Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  As it happened, Blériot was also soon wondering if he would ever see his wife again, as his remaining petrol reduced to très peu, and Angleterre refused to show. Only a few minutes after passing over the Escopette, he looked behind to check its position and found that both it and the French coast had disappeared! No shoreline behind…none in front…no boats in any direction.10 He was totally, totally alone, if one did not count the ghosts of the Norman invasion of 1066 and all that, looking up in amazement as he passed over.

  Adding to his worries was that the wind, which had been blessedly mild to this point, was now starting to buffet him and his tiny machine from side to side and up and down. Where, oh where, was England? It was all very well to just head roughly north-west and hope to hit it, but which way was north-west, anyway? He had neglected to bring a compass, and as a matter of fact, didn’t even have a watch. He simply continued to point his nose in the direction that Alfred Leblanc had indicated, trying to keep his shadow on the water just forward and out to his left as it had been when he had set off, and felt he must still be on track. Well, at least he hoped so.

  Just as he began to feel the rising bile of panic, Blériot was at last relieved to see a thin grey line in front of him that had to be England. But, hélas, where were the fabled white cliffs of Dover? Of them, no sign at all…What he did see however were three small ships, all pointing in the same direction—surely towards a port—and he decided to follow their aquatic arrow. As he passed over the ships, the sailors took off their hats and waved at him, cheering all the while, which was heartening. And if he had spoken a word of English he might even have swooped low and asked them which way was Dover. Still, he felt, he must be getting close.

  Sure enough, just a few minutes later, which was to say thirty-seven minutes after he had left France, he saw not just the white cliffs, but beyond them Dover Castle, where he intended to land. Blériot flew in over Dover Harbour, where by pure happenstance the suddenly puny-looking toy warships of the Home Fleet were anchored, and headed to the castle.

  Not far away, an English writer by the name of H.G. Wells gazed, stunned, as what had been just a tiny speck on the horizon turned into an extraordinary flying machine soaring over his head. The English Channel had been conquered! On that feat alone, the possibilities of the future were astounding and, in that instant, as he would often later recount, his writer’s mind leapt forward to the days when the entire world was girdled by huge aerial fleets taking people hither and thither across the globe.11

  For Blériot, Dover Castle now loomed large, and there, on a meadow just before it, was a friend waving a French flag! As it turned out, an enterprising French journalist, Charles Fontaine, had crossed the Channel by boat the previous day, having packed the French flag in the hope that he would be able to do precisely what he was doing as Blériot flew over.

  Blériot swirled around to come in for something that was a lot less than a ‘landing’, and—some habits died hard, no matter how much improved his plane was—a lot closer to a ‘falling’.

  ‘Merde, pas encore,’ he murmured to himself, just before impact, but the main thing was that once again he survived intact—enough for a weeping Fontaine to immediately wrap him in the flag, bury him in kisses and shower him with many a heartfelt ‘Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!’

  Within minutes, police, press and the people of Dover—many of them still getting dressed—had started to crowd onto the little field, all eager to shake the hand of the amazing Frenchman. Can you believe it? He flew here from France!

  Blériot’s own English was restricted to ‘good morning’ and ‘sank you, ver’ much’, but at least he was able to get that out to everyone who congratulated him.12

  Back in Calais a short time later, the large crowd gathered outside the Marconi hut was ravenous for information. They could hear the endless beeps of Morse code coming from within, but what was happening!? Had he made it? Crashed? Disappeared? Been rescued? What? What? What?!

  At long last an elderly Englishman emerged from within, a veteran journalist from the Daily Mail with an upper lip so stiff you could hammer a 4-inch nail with it, and spoke to the assembled people displaying much the same emotion as he might have in reading a grocery list, not his own. ‘I am informed by the wireless station at Dover that an engineer of the Ecole Centrale de Paris, Monsieur Louis Blériot, born at Cambrai…piloting a flying machine of his invention…a monoplane, with an Anzani engine of 25 horsepower, equipped with a Chauvière propeller…who at 4.52 this morning left Les Baraques near Calais…has landed safely in a field at Dover Castle and…’13

  And that was as far as he got. For the rest was drowned out in cheers, tears and wild yells of exultation. Blériot’s team collapsed into each other’s arms in tears of joy and relief. And above it all, English voices could be heard, rousing the crowd to three cheers for Blériot! Yes, he was French, but his feat belonged to the world, and now so did he. Man had now flown across the Channel, and Blériot was that man.

