Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  At Ulm’s behest, Dan Macfarlane sat down and began calling small towns and villages along the Southern Cloud’s designated route, asking the operator whether he or she had heard the plane go over, and then collating the results. By 10 pm, he had the answer: the Southern Cloud had been sighted everywhere and nowhere. There was no rhyme or reason in the reports, as some claimed to have heard it while others just one town away said they hadn’t and then it showed up again two towns on and then again it was clear that for all the reports to be correct, the Southern Cloud would have had to have been in several places at once.

  Smithy, informed at home by Ulm that evening of the situation, felt sure that in the morning they would receive a phone call from Shorty, saying he had been forced down by lack of petrol, and could someone come and get him, please? And then, hopefully, they would all have a good laugh and say that that had been a close one—as had happened to Smithy personally, dozens of times. They were some of his best stories, in fact.

  The families of the passengers and pilots were kept informed, and told not to worry too much. The following morning, however, at the ANA offices with Kingsford Smith and Ulm both present, the hours began to crawl by like sick slugs—9 am, and no word; 10 am, nothing; 11 am, and though phones were ringing hard, none of them bore good news. Noon, and there was still not the smallest clue as to what had happened to the Southern Cloud. When dusk had fallen, it was time to pull out all the stops.

  ‘All hands’, was the call, and all hands answered, with every one of ANA’s employees reporting for work at Mascot and putting enormous efforts in to getting the planes ready to go, fully prepared, as part of a coordinated push to find the lost plane. Everyone’s unspoken fear was that the Southern Cloud had hit the side of a mountain, and all crew and passengers were either dead or dying. In the case of the latter, urgency was paramount. For once, within the confines of ANA, there was no joking or skylarking, as everyone set to work. In the office canteen, Mrs MacDonald—red-haired, Scottish and motherly—organised the half-dozen office girls as helpers and got to feeding the increasingly hungry twenty men.82

  Kingsford Smith spent a sleepless night organising a team of observers to accompany him in the Southern Sun to leave before dawn the following morning to begin the search in the rugged area that lay south of Albury.83

  Other planes also joined in the search and the area north of Melbourne was in particular thoroughly scoured. Throughout, Kingsford Smith remained at the forefront of the search, day after day. Searching systematically, with all his team of eight observers on board armed with binoculars, he first scoured the Snowy Mountains, looking closely around Mount Kosciuszko, before working his way south to Cooma and down to Melbourne. Most nights, he would be landing at Essendon airport just on dusk, where weeping family members of the missing passengers and crew would be waiting for him, hoping for good news. But he never had any.

  By this time a formal search committee had been formed in Melbourne to coordinate the massive effort, involving no fewer than thirty planes, of which six were provided by the RAAF. And, of course, the whole tragedy was closely followed by the press. In fact, beyond being a tragedy, it was also a great mystery. How could such a massive plane just have disappeared like that?

  Australia’s pubs and dinner tables ran wild with theories—don’t forget the Coffee Royal affair, and how the plane turned up again after a fortnight, well that’ll happen again this time, you mark my words—even as ground parties were sent into some of the most heavily wooded areas, where it was feared that a crashed plane could not be spotted from the air. Alas, all returned with nothing to report bar their own exhaustion. It was as if the Southern Cloud had simply been swallowed whole by the wild Australian landscape.

  Complicating matters were the many reports that came in from the public, with tips ranging from Bathurst to Bega, to hearing a low-flying plane in the Dandenongs, to spotting a fast-descending plane over Port Phillip Bay.84 People in the tiny village of Tintaldra in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains were convinced they saw lights flashing in the night from those mountains as if someone was trying to signal them, so they sent out land expeditions to look for them.85 Even so august a journal as the Sydney Morning Herald reported as fact, under a headline of ‘FLASHES IN THE HILLS’, that residents of Tintaldra had seen a fire in the hills on the afternoon of the disappearance and up to ten o’clock that night, and had seen flashes every fifteen minutes on the Toolong Range.86 Smithy himself had flown from Melbourne to investigate that one, passing low over the spot where the flashes had been reported.87 As much as possible, each tip-off had to be investigated, but as the days turned into a week, and then two weeks, hope inevitably faded.

