Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  Generally, Chilla was very happy at the school, notwithstanding its rather strict regime, and the fact that four afternoons a week he and his fellow choirboys had to head to the cathedral after school to participate in evensong, and do the same as often as three times on a Sunday. Every morning he would rise just after six o’clock, dress in his formal uniform—white shirt with high Eton collar, jacket, shorts, straw boater, black stockings—and head off to the city, via the ferry at Neutral Bay, across the harbour to Circular Quay, and then take the tram up George Street until he made his way into the rather dour grey stone building on Pitt Street.

  As in most private schools of that time, there was a fair measure of ‘fagging’, with older students using younger ones as their ‘fags’—running errands, shining shoes and so forth—but young Kingsford Smith was tough enough that he coped well and was very popular with his peers. Generally, his intellectual ability was regarded by his masters as being of the top rank, without necessarily being matched by a level of application to his studies. Charles is talented but must work harder. As to sport, he excelled most at the physically robust games such as rugby, where he was a bustling back.

  Now thirteen years old, he was fascinated by all things mechanical, and enjoyed his trip to school in the city principally for the fact that it afforded him a chance to get a really good look at how both a ferry and a tram worked. By 1912, that tram trip was taking a little longer still as, once his voice had broken and he could no longer hit the high notes for the choir, Chilla moved on from St Andrew’s to Sydney Technical High School, which was one more stop down the line, near Central Station at Ultimo. Here, effectively changing his white collar for a blue collar, he began study to secure an engineering apprenticeship, and now, instead of spending such an inordinate amount of time singing hymns, the fifteen-year-old was able to do such things as help experienced mechanics dismantle and reassemble engines, clean carburettors, change brake shoes and repack ball bearings. Among his classmates he was known as being a lot of fun if slightly wild and shambolic, reflected in the nicknames they gave him: ‘Mouldy Tooth’, ‘Buccaneer’, ‘Pirate’ and ‘Mad Yank’. In the classrooms and corridors, he was noted for a particular ability to perfectly imitate the sound of a buzzing bee—in a bottle, in an old lady’s shoe, on a cat’s tail—as desired. Ah, how they laughed, as Pirate went through his repertoire.45

  Graded in the C class, with classes being graded from A through to H according to intellectual ability, his results in that first year were solid, if not spectacular. His annual report read: Conduct: very good, Punctuality: excellent, Homework: very good, Classwork: very good, Notebook: good; one day absent. He finished twelfth in his class of about thirty-four students.

  Outside of school, he remained an amazingly self-assured and high-spirited kid, spoilt by his adoring parents and older siblings, and sometimes teetering on the edge of going off the rails…without ever quite getting there. What he was mostly, was a young man with an enormous zest for life, a small blond ball of energy riding too fast on the footpaths with ‘look-no-hands-mum!’ bravado, immensely enjoying most things, constantly surrounded by friends, laughing easily and getting into and out of scrapes ridiculously easily. Once or twice the police even showed up on the Kingsford Smith doorstep when his antics went just that bit too far, as when he dropped bungers off a cliff onto a courting couple below, but it was never anything too serious.

  A win for Lord Northcliffe, at last…

  On 13 May 1912, by Royal Warrant of King George V, the military wing of the Royal Flying Corps was created, and quickly began to expand from the eleven qualified pilots with which it began. By the end of that year it had 133 officers in its ranks, flying a dozen manned balloons and thirty-six aeroplanes, all of which had been manufactured by the Royal Aircraft Factory.

  Yet it was not a birth without pain. Less than two months after its formal beginnings, a tragedy occurred. On Salisbury Plain near Stonehenge, No. 3 Squadron’s Captain Eustace B. Loraine and his observer, Staff-Sergeant Richard Hubert Victor Wilson, were flying their Nieuport monoplane at about 1000 feet when one of the strange arrangement of struts and wings and wires, which so worked on the laws of physics that they kept a plane aloft, suddenly snapped…and the flimsy craft plummeted to the ground, killing both men. The entire Flying Corps was devastated, but a great tradition was born that afternoon, as a Memorandum for All was issued by the corps commander, stating flatly: ‘Flying will continue this evening as usual…’ The show must go on, come what may, and it was up to the men of the corps to put on a jolly good one, what? Come…what…may. The corps’ official motto was Per Ardua Ad Astra (Through Adversity to the Stars), and they meant it.

