Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

‘It’s a sad fact,’ the prime minister began carefully, ‘that these days you have to give something to get something…‘51

  They continued to talk as the Australian countryside thundered past in the night and, in the early hours of Saturday morning, McMaster was woken in his Brisbane home by an excited Ginty speaking from a railway station somewhere north of Albury.52 His message was simple. If the Country Party would stop backing Labor in the Senate estimates—the method whereby senators could closely question the government’s public servants, to the point of inquisition, about all matters to do with Budget expenditure—and start backing the Hughes government, then it would be quite likely that the government would find the money needed to subsidise a service between Charleville and Cloncurry.

  The following morning, McMaster began to make his own calls, and within days, the Country Party had indeed started backing Hughes in parliament. Things began to move, and within three months the news was formally announced. The Hughes government would back Qantas with a subsidy scheme for a one-year trial period similar to the one Western Australian Airways enjoyed, to the tune of four shillings a mile flown, equal to about £30,000 per annum…53

  Thursday, 13 April 1922.

  Just near the Vickers Aircraft factory at Weybridge, England, Sir Ross Smith and Jimmy Bennett, one of the mechanics who had been with him on the flight from London to Darwin, had taken one of the new Vickers Type 54 Viking IVs skywards in preparation for a flight around the world that they were planning. The plane was an enormous amphibian, almost like a boat with wings, powered by a 350-horsepower engine and capable of landing on the ocean.54 That day, Sir Keith was meant to have been with them but he had been caught up in London, so Sir Ross and Jimmy had taken off without him to go for a quick spin to test the plane out a little and see what it could do. So it was that Sir Keith arrived just in time to see the plane fall out of the sky from a height of perhaps 1000 feet, and come to earth with a screaming wrench of metal behind nearby fir trees. Sir Keith was at the scene within minutes, and it was immediately obvious that the crash was every bit as bad as he had feared. In the twisted wreckage Jimmy seemed to already be dead, while Sir Ross was showing just the barest glimmer of life, though with a deep gash down the right-hand side of his face. When a man identifying himself as a doctor skidded to a halt, Sir Keith composed himself and said: ‘Please look at my brother and see if there is any chance of saving him.’55

  He then wandered off a little way from the horror of it all, only to see the doctor approaching him less than a minute later.

  Sir Keith steeled himself and said to the medical man: ‘I see by your face, all is over.’

  The doctor nodded, and Sir Keith broke down and wept, and was soon kneeling over his brother’s remains.

  Via the wonders of modern communications, Catherine Kingsford Smith was shocked to read of Sir Ross’s death in the following day’s edition of the Sydney Morning Herald under the headline: ‘ROSS SMITH KILLED WHILE TESTING MACHINE.’56

  The paper went on to editorialise next day: ‘With his death Australia has lost the star airman of her flying service, built up during the late war, and the Empire has lost an airman whose heart was in the pioneering of air routes which should link up the dominions with the old country.’57

  Devouring the account, Catherine wasted no time in writing to her son in Western Australia to voice her concerns. And her youngest son was equally quick in trying to allay her fears. He wrote:

  Mum, You remark re Ross Smith—‘the air, like the sea, can be pretty treacherous’ I would like to correct that impression, Mum. Apart from an actual breakage of a vital part (almost an unheard-of occurrence, thank goodness) the air is never, in my opinion, treacherous to a careful pilot. From what details have come to hand, Ross Smith evidently killed himself through taking a strange (to him) machine up after nearly two years away from the controls, and attempting an evolution that I don’t think has been done on that type before…Poor chap, it is a sad ending to a brilliant career. I wish some philanthropist would finance me to step into his shoes, and continue the flight. My dream of a trans-Pacific flight is not yet ended, and some day I’ll do it.58

  At least, in the meantime, Kingsford Smith was gaining enormous experience in an entirely different form of flying. Until this point, in all of England, France, America and eastern Australia he had never had to fly much more than 50 or 60 miles at one time. Now, he would do 300 miles in a single hop and nary turn a hair, finding his way across the terrain by virtue of his compass and recognising known landmarks—such things as the contour of the coast, hills, rivers, various townships and scattered missions. It was a stark landscape, but Kingsford Smith came to love it bit by bit, and was earning a steady wage for the first time since the war.

