Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  It was a minor breakthrough in the midst of a singularly fraught time. In February 1929, soon after the Anderson v. Ulm & Kingsford Smith case began, Ulm and Kingsford Smith approached Anderson requesting that he withdraw the action in return for the promise of £1000. Keith and his solicitors considered their offer. It was true that at one point in the protracted negotiations between the three partners when they were in San Francisco, Ulm had ensured that all three of them signed a contract whereby if for any reason a partner pulled out, he would have no further claim either on the assets, or profits, generated by a successful flight. And there was also no dispute that Anderson had left San Francisco of his own free will, and had not returned, even though invited to. In remarks the judge made, it was clear that he took the view that the partnership was thereby dissolved. The chances of legal victory were so small, there was very little likelihood that Kingsford Smith and Ulm would have to share the £50,000 that had come to them. And now they were offering £1000 if he would drop the whole thing? Keith decided to take the money and run. Or more particularly, fly…

  After paying off his legal fees, he put the rest of the money towards buying his own plane—a Westland Widgeon III, G-AUKA—a sporty type of aeroplane, with folding wings, made for speed above all else, including safety. (Among other things, the Cirrus engine the plane used was notoriously only as reliable as a two-bob watch.) And when it turned out that he didn’t have quite enough for that, Smithy fronted him another £300. The purchase was completed on 22 February 1929, and Anderson almost immediately announced plans to make an attempt on the world endurance record for a light aircraft. He decided to call his plane Kookaburra.

  As to Bobby Hitchcock, who brought his own lawsuit a month later, a similar scenario followed. Richard Windeyer, KC, was completely merciless in his cross-examination.

  Windeyer: ‘You were merely a mechanic, were you not?’

  Hitchcock: ‘Yes.’

  Windeyer: ‘You knew nothing about navigation?’

  Hitchcock: ‘No.’

  Windeyer: ‘You could not have done any wireless work?’

  Hitchcock: ‘No.’

  Windeyer: ‘You were not a pilot?’

  Hitchcock: ‘No.’

  Windeyer: ‘Do you realise you would have been only dead weight, absolutely useless while they were in the air?’

  Hitchcock: ‘While they were in the air.’

  Windeyer: ‘I suppose you realise, or you won’t deny, will you, that at every place where these people would stop it would be possible to find good mechanics?’

  Hitchcock: ‘No.’35

  When Kingsford Smith was cross-examined extensively by Hitchcock’s own counsel, the aviator denied all knowledge of any promise to pay Hitchcock £1000 if the Pacific flight was successful. In the end, the judge ruled that Kingsford Smith and Ulm had no case to answer. His interpretation was that Hitchcock had been engaged as a mechanic when the project had included the Ryan monoplane, but that engagement had ceased when that project had been abandoned in favour of taking a Fokker.36

  Hitchcock left the courtroom a shattered man. Kingsford Smith left it troubled. He had hated the whole process from first to last. As for Ulm, he was much as he had always been: stoical. He hadn’t liked the case either, but among other talents, he was a hard businessman and accepted that occasional legal action simply went with that territory.

  With everything now on track with Australian National Airways to get off the ground once they had secured the planes they needed from England, Kingsford Smith and Ulm decided they might as well fly there in the Southern Cross and become the first Australians and New Zealanders to do so in that direction. Alan Cobham was the first to fly from Australia to England in his de Havilland DH.50 float-and-land plane, in a magnificent out and back flight between June and October 1926. A knighthood that year was one of his just rewards. While they were at it they could attempt to beat Hinkler’s 1928 outward bound flight record. It would surely be a mere trifle to accomplish compared with the overwater trans-Tasman flights.

