Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  ‘For us in France and everywhere,’ he told a reporter, ‘a new era in mechanical flight has begun. I am not sufficiently calm after the event thoroughly to express my opinion. My view can best be expressed in these words—c’est merveilleux!’41

  Quietly pleased at the reaction of the French aviators—for his personal view on their own attempts at flight was that they were only capable of ‘hopping from the ground, or fluttering along like a hen chased by a dog!’42—Wilbur told them he could have stayed up there for an hour if he had liked. And yet Wilbur was less circumspect in his letter that night to Orville, who was holding the fort back in Dayton: ‘Blériot and Delagrange were so excited they could scarcely speak, and Kapperer could only gasp and could not talk at all. You should have seen them.’43

  The following morning, the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro set the tone: ‘It was not merely a success but a triumph; a conclusive trial and a decisive victory for aviation, the news of which will revolutionize scientific circles throughout the world.’ And so it did. Over the next few days, Wilbur continued to fly at the racetrack, making progressively longer flights before ever larger crowds, as more and more people made their way there to witness le miracle.

  Afterwards there were many banquets in Wilbur’s honour and great celebrations. At all of them he was asked to speak, but he declined, noting on one famous occasion: ‘The only birds who speak are parrots and they can’t fly very high.’44 (Quel bon mot!)

  No matter. The feats of the Wright brothers spoke for themselves, and now that they had demonstrated their plane’s capability in Europe, they had unleashed an entire new wave of energy towards aviation in general.

  In Canada, young Chilla Kingsford Smith continued to prosper, at least mostly. At the Queens School in Vancouver, which he was attending, a particularly perceptive teacher noted of young Charles’s conduct that while he was ‘Good’, he was also ‘Silly at times’.45 A young man of strong abilities in many areas, the general view of his teachers was that he was a good egg with the only real worry being that he lacked the maturity to focus and grind down if a subject didn’t interest him. At least he was adjudged ‘Excellent’ at writing, ‘Very good’ at arithmetic and drawing, and ‘Good’ at geography—a subject he was no doubt helped in by the fact that he had already seen a fair chunk of the world that his fellow students only knew of from books.

  In London, on 5 October 1908, Lord Northcliffe announced that the Daily Mail was offering a prize of £500 for the first successful flight across the Channel, a distance of 22 miles at its narrowest point. The Mail’s nearest equivalent publication in France, Le Matin, sniffed that this was nothing but a cheap publicity stunt, as there was no chance that the paper would have to pay up for many years. For its part, the widely read satirical publication Punch offered its own handsome prize for the first man to swim across the Atlantic, and an even bigger prize for someone who could fly to Mars and back in a week.46

  Untroubled, Northcliffe was so satisfied with the publicity the offer generated that he doubled the prize to £1000.

  He had two motivations. Firstly, it was obvious that the level of public interest in flying was enormous, and by offering such a prize, and corralling much of the subsequent story to his own paper, he would easily make that money back. But secondly, he had been appalled to see that his own British government had not realised that planes were going to change the world—most particularly when it came to the colossal effect they would have on a war—and he was determined to do what he could to awaken some interest. After all, Lieutenant B.F.S. Baden-Powell, the President of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, was in no doubt about the significance of mechanical flight, after observing some of Wilbur Wright’s first flights in Europe, and even going aloft with him on one occasion. He had been quoted: ‘That Wilbur Wright is in possession of a power which controls the fate of nations is beyond dispute.’47

  Exactly! And yet to this point, the British government had done nothing to get possession of that power. Lord Northcliffe’s view was that once a plane flew across the Channel, the government would realise that Britain’s much vaunted navy was now superseded as a military force, and would begin to pour resources into ensuring the nation was at the forefront of this new, overpowering weapon of war.

  William Kingsford Smith had tried. He had really tried.

