by P Fitzsimons
And yet if the decorated war pilot had thought at this point that he had hit rock bottom, he was most definitely mistaken. That would come a few weeks later when, in an effort to muster the money to buy a third-class fare home, he was forced to take a job painting signs for a petrol company at the rate of US$15 a week.
Normal work that was nothing to do with aviation? He hated it, absolutely hated it. The sheer tedium of it! The brain-sapping, soul-destroying boredom of it all. He might have been able to do that kind of menial work when he was a young lad, back at the Colonial Sugar Refinery in Pyrmont, but that was before he had discovered flying, before he knew how to live. He stuck it out for as long as he could—about three weeks—but then he could simply bear it no more.
Chilla knew in these first weeks of 1921 that it was time to head home. ‘Funds will not permit me to travel as a passenger,’ he wrote to his parents, ‘so I am going to have to work my way over. You know, it’s too bad that I haven’t got lots more money than I have.’17
Indeed. In the end, his brother Leofric cabled him the money he needed to get home. To get there he took a circuitous route, catching the good ship RMS Tahiti from Vancouver, which he thought was heading straight across the Pacific just as it had when he had been a young lad returning to Australia from Canada, but no…
For some unaccountable reason, the ship sailed down the west coast of the American continent and stopped at San Francisco, which had been his starting point! Though generally Kingsford Smith was not a man prone to panicking, on this occasion he did so and then some. Convinced that the sole reason the Tahiti had diverted to San Francisco was because he was on board and the American tax authorities were after him, he stayed in his cabin for the entire two days the Tahiti was in port.18
Finally, the steamer weighed anchor and headed out of the magnificent San Francisco Bay through the ‘Golden Gate’, the name the San Franciscans had given to the spectacular narrow strait that separated the bay from the Pacific Ocean, and headed home, home to Australia. Only then did he breathe easy.
And so it was done. Following the dictates of the Versailles Treaty to which Australia had been a signatory—and the subsequent Paris Convention where the fine detail had been worked out in October 1919—in December 1921 the government of Billy Hughes set up a Civil Aviation Branch to administer flying around the country. Of course, it was a part of the structure of the Department of Defence, as it was the view of Hughes and his like-minded individuals that aviation was to be encouraged, primarily because of its defence potential. No less than £100,00019 was set aside for the encouragement of civil aviation—to set up and maintain airfields as well as subsidise important air services—and it wasn’t long before contenders came forward. Foremost among these was a pilot by the name of Norman Brearley, who wanted to set up an air service in the great north-west of Australia, a place where there were no railways and the very area where the government felt the country was at its most vulnerable to invasion from the ‘yellow peril’—the 750 million Asians who lived on the country’s doorstep.20 To have pilots and planes operating in the area therefore, to bolster defensive capacity, was viewed as a matter of urgency—with the bonus that it would help the local population by carrying sick patients and doctors in emergencies.21 Previous government estimates were that it would cost £86,000 a year to have military planes based in that area. But if they were to subsidise Brearley’s service, or one set up by a competitor, they could have planes there for as little as £25,000 a year.22 The choice seemed obvious, and Defence Minister George Pearce was not long in making it known in Federal parliament.
‘If we can encourage civil aviation,’ he told the Honourable Members during debate over the Air Navigation Bill, in the parliament’s last sitting in 1920, ‘it will doubtless relieve the Commonwealth of a large expenditure on military aviation.’23
At Sydney, as ever, the Kingsford Smith clan turned out in force to greet their prodigal pilot when he arrived on the morning of 11 January 1921. There was Catherine on the docks, dressed in her Sunday best. William, as pleased as punch to have his boy home, was beaming like a lighthouse on a dark night, and there were his brothers and sister and some of their own families. In an instant, after coming down the gangplank of the Tahiti, the youngest son—dressed in a tatty suit and straw boater and carrying an old grass-woven suitcase24—was awash in hugs and kisses and hearty handshakes.