  So thorough had been the search that Kingsford Smith became convinced that the Southern Cloud must have passed over Melbourne and crashed in the sea. Charles Ulm couldn’t help but agree. After spending two days investigating reported smoke and fire signals in the Snowy River district, he returned to tell the Sydney Morning Herald that, ‘it is a million to one chance of the aeroplane being anywhere else but in the water’.88 Part of their conviction came from the fact that the great Australia war hero and RAAF Squadron Leader Arthur Cobby reported that he had been in the Melbourne suburb of Elsternwick on the day, at the height of the storm at 2.15 pm, when he had heard a three-engined plane pass over, in a southeastern direction, heading towards the bay. It was unlikely that a man of his experience could be mistaken.89

  The truth, of course, was that even if the crew and passengers were on land and had survived the crash, they would have been unlikely to survive in the wilderness for a fortnight, notwithstanding the crew of the Southern Cross’s experience at Coffee Royal.

  On his own final day of searching, Smithy spent eight hours in the air, traipsing back and forth between Sydney and Canberra. Haunted by the memory of the Southern Cross being missed by its own search planes, he did not want to give up, but in the end, he had to. There was simply no further point in continuing and with the ANA now having taken a possibly mortal blow to its reputation, as well as a £10,000 loss from the uninsured crashed plane and subsequent costs of searching, everything had to be done to save the company.

  In the end, though, they were wading against a tide that could not be stemmed. In the middle of the Depression, money to fly was already in short supply, and after the loss of the Southern Cloud, no-one wanted to fly with ANA. After all, what was wrong with the old way of getting to Melbourne—the overnight train, with a wake-up at dawn at Albury, to change trains and go from there? It was much cheaper than flying, there was almost no chance of the train crashing, and even if it did, they’d at least know where to find you to bring help. A plane to Melbourne? No thank you.

  At least the record-breaking flights went on. Only a few days after the search had been abandoned, an English pilot by the name of Charles William Anderson Scott, oft known as C.W.A. Scott, landed his de Havilland DH.60M Metal Moth, Kathleen, at Mascot after breaking Smithy’s England to Australia record a few days before, when he had arrived in Darwin, just nine days and five hours after leaving England, on 10 April 1931. Scott had been a burly heavyweight champion of the RAF90 before becoming a door-to-door mousetrap salesman in Melbourne91 and then a flying instructor for Qantas at their Brisbane Flying School, and this was his first real taste of fame.

  Smithy was on the tarmac at Mascot to greet the Englishman, distracted as he was, as the cameras rolled.

  Sixteen

  TO AND FRO…

  Yes, I am scared out of my seven senses sometimes, but I don’t let on.

  CHARLES KINGSFORD SMITH, TO HIS MOTHER, CATHERINE, WHEN SHE ASKED HIM IF HE WAS NOT NERVOUS WHEN HE MADE THOSE LONG AND DANGEROUS FLIGHTS.1

  Another crash. This time it wasn’t an Australian National Airways plane, but an Imperial Airways one, the first of the test airmail flights between England and Australia.

  Heavily loaded with 15,000 letters from England, the City of Cairo had been approaching Koepang in Timor on 19 Apr
il 1931, when it had run out of fuel and crash-landed 10 miles short of the airfield into a rice paddy. It now became a matter of urgency to get another plane there as soon as possible, to ensure that the mail went through. But whose? One from Qantas, which had a plane waiting in Darwin for the post to arrive? Not on your nelly.

  In all its expanding fleet, Qantas did not yet have a multi-engined aircraft, considered de rigueur for flying over water. The only company that had that kind of aircraft and a pilot experienced in flying long distances over water was ANA with—that man again—Smithy!