  With the Southern Cross, their first intended refuelling point was on the dried mud flat surrounded by long grass that served as the airstrip of the tiny town of Wyndham, high up in the reaches of Australia’s vast north-west, near the place on the Australian coast that was the closest to England. Through the good graces of the Atlantic Union Oil Company, they were able to ensure that there would be 750 gallons of petrol waiting for them after their 2000-mile overland hop from Sydney. The oil company also kindly put their local agent, Captain Clive Chateau, at the service of the crew of the Southern Cross, so he would be able to advise them when the weather was clear. (There would be few things worse than arriving at Wyndham only to discover that they couldn’t find the landing spot in bad weather.) Coming to the party also was the Sun newspaper, which agreed to pay them £500 for exclusive coverage, with a £250 bonus if they beat Bert Hinkler’s England to Australia record time of fifteen and a half days.

  At 10.30 am on Holy Saturday, 30 March 1929, the heavily laden Southern Cross made ready to take off from Richmond air base, ready to complete the first leg of a pioneering flight to England, before a crowd some 50,000 strong of cheering well-wishers and attendant press. Many people in the crowd were there for the sheer sake of being around such celebrity, others came with a sense of history and still more were there perhaps in the hope of seeing a spectacular crash. The press was there for all of the above. Planes provided wonderful photographs, great copy and moved papers in huge numbers.

  Rising to the occasion, Smithy addressed the crowd and told them that it was his most earnest desire to prove that the British Empire need not be a collection of distant outposts but rather, one empire entirely linked by aerial communication.

  Hurrah for Smithy!

  They hadn’t received a cabled ‘all-clear’ at Wyndham from Captain Chateau, but not to worry. A meteorological map published in the Sydney Morning Herald that morning seemed to indicate that the weather would be okay to make a landing.37 At least okay-ish. They could have waited longer, perhaps, but the agreement they had with the Australian National Airways board stated that they were to be away by 30 March at the latest.

  Usually at the moment of take-off on such a trip, the atmosphere on the plane would have been a joyous but tense type of excitement, men born to fly, who were now doing exactly that. And yet, unlike them, Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm were in rather bad humour on this particular morning. In RAAF parlance, they had S.o.L. (shit on the liver).

  It was the Federal government that was troubling them. A few weeks previously the two aviators had written to the government suggesting that perhaps Australia might care to buy the Southern Cross from them, on the reckoning that it could be put in a museum or some such. Both had been underwhelmed to receive a very lukewarm response acknowledging receipt of the letter, but also noting that the government would have to think about the offer as it was worried about the high costs of maintaining so large a plane. This, despite the fact that Kingsford Smith and Ulm were only asking for the nominal fee of £3000, a bare fraction of what it was truly worth!

  At the same time another department of the government had been pursuing them for rental on the hangar space they had been using to house the Southern Cross at Richmond and for the work done on it by RAAF mechanics and for work done on its propellers. As if that wasn’t enough, the government had been insistent that all those bills be paid before the men left for England, presumably on the grounds that by doing it in that fashion, the government wouldn’t be out of pocket should they crash and burn. Bloody ghouls. Not that they were going to crash and burn, of course. Old hands at this long-distance flying caper by now, both aviators felt confident that all would go well, as Sydney slipped behind them and western New South Wales lay at their mercy.

  It was the nature of flying, however, that at the very moment when they least expected it, something did in fact go wrong.

  In the tightly cramped back of the plane, Hal Litchfield had ju
st got up to move to the port-side window to take a sighting through the drift indicator, when he inadvertently leaned on the catch that released the spool for the radio antenna trailing beneath them. (Such was the technology of the time, that the long-wave antenna connected to their transmitter was in fact nothing more than a couple of hundred feet of copper wire, with a lead weight at the end, trailing down and behind the plane. There was also twice as much again wire tightly wound around the spool.) The instant Litchfield released the spool, the lead was given its head and, caught by the wind, went racing away. Before either Litchfield or McWilliams could do anything to stop it, the line had reached the end of its tether with such velocity that the whole thing snapped off and went ribboning away down to the countryside below!

  Oh Christ.