In the time that Chilla had been away, his parents had moved from Neutral Bay and settled into the place that would be their long-time abode, a gracious home called Kuranda at 73 Arabella Street in nearby Longueville, while Leofric Kingsford Smith and his wife, Elfreda, were practically next door, across a side street at No. 75.
Despite all the bonhomie, however, and all the subsequent welcome-home dinners at Kuranda and piano-playing and songs led by Chilla who continued to be the life of the party, the family was in fact quite shocked at their boy’s appearance and demeanour. It was not simply that he was so much thinner and more worn than the lad who had left two and a half years earlier, and had come home owning only the clothes on his back and the two American dollars he had in his pocket. It was that between the laughter and jokes and songs there were so many thousand-yard stares, sudden silences and small bubbles of misery that seemed to pop to the surface at odd moments, suggesting a deep well of great unhappiness inside him. Bit by bit, the family became aware that their beloved youngest member was bearing scars beyond the ones on his foot, and that mentally he was still suffering the effects of the punishment he had undergone during the war.25
Little by little they were to learn more of what ailed him, some of the things that had happened to him, what life in the trenches both in Gallipoli and on the Western Front had been like, the men he’d killed while flying, and the narrow escapes he’d had, the friends he’d lost and still mourned, together with the great disappointments he had experienced since the war. He’d wanted to fly in the England to Australia race, but that had been denied him. He had wanted to fly the Pacific, but that, too, had failed to elicit any interest from anyone to back him. And despite his ongoing passion for flying—nothing else came remotely close—he’d only just been able to keep body and soul together by doing it since the war had finished. So of course all was not well. What had he achieved? What had he done? Where was he going?
The answers to these questions weren’t obvious, either to Chilla or to his family, so for the moment he tried to settle down, hoping something would turn up. In the meantime, the residents of Arabella Street were able to note in subsequent months a rare phenomenon—maudlin banjo playing. For hours the youngest Kingsford Smith would sit in his room plucking at strings to make chords that would occasionally assemble themselves into a recognisable tune, but more often meandered mournfully along. In the evenings, when he could scrape enough money together from family and friends, he would sometimes go into downtown Sydney to catch up with wartime cobbers and do some drinking. And, in fact, it was this activity that was to provide him with his first employment since arriving home…
One evening in early February 1921, Kingsford Smith was getting a rather positive beer perspective by drinking heavily at the Carlton Hotel in Castlereagh Street—it was amazing how much better everything looked when you’d drained a few schooners—when he fell in with a wartime comrade, Lionel Lee, a bloke he’d come to know very well as they had been on the same courses at Denham and Oxford, before they’d flown together with the Royal Flying Corps. And Lionel had news. A few blokes were getting together to form the ‘Diggers Co-operative Aviation Company’, which would do taxi trips and barnstorming all through country towns. It was going to be funded entirely by them, and everybody working for it would be a part owner, no matter how small a percentage that might be.
In short order, Smithy had done his calculations and worked out that if he put all his combined capital together he could afford to have a small ownership of the business amounting to…let’s see…£1’s worth, so long as Lionel would lend him t
hat pound…which Lionel did!
The main thing was that it was work, and flying work at that. Whatever his woes, he was determined never again to be reduced to wielding a paintbrush or the like, as he had been back in California. Nothing of his experiences to that point had lessened his love of flying by one jot. In his wartime service he had logged 800 hours in the air, and since that time another 900 hours. It was a part of him, and he couldn’t imagine life without it.26
There was a big buzz in the Queensland town of Winton on the sunny Monday afternoon of 7 February 1921. Two planes from the new aviation company of Qantas were due in after a long journey from Sydney and, in two shakes of a burnt stick, there they were! To hearty clapping from the crowd, McGinness landed first on the bit of flat ground next to the artesian bore in an Avro 504K, and he was followed shortly thereafter by Hudson Fysh in a Royal Aircraft Factory BE2e, a modified two-seater reconnaissance type, with an RAF-1a engine of 90 horsepower. Both planes could go as fast as 65 miles per hour, though it certainly wasn’t as simple as dividing long distances by that speed to work out how quick the journey would be. As a matter of fact, the journey of 1200 miles from Sydney had taken six days with seventeen hours and thirty minutes of flying time at an average speed of 68.5 miles per hour, and quite a few unscheduled stops along the way.27 No matter. The town turned on a hearty welcome, and that evening at the North Gregory Hotel packed to capacity with locals and good cheer, Qantas was toasted three times, as was King George V.