  By mid-1922, the company was in such good shape that Major Brearley decided to replace the two men who had been so tragically killed six months earlier. The new pilot with the jutting jaw was a tall, notably good-looking, quietly spoken fellow by the name of Keith Anderson, another former fighter pilot in France—with five kills to his credit—and he and Kingsford Smith hit it off from the first, each recognising that the other was that greatest of all Australian male things, a ‘good bloke’. On their meeting at the aerodrome in Carnarvon, he and Kingsford Smith firmly clasped hands, and Anderson was soon on the back of Smithy’s pride and joy—the motorbike he had just bought for £75—as they hightailed towards the Gascoyne Hotel, where they could slake their thirst and begin to talk.

  In character they were entirely different. Charles Kingsford Smith was almost universally ‘Smithy’ to everyone who knew him, which really was just about everyone. Keith Anderson, a year younger, was either ‘Keith Anderson’ or ‘Anderson’ to the limited circle of his acquaintances, and ‘Keith’ or ‘Andy’ to a precious few. Smithy was loud, while Anderson was quiet; Smithy was gregarious, while Anderson was content with his own company; Smithy could light up a room all on his own and did so at every pub along that north-west Australian coast whenever he was in town, while Anderson was happy to hide his light under a bushel. And yet, the brotherhood of both being war veterans immediately got them off to a strong start, as did the fact that they both had dreams of doing some serious long-distance flying.

  Not for a minute had Kingsford Smith abandoned his plans of flying the Pacific, and he had nurtured the dream from the first day it had come to him. As to Anderson, his huge ambition was to fly across the entire Indian Ocean and he had also put a lot of thought into how his ambition might be accomplished.

  Naturally enough, the two began to consider each other’s dream and before long, Anderson’s had folded into Kingsford Smith’s. They began to talk about how they might be able to fly the Pacific together. What route should they take? What kind of plane would be best? And once they got the said plane, just where would they be able to put all the petrol tanks that they would need, and how much they would be able to fit in and still take off. Blériot had done his calculations and drawings on the tablecloth, they did theirs more often than not on the back of whatever scrap of paper they might have handy.

  Whenever they met, up and down the great north-west coast of Australia—and usually in whichever town’s main pub—it became a constant subject of conversation between them, the default topic they would return to. Yes, flying was heaven, but both men felt that heaven needed to have its boundaries extended.

  As it was, on a bad day Smithy’s experiences could look a lot like hell. At one point, he was flying over Roebuck Bay, just south of Broome, when the engine on his plane ran out of oil and it was all he could do to keep the plane aloft long enough to just reach the mangroves on the north side of the bay, where he was able to land on the beach. He and his passengers were stranded there for several days and by the time they were rescued most of them were so badly sunburnt they had to be put to bed for a week.59

  On other occasions Kingsford Smith or other Western Australian Airways pilots were obliged to land on beaches in moonlight, or make f
orced landings in rough country, where the general plan was to bring the plane down as close as possible to the Overland Telegraph Line—so they could shinny up the pole and cut the wire—and then sit in the shade under a wing until the wire repair team inevitably arrived a day or two later.

  Twice, when Keith Anderson went down in the desert, well away from the Telegraph Line, it was Smithy who managed to find him by scouring the countryside back and forth along the rough path until he located him—and on one of those occasions Anderson had been in particularly desperate straits, being lost for just under three weeks.60 Though to that point the two had been close, the fact that Anderson felt that Smithy had saved his life drew them closer still.

