Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (61 page)

Just after 9.30 am, Kingsford Smith, Ulm, Litchfield and McWilliams landed in Christchurch to what Smithy later described as ‘the deafening cheers of the most enthusiastic crowd I have ever seen’,
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a gathering of some 30,000 people only narrowly held in check by police and troops. As the smiling airmen disembarked the band struck up ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’, and the crowd joined in heartily. In many ways, that flight to New Zealand marked the last air link being forged to bind the developed world together.

Despite the fierce storm, they had made it and were still alive! A bath, breakfast and blessed sleep beckoned…

That evening, while enjoying what they thought was going to be a quiet drink of celebration at the Universal Hotel, Kingsford Smith and Ulm heard shouting. Apparently many of the good burghers of Christchurch had gathered outside and wanted to congratulate them. There were far too many people to greet personally, shake hands with and so forth, but would the Australians mind coming out onto the hotel balcony and giving the crowd a wave?

But of course not…

There were thousands of people outside, and they cheered as one at the appearance of the Aussies. By way of greeting, Kingsford Smith cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled cheerfully, ‘I didn’t know there were so many people in Christchurch. We are glad to be here, but by Jove we had a bad time last night and coming through this morning. My hostess is sorry that she can’t invite you all in for a drink. We tried to land here on Sunday but couldn’t make it.’
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‘Did you get the cable from the mayor?’ someone shouted equally cheerfully.

‘Oh yes, we got it all right,’ Smithy called back, with laughs all round. They got it all right! Did you hear him? He said they got it all right! That Smithy!

An exceedingly pleasant few weeks in New Zealand ensued, with the two pilots staying on as guests of the national government, and flying from function to function, event to event, at the government’s behest in the New Zealand Air Force’s Bristols. When they arrived, the waiting crowd was never in any doubt as to which plane boasted Smithy—it was always the one doing loops, chandelles and dives before landing.

That Smithy!

What they were doing was essentially promoting the cause of aviation in the Shaky Isles, as well as talking extensively with the government about the possibility of establishing a regular trans-Tasman postal service. As a matter of fact, Smithy had brought with him a letter from Australian Prime Minister Stanley Bruce to the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Mr Joseph Coates, and was delighted to formally hand it over.

The letter read: ‘Through the courtesy of the two intrepid Australian airmen, Squadron-Leader Kingsford Smith and Flight Lieutenant Ulm, I desire to extend to you and, through you, to the people of New Zealand, our warmest felicitations on the linking of our sister Dominions by air. This achievement marks a new epoch in our history and our relations. Its accomplishment alone will tend to draw our peoples closer together. But its deep significance lies in the fact that it points towards a future in which, by regular aerial communication, our two countries will be more firmly united, deriving strength in peace and war from their mutual association.’
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There really seemed to be an enormous amount of enthusiasm for the project, and the widespread view was that Kingsford Smith and Ulm were the obvious men to do it. The New Zealand government also honoured them by making them temporary officers in the New Zealand Permanent Air Force, Smithy a major and Ulm a lieutenant. Oddly enough, despite all of his fame as an aviator, Charles Ulm to this point had never been officially certified as a pilot, and so after receiving formal flight training by the NZAF in an Avro 504K, he was awarded his wings, with the temporary rank of lieutenant.
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Beyond that, the two Australians were warmly greeted by most of the populace, though there were one or two exceptions.

On one occasion, the farmer whose pastures encompassed Christchurch’s main airstrip of Wigram Field—whose cows had to be shooed off whenever there was to be a landing—noticed a large crowd had formed to greet the famous pilots, who’d gone to check on the
Southern Cross
, and saw an opportunity. The farmer sent his twelve-year-old son to the airstrip with a gallon of fresh milk, and a cup with which he could dole it out to anyone who had sixpence. This lad wormed his way to the front of the admiring crowd, at which point Smithy spotted him and said, ‘Hey sonny, if you will clean down my plane I will give you a joy flight over the city this afternoon.’

The proud and plucky young New Zealander drew himself up to his full 5 feet nothing, stuck out his chest and said, ‘I ain’t cleaning no cow shit from no plane tyres for no Aussie.’

True, his chance of a flight in the
Southern Cross
evaporated at that moment, but national honour had been served.
²⁸

When passing through Wellington, Kingsford Smith and Ulm made a brief visit to the home of the mother of Lieutenant John Moncrieff.
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That good woman still maintained hope that by some miracle her boy would be found alive.

Finally, after new propellers shipped over from Sydney had been fitted to the
Southern Cross
, it was time for them to head home, and Kingsford Smith and Ulm, with Litchfield and McWilliams again as crew, took off at 4.54 in the morning of 13 October 1928 from the Marlborough Aero Club at Blenheim, at the top of the South Island, and proceeded west by north. As they did so, a fearful wind hit them and they flew straight into the teeth of it, all day long. The wind took off so much of their speed that they were only able to make progress at an average ground speed of 65 miles per hour. At that rate, it would be touch and go whether they would make it home.

That rising anxiety, however, was as nothing to what happened at around three in the afternoon, when, shortly after Charles Ulm had stood up to stretch his cramped legs, the starboard engine cut out. There was no flutter, no splutter, no stutter—it just went
dead.

With great urgency, but remaining calm, Kingsford Smith drew on his vast experience and immediately went through his mental check list of vital actions to determine what possibly could be the cause of the engine failure, even as the
Southern Cross
started to lose altitude.

Known as FMS: ‘F’ stood for ‘fuel cocks’, and they were on, while ‘M’ was for ‘mixture’, which had been set at ‘full rich’. Too, when the cause of an engine problem was lack of petrol, the engine usually had the decency to cough a few times in protest. Which left ‘S’ for ‘switches’. Could it be an electrical fault, a wire that had come off, magnetos that had died together, a switch that…?