  In the wee hours of the morning of Wednesday, 30 May 1912, a single wan light burned in an upstairs bedroom of the Wright family home in Dayton, Ohio. For three weeks Wilbur had been vainly struggling against a fever, and in the last twelve hours his condition had deteriorated drastically. Now, as Bishop Wright said his prayers, and Orville held Wilbur’s hand and sister Katharine mopped her ailing brother’s brow, Wilbur ever so slowly passed from this world. That evening, the devastated Bishop Wright carefully wrote in his diary: ‘This morning at 3.15, Wilbur passed away, aged 45 years, 1 month and 14 days. A short life, full of consequences. An unfailing intellect, imperturbable temper, great self-reliance and as great modesty, seeing the right clearly, pursuing it steadily, he lived and died. Many called—many telegrams. (Probably over a thousand.)’46

  His name was Tom Sopwith and, at Kingston-on-Thames, he was running one of England’s first factories devoted to building aircraft, the Sopwith Aviation Company, with a flying school attached. On this day in mid-1912, a young Australian mechanic whom the factory had recently hired as their fifteenth employee, a rather capable chappie by the name of…of…what was it again…? Harry, yes, Harry Hawker, came up to him. And just like that the slight Australian with the confident manner asked Sopwith straight out, ‘Will you teach me to fly, sir?’

  The cheek of the lad! Still, amused by the question, Sopwith asked him what would happen if he broke the aeroplane he was learning in.

  Without hesitation, young Hawker dug into his sock and retrieved his life savings, all of £50. ‘This,’ Hawker said evenly, in an Australian accent so broad that Sopwith could only just understand it, ‘should help to pay for any damage.’

  Waving the money away, Sopwith agreed that Hawker could receive flying tuition.47 It was to be the beginning of a strong association between the Sopwith organisation and Harry Hawker.

  Though flying remained a dangerous activity, there continued to be a veritable army of engineers, designers and inventors across the world working passionately to develop every aspect of it, to make planes that flew faster and higher with better stability and more control. One of those designers was none other than the Dutchman Anthony Fokker, who by this time was at the forefront of world aviation design.

  The young Fokker had—after attending an engineering school in Germany, where study was of the more practical nature in which he excelled, and not academic, which withered him—built and tested his first plane just before Christmas 1910. The fact that he hadn’t broken his neck was as good an indication as any of his success, and by squeezing dribs and drabs of money out of his still reluctant father, he was able to build another plane, and then another one, with successive modifications to make them fly even better.

  Fokker’s endless experiments and modifications had led him to the belief that the key to stability in aircraft was to have a high centre of gravity and not have the wings coming straight out from the fuselage. Instead, Fokker believed, it was better to sweep them back and to have the tips pointing slightly upwards from the horizontal.

  On 31 August 1911, in the best moment of his life to that point, the young Fokker was able to demonstrate his latest plane, the Spin III, to the good burghers of his own town, by flying around the spires of the sixteenth century cathedral of Haarlem, on the occasion of Queen Wilhelmin
a’s birthday. And that showed his father something! So thrilled was Mijnheer Fokker, in fact, that Fokker junior later recorded, ‘we held our only extended conversation in which I wasn’t asking for money’.48

  As Anthony Fokker’s ability to build planes grew so did his ambitions, and he soon embarked on many journeys to try to get one European government or another to back him in setting up a major factory. His preference was for his native Holland, but in the absence of any real interest—his own country preferred Farman planes from France—he tried successively England, Italy and Russia.

  One country, however, was really very interested indeed. And that was Germany. Fokker soon set up a factory there, in the town of Schwerin, and by 1913 Fokker Aviatik Gesellschaft, as he called his company, had begun to make a profit.

  Free at last!