  But wait! Back in Dover, amid all the festivities, one thing had to be attended to. Through the throng and pressing towards the airman, came a very solemn, officious immigration officer, intent on doing his duty. First he wished to interrogate Blériot, as the ‘master’ of a ‘vessel’ that had arrived at the port of Dover, and then he gave him his official clearance papers.

  ‘I hereby certify that I have examined Louis Blériot, Master of a vessel called the Monoplane, lately arriving from Calais, and that it appears by the verbal answers of the said Master to the enquiries put to him, that there has not been on board during the voyage an infectious disease demanding detention of the vessel, and that she is free to proceed.’14

  Blériot was free to go! And so was his plane.

  Which was to the good, as although the Frenchman was very pleased with his survival and his grand exploit, he had decided that where he really wanted to be was back in France with Alicia, with whom he had just been tearfully reunited on the Dover dockside, once the French destroyer Escopette had berthed. With that in mind, the French couple went back across the Channel on the Escopette that very afternoon, Louis thinking that his feat would bring him perhaps a little renown. He had no idea…

  As Alicia later noted in her own memoirs, ‘C’était le commencement de la gloire’.15 Within a day, Blériot had been prevailed upon to return to England, by boat across the Channel this time, where he found that he was the front-page news across the land—no newspaper selling more copies than Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail, which broke circulation records with its coverage, beginning with the enormous headline on the front page, ‘BLERIOT FIRST MAN TO FLY THE CHANNEL’. An editorial inside, penned by Northcliffe himself, was emphatic that ‘As the potentialities of the aeroplane have been proved, we must take energetic steps to develop a navy of the air’.16 For its part, the Daily Express put its finger on the nub of the military significance of his feat with its own front-page headline: ‘GREAT BRITAIN IS NO LONGER AN ISLAND’. German journalists had pursued a similar theme, with Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger beginning its own coverage almost with martial glee: ‘England ist keine Insel mehr‘ (England is no longer an island).17 And right there on the Figaro front page: ‘Depuis aujourd’ hui on peut dire que l’Angleterre a cessé d’être une île’ (From today, one can say that England is no longer an island).18 After all, what price a mighty navy of Britannia ruling the waves, if there was now an entirely different realm above it which Britannia did not rule?

  As Blériot alighted at Victoria Station from the saloon carriage specially attached to the regular train for the exclusive use of him and Madame, he was stunned to see an enormous crowd waiting for him, and all these people applauding and calling out his name in that strange accent they had—‘Mind the foot!’19 someone shouted as he limped along, a little dazed—even as Madame Blériot was presented with a massive bouquet of carnations!20 And thus it continued all through the streets of London. People cheered at his very sight, as they proceeded along Buckingham Palace Road and
entered The Mall, before going through Trafalgar Square, the crowd swelling as the couple neared their destination.

  At a massive luncheon banquet held at the Savoy Hotel, situated on the Strand, and hosted by Lord Northcliffe, Blériot—who two days earlier had been more anonymous than a lost dog in the Bois de Boulogne—found himself seated right beside Sir Ernest Shackleton, whose own fame had been built on two journeys towards the South Pole, covering a combined distance of 35,000 miles and lasting a total of three years. The climax of the lunch was when Lord Northcliffe presented the Frenchman with a gold trophy and a cheque for £1000—or at least would have presented both things, had not Alicia stood up and reached forward at that precise moment to grab the money and crisply put it in her purse.21

  In response, Monsieur Blériot made a simple, elegant speech in French, which was translated to the crowd. Holding a glass of wine in his right hand he said, ‘I am deeply touched by your welcome, a welcome which is altogether out of proportion to the feat which I have accomplished. I hope that France and England, already united by water—by the Channel that was below me during my flight—may now be still closer united by air. I drink to England and to her King, and as you say in English, “your good health”.’22

  With which, Blériot raised his glass and then sat down, beaming at his wife, as she beamed back at him, and all around that massive ballroom—resplendent with French and British flags awash in the glorious light of so many candles refracting through all the crystal glassware—a spontaneous standing ovation took place as lords and ladies, cabinet ministers, industrialists, magnates and many of the good and great of the day expressed their deepest admiration.

