by P Fitzsimons
They did not. The initial plan had been for Bert Pike and Bobby Hitchcock to go up to New Guinea by boat soon after they returned to Sydney to scout out landing grounds, but to Bobby Hitchcock’s dismay, Smithy decided he could do that job himself, simply by going along to the Burns Philp offices in Sydney and having a look at some of their photos. And he didn’t like what he saw, he told Bobby.63 The landing grounds weren’t big enough to cope with the kind of space the Bristols needed to take off and land and look, well…they had pretty much just lost enthusiasm for the plan, and that’s the way things go.
Bottom line?
After nearly a decade in far-flung parts of the world, the idea of living in Sydney for a good spell was extremely attractive. It was just a matter of finding a way to keep flying and getting the money they needed to make that Pacific flight, which was now more of an obsession than ever.
If there was a complication in the relationship between Smithy and Keith Anderson at this point—and there was—it was over a woman. Her name was Bon Hilliard and she was as strong-willed as she was vivacious, the daughter of the well-known and highly respected Sydney solicitor, Arthur Hilliard. Smithy was smitten with her blue-eyed beauty from the moment of first meeting her, while on a trip to Sydney between the time of selling Gascoyne Transport Company and buying and flying the Bristols to Sydney. And Bon, too, was seemingly very taken with him. And yet, something happened in the weeks immediately after Smithy and Anderson returned to Sydney together, as they were constantly on the social circuit, with Bon as a big part of it. Somehow, in that mad whirl of lunches, dinners, singalong parties, cocktail parties and party-party-parties, Bon changed personal orbits. While she had loved gliding around Smithy’s bright sun, there was something even more attractive about Keith Anderson’s silent, stoical solidity and his gentlemanly attentiveness to her—perhaps even his willingness to have his life revolve around hers. A scone, Bon? A cigarette? Your chair pulled out? Keith was there for her, while Smithy was more than likely to be laughing or singing or playing the piano or telling riotous stories in the next room, if not standing on his head while drinking a beer.
In the space of just a few weeks, thus, Kingsford Smith was stunned to see his best girl, Bon, suddenly become Keith’s best girl, and then Keith’s officially announced fiancée!
Precisely what effect this had on Smithy’s friendship and business relationship with Keith is not clear, though the least that can be said is that Smithy was well qualified to conclude that Bon, much as he had been taken with her, was not the only woman in the world with whom he could have fun, and all together they blithely partied on, entirely unaware of just what was to come.
Nine
PIONEERS AWAY…
Meanwhile, the years were passing. This was 1927, and it was nearly ten years since the war had ended. I was no forrader. I had absolutely nothing to show for those ten years which the locusts had eaten. It was time to be up and doing. One had to do something to attract notice…
CHARLES KINGSFORD SMITH IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MY FLYING LIFE1
February 1927. Fairbanks, Alaska.
George Wilkins was back. This time he had two new Stinson Detroiter SB-1 planes with him, which he and Ben Eielson thought would be better than the Fokkers for Arctic conditions. True, George still didn’t have a pilot’s licence, but in these parts there was no-one to bother about that. Ben would be doing most of the flying in any case. Also, as a backup to their Stinsons, they decided to join the small body of the Alaskan together with the longer wing and landing gear of the larger Fokker, the Detroiter, to make a whole new plane! Alas, the best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry, and when the composite Fokker crashed upon their first attempt to take off in it, they left it in the Fairbanks hangar and continued with the Stinsons.
By late March, all was in readiness and the two pilots took off in one of the fully fuelled Stinsons from Point Barrow (where the local Eskimos had come around to calling Wilkins ‘Anataka’—as in ‘strong wise man’) and headed north, in airspace previously unconquered.
At this point there were two pertinent theories about the Arctic that Wilkins felt he could disprove, based on his long explorations while sailing and trekking in the area over a decade earlier. The first was that there was a large landmass to the north of the Alaskan coast. The second was that it would be impossible to land on the frozen Arctic Ocean, because the ice would be far too rough. No less than 650 miles north of Point Barrow, with no land to see, the first theory seemed to be disproved. And now that the plane’s sole engine was stuttering in that white frozen world, they were going to have put the second theory to the test, as Wilkins told Eielson to take ‘er down.
