Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  It was a paddock of 160 acres on the northern edge of Botany Bay, in a suburb called Mascot. The paddock had been used by a local abattoir to fatten cattle before their slaughter, but as the company was going out of business the land was available to initially lease from its owners, the Kensington Racing Club.29

  The key feature for Love was that the land was flat, fairly well drained—though it had originally been a swamp—and it was covered in buffalo grass that had been kept low by the cattle. The area had clear approaches from every direction for planes to land. All that, and it was only a little bit more than 4 miles from downtown Sydney.30 And so it was with great enthusiasm that Love sealed the deal and followed it up by also securing premises on nearby Botany Road, where he established a workshop to maintain aircraft and began to fabricate the Avros for customers.31

  But what about the rest of Australia? In the immediate post-war days there was a growing awareness of the need for more aerodromes around the country, as the England to Australia race drew closer. How were those planes that made it to Darwin or to Wyndham in the north-west, to proceed to the east coast, to the likes of Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne? Where could they land in the Australian outback? Where could they stock up on petrol and supplies? Clearly, someone was going to have to find the right spots, and then follow up by clearing trees, mulga bushes and the like for a good airstrip.

  In an attempt to do exactly that, the government of Prime Minister Billy Hughes commissioned two veteran war pilots, Paul McGinness and Hudson Fysh, to reconnoitre the far north of Australia from Longreach to Darwin—an overland trip through vast swathes of land never penetrated before by vehicles of any description. ‘From Cloncurry to Katherine River,’ their instructions read, ‘you will obtain fullest information about the air route proposed, and if possible traverse it by car. Places suitable for aerodromes and for forced landings will be marked and field sketches made of the surroundings to facilitate identification from the air.’32

  They were just the men for the job, and they were also used to working together. In the Great War, both had served with distinction, first landing at Gallipoli with the Light Horse. ‘Ginty’ McGinness, as he was known, a burly knockabout knock-’em-down kind of man from Victoria had won the Distinguished Conduct Medal in an action at Pope’s Hill, and gone on to consolidate his reputation as a fine soldier from there. Fysh, too—a slight and quiet man by nature, whose uncle had been Tasmanian Premier—had been handy with a rifle, and was commissioned as an officer after his own section officer, none other than Lieutenant Ross Smith, had left to join the Australian Flying Corps. When, not long afterwards, McGinness and Fysh had decided to follow Smith and also join the AFC, McGinness had quickly proved himself a fine pilot, with Fysh as his observer. Together they saw a lot of action in Palestine where ‘Ginty’ registered seven confirmed victories,33 and Fysh, just before the war ended, gained his own wings.

  Though both intrepid aviators had wanted to enter the England to Australia race themselves, they had failed to get the necessary finance when their chief backer died just before writing the cheque and his family had decided they didn’t want to go on with it. Still, just being involved in the race was honour enough for them, and they pursued the plans enthusiastically, organising to get a Model T Ford packed with provisions to the railhead at Longreach, and for another war friend, a mechanic by the name of George Gorham, to accompany them. (The reckoning was that if it had wheels and an engine, then George could fix it—with his bare hands if necessary.)

  It is an ill wind that blows no-one any good, and the fact that Blackburn withdrew its sponsorship of Charles Kingsford Smith opened the way for none other than George Wilkins to take his place. Wilkins had just returned from the ghostly haunting silence of Gallipoli, where he had been engaged by Charles Bean to document precisely what had occurred there four years earlier, and he had spent many weeks traipsing with his camera around and about such spiritually troubling places as Lone Pine, the Nek and Hill 971, where the tattered bits of cloth and bleached bones of dead Allied soldiers and Turks were still scattered across the bloodied landscape. Back in London, Wilkins wasn’t sure if he wanted to be part of the venture to race to Australia when initially approached, but the more he looked at it, the more he liked it.

