Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  In 1936 Bert’s mother, Frances, travelled from her home in Bundaberg, Queensland, all the way to the other side of the world, to Italy, and visited both the monument that had been built at the spot where her Bert had crashed, and his grave in Florence. In 2008, that gravesite was refurbished by the Hinkler House Memorial Museum, situated in his home town of Bundaberg.

  The good fortune of the DC-2 Uiver, which was so wonderfully saved in Albury, did not last long. Only a few months later, it disappeared while on a routine flight between Amsterdam and Batavia in the Dutch East Indies—now Indonesia—flying the Cairo-to-Baghdad leg in the early hours of 20 December 1934. At 2.30 am, a radio message was received in Baghdad reporting that the DC-2 was lost, and then nothing more was heard. Its burnt-out wreckage was found two days later in the Syrian desert, with the loss of all seven lives on board, although many items of its singed cargo of Christmas mail were retrieved and today attract a premium on the philatelic market.16

  Sir Keith Smith, who had first risen to fame as the co-winner of the famous £10,000 race in 1919 between England and Australia, with his brother Sir Ross Smith in their Vickers Vimy plane, long endured as a respected figure in the Australian aviation industry. After that victory, and the subsequent tragic death of his brother, he became the representative of Vickers in Australia, and was a highly regarded director of many airlines and other public companies. He died, aged sixty-five, on 19 December 1955, a wealthy man. In his will, he left a bequest to Wally Shiers, the only surviving crew member of the England to Australia flight. The Vickers Vimy plane G-EAOU is now proudly displayed at Adelaide airport.

  As to Koene Dirk Parmentier—the Uiver’s courageous pilot on that dark and stormy night over Albury—he fared a little better. By the end of World War II he had risen to the position of the Dutch airline KLM’s chief pilot, and then devoted himself to the company’s training school, where he was particularly strong on lecturing young pilots on aviation’s many dangers and how to avoid them. Especially, the importance of watching out for the power lines on the approaches to Prestwick airport in Scotland, he said, showing slides. Tragically, in 1948, while in command of KLM Lockheed Constellation Nijmegen in deteriorating weather, he took the big airliner into those very wires, and all on board were killed. The airport’s approach charts were riddled with errors and the pylons for the 132,000-volt main nationalgrid cables were shown as being 45 feet high. They were really at 450 feet—the height at which Parmentier was circling to an alternative runway which he had forbidden KLM pilots to use at Prestwick in low cloud.17

  In 1977, the multimillionaire electronics entrepreneur and aviation enthusiast Dick Smith set out with a team in well-equipped four-wheel drives and a helicopter to find the Kookaburra in the Tanami Desert. It eluded them. Undeterred, and knowing it was there, he and his team returned the following year and, after another six days’ search, they found it, on 21 August 1978. The Northern Territory Museum immediately sent out a ground party to recover the wreckage, which is now on permanent display in Alice Springs, a stone’s throw from where it took off for its last flight.

  Bon Hilliard never really got over the death of Keith Anderson. In 1935, she did marry another good man, Major Thomas Tate, though he died just eleven years later, and she never remarried. And yet the wounds caused by the aviator’s tragic death remained raw. In 1977, it was Dick Smith who told her personally that the telegram she had sent to Keith in April 1929, advising that she did still want to marry him, had reached him at Broken Hill, as it was found on his corpse. She cried at the news—it was something that had haunted her for decades. Such was her feeling for Anderson that a part of her final will and testament, opened upon her death in 1982 was the request that her ashes be scattered from the air above Keith’s grave in Mosman’s Rawson Park. Sadly, it was no simple matter in the early 1980s to take a light plane low over a heavily built-up area for such a purpose, and it was not possible to fulfil that request.

  In the meantime, on 12 May 1981, after much searching, Dick Smith also located the site of Coffee Royal where Smithy had put the Southern Cross down in 1929. As a matter of interest, he decided to burn some sump oil to see if it would show up against the green foliage that abounded all around. It didn’t show up. And yet burning some branches that they cut down clearly did.

  Smithy had been right!

  From being no more than a remote religious settlement, Drysdale River Mission achieved rather more significant aviation fame in World War II, when it became the site for an air base, and was heavily bombed by the Japanese for its trouble in 1943. It now has the name of Kalumburu and is a closed Aboriginal community.

  On the fortieth anniversary of the first aerial crossing of the Tasman Sea—11 September 1968—Ross McWilliams, a pilot for Air New Zealand, flew one of that airline’s DC-8s from Christchurch to Sydney. On board was his father, none other than Tom McWilliams. Greeting them in Sydney was Hal Litchfield—whose career after his flying days were over had encompassed returning to marine navigation on the Tahiti, and joining the Royal Australian Navy Reserve—thus reuniting the last two survivors of the first Tasman flight, as well as the Coffee Royal episode.

