Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  And that, was indeed, the last straw.

  TO HELL with the lot of them! He would be damned if he would sign any such humiliating document, even if he could have proved he owned the plane three times over. With no money to go back by ship, and no money to stay on, now he really did have no choice. He would have to fly home—and if he was going to do that he would make sure he broke the record and that would be the end of it. His whole flying experience to that point had been that no matter how bad he felt going into a flight, once in the air he mostly came good so he triumphed in the end, and he could only hope that would hold true this time as well.

  After one false start when he had been beset so badly by a terrible flu that the flight had to be postponed, just after dawn on the morning of Wednesday, 23 October, he began to warm up the engine of the Lady Southern Cross and prepare to mount his attempt. There to see him off was Charles Scott, a good sport, whose fifty-one-hour record to Darwin and seventy-two-hour record to Melbourne Smithy was now determined to break. This was it, his last hurrah…

  ‘I am now 38,’ he told journalists gathered for the occasion, ‘and win or lose, this is my last record attempt. Really, my last.’72 And this time he really did mean it, acutely aware that this was his fair-dinkum last long flight. A bastard of a one, but one he just had to do.

  No matter that he was back within a couple of days, after hitting a violent storm over Greece which did some damage to the wings, and he was obliged to limp back to Croydon via Brindisi, Italy. Of course, he was intent on trying again.

  In the interim, Beau Sheil was preparing to leave for America hoping to raise in New York the capital they needed to get the Trans-Tasman Air Service Development Company Ltd established. He made one last attempt to convince Smithy to accompany him, on the grounds that his name and clout was what was needed, but Smithy refused to be dissuaded.73 Beau, reluctantly, left him to it and sailed west across the Atlantic on 3 November 1935 after failing, at dockside, one last time to convince his friend to abandon the flight.

  ‘I don’t feel fit enough for the job,’ Smithy told him, ‘but I am going to see it through.’74

  Mary pleaded with her husband. Begged him, her desperation crackling down the line. Please don’t make this flight! PLEASE. Alas, the heavily pregnant Mary had no more success in the phone call she made the night before Charles was due to take off this second time around. She promised that if he would just get on a ship, she would meet him halfway in Ceylon, but nothing she said would change his mind. As she later told author Ian Mackersey, ‘He admitted he was ill, but I knew that nothing I said would stop him. He just kept saying he wanted very desperately to get home to be with me. There was a sense of panic about the urgency, as if he couldn’t hold out much longer.’75

  That afternoon Smithy and Tommy Pethybridge flew the Altair from Croydon to Lympne on the Kentish coast, from where they reckoned they would have less chance of being fogged in for an early-morning departure. They stayed in Hythe Hotel at the Norman-times Cinque Port town of Hythe, 31/2 miles from the airstrip.

  At the first flush of dawn on 6 November 1935, they were ready once more. ‘There’ll be no turning back this time,’ Smithy told one journalist, ‘I must stick up somehow.’76

  On top of everything else, Smithy had had a gutful of the cold and fog of England, of the constant sniffles, of wrapping up in heavy clothing and hopping up and down to keep warm, as his teeth chattered. If he could pull this off he would be back into an Australian summer before he knew it.

  ‘I want to see the sunshine again,’ he told another journalist, ‘but most of all, get back to my family…‘77

  And with that, they were off, flying away to the south-east at 6.28 am.

  At 4.30 pm local time, they were in Athens, having traversed the 1760 miles in just eight hours, at an average speed of some 220 miles per hour. All good, everything going well. Next stop Baghdad, and they were on their way in only a couple of hours, arriving there at dawn the following day. Again their time was good, only ninety minutes behind Scott and Black at that stage, even though the Englishmen with their full tanks, from the beginning, had been able to fly there directly.

  In Australia, everyone was waiting for news on his flight, but nowhere more than in Melbourne, where Mary had gone home to her mother’s house to await the arrival of her husband in that city, and in Arabella Street, where Catherine was monitoring closely the progress of her last-born.

