by P Fitzsimons
Within the British Empire, Fokker’s nearest equivalent was perhaps a young marine engineer by the name of Alliot Verdon Roe, who had also become fascinated by the mechanics of flight and was endlessly throwing paper gliders from a window in the top storey of the family home.
He did this so often that he eventually commanded the attention of an inmate in the mental hospital next door, who gravely informed his doctor, ‘I am afraid there’s another one like us in that house.’
When the doctor carefully informed him that he was mistaken, for that was a private home, the inmate was not put off.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve been watching that house. A man opens a top window and throws out a lot of bits of paper. Then he runs down into the garden and picks them up. And he keeps on for hours at a time!’30
Bother Bess.
Ehrich Weiss, aka Harry Houdini, loved his young wife all right, but she never seemed to have the first clue about the kinds of pressures and strains that he was under. Or, if she did know, it didn’t seem to concern her unduly. In Paris, for example, just before they had left on the long voyage to Australia—where he intended to be the first man to fly a plane—he had spent all day, every day, out at the Voisin factory, getting the plane that he had purchased properly packed and put in a box, together with all the requisite spare parts, while she spent all her days amusing herself.
‘Bess out early and shopping,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Buys dresses and hats, happy as a lark, her trunks full to overflowing. She has no worries.’31
And then, on the trip aboard the steamer to Australia, his wife had both drunk and danced up such a storm with the captain of the vessel during one of the interminable formal balls that she had collapsed, and Houdini had been obliged to carry her back to their cabin and put her to bed.
And where was Bess on this morning, the very morning he was to risk his life by attempting to be the first person to fly an aeroplane in Australia, at a place called Diggers Rest? Safe and sound, and no doubt asleep, back in Melbourne’s luxurious Hotel Windsor, 20 miles to the south-east. It was just the way things were between them. They had fallen in love at first sight, and been married within a week, but it hadn’t always been easy, least of all now.
But to work. Always to work…
The night before, Houdini had performed his magic show to a sold-out audience at the Melbourne New Opera House and had not got to bed until midnight. And yet, on this fine morning of 18 March 1910, he had risen well before dawn to be in this large flat paddock, talking to his French mechanic, Antonio Brassac—a man who had formerly been in the employ of none other than the great Blériot—just as the golden Australian sun began to appear.
The firm rule of flying at this point was that it was only safe to take off if the wind wasn’t strong enough to blow out a match. Nigh on three weeks earlier, on this very field, in his eagerness to be the first man aloft in Australia, an American by the name of Ralph C. Banks had ignored that rule and promptly crashed straight after take-off, but on this clear morning, for Houdini there was not a breath of wind and conditions seemed perfect.32
Houdini’s plane, a Voisin, looked remarkably like a couple of Lawrence Hargrave’s box kites of fifteen years earlier, for the simple reason that it was essentially just a larger version joined by thin struts, with an engine and propeller attached, atop five small wheels. In fact, so greatly did the Voisin brothers admire Lawrence Hargrave that their first commercially available aircraft had been christened Le Hargrave, and Houdini’s plane was simply a more refined version of this.
The small crowd of aviation enthusiasts who had been gathered for many days waiting for an attempt, now leaned respectfully closer to get a better look. The wings spanned 33 feet from tip to tip, with a ‘chord’—the width from the front of the wing to the back—of 6 1/2 feet, while the distance from the front of the plane to the back was just over 35 feet, the whole thing powered by a 60-horsepower ENV engine. Most interestingly, in terms of advances on previous aircraft, was that the Voisin brothers had made a leap forward from the Wright brothers’ system of ‘wing warping’ to bank left and right, and had installed the first primitive system of ailerons—‘little wings’, in French. By moving these ailerons up or down on the respective wings, Houdini could alter their shape and so make the wing rise or fall on the appropriate side.
After taking the little plane up and down the paddock a couple of times without attempting to take off, Houdini had Brassac make some adjustments to the rudder and then steeled himself. He was not crazy about the whole flying caper, but its pull on the public was undeniable, and that was the business he was in. Besides, the contract on which he had come to this continent stipulated that if he made ten flights in Australia, each of more than five minutes’ duration, he would receive no less than £20,000—so he may as well get started now. (Not that this day’s endeavour had been promoted. Rather, this attempted flight was in the manner of a trial, to make sure everything worked, before getting the paying public in.) The Australian promoter who had brought Houdini out for that money was the sleekly moustachioed impresario Harry Rickards, but the tour had been in part organised by George A. Taylor of the Aerial League of Australia. Taylor was still determined to press the Australian government into investing in a ‘navy of the air’, to thwart the likes of Japan which had become notably militaristic of late.
At last Houdini signalled to Brassac that he was ready, and the wizened French mechanic moved in to grip the propeller, while the others present—a couple of Houdini’s theatrical assistants, the chauffeur who had driven him the 20 bumpy miles from Melbourne, and a small group of young Australian men who had been camping nearby to await this very moment—stepped back.