  Smithy learnt better than ever how to fly through heavy rain and shrieking wind, and became more confident flying in the dark, though it was still something to be avoided if possible. So too was his knowledge of the mechanics of aircraft increasing as, in the time that he wasn’t actually flying the planes, he was usually busy fixing and maintaining them, and in that manner was able to qualify as a ground engineer Category D.61

  For all that, it remained aviation on the wild side as Western Australian Airways continued to ply and fly its trade up and down the far north-west coast. Always the emphasis was on getting paying customers into the plane and if there wasn’t quite enough room for them, as in when another pilot had to be transported up the coast to do a different leg, then something else would have to be worked out.

  On one occasion, thus, when two paying passengers were on offer, Smithy flew while the other pilot sat outside on the lower wing, hugging the strut as the hot air rushed all around him. For Smithy, it was nothing compared to what he and his mates had got up to in America wing-walking, barnstorming and so forth, so what was the problem? He took the same attitude to sometimes strapping his motorbike to the undercarriage of his plane so he could have transport at the next destination.62

  Of course the Civil Air Regulations strictly forbade such dangerous activities, but who cared? The same government that had sent him to Gallipoli and the Western Front, and facilitated him flying against the Germans with a mortality rate of 25 per cent a week, was now going to threaten blue murder if he took a couple of short cuts here and there, short cuts that he was better qualified than anyone to judge the safety of? He didn’t think so.

  Besides, even though on one or two occasions they had carried the new Controller of Civil Aviation, Lieutenant Colonel Horace C. Brinsmead, MC, OBE—a distinguished veteran of both Gallipoli and the Australian Flying Corps—Western Australian Airways was generally so far removed from aviation officialdom that the pilots were able to do more or less what they liked.

  The bottom line was that, one way or another, both Charles Kingsford Smith and the airline were doing fairly well. In late 1922, Norman Brearley, a good man and canny operator, even formally wrote to him, recording how impressed he was:

  I have had excellent reports about you from all and sundry and am very pleased indeed with the way you are carrying on. I know now that you are all you appear to be, and that is saying a lot. I only hope that my treatment of you meets with your approval too, as I want to keep the show one of the very best.63

  Not that his star pilot was without blemish. As good as he was in the air, he could still be a wild man on the ground and, although two decades earlier it had been Bishop Wright’s avowed hope that his sons’ invention of the aeroplane would help to spread the word of Christianity…it was fair to say that Smithy was not the patron saint of that movement. This was irrespective of the fact that he was flying further than almost any other pilot in the world. A girl in every port? No, but Smithy had a girl in most of the towns they flew to; did enough drinking for two men and at least his fair share of fighting—he remained a good man to have on your side in a bar-room brawl, displaying surprising strength and ferocity—and all up, his days of hymn singing were long gone. Rather, at his best and most comfortable, he would be drunk, at the pub piano and surrounded by cheering chanting punters as he belted out another classic from the Great War, the likes of:

  I don’t want to join the army…

  I don’t want to go to war…

  I’d rather hang around Piccadilly Underground

  Living off the earnings of a well-born lady…

  Monday I touched ‘er on the ankle

  Tuesday I touched ‘er on the knee

  On Wednesday I confess I lifted up ‘er dress

  On Thursday I saw it (cor blimey)

  Friday I put my hand upon it

  Saturday she gave my balls a twist…

  But on Sunday after supper…I rammed the bastard UP ’ER

  And now I’m paying seven and six a week (cor blimey)

  One can’t help wondering if on one such occasion a local sage might have quietly pointed Smithy out and said, ‘Look, yers wouldn’t believe it, but that bloke will have a knighthood within ten years…’ Perhaps not.

  In the meantime, life in that remote part of Australia was changing courtesy of Western Australian Airways. The well-heeled people of Derby could now get to Perth in as little as three days! And they could have weekly post and newspapers delivered from Perth. Why, the women could get the latest issue of the Western Mail, engage in mail-order shopping and have a new dress in their hands in under a week! Similarly, business and legal matters that used to take months to complete could now be expedited in a little more than nothing flat, and the wheels of commerce began to spin in the area as never before.64

  Bloody Chilla!

