Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

On 4 October 1933, Sir Charles Kingsford Smith took off from Lympne, in Kent, on yet one more record-breaking attempt on the England to Australia route. This time he was in Miss Southern Cross, a powerful, all-wood, fabric-covered, low-wing Percival Gull monoplane with an enclosed cabin, and 130-horsepower de Havilland Gipsy Major engine which had been designed by Edgar Percival, an Australian who had been born in Albury and raised on a farm adjacent to Ham Common, the original name for the cleared fields which were to become Richmond RAAF station. His intentions were avowedly moderate. ‘I am allowing time for a good night’s rest at each stopping-place,’ he said before leaving. ‘I am not going to reduce myself to a shadow with successive days of sleeplessness. I am a family man now, and the only record that has really interested me is to be the oldest living airman. That is worth trying for nowadays.’10

  It was to be a torrid flight, as despite his proclaimed hopes for a healthy flight, Kingsford Smith started to feel nauseous, faint and shaky after his first hop to Brindisi, Italy, on the first day.11 On top of all that, he was continually beset by terrible anxiety—an overwhelming sense of oncoming disaster which seemed all the worse because it was a panic with no focus on a particular peril that he could take action against. Though he felt a little better after a brief rest, the feeling of great distress was compounded as dawn broke when, off the coast of Greece, he felt the familiar sense of sinking spirits and rising panic. Suddenly, he really did feel, as he wrote in his log, Too old and worn out for these capers. But what could he do? He flew on, vowing to master both his physical and spiritual ills.

  That evening, when he consulted an English-speaking doctor in Baghdad, the medical man was shocked at the pilot’s condition and told him he had to abandon the flight immediately.

  ‘You’re ill,’ he said. ‘Keep this up and you’ll kill yourself.’12

  And yet, it was only doctor’s orders and not something truly significant, like a faulty engine or a broken wing. After a terrible night, lying practically sleepless as he faced his many demons of the dark hours—tempered only by thoughts of Mary and Charles Jnr waiting patiently for him at home—Kingsford Smith took off at dawn the following day for Gwadar, on the south-western coast of Pakistan, and his log entries tell much of the story for the rest of the troubled trip:

  In the middle of the Bay of Angels—about 100 miles over water…Will be glad to reach land again as the water looks very wet…

  Another recurrence of nervousness. Nasty feeling, as if I were going to faint. Hope I can get through.

  Landed by flares at Baghdad last night. Couldn’t sleep for nerves and had a bad night. Felt pretty rotten today.

  Had a very bad turn and had to come down to 200 feet. Thought I was fainting. Will try to make Bandar Abbas.

  Despite it all, with the constitution of two mules, Kingsford Smith was able to land in Wyndham at 5.14 pm on 11 October 1933, seven days, four hours and fifty minutes after leaving—the first time the record had entered the public consciousness in minutes—to smash Charles Scott’s record by one day, fifteen hours, fifty-four minutes and receive a hero’s welcome.

  Still, he did acknowledge to the pressing reporters something of the horrors he had endured, noting that ‘I’m getting too old for these stunts’, and that while traversing the Persian Gulf, ‘I went to pieces and had to put in a day in bed. I don’t like travelling over the sea with one engine. It has been a pretty constant fight against sleeplessness and that extraordinary sickness and nervousness I get over water. I suppose doctors would call it aquaphobia. At one stage over the Timor Sea I felt I would have to break out of the cabin.’13

  No matter, Australia celebrated his achievement anyway, and he was soon lost once more in that intoxicating rush of mass adulation that greeted him at his every appearance. Cables came from everywhere, including one from Australia’s Kangaroos rugby league team on tour in England, who had heard the joyous news at half-time of a match against Bradford, and cabled their congratulations as soon as the match was over.14 When arriving in Sydney to the usual tumultuous welcome at Mascot—that blessedly included a beaming Mary and a now walking son—his mother Catherine was asked to say a few words.

  ‘I always had confidence that he would break the record,’ she said in front of her beaming son. ‘I expected him to do it and he has done it. He generally does what he sets out to do.’15

  Cheers all round!