  It was for this reason that on 21 April, Charles Kingsford Smith, on just twenty-four-hours’ notice—and at the personal request of Prime Minister James Scullin—was given a welcome respite from the ongoing agony of the disappearance of the Southern Cloud, and was, with fellow ANA pilot Scotty Allan and two others, flying towards Koepang with all the speed that the now rather ageing engines of the Southern Cross could muster.

  ‘It is a great opportunity,’ Smithy had told the press before departure, ‘for Australian aviation to show its merits. I earnestly hope that in the near future the airmail authorities will allow Australian aviators to work on the Australian end of the route.’2

  Once in Koepang, the mail was transferred to the Southern Cross, and yet Smithy was no sooner back in Darwin than he had to go again—this time taking 25,000 letters weighing 700 pounds from the Qantas DH.61 Apollo, which had brought them from Brisbane in new white canvas bags with bold red stripes, and flying them on to Akyab, in Burma. There, he was able to hand them on to the Imperial Airways plane doing the second of the England to Australia airmail flights, to take back to London, and in turn take that plane’s post back to Darwin. All up, it was a confusing blur of comings and goings, take-offs and landings, but the bottom line was that the first test run of England to Australia airmail had taken twenty-four days.

  And though originally Kingsford Smith’s ANA was meant to have had no part in either of the first two historic test airmail flights, it had soon been proved that the firm was indispensable in making it happen—a wonderful advertisement. Smithy later wrote, ‘This experience, at very short notice, of carrying a long-distance mail, convinced me of the practicability of establishing a regular route without further delay, provided that the government assistance—for a limited period only—was available.’3

  Ulm was equally convinced and while Smithy had been flying, he had been making another approach to the government, to secure a certain contract to carry post on the Australian end of the England to Australia journey. In tough times, such a contract would be a guarantee of survival, and the times had never been tougher since the Southern Cloud had been lost. They had to get that contract or Ulm feared all would be lost.

  Hudson Fysh felt equally strongly that Qantas would also take an enormous hit if they didn’t get the contract, and sent a telegram to McMaster to that effect:

  Application made by A.N.A. to operate permanent route Brisbane-Darwin and to India. Receiving considerable support. Position fairly critical to our interest.4

  In short, if Fysh hadn’t taken ANA seriously before, he certainly was now, because if the Kingsford Smith crowd won the contract for the route to India, they would be a very serious force indeed. Other contenders for the prize were West Australian Airways, and Imperial Airways flying the whole route alone.

  What to do? It was something that McMaster mulled over for some time before coming up with a possible solution. In mid May, he wrote to Fysh suggesting that Qantas form a subsidiary company with Imperial Airways, which could be called Qantas Empire Airways. And he also asked Fysh to push ‘the matter of triple-engined machines as much as possible, and to get in touch with Westland Aircraft and Blackburn, as well as the American people’.5 While Australians felt that it was a matter of national honour to ‘buy British’, McMaster was not of their number. He just wanted the best planes at the best price.

  She was a charming, gracious lady, beloved by the people of Australia for her performances on stage and screen over the previous half-century, but by the winter of 1931 her body had had enough. On Monday, 21 June 1931, following a three-day downhill spiral from pleurisy and heart trouble, 72-year-old Nellie Stewart died in her Clifton Gardens home by Sydney Harbour.6 Typical of this happy soul, she begged that no black be worn at her funeral—a request that was respected by the thousands of people who turned up to farewell her from St James’s Anglican Church in Sydney—and as the hearse bearing her coffin moved away on its journey to Rookwood cemetery, many people threw rose petals upon it. Ah, she was loved, not least by Smithy.

