Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (3 page)

As to the problem of propulsion, Hargrave had already put in an enormous amount of work on that vexing question. His view was that the only way forward was to develop a very light-weight yet powerful engine to which could be attached an especially designed propeller, or ‘screw’ as he called it, which could bite upon the air and pull the machine forward in the same way that a ship’s propeller did in water. If it worked, then this would always pull the plane forwards and the speed of the wind over the wings would be able to lift a man.

It was with this specific aim that seven years earlier Hargrave had created, and since refined, the world’s first rotary engine. This was a revolutionary departure from most existing engine designs whereby, instead of the cylinders (and their pistons) being in a fixed position providing force on the whirling crankshaft, it was the cylinders and pistons which rotated around a stationary crankshaft. Hargrave’s idea was that, by attaching the propeller to those whirling cylinders, they would be kept cool with their own flow of air instead of the cumbersome and leaky water-cooled systems. This would only leave control as the key issue…and then a man could even, genuinely, fly like a bird.

Of course, Lawrence Hargrave was not a man working in isolation, for all over the world in the last gasp of the nineteenth century, people were busily trying to solve the riddle of how to fly—just as they had been for centuries. But, crucially, Hargrave was also a man keen to share his knowledge—with no interest whatsoever in patents—and he had no sooner been borne aloft by the power of wind moving swiftly over curved cells in a kite than he wrote a full report of it, complete with diagrams, which he sent off to Octave Chanute, just as he had previously put into the public domain notes on the design of his rotary engine.

No, this was not powered flight, which was the grand quest, but it was a significant breakthrough, one of the key riddles solved, and as Chanute spread word among other researchers around America and the world, the reaction was immediate.

Only a couple of years later, in 1897, in one of the many letters Octave Chanute wrote to his Australian correspondent, he noted: ‘Mr Millet has put a Hargrave kite on the market and I am told the skies in our eastern States are red with them.’
⁸
Another of his admirers was the famed American inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, who was then getting very interested in the problems of flight. Bell considered Hargrave’s ‘box kite’, as it had become known, as ‘a very sound design’.
⁹
The two corresponded and became such close friends that Bell would later visit Australia, just to meet with Hargrave, and noted, amazed, that ‘Mr. Lawrence Hargrave is better known in America than in his own country’.
¹⁰

And it had always been thus. In the mid-1890s, Hargrave had written to Chanute that, ‘The people of Sydney who can speak of my work without a smile are very scarce; it is doubtless the same with American workers. I know that success is dead sure to come, and therefore do not waste time and words in trying to convince unbelievers.’
¹¹

It was at this time of great excitement in the nascent world of modern aviation that, some thousand and a bitty miles to the north of Lawrence Hargrave, wee Charles made seventh, and last, in the Smith family when he was born on the 9th day of February 1897, in a rather unprepossessing house on Riverview Terrace in the leafy Brisbane suburb of Hamilton.

It was not that Charlie was necessarily a ‘mistake’, but the fact that his next oldest sibling, Eric, was a full ten years older than him, and that the first five of those seven children had come in the space of just six years, was a fair indication that he was at least a surprise. (Another indication was the fact that his father was forty-five years old when he was born, and his mother forty.) Still, the key thing was that ‘Chilla’, as he soon became known to his own flesh and blood, was loved, as much by his four brothers and two sisters—Harold, Winifred, Wilfrid, Elsie, Leofric and Eric—as by his parents. As it was, though, in the first few days of his life they felt they pretty much
had
to love him, as no-one else except the family possibly could, so unsightly did he seem to their eyes.

Bald at birth, terribly wrinkled and with a mashed nose, he looked as though he had been bashed in the face with a shovel, and there was some discussion in the family that he resembled nothing or no other person so much as ‘Yorkey’, an extremely old and battered-looking Aboriginal man who used to do chores around the house for the family when they had lived in Cairns.
¹²

And yet, what a transformation! In just a short while this baby, born with a face like a dropped pie, began to develop before their very eyes and look like an advertisement for mother’s milk, with—to use his sister Winifred’s words—‘golden hair, blue eyes, rose-leaf skin, and the reddest lips imaginable curling over pearly teeth…’
¹³

Both sisters thought such good looks were wasted on a boy, but they didn’t stop pampering him for all that, and the sunny-tempered toddler happily soaked up all the attention from them and the rest of the family.

And a very tight family it was, as in part registered by the fact that each of the children had their mother Catherine’s maiden name of ‘Kingsford’ for their middle name, to go with the ‘Smith’ surname inherited from their father, William. Generally, the maternal weight on the family scales was greater than the paternal. Catherine was warm-hearted, strong-willed and deeply involved in all her children’s lives, the sun around which they revolved. She combined great femininity with a strong constitution, and was up at five o’clock every morning, sweeping the kitchen, preparing breakfast, sorting the washing, getting the kids off to school, doing the shopping and myriad maternal things until late into the night. A born hostess, she ran an open house where there were frequent visitors and they were always welcome—at the dinner table if they needed a feed, or on the couch if they needed a place to stay. For his part, William was a loving father, and a hard worker who left the house early and didn’t return until late, but he was also a little detached and definitely deferential to his wife.

Brisbane was Catherine’s home town, with her father no less than a former lord mayor of that metropolis, while William, a relatively humble bank manager, had started his life in Sydney and, as an adult, was posted through his working life here, there and everywhere—and it just so happened that ‘here’, when Charles was born, was on Riverview Terrace. By the time Charlie was two, however, the whole family had moved to ‘there’, Sydney, to live first near Manly Beach and then to the inner harbour-side suburb of Longueville.