  By the time he got to Melbourne, no fewer than 100,000 people had gathered to greet him. The Commonwealth government, caught up in the general celebration that the record had returned to an Australian, announced that it would make a grant to Smithy of £3000, income-tax free—news that was broken to the airman in a personal phone call from the leader of the nation, Prime Minister Joseph Lyons. More spoils quickly followed. The Vacuum Oil Company offered, and he accepted, a lucrative position as their aviation consultant.16

  But just what was it that had been ailing him? This never became quite clear, though at least a part of it had to have been the fact that at thirty-six years old, both his body and his mind were showing signs of enormous fatigue, if not outright rebellion, due to the tremendous exertions he had put himself through over the previous two decades.

  And it wasn’t as if everything was fine again on those occasions when he was home with Mary and young Charles…

  Tossing. Turning. Sweating. Hot. Diving now. An angel of death in his SPAD, he was swooping down on the tightly bunched German troops below, holding his fire until he was so close he simply couldn’t miss…Now!17

  And always, always, always it was the same thing. The instant his finger tightened on the trigger, his two machine guns would start spitting lead and before him, dozens upon dozens of German soldiers were simply flung every which way by his bullets. He couldn’t miss! And he didn’t.

  Screaming now—some kind of primeval shriek that came from deep within him—he lived the horror of it once more. His bullets ripped them open like sliced sausages, blew some of their heads off, and left others pitching and heaving and dying in the mud, with their intestines spilling out of their lacerated stomachs—some trying vainly to push them back in, to stay alive…to live…live…live…not die.

  And then he would wake up, sweating, sometimes even screaming, with Mary holding him, trying to soothe him, telling him it was just one more bad dream, darling, and it is all right. It was long ago. You were doing what you had to do. It will pass. Gentle, darling. Sleep, darling. Back to sleep. Sleep …sleep…sleep. And when he was lucky, he really would get back to sleep. But most times the horror of the war years would stay with him and he could no longer shake it off. Sometimes he cried. And then, at least he could talk to Mary about it, and tell her, while all the rest of the world was sleeping and the only sound was the growl of a distant car engine taking a late-night reveller home, how unfair it all was that young Germans who loved their parents or their wives as dearly as he loved his family, had had to die. He was less haunted by the pilots he had shot down as that was a case of kill or be killed—and they had an equal chance with him.18 But those soldiers on the ground who he had slaughtered—slaughtered, Mary, do you understand?—those poor devils never had a chance, had just been doing their duty as they saw it, marching to the front, and he had come along and killed them. Do you really understand the horror of it, Mary? She understood, or at least tried to. She soothed him.

  If this was an all too common occurrence among veterans of the Great War, to be forced to relive the horrors of what they had seen and done too many times in the silent watch of the night, still there were few, if any, other veterans who put themselves under such constant psychological pressure as Kingsford Smith did in his post-war life. And in these early years of the 1930s, just as it had been in the early 1920s, when Catherine Kingsford Smith had seen it up close and worried about the mental health of her son after what had happened in the Great War, there were signs that he might be on the edge of a complete breakdown. And yet he had to keep going, pushing himself, in the hope, among
other things that he could find the financial breakthrough that would allow him the luxury of pulling back entirely.

  A sure sign that records alone wouldn’t save him was that the new record he had set for his flight from England lasted no longer than a week. After leaving Feltham aerodrome near London on 13 October, none other than Charles Ulm, accompanied by Bill Taylor and Scotty Allan in the newly christened Faith in Australia, made it to Derby in the early hours of 20 October, just six days, seventeen hours and fifty-six minutes later. The new record was down to under a week!

  For Ulm, however, there would be no government largesse of £3000. That had already gone to Smithy, and besides, Smithy had done it alone. In fact, so highly regarded was Sir Charles by the public that, again, the subject arose of whether the government owed him a highly paid position in the Commonwealth Service.

