Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  To this day, no-one knows. The only trace that ever emerged came in May 1937, when two fishermen were walking along the rocky shore of Aye Island off the south coast of Burma (today’s Myanmar), about 145 miles south-east of Rangoon, and came across the inflated wheel of an aircraft still attached to its undercarriage leg. Upon investigation, it was established that this wreckage belonged to the Lady Southern Cross—tangible proof, at least, that Smithy had crashed in water.

  The most popular theory to have emerged since the disappearance is that, flying late that night, Smithy clipped the 463-foot top of the jungle-covered island, tried to get his plane back under control but ended up crashing into the waters just off the island—hence the wheel floating to the shore eighteen months later, as the action of the incoming and outgoing tides broke one of the wheels loose. That theory has at its base the investigation conducted by Captain Alan Eadon, the Director of Civil Aviation of Burma at the time, who wrote in his report ‘if my suppositions are correct, then Aye Island must definitely be the scene of the accident and that the remainder of the wreckage of the aircraft lies covered with the sea around its shores.’6

  The other theory—which I personally find compelling—is put most cogently by the New Zealand writer Ian Mackersey, who studied the issue from all angles for many years and even managed to obtain a rare permit from the Myanmar’s military government in 1996 to visit Myanmar’s south coast. There he was able to interview locals, including those of such age that they could remember the events of 1935.

  Mackersey’s view is that Jimmy Melrose’s testimony that he saw the Lady Southern Cross can be accepted, and therefore Smithy was sighted at least 100 miles south of Aye Island. He contends that the prevailing currents in that area explain why the wheel, once it bobbed to the surface, would have subsequently drifted north.

  In an effort to prove the Aye Island theory correct, searches have been mounted in those waters, first by Jack Hodder in 1938, and by Ted Wixted in 1983 with, alas, no trace found of an aircraft lying at the bottom of the sea. Then, in late February 2009, the Australian documentary maker Damien Lay—the man who originally approached me to write this book—mounted a major search with state-of-the-art sonar equipment looking for traces of a plane around Aye Island. In late March, Lay claimed he had been successful, based on sonar images he said matched remains of the plane, with the news first breaking in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph.

  ‘To me it’s 100 per cent proof positive,’ Lay was quoted as saying. ‘The critical pieces of evidence are three equilateral triangles contained within what I believe is the starboard wing. These structures don’t occur in nature and they measure exactly 1.5m x 1.5m x 1.5m. We know those are the dimensions in which these aircraft were manufactured.’7

  What Lay took as proof-positive, however, others saw only as indeterminate grainy images, and most outspoken in extreme scepticism was Ian Mackersey himself, who called the claims ‘nonsense’.

  ‘The two occupants’ bodies would have quickly disappeared without trace,’ Mackersey told the press, ‘and so, in those tropical waters, would all the wooden components—followed eventually by the light alloy sections which would include quite a bit of the engine. All that will remain somewhere, probably spread across 200 yards of the ocean floor, will be the few steel parts of the engine.’

  For his part, Dick Smith told the Sydney Morning Herald of Lay’s claims: ‘It could be so but I think it’s about a one in 1000 chance.’8

  Undeterred, Lay has announced a plan to head back to Myanmar later in 2009 and mount a major retrieval operation to bring the plane back to Australia. I wish him well and hope he can prove us all wrong.

  Whoever is right, there is no clue as to what catastrophic failure of equipment—or total exhaustion or just possibly terrible judgment of the pilot—led to the crash, wherever it occurred. But what is certain is that there had been a time on nearly every long flight when Kingsford Smith, in his own words, had been in many, many ‘tough spots when it’s been touch and go whether I lived or died…’9 Always, in those situations he had managed to find the solution, often in extremis, that had allowed him to live. This time, sick, exhausted, older, slower…he did not and, again in his own words, it turned out that his ‘number was up’.

  Rest in peace, Smithy. You were a fascinating, courageous and inspiring man, a mixture of so many talents that for two decades of your adult life you were able to overcome your flaws to accomplish extraordinary things.

  For her part, Catherine Kingsford Smith was devastated by her youngest son’s death, outlived him by only a couple of years, and died at home on 18 March 1938.

