Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  Owning only the clothes he stood up in, which was by now his rather threadbare uniform—to make up the fare he had sold his one and only proper civilian suit—Kingsford Smith took a ship to New York, where his first true port of call was the Alien Immigration Hospital on Ellis Island, courtesy of the return of the same kind of flu that had laid him so low a year previously. Overcoming that, he took a train across America and, living on a solid diet of oranges and more oranges—the only food item he could afford—arrived in California six days later.44

  There, the 22-year-old had expected to be met at Oakland Station by his 40-year-old brother, Harold, but instead received a wonderful surprise. Besides Harold and his wife and their teenage daughter, Beris, he was greeted by his sister Elsie and brother Wilfrid who, unbeknown to Chilla, were visiting Harold too. In a blizzard of hugs, kisses and pumping handshakes, it was all ‘hail brother well met’, and back to the bosom of his family in Harold’s large and stylish home at Menlo Park, just south of San Francisco, to kill the fatted calf.

  Though his siblings were more than a little shocked at his ragged appearance, broken finances and rather fragile health, he seemed to revive quickly in their presence and the old Chilla soon re-emerged, laughing, telling them of his adventures over the dinner table and a few drinks afterwards in front of the fire, and of course gathering them around the piano to sing songs and make merry into the night…

  Harold, of course, had to rise early the following morning to go to work in his executive position with the American-Hawaiian Steamship Company, leaving Chilla and the others to sleep in, but that was no problem. Someone in the household had to work…

  It was one of the greatest thrills in Hudson Fysh’s life. After fifty-one days of crossing the central north of Australia, followed by six weeks of overseeing the building of a small aerodrome on the edge of Darwin at Fannie Bay, Fysh was at that very spot at 3.40 pm on the steaming tropical afternoon of 10 December 1919, with a crowd of two thousand people or so, awaiting what seemed like a miracle. News had come to the Darwin wireless station from Timor to say that Ross and Keith Smith should be arriving some time soon, and yet, in truth, no-one was going to believe it until they saw it.

  And then the most wonderful thing happened.

  Far to the north-west, out over the sparkling sea, they saw the tiniest speck just above the horizon. There! As one the crowd focused on it, straining their necks forward and squinting their eyes against the glare. A seagull? An albatross, maybe? No! It was a plane! A plane was coming their way. And not just any plane. This, they knew, was the plane flown by Ross Smith, with his older brother Keith as navigator, both distinguished veterans of the Australian Flying Corps. The flyers had left England just a little less than four weeks before, and at the moment they landed they would be the official winners of the England to Australia race, in the first plane to arrive in the Great Southland under its own power. Hurrah!

  As it happened, Fysh would have been delighted to see any Australian pilot now reaching the end of the race, but given their common service with first the ‘Emma Gees’—the 1st Machine Gun Section of the 1st Light Horse Brigade—and then the AFC, it was a special thrill to see the Smiths.

  And now here it was! An enormous howling beast, like an ungainly flying hippo, a Vickers Vimy bomber with the civil registration of G-EAOU marked in huge letters upon it, which, it later turned out, the crew insisted stood for ‘God Elp All Of Us!’. At the moment the wheels touched Australian soil, a cheer went up, and when the plane finally trundled to a stop, the crowd surged forward—brushing aside the two zealous customs and health officials keen to examine the new arrivals—and marvelled anew at the journey the men had made.

  Can you believe it? Close up, it was obvious the whole plane had been held together by prayer for the last part of the trip. A small branch of a tree lodged in the plane’s undercarriage told how close they had come to disaster on their last take-off, from the airfield at Timor.

  Over the previous twenty-seven days and twenty hours the plane and crew had overcome obstacle after obstacle, been through storms, howling winds and cascading rain; had broken down, fixed themselves up; been nearly knocked out of the skies by lightning; come close to crashing; become bogged; dug themselves out; become bogged again, dug themselves out again; taken off in extremis and flown over lands where natives had cowered at their very sight, thinking that they were evil spirits of the dead come back to earth,45 and somehow, somehow managed to keep going through it all. Indeed, there was so little fuel left in the plane’s tanks when it landed that one of the mechanics on board, Wally Shiers, later noted, ‘We almost fell into Darwin’.46 But look at the time! In 1788, the First Fleet had done the trip in eight months; by 1849 that had decreased to ninety-one days; and there had been a leap forward in 1854 when it had been cut to sixty-three days. But under twenty-eight days? It almost beggared belief.

