Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  So it was that much of Australia followed their journey, as city after city, state after state after territory, fell behind them and interest built as to just how much they would slash the record by. The hairiest part was crossing some of the godforsaken Kimberley in Western Australia, over a region previously unseen by white men, which Smithy described ‘as bristling with buttes of rocks and roughly timbered slopes’, before traversing ‘an endless ocean of bronze green bush’.45 If they had been forced to crash-land down there, Kingsford Smith knew, ‘our chances of getting back to civilisation would have been slender’.46 Still, they survived the Kimberley to then knock over Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne, and both pilots were stunned when, ten days and five and a half hours after they left—a record!—they landed once again at Mascot to find no fewer than 50,000 people had turned out to greet them. And one of them was none other than Nellie Stewart, the wonderful Australian actress whose photo Smithy had now carried with him all over the world—a photo which he refused to fly without—and she was as gracious and gorgeous as ever. That good woman kissed the aviators on both cheeks, placed laurels around their necks and said a few wonderful words to them. Bliss!

  In the midst of the applause and the sheer exuberance of the crowd, Ulm turned to Kingsford Smith and spoke loudly over the tumult: ‘If we could fly the Pacific from California to Australia, we’d be made!’

  ‘Ye-e-s,’ Smithy replied dryly. ‘And if it would only rain pound notes we might be able to try it.’

  ‘It won’t rain pound notes,’ was the reply from Ulm, ‘but I reckon I can fix it up.’47

  And maybe he could. A bare beginning, right then and there, was to get into the ear of the Premier of New South Wales, Jack Lang, who had turned out to greet them and make a speech of welcome where he warmed to the theme that they had, in his words, ‘accomplished something as hazardous as Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic Ocean’.48

  As the Premier was a massive man—who towered over the two relatively diminutive aviators by a good 6 inches—getting into his ear wasn’t necessarily easy, but he certainly listened to their hurried exhortations as to how this round-Australia trip was only a prelude to what they really wanted to do, which was cross the Pacific, and if only his government could give them some financial backing, they were sure it could be done.

  He promised he would come back to them.

  What on earth was going on!? Down in Melbourne, four days behind Kingsford Smith and Ulm, Keith Anderson and Bobby Hitchcock were stunned to read a newspaper report saying that the next challenge for the two men who now had the round-Australia record was to cross the Pacific, and that they had already booked their passage on the RMS Tahiti to take them to San Francisco, from where they were going to fly! And there was no mention of Anderson or Hitchcock accompanying them! As a matter of fact, it looked to them as though Ulm and Kingsford Smith would be gone even before Anderson and Hitchcock got back to Sydney…

  ‘And so, ladies and gentlemen, would you please put your hands together and welcome to the podium, Charles Kingsford Smith!’

  The gathering at the Hotel Australia—where George A. Taylor had formed the Aerial League of Australia seventeen years earlier—for a glittering luncheon the day after they had landed at Mascot had been given by the directors of Sun Newspapers Ltd. The miniature plane of shimmering orange silk, with violets and wattle blossom crusting the wings, dangling above this gathering of the crème de la crème of Sydney’s business and political classes set exactly the right tone.49 It was an audience that included none other than Billy Hughes, looking more like a gnarled walnut than ever and now no longer prime minister, but still a very strong supporter of Australian aviation.

  ‘We are met here to welcome back to Sydney two most gallant Australians,’ began the Chairman of Directors, Mr H.A. Russell. ‘They have blazed afresh the trail that leads to a larger success in commercial aviation. Men from the earliest times have had ideas of flying. They probably came from some subconscious memories of the days when men were angels. If that is so, we seem to be rapidly getting back to an angelic state. The war forced upon us and upon the men who took the risks, the necessity for the full development of aviation. These two men have carried on that development…’50

  Hear, hear! Hear, hear!

  Before such an esteemed group, Kingsford Smith, with Charles Ulm looking on approvingly, made reply in due course. Ever the showman, Smithy told something of their adventures over the previous fortnight—the highs, the lows, the things they had learnt.

