Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  Now for the port engine. It was at this point that John Stannage himself attempted to finish the job by climbing out the window to the port side, only to find that he was facing certain death if he tried to continue. A much shorter man, when he stood on the strut his head did not come up to the bottom of the wing, meaning he had no capacity to get out to the engine. It would have to be Bill once more or no-one.31

  Smithy had to change seats to the starboard side, to give Bill room to get out the other cockpit opening. And this time it not only looked impossible, but was impossible. For no sooner had Bill begun to force his body out the opening than he was nearly hurled into all eternity, as he was hit with the wash of both the central and port propellers. And yet it had to be done, as the oil pressure on the port motor had nearly fallen away to just 15 pounds from its normal level of 63 pounds per square inch, and it could only be a matter of moments before the engine seized solid. The solution?

  There is safety in speed and height.

  Well, on just two engines, he couldn’t get speed, but Smithy could maybe get a little height. By gunning both the healthy centre engine and oil-starved port engine, he managed to climb to an altitude of about 700 feet, at which point he idled the port engine. Yes, on only one engine they would swiftly lose altitude, but with the howling slipstream reduced it might be possible for Bill to climb out to the port engine to pour the precious oil into its reservoir before Smithy would have to power the engines back up to escape the gaping jaws of the grey waves below.

  Bill would do it, or die in the attempt.

  Once more he disappeared out the window and was soon wrapped around the struts like a koala to a gum tree in a cyclone, at which point Smithy gunned the engine once more, and they began to torturously climb. The instant the engine was up to full throttle Bill was again in the wash of the two propellers and was nearly blown to oblivion.

  1.03 p.m. Still in the air. Changing oil from the dud motor to the sick one.32

  Then the blessed moment came, after altitude had been regained, when Smithy cut the throttle once more and Bill was able to get thermos after thermos of precious oil flowing into the engine, each one passed to him by John Stannage from the cockpit. In short order Bill heard shouts against the wind and looked up to see Smithy and Johnnie waving at him and grinning hugely. To their delight, the oil-pressure gauge had started to inch upwards and was soon back to normal!

  Bill Taylor, a man not given to great surges of emotion in any direction, nevertheless felt a burst of exhilaration that made him want to stand, laugh, and scream back at the screaming wind that had tried to stop him but failed. He had DONE it!33 And all he had to do now was to inch his way back along the strut into the plane and he would live.

  1.10 p.m. Bill Taylor is the world’s greatest hero. Hope to see land now in about ten minutes…

  Not that they were out of trouble for all that. Though the port engine now had black dinosaur-juice back in it and was able to keep going, it was obvious that damage had been done to it through the terrible hiding it had copped, and it was unable to deliver full power. Finally, Smithy took the decision that he had put off until there really was no other choice.

  As John Stannage peered anxiously at him from the open cockpit door, Smithy told him: ‘You’ll have to dump the mail, Johnnie! We can’t keep height.’34

  John Stannage didn’t have to be asked twice. With only 50 feet separating them from the waves below, he took out his knife and slashed the cords that bound the tops of the forty blue mailbags—each one over 20 pounds of dead weight—and hurled them out the door with every ounce of strength he had in him. In fact, the Postmaster General had already radioed permission for this, but it hit Smithy hard all the same, as a trail of sinking blue bags now lay behind them.

  Still, there was no doubt that the Southern Cross responded well to the decreased burden and he was able to get a little altitude once more, helped by the fact that over the previous hours they had burnt a lot of fuel. Only Smithy could have kept them aloft to this point, and every minute that passed was a good minute, bringing them closer to Mascot, and the help that was now on its way.

  The Australian coast was just 100 miles away when off their port bow they sighted a small steamer, a New Zealand vessel, the Port Waikato. An important decision had to be made. Should they do what Harry Hawker and Kenneth Mackenzie Grieve had done sixteen years earlier and ditch in front of the steamer, thus probably saving their lives? The downside was that they would lose the Southern Cross. Or should they chance it, keep going, and try to save both themselves and their legendary plane? Ditching the Southern Cross, which had never let him down, would not be easy if it came to it. As absurd as it might sound to an outsider, he loved her like a woman, and almost felt that she loved him. In the end, after Smithy discussed it with the crew, they decided to fly on.