  There had always been something about her serene, warm beauty and manner that touched his soul and he was devastated at her death. And although some people said it was bad luck to continue to bear her photo in his plane as a good-luck charm, Smithy didn’t agree and insisted on taking it with him. Her photo had got him through Gallipoli, the Western Front, across the Pacific and the Tasman, through countless other adventures in the air and he wasn’t going to give it up now.7

  Finally, there was no way out. In the middle of the Depression, with enormous public concern about ANA’s safety standards in the wake of the loss of the Southern Cloud, the airline simply did not have the custom to keep the planes going—sometimes scheduled flights were leaving empty—and on Friday, 26 June 1931, it shut down regular services between Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Launceston, with all the planes returning to Sydney on the Saturday. This did not mean the end of the company, as there was still a chance they would be able to keep it going through charter work and joyriding until such time as it could hopefully secure the contract from the Federal government to carry the post on the international route to link up with Imperial Airways, but in such straitened economic times it was always going to be a close-run thing.

  Clearly, the best asset the company had, apart from the planes themselves, was the love the Australian public had for Smithy. And if Smithy was who they wanted, then Smithy was who they would get. This meant that for the next couple of months, he was kept busy going everywhere from Albury, through Corowa, Jerilderie, Wagga, Coolamon, Leeton, Griffith, West Wyalong, Parkes, Forbes, Newcastle and Goulburn. And back again.

  Everywhere in Australia the times were tough and getting tougher. The economic malaise that had started at the New York Stock Exchange in late October 1929 had spread throughout most of the world, and Australia was hit particularly hard. Unemployment queues continued to grow, as did the numbers of homeless people living in places such as Sydney’s Domain, where hundreds of unfortunate people slept outside every night under whatever newspapers they could gather around themselves to try to keep warm. A shantytown grew like topsy in the sand hills at La Perouse, consisting of huts constructed out of whatever spare timber could be found, upon which were tacked old sugar bags and galvanised iron. Any job vacancy advertised would draw hundreds of applications, with fights frequently breaking out to see who could get in the door first. Hit particularly hard were returned soldiers, most of whom were in their mid-thirties, and often unskilled and uneducated, as their careers had taken a five-year pause while they had been serving in places like Gallipoli and the Western Front. Was this what they had been fighting for? A world where they didn’t have enough money to even feed their kids?

  All up, there was enough anger around and enough madness in the air that a strange, paramilitary fascism movement called the New Guard began in New South Wales, with a membership base composed largely of disaffected soldiers and a leadership that was made up of solid returned servicemen. Though difficult to define, the New Guard was broadly composed of extreme loyalists to the Crown who regarded themselves as an auxiliary to the police to prevent there being any possibility of a Bolshevik revolution taking place in Australia—and they cared nought that the police did not want their support.

  A particular target of the New Guard was the duly elected New South Wales government of the day, led by Jack Lang, who had returned to power and staked out a remark
able position. That was, that if the government was caught in a choice between paying for such things as food rations for the people of New South Wales and making due interest payments to the British bond-holders from whom it had borrowed money to build such things as the nearly completed Sydney Harbour Bridge, it would be the citizens who came first. Lang would ‘repudiate’ the debt to Great Britain. Cry treason!

  The New Guard’s first major rally was held in the Sydney Town Hall on 24 July 1931, where they sang loyalist songs and cheered their leader Eric Campbell—none other than Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm’s long-time solicitor. Whether Smithy attended that meeting or subsequent New Guard meetings is not definitively documented, though Campbell would later describe them both as ‘sound New Guard members’, as was, by Campbell’s account, Sir Frederick Stewart, one of the leading directors with ANA.8 What is certain is that both the State and Federal governments of the day took the view that they were involved, after police surveillance spotted Kingsford Smith’s car outside New Guard meetings. It was not something calculated to find favour for him or ANA in high circles of power.

  Whatever Smithy’s involvement with the New Guard, it was certainly tangential, as he had to keep barnstorming to pay the bills. While it wasn’t a great existence, at least he was still in the air, still flying. Clearly, it was important to keep his name before the public, to maximise the company’s chances of being awarded the contract. And, as ever, the best way to keep his name out there was to break not one but two records in one fell swoop.