  Smithy’s first wife, Thelma Corboy, never talked publicly about her first marriage, though in 1990 Mackersey was astounded to find that she was still alive at the age of eighty-nine and living in Perth. He made his best efforts to interview her, but was firmly rebuffed on the grounds that that part of her life was long gone and she wanted no-one to know that she had once been married to the ‘great aviator’, as she apparently referred to him. She had since gone on to a much happier second marriage.

  Nevertheless, Mackersey persisted and via the intermediary of one of Thelma’s cousins, Milton Baxter, was able to get much valuable detail about her time with Smithy, before she died in September of that year.

  As to Lady Mary Kingsford Smith, in 1937 she married again, this time an Englishman, Alan Tully, who was the Australasian and Far Eastern manager of the Ethyl Corporation. From then on she lived mainly in America and Canada, where she raised her son, Charles Jnr—who was just three years old when his father died—as well as a second child, Belinda, who was born to the couple. (Sadly, the baby with whom she was pregnant to Smithy, was miscarried shortly after he disappeared.) After Alan Tully died in 1975, following thirty-eight years of marriage, Mary married in 1984 for a third time, to a former General Motors executive, Frank Noldin, and they lived in Florida. Mary lived until the middle of 1997—dying at the age of eighty-seven—and generally remembered her first husband fondly, making herself available to appear at various commemorations over the years, as well as happily talking to most journalists and authors who asked her about him.

  Charles Jnr is now retired from his career as an electronics engineer and lives in Colorado. Among other passions, he is a pilot and a courageous one. In 1978, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Pacific Ocean being crossed for the first time, he decided to co-pilot a Cessna 340 II pressurised twin—fitted with extra fuel tanks, of course—on its delivery flight from San Francisco to Sydney. During the preparations for this flight, the young Australian television journalist Ray Martin, then working for the ABC’s This Day Tonight, turned up with the famed Vietnam War cameraman David Brill, wanting to fly with Charles Jnr from Wichita back to Colorado. And they would have, too, but when a tornado rolled in from Texas, blocking their path, Martin and Brill decided that it would be something close to suicide to take off.

  Not Charles Kingsford Smith Jnr, though. Spying on his radar a tiny window of opportunity in the middle of the tornado, he decided to go and at least have a look as to how manageable the weather was, and took off without them…As he discovered, it wasn’t remotely manageable and he ended up landing at a nearby airport, where he spent the night on a couch in the pilot’s lounge.

  No big deal. These things happen. Soon afterwards, Charles Jnr did indeed cross the Pacific in the path of his father, and was féted upon arrival. For the record, the only memory he retains of his father is being taken on ‘an airplane ride and sitting between two big men, one of them my father, I’m quite sure. I can still visualise the propeller turning in front—it must have been idling because I could see the blades. It was noisy and scary, and I was crying, and I think my mother was not too far away trying to comfort me. I don’t remember the ride itself, nor coming back. But I definitely was not happy about the whole experience!’10

  Captain Hancock continued his business and philanthropical ventures for another thirty years and passed
away, just nudging ninety years old, in 1965, to the end the very personification of his motto ‘Keep Moving’.

  In September 1931, Captain Les Holden who was piloting the Canberra when it discovered the Southern Cross and its crew at Coffee Royal, flew from Sydney to New Guinea in an historic first, and essentially followed up on Bobby Hitchcock’s dream by starting a successful air-freight business in those parts. Alas, the following year, on 18 September 1932, while briefly back in Australia, he was killed when a plane he was travelling in from Sydney to Brisbane crashed near Byron Bay.

  Jimmy Melrose did not survive Charles Kingsford Smith for long. On Sunday, 5 July 1936, he was killed instantly when, in the middle of a terrible storm over South Melton, Victoria, his wooden Heston Phoenix plane crashed into a field strewn with boulders, one of which connected with his head, splitting it, according to the Canberra Times, ‘like an overripe rockmelon’.11

