Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  An ashen-faced Smithy immediately abandoned the lunch. ‘Let’s go,’ he said to Stannage.59 The two went straight back to their room at Los Angeles’s Roosevelt Hotel and for the next five or six hours worked their contacts to try to learn as much information as they could about the last fixed position of the Stella Australis—where it had likely gone down, and precisely what was being done to find them. In the end, Smithy couldn’t stand it any longer, and gave Stannage the order: ‘Get the plane ready.’60 They were going to search for Ulm.

  Surely Smithy couldn’t be serious? Surely he understood that it would be madness to simply jump in a plane and head to Honolulu unprepared? (That was, after all, precisely what had led Keith Anderson and Bobby Hitchcock to their deaths, when they had gone looking for the Southern Cross four years earlier.)

  But no, Smithy was dead set upon it, and no amount of protestations from Stannage or his brother Harold—nor even a teary phone call from Mary in Sydney, begging him not to go—could dissuade him.

  All right then, Smithy, what about at least a farewell drink? Smithy agreed, but before he could drink it, Smithy’s friend Bud Morriss managed to slip a very powerful sedative into it, which knocked the half-crazed airman out for the next twenty-four hours, by which point some of his rationality had returned.61 By the time he was properly back on his feet, the Los Angeles Times was running a story on its front page with the ominous headline, ‘FLYERS DEAD, SAY EXPERTS IN SEA HUNT’. The article detailed how, ‘despite the largest rescue force ever pressed into action, forty-eight hours now having passed since they went missing and the chances are probable that Ulm and his companions have perished’.62

  In Sydney meanwhile, and refusing to believe any such thing, Charles Ulm’s second wife, Josephine, kept up a teary vigil, supported by family and friends, as she desperately waited for news. Day by day the newspapers delivered ever more grim reports, focusing on the news that there really was no news. Nothing.

  Despite the massive search with planes and ships combing and recombing the area where the plane was thought to have disappeared, there was not the tiniest sign. After a week the American authorities were left with no choice but to regretfully call off the search. While appreciating the efforts of the United States, the grief-stricken Mrs Ulm refused to give up hope and clung to the belief that her husband must still be alive—just as Harry Hawker’s wife Muriel had done a decade and a half earlier when it appeared that Harry had been lost in the Atlantic.

  The only way that could be so would be if Ulm and his crew had landed somewhere on the chain of tiny islands which extend for 1200 miles from Honolulu in the south to Midway Island in the far north. So it was that, via the good offices of the British consul in Honolulu, she was able to charter a cutter by the name of Lanikai to keep searching along that chain.

  Still nothing. Stone cold motherless nothing.

  As to thirteen-year-old John Ulm, he found that wherever he went people were suddenly going out of their way to offer their deepest condolences on the tragic death of his father. They would cross the road to embrace him, to mutter their grief, people whom he’d never even met before. He really felt very important.

  A cruel juxtaposition to the tragedy—as if marking the final triumph of successful passenger airlines over the pioneers who had blazed the path—was that just six days after Ulm’s death, the first Qantas Empire Airways link between England and Australia was successfully inaugurated (albeit with older planes following a terrible accident as one of the new planes was being delivered), after being officially launched in Brisbane by Prime Minister Joseph Lyons and His Royal Highness Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester. That first regular airmail, carrying precisely 1267 pounds and 43/4 ounces of letters and packages to England, where it arrived just fourteen days later, was the beginning of a new era.63

  Struggling to find a role in this new aviation world that was developing all around him, Smithy remained devastated by Ulm’s death—Stannage would later write that he ‘cracked up’64—and wrestled with the problem of what could have gone wrong. He wrote to the Controller of Civil Aviation, Edgar Johnston, ‘It is impossible, from the scarcity of information available to form any very definite opinion of how it all happened, but it looks as though they were somewhat uncertain of their position throughout the flight, and were relying on picking up the wireless beam at Honolulu. Whether their uncertainty of position was due to bad weather conditions or to laxity or inefficiency in navigation I do not know, but it seems almost inconceivable that with Charles in charge the latter could be the cause.’65

  It didn’t make sense that Charles Ulm would have been anything other than totally assiduous in his preparations and selection of his crew, but against that, Smithy knew better than most just how many things could have gone wrong.