  After those adventures, Tom had forged a successful career as a sales representative with the Shell Oil Company, before being put in charge of the Royal New Zealand Air Force’s Air Training Corps during World War II, and then embarking on a successful career in business after the war was over. When the fiftieth anniversary of the first crossing was celebrated, this time with Ross McWilliams flying an Air New Zealand DC-10 from Sydney to Christchurch, alas Tom McWilliams had been in his grave for five months, having died on 28 April 1978. And yet, on board was not only Hal Litchfield, still going strong, but Charles Kingsford Smith Jnr and John Ulm. Hal Litchfield, after a career in the Royal Australian Naval Reserve, died in 1987.

  On 26 October 1958, a young construction worker on the Snowy Mountains Scheme, by the name of Tom Sonter, momentarily jack of working seven days a week, decided to take Sunday morning off to go for a walk up Mount Blackjack, within a few cooees of the tiny village of Tumbarumba.18 It was a beautiful day and, wandering from his original destination, he was heading through heavy foliage in Deep Creek Gorge, about 150 yards below the ridge line, when, for no good reason he could think of, he stopped to look around.19 Then he saw something that looked a little odd. It was a mound of earth that didn’t look natural in an environment that was otherwise entirely untouched by man. Going over to investigate, he found a bit of metal, from which tall saplings protruded, and put his hand on it. It looked like some kind of tubular steel. And this, what was this? A moveable horizontal flap on what looked to be the tail of…an aircraft? In an instant, the big lump of indeterminate shape before him formed up into what it was—the remains of a crashed plane from long ago. In the silence, birds twittering nearby suddenly seemed unnaturally loud, and the buzz of the Australian bush almost a little oppressive. Uncertain if this wreck was known or unknown, he walked back to camp with a petrol cap and a stamped engine part. Before long his world went crazy—it turned out he had discovered the Southern Cloud.

  Among the few human remains that were found—basically fragments of bone—was a gold men’s watch that had stopped at 1.15 pm. From Sydney the plane had only made 220 miles, at an average of just 44 miles per hour. For the families of those who had gone missing all those years ago the discovery of the wreckage was a bittersweet relief.

  The granddaughter of pilot Travis ‘Shorty’ Shortridge, Cynthia Balderstone, would ever after remember going with her brother Christopher, as they accompanied their mother, Yvonne—Shorty’s daughter—down to Bondi Beach on a moonlit night not long afterwards.20 All their lives, their mother had never said that their grandfather had ‘died’, only that he was ‘lost’. And now she at last knew the truth. As they stood there by the water’s edge in the moonlight, their middle-aged mother used a stick to scrawl in the sand, the words:

  Daddy, now I know where you are21

  A
nd then the three of them stood alone on the beach in the moonlight, watching that scrawl until a wave came and washed it away. After her death, Yvonne’s ashes were scattered at the crash site.

  Bill Taylor was awarded an MBE for his bravery in saving the Southern Cross in 1934 as it staggered back across the Tasman, and this was later changed to a George Cross, when the awards system was altered. He went on to a sterling aviation career which included being the first man to cross the Indian Ocean by air. In 1954, Taylor was knighted for his services to aviation and, as one of the most respected aviators in the world, died of a heart attack in Honolulu on 16 December 1966, aged seventy.

  As to the other notable Taylor of Australian aviation, George A. Taylor, who founded the Aerial League of Australia and was at the forefront of the need for the Australian government to get behind Australian aviation—he died in his bath in his Sydney home on 20 January 1928, after an epileptic seizure.

  Harry Houdini, of course, continued to build his extraordinary fame as a magician, long after his visit to Australia in 1910, though there is no record of him ever flying again after his efforts at Rosehill Racecourse in April of that year. In 1926 he was in Montreal and was asked by an aggressive McGill University theology student, J. Gordon Whitehead, what the magician’s opinion was ‘of the miracles mentioned in the Bible’? Houdini was instantly cautious. He had run a long and public campaign against so-called spiritualists, mediums and the like, exposing them as frauds and charlatans, but had learnt to draw the line before attacking religion, as many people were easily offended.

  ‘I prefer,’ he therefore said in reply, ‘not to discuss or to comment on matters of this nature.’22

  But then, uncharacteristically deciding to go a bit further, Houdini continued. ‘I would make one observation however—what would succeeding generations have said of Houdini’s feats had he performed them in Biblical times? Would they have been referred to as “miracles”?’

  Whitehead was indeed offended, perhaps outraged, and followed up with another, aggressive question. ‘Is it true, Mr. Houdini that you can resist the hardest blow struck to the abdomen?’23

  On safer ground, Houdini replied that that was true—as he was also a physical fitness fanatic and sometimes gave demonstrations of his physical strength—and yet, before he was properly ready to take any blows, Whitehead then hit Houdini four or five hard blows to the stomach before the 52-year-old protested. Although Houdini didn’t know it, his appendix had burst and peritonitis soon set in. Two nights later at the Garrick Theater in Detroit, Michigan, on 24 October 1926, Harry collapsed on stage with a raging fever. He was revived and—a trouper to the end—finished the show, and was hospitalised at Detroit’s Grace Hospital the next day where his appendix was immediately removed. It was there that he died, at 1.26 pm on 31 October (Halloween) 1926, in room 401.24

  For his funeral—held at the Machpelah Cemetery in Queens, New York, before 2000 mourners—Houdini was laid in the very coffin that he had long used in his magic shows, and atop it was placed a broken wooden wand to symbolise that without its master, the wand no longer had the magic and so was broken. Inside the coffin the magician’s head rested, as he had instructed, on a packet of letters from his mother. As it was lowered, his great friend, and pallbearer, Broadway impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, whispered, ‘Suppose he isn’t in it?’25

  To this day there is no sign that he has escaped. And yet, deep reverence for him continues. Each year, in November, the Society of American Magicians holds its ‘Broken Wand’ ceremony at his gravesite, where they gather to remember the greatest magician of them all.