Each day, William would head off to work in the city with his older sons, while the other siblings would walk to school and Charlie would stay at home to play, with his mother never more than a quick scold away. Generally, he was a boisterous child, confident from the first, and despite his angelic looks, never minding a bit of rough ‘n’ tumble or taking a scrape. Ah, the stories the family delighted in telling each other of what Chilla, their ‘engaging little sinner’,
¹⁴
had got up to
this
time.

What about when he put the house-help Ruby’s hat through the laundry wringer, only to have it emerge as flat as
two
pancakes? Knowing that he was in real trouble this time, Chilla trotted out to the rose garden, broke off the thorniest branch he could find, and brought it to his mother, gravely announcing: ‘Here’s a pwickly stick to whip him wif, he’s been a naughty boy to put poor Wooby’s hat froo her mangle…’
¹⁵

Catherine did not whip him with the prickly branch or anything else on this occasion, not that she was above administering the odd bit of corporal punishment. (Still, as one who stood just over 5 feet tall, and weighed only 6 stone, she was never one to pack much of a wallop even on a bad day—it was her emotional power that guided her children to adulthood, not her physical force.)

While she was close to all her children, the bond between her and her youngest child was a particularly strong one from the beginning. With the rest of the family gone for the day, it was frequently just the two of them spending time together. One way Catherine kept him occupied was to set him up with a pencil and huge sheets of butcher’s paper, encouraging him to draw, which he delighted in doing, frequently focusing on drawing those mechanical things he could see from their garden, like ships, ferries, paddlesteamers, bridges and trains. Not for nothing would Chilla’s first note to Santa Claus read when he was four:

Dear Santa,

Will you bring a train with piston rods to make

the wheels go round? Will you make Christmas

come quick?

Sincerely,

Chilla.
¹⁶

Of course, it was Catherine who would arrange with Santa to bring exactly that, and then delight in playing with him and the train while Father was at work. And it was also Catherine who tended his many wounds when Chilla, convinced that he could
fly
, jumped from the roof of their shed holding nothing but an open umbrella.
¹⁷
Turned out he couldn’t fly after all…

Generally, however, Chilla’s favourite times were when the whole family was together, particularly on Sundays, when he was more often than not the centre of attention. One of his show-stoppers—at this time when the Boer War was in full swing—was to sing out with great passion the words of Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’, as best he could. With all the family around him, egging him on, Chilla would stand on the enormous polished dining-room table and belt out…

Duke’s son—cook’s son—son of a hundred kings—

(Fifty fousand horse and foot goin’ to Table Bay!)

Each of ‘em doin’ his country’s work

And who’s to look after the things?

Pass the hat for your credit’s sake,

And pay—PAY—PAY!
¹⁸

Again, Chilla,
again!
they would urge him. And he would give another rousing rendition. Whenever there were guests over, young Chilla would take centre stage with some kind of performance or other and the entire family thought the little showman something of a prodigy for his capacity to memorise words and sing them well, and as he got a little older to quickly teach himself the musical instruments they were playing on, including the piano and the ukulele.

Even when Sunday began to ebb away there was still a little more fun to be had, albeit of a slightly more pious nature, as the family would gather round the piano and lustily sing hymns together, before Father would read a chapter from the Bible. This last was less because they were particularly religious than because it was just a nice, communal family thing to do.

All up, there might have been happier kids than Chilla as the twentieth century dawned, but probably not many…

‘Is that man your dad?’ asked the small boy down at Stanwell Park of the young girl who sat gazing at the man on the beach with all the kites.

‘Yes, he’s my father,’ replied Nellie Hargrave, barely repressing a sigh and throwing a ‘here-we-go-again’ glance at her sister Hilda and younger brother Geoffrey. She more or less knew what the young tousle-headed lad was going to say before he said it.

‘Is he…is he really a
wizard
?’

‘No,’ replied Nellie firmly, ‘he’s a scientist discovering how men can fly.’

‘Fly! That means he must use magic,’ said the boy with wide eyes.

‘No magic,’ said Nellie with some conviction. ‘One day men will fly in machines with wings like those.’
¹⁹

In fact, many men around the world had been trying to do exactly that, and her father’s initial breakthrough with box kites was just part of a great burst of experimentation in aviation, as the conviction had grown that it really might be possible for man to fly. No-one had been more active than Germany’s Otto Lilienthal, who for many years had been pioneering gliders, including an 1894 model designed to have the two wings flap in the manner of a bird. Lilienthal established that a key component to successful flight was for the pilot to be able to react while in flight to changing wind conditions, and he was able to fashion a primitive rudder on his gliders, attached to a piece of string, which he could control by backwards and forwards movement of his head. Alas, on 9 August 1896, while he was soaring from the hill he had constructed just outside Berlin, he was caught by a gust of rising air, causing the glider to stall and he fell to the ground from a height of more than 50 feet. Just before he died the next day in a Berlin hospital, celebrated legend has it that he uttered his last words on the subject of flying experimentation: ‘
Kleine Opfer müssen gebracht werden
…’ (Small sacrifices must be made…)

Lilienthal’s work went on. His greatest disciple was a Scottish marine engineer by the name of Percy Pilcher, who as well as being a devotee of building gliders believed that powered flight was possible. In 1897, after building a glider called the
Hawk
, which sailed a breathtaking 820 feet, he began to build a triplane—with three levels of wings—which he intended to get into the air by virtue of a 4-horsepower engine. And yet, like his mentor Lilienthal, Pilcher was to discover the perils of leaving mother earth’s close embrace.