  ‘We passed over country we have never seen before,’ he said, ‘and probably no white man has ever seen. Between Darwin and Wyndham, and Wyndham and Broome, there are tracts that have never been explored. The people at Darwin told us we were mad to fly over the Kimberleys because of the fierceness of the Aborigines, the absolute impossibility of landing, and because, even if by some miracle we did land safely, we could never be located by relief parties.’51

  Smithy then made the case for the potential of a Pacific flight. It would not be easy, he acknowledged, but it was going to be done, and it might as well be Australians who did it. And not just any Australians. Them. They had proved, they hoped, by their record-breaking trip around Australia that they were at the forefront of long-distance flying, and now they wanted to do it on a bigger stage. The biggest stage in the world: the Pacific Ocean. But it would take money, quite a lot of money, and that is where they hoped that the esteemed patrons of this lunch might come in…

  And so it went. Within days, Premier Lang had indeed made the public announcement that his government would guarantee such a flight to the tune of £3500! Other promises of tentative support started to emerge from some of the men at the lunch, and suddenly what had been just a distant dream actually started to materialise. Maybe they could really do this!

  The following fortnight was simply a blur. With the money just about assured, Kingsford Smith, Ulm and Anderson were quick to book tickets on the next ship heading across the Pacific to the west coast of America and a seemingly endless round of farewells, drinks, speeches and parties followed, together with an enormous dinner at Kuranda, hosted by Kingsford Smith’s parents, to send their boy and his friends away in proper style. Not that all of it was pure joy.

  At one point the intrepid trio had to tell their faithful mechanic Bobby Hitchcock that despite their previous plans—and the fact that he had resigned his job on the strength of their promise that he would accompany them to America—there simply wasn’t going to be room for him to come with them. The money they had could only go so far, and it wouldn’t extend to a party of four. As a matter of fact, they had had an enormously hard time making it stretch to three, with another bitter dispute between Anderson and Ulm occurring as to who should accompany Kingsford Smith on the Pacific attempt.

  In various meetings shortly after Keith had returned from his own round-Australia flight behind Kingsford Smith and Ulm, the physically imposing man pointed out the outrageousness of the situation to his old friend, while the usurper Ulm, who had led Smithy astray, listened. It had bloody well been the money of the Anderson family that had got them started in both the trucking and aviation business, and got them to this point, where they could now fulfil their dream. And what had Ulm contributed? Nothing! Not a brass bloody razoo!

  Actually, Keith, no, Kingsford Smith continued to point out as calmly as he could. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Ulm organising the round-Australia flight, the deal with the Sun, the sponsorship with the Vacuum Oil Company and others, they simply wouldn’t have been able to pull it off. It was only reasonable to ask him to be a part of it, when he had done so much.

  Finally, the dispute had been resolved with the mutually reluctant agreement that both of them would go. With that scenario, taking Bobby Hitchcock as well was simply out of the question. Besides, Bobby, the simple fact was that they would be flying an American plane that he wouldn’t be familiar with. But not to worry, Bobby. If they succeeded, there would be a thousand
quid in it for him.

  ‘Yes,’ Charles Ulm told him on the morning of their departure. ‘You’ll hear a knock on the door, and I’ll say, “Sir Charles, Robert awaits outside about his thousand”.’

  ‘And I’ll say,’ Smithy said, though perhaps a little drunkenly, because they had had a big night of it until the wee hours, ‘“Show the boy in.”’

  Bobby Hitchcock left their offices, devastated.

  A few hours later, on the afternoon of 14 July 1927 the three men stood before the gangplank of the SS Tahiti, ready to board. Bon Hilliard was there to see Keith off, and she also farewelled Kingsford Smith in a manner that was somewhere between rather restrained and seriously strained. Ulm was farewelled by his second wife, his former landlady Jo Callaghan, now Jo Ulm, whom he had married on the very afternoon that he had returned from their round-Australia trip. And Charles Kingsford Smith was, as ever, sent off to glory by the Kingsford Smith clan, who turned out in force.

