Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

  Fitzsimons, Peter

  Harper Collins, Inc. (2010)

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  * * *

  To my wife, Lisa

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Epigraph

  HIGH FLIGHT

  FOREWORD

  INTRODUCTION

  One IN THE BEGINNING…

  Two DISTANCE

  Three WAR!

  Four IN THE TRENCHES

  Five ACES AT DAWN…

  Six APRES LA GUERRE

  Seven HOMEWARD BOUND

  Eight THELMA

  Nine PIONEERS AWAY…

  Ten THE TOUGH GET GOING

  Eleven ACROSS THE PACIFIC…

  Twelve THE URGE TO ELSEWHERE…

  Thirteen COFFEE ROYAL

  Fourteen TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS

  Fifteen NEW FRONTIERS

  Sixteen TO AND FRO…

  Seventeen TROUBLES

  Eighteen THE GREAT RACE

  Nineteen OUT ON A WING AND A PRAYER

  EPILOGUE

  ENDNOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ALSO BY PETER FITZSIMONS

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  If any one man typified the Australian character at its best, with all its great qualities, as well as some of its faults, he was Charles Kingsford Smith. No other Australian was ever so worshipped by the average man and boy. He still figures in most Australian minds as the greatest native son…

  STANLEY BROGDEN, THE HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN AVIATION, 19601

  He had greatness as a pilot and as a man. As the fundamental urge to his flights he had the enlightened spirit of the born pioneer whatever the risks, the way into the unknown was always an irresistible invitation to him. His rugged appearance hid a sensitive finely balanced personality upheld with a smile throughout his adventurous life by an inner structure of fine steel, that was the extraordinary combination of Smithy. It was this unusual combination of qualities which made him the great airman. He could see, feel, and predict the air vividly and accurately with his sense of personality, but whatever the conditions his steel structure had the strength to deal with any situation…

  BILL TAYLOR ON HIS LONG-TIME FLYING COMPANION, SIR CHARLES KINGSFORD SMITH2

  HIGH FLIGHT

  Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth

  And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

  Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

  Of sun-spilt clouds—and done a hundred things

  You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung

  High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there

  I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

  My eager craft through footless halls of air.

  Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,

  I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace

  Where never lark, or even eagle flew—

  And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod

  The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

  Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

  Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, RCAF3

  FOREWORD

  BY CHARLES KINGSFORD-SMITH JNR

  Author Peter FitzSimons begins this eminently readable book with a quote from my father: ‘I came into the world of flying at its dawn, and what a glorious dawn…’

  Everyone knows how the ‘world of flying’ has brought about enormous and profound changes affecting almost every person on the planet. As one beneficiary of these changes, I’m solidly enthusiastic about flying, its technology and the technical skill called piloting.

  But for me, there is an aspect of flying just as important as the benefits it has brought. I suppose I could call it the romance of flying. The quote above from my dad hints at what this is. From the earliest days—and extending to the present—aviation has exerted a tremendous hold on its practitioners: designers, builders, pilots etc. There is a fascination, both intellectual and emotional, which captures an individual, often for a lifetime. My father is a prima facie example of this total involvement.

  How I would have loved to talk long hours with him about his passion, to gain more insight into what captivated him and his flying generation, and to experience vicariously his exciting adventures. But it was not to be; he was lost just before I turned three.

  So how do we, in the present, experience something of that ‘glorious dawn’? The pioneers are gone and what few airplanes are left sit silently in museums. As always, when we yearn to recapture something of the spirit of the past, our best resource is a good book by a skilful author. When Peter sent me a copy of his manuscript, I read it avidly, hoping that it would turn out to be just such a book. I was not disappointed! For that reason, if you are intrigued even slightly with the ‘world of flying’, I recommend it for your insight and enjoyment.

  INTRODUCTION

  In March 2007 I was asked to have a cup of coffee with a couple of blokes who wanted to make a documentary about Charles Kingsford Smith. They had a few extraordinary revelations they felt they could make in the doco—were gung-ho on the whole subject—and wondered if I was interested in writing a book on the aviator that might come out at roughly the same time.