  At last, on the horizon they saw a purple streak that didn’t alter, a line that proved to be the Australian coast about 30 miles away, but even then there was no lessening of tension. Now that they could see the promised land it looked infinitely far away, as the Southern Cross barely seemed to move towards it, or be likely ever to reach it.35

  Once more the oil pressure on the port engine fell away and it was obvious that either the completely sapped and bloodless Bill Taylor was going to have to risk his life again or they would have to ditch the plane. Smithy told Taylor he didn’t want him to do it, but this time it was Taylor who insisted they try to save the Southern Cross, and he climbed out the window once more to repeat the whole dramatic process until the port engine again gurgled with some blessed relief.36

  Six trips in all Bill made. Three to each side. Finally all he could do was sit beside Smithy, covered in oil from head to toe, and hope that the centre engine, also low on oil, could hang in there.

  At last, at 4.45 pm, the Southern Cross hotly coughed and hacked its way over Cronulla beach and dribbled in to Mascot airport—touching down fifteen hours and thirty-five minutes after taking off.

  Such was the drama of the day that a huge crowd of public and press had built up awaiting the return of the plane and they rushed forward en masse, once Smithy had cut the two engines and the propellers had stopped whirring. Observers could see oil dripping from the fuselage, and the shattered starboard propeller. For a moment there was nothing—no triumphant, grinning Smithy bursting forth hailing all and sundry, cracking one-liners. No sign of Stannage or Taylor either. Nothing.

  Inside the plane, none of the three men—barely believing they had made it and were still alive—could move.

  Finally, the door opened and out they came. Sort of…Were they ghosts of the men they had been? Smithy was barely recognisable, his eyes set deep in his skull, his face pale, every wrinkle a crevasse. He was so totally spent that he had to be helped on the arms of friends to make his way through the pressing throng.37 For his part, John Stannage seemed stooped, weighed down, perhaps by the enormity of the ordeal they had been through.

  ‘God, what a time we have had,’ he said, as he fell into the arms of his wife Beris, who had rushed to the airport. And yes, there was Taylor, covered in oil from top to toe, but showing signs of life, his bloodshot eyes sparkling from his blackened visage.

  Smithy was able to rouse himself to say, pointing to Bill, ‘If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t be here now.’38

  ‘Once is enough, that’s all I can say,’39 the navigator and new Australian hero smiled tiredly in reply.

  The aviators were led away to a private room in the Mascot hangar where, among others, Mary was waiting for her husband. Smithy embraced his weeping wife and held her long. ‘It’s all right,’ he tried to soothe her, ‘they can’t kill me.’40

  That evening, the exhausted Smithy finally made it home at about 10 pm, and promptly excused himself to have a hot bath. A friend of the family who was visiting became worried at his long absence and knocked on the bathroom door. Receiving no answer, and becoming alarmed, he opened the door to find Smithy fast asleep wit
h the water up to his chin.41

  The following day’s newspapers, both in Australia and around the British Empire, were filled with accounts of the extraordinary episode. And yet while much of the focus was on the heroics of Bill Taylor, there was also much comment on the fact that despite ‘KINGSFORD SMITH’S MISHAP’, as the headline in The Times ran,42 the ‘Jubilee’ mail had been lost, including a letter from the Governor-General to the King.

  For its part, the British aeronautical journal Aeroplane had no hesitation in attacking the whole concept of Kingsford Smith’s trans-Tasman flight. ‘If he were to disappear on a silly stunt such as the New Zealand flight,’ it thundered, ‘no sensible person could feel any sympathy…Kingsford Smith has tried his luck too high already on his trans-Pacific and Tasman flights.’43

  At least the man of the moment, Bill Taylor, was able to use the opportunity to tell the press that the whole point of the flight had been to generate public interest ‘so that people of the two Dominions would ensure that the trans-Tasman airmail service would be owned and operated by their own people. Quite frankly, we do not want the English company, Imperial Airways, to operate a service which is our own by right of the pioneering development which has been done.’44

  But against that, at a time when they had been obliged to dump 28,000 letters and packages, it was hardly the time to press their case that they should be given the privilege of carrying letters in the future.