  It was not that young Kingsford Smith’s time at school and Technical High School had been unhappy, by any means. It was just that nearing the end of his described formal education he was more than ever conscious that what he most wanted was to be liberated from the artificial strictures of the classroom and get into the real world, with a job, a salary and freedom. In May 1913 that opportunity arose when he was taken on as an apprentice at the engineering workshops of the Colonial Sugar Refinery (CSR) in Pyrmont, in Sydney’s inner west, right by the harbour foreshore.

  For some people working in such a place, so full of grinding, noisy machinery, would have been unpleasant and perhaps intimidating. But not for Charles Kingsford Smith. He loved being in such a busy place as Pyrmont to begin with—a thriving industrial hub full of workers, steam engines shunting into sidings, ships coming into dock, and the endless hustle and bustle of heavily laden horse-drawn drays. He particularly loved working at CSR, a place where frantic and oft-exhausting activity was countered somewhat by the lovely, languorous smell of molasses and sugar that permeated everything. Most importantly for young Charles, it was a place where he could earn money, learn things and become physically stronger, as he engaged in hard daily labour. After three months of working with the refinery’s massive machinery he was able to move into the electrical workshop and so begin to develop skills in an entirely different field…

  Yet he still had time to amuse himself, and one of his favourite ways was fighting. This was never in the manner of picking on smaller blokes, as for a start there were few smaller fellows than him, but he did like a good scrap.

  One day while walking along in downtown Sydney with his friend Terence Trousdale, he pointed out a big lad coming their way, with a smaller companion. ‘Trousers, you see that big chap coming along? Well, I’m going to have a bit of him.’49

  And, sure enough, as they passed, Charles knocked the chap’s boater off. The said chap was not very happy about it, though his companion seemed more amused, telling Trousers that his aggrieved friend was actually a boxing champion and ‘s-a-matter-of-fact, they were off to do a training session together.

  Not to worry, Charles invited him to a nearby park to ‘’ave a go’ if he liked, and the two went at it, with Charles at least holding his own until the police came and they all scarpered.

  What on earth was going on?

  One Saturday night when her parents were out with friends and all her brothers and sisters bar young Chilla were otherwise engaged, Winifred Kingsford Smith returned home unexpectedly. And what did she find? Seemingly every light in their Neutral Bay house ablaze and the whole place rocking to the sound of music and singing. Winifred crept up to the front window and looked in. Through the billowing clouds of cigarette smoke she could see her youngest brother at the piano, bellowing out the verses of bawdy songs, with his mates laughing hysterically and joining in on every chorus. She could, she supposed, storm in and make a scene, but to what point? They were having such a lovely time, she wrote in her memoirs, ‘that it seemed a great pity to spoil it…’50

  Fact was, wherever Chilla was, there was usually a crowd around him as he held court, always with a lot of laughter and high-jinks and frequently raucous singing and carrying-on. He had such naturally high spirits, and such an easy charm, it was impossible to be angry at him for long. It was also a charm that, mixed with his exceptionally good looks, many teenaged girls found hard to resist, notwithstanding the fact that in terms of dress sense he could look like something that had been dragged through a hedge backwards. Not surprisingly, the young engineering apprentice developed something of a reputation as a ladies’ man. Yet the object of his most ardent affections remained a woman he had never even met.

  Her name was Nellie Stewart, and she was one of the most accomplished actresses and theatre performers in the country. One day, he dreamed, he would meet her. One day!

