by Carol Baxter
Chubbie and Bill had known that interest in the Red Rose’s flight was waning and would die away altogether after they finished their tour. The Southern Cross’s arrival had seen to that. The question ‘What next?’ had already been on their lips. Their options were limited. Few people or sponsors would be interested in a return flight to England after Bert Hinkler’s achievement. And Chubbie couldn’t bear to return to her unhappy married life, to become the woman who had once done something important but now lived in ignominious obscurity. With these new enticements on offer, they couldn’t help themselves—they said, ‘Yes!’
A flurry of activity followed as they made the necessary preparations. Chubbie wrote to her husband and mother, saying that she had been offered a flying opportunity that was too good to turn down so she was sailing to America. She deliberately sent them letters rather than cables as this gave them no time to send forbidding responses. She had shed the cocoon and was making her own way in life.
The most heart-wrenching decision was their need to dispose of the Red Rose. It had carried them through so much—more successfully in fact than most people realised. They hadn’t broadcast to the world that both the Muntok crash and the near-disaster over the Torres Strait had not been the engine’s fault. The engine had died over Muntok because Bill had forgotten to turn the petrol on. And the engine had struggled over the Torres Strait because he had left the reserve tap on, so oil kept clogging up the plugs. They had survived because the plugs cleared themselves every so often.
They didn’t have an opportunity to say goodbye to their trusty plane. It was in Cooma being repaired. They sold it to R.A. Charlton of Sydney, who kept it for only seven months before selling it to J.R. Palmer, a Sydney stockbroker and aviation enthusiast. In January 1929, Palmer flew a doctor to Scone aboard the Red Rose to operate on a critically ill patient, and the publicity for this flight demonstrated to the New South Wales public the value of Queensland’s recently established Flying Doctor Service. Over the next few years, the Red Rose passed from hand to hand until it was destroyed by fire after a crash-landing at Singleton, New South Wales, in 1936.
The spectators began gathering at Sydney’s Circular Quay early on 23 June to say thank-you and goodbye to the two Americans of the Southern Cross crew, Harry Lyon and Jim Warner, the radio operator. Few knew that Chubbie and Bill were sailing out with them; their plans were too sudden.
Sydney had turned on a splendid aviators’ farewell: a crisp winter’s day with a cloudless sky of cornflower-blue. A police band played as rainbow-coloured streamers thrown from deck and dock trailed down the ship’s side like a mermaid’s tresses.
The six members of the Southern Cross and Red Rose crews were whisked past the crowd and bundled on board. For a moment, few recognised the pilots, Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm, who were dressed in their new Royal Australian Air Force uniforms with the golden stripes of their recently acquired ranks glinting on their royal-blue sleeves.
The band started playing patriotic tunes, including ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever’ and ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. An RAAF plane circled overhead, the drone of its engine heard only when the band paused between songs. The crowd waited hungrily, keen to see the faces of their heroes, to feel as if they were part of this event, a part of history in the making.
At last, only minutes before the scheduled departure time, the four members of the Southern Cross crew appeared on deck with Bill and Chubbie beside them. The crowd went berserk, cheering and waving hands and handkerchiefs. After Kingswood Smith and Ulm slipped ashore again, the Sonoma pulled away from the dock and headed into the harbour. Every ferryboat captain in the vicinity tugged on his horn as a final raucous farewell.
It was the first time Chubbie had sailed along Sydney’s beautiful harbour and out through the heads into the open ocean. It was also the last. The Australian aviatrix—as the Americans would soon call her—would never return.
Chapter Fifteen
America loves a hero. The celebrations began as soon as the Malolo—their ship from Honolulu—appeared out of San Francisco’s fog and passed through the Golden Gate heads. Planes roared overhead scattering a vast flock of squawking seagulls. The coastguard cutter Golden Gate ploughed through the water beside them as it escorted their ship to the dock, an honour bestowed only on vessels carrying the most famous of the famous.