  The money didn’t attract him particularly—he had never been motivated by money—but it was a challenge, an adventure, and he could see that it really would help the land of his birth, to open up an air route between Australia and England, so he accepted a position on the Kangaroo. Most importantly, for him, it was an opportunity to continue on his life’s quest of scientific discovery, and he was careful to pack all kinds of equipment that enabled him to record temperatures, humidity, air pressure and so forth, in the course of the journey.

  In the final structure, Wilkins became both the commander and the navigator on the flight of the Kangaroo and it was a measure of the respect in which he was held within the London establishment that at the crew’s departure from London’s Hendon aerodrome at 10.37 on the morning of 21 November 1919,34 he was carrying the cabled best wishes of no less than the future King of England, Prince Albert and the former First Lord of the Admiralty, the Right Honourable Winston Churchill. Which was to the good. All their ‘good lucks’, ‘bon voyages’ and ‘tally-hos’ were very much appreciated. But could the crew actually do the job they had set out to do…?

  Trouble. Big trouble. After a problem-plagued trip that had taken them only a quarter of the distance to Australia in two and a half weeks, George Wilkins and his Blackburn Kangaroo crew suddenly had the spectre of death riding along with them. Eighty miles south-west of Crete—with the North African coast ahead about the same distance again—Wilkins looked out his window to see the plane’s lifeblood pouring away. Just off the back of the port-side engine, an oil pipe had burst and was spraying the black gold into the waves of the Mediterranean Sea, some 2000 feet below. After an agonised, grinding growl to indicate how unhappy it was to go in such a tortured fashion, pilot Val Rendle quickly switched the port engine off to preserve it.

  This left the Kangaroo with one engine to make it to the nearest land, and meant going back to Crete—their calculations showed that on one engine from that height, the greatest distance they could hope for was 30 miles. Still, reasoning that it was better to be 50 miles from land in the middle of the ocean than 80 miles, they turned the plane and did their best.

  And were favoured a little by providence…as a propitious wind blew up, and helped them on their way.

  Paradoxically, as they edged along past 30 miles, 40 miles, 50 miles, then 60 miles, the crew members began to show increasing signs of fear. Somehow, with a growing chance of survival, they all began to feel afraid of dying.35 At last, at last, Crete came into view, but still they were not safe. For where could they land? Everywhere they looked, all they could see were cliff faces, rugged rock and yawning, hungry canyons, each one clearly happy to swallow them whole without burping.

  In vain did they search the terrain beneath them for some flat ground where they could attempt a smooth landing…or at least land flat enough on which they could get down intact. Finally, it was obvious that they were going to have to take their chances on the flattest handkerchief of land they could find. Rendle dropped the throttle back, and began to bring the plane down on the impossibly small clearing that now presented itself. And while it was reassuring to once again be close to mother earth, and in some rough kind of control, the problem was that they were still moving in far too quickly and…and…after clipping the tiles on a farmhouse roof, a solid stone wall, which had been a good distance away when they first made contact with the soil, had now grown legs and was rushing towards them with unseemly haste. As the entire crew held their heads in their hands, in an instinctive effort to provide some protection, the plane rushed over a ditch, up a bank and came to rest against the wall, with its nose in the ground and its tail high in the air.

  Now, given how many people thought that onl
y lunatics would enter such a race in the first place, it was perhaps appropriate that the wall they had hit belonged to Crete’s largest lunatic asylum. Still, at least they were alive to fight another day!

