Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  It was with this imperative in mind that he set his sights on Jimmy Mollison’s Australia to England record of eight days, twenty-one hours, in itself over half a day better than the former Qantas pilot C.W.A. Scott’s record. Then he would turn around and sprint back home, to flags waving, in less than nine days—or, even better, eight days. He felt he had just the plane to do it in, the Southern Cross Minor, another Avro 616 Avian biplane that he had just purchased with the help of his rich father-in-law, but this time it was the MK.V fitted with long-range fuel tanks.

  To get to his starting point of Wyndham, Smithy—after bidding a tearful Mary goodbye—flew first to Alice Springs, where he was obliged to get some running repairs done, just as Keith Anderson and Bobby Hitchcock had done two years earlier when one of the tappets had come loose, causing the engine to vibrate. Smithy’s problem was that the vibration had caused an oil-gauge pipe to fracture, though he wasn’t particularly concerned. In fact, so little concerned was he with this problem that the next day, when he was following the Overland Telegraph Line north, just as Keith Anderson had done, he decided to take a short cut inland over the Tanami Desert, just as Keith had done…9

  With Keith, of course, the decision had resulted in his and Bobby Hitchcock’s tragic deaths. In Smithy’s case, however, he was able to fly on through to Wyndham, no worries.

  Such was the luck of the draw for intrepid aviators…

  After leaving Wyndham in the Southern Cross Minor, at two o’clock on the morning of 24 September 1931, Smithy landed in Cheribon, in Java, just sixteen hours and fifteen minutes later, and left the following morning at dawn, bound for Victoria Point, which was 1390 miles distant on the southernmost coast of Burma. Alas, after circling the RAF aerodrome at Seletar in Singapore, only a short time later he found himself in a monsoonal rainstorm and became disoriented. Effectively flying blind, he had no idea where he was, or whether he could stay aloft long enough to make it to Burma, even if he could navigate his way there in the storm. The only way forward was to fly within 30 feet of the ground and keep the coast in sight. The monsoonal rain kept battering his slender craft, almost as if it was in a conspiracy with the wretched wind to force him to crash. In extremis it became obvious that his one hope of salvation was to land on a beach and wait the storm out.

  Just as the sun was setting that day, a group of villagers on the deep southern coast of Burma were taking shelter from the terrible storm when they heard a sound they had not heard before, at least not up close. It was that of a motor, getting nearer and nearer, until it was screaming loud enough to wake the spirits of the dead and…then it stopped.

  The braver of them ventured out, moving stealthily through the jungle until they could see the beach. And there was an amazing-looking thing, like some kind of giant bird, with its wings stretched out, sitting on the beach! The two bravest of the men ventured forward and peered into the interior of this strange thing, only to find that it had swallowed a white man who was peering back at them!

  Two Burmese men, possibly hostile, stared at Smithy from just outside the cockpit, while the raging storm pounded the plane with no sign of cessation. In front, the dark jungle. Behind him: the raging sea, with an incoming tide. And no-one knew where he was.

  Just another day in his life…

  At last the two men went away, which eased the situation somewhat. The most urgent thing to do was to secure his plane and ensure that the wheels did not sink into the sand. To do that he would have to gather light wood from the jungle and get it beneath the wheels to spread the weight. Cautiously, he ventured into the jungle to retrieve a couple of saplings, when, from perhaps 100 yards away but it felt like 10 yards at the time, he heard the unmistakable roar of a tiger.10 Now, although Smithy had not necessarily been the fastest sprinter in his school days at St Andrew’s, on this occasion he broke all records as he crashed through the brushwood to get back to the plane and bolt the door shut, before lying there trembling for some time—and bugger the tide!11 The water was lapping at the wheels before he tentatively re-emerged—positive that the tiger must be right on the edge of the jungle and about to charge—to at last secure the plane. In record time.

  A dreadful night followed where every sound from the jungle was clearly the hungry tiger coming for him, getting angrier and hungrier by the minute. Could it be that Mary was right, and his proper place in the world when the sun went down was at home with her and not dashing around all over the world?