  One who watched from afar the stunning reaction to Blériot’s feat was the famous magician Harry Houdini, who decided on the instant that he needed to incorporate flying into his own shows. And if France was where Blériot was from, well, then that was where he would go to get lessons…

  And still, the reaction to the Frenchman’s cross-Channel dash was just warming up! For as soon as both the thrust and the detail of the feat had spread across two lands, it really was tout le monde that was caught up in celebrating it. That, at least, was how it seemed to Blériot when, on his return from London the next day, he arrived at Gare du Nord station to find a stunning 100,000 wild Parisians waiting to cheer him to the echo. ‘Vive Blériot!’ they cried.’ VIVE Blériot!’ There were so many people, and so much tumult, that the five goggle-eyed Blériot children who had been taken by their nanny to the station to meet their parents, simply couldn’t get near them.

  Songs had been penned to Blériot’s greater glory, street peddlers were hawking his image, and the now great man was taken by open horse-drawn carriage up the Champs Elysées to another luncheon, where the Aéro-Club de France awarded him a gold medal.

  Just two days later, Blériot was visiting the offices of the great French newspaper Le Matin—which had so overcome its scepticism of the previous year that it now had the successful aviator’s plane suspended outside its window for all the world to see—when the editor asked him if he would step out onto the balcony to greet the crowd gathered there to acclaim him. Blériot obliged, only to be near deafened by the almost aggressive, hungry roar of the multitude that sprang forth upon his first sight. There were people as far as the eye could see, along the boulevard, straining out of windows, clambering over the top of each other, just to get a better look at him. Roaring, and roaring, and roaring. On and on and on…

  ‘It’s too much,’ the bewildered Blériot murmured to the editor, his once sleepy moustache now wide awake and quivering. ‘Never, ever, not even the other day in London did I feel anything like this. It’s wonderful and it’s frightening…’23

  Just what was going on? It was a question worth contemplating as he waved at the crowd, glancing a little at his frail plane, its fin now covered with the signatures of the English people who had been in front of Dover Castle that morning and had decided to leave their own mark on history…

  Other men, most notably the Wright brothers, had already covered much greater distances than his 24 miles (flying off course added another few miles to the Channel crossing), and had stayed in the heavens for much longer than his mere thirty-seven minutes. And yet even the famously taciturn Wilbur Wright himself, when woken in the middle of the night by a reporter to be told of the news, had professed himself impressed, and thanked the reporter for telling him! Wilbur couldn’t resist, however, adding a rider: ‘Mr Blériot is very daring in his work, too daring, really, for flying. His feat is the greater when the machine he used is considered.’

  Do you think it would have been less remarkable if he had used a Wright aeroplane, the reporter asked.

  ‘Well, of course,’ replied Wilbur. ‘We think we have the best aeroplane in the world.’24

  Which was as may be, but the fact that Blériot had vaulted such a famed natural barrier between two countries in one magnificent hop had so totally captured the imagination of both populaces that it was felt nothing would ever be the same again, either for him, or the world.

  And it never was.

  Within a couple of months, a survey of French schoolboys found that the man they most admired, well ahead of someone called Napoleon Bonaparte, was Louis Blériot.25 Suddenly Blériot was awash in the money he needed to make a lot of planes, and the fame he needed to sell them.

