by P Fitzsimons
Kingsford Smith’s first focused words upon landing, after the preliminary greetings, were to the point: ‘By the way, is there any word of my friend Hinkler? He is an extraordinarily resourceful man. I am by no means unduly alarmed. He has probably landed somewhere on one of the various mountain ranges on his route, and is beyond communication.’47
That Hinkler was beyond communication was certainly clear, as no further word from him was heard, and the search was finally called off. Though Smithy grieved, he knew, almost better than anyone that the strong possibility of death and disappearance were to him and his fellow pioneer flyers what a bad back was to a bricklayer—it simply went with the job.
For now, at least, he didn’t need to engage in any great risks and continued barnstorming in New Zealand for the next three months, punctuated only by a short stint at home when his plane was in need of repair. A sign of his ailing emotional health, however, was his brief hospitalisation in Auckland for ‘nervous exhaustion’, before he returned once more to the air to take as many people as possible on joyrides.48
Not that barnstorming ever offered much respite from the constant pressure, as wherever he went the well-meaning public always wanted a piece of him. Once, after a very long day, one of Smithy’s mechanics, Harold Affleck, was resting on his hotel bed when the door burst open and a wild-eyed Smithy rushed in.
‘These two blokes are after me,’ he blurted out. ‘Tell them I’ve jumped over the balcony and gone out.’ Without another word, he dived under Harold’s bed, just before two men came in clutching bottles of champagne.
‘Where’s Smithy?’ they asked.
Gone over the balcony and run off, Harold replied. Deeply disappointed—why would ol’ Smithy do something like that, when they just wanted to have a bit of fun with him?—they left the bottles on the bed and said, ‘When you find him, tell him to have a drink on us.’49
Heightening the pilot’s great celebrity was the publicity being organised for him by a man fast becoming a great friend, one Beau Sheil who was with Vacuum Oil, and had a part in ensuring that both the oil company and Smithy received plenty of column inches in the newspapers. Travelling a town ahead of them, Sheil would make sure that journalists were forewarned of the great man’s arrival, where he would be staying, where he would be doing the barnstorming from and so forth.
Such advance publicity meant very good business for joyrides in the Southern Cross, and just as it had been in Australia when business was good—and they were able to gross as much as £200 a day50—Smithy was so keen not to lose time for so much as a toilet break that he used what was effectively a urinal in the cockpit, a funnel attached to a tube, that led to a container beneath the fuselage.51 (James Warner could only wish that Smithy had had such a thing back in 1928!)
On 26 March 1933 their sojourn was finally over and, with Bill Taylor, John Stannage, Tommy Pethybridge and a New Zealand businessman by the name of Mackay—who was interested in establishing a commercial air link between New Zealand and Australia—Smithy flew the Southern Cross back across the Tasman, leaving from Ninety Mile Beach at Hukatere. This particular flight had the distinction of being the first time that an amazing new technology called ‘wireless telephony’ was used in an aircraft in the southern hemisphere.52 Unbelievably, as the Southern Cross flew on, radio operators in both Australia and New Zealand could actually hear the crew speaking.
What listeners didn’t hear, mercifully, was Smithy experiencing another spell of illness halfway across the Tasman. Once again, he had to scrawl a message asking Bill Taylor to take over the controls, then excuse himself and go and lie down on the mailbags for a couple of hours until the nausea passed.
On the upside, however, during the trip back—in a manner that was reminiscent of Louis Blériot flying over Alicia on the Escopette going across the Channel two decades earlier—Smithy was able to use the wireless telephony to speak to his wife on the MV Wanganella, which had left New Zealand before them and was also heading to Sydney. True, Mary had to reply by Morse code, courtesy of a ship radio man who could do the translations for her, but the technology was simply stunning.
Smithy later wrote for public consumption: ‘Our flight emphasised the practicability of instituting a regular airmail service between the two Dominions, and it confirmed in me the belief I had long held, that the day was not far distant when the pioneer flights that we were then making would be succeeded by regular commercial flights, made to schedule, on a dividend-earning basis.’53
And Smithy was desperate to have a part of that action, as there was only so long he could continue barnstorming and the like, as well as taking the risks he did on long flights. The fact that he was now a married man with a child meant that the game had changed. He was really starting to feel older, and not quite so bulletproof as he had in his wild days.
As it happened, his bank account was also feeling a little weary. While Smithy had been in New Zealand, ANA had gone into voluntary liquidation—with nary even a final gurgled ‘kaput’ to mark its passing. It was really only the formalisation of a situation that had existed for most of the previous year, as all work had evaporated. All the company’s planes were put up for sale, the proceeds of which would go towards paying back some £79,440 to its creditors, although less than £17,000 would be retrieved by selling the planes. (And while Smithy kept the Southern Cross because he owned it independently from ANA, Charles Ulm purchased the Southern Moon from the firm’s creditors, rebuilt it and renamed it Faith in Australia.)