  The race was over, the £10,000 won and, as Ross Smith recorded, ‘shoals of telegrams and cables arrived in fifteen minute lots from every corner of the globe’,47 including one from Prime Minister Billy Hughes, addressed to him:

  You have covered the name of Australia with fresh laurels. You have broken all world records, and you have shown the world once more what manner of man the Australian is. You have given your country world-wide advertisement, and proved that, with relays of machines and men, Europe can be brought within 12 or 15 days of Australia.

  W.M. Hughes.48

  For his part, Winston Churchill, the British Secretary of State for Air, cabled: ‘Well done. Your great flight shows conclusively that the new element has been conquered for the use of man.’ And even His Majesty King George V honoured them by sending a message noting, ‘Your success will bring Australia nearer to the Mother Country.’49

  Ross and Keith Smith became almost instantly the two most famous Australians who had ever lived, with no less than Sydney’s Daily Telegraph opining that: ‘Only one achievement in the history of Australia was as great—the arrival of Captain Cook. It took Captain Cook three years to make his voyage to Australia and go back. Captain Ross Smith made the journey one way in 28 days.’50

  The Smiths and their crew had flown home from the other side of the planet—can you believe it?—and the Smiths were, quite rightly, not long in receiving knighthoods! For Sir Ross Smith, particularly, it was just one more honour to go with the two Military Crosses and three Distinguished Flying Crosses he had received for his derring-do during the war. True, upon arrival in Darwin, he, his brother and their two mechanics were so exhausted they could barely stand up—not one of them had had more than five hours of sleep on any night during the whole trip—but it had all been worth it. As to the £10,000 they had now won, both Ross and Keith Smith insisted that it be shared equally with their two mechanics, who had taken equal risks with them.

  And, as they all slept soundly that night, the printing presses of newspapers around the country were humming along to their fame. The banner headline in the following day’s Daily Telegraph set the tone. Crossing half of the page it blared:

  ROSS SMITH REACHES AUSTRALIA

  ARRIVAL AT DARWIN

  A THRILLING RECEPTION.

  PRIZE CONDITIONS COMPLIED WITH.

  Captain Ross Smith, the paper reported, had replied to the welcome by saying, ‘He was proud, as an Australian, to be back in Australia, and receive such a rousing welcome from real Australians’.51 And yet that welcome had only just begun, as all was put in readiness for them to fly on, first across the top of Australia and then down through the major cities of the east coast, before they made their way home to Adelaide.

  To that end, Hudson Fysh’s partner, Paul McGinness, was over at Cloncurry in far north-western Queensland, putting the finishing touches to the construction of the airstrip there. If all went well, the Smith brothers and any subsequent competitors who made it to Australia—not to mention future generations of aviators and maybe even air travellers—would be able to land and refuel on their way to the east
coast. Since mid-October, when McGinness and Fysh had arrived in Darwin, two months had gone by. The trip had convinced both of them, as well as the Federal government that the country in the far-central-north of Australia was fundamentally unsuited to the construction of airstrips. On the instruction of the government, therefore, McGinness had headed back towards their starting point on a much more inland route, getting rough airstrips built along the way, at Newcastle Waters—where he paid a group of Aboriginal women with two bags of flour, 20 yards of red material and twenty-four sticks of tobacco, to do the bulk of work52—Brunette Downs and Camooweal. This Cloncurry airstrip would be his last.

  It was hard, backbreaking work, in hideous heat, and yet not without respite on the odd occasion. For on the Sunday after the Smith brothers had landed in the north, McGinness was overjoyed to have organised for that early afternoon to go on a picnic with a nice local girl he had met, a real beauty, little knowing what lay ahead…

  And wouldn’t that be a bastard of a thing?