  Tom Campbell Black, who rose to fame as one-half of the celebrated Scott and Campbell Black team that won the Centenary Air Race died, as did so many pilots of those early times of aviation, in a freak, tragic accident on 19 September 1936. Having just been christened Miss Liverpool 1 at a ceremony at Speke airport, Tom’s Percival Mew Gull was being taxied out to give the large crowd a demonstration of the tiny, sleek racer’s grace and pace when an RAF Hawker Hart light-bomber biplane landed and collided head-on with the almost invisible white Gull. The whirling propeller savaged a gash in the cockpit and inflicted fatal injuries to Tom’s shoulder and left arm. He died in the ambulance. He was forty-seven years old.

  And yet, even for those famous pilots who were spared death by tragic crashes, their lives often became problematic. A case in point was Campbell Black’s partner, Charles Scott, forever known in aviation circles as C.W.A. Scott.26 The immediate years after his win were a triumph for Scott as he went from dinner to dinner, to champagne-soaked gala day to aviation gathering of the good and the great, to…all hail Scottie, as we lift a glass once more! One of the most celebrated men of his day—and here’s to Scottie one more time for the road—his autobiography was a best-seller. From there he earned a living, among other things, writing elegant aviation pieces for The Times and the Daily Telegraph and winning air races.

  Then World War II changed everything. Aviation again took a quantum leap forward—alas, this time without him on board. For a while all he could do was get work as an ambulance driver; then he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve as a lieutenant, and took part in the Dakar landing. He also spent a period as an Atlantic ferry pilot. By the time the war was over, the air race that had made him famous, although it had occurred only eleven years earlier, was ancient history. Great Britain had an entirely new crop of heroes and he was not remotely of their number. Of the many fatalities of that war, one of the key ones was the world he had known before it. Marriages came and went, and it was only alcohol that seemed to help, and then just for a short time. On 15 April 1946 he had had enough and shot himself dead.27 C.W.A. Scott was aged forty-two.

  Max Valier, the man who first came to the world’s attention when he was described by Ivan Federov of the All Inventors Vegetarian Club of Interplanetary Cosmopolitans as a ‘German moon fan’ who was going to accompany him on a rocket to the moon, actually went on to do some very good work in the field. Educated in physics at the University of Innsbruck, Valier was passionate in his advocacy of the use of rockets for space flights and, in fact, did a lot of experimentation with them in the late 1920s. He wrote a book, Der Vorstoβ in den Weltenraum (The Advance into Space), which helped to popularise the idea to the wider public, and in 1928 he and two close colleagues were credited with building the world’s first rocket-powered automobile. He started to be taken seriously as not just a moon fan but as a rocket scientist. Alas, two years later while he was testing another rocket engine it blew up and killed him.

  For all that, many of Valier’s strange ideas were entirely vindicated on 20 July 1969, when Neil Armstrong—himself something of a moon fan—took one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind and so lived aviation’s most stunning moment since Orville Wright left the ground in the Flyer on the late morning of 17 December 1903. In just sixty-six years, aviation had gone from a few feet off the ground to one foot on the moon.

  Orville Wright lived in Dayton, Ohio, until 30 January 1948 and died at the age of seventy-six—at a time when planes had not only breached the mythological ‘sound barrier’ of Mach 1, around 700 miles per hour, but had gone faster than 1000 miles per hour.

  As to the men who had survived the horrors of the Great War in Passchendaele, Fromelles, Villers-Bretonneux and the like, they and those thousands who had fallen were not forgotten and, in fact, there has been a resurgence of interest in that war in Australia in recent years. Those who survived it took the memory of it to their graves. On 12 July 2007, the last survivor of Passchendaele, a Brit by the name of Harry Patch, was quoted in the London Daily Telegraph: ‘I fell in a trench. There was a fella there. He must have been about our age. He was ripped shoulder to waist with shrapnel. I held his hand for the last 60 seconds of his life. He only said one word: “Mother”. I didn’t see her, but she was there. No doubt about it. He passed from this life into the next, and it felt as if I was in God’s presence. I’ve never got
over it. You never forget it. Never.’28

  Harry himself is, at the time of writing in April 2009, 110 years old, making him the second oldest man living in the United Kingdom and believed to be the ninth oldest man in the world. Old soldiers never die…

  Fergus McMaster remained chairman of Qantas until he was obliged to retire in 1947 because of ill-health. He was knighted in 1941 for his contribution to Australian aviation and died on 8 August 1950, aged seventy-one.