Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  On this dreamy afternoon down Cowra way in western New South Wales, the Lachlan River was flowing as sweetly as ever, the birds were singing and the only other sound on Cowra Bridge was the pleasant clip-clopping of hooves, as a big wheat wagon drawn by twelve horses was heading homewards. In the opposite direction at a slightly faster clip came a sulky in which a farmer was rushing his heavily pregnant wife to the maternity ward of the local hospital, because she had had stirrings, she said. It was a bucolic, perfect scene, one that could well have been painted by Tom Roberts.

  But do you hear something? What? That bzzzzzzz buzzing sound…getting louder and louder…

  THERE!

  From out of the blue, literally, and seemingly making straight for the Gates of Hell, suddenly descended the plane of one Charles Kingsford Smith, who had been drinking heavily, and was intent on having some fun. Flattening out above the river, he gunned it straight for the bridge, while those upon the fragile structure stared at the fast-approaching machine in horror! Was he…? Is he…? Can he…?

  Yes, or die in the attempt, perhaps taking them with him. The stanchions below the bridge stood 70 feet apart at their widest point, while the Avro stretched 36 feet. This gave the pilot 17 feet of clearance on either side, while a gap of 15 feet separated the bottom of the bridge from the water, just enough, perhaps, to allow the Avro’s 10 feet 5 inches height through. Only one of the best, most confident pilots in the world, or the most foolish, or the most drunken, would attempt such a thing. As it happened, on this day Smithy was all three of those things.

  The plane continued to hurtle towards the bridge at just under 100 miles per hour, as the three people on the bridge watched, completely terrified…And he made it!

  Still, he wasn’t done. After emerging on the other side, Smithy pulled back on his stick hard and executed a perfect ‘Immelmann turn’, just as he had learnt to do in the Great War, which meant that after a tight loop an instant later he was hurtling back over the bridge at a very low height.

  On that bridge, of course, total pandemonium had broken out. As Kingsford Smith had roared underneath, the horses hitched to the wheat wagon had bolted like scalded pigs and driven the oncoming sulky hard into the side of the bridge, which precipitated the pregnant farmer’s wife falling out and landing heavily on the roadway. Her baby came into the world there and then, on the bridge outside of Cowra, as a plane piloted by a seeming madman screamed off in one direction and flocks of terrified cockatoos raced off in every other.

  And still Smithy was only warming up…

  Oblivious of the devastation he had left behind him, he flew on. His job on that late afternoon, after going back to the Cowra airstrip, was to take two local men out to distant Riverslea station to celebrate the christening of the station manager’s son and heir. (And with Smithy in the area, this was an heir who was very fortunate to be born in a bed.) Feeling good. Feeling strong. Did he need to land in the big paddock, a small distance from the homestead? He did not. For he was Smithy.

  Far better, and more fun, to land on the sweeping driveway, and take his passengers right up to the door, which he did with aplomb—bar the fact that one of the tyres blew on impact. Not to worry.

  One thing led to another, which led to him forgetting about the blown tyre. Country hospitality being what it was, Smithy was invited to join the celebrations and over the next couple of hours held court, telling war stories, drinking champagne, flirting with the women, laughing and charming everyone. In that part of the world, decorated war pilots were a great rarity, and the locals hung off his every word.

  When the time came to go, just as the sun was sinking low into the western hills, the burst tyre really had been forgotten. With a last ‘cheerio’, Smithy and his two passengers climbed into the cockpit before the admiring onlookers, then, without further ado, Smithy gunned it down the driveway. Too late he realised his colossal error, as the plane swerved, then swerved again and again, as he desperately tried to keep it straight. In this instance, however, his masterly pilot skills didn’t register as he was less a pilot of a plane than a drunken driver of a vehicle with a busted tyre, and he ended up losing control. The Avro left the driveway and veered right, then one of the wheels suddenly bit into a large rabbit hole, causing the plane to tip forward and have its nose smash into the ground. From the wreckage, the two passengers emerged, bleeding from facial cuts, while Smithy himself suffered two broken ribs and a near broken heart.