  Fergus McMaster, a wealthy and well-bred grazier, who had just returned from serving with the AIF himself, was on this hot Sunday early afternoon crossing the sandy, rocky bed of the Cloncurry River, trying to get back to his vast station, Moscow, when the damn stub axle on his car broke.

  McMaster had not the tools, nor the spares, nor the skills to fix the car himself and he was on the kind of road where hours might pass before someone else would happen along. The only option was to use shanks’s pony and walk the 3 miles back into Cloncurry in the hope that he could get some help there. And yet, when he arrived, it was only to find the place all shut up and practically deserted, as everyone was going to some picnic.53

  It was while he was trudging exhaustedly up the main street, trying to keep in what scant shade was offered by the low buildings, that McMaster was hailed by a man coming the other way.

  Paul McGinness recognised the 6-foot frame as belonging to local station owner McMaster, whom he had met on a couple of occasions. Now, McGinness was the kind of man who would have helped anyone in such circumstances, but for McMaster—a fellow Digger and said to be a good bloke—he certainly went the extra mile. For greater mateship hath no man than he who should arrange for another mate to take a beautiful girl to a picnic so he could help a maybe future mate fix his car. After sorting the girl, McGinness, with McMaster under his wing, carefully broke into the back of a shut-up garage to get the gear they would need, including a spare axle. McMaster left an IOU for the amount, while McGinness left a note for the proprietor explaining why they had been obliged to break in, but noting that they had nailed the corrugated iron they had prised from the rear of the shed back on.54 (Cloncurry was that kind of place.)

  Now, you didn’t come through the kind of country that McGinness and Fysh had got through without the capacity to fix just about anything, and McMaster’s simple axle replacement—once they had driven back out there in the Model T Ford—was a comparatively easy thing to sort out. Profuse in his thanks, McMaster, in his thick Scottish burr, asked McGinness to look him up if ever he was in Brisbane, where the station owner also spent a lot of time, and perhaps he could find a way to repay his kindness.

  Will do…

  And then each went about their business: McMaster to get back to his station, and McGinness to more fully explain to the enraged local girl why he hadn’t been able to make the picnic. And then, of course, McGinness had to get back to putting the finishing touches to the Cloncurry airstrip. While he worked, his thoughts kept returning to something he and Fysh had talked about intermittently over the previous few months of crossing the top end of the country—the possibilities of forming a company to engage in commercial aviation. One episode in particular had convinced him that there was a need for it. At an enormous cattle station south of Katherine, where he had accepted bush hospitality for a spell, McGinness had been stunned at how tough things were for the station wife, who had a tiny newborn baby. She had explained to him that if the baby—or anyone else for that matter—got sick, they pretty much had to make do, because in the wet season, particularly, no-one could get in or out. Post was always a big problem, and if you wanted anything, it could take up to twelve months to arrive! These people needed, and could afford to pay for, an air service, but there simply wasn’t one. And the top end of Australia was full of people exactly like them.55 It was a huge area, with a fair sprinkling of population, substantially uncrossed by roads. Of course an air service would prosper there, and Hudson and McGinness might be just the men to provide it!

  All they needed was the capital to start it. Maybe, just maybe, McMaster might be the man to approach about organising it? It was certainly worth consideration, and McGinness resolved to seriously talk to Fysh as soon as they caught up with each other again.

  Before leaving Darwin, Ross and Keith Smith were fully briefed by some stockmen on how best to navigate their way to Cloncurry, a thousand miles to the south-east. Just do in reverse what the stockmen had done with their mob of cattle a few months previously, see? First, you hafta follow the telegraph line south, until you get to Newcastle Waters station, and then turn south-east. Do not leave that telegraph line, or you’ll dinkum get lost, as everything looks the same, and you’ll be rooted. Now follow that line for, oh, about a hunnert miles or so, and then from the air you should see two big patches of scrub that kinda meet in a ‘V’. Now, go down low and look hard at the scrubland below. If you look real close, you’ll see the tracks of where we drove the cattle—don’t worry, there’s been no rain to wash them tracks away—and all you’ll have to do is follow them for a few miles, and you’ll get to a real bush track and if you follow that, you’ll get to Cloncurry. Got that?

