Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (77 page)

Bugger!
How on earth could that be?! What had Qantas ever done to open international routes? Where, now, were the government’s statements that Australia owed Smithy
more than it could ever repay?
Was there to be nothing for those who had blazed the path of Australia’s international airroutes more than any other flyers in the country? Just a month earlier the Australian Post Office had deeply honoured Kingsford Smith by releasing a range of postage stamps bearing his image—to celebrate his achievement in circumnavigating the globe—and yet he was now adjudged as not good enough to even
carry
the mail on which his image was frequently plastered.

It took some time to get over missing out on such a plum, but there was little ANA could do. For the moment the airline decided to focus on building up its domestic routes between the major eastern cities, which a few months previously had expanded to Launceston. All the company could do was keep going and hope that it would continue to prosper without mishap. Something the board thought would help with the matter of safety would be to erect a series of ground radio stations along its principal routes, so company management could always be in touch with its planes, but the Federal authorities had refused permission on the basis that it intended to build its own stations, which facilities would be available to all airlines.
⁷⁸

Saturday, 21 March 1931 dawned in Sydney cold, blustery and wet. Although it was not yet winter, it was the kind of morning where the instinctive human reaction was to stay in bed and snuggle up.

Alas, that morning, as on most mornings, ANA’s engine foreman, Dan Macfarlane, had a job to do, which was to get the Avros shipshape and away on their regular runs, come rain, hail or shine. But still, even on
this
morning? He wasn’t sure, as he pulled up outside ANA’s hangars at Mascot and wind gusts fiercely shook his old Vauxhall. What a bloody day!

Macfarlane’s unease grew as the time came to get the
Southern Cloud
away to Melbourne. If the plane was going into a sustained 40-mile per hour headwind, strong enough to blow the chicken out of a chicken sandwich, its ground speed would be cut to 50 miles per hour, making it a nine-hour trip to the Victorian capital. And yet the planes only carried eight hours of fuel in their tanks! Of course, it probably wouldn’t be a headwind that strong all the way, but still…Dan personally ensured that all four fuel tanks were topped up right to the brim.

He signed the maintenance release and gave it to the ex-British Army officer and now ANA pilot ‘Shorty’ Shortridge for countersignature, whereupon Shorty asked, sort of disinterestedly, in his British burr, ‘What’s the weather report?’

‘Nothing in this morning, but last report was a low, east of the mountains, and strong south to south-west winds.’

Shorty grunted in the manner of a man who had seen a few storms in his time—three months earlier he had published a guide to ‘Blind and Bad Weather Flying’
⁷⁹
—and had never been too impressed by them.

‘Sounds like bloody blind flying and bumps. Tanks full?’

‘Topped them up myself,’ Dan replied.

‘How many passengers?’

‘Only six, so you don’t have much of a load.’

‘Good job. Might be able to get above some of the dirt anyhow. May have to land at Benalla for fuel if it stays too bad.’
⁸⁰

And with that, Shorty climbed into the cockpit of the
Southern Cloud
, where young Charles Dunnell was already in the co-pilot’s seat, and only a few minutes later they were taxiing to the northern end of the airstrip. In the cabin the six passengers were themselves a little nervous, as the plane rocked in the buffeting wind. Of them all—theatre producer Clyde Hood, electrical engineer Julian Margules, businessman Hubert Farrall, accountant Bill O’Reilly and holiday-makers Elsie Glasgow and Claire Stokes
⁸¹
—one had the most reason to be nervous. Young Claire had never flown before, and this hardly looked like the day to start. And yet, once they were rolling, one didn’t really want to make a scene and demand to be let off the plane. She was, after all, in the hands of professionals.

It was just after 8.10 am when Dan Macfarlane watched the plane take off—slower than usual, it seemed to him, struggling against the headwind—still feeling most uneasy. His unease grew when, only an hour after they left, a phone call came in from the weather bureau, with nothing less than a cyclone warning, saying that something close to the worst weather in thirty years was hitting the area south of the new Federal capital of Canberra.

Though there were no means of contacting the
Southern Cloud
to relay this warning, there was no great alarm in the ANA offices. Shorty, with 4000 hours’ flying time logged to his credit, would surely find either a way through or around it. Short of Kingsford Smith himself, the plane could barely have been in safer hands.

And later that afternoon, when Charles Ulm took a phone call at the company’s offices from ANA’s Melbourne manager, to inform him that the plane had not arrived at Melbourne, there was still no panic. All that meant was that Shorty hadn’t found a way through, and had no doubt headed west to the vast farming flat-lands around the Riverina that were an aircraft’s friend.

At Ulm’s behest, Dan Macfarlane sat down and began calling small towns and villages along the
Southern Cloud
’s designated route, asking the operator whether he or she had heard the plane go over, and then collating the results. By 10 pm, he had the answer: the
Southern Cloud
had been sighted everywhere and nowhere. There was no rhyme or reason in the reports, as some claimed to have heard it while others just one town away said they hadn’t and then it showed up again two towns on and then again it was clear that for all the reports to be correct, the
Southern Cloud
would have had to have been in several places at once.

