Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  ‘They were in serious financial straits?’

  ‘Yes, they were.’

  ‘And you had the right to go back to your job if you wanted to go?’

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘Have you anything against Litchfield?’

  ‘Not at all…’

  ‘Did you say to Litchfield that if you ever got a chance to do Ulm a bad turn, you would do it?’

  Mr Todd was sure that there must be a mistake, because he was quite sure he had said no such thing.

  With another theatrical pause, Cassidy steadied for a moment, almost as if he wanted to make Todd think that the worst was over…before he bored in hard again.

  ‘You understand I am suggesting that you are a man whose word cannot be relied upon?’

  Yes, Mr Todd understood that.

  ‘You understand I am suggesting that you did this from spite?’

  ‘Yes, I can see that quite clearly…’

  As it turned out, Cassidy almost seemed better informed about Todd’s background than he was himself. Step by step, the barrister walked him through it, from the fact that he had no previous flying experience to the fact that he had feared that his nerves might ‘crack’ under the strain of the proposed flight. He also highlighted the fact that Todd was claiming Ulm had made this statement on the same day that Todd had crashed the car while drunk—a day when it would be surprising if Todd could remember anything.

  Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of death…

  If it had been a horrifying, gut-turning job to bury Anderson and Hitchcock, it was probably a worse one to exhume them. And yet, by prime ministerial command, it was a job that had to be done and, after a tough journey overland from Alice Springs lasting a mere two weeks, courtesy of a new-fangled, twin rear axle, four-wheel-drive truck, an A3 Thornycroft, the men assigned to the task were now in position to do exactly that. Under the command of Constable George Murray of Alice Springs, the eight-man party, which included four Aboriginal guides, had arrived at the haunting scene late on the afternoon of Wednesday, 13 June 1929; just hours after Todd had given his devastating testimony. The plane stood forlornly facing the east, tilted to one side by the punctured tyre, and somehow the members of the party were all immediately struck by the pathos of this ‘man-made machine…marooned in the pitiless waste of primeval nature’.5 They shook off the feeling and immediately got to work on exhuming poor Bobby Hitchcock.

  Under the command of Constable Murray, they dug a trench parallel to the grave until they reached the level of his body. Then, after they carefully laid matting at the bottom of the trench, they were able to roll the body onto it, before lifting it up and delicately placing the remains in the pine coffin they had brought for that purpose, and then painstakingly sealing the lead lid.6

  If it was a process troubling to the white men in the party, it was deeply disturbing to the Aboriginal stockmen who had again accompanied them. At night it had been their practice to sleep a small distance from the white fellas, but on this night they camped beside the white men, between two large fires which they had placed almost in a manner to ward off evil spirits.7 Of such spirits there was no sign, but a very strong wind blew up overnight, rocking the Kookaburra to an extent that two of the white men folded back its wings for fear that it would tip over.

  At the first light of dawn, Constable Murray and another white man arose and exhumed Anderson’s body, repeating the same grisly process. It was weird, and seemed almost supernatural, how the glow of the rising sun cast a strange bluish light over the country around them, while the burnt and blackened area in which they were digging seemed to remain dark and sombre.8

  By mid-morning, Keith’s body, too, was sealed in a pine coffin, and with both dead bodies secured atop the Thornycroft, the party set off for the long journey back to what passed for civilisation in the Northern Territory. They took with them the small blackened penknife they had found in the cockpit, the one that Anderson and Hitchcock had used to try to clear an air strip with, all of its blades pathetically broken.9

  Charles Ulm was recalled to the stand to refute Todd’s devastatingly damaging testimony.

  ‘What do you say to Todd’s statements [about the virtue of staging crashlandings to generate publicity]?’

  ‘I say that Todd is a deliberate liar of the lowest order, and that the statement was malice.’

  ‘Is there any reason for his being malicious?’