Ladies and gentlemen, the King!
The King…the King…the King…
In a towering voice, Fergus McMaster, who had arrived as the sole passenger in McGinness’s plane, made a resounding speech, noting that this was not just a great day for Qantas, but for ‘the defence of Australia’, which was now dependent on aviation.
‘Australia,’ he warned, ‘lies open to all from the air. The only reason that Australia is held by us today, gentlemen, is because we are fortunately a part of the greatest empire in the world.’
Hear, hear! Hear, hear! Hear, hear!
‘This commercial aviation company,’ he continued when the enthusiastic rumbling had subsided a little, ‘should get your support as Australians, not investors; not for the dividends it is likely to bring in, but for the great influence it must have in the administration, development and defence of Australia.’28
Bravo! Hurrah!
In any case, they had made a start and were soon in operation, flying through every district of western Queensland, where the need for Qantas’s services was greatest. A sure source of revenue was joy flights, where a member of the public would be taken aloft for ten minutes and £3 and 3 shillings, or £5 if they wanted to do a ‘loop-the-loop’.29 If, on the other hand, they wanted to be taken to an outlying station or another town, the basic rate was ‘two shillings per mile flown’. Though not yet ready to begin taking passengers on scheduled services, Qantas kept working towards that day, spreading the word and setting up airfields in the towns they intended to fly to. Leaflets were distributed saying such things as:
The person who has not been in the air has not yet started to LIVE. Fly in the famous B.E.2e, second in the Sydney Aerial Derby. Have you ever had a flight in a British War Machine?30
The people flocked to it in their droves.
For Charles Kingsford Smith, a wild, wild time in various country towns around New South Wales followed his employment with the Diggers Co-operative Aviation Company. Under the terms of his contract, he was to be paid £12 a week as a base rate, with a further commission of 10 per cent of gross after he had made a certain amount. First-class accommodation in each country town was also to be provided by the company.
In return, Kingsford Smith was expected to ‘fly in’ around £80 a day, and his first job was to take one of the company’s Avros from Mascot and drop into the small New South Wales country town of Oberon to work the local show. And Kingsford Smith intended to do exactly that, and would have, if not for a small crash on landing due to an unexpectedly boggy paddock. The question then was: to tell the company or make his own arrangements?
Typically, Smithy decided to make his own arrangements, and managed to get the local blacksmith and undertaker to fix the undercarriage and wing. (And if that made the plane resemble a little more a flying coffin, then so be it, and maybe he was dipping a lid to his old French wartime comrade Charles Nungesser, with his famed symbol of a coffin flanked by candles painted on the side of his plane.)
From there Smithy went to Dubbo for a picnic of railway workers, men widely renowned for their thirst and ability to pack beer away as if there was no tomorrow. Even they, however, would likely have had to acknowledge Smithy as their master when it came to drinking.
On this rather warm day, what Smithy did was to take a couple of paying passengers skywards for about ten minutes, then bring them back down and have a bit of a beer while another pilot took the next pair, whereupon he would take over again to take another pair up. Then another beer, before taking another pair up. And another, and another, and another. Beers, cheers, pairs, planes, flying, Dubbo, up, down, over, under, beers, in the end it’s all a blur, arr…duzzenmatter.
What was certain was that late that afternoon, and with the beer goggles so firmly attached now that everything seemed like a good idea at the time, he decided to take this particular couple, young Oliver Cook and his fiancée, Dulcie Offner, on a couple of loop-de-loops.