  The idea grew on me. For me and most Australians of my age and older, Sir Charles Kingsford Smith was an iconic figure, although that was mostly through his long-time appearance on our $20 bill and the fact that Sydney airport was named after him. Too, I dimly remember my parents and grandfather speaking reverentially about him.

  But who was he? What was the legend actually built on? After some preliminary research, the best of all possible things happened to me. I—as we writers say in the trade—got into it and was consumed by the wonder of the story.

  Certainly there were many accounts of his life to learn from, foremost of which was the outstanding 1999 book by the New Zealand writer Ian Mackersey, Smithy: The Life of Sir Charles Kingsford Smith; and many other biographies dating back to the 1930s. I did indeed find Kingsford Smith a fascinating man the more I found out about him and yet, apart from the wonders of Smithy’s own life, I also became intrigued—my wife would say obsessed—by other aviation people of those early times. I found I loved the stories of Lawrence Hargrave, the Wright brothers, Lord Northcliffe, Louis Blériot, Harry Hawker, Anthony Fokker, Roland Garros, Charles Nungesser, the Red Baron, Sir Ross Smith, Lawrence of Arabia, Bert Hinkler, George Wilkins and Charles Lindbergh among many more.

  They were all, of course, august names—at least in their own time—but even in such exalted company, Kingsford Smith could more than hold his own.

  I was fascinated to find, in the course of my research, that no-one less than Charles Lindbergh himself had dipped his lid to Kingsford Smith personally, saying that what Lindbergh had done in crossing the Atlantic could not be compared to Kingsford Smith’s feat with the Pacific.

  As well, when I came across the stories of the 1919 air race from England to Australia, the formation of Qantas, the saga of the Kookaburra, the loss of the Southern Cloud, the 1934 Centenary Air Race, the story of P.G.Taylor’s wing-walking in 1935, I was stunned both by what wonderful sagas they were and by how little those stories were known by the wider public outside the aviation community, which certainly included me.

  The book that I offer now, thus, is not the book I intended to write…

  Starting with the narrow parameters of looking at Smithy’s life, bit by bit it morphed into the story of his life and times, and of the other extraor
dinary figures who occupied those times. I have never enjoyed working on a book so much, from finding out more and more about these figures long gone, to travelling all over the world in pursuit of their tales. All through San Francisco, New York, Washington, London, Paris, Calais, Wellington, Christchurch and, of course, all around Australia, I traipsed through museums, over abandoned airfields, into old hotels, and regularly buried myself under piles of dusty newspaper cuttings and old letters, trying to get the feel for the times that were and the place that Kingsford Smith and those magnificent men had in them.

  It is, of course, for the reader to judge whether or not I have managed to pull this off, but at least let me state my aim at the outset—that was to have Kingsford Smith and his companions fly again. I wanted to take the thousand points of light represented by endnoted fact, and, by judicious and occasional use of the poetic license I keep in my wallet, to put enough colour in between that the book would have the feel of a novel, even while remaining in the non-fiction genre. This is the approach I have employed since coming under the influence of the American writer Gary Smith in the year 2000—most particularly in my books John Eales, Kokoda, Tobruk and The Ballad of Les Darcy.

  In terms of ensuring that my endnoted fact was indeed fact, allow me to say, it was not easy. I have never worked on a subject with such an extraordinary amount of technical detail, nor with such a vast body of archival material to trawl through. Nor, might I add, have I ever worked on a story where accounts of the same episode have been so different, sometimes from the same writer who was there at the time!