  The good news was that at one o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday, 7 November, the Lady Southern Cross was spotted by an airport controller using binoculars at Karachi, cruising south-east at an altitude of about 15,000 feet—proven to be the level at which the supercharged Wasp engine worked at optimum efficiency, even if aviators had to breathe heavily to get enough oxygen in their lungs—a tiny speck in the far skies. Due to an infernal headwind, however, when Smithy and Pethybridge arrived at sundown at Allahabad’s Bamrauli aerodrome, in Northern India, just over 2300 miles away from Baghdad, their time had fallen back to being nearly three hours behind Scott and Black’s mark.78

  One way of catching up was to simply refuel and keep going, barely taking the time to wolf down some food, let alone anything as indulgent as a rest. In total, they were on the ground for no more than an hour before they were winging their way onwards once again. Next stop, Singapore, which was 2200 miles away. If they could get the wind to go their way, they really might be able to cut into Scott and Black’s record.

  Just after 9 pm, the Lady Southern Cross was spotted in the moonlight over Calcutta’s Dum Dum aerodrome, before Smithy took her out over his dreaded Bay of Bengal, the one exceedingly long stretch of water on the trip. Still, they made it, and around midnight, they were spotted above Akyab aerodrome in northern Burma, making good time by the light of a setting full tropical moon. From there, Smithy was heard, but not seen, flying over the Burmese capital of Rangoon at around 1.30 am. At three o’clock that morning of 8 November 1935, another Australian pilot by the name of Jimmy Melrose—endeavouring to break Smithy’s solo record of seven days and four hours between England and Australia in his green Percival Gull Four, Westley—was on his way to Singapore from Rangoon. Flying above the Andaman Sea off the coast of Burma, to his great excitement he thought he saw the blue glow from the twin exhaust pipes of Smithy’s much faster Altair overtake him at an altitude of about 10,000 feet, a couple of hundred feet above him. An imprecise thing, true, at that time, in that situation, to positively identify another plane, but that was certainly his impression. It had to be good ol’ Smithy. Still out there, still going strong! It was an honour to be in the same skies as the famous aviator.

  When Jimmy landed in Singapore several hours later, a short time after dawn, he looked out for the Lady Southern Cross and was surprised it was not visible on the tarmac. Perhaps it was in one of the hangars being worked on or, just maybe, Smithy had already refuelled and taken off again, as his stamina was legendary. Either way, Jimmy’s sense of disappointment was keen.

  Where was Smithy, he asked cheerfully, upon alighting from his cockpit. Smithy hasn’t arrived yet? But that’s not possible! Jimmy had been in his much slower Percival Gull, while Smithy had been in his speedy Lockheed Altair, nudging 200 miles per hour at 13,000 feet altitude and he had personally seen Smithy overtake him in the wee hours of the morning! How could it be that he hadn’t landed?

  After talking it over with ground staff, the situation became as clear as it was serious. There were no other airports within cooee of the Lady Southern Cross’s fuel range, and the only possible explanation was that Smithy and Tommy Pethybridge had met with misadventure and perhaps…disaster. Within hours a major search operation was under way as squadrons of planes and fleets of ships methodically covered every square mile along his route. The searchers included Jimmy Melrose who announced that, ‘I cannot continue while there is a chance of finding my fellow Australian’,79 and so immediately retraced his path to see if he could spot anything.

  In Aus
tralia, Smithy’s family was devastated that he had clearly failed to break the record, but not unduly worried that he hadn’t turned up yet. Smithy’s brother Wilfrid told the press: ‘It is not likely the boys overflew Singapore. It is my theory he took the jungle route to Burma to avoid monsoon storms over the ocean. It is also possible that if forced down he may have landed on one of the emergency airport fields which have been established along the Malay Peninsula on the coast line of the Bay of Bengal, without radio communication. I have no fear for his safety. He has been lost several times before and I feel confident he will come out all right.’80

  And so said all of them.