There may well have been recriminations between Kingsford Smith and Ulm about the company’s demise, had they been seeing or talking to each other on a regular basis. But their friendship had become extremely strained in recent times, perhaps in part due to Ulm’s resentment at having to constantly play tenth fiddle to Smithy’s whole orchestra of acclaim, at least in the public domain. What had particularly got Ulm’s goat—and he took legal action to rectify it—was that, in his view, Smithy had not given him due recognition in a book he had penned the previous year about the flights of the Southern Cross, titled The Old Bus. At the behest of Ulm’s lawyers, the manuscript had to be changed so that Ulm was given equal credit as a co-pilot and chief organiser and, by the time the book hit the bookstores, Smithy had even been obliged to dedicate the book to Ulm, ‘Without whose genius for organisation, and courageous spirit, many flights in the Southern Cross could never have been achieved.’54
Early spring is a wonderful time in Europe, most particularly after a bitter winter, as people leave their burrows, take off their heavy clothing and emerge into the fresh and sparkling air once more to enjoy the blossoming of tulips and daffodils. So it was that on the morning of Friday, 27 April 1933, a 25-year-old Italian hiker by the name of Gino Tocchioni, with his knapsack on his back, did cheerily go a-wandering, along the mountain track—tra-la-leee, tra-la-LAAAA—making his way up the slopes of the Pratomagno Alps, about 25 miles east of Florence, fording the now bursting mountain streams that were carrying away the melting snow. And then his whistling suddenly stopped. What was that? Somewhere above him something was glinting. Approaching, he saw it was the shattered wreckage of an aeroplane. After only a few minutes of looking around he found the pilot, lying on his back and surely staring to the eternity above when he had died. According to the papers he found on the body, the pilot’s name was Herbert, and he was born in Bundaberg, Australia, on 8 December 1892. His surname was illegible. The Puss Moth was identified by its Canadian registration, CF-APK.
Two days later, his body had been retrieved by the local carabinieri and taken to the village of Strada-in-Casentino.55 There, 114 days after his disappearance, the remains of Bert Hinkler were placed in a walnut coffin in the Casa del Fascio, the House of the Fascists, and soon covered by a Union Jack, which the local women had painstakingly sewn. Candles were placed at the head and foot of the coffin, and spring wildflowers, picked by the locals, were laid all around it. Armed Italian soldiers stood guard, their heads bowed.
By order of Italy’s leader, Benito Mussolini himself—a keen student of aviation who knew exactly who the dead pilot was—Bert Hinkler was given a state funeral of great pomp and ceremony. On the evening of 1 May 1933, his horse-drawn hearse, at the head of a long cortege, passed along the cobbled streets of old Florence, through thick crowds of Florentines, all with their heads bowed and many of them weeping. Past the mediaeval Cathedral of St Maria del Fiore, the procession crossed the ancient stone bridge above the Arno River, and halted at Porta Romana, the gates of the city. Then, following custom, a voice cried out the name of the deceased.
‘Senor Hubert Hinkler!’
‘Presente!’ responded the many mourners. Bert was here, and here he would remain, as the procession moved into the Protestant section of the Cimiterio Evangelico degli Allori, where he was buried.
Seventeen
TROUBLES
The successful aviator who performs some startling feat will always have the microphones and newspapermen around him. There will always be an excess of publicity that will spread his name to the ends of the world with the speed of radio. But when it all ends and the captains and kings depart, he is left high and dry, stranded in a financial desert from which he must find his own way out.
CHARLES KINGSFORD SMITH TO A JOURNALIST, CIRCA 19331
It was time to go it alone. Despite Smithy’s financial woes there were still enough men of money who believed in him that, in May 1933, he was able to announce the formation of Kingsford-Smith Air Service Ltd, with its base a massive 80 by 90 foot hangar to be built at Mascot. As ever, the jewel in his flying stock was the old faithful Southern Cross—now a venerable seven years old—but he was able to add to this with five other, smaller planes, including three Gipsy Moths.
‘To hell with the Depression!’ Smithy told those who cautioned him about the expenditure at a time of such terrible economic trouble. ‘If people let Depression talk stop them, we’ll never be through with it.’2
The company would be part flying school, part charter service, part joyflying base, part air-taxi, part whatever-kind-of-work-came-up-so-long-as-he-could-keep-flying. Two key appointments were John Stannage as manager and the ever-enthusiastic Tommy Pethybridge as chief engineer. They essentially moved just a few hundred yards from their old Australian National Airways hangar, which had been taken over by Charles Ulm, where he was operating his new company, Great Pacific Airways Ltd.
And yet, the fact that Smithy and Ulm were operating in an aviation world that was evolving and advancing with the rapidity of the planes themselves, was evidenced by the arrival in Australia in late June 1933 of a massive Imperial Airways passenger plane, the Astraea. Just as West Australian Airways had been at the forefront of regional travel in Australia in the early 1920s, Imperial Airways was now leading the way in international travel, pushing ever outwards from its home base in London to the farthest reaches of the world—a push that was given extra oomph by a British government backing it all the way with generous subsidies.