  In order to do everything possible to get the detail in this book to be as accurate as possible, I was fortunate to be able to call on the expertise of many people, and draw on their scholarship in particular fields. In this regard, I warmly thank Michael Adams for help with the story of Lawrence Hargrave; Simine Short on Octave Chanute; Andrew Moore on the New Guard; Simon Nasht on Sir Hubert Wilkins; Ron Cuskelly on the saga of the Lady Southern Cross and on details of other people and planes—extending even to photographs of the manufacturer’s plates on the engines of the Southern Cross; Mark Day on the Red Baron; Neil Cadigan on the pilot Lester Brain; Dick Smith on the saga of the Kookaburra; Ron Frew and Matthew Higgins on the fate of the Southern Cloud; and Howard Jones on what happened to the Uiver when it found itself in trouble over Albury.

  The remaining family of Sir Charles Kingsford Smith were good to me, led by Sir Charles’s only son, Charles Kingsford-Smith Jnr, and I warmly thank him—including for his fine foreword. Early in the writing of this book, I had lunch with John Ulm, the only son of Charles Ulm, and I thank him equally for the help he gave me thereafter.

  Soon after I started the project I was blessed to find exactly the person I needed: an aviation researcher with knowledge as deep as it was wide, powered by a passion that would kill a brown dog. His name is Peter Finlay, and he proved to be a godsend in terms of ferreting out fresh detail and endlessly tapping old detail on the head with a hammer to see if it sounded tinny or not. And while, of course, all mistakes that remain are my own, I cannot thank him enough for his work and dedication to the cause.

  My long-time researcher Sonja Goernitz was a great help across the board, liaising with libraries, newspapers and museums around the globe, as well as using her own prodigious writing skills to give much salient advice as my manuscript took shape.

  I record my appreciation to my other long-time researcher Glenda Lynch for her efforts in working the wonderful resources of the Australian War Memorial and National Library for me; Henry Barrkman in London for the research work he did for me there, most particularly with the British Museum and gleaning crucial, minute detail by trawling through newspaper archives around the world; David Wiseman in Israel; and my friend Dr Michael Cooper, who helped me a great deal with medical research.

  I hope in the thousand or so endnotes and bibliography to have acknowledged all other writers whose work I have drawn from, but there are several in particular I wish to cite here. In his book The Wright Brothers, the aforementioned New Zealand writer Ian Mackersey recounts how, as soon as he began writing it, everyone in the field said if you’re doing Orville and Wilbur, then you have to talk to Tom Crouch, who had himself done a biography of the brothers and is the acknowledged leader in the field. My own experience was similar except that when it comes to Kingsford Smith, it is Mackersey who is the equal authority on Charles Kingsford Smith. His book Smithy is, and will remain, the benchmark for research on the great pilot, and the notes of his book were also particularly valuable pointers as to where the diaspora of Kingsford Smith treasure-troves of information could be found.

  Ted Wixted and Pedr Davis are two other writers who have done particularly valuable work over the years. Beyond Smithy, I found John Gunn’s book on the history of Qantas, The Defeat of Distance, another absolute treasure trove of fascinating material—with equally valuable notes. (I was impressed with Gunn’s book after just reading it, but when I saw the Qantas Heritage Collection, and the truckloads of archival material that he had to trawl through, I was in awe.) And, though Percy Cogger’s book on Charles Ulm—Wings and the Man—the Private Papers of Charles Ulm, Aviator—was never published, I found the manuscript held by the Mitchell Library of Sydney immensely helpful, most particularly when it came to the machinations of the Air Inquiry Committee hearings, after the Coffee Royal affair.

  I also cite Scott Berg’s masterwork on the Lone Eagle himself, Lindbergh, and note that Robert Wohl’s book, A Passion for Wings, was a wonderful pointer to early aviation history. In 1990, the Australian academic Dr Leigh Edmonds wrote a paper titled Problems of Defence, Isolation and Development: What Civil Aviation Could Do To Help, which I have subsequently sucked dry for information in that field.

  I found the wider aviation community and descendants of particular characters in the Kingsford Smith story to be wonderfully helpful.