‘There, that’s right,’ he gestured in defiance of the engine’s ragged but shattering staccato, pointing to a dimly perceived spot ahead on the ice. ‘Keep her on that course! This ice is thick…enough to hold a hundred tons.’2
In fact, Wilkins had no idea what the ice was like, or if the famous Arctic explorers Roald Amundsen and Richard E. Byrd were right and it really would be impossible to land in these parts, but with no other option, it seemed like the right thing to say to give young Ben confidence as they descended. In that most forsaken part of the planet, with not another human within 650 miles in any direction, the plane touched down to a shuddering, skidding halt. And they were alive! And their plane was intact! Wilkins was exultant, Eielson slightly less so as he contemplated their situation.
Then each got busy with his own work in temperatures that jarred and jangled at about 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. In a few minutes Eielson was deeply relieved to have the engine going again, while Wilkins was just delighted to have cut a hole through the ice in preparation for exploding some dynamite to take a depth sounding. Ah, but one thing, Ben. You’ll have to turn off the engine so we can be sure of hearing the echo of the dynamite explosion once it has bounced off the ocean floor and come back to us…
The strong, silent type was Ben Eielson. For, at this point, he looked at the half-mad, albeit very likeable, Australian and thought, ‘All right, go ahead and take your sounding. But if I stop this engine I may never get it going again, and then nobody but us and God will ever know what the sounding is.’3 And then he turned the engine off. The only sounds now were the whistling of the wind, the chattering of their teeth and the curious humming that Wilkins made as he went about his work. A short time later the dynamite exploded, and it was a long seven and a half seconds before the echo returned. This meant, according to Wilkins’s instant calculations, that the ocean floor was 18,000 feet below them, well over three miles! This in turn made the existence of any large landmass anywhere near them most unlikely, and Wilkins had now all but definitively disproved the first theory.
Yes, that’s great, thank you, but would anyone else bar them and the Almighty ever know? Fortunately, blessedly, Eielson did get the motor to bark and they were soon airborne again and heading back to Point Barrow, but after only two minutes the engine gave up the ghost once more and they had to land. This time the two men worked for several hours to get the engine going, during which Eielson suffered bad frostbite to his fingers, but once more they got aloft and made it to within 70 miles of Point Barrow before running out of petrol and coming in to land in a howling blizzard…
Midnight in the Garden of Eden…Life…or death
?
Life! Somehow, impossibly, they survived this third landing, despite the presence of cruel snowdrifts all around. The relief was such that both men burst into hysterical laughter. Life! They had done it again!
Too, it occurred to Wilkins that ‘we were the first men ever to land on the sea, with an opportunity to walk home’.4 Eighteen days later, of which five had been spent waiting in the plane for the blizzard to blow itself out, they managed to do exactly that—walking, walking and walking some more and with frosty feet and fingers, they returned to a Point Barrow overjoyed to see the presumed dead walk again. And that was the end of George Wilkins’s seco
nd attempt to fly across the top of the world.
Things had moved relatively quickly for Charles Lindbergh after he began considering the possibility of flying from New York to Paris. The first thing he had discovered was that he was not the only one who had conceived the idea. In fact, a French-born American by the name of Raymond Orteig, an extremely rich New York hotelier, had put forward a prize of $25,000 back in 1919 for the ‘first aviator of any Allied country crossing the Atlantic in one flight, from Paris to New York or New York to Paris’,5 and there had been several attempts since to traverse the 3600 miles. (This, of course, was a far more formidable task than the 1900-mile Newfoundland to Ireland hop across the Atlantic, which had been first accomplished by Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Brown only shortly after Harry Hawker and Kenneth Mackenzie Grieve had failed, and several others thereafter.)
