Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men
Page 52
On that first night on the high seas, only a few minutes after spotting Mary, Kingsford Smith breathed quietly to his 25-year-old niece, Beris—Harold’s daughter, to whom he was shouting a trip to Australia, after he had spent a couple of weeks catching up with the American branch of the family in their Californian home—that he had made his choice.
‘The one in red will do me,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t mind practising on her.’25
And he was as good as his word.
From that moment on, as the Pacific Ocean opened up before them, the rising 33-year-old pilot turned the full force of his charm on both the young woman and her parents. As he was quickly installed on the captain’s table, it didn’t take long for him to organise for the Powell family to be invited, too, and it was not long until they were all in his thrall.
No matter what the subject, Smithy usually had a well-turned, self-deprecating story to go with it. When it came up that, on their recent tour, Mary had been presented at court to King George V, the war veteran was able to tell his own story of meeting the King when he had, can you believe it, tripped over his own feet and gone to ground! Laughter all round.
When Arthur Powell mentioned that he and his wife had been there at Melbourne airport the previous year after the trans-Pacific flight, Smithy was able to relate to the family anecdotes about that splendid afternoon, what the Governor and Premier had said, and so forth.
And what of India, where the Powell family had lived for many years, as Arthur bred his horses? Smithy had been there many times on his cross-global travels, and was a wonderful mimic of the Indian accent, complete with imitation of the curiously sideways nodding Indian head. Ah, how he could make the family laugh, just as he could reduce many of Mary’s friends, who were also on board the ship and all eager to meet him via her, to tears of mirth.
And yet, despite the breadth and grandeur of Kingsford Smith’s experiences, somehow he managed to present it all in such a down-to-earth and humble fashion that he didn’t seem to have an ounce of arrogance about him. Nothing could make him tell a story about one of his adventures where he was made to come across as heroic. Rather than talk about himself, he seemed every bit as interested in them, as they were in him. He was a good listener too. And while everyone on the ship seemed to be competing for his attention, it was clear that the Powells were at the top of his list.
Dance, Mary?
Yes, Charles, she would like to dance, and did so beautifully, around the floor as he held her close. Mind the foot, dear. Small war wound, nothing to worry about…
The hit of the era, because it was both romantic and also captured so wonderfully the enduring prosperous spirit of the times was Irving Berlin’s ‘Blue Skies’:
Blue skies
Smiling at me
Nothing but blue skies
Do I see
Bluebirds
Singing a song
Nothing but bluebirds
All day long
Never saw the sun shining so bright
Never saw things going so right
Noticing the days hurrying by
When you’re in love, my how they fly…
In America, as Charles and Mary danced on, night after night, a curious thing was happening at the New York Stock Exchange, the world’s largest and most powerful exchange. On the morning of Thursday, 24 October 1929, turmoil had set in as the price of shares started to tumble, and then continued to fall at an ever-increasing rate. Panic begat panic. By virtue of the fact that every ‘buy’ order was on a black pad and every ‘sell’ order was on a red pad, this panic was soon represented by a sea of fluttering red papers being furiously waved on the floor by desperate stockbrokers trying to unload shares and save their clients.
Something had to be done, and it was. By noon of that day the most influential of the Wall Street bankers had a meeting in the House of Morgan, directly opposite the exchange, in an effort to find a solution and turn the market back around. On the spot, they put together an effective fighting fund to support the market, and an hour later Dick Whitney, the vice-president of the exchange, made what was to become a famous walk across the floor. Speaking in a firm voice and holding a black order form, he called out in a loud voice, calculated for effect, ‘I give $205 for 10,000 US Steel.’ This was ten dollars up on the asking price!
Then he moved to the next post and standing on a chair, called out: ‘I give $45 for 50,000 Standard Oil.’ Another huge, high order!
On the instant, the stockbrokers began to applaud, and kept applauding as Whitney moved from post to post, pouring millions into the market. And his strategy seemed to work. The stampede of the stockbrokers to keep selling at any price stopped, and even turned a little. Some began to buy again. If Morgan was putting their money in, then maybe the crash was over!