  This was a real problem, because, while they could transmit messages on the radio that still had its aerial, they were incapable of receiving any. The first that Smithy and Ulm knew of it in the cockpit was when McWilliams passed a note forward: Long-wave aerial gone. Shall we return?38

  Yes, well. After the fanfare of departure, it was ever and always a difficult thing to meekly return just a short time later to say, ‘Ummm, things didn’t quite work out’, but that was not what was stopping Ulm and Kingsford Smith from returning now. It was not simply a matter of returning and landing. It was one thing to just manage to take off with the heavy load that they had, but quite another to be able to safely land with that amount, less the ninety minutes of fuel that they would have burned. Certainly they could dump that fuel before landing, but that was an extremely expensive option. And then they would have to face another risky take-off in a heavily laden plane. On the other hand, if they pressed on, and all went well, they would be able to get a fresh reel of copper wire at Wyndham.

  After all, what was the lack of a bit of copper wire to men flying in good weather over land, when those same men had traversed the entire Pacific Ocean in far worse conditions? They were adventurers and it was in their very nature, once embarked, not to worry too much about unexpected things happening. Had they possessed the ‘fretful minds of weaker men’ as the New York Times had phrased it the year before when lauding the fact that Charles Lindbergh did not have a radio, and had they been the kind of blokes who always turned back from an adventure the first time something went wrong, they would never have been the kind of men to embark on flying the Pacific, or flying to England from Australia, in the first place. So that was the answer. Press on. Bearing 306 degrees, just a bit north of north by west, all the way to Wyndham!

  Meanwhile, in that very settlement, Clive Chateau had woken to the gobsmacking news that the Southern Cross was on its way, without his having sent a telegram that the weather was clear!39 What was worse, far worse, was that not only wasn’t the weather at Wyndham clear, it was positively bad—windy and stormy, with rain lashing down—and it was getting more frightening by the hour. In general, Chateau was an affable, easygoing, hail-fellow-well-met kind of man, not prone to panic. But under such circumstances he was instantly highly agitated and had no hesitation in immediately cabling Sydney:

  Cannot believe Southern Cross would leave without definite OK from me. If they have left they must be recalled. Conditions are unfavourable and unsafe and will be unsuitable for some time.40

  And in Sydney, at the La Perouse receiving station of Amalgamated Wireless Australasia Ltd, the radio operators did indeed try very hard to recall the Southern Cross. For the life of them they tried. But for some reason they couldn’t understand—they had no way of knowing what had happened to the antenna—no-one on the Southern Cross replied. How could this be?

  Trouble ahead. Big, black, billowing bundles of bloody big trouble.

  It was obviously a storm as high as it was wide, as black as it was crackling with shafts of catastrophe called lightning, preceded by swirling, red dust. The Southern Cross was heading straight into the maelstrom, with visibility almost non-existent through the mud-caked windows, as the sun started to fall away at the end of that first day of flying. Only a short time after crossing the Overland Telegraph Line, they were right in the thick of the storm, and being buffeted from side to side as well as up and down. As the wind howled at them like a thousand banshees and the rain pelted in, Kingsford Smith tried everything to ease the pressure on the craft. Flying in total darkness, with the clouds around them being illuminated by progressively more intense flashes of lightning, Smithy tried first to climb above the storm, but it seemed to have no top—or at least no top that they could get above. Nor could they get around it, so the only thing they could do was keep going on and on through the night, and hope that at dawn they would have left the storm behind and at least be able to see where they were.

  As the Southern Cross smashed her way through the belting, pelting night, Clive Chateau passed the worst night of his life at Wyndham as the rain continued to bucket down from the swarming, low clouds and the wind kept howling. He knew this wasn’t just a local storm, as it in fact covered the best portion of north-western Australia. How could the Southern Cross ever find one small town in this tempest? That is, if she was still aloft. How had this happened? What had gone wrong? Why had they left, when he hadn’t given them the okay? He had no answers.