Everyone wanted to personally congratulate the Southern Cross’s two American crewmen, as if the well-wishers could draw the mantle of glory over their own shoulders by shaking the men’s hands or, better yet, kissing them. The plane’s navigator, bluff and hearty Harry Lyon, was the type to count the kisses: 284 from Australian lasses, he had previously told the Australian press. Since Harry and Jim were accompanied by the Red Rose’s crew—known internationally because of the snake-in-the-plane incident, if nothing else—America also embraced them in its celebrations.
Chubbie and Bill disembarked with the Southern Cross crewmen, and trooped aboard the Golden Gate for a ceremonial trip across the bay to Oakland. The Southern Cross had departed from Oakland’s airfield six weeks earlier without—the city was embarrassed to admit—any fanfare whatsoever. At Oakland, the crews climbed into two open-topped cars for the ticker-tape parade to the Town Hall. As Chubbie waved to the cheering crowds lining Oakland’s streets, she tried not to feel like a gatecrasher.
At the Town Hall, the mayor shepherded them upstairs to a private room where he was holding a small function before the main festivities. Turning to Chubbie, he asked, ‘What would you like to drink?’
She looked at him in bewilderment and replied, ‘Well . . . I thought there was a prohibition in America.’
Amid howls of laughter, he swept open some sliding doors. She saw row upon row of distinctively labelled bottles with glasses scattered among them. As she gasped in surprise, a few of the women around her joked that they were drinking more under Prohibition than ever before. When she saw the amount of alcohol they consumed, she had no reason to disbelieve them.
The absurdity of Prohibition and its Kafkaesque bureaucracy would strike them again a few months later when US customs officials attempted to drain the alcohol from one of Bill’s compasses. Its presence, they claimed, breached Prohibition laws.
In the following weeks, the two crews were honoured at breakfasts, buffets and banquets, meeting California’s rich and powerful as well as the stage and screen stars the world fawned over. They even enjoyed a yachting party until Chubbie fell overboard and nearly drowned. Semi-conscious and with two cracked ribs, she was going under for the second time when Bill and Harry threw themselves into the water and rescued her.
Los Angeles—Hollywood—drew them south; however, little was happening with the film contract. In the end, the project fell through.
Their hopes of obtaining backing for an Atlantic flight were soon realised, though. Los Angeles was becoming more interested in air travel every day, according to the Los Angeles Times, and some of its financiers were keen to transform it into the world’s aeronautical centre. On 20 July, Harry announced to the press that he, Bill and Chubbie would fly from London to Los Angeles the following spring in a tri-motored plane built especially for them in Los Angeles. The plane would cost $80,000 to $100,000, according to the financiers. It was to be an all-metal, closed-cabin monoplane with a 78-foot wingspan and a 1700-gallon fuel capacity—a condor compared to Chubbie and Bill’s recently sold wren.
Early in August, Harry had to rush to Washington to see his gravely ill father. Thinking it would be a valuable opportunity to discuss their Atlantic plans with navy and government officials, he took Chubbie and Bill on the flights with him. Soon after their arrival, Chubbie’s loose lips landed her in trouble again. ‘You can’t get any decent cigarettes or soap in this bloody country,’ the tired traveller complained, not expecting her comment to be picked up by the nation’s press.
While the flappers of Australia and England saw ‘bloody’ as a deliciously naughty word that reflected
their modernity, America interpreted it as an insult to their homeland. Chubbie denied the report, saying that she had never made such a statement and that she was grateful for America’s kindness and hospitality. It was another reminder of the importance of minding her tongue.
Then another scandal broke. Reportedly, Harry Lyon was a bigamist, with wives in Boston and San Francisco. Harry ducked his head for a time and stopped talking to the press. Thus, the public had heard nothing about his plan for an interim record-setting flight, also with Bill as his pilot, until two days before its commencement.
Their destination was the fishhook-shaped Bermuda archipelago, some 800 miles south-east of New York. Such a flight had never previously been undertaken because of the difficulty of finding the twenty-square-mile pinhead in the vast Atlantic Ocean. Cocky Harry had no doubts about his navigational abilities. ‘If Captain Lancaster keeps the old bus up in the air,’ he told the press, ‘I don’t expect to have any trouble finding Bermuda. Out in the Pacific, which is a real ocean, they have islands that are really small.’