By the end of the day the market had indeed risen slightly and wobbled its way forward on the Friday, not losing too much. But over the weekend, the mood changed once more. Huge numbers of speculators decided that, to be on the safe side, it would be best to get their money out.
The market fell sharply on the Monday and then, on the day that would forevermore be known as ‘Black Tuesday’, 29 October 1929, it was all over. The market lost $14 billion in a day—12 per cent of its value—to go with the $16 billion of the previous four trading days. People walking along Wall Street were seen to be nervously looking skywards as rumours spread that stockbrokers and investors were queuing up to leap to their deaths. A savage worldwide economic downturn had just begun, a downturn that the aspiring American presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt would soon refer to as ‘this depression’. It was terrible news for everyone, but most particularly those who had gone deep into debt to launch new business ventures.
And so what he was going to do, Charles Kingsford Smith explained to the charming Mary, as they continued to glide oh so sweetly over the Pacific Ocean, was to start up his own aviation company with Charles Ulm. They now had the reputation they needed together with the experience, and had already bought the planes they required to get started. It would be a long haul, no doubt, but Smithy had made his reputation through bringing off long hauls, and he was confident he could do so with this one, too. The future looked bright.
So bright, in fact, that one night, not long after they had crossed the equator—in a far more pleasurable manner than the last time he had crossed it heading towards Australia—Smithy asked Mary to marry him. Less than three weeks since she’d first laid eyes on him—she was completely stunned.
Though they had exchanged some rather chaste kisses outside under the stars, she had no idea that his thoughts were turning towards a lifetime commitment. She hadn’t been planning on getting married for years. And yet, he was so nice, so charming, and while he could have had just about any single woman in Australia, he had chosen her!
Realising what an important decision it was, she managed to hold him off for a couple of days, until agreeing that yes, she would marry him so long as it was all right with her parents. In fact, she was near certain that it wouldn’t be.
‘We’ll see about that,’ Smithy replied, before marching straight off to find her father and present his case.
A hard man, Arthur Powell—a man of the world who knew which way was up. While he admired Kingsford Smith and all he had achieved, he was far more concerned about his beautiful daughter and her future. So, after the first shock of Kingsford Smith’s words had passed, as had a moment’s heavy silence, he chose his words carefully and spoke, hard man to hard man: ‘You’ve got a damned cheek. You’re much too old for her.’26
What, a mere fourteen years difference? Not at all, not at all.
In the end, a compromise was reached. So long as the young couple delayed announcing their engagement for twelve months then they could see.
‘If, after you’d done the Atlantic flight, you and Mary still feel the same way, I suppose you can go ahead,’ he said gruffly. ‘Not before.’
Done!
From which point, everything went swimmingly. Whereas Thelma had not gelled with the Kingsford Smith clan, it was entirely different with Mary. Whisked out to Kuranda, she was quickly embraced to the family’s bosom, and embraced them in turn, loving their life, their laughter.
‘It was so full of fun,’ she later recalled of Kuranda. ‘A relaxed happy-go-lucky place, with such a good feeling about it.’28
And so to work…
Mary returned home to Melbourne, while Kingsford Smith headed to the Australian National Airways office newly established in Challis House in Sydney’s Martin Place, opposite the GPO. Just a few days before he’d arrived in Sydney, the first three Avro 618 Ten planes he and Ulm had bought in England had also arrived at the Sydney docks, on the SS Huntingdon, and it was time to assemble them in the company’s hangar at Mascot, get them into the air, and test them.
Initially, the pride aircraft of their fleet were to be the Southern Cloud, the Southern Sky and the Southern Sun. The next planes to arrive were called the Southern Star and Southern Moon. All were decked out with royal blue fuselages and silver wings to capitalise on the fame of the similarly fashioned Southern Cross.