  The storm continued, unabated, with the rain pounding down on the tin roof like an angry devil on drums. A few of the older locals told him it was the worst weather they had experienced in thirty years, while others said it was the worst in their lifetime!41

  But the much-awaited dawn, when it finally came, only served further to horrify the flyers. When Smithy carefully tried to bring the Southern Cross low enough to get a look at the ground, the only glimpses they could see were of a landscape as uninviting to aircraft as it was possible. Through the swirling clouds and heavy winds they could see thick forests, gullies, hills—just about everything bar any clear space in which to land, should they need to. And the further they flew, the more obvious it was that a forced landing was a real possibility, if not yet a probability.

  It wasn’t just that there was no sign of Wyndham; it was that there was not the tiniest sign of where any bit of civilisation might be. Not a road, or a telegraph line, or a fence, nor the slightest indication that humans had ever even crossed the forbidding landscape below, let alone left their mark on it.

  What to do? The one thing they could, which was to keep going and keep looking for some kind of sign.

  Finally, they saw what appeared to be a small river and, reasoning that the river must lead to the coast, where they would find Wyndham, they followed it, as scudding dark daylight slowly broke through. When they reached the coast, however, there was no Wyndham, just an angry-looking sea.

  Keeping his calm, Smithy reasoned that they must have overshot Wyndham, and were therefore now on the west coast of the Kimberley district, which would mean he had to turn…let’s see…north-west.

  With lack of fuel not yet a problem, they flew on, expecting at any moment to spot the familiar shape of Cape Londonderry, which Smithy had seen many times in his days with Western Australian Airways.

  Glory be to God. Another day, another round of reciting prayers and doing the Almighty’s work—either shouldering the white man’s burden, or being it. Drysdale River Mission was an isolated spot, situated near the coast, about 140 miles north-west of Wyndham. Settled by Benedictine fathers in the early 1900s, it cared for the local indigenous population and had such little contact with the outside world that it was September 1920 before word came to them that the Great War had ended nearly two years earlier and that the Allies had won. From one month to the next, from year to year, it was a life of work and prayer, work and prayer, while tending to their flocks, both real and spiritual.

  But on the late morning of Easter Sunday, 31 March 1929, something happened. They heard engines! From the heavens! Both the fathers and the small group of Aborigines living at the mission rushed outside, and were stunned to see an enormous plane circling above them. A plane! They h
ad heard stories of such a thing, and now, here was one. It really existed, praise the Lord. And yet why was it circling? Was the crew on board in trouble? Did they want something from the men on the ground?

  Aboard the Southern Cross, it was a great relief to see human habitation in the wilderness. No, they didn’t have a landing strip but it was something. People were now gathered in a courtyard, looking up at them and waving. Most importantly, they would know something of the geography of the land in which they lived.

  While Kingsford Smith circled low, Ulm wrote a message in pencil on a piece of paper in big black letters, wrapped it around a torch, tied it with a piece of string and dropped it out of the window, being sure to drop it far enough away so that it wouldn’t hit anyone. On the paper was written: Please point direction of Wyndham.

  As the plane continued circling around, Smithy and Ulm waited expectantly for the signal to come, expecting the direction to be to the south-east, where, by their reckoning, Wyndham must lie…

  To their great consternation, however, the people immediately started pointing to the south-west! But how could that be? Still, there was nothing for it but to take them at their word and head off in that direction, though feeling more desperate and confused with every passing minute.

  At the mission they watched the plane disappear over the south-western horizon, and stayed watching long after the last tiny buzz of its faraway engines could no longer be heard. What was that all about? Why had they been circled in such a fashion, and why, when they had clearly indicated where the only bit of flat ground in cooee lay just a few hundred yards away in the south-westerly direction, had the people on the plane so totally ignored it? It was something that would occasion a lot of discussion among them for many days to come. Ulm’s message, meanwhile, still lay wrapped around its torch, lost in the landscape near the mission, and remained undiscovered…