‘Un, deux, trois,’ the mechanic muttered, before giving the great 8-foot-long blade the powerful heave it needed. In an instant the engine caught and throbbed into noisy life. Houdini gunned it, and within seconds was accelerating down the paddock.
All seemed well until, just 50 yards on, the plane suddenly careered sharply to the left and headed straight for a tree. If only the plane had brakes he might have applied them, but that was not an option. So, instead of slewing to the left or right, Houdini kept ‘er straight, gunned the throttle and, as the onlookers held their breath…lifted off and managed to clear the tree by just a few feet!33
‘I love you! I love you!’34 the mechanic yelled in English, though this was to the aeroplane—which he had so lovingly worked on for the previous few months that he had slept beside it most nights—and not Houdini, whom Brassac only tolerated so long as he didn’t crash his beloved plane.
And now, about 50 feet above the ground, Houdini circled the paddock just once and then came in for a good landing, only a minute after he had taken off. Two more flights followed in quick succession, each one a little longer than the first, and at the conclusion of the last one, the magician landed and was overcome with elation.
Climbing out of his craft he yelled with uncharacteristic exuberance: ‘I can fly! I can fly!’
At this moment a black bird, probably a raven, landed on the wing above Houdini’s head and squawked loudly. ‘He’s telling me,’ Houdini laughed, ‘that I can’t fly worth a cuss.’35
Ah, but he really could, as the handful of men present attested in written statements. One who had witnessed the whole thing—and was simply beside himself with the wonder of it all—was a 21-year-old Melburnian mechanic by the name of Harry Hawker.36 With several others he had been living at the Diggers Rest railway station over the previous few days in the hope of seeing precisely this, and he had not been disappointed.37 For from the moment Hawker saw Harry Houdini fly at Diggers Rest, he knew that whatever happened, however it happened, he simply had to fly himself.
When Houdini landed after his first stunning flight, he exulted to journalists, ‘I am the first man to have flown in Australia, and I have fulfilled my greatest ambitions. I shall never forget my sublime and enthralling sensations, and I only hope that my success will enco
urage other aviators to persevere and conquer the air. They will find aviation a pastime providing new and wonderful sensations, such as no other pastime can afford.’38
(In fact, Englishman Colin Defries briefly left the ground in a Wright Flyer three months earlier in Sydney, as did L.J.R. ‘Jack’ Jones at Emu Plains,39 while two South Australians, Bill Wittber and Fred Custance, also fleetingly lifted off the ground near the town of Bolivar in a Blériot aeroplane, the latter, reportedly, just the day before Houdini—although there is no doubt Custance crashed the machine. But it would be some time before these feats became widely known, and it is certain that the man who captured the public imagination as the first man to fly in Australia was Harry Houdini.)
That night Houdini performed his last show at the Melbourne New Opera House, and over the next few days—frequently before crowds of up to 200 open-mouthed spectators as the stunning news made the Melbourne press—went up another fourteen times, including a crucial flight that lasted two minutes more than the contracted five minutes.
All of this, however, was merely a preliminary to Houdini’s real attempt to make huge money out of flying, above and beyond the already fabulous money promised by Rickards. For now that he felt he had properly learned to fly the machine, after those first few tentative lessons in France and then practice at Diggers Rest, he and Rickards agreed it was time to take the whole show to Sydney and charge people to watch!
And it worked a charm. For a week from 18 April 1910, Houdini flew before stunned crowds at Sydney’s Rosehill racetrack, each person paying one shilling for the privilege of watching and being part of it. As reported in the Daily Telegraph on 19 April, on the moment Houdini first became airborne, ‘men tossed up their hats, women grew hysterical and wept for sheer excitement. A hundred men rushed towards the biplane, pulled the happy aviator from the seat, and carried him, shoulder-high, mid deafening cheers and salvos.’
Watching with great satisfaction was George A. Taylor. He was deeply satisfied with the impact that Houdini was making, and the demonstration of what the advent of aviation must mean for military power. No paper put it better than the Daily Telegraph, which wrote: ‘People who scoff at the idea of warfare in the air, ought to have been at Rosehill racetrack on Sunday. Shortly after noon, when, with a roar like a thousand maniacs released, the Voisin biplane, which had been tugging at its moorings for a week in vain endeavour to break away, was released by command of the pilot, Harry Houdini.’40
For its part Melbourne Punch commented: ‘When Houdini’s great machine was circling and whirring round like a gigantic bird, the great thought was “What of the future?” We in Australia are remote from the great world centres. We are peculiarly exposed to attack…We are building ships and training men…We are making no provision to defend ourselves against an enemy in the air. Yet the battles of the future will go to whoever is strongest in the air.’41
There was a great deal of such reaction, and in an effort to consolidate and keep it going, Taylor and the Aerial League of Australia held a reception for Houdini at Sydney Town Hall with an array of speakers celebrating the magician’s feat, and focusing on its military implications.