  The Tahiti passed through Sydney Heads in the early afternoon of a sparkling day. Destination: the United States of America. A one-way ticket, if you please, as they intended flying back. And, of course, they travelled first class. After all, with the sort of money that was being bandied around, it seemed crazy to try to save just £30 per man on the difference between first class and steerage.

  ‘Second star on the right, and straight on till morning…’

  So, famously, had run Peter Pan’s instructions to Wendy on how to get to Neverland. And yet, as the author J.M. Barrie also noted, those navigational directions were insufficient, as ‘even birds, carrying maps and consulting them at windy corners, could not have sighted it with these instructions. For, Peter, you see, just said anything that came into his head.’

  In the real world, although navigating their way across the Pacific in an aeroplane was going to be difficult, there really was something in focusing on the ‘second star on the right’, or the like, just as mariners had done for centuries. And as the Australians were going to be on a ship for the next three weeks, why not learn it from some mariners directly?

  So it was that for most of the trip the three aviators studied celestial navigation courtesy of a bloke by the name of Bill Todd, the Tahiti’s enormous second officer, aided by the ship’s third officer, Hal Litchfield…

  Now, the thing you have to understand is that if you knew how to read it all properly, then the sun, the moon and the stars could be nothing less than signposts in the sky. By using a sextant—an instrument for measuring the angle that an object lies up from the horizon—and noting the time of day adjusted to Greenwich Mean Time, you could—by consulting tables minutely designed for the purpose—work out either your approximate or exact position on the earth’s surface, depending on whether the sun or the moon was king of the sky. In daytime, you could get your longitude position, but alas not latitude, as you only had the sun to read off, and couldn’t cross-reference with any other heavenly bodies. But at night-time, the sky was filled with reference points, and once you knew how to read them, you could be remarkably accurate in working out your position. By virtue of knowing the fixed points in the heavens, you could be freed from needing to see fixed recognisable points on earth!

  That is, so long as clouds didn’t prevent you from getting a fix on the object, and you hadn’t made even the tiniest error in all of the complex calculations, and all your prayers had been heard and answered…

  Familiarity with the heavens was half of it. Take the constellation of the Southern Cross, for example, which is always visible in the southern hemisphere. As the earth rotates on its axis over a twenty-four-hour period, so too does the Southern Cross appear to rotate around a fixed point in the night sky known as the south celestial pole—which is, in turn, that spot in the sky pierced by an imaginary line going from the earth’s north pole to its south pole and continuing on up towards the Southern Cross’s stars.

  It was not at all easy to understand, let alone master, and yet, although foremost among them as a pilot pure, Kingsford Smith concentrated every bit as much as the other two. True, in Western Australia you flew ‘by guess and by God’ and by recognising the landmarks beneath you, while in the Great War, navigation hadn’t been that important because the main thing you needed to find was Germans, and even if you couldn’t find them, it generally didn’t take them long to find you…but this was different. If the aviators were to succeed in their venture to cross the Pacific, they would be landing on islands in the vast blue swirl of the Pacific Ocean that would be no more than needles in the world’s biggest haystack, and failure to find them would result in the all but certain deaths of the flyers. So let’s try it again. And again and again. And again.

  After several days of intense instruction, the three men had achieved some proficiency with the sextant, while remaining aware that it would be far more difficult to operate such an instrument when hurtling above the earth’s surface at 100 miles an hour. And they also became more proficient at doing all the calculations, comparing their estimations as to where they were at that moment, against where Todd or Litchfield told them they actually were. In the course of the trip and their lessons, the aviators became very close to Todd and Litchfield, strengthened in part by the fact that the massive Todd—he was all of 19 stone—was such a big drinker. He and Smithy, particularly, frequently liked to imbibe late into the night, as the Pacific Ocean slipped by beneath them.