  As a matter of fact, as he knew only too well, that even safely on the ground things could go wrong. A case in point was that, despite all his plans, he could not sell his Lockheed in America for love nor money, and was eventually obliged to leave it in a hangar at Burbank and return home via ship, leaving San Francisco on the SS Monterey on 28 January 1935. Such was his reduced state at this time, that at Smithy’s insistence, Mary had to cross the Pacific from Sydney to come and get him to accompany him home.

  As to where his energies should be concentrated now, once again the answer was not obvious. While in America he had fielded another offer from Anthony Fokker to join his company as part consultant and part roving ambassador. Though flattered, he had declined. For better or worse, for richer or poorer, he loved his life in Australia and wanted to remain there, as did Mary. Apart from everything else, it was where they wanted to raise their son, now a bonny two-year-old with blond curls, rather like his baby photos showed Chilla to have been at the same age.

  Once his strength had partially returned he was able to do a little barnstorming, but the situation was far from satisfactory, and there were many people who thought that a well-paid role should be found for the great man. One who felt like this was Bill Taylor. He wrote that it was a sad situation when ‘the world’s greatest airman has to live a hand-to-mouth existence by giving people joyrides in Southern Cross when, in fact, his achievements were such that they should have been bringing him the rewards of Government sponsorship and other encouragements’.66

  But there was none.

  It was a time when aviation companies came and aviation companies went. Within just a few weeks of Smithy arriving home from America in early 1935, Kingsford-Smith Air Services Ltd—going, going, gone!—was sold to rival Eastern Air Transport, which was planning to extend air services into rural New South Wales. Throughout his company’s brief life span it never achieved great heights, and in fact could often be found rumbling low between the craggy walls of the Valley of Death. It had never made any big money, even at the best of times, and Smithy no longer had the energy or interest to run it. Besides which, selling it would free up some much-needed capital to play the last card he had in his business deck…

  Yes, he had had his troubles in Australia and Great Britain and America, but never in New Zealand. There, his welcome had been unwavering. There, they had listened to his proposals. There, he was taken seriously as both an aviator and as a businessman. So it was there that he hoped to finally organise, and get up and running, a twice-weekly trans-Tasman air service between Sydney and New Plymouth, backed by the weight of the New Zealand government. With that in mind, Smithy, Bill Taylor and Beau Sheil—who had left Vacuum Oil and practically become Smithy’s manager—firmed up plans to form the Trans-Tasman Air Service Development Company Ltd, with the idea of getting a service up and running by early 1936.

  The response was lukewarm at best. The Australian government evinced almost no interest, and although Smithy was received by the New Zealand cabinet when he ducked across the Tasman on a quick visit by ship, it was obvious that they, too, felt that as the most far-flung outpost of the British Empire, they were almost obliged to use that Empire’s leading air company, I
mperial Airways, for such an important leg. Broadly, while Smithy was most certainly the man they wanted to have a drink with, and tell their wives they had met, he wasn’t necessarily the one they would choose to run a serious aviation concern.

  Why, the people of Melbourne wanted to know, was that plane buzzing Flemington racecourse on this afternoon of Wednesday, 13 February 1935? Oh! Oh dear. Why it was none other than…yes it was, Raymond Parer, ‘The Reparer’! With his flying partner Godfrey Hemsworth, Parer was arriving in Melbourne rather later than the three days it has taken C.W.A. Scott and Tom Campbell Black when they had won the race. As a matter of fact, it had taken Parer the Reparer no fewer than 116 days. Fuel trouble. Engine trouble. Wing trouble. Propeller trouble. Trouble-trouble. Still fuming, Raymond Parer didn’t want to talk about it. But at least he and Hemsworth had finished, which was something…67