Then he saw it. The magneto ignition switch for the starboard engine, instead of being in the ‘on’ position was now in the ‘off’ position. In the confined cockpit, Ulm must have knocked it accidentally, perhaps as he put out his hand to steady himself.

Smithy reached over, snapped the switch back to ‘on’, and an instant later the still windmilling propeller on the starboard engine burst into life. Though that was definitely good news, they were still not safe. By the time it became dark at about 7 pm, they remained a long way from the Australian coast, with a third of their journey still to go, and even when they eventually saw the coded flashes of a lighthouse in the distance, it turned out to be Newcastle, a bit over an hour’s flying time north of Sydney, meaning the wind had blown them a long way off their correct course. Could they make Richmond air base, on the amount of petrol left in their tanks? The answer was…maybe.

At last, coming in over the muted lights of Sydney, the crew of the
Southern Cross
were momentarily confused as to just where Richmond air base lay, until, out to the west they saw what was effectively an arrow of light, pointing straight at a dark blob that just
had
to be the field. So many Sydneysiders had followed the drama of the flight on the radio and were now heading out to Richmond to greet them, that a traffic jam had ensued, which meant the
Southern Cross
could follow the cars’ headlights all the way to the field, where an arc light, together with a dozen flares—lit kerosene-soaked rags in large tins that had been cut in two—had been set up to guide them in.

Finally, the plane came over the gathered crowd at the airfield ‘like a great bat in the darkness’,
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and touched down at 2.15 am. When they mercifully turned their faithful engines off, only 3 gallons of petrol remained in the tanks.
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That would have been enough to keep them in the air for another ten minutes—at best. The flight had taken just less than twenty-four hours, but the main thing was that they were safe and sound, and those listening on their radios across Australia could now breathe out.

As ever, the Kingsford Smith clan turned out in force to welcome their boy home.

Before Kingsford Smith left the airbase with his family for home, he was handed a telegram addressed to him from the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Joseph Coates:

Hearty congratulations on successful re-crossing. Now we can all go to bed.
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The usual slew of glorious headlines followed their achievement, though one headline out of the ordinary that was of particular significance to Smithy’s personal life was ‘KINGSFORD SMITH DECREE NISI GRANTED’. The article appeared in late October 1928, and noted that his divorce from Thelma had gone through.

Two letters were tabled during the proceedings. One was from him formally asking her to return to him, and the other was her reply:

I have no intention whatever of returning to you, and absolutely refuse to live with you again. I am content at home and am capable of supporting myself as I have done for the last four or five months since you went to Sydney. Do not trouble to write again, as this is definite. Thelma.
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Well, that seemed rather final then.

In the final judgment, Smithy was able to give Thelma £250—now only a tiny percentage of the riches he was amassing—and she was able to give him a wide berth as long as they both would live. All to the good…

What now? After all, they had flown around Australia, crossed the Pacific Ocean and crossed the Tasman. Hinkler had flown from England to Australia in under sixteen days. Blériot had long done the Channel, Lindbergh the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Paris in one hop and Richard Byrd claimed to have flown over the North Pole. And, in 1924, the US Army had flown a fleet of aircraft right around the world in the northern hemisphere. Pioneer aviators had effectively run out of oceans to cross, heroic deeds to do. So what would they do? In Smithy’s words, the only answer was for them to focus on ‘the exploitation of commercial flying in our own country, where there was much scope for aviation enterprise’.
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And so Australian National Airways Limited was formally born. The central idea was for Kingsford Smith and Ulm, together with financial backing from some leading Sydney businessmen who Ulm had rustled up, to buy five tri-motor Avro Ten (licence-built Fokker F.VIIb.3m) aircraft—similar to the
Southern Cross
—and establish regular passenger and postal services between Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Hobart. As a railway line ran between Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, this meant that under government policy there was no question of them receiving subsidies—competing as they would be with the government for travel and freight custom—but they still felt the time had come for such a service, and they were just the men to do it.

The only place to buy the five Avro planes they needed was England, as Australia’s nascent aircraft manufacturing industry did not have suitable products available, and both Ulm and Kingsford Smith—now ‘joint managing directors’, if you please—felt strongly that the Australian public would be happy only in planes that were British built.

True, their last attempt at an aviation company, Interstate Flying Services, had been no great success, but this was different. Back then no-one had known anything about them, now they were famous. Now, they had clout. Now, surely, there would be plenty of people who would want to fly with them, just as governments would also be more disposed to listen to their needs. They hoped so, anyway. And yet, there would be some difficult things they would have to get through before making that a reality.

It was a minor breakthrough in the midst of a singularly fraught time. In February 1929, soon after the
Anderson v. Ulm & Kingsford Smith
case began, Ulm and Kingsford Smith approached Anderson requesting that he withdraw the action in return for the promise of £1000. Keith and his solicitors considered their offer. It was true that at one point in the protracted negotiations between the three partners when they were in San Francisco, Ulm had ensured that all three of them signed a contract whereby if for any reason a partner pulled out, he would have no further claim either on the assets, or profits, generated by a successful flight. And there was also no dispute that Anderson had left San Francisco of his own free will, and had not returned, even though invited to. In remarks the judge made, it was clear that he took the view that the partnership was thereby dissolved. The chances of legal victory were so small, there was very little likelihood that Kingsford Smith and Ulm would have to share the £50,000 that had come to them. And now they were offering £1000 if he would drop the whole thing? Keith decided to take the money and run. Or more particularly, fly…