As the crowd below watched open-mouthed, Smithy did indeed manage to pull off a spectacular version of the aeronautical loop. ‘S matter of fact, it wash sho good, he decided to try another! This time, alas, he was only halfway through when there was a sudden loud crack like a gunshot, as either the work of the undertaker or blacksmith gave up the unequal struggle, and now it was the plane that began to drunkenly lurch.
Only a master pilot could possibly have wrested the machine back under control in such circumstances, and Smithy almost did just that. Somehow he managed to get the whole thing back on the ground with his passengers intact but shaken, in a plane that nevertheless had its nose partly buried in a hillside, with a broken undercarriage and snapped propeller.31
Up there! For the people in the Queensland coastal country town of Bundaberg on the sunny afternoon of 11 April 1921, it was an amazing thing to look up and see a plane, a real plane, buzzing around overhead. Most of the town was completely mystified as to who it could possibly be, but not John Hinkler, nor his wife, Frances. They both knew it had to be their boy Bert, who had left town nine years ago to become first a mechanic with Sopwith and then a pilot with the Royal Naval Air Service, making no fewer than 122 flights over enemy territory. He had always said that when the time came, he wanted to fly home, as a ‘real dinkum pilot’,32 to the ones he addressed as ‘my beloved parents’ in his many letters home.
John Hinkler—always distinctive because of his enormous Ned Kelly-like beard—was down town when he saw the plane and, knowing only too well where his boy Bert would head to, immediately crossed the bridge to the north side of town and headed home. Out in the garden, a teary Frances watched as the plane circled lower and lower, and then she saw him, her Bert, waving furiously from the cockpit of his tiny white biplane, as he zoomed low over his childhood home and she waved furiously back before rushing inside to put the kettle on. Banking sharply, the pilot came in for a perfect landing on the Bundaberg Foundry Green and then, as stunned people rushed from everywhere, he taxied it up Gavan Street to his home—blessed home!—as locals on bikes and horses kept pace, and others ran alongside tried to keep up. And there, inside the lattice-enclosed front veranda was his now grey-haired mother waiting for him, soon joined by his father, who was fit to bursting with pride and happiness. Bert was home. In a new Australian record—not that the self-effacing Bert cared, as he was simply flying his Avro 543 Baby home from Sydney, where he had unloaded it from the good ship Ascanius. Yet Bert Hinkler had flown 700 miles non-stop in eight and three-quarter hours.33
; There was much hoopla, many headlines and numerous civic receptions to honour his achievement, the first of which was held the following evening in Bundaberg Town Hall, with Bert and his beaming parents seated at the table of honour. After an overwhelming speech from the mayor, which went on for some time, Bert stood up and simply said: ‘Thank you. I’m glad to be home.’34
In the end, perhaps this result was inevitable, such were the risks that he took and in such flimsy aircraft. Just after 6 pm on 12 July 1921, Harry Hawker was flying his Nieuport Goshawk biplane above the Burnt Oak and the RAF Hendon airfields in preparation for the aerial derby in just four days’ time, when on this wonderfully balmy early evening in England the amazing luck that had always characterised his survival despite everything, suddenly began to waver.35 Witnesses saw his plane catch fire and begin to spin towards earth almost immediately afterwards, with Harry fighting it all the way down…
Oh, blessed Muriel…Oh, my daughters!
On the moment of impact the plane exploded with such force that the broken body of Hawker was found 50 yards away. At their home at Hook, in Surrey, only a short time later, Muriel was informed that there had been ‘an accident’, and departed immediately for the aerodrome, leaving her two young daughters in the care of a neighbour. While driving there she reminded herself of the Atlantic flight, and how when everyone else had given up hope, she hadn’t, and had been proven right, and Harry had returned to her more alive than when he left.
Alas…alas…
When she arrived, it was to find that Harry was dead.36
A day later, no less than King George V himself was to write in a letter of condolence to Muriel, noting that ‘the nation has lost one of its most distinguished airmen who by his skill and daring has contributed so much to the success of British aviation’.37 This time, there was to be no miraculous reappearance of Harry.