  ‘He thinks,’ answered Ulm firmly, ‘that with Anderson dead there is nobody to refute his statement. He is an excellent navigator, but he is a big chap with a frightful temper. There were times in America when the crew had to go without meals. On these occasions Todd would abuse me. As you see, he is a big lump of a fellow, and you can’t do anything with him. I would have knocked him down otherwise…’

  Ulm was followed in the dock by one Harold William Lilja, a sales manager, who—fortunately for Ulm and Kingsford Smith—gave devastating testimony against Todd.

  Lilja told the court that he had met Todd just after he had left the Southern Cross expedition and was returning from San Francisco on the Makura, upon which he was working as a navigator.

  ‘On the ship,’ Lilja said in a confident, no-nonsense, this-is-precisely-what-happened voice, ‘Todd told me he had his knife into Ulm because Ulm had been the cause of his leaving the expedition.’

  At last, after a week and a half of deliberations, on the morning of 24 June the Air Investigation Committee assembled in Sydney to announce its findings and Kingsford Smith and Ulm were able to find out if their reputations had been ruined or repaired.

  It took Brigadier General Wilson only seven minutes to read the report in front of the packed courtroom. There were several key points. Firstly, and most importantly, the committee found that the crash-landing of the Southern Cross was not premeditated, which thus dealt with the most heinous allegation of all. Against that, the committee recorded its suspicions that Ulm had exaggerated his diary entries with a view to publication, and that he probably had talked about the virtues of getting lost even if he hadn’t meant them. McWilliams was strongly criticised for his failure to convert the wireless into a transmitter, as the committee recorded that it was ‘surprised at Mr McWilliams’ lack of knowledge. It attributes the failure to communicate by wireless to ignorance or lack of initiative on the part of Mr McWilliams.’10 The report also reserved some rather trenchant criticism about the lack of emergency rations, the inadequate equipment that the Southern Cross carried and the failure to make a bigger signal fire by using available oil but…

  But the bottom line remained the same: their forced landing had been genuine, and not some put-up con job on the public sympathy.11

  Although Kingsford Smith and Ulm were immensely relieved that they had been found innocent of the most devastating accusation that had been levelled against them, there was little time to focus on it. For after all had been said and done, and written, it was time to resume the trip to England that they had been on three months earlier, when they had crash-landed at Coffee Royal. They still had to go, and for the same reason as before—to buy the planes they needed to get Australian National Airways off the ground.

  On the very day after the findings by the Air Investigation Committee had been released, at 2.25 pm on 25 June 1929, the Southern Cross took off from Richmond air base bound for England once more—this time extremely well stocked with thirty fresh sandwiches, a dozen apples, lots of chewing gum, spare antennae, tools and water—departing before a bare handful of family and friends as the big crowds had simply vanished.

  On board were Kingsford Smith, Ulm, Litchfield and McWilliams, exactly the same crew as before, too bloody right they were.

  When, the day before, a reporter from Smith’s Weekly had intimated that Kingsford Smith and Ulm were taking a risk in including the maligned McWilliams once more a
s their radio operator, Smithy very quickly turned savage: ‘Why don’t you stop mouthing such nonsense…go and find a large toilet and pull the damned chain on yourself?’12

  A relatively uneventful trip followed through Derby, Singapore, Rangoon, Allahabad, Karachi and Baghdad, with the crew’s spirits rising as they made good time and seemingly left their troubles in Australia behind. There was something about being in the air that just cleansed them. The first real glitch they had came in Athens when, after refuelling and a good night’s sleep in a hotel near the airport, they tried to leave.

  Where was their permit, an official in gold braid asked them.

  ‘What permit?’

  ‘The permit which says you can leave,’ the official said.

  ‘We don’t have one, and didn’t know we needed one.’

  ‘Well, you can’t leave.’

  ‘But we’re not bothering anyone. Why can’t we go?’

  ‘Sorry, no permit.’

  ‘Okay, we’ll wait. But can we give the engines a whirr to keep them loose?’

  ‘Whirr? What you mean—whirr?’ asked the official.

  ‘Just give the plane a dry run…take her to the end of the runway and bring her back—just to make sure the engines are okay.’

  ‘Just a run, no flying?’