As a matter of fact, at much the same time as Lindbergh had felt that he might have a go at getting to Paris himself, the famous French fighting ace René Fonck had lined up a Sikorsky S-35, powered by three Gnome-Rhône Jupiter nine-cylinder radial engines, with a three-man crew, at one end of Roosevelt Field on Long Island and opened the throttle. The massive crowd gathered for the occasion held its breath. Faster and faster the plane tore down towards the far end and…and…steadfastly refused to leave the ground. Terribly overloaded with too much fuel, a wooden bed, red-leather upholstery, two flotation bags and many other accoutrements—not to mention the heated compartments in which specially prepared meals of Long Island duckling and roast turkey could be kept warm and the crew could eat in style all the way to France—the plane had simply refused to lift,6 crashing instead in a gully at the end of the runway. Fonck and one of the crewmen escaped with their lives, but the two others were burned to death when the 2380 gallons of petrol onboard exploded.
And still there were more pilots coming forward, as advances in aviation permitted longer flights. As many as six other crews besides Fonck’s were trying to fly the Atlantic but, not at all put out, Lindbergh kept going. After raising sufficient money from St Louis businessmen, he organised for a Ryan monoplane to be custom-made for him in California, pursuing his model of ‘one set of wings, one engine, and one pilot’, which he felt was the best way to proceed. There was no doubt that a single-engined monoplane was the most fuel-efficient option and, by swapping the weight of a co-pilot for fuel, and doing all the flying and navigation himself, he calculated he could squeeze 50 gallons more on board and another 300 miles of range. He wrote to his mother, Evangeline, in Detroit:
It is probable that two attempts at the NY–Paris flight will be made before I am ready to go. Either or both may succeed, although in both cases, there are reasons to throw doubt on the successful completion of the flight.
We are not taking off before everything is ready, and if someone makes the NY–Paris hop, we will probably try a trans-Pacific flight via Honolulu to Australia, which would be a still greater accomplishment…7
For her part, while his mother was extremely proud of what he was setting out to achieve, she was also very worried for her only son. ‘For the first time in my life,’ the humble high school teacher wrote back to her son, ‘I realise that Columbus also had a mother…’8
So it was that in those early months of 1927, the just turned thirty years old Charles Kingsford Smith and Keith Anderson opened the rather grandiosely titled Interstate Flying Services in the very smart premises of Eldon Chambers at 92 Pitt Street, Sydney, just down the hill from where Smithy had attended St Andrew’s Cathedral School fifteen years earlier. And look at him now! Nominally, as their letterhead stated, they were engaged in…
INTERSTATE FLYING SERVICES
AEROPLANE FLIGHTS ARRANGED TO ANY PART OF THE WORLD
AERIAL ADVERTISING
SPECIALISTS IN AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHY
Unfortunately, they were in fact doing very little bar sitting around the office, chatting, waiting for the phone to ring and watching their capital draining away on overheads, all but entirely unleavened by serious paying jobs. The Bristols were parked out at Mascot airport being tended by Bobby Hitchcock—who was still dismayed about the New Guinea venture being abandoned—while Bert Pike had been appointed again as ‘business manager’, in the hope that some might actually eventuate.
Truth was, they were simply one more flying company among many at this time trying to get off the ground, and there was no real reason why such little work as there was would come to them particularly. They may have been called Interstate but not once in those early months of that year did they actually fly to another state, or indeed beyond the metropolitan confines of Sydney.
And then one day in early April 1927 came a letter which changed everything. It was from a Sydney solicitor by the name of Willis. He had a client, Charles Ulm, who had a proposal he would like to put to them. Was a meeting possible?9
Anderson and Kingsford Smith consulted their calendar. A meeting? Yes, they were free for a meeting on…well, pretty much on any day…at any time…for at least the next couple of months. Still, if for nothing more than form’s sake, Bert went and met the solicitor and it was all soon arranged.