  Nineteen

  OUT ON A WING AND A PRAYER

  He was always fond of saying ‘I don’t want to be the world’s most famous pilot, I want to be the world’s oldest pilot…’ LADY KINGSFORD SMITH, 19781

  Kingsford Smith, his gallant spirit never admitting defeat, gradually had his essential fibre whittled away, leaving effective only his spirit and his body with his unafraid smile. BILL TAYLOR2

  To conquer or die—that was life’s eternal challenge for this truly great adventurer…

  JOHN STANNAGE3

  Just before midnight on 14 May 1935, Smithy was sitting in the Officers’ Mess at Richmond air base when a rather ominous thought struck him: ‘Here I am, thirty-eight, apparently sane and sensible, and yet I’m going out over the ocean again, in the middle of the night.’4

  In half an hour, he was due to head off in the Southern Cross over the treacherous Tasman Sea once more. As May 1935 was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the accession of King George V, Smithy had conceived the idea to take a ‘Jubilee Flight’ across the Tasman and for the first time carry mail from Australia to New Zealand. He hoped the flight would so capture the imagination of the public of both New Zealand and Australia, that the trip would be the forerunner of a regular service—to be run by him and his partners.

  To double the impact, the original plan had been to take the late Charles Ulm’s Faith in Australia, the former Australian National Airways Southern Moon, as well, but this plan fell through at the last moment.

  For the trip, Smithy had chosen the redoubtable Bill Taylor as his co-pilot and navigator, and the ever-faithful John Stannage as his radio operator, who would be broadcasting to stations on both sides of the Tasman as this historic flight took place. On board, they had 34,000 letters to be delivered, together with several other items of freight, including wrapped bundles of Sydney newspapers.

  So long as they got there, of course…

  Bill Taylor thought it was no sure thing and was also beginning to question his own sanity in going on this trip. Just the day before, he had wandered into Smithy’s hangar at Mascot to see John Stannage and the Associated Newspapers aviation correspondent, Jack Percival—neither of whom were even close to being trained mechanics—up to their elbows in what had been the starboard motor, but which they had now stripped down into tiny pieces to replace the cracked crankcase. In Taylor’s mind this was not the stuff successful flights were made of and, given a rising presentiment that he was about ‘to walk the plank into the Tasman Sea’,5 he considered refusing to go. In the end, however, his loyalty to Smithy was such that he decided he just couldn’t pull out. He would go on the flight, walk the plank, and hope for the best. So too, John Stannage, who had his own grave doubts, but simply couldn’t say no to Smithy. For Smithy was not a man you let down, and to refuse to go would be to question his judgment, which was unthinkable.

  At 12.20 am on the morning of 15 May 1935, the Southern Cross roared down the Richmond airstrip and headed towards New Plymouth, some 1300 miles away. On the tarmac behind them, they left Smithy’s wife, Mary, his aged mother, Catherine, and his niece, Beris, who was, of course, married to John Stannage—all of them heavily rugged up against the cold and sombrely ruminating on the same emotion that always pressed at such moments…the desperate hope that the aviators would be all right. All else being equal, Smithy should land late the following afternoon New Zealand time.

  Racing towards the rising sun, the night would be compressed, meaning that dawn was not so far away, which was comforting to Smithy as, like most airmen, he found night-flying a debilitating exercise.

  Well before dawn was due, he saw dead ahead a large black blot in the eastern starry night that could only be a massive storm. ‘Johnnie,’ Kingsford Smith called over his shoulder to Stannage down the narrow passageway that was again open, now that the large petrol tank previously blocking it had been removed. ‘Ask Sydney if there has been a change in the weather. Look at that!’6

  In Arabella Street—as in many homes around Australia and in New Zealand, where families stuck close to the radio—the Kingsford Smith family took the news of the storm with equanimity and gallons of tea. It was the view of the matriarch Catherine, for one, that her Chilla had gone through so many storms that there wasn’t one out there that could bring him down. The near-octogenerian had been afraid so many times before, and he had always turned up safely, that she refused to put herself through it again. Otherwise, most people were simply stunned at the wonders of modern radio—they could actually hear John Stannage, with the muted engines in the background, giving reports of the journey, even though the plane was hundreds of miles away, and occasionally they could even hear Sir Charles Kingsford Smith himself!