  After the disaster of the defaulted bank loan, which had destroyed his banking career, he had been glad to make a fresh start in Canada, and now, after a couple of years working as a humble clerk, he had decided to try his hand at business once again. With his brother-in-law Arthur Kingsford and his oldest son, Harold—who had now married a Canadian girl, Elsie, with whom he had two children in quick succession—he had decided to begin a real estate business. Vancouver was growing, money was flowing in, and it stood to reason that there would be many opportunities to make money if they did it right. But somehow it just didn’t work. Maybe it was because for something so personal as the buying or selling of a home, Canadians preferred dealing with their own, or maybe it was because they were entering into a business of which they had absolutely no first-hand knowledge…but one way or another the venture failed. In the end, after nearly six years in Canada there was nothing to do but sell up and head home. While the Canadian experience had been physically invigorating, it had been financially debilitating. And at least Australia was warm. In ones and twos, then, the Kingsford Smiths began to head back across the Pacific throughout the last half of 1908, until William, Catherine and young Chilla were the last to leave in January 1909.

  William found work sorting mail at the Neutral Bay post office, on Sydney’s lower North Shore, and the Kingsford Smiths now based themselves in a modest rented home in that suburb, at 68 Yeo Street.

  Scribbling again.

  Ever since her husband Louis Blériot had seen Monsieur Wilbur Wright fly, his wife Alicia had been driven mad by his constant distraction, up to and including his endless scribbling of plans and drawings on the tablecloth while she was trying to feed him and their five children dinner!48 The children would finish dinner and ask to be excused, and her Louis would still be sitting there, jotting down notes, working out sums, and frequently he would have entirely forgotten to eat! More often than not, Alicia—mightily annoyed, much as she loved him—cleaned up and left him to it. He talked about nothing else, thought about nothing else, did nothing else but continue to build his plane in his workshop with the help of another designer, by the name of Raymond Saulnier, incorporating all the best features of the Wright Flyer he had seen at Hunaudières racetrack.

  For this plane owed no little inspiration to what Louis had closely observed on that wonderful day he’d seen Wilbur Wright take to the air, including wing warping, which the Frenchman recognised would give him greater control. Louis’ great departure, however, was to embrace the concept of a monoplane, a plane with just one set of wings, which he was convinced would give him greater speed and less drag. In fact, it was something he had been working on even before he’d seen Wilbur Wright fly, and had even built some monoplanes with mixed success—read disastrous and just passable—but Flyer III had given him the clue as to how to make it really work.

  This plane, he decided, would be built of oak and poplar wood, with its cockpit and flying surfaces covered with canvas, save for the uncovered rear fuselage. It incorporated the Wright’s wing-warping system, and also had a steel tube tower above the cockpit to provide a firm anchor for the flying wires needed to support the monoplane’s 25-foot 4-inch wings. A matching frame underneath the cockpit gave a handy attachment for wires to resist the lifting forces. The main undercarriage consisted of two bicycle wheels which were free to swivel, with another bicycle wheel supporting the tail.

  For propulsion, Louis decided, after experimentation, to give it a 25-horsepower Anzani 3-watt cylinder radial engine, with a 6-foot 10-inch twin-bladed wooden Chauvière Intégrale propeller, turning at 1200 revolutions per minute. And, just as he had done in his recent
designs, he put that engine with the propeller right at the front of the plane, not too far from the wings, while he put the elevator and rudder well back at the end of the tail. Oh, and one more thing, ma chèrie. Developing a system he had tried in previous incarnations of this plane, he would link the control to the wing warping and elevator to one central manette, a joystick, while he would control the rudder of the plane by a bar at his feet. If he wanted to go up, he pulled the joystick back. If he wanted to go down, he would push the joystick forward. So elegant. So simple. If he pressed the right rudder while banking, it would turn right, and if the left rudder, it turned left. Louis, as he never tired of telling Alicia, was absolutely sure that this would be his best plane yet…

  One man in Australia who had come to the same conclusion as Lord Northcliffe about the potentially huge military significance of aeroplanes was an engineering disciple of Lawrence Hargrave, an intense fellow by the name of George Augustine Taylor. He had variously worked as a builder, journalist and cartoonist; had been a leader in Sydney’s literary set and bohemian movement; was a successful businessman and nationalist; and was now possessed by two passions—how important both aviation and wireless communications would be to the future of Australia.