  As to Mary, in Melbourne with Tommy Pethybridge’s wife, she too was very upset that the record would not now be broken, but not unduly alarmed. ‘He has been in many difficult situations,’ she told the press, ‘and his ability has always pulled him through. I have the utmost confidence in him, and I am sure that if he has met trouble he has made a safe landing.’

  Strangely, despite all her previous fears about what might happen to him, now that he had actually disappeared she felt confident that her husband was safe somewhere. There had been other times when he’d gone missing, or had been hideously overdue and always, always he had turned up. That would no doubt be the case this time, too.

  The search continued, with two RAF planes based in Penang flying off the coast of Siam, as well as over the Burmese jungle for any sign. Ships in the area were alerted to keep a lookout, as were the Imperial Airways and KLM aircraft travelling the route.81 From Singapore, none other than Charles Scott himself, who happened to be passing through, took an RAF Singapore III reconnaissance flying boat and, after refuelling at Victoria Point began flying low over the Bay of Bengal, looking for the tiniest sign.82

  Alas, between them all, after those first few days of frantic searching they turned up with…nothing. Undaunted, they continued to search, and before a week had passed every island on his route had been looked at, sometimes with landing parties. Wireless broadcasts went out to all stations asking people for any information they might have on the aviators, and leaflets were circulated among jungle dwellers in their own language, asking the same.83 In Sydney, Hudson Fysh of Qantas Airways made plans to get one of their planes from Sydney to join in the search, and this was soon done.84 All up, the biggest land and sea search operation in history was quickly under way.

  Inevitably, in such circumstances there was a lot of focus on Jimmy Melrose’s last sighting of the Lady Southern Cross, and just where that occurred, though not everyone gave that sighting credence. Qantas pilot George Urquhart ‘Scotty’ Allan, for one, went public with his view that the light of a ship on the horizon was easily mistaken for the exhaust trail of an aeroplane.85

  As the days passed there was still no sign. No-one wanted to believe it—no-one could believe it—but inevitably hope began to fade. In the House of Representatives five days after the disappearance, Minister of Defence Archie Parkhill gravely informed the honourable members that the only action left was to search the dense jungle. What made it difficult, he noted, was that Kingsford Smith had left little in the way of a flight plan, and after he was certainly spotted above Rangoon, everything else was mere conjecture as to his next destination.

  This was not good enough for the Opposition, with the ALP Member for Hunter, Rowland James, boring in, asking whether the government felt they had contributed to Kingsford Smith’s death by having considered him too old for a government position. The government did not. The member for Melbourne, Mr William Maloney, asked the minister whether, with all the loss of life in such endeavours, record-breaking flights should be prevented from continuing. No, the government did not.86

  From Arabella Street, Eric Kingsford Smith, Chilla’s next oldest brother, told of how his family had been contacted by many mediums and spiritualists and received conflicting information about where the two men had come down.87 One of these psychics divulged publicly that the men were no longer alive, their plane had landed in the sea at 8.12 am, floated for three hours and thirty-two seconds before sinking and drowning both aviators. They had sunk—let’s see—68 miles offshore.88

  And then, just when despair was starting to set in, at last came the breakthrough. On Friday, 22 November, a fortnight after they had disappeared, flares were sighted by the captain of a vessel steaming past Sayer Island just off the coast of Siam—a place that was right on Smithy’s flight path.89 That had to be them! They should have known that Smithy would have survived!

  Alas, as quickly as hope surged in Mary—now back in Sydney with Charles Jnr—as she took cautiously congratulatory phone calls and visits from her nearest and dearest, it died. A Qantas plane was assigned to buzz low over Sayer Island and did so for a couple of hours, but saw nothing. Had the missing pilots in fact been there, they surely would have managed to make themselves known. Clearly it was a false report.

  On that very day, as it happened, the Defence Minister advised that the RAF would no longer be participating in the search, as the situation was now judged to be hopeless.

  And then, as is the way of these things, another report came in. On Sunday, 24 November 1935, a report filtered back from a Siamese train-driver that he had heard from a woodcutter living in the area that, on the night Smithy disappeared, he had seen a plane in flames heading towards the Setul Mountains, on the border of Malaya and Siam, in the middle of a fierce storm.90 Alas, after an RAF plane was dispatched to closely check the area this proved to be another false alarm.