  By dawn the following morning the storm had passed and he was able to take off again and fly for an hour to Victoria Point on his scant fuel reserves. Having refuelled he flew on to the Burmese capital of Rangoon, now behind Mollison’s time. Yet that was not all. He began to suffer dizzy spells that stayed with him, following the thirty-eight hours and fifty-five minutes he had spent in the air over the previous three days. After a quick bit of shut-eye, he was on his way again at three o’clock in the morning, but if anything he now felt worse. What was wrong with him?

  While well out over the Bay of Bengal his condition suddenly deteriorated. What had started as a headache and a kind of fuzzy feeling—like he was not all there—descended from that point with no relief. As he flew on, the headache worsened, feeling almost as though someone was taking a drill to his head and he began to feel…faint…becoming dimly aware that he had been hit in the left foot and that a fog of blackness was filling his cockpit…no…maybe just his head. Must…turn…and get back to…have another…go…at the bastard…who had got him.

  No! Coming back to himself from a state where he didn’t know who he was or what he was doing, he found that he had put the plane into a frantic spin and now he was just a few hundred feet above the water and heading down fast. Getting the plane back under control, he vomited twice in quick succession—not an easy thing in an open cockpit with the wind rushing by—as dizziness continued to engulf him, ‘like a warm, soft cloud’. He had the sensation that not only was he about to die, but, curiously, that he didn’t particularly care: ‘And you know, it didn’t bother me much, either’.12 Fortunately, the worst of it passed and he was able to recover enough to fly on, and even note in his log:

  Feel awful! Just suffered a fit of vomiting. It must be sunstroke, should have worn a suitable hat…no protection in this helmet.

  And then:

  All that vast wilderness below. I feel very lonely.

  And he was not the only one. In Sydney, waiting for news, Mary often felt very lonely. It had been no easy thing to adjust from her relatively gay, carefree life in Melbourne, surrounded by her family, young friends and things familiar to her, to forge a new life as the wife of a frequently absent national icon, but she had coped. Her most earnest hope was that her husband would get the pioneering, record-breaking bug out of his system, that he would accomplish what he wanted to accomplish and then settle down, as he promised that he would. In the meantime she had great support from the rest of the Kingsford Smith family and was a frequent guest at Kuranda, as well as at the homes of her brothers- and sisters-in-law. Still, when he was making dangerous flights like the one at present, the time dribbled by at best, and all she could do was pray that he was safe.

  For Smithy, the next couple of days proceeded in a blur, as he kept going—and despite his illness he was now ahead of Mollison’s time—through Calcutta, Jhansi, Karachi, Bushire and Aleppo. He had to get to London within eight days and nineteen hours. At last, though, it became clear that something was going to have to give:

  What am I doing here? Why am I here? Only desert below…must be off my head. I know I can’t keep this up much longer.13

  Finally, on 30 September 1931, on his seventh day of flight—and a full day ahead of record time—he found himself flying over the Gulf of Alexandretta, an inlet of the eastern Mediterranean Sea, and only just remaining conscious, as he approached land and flew along the coast of Asia Minor.

  I feel as though I might die before this flight is over. Must find a place to land. If I don’t I’
ll crash for sure.

  Not long afterwards he spied a small village and just managed to get his plane down near it, taking out a barbed-wire fence as he did so, before collapsing. He awoke to find himself surrounded by villagers and then, shortly afterwards, soldiers with guns arrived, all looking down at him and talking gibberish.14 Actually, Turkish. He had landed near an impoverished settlement by the name of Milas.

  For their part, the villagers looked down upon the fallen flyer, wondering what this strange word he kept gurgling—‘Cognac, cognac, cognac!’—meant in their own language. Whatever it was, he seemed insistent about it. Minutes later, Smithy was under arrest, for having landed without a permit. (In fact, he had previously landed in Turkey without a permit, at Gallipoli in 1915, but that was another story and one that he probably shouldn’t cite right now.)