  No doubt aware of the damage that had been done, Smithy was keen on flying to New Zealand as soon as the following day, in Ulm’s old machine Faith in Australia, to take a few mailbags that had been found in the tail of the Southern Cross and so had survived with 1000 letters, but received no support from anyone for such madness.45 (This proved to be extremely fortunate for Kingsford Smith, as just five flight hours later, one of the Faith’s engines blew a cylinder head, and had Smithy been over the Tasman at the time, the far greater weight of that plane would have sent him quickly into the drink.46) The mailbags would later make their way safely across the Tasman by steamer.47 If the whole episode proved anything, said New Zealand Prime Minister George Forbes, it was that the right type of machine had not yet been found to make a regular crossing to New Zealand practical.48

  In short, while it was wonderful to have survived, there was no escaping the fact that Smithy and his proposed ventures had taken yet one more hit. Compounding the situation was a severe lack of capital both to get his new airline up and running, and to pay for the new family home, which, thanks to hefty financial input from his father-in-law, was nearing completion at 33 Greenoaks Avenue, Darling Point.

  Beyond that generosity from Mary’s father, Smithy was broke and the only way out was to sell the now clearly past it Southern Cross to the Federal government, on the reckoning that it would put her on permanent display for the public. After negotiations, the government upped its offer from £1500 to £3000—not nearly as much as Smithy wanted but clearly as much as he was going to get—so he accepted, though he was not happy about it.

  As a matter of fact, Smithy wasn’t happy about much at all these days, as even on a good day he seemed restless, tetchy and demoralised. On a bad day he could swing back and forth between depression and anger. Nothing was going right. Everything was going to hell. This included money and energy he had put the previous year towards the building of a revolutionary chassisless car with a body of laminated wood, built on much the same principles as the fuselage of an aircraft, to be called the Southern Cross. Though six models had been made, it was already apparent that the idea was not going to take off, unlike its namesake.

  Another failed venture was a specially designed plane he had commissioned to be ready to fly the commercial trans-Tasman route. At a cost of £3700 to Smithy, the ‘Codock’ was a one-off twin-engined, high-wing monoplane conceived and built by Lawrence Wackett on Cockatoo Island, and its key characteristic was that, through myriad engine faults, it had a great deal of trouble staying in the air. In its final form it was judged to be worth just £75…and the financial pressure continued to build.49 (Other aviation entrepreneurs were far more careful with their money. At the modest family home of Hudson Fysh, in Brisbane, when the economic times had been at their toughest, they had ceased to buy the afternoon paper and gone to the picture theatre only when the cheapest sessions were on.50)

  But something wasn’t right. For the first time Smithy started having rows with Mary, who was at a loss to know quite what was wrong with her husband.51 What she did know was that he was a long way from the relatively carefree legend of a larrikin she had met six years earlier. And it was equally obvious that he was not yet ready to stay home with her and young Charles Jnr to do the gardening.

  On 6 June 1935, Smithy formally announced that he and his partners had formed a new company, rather grandly called the Trans-Tasman Air Service Development Company Ltd, with the stated aim of offering a regular air service between Australia and New Zealand. Imperial Airways, of course, was somewhat underwhelmed, as it was not of the view that an air service between Australia and New Zealand should be the preserve of those nations’ peoples. Rather, as a spokesman told the Melbourne Argus on the same day that Smithy made his announcement, that route ‘was certain to be included among the trunk lines of the great Imperial system’.52

  This Kingsford Smith fellow would have to be stopped.