  Convinced that Australia would soon no longer be isolated, and therefore safe, from the rest of the world, Taylor was determined that the Australian government should be prepared. With that in mind, on the late afternoon of 28 April 1909, he met other leading figures—including Lawrence Hargrave—to discuss the formation of the Aerial League of Australia in Sydney.

  This meeting was held at the salubrious Hotel Australia, on Castlereagh Street in downtown Sydney. While other men caroused downstairs discussing such banalities as cricket and football, matters of great moment were being discussed upstairs. Taylor himself began, opining that the conquest of the air changed entirely Australia’s position in the world. Not for much longer, surely, could the nation depend on the all-powerful British naval fleet for its protection, when that fleet could so soon be flown over. There were also many commercial considerations, as the advent of the aircraft would likely change entirely the way nations interacted with each other commercially. Both ways, it was important that Australia be at the forefront of this aerial revolution, and the Aerial League of Australia would devote itself to that end. He then moved a motion to that effect!

  Hear, hear! Hear, hear!49

  The motion was seconded by one Major Charles Rosenthal, who noted that while it had long been difficult for Australia’s enemies to get battleships to such distant climes, the same could not long be said of flying enemy planes here, and it was urgent that Australia get prepared.

  Hear, hear! Hear, hear!50

  By meeting’s end it was done and the Aerial League was formed, immediately receiving much positive comment from the press and public alike. ‘While the utility of the airship or aeroplane is little understood,’ the Sydney Daily Telegraph noted the following day, ‘its possibilities appeal strongly to the imagination. One scientist avers that a voyage to the moon would be possible, could we once “get a kick on the ether”.’

  It went on, ‘The development of the aerial ship, in warfare, may yet mean much to Australia, and the new league begins a useful and patriotic work…’51

  Two

  DISTANCE

  What we early designers did we did under the stress of necessity, that ancient mother of invention. We were not university trained. Rule of thumb inventors taught in the school of experience, we used our necks as measuring sticks of success.

  ANTHONY FOKKER1

  There was a young man of Mark Lane

  Who constructed an aeroplane,

  It flew, so we heard,

  Like a beautiful bird,

  His tombstone is pretty but plain.

  POPULAR LIMERICK AMONG THE ENGLISH PUBLIC IN THE EARLY 1900S2

  [The first seafarers] had it easier. They could practice first in pools, then in ponds, then in streams, and not venture out to sea until much later. For this man there is only the sea.

  FRANZ KAFKA DESCRIBING HIS FIRST VIEW OF LOUIS BLÉRIOT FLYING AT BRESCIA3

  In Europe, things moved quickly in the aviation world from the moment that word of Lord Northcliffe’s prize for crossing the Channel got out. There had already been several failed attempts before the 37-year-old Louis Blériot decided that he and his plane were ready. For years he had been fascinated by the concept of powered flight and had poured all his resources into building planes of his own design. The key feature of this latest wood and canvas monoplane, the Blériot XI, he called it rather grandly, was that it was the first one he had built that hadn’t actually—comment ça se dit?—crashed. As a matter of fact, Blériot had crashed so often in so many different planes that he had developed a theory that his survival had all to do with ‘the elasticity of the aeroplane’.

  ‘What happens when an aeroplane strikes the ground,’ he had written in 1907, with surely more authority than any pilot in the world, ‘is this: first some wooden rod or strut breaks, and then another, until half the machine has been either crushed or beaten in. The breaking of these parts, one after the other, absorbs the shock of the impact with the ground. One feels…as though…the machine was telescoping upon itself.’4 As to how one must comport oneself in a crash, he was equally clear: ‘One must not try to save both the machine and oneself. I always throw myself upon one of the wings of my machine, when I have a mishap, and although this breaks the wing, it causes me to alight safely.’5

  Blériot also had a very relaxed attitude to injuries sustained while flying, never allowing them to interfere with getting back into the air. At the present, for example, he was unable to walk without crutches because of a deep burn he had sustained to his left ankle when it had been pressed hard up against an exhaust manifold while he had been flying the previous week. Never mind. Maybe he really would get over La Manche and win the prize offered by Lord Northcliffe. True, that morning when he had been awoken at 2.30 am to be told the weather across the Channel was clearing and he could make an attempt at dawn when the wind would be calmest, he had received the news in his own cloud of blackness, all but certain that he was now on the edge of yet another heroic failure, and perhaps this time a catastrophic one. There would be no throwing himself on the wing this time, not if he hit the water. There would be no point. In that pre-dawn darkness, jostled awake to be told his hour was now, he had wished that the weather would turn bad again, so that he wouldn’t have to go, but could stay there, snuggling into his wife Alicia.