  Too sick to care—there was no hope of getting the record now, so what did it matter?—it was four days before Kingsford Smith was free to go, courtesy of an American businessman living locally who recognised the Australian and was able to pull strings with the local authorities. And yet, even when he was back in the air after four days’ comparative rest, the illness soon returned. Was it sunstroke? Carbon monoxide poisoning, perhaps? Or, at thirty-six, was he just getting too old?

  A clue was provided by the fact that after landing in Athens and divulging his distress to English expats, he was persuaded to see an American nerve specialist who told him in no uncertain terms that he must stop his flight immediately and get some rest.15

  Smithy, typically, ignored this professional advice and finally dribbled into London on 7 October 1931, where the chief aviation news of the day was not that he had arrived, but that one RAF Flight Lieutenant G.H. Stainforth, AFC, had just set a new speed record in his Vickers Supermarine S6B seaplane of 408.8 miles per hour!16 Was there no end to how fast these modern planes could go?

  As to the ailing Smithy, he was deeply upset over what had happened. ‘The machine did not let me down,’ he told journalists. ‘This is the first time I have ever let my machine down.’17

  A round of medical professionals confirmed the opinion that one way or another he was too sick to fly, and should stop immediately and return to Australia by ship. As to exactly what the Australian was suffering from, that was not clear. The theories put forward ranged from sunstroke in the open cockpit to carbon monoxide poisoning from the shortened exhaust pipe on the Southern Cross Minor, to some kind of nervous breakdown that became acute when he was flying long distances, most particularly over water—the acute reaction perhaps stemming back all the way to his near-drowning at Bondi Beach in 1907.

  At the least, doubt was intruding on him, perhaps for the first time.

  ‘It was not the sunstroke alone which cruelled me,’ he said openly to one journalist. ‘It was the climax of a series of nervous troubles.’

  Asked if he would be attending a planned meeting of trans-oceanic fliers the following year in Rome, an uncharacteristically diffident Kingsford Smith replied: ‘It will depend on whether my wife allows me to make the journey again.’18

  Smithy took the first ship for home.

  At one point during the Great War, the German Army had been able to crash through the forces of France’s highest ranking military man, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, causing great celebrations on the part of the Germans. In the face of the disaster, Foch sent what would be a famous cable to his headquarters:

  My centre gives way, my right recedes; the situation is excellent. I shall attack.

  In that case, Foch had gone on to engineer a great and unexpected victory.

  Now, taking a leaf out of Foch’s book, Charles Ulm, Kingsford Smith and the board of the Australian National Airways decided to do much the same thing. Their regular service along the eastern seaboard had been shut down for lack of custom. They had lost a plane, with no subsequent trace of it being found. The Federal government had not given them a cracker for any domestic subsidies, had denied their requests for financial assistance of any kind and had shut them out of the international route that could have guaranteed their survival. They had no capital left and the company was heading into deeper debt.

  In short, their centre had given way. Their right flank had receded. The situation was excellent. They attacked.

  On 23 October 1931, the company announced that one of their planes would leave Melbourne on 20 November with Christmas post for England. That post would arrive in London on 2 December, and the plane would return to Australia with English post, just in time for Christmas. Too, it was something of a coup when Lieutenant Colonel Horace Brinsmead, the Controller of Civil Aviation and the most influential and powerful man in the field of Australian aviation, agreed to go on the 20 November flight as a paying passenger, all the way to London. Given that he was travelling to Old Blighty to conclude negotiations on establishing a permanent aerial passenger and mail service between England and Australia, what better time was there to show what they could do? If they could pull this off, they really might be in with a chance of surviving, and even prospering!

  With Kingsford Smith having only just arrived home in Australia, and still of uncertain health, it was decided that Scotty Allan would take the pride of the fleet, the Southern Sun, to do the job, and he left on schedule with many bulging sacks on board containing 45,288 letters from enthusiastic Australians to loved ones in Britain. Though each individual letter was feather-light—paid at a shilling for every 14 grams, added on to the normal sea-mail postage rate19—together they weighed well over half a ton.