  For once, for once, this storm didn’t prove to be too much of a problem and when the blessed dawn did welcome them back to the land of the living they were above the sort of lovely, white, billowy clouds that are to airmen what daisies are to the earth bound—the loveliest things imaginable to skip your way through. Things were looking up.

  Smithy handed the controls over to Bill Taylor, so he could stretch his legs and have a chat to Johnnie—who, in turn, had taken a break from his radio duties to prepare a breakfast for them of hard-boiled eggs, sandwiches and coffee from a black thermos flask. All seemed right with the world as, happily munching and sipping away, they worked out that they had already knocked off at least half of their journey. Then something was suddenly up.

  Bill Taylor, his mouth agape beneath his trim moustache, handed over to Smithy and pointed through the windscreen. Just back from the centre motor, which lay before their cockpit, they could see a tiny but angry sliver of flame coming from the point where the exhaust was connected. At first glance the situation didn’t look too dangerous, as it seemed that just a little bit of welding or some such on the manifold had come unstuck. And yet, as they put their breakfast aside and watched, mesmerised, the flame got bigger and the gap on the exhaust manifold widened. Something had to give…and it did.7

  While they were travelling at well over 90 miles per hour, at an altitude of 3000 feet, a solid piece of the exhaust manifold broke loose and was hurled by the slipstream straight at the starboard propeller…And where was Roland Garros or Anthony Fokker when they were needed? Two decades earlier, both men had mastered the art of getting small bits of metal through whirring propellers without causing any damage, and it was still possible that this could happen on this occasion. Alas, at speed, the piece of manifold hit and broke off a large chunk of the wooden starboard propeller, instantly causing the Southern Cross to vibrate appallingly—almost shaking them out of the sky.8

  At this point only a master pilot could have kept them in the air, but again, the Southern Cross was fortunate to have one on board. Realising on the instant what had happened, Smithy hauled the wheel into his chest to point the nose of the Southern Cross up high and bring her to just above the point of a shuddering stall. With a deft flash of his right hand he cut the magneto switch of the starboard engine and it windmilled, reluctantly, to a stop. Now the vibration had mercifully ceased, and with the Old Bus barely flying—her nose s
o high in the air—they could see the damage. One blade of the propeller had broken off about two-thirds from the tip and was wafting back and forth pathetically. For all that, Bill Taylor, witnessing Smithy’s manoeuvre first-hand, was stunned at the instantaneous, precise and intuitive skills displayed and, as he told John Stannage shortly afterwards, Smithy was pretty much the only pilot in the world who could have pulled it off.9

  The first that any of the many people following the course of the trip in Australia and New Zealand knew of the drama was the urgent voice of Stannage as it crackled through the static:

  Prop gone on starboard motor! Please inform all stations stand by. Please ask all stations stand by. May not be able to hold height.10

  Which left them where, precisely? Out in the middle of the Tasman Sea, with one engine useless and two engines snarling under the severe strain of having to work so hard to keep them aloft. It was just before seven o’clock in the morning, Australian time, and the immediate question to be answered was whether to keep going or to turn back? Again, Smithy was quick with his decision. To avoid the storms and heavy headwinds that were reported ahead, he immediately turned the plane for home, while Taylor worked out the proper course to get them to the nearest strip of hard sand on Stockton Beach just south of Port Stephens, on the New South Wales coast.

  And then they faced the next problem. Their weight was too great to maintain altitude on just two engines and they were already starting to sink towards the Tasman Sea. ‘Have to dump some weight!’ Taylor shouted to Smithy. ‘Shall I go ahead?’

  ‘Anything, except the mail!’11 Smithy yelled back. It was a decision that, frankly, rather underwhelmed Taylor in their extreme circumstances, but Smithy was the captain, and he didn’t argue, simply going back to pass on the order to Stannage.