  As to forthcoming changes to the world, some of these were picked early by journalists rhapsodising over the significance of Blériot’s flight. Gaston Calmette in Le Figaro posed the question: ‘What will become of men’s laws, their customs, barriers, the vain efforts of their industrial protectionism, their commercial exchanges, their defences, their relation, their intercourse, on the day when man can, by the action of his will alone, pass in a few hours beyond all horizons across all the oceans and above all the rivers…? Within the foreseeable future, the conditions of human life will be profoundly changed…‘26

  Even in faraway Italy—although now, suddenly, a lot less faraway than it had been before—an ambitious journalist by the name of Benito Mussolini wrote in a regional paper that there was only one word that could possibly sum up this new century: ‘Moviménto’. ‘Movement towards the icy solitudes of the poles and towards the virgin peaks of the mountains; movement towards the stars and towards the depths of the seas. Movement everywhere and acceleration in the rhythm of our lives…The dream of Icarus, the dream of all the generations, has become a reality.’27

  In Australia, a keen observer of the leap forward made by aviation was George A. Taylor, the Hononary Secretary of the Aerial League of Australia, who, just two days after Blériot’s feat, wrote an appeal in the columns of the Daily Telegraph for greater effort to be made towards ‘the aerial defence of Australia’. Among other things he noted, ‘To England is credited the steam railway engine, to France belongs the honour of producing the automobile, to Australia belongs the credit of giving the world the key to the problem of flight, by inventing the aeroplane fifteen years ago, and leaving it for the rest of the world to develop.’28

  As to Lawrence Hargrave, he made no public pronouncement, but was quietly thrilled at the progress that was being made in the field of aviation, and certainly felt a great deal of satisfaction. That satisfaction was lifted a few notches further when, at the Reims International Air Meet held in France, the star of the show was Henri Farman’s eponymously named Henri Farman III, which won the distance competition by flying 111.8 miles in three hours, four minutes, and fifty-six seconds using a 50-horsepower air-cooled Gnome Omega rotary engine, which owed its inspiration to the design of the rotary engine Hargrave had released into the public domain many years before. A veritable revolution in aviation had begun—and again, it had Hargrave’s name on it.

  It was a pleasure to be back in Australia. It felt like home, and was home, even if young Chilla, whose language had not been fully formed when he went to Canada, had returned with an accent strong enough that the other kids would raz
z him a bit about it, not to mention his weird haircut, rather reminiscent of a Mohawk. No matter, it was just good to be home. On weekends and holidays the family would frequently go camping and sailing on the Hawkesbury River, with Chilla, particularly, delighting in how the wind, coming from any direction, could still propel them in almost any direction, just so long as you understood the way it worked…29

  All Europe was now plane crazy. Newspapers seemed to cover little else. Science had become obsessed with understanding the laws of flight, while industry and then commerce had devoted themselves to first building flying machines and then refining them. Influential people within the establishment were agitating for Britain to develop a ‘navy of the air’, and similar movements were afoot in continental Europe, particularly France and Germany.

  There were, yet, small hold-outs against all this aviation craziness. In a grand mansion in the thriving Dutch city of Haarlem, near Amsterdam, a heavily moustachioed man by the name of Herman Fokker had no doubt that the whole flying fad would pass and things would return to normal. In the meantime, he would be damned if he stood by and watched his wastrel son Anthony continue with his obsessive compulsion to build flying machines. For days on end, over months, and then years, Anthony had been in the family attic, building models of aeroplanes, devouring everything he could read about the Wrights and Blériot and totally wasting his time. The young man, who Mijnheer Fokker was sure would come to nothing, seemed to think of nothing else, talk of nothing else, do nothing else. He had even convinced himself that he knew better than some of the aircraft designers how a plane should be built—saying that, for starters, he felt the lateral stability of the Wright brothers’ plane could be vastly improved—and the precocious one had tried to demonstrate this fact to his father by virtue of his models! Well, Fokker the elder was having none of it. A practical man who had made his fortune carving out a coffee plantation in Java, he felt he had earned the right to enjoy his prosperous retirement, and wanted his son to head off into something useful in turn. He had hoped that young Anthony would grow out of his idée fixe, but if anything it had become worse all through his teen years until now when he was almost twenty. The boy was obsessed.