  All went well right up until the plane arrived in Alor Star in Malaya. Then disaster struck when Allan tried to take off from the rain-drenched field with the heavy load. He crashed into a ditch at the end of the runway, and though the precious cargo of mail was retrieved and there was no significant injury to the crew or Horace Brinsmead, the Southern Sun had been damaged beyond repair.

  At Kuranda, Catherine got the call shortly afterwards. Her son was off again. There had been a crash in Malaya and Chilla had been sent for in the Southern Star to go and finish the job. Of course he had been. He was always being sent for, or heading off somewhere. Yes, he always survived, and eventually returned home, but it did worry her. The papers were filled with news of aeroplane crashes in Australia and various parts of the world, and she knew only too well the risks her boy took. Like Mary, though, all she could do was wait, and pray that he would be all right on this trip, too.

  As it turned out, Smithy very nearly wasn’t all right—in extremely heavy weather he crashed while landing in Darwin. Fortunately he was not hurt, but it did cause a three-day delay while repairs were done. An impatient Horace Brinsmead decided not to wait, and instead get to England via Amsterdam, by catching one of the regular KLM flights from Bangkok. This time, true disaster struck, as the KLM Fokker F.VIIbm Ooivaar crashed while attempting to take off on 6 December from Bangkok, with the centre engine coming into the cabin and killing three of the four-man crew, two passengers and critically injuring Brinsmead.20 He was immediately admitted to hospital with broken ribs, a damaged lung, a contusion of the brain and one side of his body paralysed—a bitterly ironic fate for one whose professional life since the Great War had been almost exclusively devoted to lifting aviation safety standards.

  Arriving in Bangkok just five hours after the tragedy, Kingsford Smith was particularly devastated as he had such an enormous regard for Colonel Brinsmead. And yet, advised there was nothing he could do to help the Controller of Civil Aviation, Smithy—with both the mail and Scotty Allan on board, as he had picked up both in Alor Star—flew on.21

  Apart from a brief return of Smithy’s illness, when he was again taken ill while over the Bay of Bengal and had to excuse himself while Allan took over the controls, so he could stagger back to lie on the mailbags to recover, the flight went well.22 After proceeding via Bangkok, Karachi, Aleppo, Le Touquet and Lyons, they landed at Croydon, 10 miles out of London, on 16 December 1931, twelve days, twenty-one hours an
d eighteen minutes after leaving Australia, to hand the mail to the representatives of the General Post Office.23

  ‘I am very proud to bring the first direct air mail to England,’ Smithy told waiting pressmen. ‘I hope it will be the forerunner of a regular service. The Australian public has shown that it wants an air mail. If I get a similar load on the homeward trip, it will show that England also appreciates the service.’24

  Mail from Australia in less than thirteen days! Hinkler’s sixteen-day record cut to pieces! The achievement caught the popular imagination, and for a day or two Smithy’s feat was the talk, if not the toast, of London.

  Even as Kingsford Smith was approaching London, however, another famous Australian aviator had already reached the end of his even more amazing journey to that destination from afar. In the annals of long-distance aviation, Bert Hinkler’s trip would always be a standout. In his tiny single-engined 120-horsepower de Havilland DH.80A Puss Moth monoplane, travelling solo, as ever—with no radio and just a compass and Times Atlas for guidance—in late November he hopped first from Toronto to New York and then down to Jamaica, before crossing over 700 miles of open sea to Venezuela. After that, a little jaunt to Trinidad before popping across the Gulf of Mexico to the land of Alberto Santos-Dumont, Brazil, where the 39-year-old from Bundaberg was stunned to see enormous flocks of brightly coloured birds rising from the jungle to greet him.25

  After a short rest, he made ready for the big leap, across the South Atlantic. On the morning of 25 November, Hinkler flew above the enormous jungle beside the mighty Amazon River and was reflecting that it looked like a motionless green sea, when he saw it: the real sea, the Atlantic Ocean up ahead. At its sight he experienced a momentary quavering of confidence and then came the familiar surge of steel.