If Harry failed to find that pinhead though, Bill’s fuel tanks would be dry long before he could double-back to the American coastline. And, while his amphibian—which had a seaplane’s floats as well as a land plane’s wheels—could set down on the ocean surface, a violent sea was just as deadly for amphibians and seaplanes as for any other small vessel.
Chubbie and her new friend Amelia Earhart stood chatting on Long Island’s shore on Sunday morning, 28 October 1928, as they watched the green-and-yellow Flying Fish hurtle across the surface of Manhasset Bay. The two women had felt an immediate affinity when they recently met, having both risen to fame as passengers on record-setting international flights. Chubbie had hoped to be on board the Flying Fish for its historic flight to Bermuda until the flight’s backer, the publisher and publicist George Palmer Putnam, chose to accompany Bill and Harry. Putnam had also backed Amelia’s Atlantic flight and would later become her husband.
Manhasset Bay had little tidal current and a low tidal displacement, creating an ideal runway for amphibians and seaplanes. On this idyllic autumn day, the bay was as flat as a plate-glass window—too flat, as it happened, because it caused a suction that kept Bill’s heavily fuel-laden plane glued to the water. After four frustrating hours, with more and more gear offloaded in unsuccessful attempts to lighten its weight, the men decided to siphon off all but 80 gallons of fuel and head towards Hampton Roads near Norfolk, Virginia. The shorter distance from there to Bermuda would reduce the amphibian’s fuel requirements.
Chubbie was invited on board a second amphibian, which was carrying mechanics and would follow the Flying Fish. Eighty miles from Long Island, Bill’s engine cut out, forcing him to glide down onto Barnegat Bay. Chubbie’s pilot landed as well, allowing the mechanics to investigate. They discovered water in the fuel tank. Bill would have come down in the unforgiving Atlantic Ocean if his initial take-off had been successful.
After his fuel supply was replaced, the two machines set off again; but they encountered bad weather near Atlantic City, forcing them to stop there for the night. By the time the mechanics finished overhauling the engine the following day, the extremely low tide made it difficult to move the amphibian from the shore onto the water. It was 5 pm by the time the Flying Fish reached Hampton Roads.
Chubbie’s amphibian didn’t make it there at all. A stiff northwest wind forced it down off the Virginia Capes. Without a radio, they drifted for hours until a tugboat stumbled across them and attached a tow line to prevent them drifting out to sea. The tug radioed the coastguard; however, it was 9 pm before a patrol boat reached them and towed them to shore.
On Tuesday, Putnam told the press that the Flying Fish needed further adjustments, which would take a day. On Wednesday, he announced that the plane would fly to a fishing village, some twenty-seven miles closer to Bermuda. On Thursday, he advised that weather forecasts indicated poor conditions along the route to Bermuda. The following Tuesday, he cancelled the flight.
Bill’s first chance at American glory had failed.
Back in Los Angeles, the manufacturer of the proposed plane needed advice about equipment and other essentials for the transatlantic flight Harry was planning, and required one of the trio on hand to provide assistance. Bill was negotiating a work contract with Cirrus Aero Engines Limited and Harry was more puff than pragmatism, so this task fell to Chubbie.
She travelled across America again, this time by train, having already seen more of the vast country than most Americans would see in a lifetime. When she discussed the flight plan with their backers, they mentioned that the flight needed a radio operator and asked if she would be willing to take on the role.
‘Certainly,’ was her response. She was always keen to learn something new and anything to do with planes excited her. Besides, the more aviation skills she possessed, the greater her chance of being employed in America’s aviation industry.
‘Do you know anything about wireless?’
‘No, but I’ll find out,’ she said decisively.