  Hope slumped. Mary hugged Charles Jnr all the tighter, and the Kingsford Smith clan held the both of them close to their collective bosom, as they hoped against hope there would be a breakthrough and that the obvious conclusion—that their beloved was dead—was not true.

  And then, at last, and this time it really had to be something, came a genuinely credible report.

  On Monday, 25 November, a crackly wireless message was received from the remote Siamese village of Kjupun, whereby a villager told how four days earlier he had met someone in another village who told him of how two weeks earlier a plane with a broken wing had landed in the jungle in the Laik Pu area, 85 miles south of Victoria Point. And they had found two airmen! One of them had a broken leg and the other was unhurt!

  This time, this time, it had to be true. The whole report was too detailed to be conjured out of nothing.91

  Sure enough, it more or less was true. But alas, when the whole thing was sorted out, it turned out to be two Polish airmen.

  Smithy and Tommy Pethybridge remained missing as Christmas came and went. Mary took Charles Jnr down to spend some time with her parents in Melbourne, trying not to weep too often in front of her son, but not always succeeding. Catherine, under no such constraints, wept openly most of the time. Then New Year was upon them all.

  Bit by bit the realisation really did sink in. As impossible as it seemed, that wonderful, laughing man—so full of energy, fun, vitality, charisma, derring-do, wisecracks, courage, vigour—had gone the way of Manfred von Richthofen, Harry Hawker, Ross Smith, Ormer Locklear, Charles Nungesser, John Moncrieff, George Hood, Bert Hinkler and so many, many others. How could they have believed it would have ended any other way? Could Smithy have truly believed it could turn out differently?

  He was a daring flying man in a daring flying age when, almost without exception, flyers of daring died. Charles Kingsford Smith and those magnificent men all knew the risk, and went on regardless. They all had in common that they had pursued the greatest passion of their lives, and very much the passion of the age—flying—to the point that it had ended their lives.

  The widows wept, the masses mourned, but at least these men had lived lives like no others, before or since—something worth remembering, and saluting, nigh on a century later.

  Vale.

  EPILOGUE

  Surely it cannot be that this laughing, sunny-haired baby, eager boy and great-hearted man, who gave so much happiness to all around him, has really lef
t us. Is it not more likely that in some sea-girt isle, carried thither by the drift of reckless ocean currents far from the ebb and flow of our fitful civilisation, he and his companion keep watch, with wistful eyes, for the help that seems so long in coming?

  WINIFRED SEALBY, CHARLES KINGSFORD SMITH’S OLDEST SISTER, WRITING WHIMSICALLY IN 19501

  We need such performances as Sir Charles Kingsford Smith’s, not only to advance the technique of transportation, but to enlarge our conception of our social destiny. The man who thinks nothing of skimming through the air for a distance of 3,000 miles between sunrise and sunset sets us dreaming of a Wellsian future, when the whole atmosphere will become a playground and the barriers to the free intercourse of nations seem ridiculous.

  EDITORIAL IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, NOVEMBER 19352

  As it was, there was no other way for Smithy. To have dragged out his life in some physically secure but drab situation would have been death for him anyhow. He was completely right in setting out upon this flight. It was necessary for the freedom of spirit on which he lived.

  BILL TAYLOR, ON SMITHY’S FINAL FLIGHT, AND ITS RESULT3

  On 16 March 1936, Lady Kingsford Smith appeared in Sydney’s Probate Court and swore to the death of her husband. ‘From today,’ said one press report, ‘Sir Charles Kingsford Smith is legally dead.’4 Only a few months afterwards, on Friday, 14 August 1936, the Defence Minister, Archie Parkhill, announced that Mascot airport in Sydney would officially become Kingsford Smith Aerodrome to mark his contribution to world aviation.5

  So what did happen to Smithy and Tommy Pethybridge?