  Still, if there was one thing to rival his passion for Nellie Stewart, it was a passion for his motorbike. Now that he was earning the princely sum of five shillings a week as an apprentice, he could almost afford to run it, and given that his father had kindly agreed to make up the difference—from the meagre wage he was on himself—the teenager became a constant sight, and an even more constant noise, around and about the streets of Neutral Bay and Mosman on his powerful ‘one-lunger’, as his motorbike was known.51 Around the big loop of Kurraba Road, he would lean into the corner as his wheels angrily spat out loose gravel, before going up and over the hill, hanging a left on Wycombe Road and dropping a gear to get across the Harriette Street dogleg. Then tearing up Bannerman Street, he was soon getting close to his favourite part of all, the downhill ‘S’ bends of Rangers Avenue. The speeds he got up to! The gravel he threw! Always aiming to go about 1 mile per hour slower than an accident, he would lean into each corner, his heart racing, as he powered up, changed gears, gripped the handlebars and screamed past oft-appalled pedestrians staring open-mouthed at this noisy larrikin making such a dreadful peace-shattering noise. Not for nothing was he known locally as the ‘Terror of Mosman’…Then one day, he went 1 mile per hour faster than an accident, and straight through the wall of a dairy went he and his bike, mercifully only completely wrecking the latter.

  Three

  WAR!

  Rally round the banner of your country,

  Take the field with brothers o’er the foam,

  On land or sea, wherever you be,

  Keep your eye on Germany.

  But England, home and beauty have no cause to fear;

  Should auld acquaintance be forgot?

  No! No! No! No! No! Australia will be there…

  Australia will be there…

  POPULAR SONG IN AUSTRALIA, 1914–181

  At 10.15 am on 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro–Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie, Her Highness the Duchess of Hohenberg, were in an open-topped limousine bathed in bright sunlight, magisterially progressing down a street in Sarajevo, Bosnia–Herzegovina, when a young Serb by the name of Gavrilo Princip ran towards them with a pistol in his hand and fired two shots.2

  A thin stream of blood spurted instantly from the Archduke’s mouth, whereupon the Duchess cried out to her husband of fourteen years, ‘In heaven’s name, what has happened to you?’ And yet, no sooner had she said that, than she too reeled, bleeding from a grievous wound in her abdomen. As she weakened, the Archduke gurgled to his beloved but stricken wife, ‘Sophie, Sophie, don’t die. Stay alive for the children!’

  Tragically, both the Duchess and the Archduke passed away shortly afterwards.

  Although the assassination in Sarajevo represented to most Australians nothing more than a tiny rumble of dirty thunder on the northern horizon, it was not long before a storm the likes of which no-one had ever seen before, broke out. In a matter of a few weeks, after an outraged Austria–Hungary declared war on Serbia for its failure to take action to quell the subversive organisations that nurtured the likes of Gavrilo Princip, Europe’s two armed blocs were drawn into action against each other. Russia lined up beside her Slavic brothers in Serbia and was joined by France, while Germany stood foursquare with Austria–Hungary.
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  When, on 4 August, Germany invaded neutral Belgium to get quickly to the French infidels, Britain declared war on Germany and the Great War had begun. Across most of Europe, men, munitions and the machinery of war were mobilised.

  At his Fokker Aviatik Gesellschaft factory in Schwerin in north Germany, the struggling young manufacturer Anthony Fokker suddenly received a telegram informing him that his entire stock of aeroplanes would be purchased by the German Army, only shortly before the German Navy tried to do the same thing.3 Price was no object for either military arm, and a similar injection of funds was apparent across much of Europe, put towards anything that might intensify the war effort.

  There were, however, exceptions. In France, on the same day that Fokker received his telegram compelling him to work his factory around the clock, the hero of the cross-Channel flight, Louis Blériot, received a delegation of French government officials at his aircraft factory, Blériot Aéronautique, situated just outside Paris. No matter that in the last six years since his Channel triumph, he and his workers had built more than 800 monoplanes of his design, and that he was the most successful aircraft manufacturer in all of France—he was now to stop work immediatement. He and all his men of military age were to at once join the French Army.

  Blériot had no choice but to comply, just as factories around the country, bar those staffed mostly by women, had to follow suit for the same reason. It was a week before some form of sanity prevailed and Blériot and his men were released to re-open the factory—just as other key factories were also granted exemption—but even then the reason was not to produce planes at all possible speed. No, the view of the French government was that as the war would be over in six weeks, further orders of planes and munitions would be pointless, and the country would have to focus on fighting with the resources it already had. Flying schools were shut down so that would-be pilots could immediately be shipped to the front line where they would be needed.