She rented an apartment in Los Angeles and attended classes at the YMCA School, the only woman in a room full of men. She learnt how to use and repair a wireless radio. Learning Morse Code was especially difficult. There were only so many dots and dashes the brain could comfortably process or the hand jot down. Most people found it overwhelming and many students failed or dropped out. However, she was determined to master the skill. She was lent a little Morse-tapping machine and practised in her apartment at night and on the weekends. After four months, she was delighted to see the respect in the backers’ eyes when she proved her proficiency in all the skills required by a radio operator.
Afterwards, she returned to New York, where Bill was residing. Bill had had a visitor while she was in Los Angeles: his wife Kiki. Since he had been away for more than a year and showed no sign of returning home, Kiki had left the children in England and travelled to America to find out what was happening with their marriage. Bill later told Chubbie that he had asked Kiki for a divorce and that her response had been a demand for $10,000 for her upkeep and that of the children. Without it, she wouldn’t release him.
Chubbie was thankful she didn’t have to face the woman. How could she look her in the eye after taking her husband? Kiki’s obstinacy, though, dimmed her hopes that she and Bill could ever have anything but an illicit relationship, that they could ever live without the fear that their adultery would one day be exposed to the world.
Meanwhile, Bill’s negotiations with Cirrus Aero Engines had proved successful. He was employed as a test pilot and demonstrator at a monthly salary of $500. The company also sponsored him to fly the 9000-mile Caribbean Circle, a flight that had ended in mishap for all previous flyers. The route would take him from New York down the eastern seaboard to Miami and across to Havana. Then he would island-hop via Puerto Rico to South America. From there he would travel west to Panama and Mexico City, around the Gulf of Mexico to Miami and back to New York. While there was no financial reward, the Central Union Trust had offered a gold medal to any pilot who could successfully fly the circle.
The American press showed little interest in his Caribbean challenge, although Britain’s Flight magazine devoted a full page to the subject, more column inches than it had allocated to the Red Rose’s entire flight. Bill sent the press detailed accounts of his journey, which began early in March 1929, but few newspapers published them. However, the press showed more interest on 7 April when his plane crashed at Trinidad. His engine had stalled on take-off, smashing the aircraft and sending him to hospital. His internal injuries required surgery aboard the ship on his way back to New York and then months of rehabilitation.
Bill’s second chance at American glory had failed.
Under the circumstances, it was probably fortunate that the Atlantic plane wasn’t ready in time for their mid-1929 attempt at crossing the Atlantic. However, the flight’s cancellation meant that Bill’s third chance a
t glory had failed. Publicity-wise, he was unsellable.
While American newspapers had spent the summer of 1928 talking about Chubbie’s involvement in the proposed Atlantic flight, few people knew that she wasn’t a licensed pilot. Although she was skilled at flying a dual-control aircraft—as she had proved in Los Angeles when she had taken control of a twelve-seat passenger plane—she hadn’t actually performed any take-offs or landings. So, when she returned to New York, she rented a room near New Jersey’s Red Bank airport and quietly commenced lessons with the Airview Flying Service.
Having total control of a plane thrilled her more than anything she had ever experienced. She flew for as many hours as possible, and the rest of her time was spent learning about engines and pottering around the planes themselves. As she practised soaring and swooping and rolling and diving, she dreamed of a time when she would be paid to take a plane up into the air, when she would be respected for her abilities as a pilot rather than being patronised simply because she was a woman.
Most women at this time had no real comprehension of how patronising the world’s attitudes were because they had never experienced anything different. Since she had set off on the Red Rose flight though, Chubbie’s eyes had been opened. In her world travels, she had received looks of respect from many men for her achievements in a male domain and for possessing character attributes like courage, which were normally credited only to men. She had no desire to ever go back to the world of domesticity.
In her morning flights above Red Bank, she noticed that the Blue Comet passenger train passed beneath her each morning. One day, partly for the practice and partly for the thrill, she dropped down towards the railway tracks and raced the train. Her old training plane had a maximum speed of about seventy miles per hour and was able to keep pace with the Comet as it chugged towards the seashore. Gradually, though, the train outpaced her. As it pulled further and further ahead, the fireman stuck his hand out the window and waved at her while the engineer blew a victorious toot.