Prospective pilots also had to be interviewed and hired, and good ones they were, too. They included Eric Chaseling, Scotty Allan, James Mollison, Jerry Pentland (second only to the great Captain Arthur Cobby with the number of Huns he had shot down during the war29), Travis Shortridge, Paddy Shepherd and P.W. Lynch-Blosse, with the man who had virtually invented the Australian version of the bubble sextant, Bill Taylor, joining a short time later. An envious Hudson Fysh would label the group later, as ‘the finest group of pilots ever to be gathered together in Australia’.30
The inaugural flights of Australian National Airways took place simultaneously on New Year’s Day 1930. Smithy himself flying the mighty Southern Cloud with Scotty Allan as co-pilot, took off at 8 am from Mascot with seven of the eight seats filled—each of the passengers paying £9 13s for the privilege of flying one way, plus an excess fee for all baggage weighing over 10 pounds.31 A large gathering of the press watched them depart and they landed at Eagle Farm aerodrome in Brisbane at 1.30 pm.
At the same time, Charles Ulm and Paddy Shepherd in the Southern Sky took off southwards from Brisbane.32 As it happened, however, bad weather forced Ulm’s plane down onto a ploughed paddock at Old Bonalbo in northern New South Wales, and it was a little over a fortnight before it could take off again. Although it was an inauspicious beginning, ANA was soon able to recover its equilibrium.
Every morning, an ANA aircraft took off from Sydney airport and headed to Brisbane, while its counterpart left Brisbane heading to Sydney. Following the model established for cruise liners, each day the major newspapers published passenger lists, more often than not including the names of the good and great of the day. Yet Smithy was more than a little restless.
A decade and a half earlier, at the conclusion of the Great War, he had written to his parents that ‘I am going to continue flying if possible, so long as it doesn’t come down to the level of being a chauffeur’.33 Yes, he had done his fair share of precisely that kind of flying when working for West Australian Airways, but that had been before he had inhaled deeply the intoxicating vapours of record-breaking flights around the planet.
Once he knew what it was like to be greeted by 300,000 of his fellow citizens at Sydney airport after crossing the Pacific, or break records left, right and across central Australia, it did not sit easily on him to do the regular Sydney to Brisbane service and fly other tiny hops back and forth. And nor did office life suit Smithy’s temperament. All those damn numbers and papers! That stultifying routine. It was only by endlessly playing his ukulele in the ANA offices at Martin Place that helped to make his time there a little more tolerable, and even then it was only just. The truth of it was, he was made for neither flying aircraft back and forth on regular runs nor administering the business that organised those flights.
To those who knew him well, it was no surprise when in early March 1930 Smithy announced that he was going to head back to Europe to collect the Southern Cross and finally reach his goal of circumnavigating the globe. After long, agonised discussions, Mary had finally agreed to give her blessing for him to make the attempt, chiefly on the grounds that it was the only big thing left for him to do in aviation, and that if he didn’t do it, the likelihood was that it would nag him forever.
So go, darling.
Smithy, in turn, faithfully promised that once the Atlantic flight was done, he would not undertake any more big flights.34
True, crossing the Atlantic Ocean from east to west was a fraught affair, as for most of the trip he would be buffeted by strong headwinds, and the North Atlantic coast of the American continent was notoriously foggy—making navigation and landing difficult—but Smithy felt he was just the man for the job.
Though Ulm had wanted to accompany him, the board of the ANA—consisting of such leading Sydney businessmen as Frederick Stewart, Mark Reid and Arthur Vickery—had made it absolutely clear that that was out of the question. They had personally put up serious money to get this company—capitalised at £200,000—off the ground, and wanted to be absolutely certain that it was going to work. Ulm would have to stay in Australia, supervising the firm’s forty staff, and keeping the operations going, which were now running from 7 am to 7 pm. Truth be told, the board didn’t want Kingsford Smith to go either, but knew that ultimately, they could not hold him back.