  Yes, no worries.

  And so it proved! When Ross and Keith Smith and their two mechanics landed in Cloncurry a couple of days after leaving Darwin—they had had to spend one awful night on the ground on the way, where it turned out they had been invited to a surprise mosquito banquet and they were the main course—it was to receive the usual accolades and rapturous welcome, and one other thing besides. From Sydney, Nigel Love’s Australian Aircraft and Engineering Company sent a telegram, which finished with:

  Should you decide to honour Sydney with a visit on your way south, this company wishes to extend an invitation to land at the aerodrome at Mascot. Position, north bank George’s River, close to mouth. Extreme northern corner Botany Bay. Landing ground marked with white circle.56

  The brothers decided to do exactly that and when they arrived at Mascot a couple of weeks later, were received in the manner to which they had so recently become accustomed: as conquering heroes, men who had managed to fly from one side of the planet to the other!

  Seven

  HOMEWARD BOUND

  Pilot after pilot was featured on the sporting pages of the newspapers as he succeeded in remaining aloft five minutes longer than the hero of the month before, reached an altitude fifty feet higher, or somersaulted his vibrating little kite once oftener. And with deadly regularity pilot after pilot was killed—his effort to find out how far he could stretch the capacity of his machine being successful…

  KENNETH CHAFEE MCINTOSH, IN THE ATLANTIC, SEPTEMBER 1921

  Riding on horseback is always cheaper than travelling by rail or hiring a car. But what would we think of the man who preferred that mode of transport for a journey of any length? In time, people will realise that aerial travel at 90 miles per hour will practically always pay them.

  HUDSON FYSH, WRITING IN AN ARTICLE IN THE GRAZIERS’ REVIEW, EARLY 1920S1

  Poor Chilla.

  News of the triumph of the Smith brothers in winning the England to Australia race was not long in reaching California, and he could have been forgiven for thinking that had things gone differently, their victory might have been his. And that prize money! While the celebrated brothers—with their knighthoods—were now splitting £10,000 between them, the rather down-and-out Chilla remained dependent on the familial generosity of his brot
her Harold and his wife, Elsie.

  How to keep body and soul together?

  It wasn’t immediately apparent. Ideally, it would be by finding people who would pay him for the only thing he wanted to do—fly. Rather inconveniently, however, at that time in California there simply weren’t flying jobs to be had, at least not for ‘aliens’, as non-American citizens were charmingly known.

  Clearly, what he most needed was to learn a skill apart from flying, and as ever, Harold came to the rescue, arranging for the baby of the family to take a course as a radio man, which proved to be extremely hard yakka. His family, both in America and Australia, worried about him greatly. Sister Elsie wrote home in mid-February 1920:

  Poor old Charles is taking up wireless as there seems to be nothing doing in the flying game for him—beyond a couple of rather indefinite offers. The trouble is that Chilla is so very stony he can’t wait, so Harold is going to send him away on one of his ships to South America in a few weeks time. Now he is studying hard to get thro’—in the meantime hoping madly that something more congenial will turn up. His whole heart is in flying and nothing else seems to interest him—except a pretty girl and the banjo—and as the former require a certain amount of dollars to be entertained he has had to fall back on the good old banjo and spends all his spare time practising. I don’t think [Harold’s wife] Elsie is fearfully keen on the banjo though!2

  As it turned out, being Australian also prevented Chilla from working as a deckhand on one of Harold’s ships, and nor did he have whatever it took to continue his radio studies. The one thing that really worked his spirit, apart from banjos and a succession of pretty girls, was news of a prize that had been put forward, rather like the England to Australia race prize, except this was for a far bigger amount, and for a much bigger task. Smithy had first spied a report of it in the San Francisco Examiner. A rich silent-film producer and director by the name of Thomas Harper Ince—known as ‘the father of the Western’—had put up $50,000 to the first aviator or team of aviators who could fly across the Pacific Ocean. At 7000 miles, it was the longest stretch of water in the world.