  ‘It isn’t hurting that much,’ he said, ‘but there goes my job.’38

  There was, nevertheless, a saving grace, thought the intrepid pilot, as he explained in the course of a letter to his parents:

  We had a spill in Cowra, and I was a bit bruised in consequence. However I am okay today and except for being a trifle stiff, have nothing to complain of. Rather bad luck tho’, with the new machine, but she was fully insured, and except for the delay the company won’t lose. Struck a rabbit burrow at great speed and of course went a thud.39

  That thud, as it turned out, was nearly, but not quite as great a thud as the Diggers Co-operative Aviation Company was about to receive. No matter that the insurance assessor, Paddy Lee Murray, was an old mate of Kingsford Smith’s, as he had been a fellow wartime pilot with the Royal Flying Corps. It was perhaps because he knew Smithy so well that he suspected the kind of behaviour that might have led to the wreck, and was soon able to produce testimony from people who had witnessed him drinking heavily. Paddy Murray liked Smithy a great deal, and didn’t mind a drink himself, but in this instance his duty, his job, was to serve the interests of the insurance company, and so he was instrumental in that company exercising its legal and moral rights in refusing to pay up. When put together with the £600 legal settlement that the Diggers Co-operative Aviation Company had to make with the farmer and his wife, the crash of the Avro meant the company had received an all but mortal wound to its finances. And, for Kingsford Smith, his instant reckoning that the crash would cost him his job proved to be correct. The managers of Diggers Aviation liked him a great deal and were happy to write him a glowing reference, but the bottom line was that as gifted a pilot as Smithy was, they simply could no longer afford to have him in their employ.40 Good luck. Goodbye.

  Smithy left Diggers Aviation and returned to Sydney with little more to show for his time there than a badly broken nose he had received one night in Coonamble, courtesy of a drunken fight with a mechanic. Not to worry. Flying for Diggers Aviation had been fine, but it hadn’t altered a jot his dream of flying the Pacific, the very expedition he referred to, in a letter from the New South Wales country town of Wellington to his parents on 4 August 1921, as ‘still my ultimate ambition’.41

  In terms of what to do in the meantime, however, Kingsford Smith was fortunate that in the early 1920s, as one aviation company began to falter so would another one or two start up. Such was the case with Major Norman Brearley—he too had received his commission by flying for the Royal Flying Corps in the Great War—who, in mid-August 1921, began to advertise for airline pilots to work for him on his nascent Western Australian Airways Ltd, which was going to provide the first regular airmail service in the west of the country, flying vast distances. The service would go from Geraldton, where the railway line from Perth finished, to Derby, 1200 miles to the north.

  Brearley had come a long way since shooting down the German observation balloon and shortly thereafter taking a bullet through both lungs. He had returned to Australia, recovered, married Violet Stubbs, a prominent politician’s daughter, received the first commercial pilot’s licence from the newly established Civil Aviation Branch and had now got the go-ahead from the government to start up the country’s first regular scheduled passenger and airmail service airline. Under the terms of the contract, the Federal government would pay Brearley four shillings for every mile that his planes flew, and in return, space on the aircraft would be reserved for 100 pounds of government mail—while the rest of the space could be used by Brearley for passeng
ers and freight.42 Western Australian Airways also had to ensure that all its pilots were members of the Air Force Reserve, and therefore available to fly for the government in the event of a national emergency.43

  One dark day, back in Sydney licking his wounds, Smithy spotted an advertisement in one of the local newspapers, inviting pilots to apply for positions with the soon to start Western Australian Airways.44 He immediately wrote away presenting his credentials. Brearley quickly replied, inviting him to come down to Laverton, just outside Melbourne, where he would shortly be conducting interviews and giving prospective pilots practical tests. Kingsford Smith was overjoyed.45 The chance of a job flying with a serious aviation company! Certainly he had to borrow the railway fare from Diggers Aviation to get down to Laverton to meet Brearley, but the whole thing went well.