  ‘It is believed,’ the Courier-Mail reported in late October, that with such a job, Kingsford Smith ‘would be able to build up a sound business enterprise, and be able to forsake for all time the barnstorming career which he has had to follow in the last few years. Fear has been expressed in ministerial circles on more than one occasion that the loss of the aviator, while engaged in one of his record breaking solo flights, would be an Australian calamity of the blackest character. It is to prevent the possibility of any such occurrence that immediate attention will be given to the proposal to assist him.’19

  Alas, after Cabinet met to decide the issue, the answer that came back was a firm ‘no’. The grant of £3000 would stand, but there would be no safe government position for the airman. Yes, he was one of the two most revered men in Australia, with Bradman, but Smithy was always an outsider, not an insider, and the government simply did not care to offer him a secure sinecure.

  In the meantime, the airline tendering process had gone on. In the final wash-up, while Qantas had indeed thrown in their lot with Imperial Airways to submit a joint bid, Charles Ulm had combined with Norman Brearley and the two had submitted a joint tender where they announced their intention to form, if successful, a company called Commonwealth Airways. As to Smithy, the most famous aviator in the land, in the end he advised his position in February 1934—from New Zealand, where he had gone for another burst of barnstorming—in a personal letter to the new Controller of Civil Aviation, Edgar Johnston, yet another veteran of the Royal Flying Corps. He wanted Johnston to know that ‘definitely I am associated with Robinson [of New England Airways] in his tender for the mail subsidy and anything that can be done to help him, will also help me. Naturally, old man, I am not suggesting you do not consider each tender on its merits.’20

  Perish the thought.

  For his part, Qantas chairman Fergus McMaster refused to take either alternative bid seriously, writing to Fysh on 2 March: ‘There is no telling what will be done about the tenders, but it could hardly be imagined that the Ulm and Brearley lot would be considered for the Singapore-Brisbane section, or that the loose arrangement between Robinson and Kingsford Smith would be seriously considered – with three old Avro Tens and the even older Southern Cross. There is no doubt they were hard pushed, to make use of loose sentiment when they included the Southern Cross.’21

  Smithy stayed on barnstorming in New Zealand, though he had another motive for being there, which he noted publicly: ‘To establish my claims to the regular airmail service between the two countries that must come before very much longer.’22

  Kingsford Smith’s reasoning was, as he wrote, ‘that we, who had pioneered the Tasman sea route, who had repeatedly crossed it, carried mails to and fro over it, and had by our activities created an air-mindedness in the people of New Zealand, should be entrusted with the organisation and maintenance of this section of the Empire airmail route’.

  For Smithy at this time, establishing that route under his own umbrella had become nothing less than ‘my life’s objective…’23

  At least he was back in Australia when on 19 April 1934, Prime Minister Joseph Lyons himself announced the news. The winner of the tender for the Singapore-Darwin-Brisbane route was Qantas Empire Airways.24

  Using the five de Havilland DH.86A aircraft—fitted with Gipsy Six engines and capable of carrying ten passengers and two crew—that it had had especially built, Qantas Empire Airways would receive £228,478 from the government in subsidies over the next five years.25 As if that wasn’t enough of a blow to their competitors, Qantas Empire was also awarded the contract to distribute the post through the bulk of the rest of Australia—with subsidies bringing its total payment to £318,426—with a couple of tiny sections reserved for a few minor local airlines. For Charles Kingsford Smith, Charles Ulm and Norman Brearley there was nothing.

  This, in Kingsford Smith’s view, was a major injustice that Australian airmen such as he and Ulm, ‘who have been primarily responsible for the development of aviation in Australia, have been overlooked. I feel that the men who brought to Australia a realisation of the value of air transport and have successfully striven against tremendous odds to provide efficient services for Australia have suffered a serious injustice. Apparently my tender was not even considered.’26

  One pilot who did take the news very well was none other than Paul McGinness, the co-founder of Qantas, who wired Fysh from his farm in Western Australia: Congratulations on your success in securing the contract. Best wishes future.27

  And a wonderful future it looked to be, too, with Qantas having grown from a tiny outback operator in 1921 to a genuine international operator with an assured government income by 1933.