  And, truth be told, George Wilkins was not at all perturbed about not winning the race. As he had made clear from the beginning, he was only interested in competing for the opportunity to collect a lot of scientific data. His major concern after the crash was to ensure that his notebooks were secure, and that his varied equipment—barometers, thermometers, hygrometers, wet and dry bulbs and density meters—was all intact.36

  Kingsford Smith, meantime, was discovering his own new worlds, albeit in rather different circumstances. After Blackburn had so hurtfully pulled the rug out from under him, he had tried to interest other sponsors, but to no avail. He had even written to his prosperous brother Harold in California asking for money, with a similar result. Chilla’s sister Elsie, then staying with Harold, wrote something of a telltale letter to their parents:

  Harold had rather a pathetic letter from Charles…telling all about their troubles (re England–Australia flight) & saying he will not return to Australia unless he can fly back—after all that fuss and publicity made. Incidentally, he hoped that Harold might be able to finance him to the extent of a couple of thousand pounds so that he could get his own machine.37

  Harold, though a faithful brother, wasn’t particularly interested, and Smithy, with increasing desperation, was obliged to continue looking elsewhere for money.

  Anthony Fokker was now going well, expanding his aircraft manufacturing premises in North Amsterdam and focusing on building fast, reliable planes capable of carrying the maximum number of passengers and goods the greatest distance—while his old wartime rival, Tom Sopwith, was fading fast. As soon as the Great War finished, the impoverished British government had immediately cancelled all of its orders with the Sopwith firm, with no recompense, and then pursued Sopwith vigorously for a great deal of back taxes!

  What could Tom Sopwith do? The only thing he could—allow the old firm to go bust and form a new one with himself and new partners Harry Hawker, Fred Sigist and Bill Eyre, each contributing £5000. This new company bore the name H.G. Hawker Engineering. Sopwith didn’t mind that his name was not on the new firm. After all, he told everyone, ‘Harry Hawker was largely responsible for our growth during the war.’38 In no time at all they were making Hawker planes and H.G. Hawker two-stroke motorcycles, while Harry soon personally added to his fame by being the first man to drive a 1500 cc car—whose engine he had personally modified—faster than 100 miles per hour.

  It was possible there were more inhospitable terrains in the world to take a car, but notwithstanding the fact that both Hudson Fysh and Paul McGinness had flown planes in Syria, Palestine and Egypt, neither had ever seen anything like this. For it wasn’t just the endless sand dunes that confronted them as they tried to make their way from Longreach, Queensland, to the Katherine railhead in the Northern Territory, 1354 miles distant. It was also the sucking black plains of western Queensland, which just a few points of rain would turn into a muddy glutinous mass and make them all but impassable. It was the oppressive heat, ‘neath a sun that did not so much shine as beat. It was the lack of any kind of roads except scratched tracks, and the lack of bridges to get them over constant raging torrents. It was the fact that the population was so sparse that when you did get into trouble there was likely no-one to help in any direction for 100 miles, even if you knew where to begin to look for them. Nevertheless, McGinness and Fysh persisted, in the company of their long-suffering mechanic, George Gorham, who somehow managed to keep his straw boater intact, perched atop his head through everything.

  Slowly, painfully, the three men continued to edge their way forward, as the general put-put-put and sometimes angry snarl of their overloaded Model T Ford melded with the thick, sweltering buzz of the Australian bush. As they went, it was Fysh who meticulously sketched and mapped the landscape documenting possible places for airstrips to be built. McGinness, never one for details, focused on finding ways to just keep them moving, come what may.

  Occasionally they would argue, such was the strain they were under, and mostly it was McGinness who would have the last word. He was a sometimes domineering rough diamond of a man who cared little for correct form—an extrovert Australian original who believed that there was no problem so great that enough elbow grease and fencing wire couldn’t fix it. Fysh, on the other hand, was a lot more laid-back, an introvert of a far more cerebral nature.

  Somehow, between them—with George the mechanic nearly always in tow but also pushing, too, as well as taking his turn at driving—they continued to make their way roughly west, shooting parrots and the like for food when their supplies ran out. On a bad day they would make only 4 miles. On an average good day they could go as far as 15 or 20 miles. What was soon abundantly clear, through their own observation and through talking to the few people they met, was that this was a part of the world that desperately needed an airline, as land travel was just too damn difficult. The only transport infrastructure that existed in a few parts were the railways, and they terminated at Charleville, Longreach, Winton and Cloncurry, with no connections between.