The meeting took place in the offices of Interstate Flying Services. Tall, dark, dapper Charles Ulm, when he arrived, proved to be a Mosman man, much the same age as Kingsford Smith and Anderson, and just like them, was a war veteran who had been trying to make a go of it by launching various aviation companies, with only mixed success. One or two ventures had worked, and lots hadn’t. As a matter of fact, though Charles Ulm wasn’t a man much given to witticisms, his experience in recent times justified him uttering one of the defining and oft-repeated lines of those difficult times: ‘The greatest risk to life in modern aviation is starvation.’10
Nevertheless, Ulm felt that by joining forces, he and Interstate Flying Services could make a serious go of winning the tender for the Adelaide–Perth postal route, which was shortly going to be on offer. Certainly, one Norman Brearley, with his West Australian Airways, would have the inside running on it, but Ulm was confident they could beat him.
Kingsford Smith was keen from the first, as he liked both Ulm’s upfront way of going about things and the possibility of getting one up on Major Brearley. Keith Anderson was less so. He simply wasn’t sure whether he liked the cut of Ulm’s jib in the first place, and it seemed to him unlikely that Interstate Flying Services really would be able to beat their old employer for such a big tender. Still, it was obvious to both partners that Ulm had what they both lacked, which was a keen commercial brain. While Kingsford Smith was happy to be in the ‘aviation business’, the business part of it interested him only insofar as it allowed him to continue his true passion, which was aviation. Keith Anderson felt much the same.
Maybe under this new arrangement Ulm could take care of all the numbers, making them black rather than red, and Kingsford Smith and Anderson could get on with the flying. And if they could win the tender to fly between Adelaide and Perth, they would have it made. Have it made!
Therefore on the following morning, when Ulm returned to hear their answer, they did the deal, shook hands and all started to steer by the same star.
A small parenthesis here. One other key thing Ulm and the two partners of Interstate Flying Services had in common, though none of them knew it, was that they were all broke. Smithy had been quite impressed with Ulm’s suit and briefcase, but was unaware that that was basically all Ulm owned, and that in recent times he had been reduced to working by the hour in a billiard saloon, playing against people who needed an opponent. For his part, Ulm was impressed with the salubrious offices of Interstate Flying Services but was unaware that the company had only £49 in the bank and was over £700 in the red. Close parenthesis.
In the northern hemisphere at this time, great attention was focusing on the continuing attempts to win the Orteig Prize for being the first to fly the distance between New York and Paris in either direction. On 8 May 1927, none other than Captain Charles Nung
esser made ready to leave Paris’s Le Bourget airfield, with his navigator, Captain François Coli, and fly to New York. ‘I am attempting the flight,’ Nungesser had announced grandly, ‘to bring honour to French aviation.’11
The greatest French hero to beat them all, Nungesser had finished the war with forty-five confirmed kills, and had more or less prospered since, being celebrated everywhere he went and showered with decorations, money and whatever else took his fine fancy. His marriage to an American in 1923 had only temporarily slowed his nocturnal conquests of some of the most beautiful women in France, before divorce had allowed him totally free rein once more. But could he achieve something in peacetime that was the equivalent of his wartime feats, and actually fly all the way from Paris to New York? He was convinced he could, as was much of the French press, who turned up, in the company of thousands of Parisians, to record his departure.
Nungesser’s plane carried no radio and no life rafts. When Coli had complained about this to Nungesser, the famous pilot gave him short shrift. ‘The idea, mon cher Coli, is to reach America by flying over the water, not swimming to New York. You’ve been in the navy too long, mon pauvre.‘12
And there he was! The crowd swooned as Nungesser himself came out onto the tarmac in a garish yellow flying suit, trailed by a rather hangdog-looking Coli. Nungesser paused to kiss two beautiful women, share a couple of jokes with his great friends the singer Maurice Chevalier and the boxer Georges Carpentier, and then, with a cheery wave to the adoring spectators, climbed up into his cockpit.
And with that the plane, a Levasseur PL-8 biplane named L’oiseau blanc—painted with Nungesser’s Great War insignia of a black heart, two burning candles, a coffin and skull and crossbones—staggered down the runway and, after just managing to take off, headed out towards the Atlantic Ocean. Tragically, after being briefly spotted over Ireland some six hours later, Nungesser and Coli were never seen again.