  Brearley was extremely impressed with the way Kingsford Smith handled the Avro 504K when he gave him the practical test in the skies above Laverton. After the Sydneysider had passed the practical with flying colours, Brearley gave him the formal interview, beginning by asking his full name and service background.

  ‘Charles Edward Kingsford Smith.’

  ‘And how did you win your Military Cross?’

  ‘For various acts of foolishness.’46

  Brearley liked his style, and soon afterwards offered him the job. Again Smithy had to borrow the ship fare from his father to get to Western Australia, topped up with another couple of loans from two of his brothers, Eric and Wilf, who happened to have a little spare cash at the time. But the main thing was, he once again had a job, and a quite respectable one it was, too, for a nice change, with Smithy contracting to fly for Brearley’s WAA for the relatively handsome salary of £500 per annum—well over double the average annual wage for a male, which was just on £200.

  As to Major Brearley, it was clear from the start—in the way Kingsford Smith carried himself and spoke, in his military bearing—that he was not the sort of man who would cop any shenanigans and, given Smithy’s near disastrous experience with Diggers Aviation, the younger man was happy enough to knuckle down, at least after a fashion. The next weeks in Perth were filled with getting to know Brearley and his fellow pilots—Val Abbott, Arthur Blake, Bob Fawcett and Len Taplin—as they all worked together with the WAA’s mechanics to get the six three-seater, 250-horsepower Armstrong Siddeley Puma-engined Bristol Type 28 Tourer Coupé biplanes ready.

  Brearley had shipped these latest models from England and, after uncrating the beauties, the men began to carefully assemble them, before firing them up and taking them to the skies for testing. All the pilots were issued rather smart khaki uniforms with the words Western Australian Airways embroidered on their left pocket beneath a freshly designed emblem which showed a large pair of wings sprouting from a globe.

  The company’s stated intent was to establish a regular route from Geraldton in the south to Derby in the north, with stops at Carnarvon, Onslow, Roebourne, Port Hedland and Broome. To go the whole way from Geraldton to Derby across the vast sprawling region of pearling, mining and farming concerns would take an amazingly quick two and a half days, with overnight stops in pubs at Carnarvon and Port Hedland. In the morning passengers would set off with a fresh pilot and usually in a fresh plane. Western Australia had some of the most isolated towns in the world, and boasted the most isolated city on the planet—Perth—but now these towns would be effectively joined up to each other and a major blow struck at the prevailing tyranny of distance. An expensive blow it would be, however, with the price of a ticket calculated at the rough rate of a shilling a mile. This meant that a Geraldton–Derby flight cost around £60!47 And so, too, would ‘airmail’ be more expensive—5 pence for a half-ounce letter from Perth to Derby by air, instead of the usual twopence—but given that whereas previously to get a reply to a letter sent between those cities had taken two months and it could now be accomplished in a matter of days, few people were quibbling.

  As to the pilots, they would essentially be on an eternal relay around the circuit, handing on passengers and post to each other, before resting and taking the fresh lot on to the next town. Hopefully there would be enough passengers and post to make a healthy profit, but if there wasn’t, the government subsidy meant they were assured of survival in the short term.

  In those last months of 1921, Qantas was seriously struggling. What was already obvious was that without a government subsidy the company would go under. Their one hope was in convincing Prime Minister Billy Hughes of the virtue of subsidising their service in western Queensland—the same way the Federal government had done with Brearley’s Western Australian Airways in the great north-west. Matters came to a head on the night of 10 November 1921 in Hughes’s private office, located in the basement of Parliament House in Melbourne, the Federal government’s then seat of power. Fergus McMaster led a delegation of all the Queensland members of the House of Representatives and Senate in an attempt to convince the prime minister of the justness of their cause.