  After years of languishing in storage, the Southern Cross at last emerged to public view when it was placed in a hangar at Brisbane’s Eagle Farm airport on 17 August 1958. High in the air above, a skywriter traced the word ‘Smithy’ in the clear blue Brisbane sky, while five RAAF Meteor jets flew over the ceremony in a formation representing the celestial Southern Cross.12 Charles Ulm’s son, John—who had gone on to a distinguished career as a journalist and then executive with Qantas—presided at the dedication. Most interestingly, he had been instrumental in getting Harry Lyon, now a rather crotchety 73-year-old, to attend with his wife. Ol’ Harry—who had served his country once again in World War II, even commanding a small cargo vessel—said very little at the ceremony, but one thing that he stated into a microphone John Ulm would treasure ever afterwards: ‘Without Charlie Ulm, we would never have got into the air.’13 Thirty years on, and it was at last all even on the cards between Harry and Charles Ulm.

  Harry passed away in the Veterans Hospital at Togus, Maine, on 30 May 1963.

  As to Jim Warner, who also came out to Australia for the dedication with one of the six wives he married in his allotted life span, the one constant in his life was radio. After returning from that first Pacific crossing he opened a radio shop in Fresno, California, before serving in World War II as a radio instructor. He did, nevertheless, complain for the rest of his life—I said, he did, NEVERTHELESS, COMPLAIN for the rest of his life—that the Southern Cross journey had permanently damaged his hearing. He died in 1970 at the age of seventy-eight.14

  With Eagle Farm airport closing, the Southern Cross was moved again in late 1987 to its present and permanent home at the Sir Charles Kingsford Smith Memorial, on the approaches to Brisbane airport.

  The fate of the effete Alberto Santos-Dumont, who first came to fame as the flying dandy of Paris and the first man to get an aircraft aloft in Europe, is a curious one. By the early 1930s, he was living in the land of his birth, Brazil, and on 23 July 1932, while in the city of Guarujá, he hanged himself, without leaving a note. It was, however, said that he was depressed over both the fact that he had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and how aircraft, his beloved flying machines, had become devastating weapons of war. (A mercy then, perhaps, that he did not live to see the likes of the London Blitz, or the levelling of Dresden by Allied bombers in World War II.)

  Of the 14-bis itself, I can find no trace. The best reckoning seems to be that Santos-Dumont broke up that original to use in subsequent planes. A number of flying replicas have been built and are extant in Brazil. One of the replicas was displayed at the 2005 Le Bourget Paris Airshow. Another replica was unsuccessful in becoming airborne during a test flight at Bagatelle in 2006 when a wing folded.

  The Blériot XI hangs from the ceiling of the Musée National des Art et Metiers Techniques in Paris, not quite forgotten but certainly with little fanfare. To look at it up close is to be simply staggered by both its fragility and Blériot’s courage in setting off across the English Channel in it. At Les Barraques, from where he set off, the once rolling farmlands are now densely populated and the point of departure is today a school, but at least that school is named after Blériot. Alicia would have been proud.

  Louis Blériot, with his wife, Alicia, beside him all the way, continued to prosper through the 1920s and early 1930s, as his aviation manufacturing company Blériot-Aéronautique maintained its position as a leader in its field. He remained a highly respected figure in the international aviation community until his death on 1 August 1936, in Paris. He is buried in the Cimetière des Gonards in Versailles.

  Anthony Fokker also prospered throughout the 1930s, the Depression notwithstanding, with his planes being placed with no fewer than fifty-four airlines around the world. Alas, in 1939 he contracted pneumococcal meningitis—an inflammation of the brain and spinal cord—and, after fighting a losing battle for three weeks, died in New York City. He was forty-nine years old.

  These days, Roland Garros is famed as the name of the stadium where the French Tennis Open is played in Paris every year, though the man himself, his long-distance aviation feats and the fact that he was the first to turn his plane into a flying machine gun has been substantially forgotten. After he was shot down by the Germans in 1915 and taken prisoner, he was well treated by his captors, being put in a camp for elite prisoners. Desperate to get back to fight in the war, Garros made many attempts to escape and finally succeeded in February 1918, when he crossed the border into Holland. He returned to an air war that was unrecognisable from the one he had left, in which the planes were far faster and more manoeuvrable, and the guns far more lethal than anything he had experienced to that point. On 5 October 1918, just five weeks before Armistice, and the day before his thirtieth birthday, Roland Garros was shot down and killed at Vouziers, in the Ardennes region. There he was buried, and there lie his remains today.

