be the question I would have liked to ask, having crossed the Timor sea in a yacht, on my way to the shipwreck, just three men in a boat and frights of hammerhead sharks looking up at us, licking for what passed as their lips.

  Francis was typically sangfroid about the whole affair, pointing out correctly that neither the plane nor its single engine knows that it is over the sea – therefore you should be as unconcerned about an engine failure as you would be if it was flying over four hours’ worth of perfect landing strips. In theory, of course, he was quite right; in practice, of course, he was quite wrong.

  I remember flying single-engined over the sea. We used to fly quite regularly over the English Channel on a duty-free run to Le Touquet, throw in a pissy lunch at L’Escale restaurant on the airfield, and fly back to Lydd, as people did in those drink-and-fly, duty-free days. It’s only 25 miles, less than 15 minutes, over the sea and yet the thought of a forced landing was always to mind, at least on the way over. Then we used to fly to Le Mans for the Vingt-Quatre Heures every year, leaving England from the Isle of Wight to cross the French coast at Cherbourg. Again, only 60 miles or 30 minutes, not enough danger, you would have thought, to raise a Franciscan eyebrow. One year, mid-Channel, the four of us on board all heard the engine miss a beat – just the one – but one was enough. From then on we took the long route via Dover and Calais, just in case the one missed beat turned contagious.

  Yet for all his insouciance, Francis knew that a sea landing in a single-engined aeroplane with a fixed undercarriage is a sinking waiting to happen:

  The question of coming down in the sea with the landplane is an interesting one, and I have discussed it with several experienced pilots, without being able to come to a definite conclusion about it. The general consensus of opinion seems to be that every landplane, falling into the pond, puts its nose right into it and goes straight to the bottom. Theoretically, the wings are supposed to keep the bus afloat for a short time, but I understand that in practice they never do. It is wonderful what you are ready to do in emergencies. That is to say, theoretically, before the event. What happens in practice, it is generally fortunate nobody is there to see.

  And he took precautions seriously:

  I trotted out the rubber boat, blew it up to see that it had no leaks, took off the front cockpit streamlining, and arranged it in position so that I only had to pull a rope fastened around its middle and yank it out of its place in order to float it on the water. I fastened the sail, mast and oars up together with an inner tube, so that they too would float, provided I could reach them, before Elijah and I sank. The drink and iron rations I put in a sack and placed in the cockpit. I’m afraid they would not stand much chance of getting out in the event of landing in the water, but still one never knows one’s luck.

  It was in the spirit of taking enough precautions to meet luck half-way that Francis set off single-engined for four hours across the Timor Sea:

  You certainly get a kick out of crossing a good stretch of sea with the single-engined land machine. I felt moderately excited, and slightly elated. The fact is, if you are confident you have done everything possible to have your engine and plane in good order; if you have taken every precaution in the event of you falling into the pond, in that case it does you no good to worry, and it becomes a great gamble which you can sit back and enjoy.

  The great gamble paid off and this navigation was once again ‘Spot on!’, hitting Rocky Point, Bathurst Island, as planned and then on to Darwin. On his way in he saw a stream of cars racing to the aerodrome to meet him after he had buzzed the town to let them know he was arriving. It didn’t occur to him that he might be becoming famous, that all the time he was cut off in the Dutch East Indies the Empire newspaper wires were taking up where the Daily Mail had left off three weeks ago.

  The prospect of fame, or ‘fuss’ as Francis always called it, must have dawned on him on arriving at Charleville, Queensland, about 600 miles north-west of Sydney. He wrote:

  I never saw such an enthusiastic place as Charleville. The whole town had turned out, which made me nervous as the deuce in landing. Then the mayor and town council held a reception in the town hall, complete with beer and lemonade.

  I have often been asked what was the worst moment of my flight, and I think it was this moment, when I was called upon to try to make a speech.

  After lunch he flew onto Bourke, now in New South Wales, to another civic reception and dinner: ‘Life was getting strenuous.’ Just as well he did not know what Sydney had in store for him. But while flying into that other sort of storm, the media sort
of storm, he had time to reflect on what he had achieved:

  1) I had not beaten Hinkler’s record. 2) I had not done what I had really wanted even more, namely, to fly solo half-way round the world. To do this is exceedingly difficult without crossing the Atlantic or Pacific. I think flying from Spain to New Zealand is the only way a true flight half-way round the world can be made without crossing the great oceans. 3) Even my attempt to cross Australia in three days had failed. The best I could claim was the 12,655 miles between Tripoli and Sydney which took me 22 days, an average of 575 miles per day, against Hinkler’s 760 miles a day’

  His mood grew even darker as the end came into view:

  I was a human 22-day clock beginning to wind down. After being wound up at Tripoli I began ticking away every day from before dawn to after sunset. It had become a habit. And now the clock was just about to stop, to leave a desolation, an emptiness, a solitariness in place of its steady tick. Lor! I should soon again be a slave to petty circumstances and petty officials. In the air … well, one was a slave there as much as anywhere else, if not more so. Yet how much greater the masters: Father Time, as usual; Aurora, the goddess of dawn; Vesper, the goddess of night; Jupiter the god of weather; and lastly, of course, Minerva, goddess of wisdom.

  His worst fears came true in Sydney. It seemed that every light aeroplane that could fly took to the sky to escort him in, flying around like ‘like a flock of deranged seagulls’. One by one they landed; then it was his turn. With the world watching he botched the landing, of course, but that was the easy part: ‘Ensued for me a turmoil’, he wrote, before going on to describe the demands of celebrity by someone who sincerely did not seek it, yet found it inconceivable not to answer every request for information or to thank every well-wisher personally. If we are all famous for fifteen minutes now, back then fame could last fifteen days: Francis’s flight had caught the moment, the angle being that a novice pilot with no money had accomplished what had previously needed experience and a weighty budget.