  My thanks for their contributions to this manuscript go to: Ashlyn Macfarlane, Ivor Davis, Warwick Finlay, Jo Beresford (NZ), Dave Homewood (NZ), Brian Caldersmith, Mac Job, Frank Cuttell, John Laming, Cam Spencer, Aub Pop, James Oglethorpe, Pauline Curby, Terri McCormack, Stewart Wilson, Tom Sonter, Kenneth Hope-Jones, Helen Wilder, Millie Cooper, Cynthia Balderston, Jack Eyre, Glenn Pettit, Eta Varani-Norton, Mr Tukana Rainima, and my great friend, the late Matt Laffan.

  From particular institutions, I thank Megan Wishart and Allan Rudge, Walsh Memorial Library at Auckland’s Museum of Transport and Technology; all the fast, friendly, reliable and rotating staff at both the National Library of Australia and the State Library of New South Wales; David Watmuff and Matthew O’Sullivan, Air Force Museum of New Zealand, Wigram; Bob De La Hunty, Historical Aircraft Restoration Society; Ian Debenham, Powerhouse Museum; Val Carpenter, Cowra and District Historical Society and Museum; Dace Taube, Doheny Memorial Library, University of Southern California; Karen Harrigan, Sydney Airport Corporation; Cecilia Ng, Alexander Turnbull Library, New Zealand; Rebecca McConnochie and Toni Kasch, Brisbane Airport Corporation; Lex Rowland, Hinkler House Memorial Museum; Richard Breckon, Australia Post Historian; Roger Meyer, Airways Museum, Essendon; Richard Chenoweth, Santa Maria Valley Historical Society; Hans Holzer, Deutsches Museum, Aviation Department; Hayden Hamilton, APT Collectibles; William Edwards, Reference Officer, National Archives of Australia; John Blanch, Bondi Surf Bathers’ Life Saving Club; Peter Dobson, New Plymouth Aero Club; Des Sullivan, Qantas Heritage Collection, Kingsford Smith Airport; Guy Tranter, ABC Document Archives; Michael Nelmes, Curator, Narromine Aviation Museum; Sarah-Donna Philips and Lynette Riquelme, Supreme Court of New South Wales; Nancy Meddings, Allan Hancock College, USA; David Whatmuff, Wigram Aviation Museum, New Zealand; Di Davies, Bank of England; Meg Reilly, Sydney Technical High School; and Professor Sean Brawley, University of New South Wales.

  For her help in all things to do with the form and texture of the book, I offer, as ever, my deep appreciation to my treasured colleague at the Sydney Morning Herald Harriet Veit
ch, who put many weekend and evening hours into the project. I also record my appreciation and professional respect to everyone I worked with at HarperCollins, most particularly Shona Martyn, Mel Cain and the indefatigable, unflappable, Mary Rennie.

  Finally, my thanks to my wife, Lisa Wilkinson. In fact, Lisa was not only supportive of the project from the beginning, but also did a wonderful job once again of applying her long-time professional editing skills to—in my opinion—making it sing where it sometimes was only warbling. I have always loved that line from Jack Nicholson to Helen Hunt in As Good as It Gets, when he says: ‘You make me want to be a better man.’

  Lisa does that for me, too, but she also makes me write better books.

  I hope you enjoy this book.

  Peter FitzSimons

  Sydney, April, 2009

  One

  IN THE BEGINNING…

  I came into the world of flying at its dawn, and what a glorious dawn…

  CHARLES KINGSFORD SMITH, 19351

  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

  But to be young was very heaven!

  WILLIAM WORDSWORTH2

  In my mind, the flying machine will tend to bring peace and goodwill to all; it will throw light on the few unexplored corners of the earth and it will herald the downfall of all restrictions to the free intercourse of nations.

  LAWRENCE HARGRAVE, SPEAKING TO AN AUDIENCE IN SYDNEY IN THE LATE 1890S3

  January 1894. A soft, snowy kind of day…

  Before a roaring fire in the study of his stately Chicago home, the respected French-American scientist Octave Chanute was seated at his oak desk, putting the finishing touches to the manuscript of his book which he intended to publish under the title Progress in Flying Machines. It was a work that had been a long time in coming.