  And then there was Charles Nungesser. As recounted in Mark Sufrin’s book, The Brave Men, a lobster fisherman was working his pots in Casco Bay off Maine, on the east coast of the United States, in January 1961 when he was surprised to haul onto his boat a strange catch—a large piece of aluminium with some rivets apparent. He handed it over to police and, after scientific examination, the word came back that it appeared to be part of an aircraft made in the 1920s. What is more, when all the gunk over the metal was cleaned off, it showed a coat of white paint, with an edging of black. Perhaps part of an enormous black heart?15 If so, Nungesser and Coli really did get extraordinarily close to flying across the Atlantic Ocean, from Paris to New York.

  Not the slightest trace of the New Zealand aviators Moncrieff and Hood has ever been found, though there have been many false dawns. As to their widows, Dorothy Moncrieff lived at the same address in Wellington for many years afterwards, but a few months after her 31-year-old husband disappeared, the very private Laura Hood returned to her native England to nurse her ill mother and never returned.

  Wigram Field, where Kingsford Smith and Ulm landed in September 1928 to complete the first trans-Tasman crossing, remained the hub of New Zealand aviation for many decades afterwards. By pure happenstance, I visited Wigram on 27 February 2009, the last day it was to be operational as an airfield. Though houses will soon be marching across it—as part of a new development—the actual spot where the Southern Cross landed will be marked for perpetuity by a plaque in a park.

  Harry Hawker has been substantially forgotten in his native Australia, despite his massive contribution to international aviation. At least his name, however, and to a certain extent his legacy, lives on in the form of the famed aerostructure component-manufacturing company Hawker de Havilland, a division of Boeing. This is a direct descendant on the corporate family tree of the company H.G. Hawker Engineering, which Hawker had established in 1920 with Sir Thomas Sopwith and two others, which continued to prosper after his tragic death at the age of thirty-two.

  Muriel Hawker, aged twenty-six, was left with two toddler daughters when her husband died. Consumed by grief, she could only just function. Spurred on by Mrs Phyllis Sopwith, however, she r
esolved to set down for posterity the extraordinary events of Harry’s life, and in July 1922 her book, HG Hawker: Airman—His Life and Work, was published. To provide an income Muriel started a shop in London selling smallgoods, put it on its feet, and in due course, bought another. And then another. And then still another. In 1929 she married again, this time a ship’s doctor, whom she had met on a voyage to New York—but sadly, he died only six years later. Bowed but unbroken, Muriel married a third time just before the outbreak of World War II—another doctor—and more or less lived happily ever after, never too far from her daughters or subsequent six grandchildren, and great-grandchild. ‘It must have been an odd sort of life,’ her grandson, Kenneth Hope-Jones, noted in a letter to me in December 2008. ‘The early years with Harry were meat and drink to a girl of Muriel’s spirit, and were surely the most entrancing years of her life: and yet she lived for another sixty-two years after Harry’s death. But she never lived in the past: she got on with her life and lived it to the full. I, her eldest grandchild, remember her with great affection.’

  Muriel died in 1983 at the age of eighty-seven, adored by all of her descendants.

  Both of Bert Hinkler’s most famous aeroplanes—the Avro Baby, G-EACQ, and his Avro Avian, G-EBOV—are at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane and are impressively displayed. As to Nancy, the seeming love of Hinkler’s life, there is little trace of her beyond the first few months after his death—and for good reason. In a bizarre tale, it turned out that although they had intended to marry after the Great War, there was a legal impediment caused by her previous marriage being technically still in existence. So they had simply lived together as a married couple to all intents and purposes—and certainly, Nancy was always described in the press as his wife, ‘Mrs Hinkler’. But wait, there’s more. For Nancy, Bert’s family and the Australian authorities were all staggered to find out in the weeks after his death that on Saturday, 21 May 1932, eight months before his death, Hinkler had secretly married in Connecticut an American woman by the name of Katherine Rome, whom he had met seven years previously. As this was, apparently, his only legal marriage, it was Katherine who subsequently inherited his estate. It was a saga worthy of a book, and the late, great, Ted Wixted has written it: The Last Flight of Bert Hinkler.