The Astraea was there on what was called a ‘survey flight’ to effectively do whatever the aerial version of ‘testing the waters’ was. The Armstrong Whitworth AW.15 high-wing monoplane, with four 340-horsepower engines, could cruise at 110 to 125 miles per hour, go as high at 14,200 feet, as far as 640 miles in one hop and had the capacity to carry between nine and seventeen passengers with luggage and three crew members—and was already extensively used by Imperial Airways on routes from England to both Africa and India. To the question of whether those routes could be extended to Australia, the answer seemed to be a resounding yes, and the issue the Australian aviation world was dealing with at that time was, could and should one of their own companies have a part of it?
For much of the early 1930s there had been discussions between ANA, Qantas and West Australian Airways about whether they should form a combined company to take on the Australian end of the route, perhaps from Singapore on. Ultimately, however, those talks had come to nothing. In the absence of an all-Australian option, thus, Hudson Fysh had pushed hard with his long-time proposal that Qantas and Imperial Airways form a subsidiary company to take on that end of the route, and the presence of the Astraea was in fact part of a publicity campaign to promote Imperial Airways to the Australian public.
In fact, many people of influence were outraged about the whole idea of Imperial having anything to do with the Australian end of the route. Thundering in the Senate on the afternoon of 1 September 1933, Senator James Patrick Digger Dunn extolled the virtues of Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm before thrusting his point home: ‘Apparently these men are to be left on the beach, while this profitable contract goes to Imperial Airways, to be run on British capital, manned by British airmen, and paid for with good Australian cash. What chance has Smith or Ulm, or any other Australian without money, to compete with this wealthy monopoly in open tenders? They will be frozen out and the Government, by its encouragement of the propaganda stunt of the Astraea, is already preparing the public mind to see them frozen out…‘3
That, the government very likely, was. And yet the tender process had to be observed. On 22 September 1933 the Federal government made its announcement calling for aviation companies wishing to bid for the Singapore to Darwin section, and for the Darwin to other parts of Australia section. Those wishing to apply had to have aeroplanes with a cruising speed of not less than 110 miles per hour, and a range of at least 600 miles.
Gentlemen, start your engines…
Ladies, fix them. At least this lady did. Her name was Nancy Bird and, as an eighteen-year-old, the Manly girl had been one of the first pupils at Kingsford Smith’s flying school at Mascot. Her first lesson had been with Smithy himself and it had instantly consolidated her view that flying was to be the great passion of her life. So much so, that she announced that she would like to learn something about the engineering side.
‘We’ll learn her to learn engineering,’ Smithy’s chief engineer, Tommy Pethybridge, exulted gleefully, ‘give her some dirty jobs to do.’4
Soon enough, Nancy Bird was up to her elbows in them, soaked in petrol and oil, and more often than not wielding a steel brush on filthy spark plugs to get the carbon off them, or wriggling under the engine to remove the sump plug and letting the oil flow out. Tommy wasn’t necessarily mean in giving her such jobs—even though, like Kingsford Smith, he wasn’t sure if there was a place in aviation for females—but he did think it would be a fair test to see if she had what it took.
For her part, Nancy felt up to the task, and kept working away, while she continued to take flying lessons.
From the first, both Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm expressed interest in submitting tenders. ‘I told Mr Ulm,’ Kingsford Smith informed the press, ‘that if his company, which will also tender, was successful in getting the contract, I would join his board of directors in an advisory capacity. Meantime, I am preparing…for my own tender for the aerial mail contract.’5
Smithy’s view as to how to best present his credentials to win that tender was not to continue to build his aviation company or to bury himself in oh-so-boring paperwork, but rather to have another go at the England to Australia record, on the reckoning that the resultant publicity could only help his cause as it had done so many times before—and to hell with those who thought he was too old to keep going after records. ‘At the age of thirty-six, and after seventeen years of flying,’ he later recounted, ‘I began to recognise that I was fast becoming one of the “veterans”, a conviction for
ced on me by the fact that in the United States I enjoyed the honorific title among airmen there of “Daddy”. The years pass, but though “getting on”, I felt that I was still not too old to compete on equal terms with the younger generation, and in any case, we “veterans” have the right, and indeed the duty, to show the up-and-coming-young-fellows that there is “life in the old dog yet”.’6
To some people, the constant quest to break records was both tedious and dangerous, and foremost of these nay-sayers was the co-winner of the 1919 Air Race, Sir Keith Smith. In his own way, echoing the grizzled Fijian who six years earlier in Suva had asked, ‘But what are they all doing this for?’7, Sir Keith stated firmly his own view that ‘records serve no good purpose’.8
To this Smithy responded, ‘I am an old friend of Sir Keith, but I venture to disagree with him. In my opinion they cannot be done without…There must be pioneering in everything, and record flights help to establish the worth of human stamina, the worth of machinery, and I am satisfied that if record flights were abandoned the British nation would become decadent, and the pioneering spirit would disappear.’9
So there.