  Behold, the ancient mariner…Why, it was none other than Captain Phillips, who thirty years earlier had put the fear of God into young Chilla when the youngster had been running amok on the Aorangi, when the family had been on its way to Vancouver for the first time. Smithy ran into him on a street in downtown Sydney, and was delighted to do so. The old man had followed the aviator’s career since he had first come to fame and was thrilled to meet him again now. Still, he couldn’t resist offering some advice.

  ‘You’ve done enough flying,’ he said with a smile. ‘I’d like to put those irons on you now and keep you here.’53

  18 July 1935 was a very big day in young John Ulm’s life. It was the day when the Southern Cross—once again scrubbed clean and repaired enough to safely fly a little way—would be handed over to the Australian government. At Smithy’s invitation the fourteen-year-old was going to be sitting in his late father’s co-pilot seat, beside Australia’s most famous man, as he flew the tri-motor Fokker from Mascot to Richmond. The ‘Old Bus’ was to be temporarily housed there until permanent accommodation in a museum-like environment could be found for her.

  ‘This is a great man’s seat, John,’ Smithy told the young’un, as the cameras rolled. ‘A man who took chances with a smile in this dear old bus of mine. A man whose name any boy would be proud to bear…‘54

  ‘Gee I wish Dad would [be with me] on this last flight, ‘John Ulm near whispered in reply.

  ‘Perhaps he is, John…’

  For the occasion, a crowd of several thousand people had gathered at the Mascot hangar where the Southern Cross had been prepared for her last flight. Smithy was in the formal dress-uniform of air commodore for the occasion, and looked resplendent in blue, with gold braids. A swagger stick completed the imposing picture.

  The Southern Cross, with young John in the cockpit—and Lady Mary Kingsford Smith, Bill Taylor, Beau Sheil and John Stannage in the cabin, together with one of Smithy’s friends from New Zealand, Reverend Colin Scrimgeour—took off and was escorted towards Richmond by no fewer than six Hawker Demon biplanes from the Royal Australian Air Force.55 In the course of the journey, Smithy made three brief detours. First he dipped down in sad salute over Keith Anderson’s grave at Mosman, before heading over to Longueville where—in the manner of Bert Hinkler several years before—he was able to buzz low over his mother standing in the front yard of her home, waving. Most exciting for young John Ulm, though, was when Smithy also swooped down joyously low over his primary school at Chatswood, with all the kids running into the yard and waving up to them, as John ecstatically waved back. Such fun!

  Smithy was ki
nd to the lad, but at the same time the great pilot also seemed a little sad at having to part company with the plane with which his name had become synonymous, a plane that had taken him around the world, across the seven seas, through wind, storm, hail and snow, and had never let him down.

  When they landed at Richmond RAAF base, Smithy seemed reluctant to get out of his seat, almost like he was glued to it, or it was a part of him. Finally, though, he stood up and slowly walked down the narrow passage which allowed him to exit via the rear stairs. There, a small crowd had gathered for the occasion, including a glitteringly turned-out Minister for Defence, Archdale Parkhill, who was often known as ‘Archduke’ for his propensity to overdress.

  ‘I am proud,’ the Defence Minister told Smithy in his brief formal speech, ‘to take over for the people this most famous aeroplane, from a man whose magnificent airmanship has made history for Australia.’56

  Everyone applauded, and Smithy then addressed them in a low, sorrowful voice about the plane that he loved: ‘She has been a living thing to me. I’ve spent one hundred and fifty days and twenty whole nights on board. During all her long flights she had never let me down. Even on that last flight across the Tasman, it was not the Southern Cross that failed me.

  ‘When the propeller was smashed, I seemed to hear her call out: “It isn’t me, boss! It’s that new bit of cowling.” One day, I want to put a brass plate on the old plane. It will bear an inscription something like this: “To my faithful Old Bus, in grateful memory and regard—from her boss.”’57

  With quavering voice, Smithy then read a poem he had composed.

  ODE TO THE OLD BUS

  Old faithful friend—a fond adieu,

  These are poor words with which to tell