  But then he felt better! Stronger. Maybe, just maybe his jour de gloire had indeed arrived.

  And now, as the dawn of Sunday morning 25 July 1909 broke over Les Baraques just west of Calais—not far from the abandoned late nineteenth century workings of the Channel Tunnel project—and he breathed in the fresh air, he even felt strangely confident, the more so after he made a quick test flight to ensure that all was in order. At his take-off for that trial flight the spectators had wildly applauded and cheered. The fuel tanks were topped up again and all was in readiness, as the crowd of hundreds of villagers, awoken by the stunning noise overhead as Blériot did his test flight, pressed close, pulsing with excitement.6

  Without further ado, Blériot’s manager and great friend, Alfred Leblanc, started the 25-horsepower engine of his frail-looking mechanical dragonfly. The plane, still caked in mud from its last flight and looking very weatherbeaten, instantly came to life and now the intrepid pilot, dressed in the ubiquitous blue overalls of the French workman, replete with oil stains, adjusted his goggles and did up his top button. Blériot had just one last question for Leblanc, and he shouted it over the sound of the engine, even as the Daily Mail’s aviation correspondent, Harry Harper, faithfully recorded it in his notebook.

  ‘Au fait, ou est-ce exactement, Douvres?‘7 (By the way, where exactly is Dover?)

  The insouciant Leblanc pointed rather vaguely over the misty waters in a more or less north-westerly di
rection, and with that Blériot gave the order: ‘Laissez aller!’ (Let ‘er rip!)

  With this, the chocks were removed from in front of the plane’s wheels, whereupon the machine lurched forwards across the rough paddock towards the cliffs, the air poured over and beneath the curved wings, providing that magic upward lift…and in no time at all he was flying towards England!

  Behind Blériot on the cliffs of Calais, there was no wild applause or cheering as he took off, the tension was simply too strong.8 At the instant of take-off, Alfred Leblanc and other support crew, together with reporters and the hundreds of spectators, at this early hour, rushed up the nearby sand dunes so they could watch the plane for as long as possible. And it was going well! The fact that it was 60 metres high already was incredible; as no-one had seen a plane at that altitude before.

  ‘Gradually,’ ran the account of one eyewitness, ‘we lost sight of the tiny little black spot which carried our fervent hopes, and nothing remained except the luminous sheet of water and the radiant sun. We were truly overcome by the disappearance.’9 Between them there was a mixture of excitement, wonder and fear. They had either just witnessed a man flying to his death…or an historic triumph.

  Quickly they jumped onto bikes and into cars and headed to the Marconi wireless hut a couple of miles away, which had been installed by the Daily Mail and was in contact with another wireless station installed on the roof of the Lord Warden Hotel at Dover. It was from here that Harry Harper’s reports to the Daily Mail had been transmitting all morning, and now, if there was news, this would be the place to hear it.

  With just 17 gallons of petrol on board, it was imperative that Blériot cover the 22 miles to England in as direct a manner as possible. And, not to forget, every three minutes he had to furiously pump a hand-plunger atop an oilcan, to prevent the engine from seizing up. Strangely, because there was an endless expanse of water beneath him, with no rushing landmarks, Blériot had the sensation that he was travelling distinctly and unnervingly slowly, whereas on land it was merveilleux the rapidity with which everything passed beneath. And yet, travelling at just a little over 40 miles per hour, at an altitude of around 250 feet, the Frenchman quickly outstripped his naval escort, the destroyer Escopette, which, with his wife Alicia on board, had been sent out by the government for his possible salvation. Alicia saw her husband go overhead, flying just to the left of the smoke from the destroyer’s funnel, and waved furiously, but couldn’t help wondering if she would ever see him again. (She wished that sometime in his busy but not always glorious life to this point her husband had learnt how to swim. Merde!)