  ‘No flying.’13

  In fact, of course, Smithy gunned the engines and the crew in the Southern Cross—‘#!?*#! Those sons of bitches!’—were soon winging their way to Rome, and from there to London, where they arrived in the record time of twelve days and eighteen hours.14

  A few days before their arrival, at a time when the Southern Cross had just been leaving the hot winds of Karachi behind, the body of Keith Anderson had at last arrived in Sydney, after a long journey by rail. At Central Station, his flag-draped coffin had been met by his mother, Mrs Constance Anderson, Bon Hilliard and her parents, a party of RAAF officers who acted as pall-bearers and a large crowd of sympathisers.15 From there his coffin had lain ‘in state’, at St Stephen’s Church in Phillip Street, where thousands of Sydneysiders could file past and pay their respects. Many women, particularly, fell to their knees and sobbed before the casket.16

  And on the cold morning of Saturday, 6 July 1929, after the funeral service at the Presbyterian Church on Belmont Road in the harbourside suburb of Mosman, 6000 mourners filed behind the horse-drawn gun carriage upon which Keith’s coffin lay, as it made its way to his final, final resting place in nearby beautiful Rawson Park, with views stretching far out through Sydney Heads into the Pacific Ocean over which he had long dreamed of flying. It was the day of his thirty-eighth birthday. Overhead, five Gipsy Moths flew in the formation of a cross, followed by eight No. 3 Squadron RAAF Westland Wapiti biplanes that swooped down low to drop wreaths on the burial site.17 As Keith’s coffin was lowered into the grave, a high-winged monoplane broke away, a Westland Widgeon III and, swooping low, managed to drop a wreath of red roses and green leaves nearly right on top.

  An honour guard of soldiers fired their rifles in the air as a last salute—rather as had been done at the Red Baron’s funeral at Bertangles a decade earlier—as Bon Hilliard quietly wept, supported by her family. A lone bugler played the ‘Last Post’ as the coffin was laid beneath the sod.

  ‘He died there in the course of duty, out there in the waste places of Australia,’ the Reverend D.P. MacDonald intoned, ‘but he will live forever in the hearts of the Australian people.’18

  Vale, Keith.

  Bobby Hitchcock, meanwhile, at his wife’s insistence, had been buried a couple of days earlier in Perth’s Karrakatta cemetery after a relatively quiet funeral. For this farewell, Smithy and the crew of the Southern Cross had sent messages of condolence and flowers.

  Although the purpose of the trip to London had been to buy planes for the Australian domestic route, already the thoughts of Kingsford Smith and Ulm were turning to opening up international commercial routes—in particular, expanding Imperial Airways’ current London to Karachi route, all the way to Australia.

  ‘I anticipate an efficient Sydney to Melbourne air service,’ Smithy told waiting pressmen on the ground in England, ‘and am also interested in the inauguration of the Karachi to Australia service.’

  ‘I hope,’ Ulm added, ‘the Commonwealth and Imperial governments will subsidise the proposed services. This is a very important subject in the closer linking of the Empire.’19

  Once again the Southern Cross had performed so well on the flight that if all else had been equal, Kingsford Smith and Ulm would have liked to have purchased six Fokkers to establish their airline, and yet that would not have been a good look with their future passengers who had been raised on the notion, as had they, that ‘British is best’. The solution was to buy four Avro 618 Ten monoplanes from A.V. Roe and Company, which had purchased the rights to manufacture Fokker’s F.VIIb.3m machines in Britain—and the two pilots cum businessmen, soon journeyed to the company’s headquarters in Manchester to begin negotiations.20 They decided to buy five planes and have them fitted with 225-horsepower Armstrong Siddeley Lynx seven-cylinder engines instead of the Wright Whirlwinds, which would make them 5 miles per hour faster.