Taylor himself thundered to the theme he had already written on copiously. ‘Australia, at the crash, will be like a rabbit in a trap. It will watch the blow fall and be powerless—for the crash will come from the sky. You, O brother, may rush the fighting line with bare fists if nothing else. But what of your wives and children? Some, at first thought, will rush the great buildings till they are shattered. Others, more desperate, will crowd and fight and tear at the manholes of our sewer shafts and will mass in huddling mobs in the darkness, safe from the aerial terror that is smashing their menfolk above. And this day will come as sure as tomorrow’s sun, unless Australia is prepared to meet aerial invasion with aerial defence.’42
The upshot was that the government got the message and it wasn’t long before Australia’s defence minister, George Pearce, was on his way to London to sort out the beginnings of an Australian ‘navy of the air’.
As to Houdini, he and Bess returned to the United States shortly after his successful week at Rosehill racetrack—Bess laden down with the shopping she had done in Melbourne. Despite the tremendous financial rewards he had received, Houdini was never to fly again. Though immensely satisfied with that week in Sydney, he did have one regret.
Lawrence Hargrave, whom he knew all about, had not been there to see it. When Houdini had formally written to him before arriving in Sydney, inviting him to come out to the racetrack as his guest and watch him fly his plane, Hargrave had replied rather crisply, perhaps disapproving of his science being presented by a mere magician: ‘Why should I do that? I invented it…’43
The King. The King. The King, he is dying…
In his bedchamber at Buckingham Palace, King Edward VII—Sovereign of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, Emperor of India, Supreme Governor of the Church of England—just shy of his allotted ‘three-score years and ten’, was clearly close to breathing his last rasping breath. Beside him throughout sat the Prince of Wales, willing his father to go on, but acutely conscious that the last beat of his father’s heart would be followed by the first beat of his own reign. At one point when King Edward surfaced from his nearly comatose state the prince was able to inform him that his horse Witch of the Air had won at Kempton Park that very afternoon.
Slowly, agonisingly, the King replied, ‘I am very glad.’ And then he spoke no more. A short time later, just before midnight tolled on this sixth day of May 1910, the King did indeed breathe his last breath, with his son, formerly the Prince of Wales and now King George V, embracing his father’s still warm body.
When the bells pealed the news the following morning, the people wept, first in London and then throughout the entire British Empire. For its part, the Sydney Morning Herald claimed, ‘death has clutched at the heart of the Empire with a grip of ice’. In Australia the populace immediately moved into a period of official mourning, where many officials wore black, and large parties, public balls and any public exuberance were severely frowned upon.
Even as King Edward’s body lay in state in Westminster Hall—and the good and the great of Europe, including the German Emperor, the kings of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, Belgium and Bulgaria, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria gathered in London for the funeral—so too were services being held all over Australia, packed with loyal citizens wishing to pay their final respects.
One such service was held at St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney’s George Street, presided over by the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, John Charles Wright, and commencing with angelic choirboys slowly walking down the aisles singing a favourite hymn…
Praise, my soul, the King of heaven,
To His feet thy tribute bring;
Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven,
Who like me His praise should sing?
Praise Him! Praise Him!
Praise Him! Praise Him!
Praise the everlasting King…
Their glorious voices soared surely to the heavens above, though many people were weeping at the sadness of it all. Still, on this most solemn of all occasions, the smallest of the choirboys, the one at the front of the procession, who had been singing with fervour like all the rest, was seen to turn to his mother in the pew just to his left…and wink.44
At this moment, that good woman, Catherine Kingsford Smith, could have wished that the stones of the cathedral floor would simply open up and swallow her, so mortified was she by her boy’s levity…
But on the other hand, that wink from her Chilla was simply him all over. Nothing was to be taken too seriously and no convention too solemn that it couldn’t be broken. There was fun to be had in everything, even the death of the King, and she couldn’t really hold it against him. He was just that kind of child, and she adored him regardless.
And, truth be told, it was only in his singing and his long white smock that Cha
rles Kingsford Smith had much of the ‘choirboy’ about him in the first place. Despite the religious belief of his father particularly, Chilla himself was neither pious, nor quiet and withdrawn, nor meek, nor even particularly humble. As a matter of fact, his personal taste in songs was far less hymns harmoniously sung than bawdy ballads belted out. But, and this was the important part, singing such hymns was at least helping him to get an education. The cathedral school had been established a couple of decades earlier, by the third Bishop of Sydney, Dr Alfred Barry, for the purpose of providing ‘the choristers with a high-class, free education on Church principles, in addition to a musical training’, and, noting that Chilla had a very strong singing voice, Catherine had applied to get him a scholarship, whereby in return for his singing prowess being placed at the service of the church on Sundays and special occasions, her lad would be privately educated.