With Smithy thus forced to go it alone, he and Ulm came to a deal whereby, in return for Smithy handing over a portion of his shares in ANA, Ulm would hand over his half-share of the Southern Cross to Smithy—the deal to be confirmed the instant that the trans-Atlantic attempt was under way.
But a moment before you go, Smithy. It was around this time that the same Lester Brain who had discovered the Kookaburra in the Tanami Desert, and first seen the body of Bobby Hitchcock lying beneath the wing, requested a meeting with Kingsford Smith and Ulm in their office in Martin Place. He was concerned, he told them frankly, by reports that they were going to expand the Australian National Airways route to include a daily Sydney–Melbourne/Melbourne–Sydney shuttle.
They had to realise, he told them, the difficulties of the weather on that route, taking them above the highest mountains in Australia—how the cloud was frequently impenetrable, the wind vicious, and ice would form on the plane’s wings. It was not feasible to mount a regular service with safety, he said.
Smithy, by Brain’s later account, looked him right in the eye and said: ‘We’re going to fly through a brick wall if necessary. We’re going to run on schedule whatever the weather is and I’m going to be a millionaire or go bust.’35
Of course Mary went to see him off, as he sailed on the Sonoma, departing from Sydney on 15 March 1930, to head first to San Francisco, and then catch a train to New York before crossing the Atlantic on the Statendam for Holland, where he would reclaim the reconditioned Southern Cross.
While Kingsford Smith was off on yet another adventure, to no doubt break more records, make more headlines, and be fawned over once again before flying off to various far-flung parts of the world, at Qantas Hudson Fysh and Fergus McMaster were quietly going about the business of business. They were not making a public splash like Smithy, but they were making money, developing contacts, consolidating relationships and maximising the ability to run a major airline, mastering everything from how to ensure that the planes were regularly and meticulously serviced to a requisite degree of excellence, to the financial complexities of operating their expensive aircraft in the tightening regulatory environment.
Just a few weeks after Smithy had gone overseas once more, in fact, it was a big day in the life of the Fysh family in Longreach. As
one, they piled into a Qantas de Havilland DH.61, and took off, bound for Brisbane, where the new headquarters of Qantas had been set up. After nine years of struggle in the nation’s interior—carrying 10,400 passengers just over one million miles—Hudson Fysh had, together with the Qantas board, decided it was time to move to the Big Smoke, to try their luck in the capital city. He and the rest of the Qantas management left the rustically charming Longreach with heavy hearts, but the opportunities that beckoned were enormous.
The chairman of Qantas, Fergus McMaster, put it grandiloquently in his official farewell speech at the Longreach premises: ‘Is it not a high honour to participate in man’s last and final accomplishment in the development of a rapid convenient mode of transportation which eventually will give each individual in ANY part of the World a common economic interest in every part of the World?’36
Aeroplane travel was changing the way commerce between nations was conducted and both Hudson Fysh and McMaster were determined that Qantas would lay claim to a big part of Australian aviation’s next frontier—international routes leading to and from Australia. In the view of many, it was nothing less than a matter of national urgency that this frontier be conquered. The South Australian Governor, Sir Alexander Hore-Ruthven, had put it well: ‘Every hour by which we can shorten the journey between the Old Country and the New, will further the progress and prosperity of the Empire.’37
Already, that remoteness was diminishing, thanks to aviation companies following the paths now blazed by the pioneers to set up commercial routes. The previous year, in 1929, the Dutch airline, Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij—or KLM as it was known—had begun a fortnightly service between Amsterdam and Batavia (as Jakarta was then named), while Britain’s Imperial Airways had inaugurated a weekly service between London and Delhi. The obvious thing, therefore, was for an Australian airline to begin a service to either Batavia or Delhi—preferably the latter, on the grounds of loyalty to the Empire—and be part of a lucrative route that would take passengers and post around the entire planet! Who would get it? Qantas felt it was a strong contender, as did ANA, as did Norman Brearley’s West Australian Airways.