  It was at this point that Anthony Fokker sent Smithy and Ulm a cable to the effect that if they could get the Southern Cross back to where it was first built, in Amsterdam, he would see that the whole plane was entirely reconditioned, from wing tip to wing tip, tail to propellers, at his own expense—an extremely generous offer. When the negotiations were completed with the Avro people, they flew their champion plane to Amsterdam and were thrilled to be greeted by a veritable honour guard of Fokker fighter planes sent up by the Dutch government’s LVA Luchtvaartafdeling (aviation department) to escort them to Schiphol aerodrome. There, an enormous crowd awaited them—an indication of the pride all of Holland had taken in the achievements of the Southern Cross.21

  The four aviators were hailed as such great heroes that it was hard to imagine only two months previously they had been vilified as liars and cheats by a significant portion of their own public at home. Within a fortnight, however, it was time to head back to London, and they left the Southern Cross in the wonderfully skilled hands of the Fokker engineers. The board of Australian National Airways had made it clear that it wanted Ulm to return immediately to help get their new airline set up, while it had very reluctantly agreed to allow Kingsford Smith to head to America by ship, to explore the possibilities of fulfilling his dream of being the first man to fly around the world.22 (At least, while crossing the equator. In 1924, a US Army team using massive resources had managed to get two planes around the world while staying wholly within the northern hemisphere.)

  Having done the San Francisco to Sydney leg, and then the Sydney to London leg, all he needed now was to cross the Atlantic from Europe to the American mainland, and then proceed to San Francisco, and it would be done! If it worked out, Smithy could also claim to have made the first successful crossing east to west, as although two Germans, Günther von Hünefeld and Hermann Köhl, together with Irishman Captain James C. Fitzmaurice, DFC, had partially done it a couple of years earlier, they had crash-landed on an island off Labrador and then been stranded for several weeks, so that hardly counted!

  When Smithy landed in New York on this preliminary trip, he was delighted to meet his old friend Anthony Fokker once more who, hail-fellow-well-met, showed his eagerness to help Smithy be the first man to fly the Atlantic from the other direction by immediately pulling out his pen and chequebook and handing over a cheque for £1000.23

  Now that was Smithy’s kind of encouragement!

  October 1929. Vancouver.

  What was going on? On her regular course back and forth across the Pacific, the RMS Aorangi had been due to leave the docks of Vancouver at high noon, and yet here it was, two o’clock in the afternoon, and there was still no sign of movement. Finally, the word went round. There was to be a slight delay, because one of the passengers to come was the famous Australian av
iator Charles Kingsford Smith, who was then and there addressing Vancouver’s almost equally prestigious Canadian Club. He should be boarding very shortly, apparently, and then they would be full steam ahead across the Pacific. Which was all right for some.

  Many passengers were thrilled at the news that for the next three weeks they would have Australia’s most famous man among them. Others, however, were furious—furious, do you hear—that an entire ship and all her passengers were being held up for just one man, and none was angrier than one Mary Powell, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the rich Melbourne horse breeder Arthur Powell and his wife, Floss. Mary and her parents had been on a grand tour of the world for the last nine months, and were now about to leave on the last leg home, and would have already left, if not for this wretched pilot chappie. Bother. Bother. Bother.

  At last, near three o’clock, there was a flurry of activity on the docks. A car pulled up and out of it got a man with a young woman, both of whom were soon hurrying up the gangplank, with the porters carrying their luggage scurrying behind.

  ‘Here’s Kingsford Smith at last,’ Arthur Powell said to his daughter.

  Mary looked. That was Kingsford Smith? She was stunned.

  ‘It was a bit like saying,’ Mary later recounted, ‘“Here’s the King.” I remember my absolute amazement that in the flesh, he was such a little man. I said, “How insignificant he looks to have done all those things.”’24

  Well, her parents didn’t think him insignificant. When he had touched down at Essendon aerodrome the previous year, they, like some 80,000 fellow citizens of Melbourne, had been there to greet him—while Mary had had a tennis party—and they were now delighted to be seeing him up close…

  And yet, if Mary Powell was not impressed with the aviator, Kingsford Smith felt quite the opposite that evening at dinner when he cast his eye over the assembled company and picked her out as the most attractive young lady present. Small and gorgeous, elegant and poised, impeccably groomed, with high cheekbones and full lips, this ravishing brunette had piercing blue eyes that simply mesmerised him.