  Once returned from the war, it had become apparent to the rest of the family just how hopeless the youngest of the clan was in managing his money, so Catherine had decided that Leofric, a responsible forty-year-old accountant, should effectively manage the wayward one’s money for him. This would entail Leofric having control of a bank account that Chilla would contribute a portion of his weekly wage to, which was fine, on principle. The problem was that Chilla still had no idea of saving, and thought that account was something he could raid whenever he needed to. One particular letter, sent on New Year’s Eve 1922, demonstrated just how hopeless the task Leofric had been set was.

  ‘Many thanks for the book, Mum, dear,’ Chilla wrote warmly, before adding grandly, ‘I want you to take a few pounds of my dough, and buy yourself and Dad a little treat of some variety, and will write the Old Dragon re same.’

  The ‘Old Dragon’ in question, Leofric, was then stunned to read several paragraphs later, when his mother had passed it on to him:

  I’m still plunged in impecuniosity through said motorcycle, but am getting lots of fun with it. By the way, my income tax for the last two years will soon come to hand and as it will be at least £30 I’ll have to get assistance from over there, so tell Leofric to make ready in a few weeks.

  Nor was he averse to getting Leofric to do some running around for him, re said motorbike, asking in another letter.

  If Leofric has time, can he get a kick-starter pedal complete with gear quadrant for a 41/4 Premier (1918 model). Tell the Dragon that I have no dough to spare over here to pay for it, and mainly there are no Premier agencies in this state anyway. Also tell him that I now consider Scrooge an archangel of charity. Also that he won’t get the £25 back, as it’s gone into the other bike. If he still lives after that it ought to be in a chastened state of mind. I can’t bear to think of his poor little daughter going ragged and starving, a footsore waif, from house to house, begging pennies so that her father can hoard and gloat over them in his avarice…65

  Impossible! On matters of money, it was Leofric’s strong view that his brother was simply impossible to keep on the straight and narrow!

  Eight

  THELMA

  I don’t know how Taplin’s little accident got into the papers. These little spills are only to be expected on a difficult service like this, and the publicity merely unfortunate. Papers, ‘blooming ghouls’, always mention the accidents. But you never hear that we have already flown about
18,000 miles of the most difficult, loneliest and longest aeroplane mail service in the world. But that’s the way of things.

  KINGSFORD SMITH, IN A LETTER HOME TO HIS PARENTS, 30 MARCH 19221

  McGinness, I think, had even less academic education than I had, but he had something else, something great, something born of the young, immature but intensely venturesome Australian returned from the war, groping with gusto for something ahead, something undreamt of but which he must do. It was men like McGinness, Ross Smith, Kingsford Smith, Ulm, Hinkler and other Australians who infused that first great spark of adventure, Columbus-like, into what air transport is today.

  HUDSON FYSH, WRITING IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, QANTAS RISING, IN 19652

  When Thelma Corboy first laid eyes on Charles Kingsford Smith in late July 1922, he appeared to be a rather curious cove, though full of life. She and her mother had been in a Port Hedland drapery shop buying material for new dresses for the race-week grand ball when she heard a lot of raucous laughter. Looking up, she saw five or six young men walking past the open shop front.

  ‘Who are they?’ her mother asked the shopkeeper, a little disapprovingly.

  ‘It’s the Kingsford Smith crowd,’ that good woman replied, pointing to the smallest of the group, the one laughing the loudest. ‘And that’s Kingsford Smith himself, the airways pilot—you must have read about him.’3

  At this point, to Thelma’s amazement, the matronly shopkeeper then took her mother aside and began speaking about the pilot in a low voice. It was not clear what she was saying, only that whatever it was, wasn’t proper for the ears of a beautiful 21-year-old girl, which Thelma was.