  Given that the Queenslanders were members of the very same Country Party that had been making Hughes’s life hell in recent months by voting with the Labor Party and against the Hughes government on matters of expenditure, things were tense from the beginning. For now they wanted what? More money so Queenslanders could fly around at the government’s expense?

  Like a bristling battleship, Hughes began the meeting by raking the Country Party from stem to stern on every issue he could think of, steaming back and forth to fire broadside after ever more devastating broadside.

  Twenty minutes into this tirade, however, Hughes suddenly stopped—whether because he was finished or was merely reloading, the delegation wasn’t sure. When he reached for an enormous listening device that lay on his desk and put it to his ear, it seemed that it was now McMaster’s time to make his presentation.

  Which McMaster tried to do, but after only a few minutes Hughes laid down his listening device, as if he were refusing to listen further. And maybe he was, for after McMaster had finished and then other parliamentarians began to make their supporting speeches, Billy Hughes interrupted them, turned to McMaster and said: ‘When are you going back to Queensland?’

  McMaster: ‘As soon as we secure your reply.’

  Hughes: ‘You have it now. The government has no money. My reply is no!’48

  The launch of Western Australian Airways in Perth went well enough, and Kingsford Smith was pleasantly amazed with all the carry-on during the official opening on 3 December 1921. No less than the Governor of Western Australia, Sir Francis Newdigate, turned up at Perth Town Hall, together with the mayor, and there were speeches and brass bands galore. Later, there was a demonstration of flying from Major Brearley’s base in Langley Park, using the foreshore of the Swan River as a runway. Chilla happily informed his parents that evening after the opening was over:

  The major and myself did all the flying in the new planes as the foreshore is rather small and we are both more experienced with small fields than the others. Our salaries are paid monthly, and I have arranged to have the £5 paid regularly into Leof’s account weekly, or else £20 monthly. The fare will be refunded at the end of the month, so that I will be able to pay some of Eric’s and all of Wilf’s loans back.

  The major and two pilots leave tomorrow morning to do the first mail…49

  And so they did. Amid much fanfare and good wishes on that bright, sunny morning, Len Taplin took off in one Bristol, followed by Bob Fawcett and his mechanic, Ted Broad, in another, while Major Brearley took off last, taking two passengers with him. Flying in rough formation, 100 yards separating them, they made an impressive sight on their way to begin a new era in Australian aviation.

  After a brief stopover at Geraldton, they were about 80 miles north of that coastal town and flying over the massive Murchison House station, when Len Taplin’s engine began playing up like the devil, so much so that he was obliged to make a forced landing. And yet there was worse, much worse to follow. When Bob Fawcett—a
very softly spoken and gentle young man—throttled back and started circling low over Taplin to make sure he was fine, something went wrong and his plane stalled, sending him and his mechanic plummeting earthwards. Both men were killed instantly, and the wife of the station manager later said the only time she ever saw a man cry was when Major Brearley landed a minute later and found out what had happened.50 Fawcett and Broad were buried in the station’s cemetery, with the station manager presiding over proceedings.

  It was a catastrophic beginning to the life of the airline, but tradition was observed. Within as short a time as possible, flying resumed as normal.

  Finally, it was ‘Ginty’ McGinness who effectively refused to take no for an answer from Billy Hughes. Knowing that without the subsidies Qantas was as good as dead, McGinness took extreme measures. Learning that the prime minister would be on the night train returning from parliament in Melbourne to his home in Sydney, Ginty boarded the train with one thing in mind. ‘Prime Minister Hughes?’ he said, thrusting out his hand. ‘Paul McGinness—from Qantas.’

  Billy Hughes, his head like a warped walnut with two piercing eyes that missed nothing, sat there looking at him silently and menacingly, and there was nothing for it but for McGinness to quickly state his business.

  ‘Look, is there no way that I can convince you how important it is for us to have that mail contract?’

  The fact that Hughes didn’t yell at him that he wished to be left in peace McGinness took as a positive sign, and indeed it wasn’t long before Hughes even delicately pointed the way towards a deal.