  The only people who seemed to move easily in this kind of country were the Aborigines, whom they would occasionally see flitting away in the distance—and they had had thousands of years to acclimatise. (And for the most part the white men were glad not to make too much contact, as they had been told by locals, ‘The blacks are bad, and Murdering Tommy is out in the Turn-Off Lagoon area.’39)

  As to the race itself, Ross Smith and his quietly spoken older brother Keith, a former RFC and then RAF flying instructor, were considered by many judges to have the best chance of winning it. With two mechanics, they had left Hounslow Heath at 9.05 am on 12 November 1919 and flown, on average, ten hours a day. Every night, as the mechanics worked feverishly on the engines, the brothers carefully put such petrol as they could find into their machine, being very careful to strain it through cloth to remove whatever local impurities it might contain. Eschewing a radio, as at 100 pounds they had decided that it weighed too much to carry, their one concession to safety was to take a fishing line and a few hooks, on the reckoning, as Ross Smith described it, that they might be useful, ‘in case we should land on some small uninhabited island and have to do the Robinson Crusoe act for a time’.40

  And coming down unexpectedly in strange country was certainly a common experience. In Yugoslavia, a Sopwith Wallaby piloted by Captain George C. Matthews—formerly of the Light Horse and then of No. 4 Australian Flying Squadron—with Sergeant Tommy D. Kay of Ballarat as mechanic, had been obliged to land in bad weather just 100 miles out of Belgrade. This part of the world was still in a state of post-war upheaval, and it had not yet been definitively determined just who were the patriots and who were the traitors. And yet those in temporary power where the plane had come to earth had only taken one look at the Australians before they knew exactly what they were—Bolsheviks!

  Therefore, for the Australians’ trouble, they were immediately arrested and thrown in a room so tiny and dark it was little more than a vertical coffin, just capable of holding the two of them. For four days they were fed only enough of the local delicacy—black bread topped by pig fat and swarming flies—to keep them alive. Until…Until they managed, in the middle of the night, when their captors had fallen into a drunken stupor, to make a break for it…run like mad things for their plane, get it started and fly away…all of it in the company of myriad bullets winging around them.41

  See yers!

  In a highly creditable performance, over the next few weeks Matthews and Kay managed to hip-hop all the way to Bali—practically in sight of Australia, just a hundred horizons ahead!—before they crashed into a banana plantation on the island on 17 April. But at least they survived. Not all were so lucky…

  Sadly, just 6 miles after take-off from Hounslow Heath near London, the
Alliance PZ Seabird, named after Cook’s ship, flown by Captain Roger Douglas and navigated by Lieutenant J.S. Leslie Ross, crashed into a Surbiton orchard, killing both men. Only minutes before, when the plane had been wheeled out of its hangar at Hounslow and the sun had burst through the clouds with an unexpected brilliance, the onlookers had broken into loud applause at such a good omen for a wonderful trip.42 Quite what went wrong was never established, though it was noted by some that the plane had excessive emergency provisions, which would have weighed it down—as would the leather upholstered armchairs both men were sitting in.

  As to another plane, a Martinsyde, flown by the Australians Cedric E. Howell and George Henry Fraser, which crashed into St George’s Bay off Corfu in the Adriatic Sea while flying at night on 9 December, its demise was equally tragic. Villagers on Corfu saw distress rockets go up in the night, and could even hear Howell and Fraser yelling for help, but in the middle of a terrible storm it proved impossible to reach them. Then the shouting stopped. A few days later the wreckage washed up on the beach, and two weeks after the crash, Howell’s body was also washed ashore.43

  Finally, with no finance forthcoming and all hope of entering the race abandoned, Charles Kingsford Smith and Cyril Maddocks were to find that even trying to sell their joyriding concern was a very lugubrious endeavour because no-one was remotely interested. So it was that, devastated and humiliated in equal measure by his failure to be part of the race, Smithy decided to go home to Australia by alternative means.