  Which was all right for some. For Smithy, money was getting progressively tighter, and despite his only half-hearted tender he had been devastated by the government announcement, wandering around his house and telling Mary endlessly, ‘Nothing—absolutely nothing—is working for me.’28

  Inevitably, he began to wonder how he could make his way out of his growing financial difficulties. Before, in bad times, he had been able to live on nothing but fresh air and love. Now, with a wife and baby Charles to support, he needed to have them secure.

  At least there was one easy way to earn a lot of money on the near horizon. The previous year, a Scottish-born Melbourne chocolate manufacturer by the name of Sir Macpherson Robertson had announced a £10,000 prize for a Centenary Air Race between London and Melbourne in the coming October, to celebrate 100 years since John Batman had sailed 6 miles up the Yarra River, found the water good and deep, and famously proclaimed ‘this will be the place for a village’, a village later to be called Melbourne.

  There was to be no limit to the size of the aircraft, the nationality of entrants, or how many crew it could have, though when it came to plane and crew, ‘I am hoping that both will be Empire products’.29 Robertson was very insistent, however, that safety was a top priority—there was to be no repeat of the disaster of the 1927 Dole Air Race or the deaths of the 1919 race from England to Australia. The key stipulation, thus, was that all entrants must present a certificate of airworthiness from their country of origin to show that the aeroplane they were flying met the minimum safety requirements of the International Commission on Air Navigation, which had been signed by member countries in Paris in 1919. The idea was that the aircraft were not to be dangerously overloaded flying petrol tanks, but to compete with a fuel capacity that was ‘normal’ for that design of plane.

  This was obviously the greatest air race ever conceived, over a route with which he was more familiar than any other airman, and if Smithy could win it, it would crown his already splendid flying career.30 To Mary’s expressed worries that she no longer wanted him to take the risks of long-distance flying, most particularly when his health had not been good, he laughingly replied, as he always did, with the reassurance that ‘Poppa is going to die in his bed, with his socks on’.31 Too, as he had already announced firmly to the press, ‘my last long flight will be the Melbourne Centenary Air Race’,32 so Mary would just have to accept that he needed to do it one last time and then he would be able to s
ettle down.

  The truth of it was, he didn’t have a lot of choice. He needed that money, and with £10,000 he would be able to see his way clear of most of his financial trouble. The further good news was that not only was Robertson funding the race, he was also keen to help finance Smithy, to the tune of £5000, into buying a British plane that might win it. Smithy was, after all, a national hero and there was no doubt he was such a public favourite that a victory for him would cause the greatest splash of publicity.

  The only difference the aviator and businessman had was over the choice of plane. After due consideration, Smithy had decided that the most capable machine for the job would be an American one—as their planes had lately been leading the field in long-range high-speed jobs—and he thought probably a Northrop Gamma would do the trick.33 It was a single-engine, solo cockpit, all-metal screamer with a long range. Robertson’s instant riposte was that he would much prefer that Smithy bought a British plane. Given that Robertson was the principal backer—although Smithy’s father-in-law also put in £1000, as did the Melbourne Herald, while Sidney Myer once again backed him with £500—Smithy agreed to look at it, but his investigations didn’t last long. The only British plane that would come close would be one of the radical de Havilland DH.88 Comets then under construction, but there was a serious problem. All three machines had been promised to other competitors, including to the two piloting partnerships Smithy already regarded as his principal competitors, Charles Scott and Tom Campbell Black, and Jimmy Mollison with his new wife, the former Amy Johnson. (Jimmy had met Amy four years earlier when she had arrived in Australia, flying solo. So impressed was he that he had proposed to her within eight hours of their meeting.)

  Now, while Captain Geoffrey de Havilland, AFC, could supply another Comet for Smithy if he ordered and paid for it, he regretted to say that de Havillands had insufficient resources to also install a crucial Ratier ‘variable pitch propeller’. French-made, the company had only three of them and there would be no more available for some time. A recent innovation in sophisticated aircraft, the variable pitch propeller was the rough equivalent of gears in cars, whereby the pilot could alter the ‘pitch’ at which the propeller blades bit into the air—the ‘pitch’ being the angle at which the blade was positioned along its axis. Whereas for taking off and climbing, a fine pitch of the propeller was the most efficient way to get a grip on the air, a much coarser pitch was required for economical cruising.