  In between such lessons and carousing there was, of course, time for other things, which included discussing in more detail how they were going to do the flight.

  On the strength of Lindbergh’s achievement, the obvious thing was to purchase a bigger version of the Ryan monoplane, one that would be capable of holding all three of them. As to the route they would take, their plans changed by the day.

  At first it seemed as though the best plan would be to have the plane as a land plane and fly it from ‘Frisco to Honolulu, at which point they could have it quickly converted to a seaplane, and proceed from there via a series of Pacific islands, such as Fanning Island, the Phoenix Islands and so forth. Perhaps Samoa? Fiji? New Caledonia? There was a lot to discuss and they kept tossing ideas around as America drew closer.

  Ten

  THE TOUGH GET GOING

  Smithy was happily irresponsible on the ground. But as soon as he stepped into a cockpit he became a changed man. His very features altered. He looked like a hawk—a creature of the air with wings to fly, for it is no more than the truth that the plane was part of the man. No matter how friendly he was with his crew—and he was always that—he commanded their respect. Not one of those who worked for him would have refused to follow him anywhere he wanted to go. He had that precious gift of all born leaders of men—an infinite capacity to inspire confidence.

  RADIO OPERATOR JOHN STANNAGE, WHO FLEW EXTENSIVELY WITH KINGSFORD SMITH AND WAS ONE OF HIS EARLY BIOGRAPHERS.1

  On 5 August 1927, the three Australians—Charles Kingsford Smith, Charles Ulm and Keith Anderson—headed down the gangplank of the Tahiti onto the San Francisco docks, with their kitbags over their shoulders and a dream in their hearts to fly the Pacific.

  How exactly?

  Yes, well.

  As Kingsford Smith would later write, ‘We landed with but vague notions how such a flight was to be successfully carried out; we had some promises from Australia of financial support and I had considerable experience of flying in all types of planes in England, America and Australia. But our determination to make the flight was our principal and indeed our only asset when we set foot in the United States.’2

  Their first priority after landing was settling into a rather salubrious hotel in downtown San Francisco, where they began to get down to brass tacks. And at least Harold Kingsford Smith, who had met them at the ship, had pledged himself to give them a good start by introducing the adventurers to some of his more well-heeled business contacts.

  What was obvious from the first was that there would be no problem getting people intere
sted in crossing at least part of the Pacific Ocean, as they had arrived in San Francisco just when the Dole Air Race was about to take off, and it seemed that all of America was crazy for these amazing aviators about to race each other from newly established Oakland airport to Honolulu. Day after day, the papers were filled with breathless accounts of the flyers gathering, the rules of the race, what would be required, who was likely to win and so forth. In the midst of such excitement not a lot of play was given to a comment by Charles Lindbergh to the effect that the race was ‘sheer suicide…’

  The Australians came to share that view, after being given cause to look at the project closely. Shortly after their arrival they were offered a plane to fly in the race by a representative of the Vacuum Oil Company—which organisation was acting as the New South Wales government’s agent in the matter of the Pacific flight—by extending them up to £3500 capital, as required.

  But after looking at the aircraft—an International F-18 air coach biplane, fitted with a Wright Whirlwind engine and named Miss Hollydale—and speaking with competing pilots, it became clear that neither the planes nor the personnel were remotely ready to embark on such a venture.

  And indeed, there was no doubt that things did not go smoothly for the race from the first. Just five days after the Australians arrived in San Francisco, two US Navy pilots, George D. Covell and Richard S. Waggener, were on their way from San Diego flying to the starting point of Oakland when they completely lost their way in fog and ended up crashing straight into an ocean cliff face and being killed outright, as their flaming plane hit the beach 75 feet below. Less than twenty-four hours later, another intended contestant, Arthur Rogers, took his plane up for a test flight above Montebello, California, and lost control and crashed, killing himself—in full view of his young wife holding their infant daughter. And even then the race preliminaries were not done with disaster, with two more crashes occurring, although mercifully these were not fatal.