Smithy, informed at home by Ulm that evening of the situation, felt sure that in the morning they would receive a phone call from Shorty, saying he had been forced down by lack of petrol, and could someone come and get him, please? And then, hopefully, they would all have a good laugh and say that that had been a close one—as had happened to Smithy personally,
dozens
of times. They were some of his best stories, in fact.

The families of the passengers and pilots were kept informed, and told not to worry too much. The following morning, however, at the ANA offices with Kingsford Smith and Ulm both present, the hours began to crawl by like sick slugs—9 am, and no word; 10 am, nothing; 11 am, and though phones were ringing hard, none of them bore good news.
Noon
, and there was still not the smallest clue as to what had happened to the
Southern Cloud.
When dusk had fallen, it was time to pull out all the stops.

‘All hands’, was the call, and all hands answered, with every one of ANA’s employees reporting for work at Mascot and putting enormous efforts in to getting the planes ready to go, fully prepared, as part of a coordinated push to find the lost plane. Everyone’s unspoken fear was that the
Southern Cloud
had hit the side of a mountain, and all crew and passengers were either dead or dying. In the case of the latter, urgency was paramount. For once, within the confines of ANA, there was no joking or skylarking, as everyone set to work. In the office canteen, Mrs MacDonald—red-haired, Scottish and motherly—organised the half-dozen office girls as helpers and got to feeding the increasingly hungry twenty men.
⁸²

Kingsford Smith spent a sleepless night organising a team of observers to accompany him in the
Southern Sun
to leave before dawn the following morning to begin the search in the rugged area that lay south of Albury.
⁸³

Other planes also joined in the search and the area north of Melbourne was in particular thoroughly scoured. Throughout, Kingsford Smith remained at the forefront of the search, day after day. Searching systematically, with all his team of eight observers on board armed with binoculars, he first scoured the Snowy Mountains, looking closely around Mount Kosciuszko, before working his way south to Cooma and down to Melbourne. Most nights, he would be landing at Essendon airport just on dusk, where weeping family members of the missing passengers and crew would be waiting for him, hoping for good news. But he never had any.

By this time a formal search committee had been formed in Melbourne to coordinate the massive effort, involving no fewer than thirty planes, of which six were provided by the RAAF. And, of course, the whole tragedy was closely followed by the press. In fact, beyond being a tragedy, it was also a great
mystery.
How could such a massive plane just have disappeared like that?

Australia’s pubs and dinner tables ran wild with theories—
don’t forget the Coffee Royal affair
,
and how the plane turned up again after a fortnight
,
well that’ll happen again this time
,
you mark my words
—even as ground parties were sent into some of the most heavily wooded areas, where it was feared that a crashed plane could not be spotted from the air. Alas, all returned with nothing to report bar their own exhaustion. It was as if the
Southern Cloud
had simply been swallowed whole by the wild Australian landscape.

Complicating matters were the many reports that came in from the public, with tips ranging from Bathurst to Bega, to hearing a low-flying plane in the Dandenongs, to spotting a fast-descending plane over Port Phillip Bay.
⁸⁴
People in the tiny village of Tintaldra in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains were convinced they saw lights flashing in the night from those mountains as if someone was trying to signal them, so they sent out land expeditions to look for them.
⁸⁵
Even so august a journal as the
Sydney Morning Herald
reported as fact, under a headline of ‘FLASHES IN THE HILLS’, that residents of Tintaldra had seen a fire in the hills on the afternoon of the disappearance and up to ten o’clock that night, and had seen flashes every fifteen minutes on the Toolong Range.
⁸⁶
Smithy himself had flown from Melbourne to investigate that one, passing low over the spot where the flashes had been reported.
⁸⁷
As much as possible, each tip-off had to be investigated, but as the days turned into a week, and then two weeks, hope inevitably faded.

So thorough had been the search that Kingsford Smith became convinced that the
Southern Cloud
must have passed over Melbourne and crashed in the sea. Charles Ulm couldn’t help but agree. After spending two days investigating reported smoke and fire signals in the Snowy River district, he returned to tell the
Sydney Morning Herald
that, ‘it is a million to one chance of the aeroplane being anywhere else but in the water’.
⁸⁸
Part of their conviction came from the fact that the great Australia war hero and RAAF Squadron Leader Arthur Cobby reported that he had been in the Melbourne suburb of Elsternwick on the day, at the height of the storm at 2.15 pm, when he had heard a three-engined plane pass over, in a southeastern direction, heading towards the bay. It was unlikely that a man of his experience could be mistaken.
⁸⁹

The truth, of course, was that even if the crew and passengers were on land and had survived the crash, they would have been unlikely to survive in the wilderness for a fortnight, notwithstanding the crew of the
Southern Cross
’s experience at Coffee Royal.

On his own final day of searching, Smithy spent eight hours in the air, traipsing back and forth between Sydney and Canberra. Haunted by the memory of the
Southern Cross
being missed by its own search planes, he did not want to give up, but in the end, he had to. There was simply no further point in continuing and with the ANA now having taken a possibly mortal blow to its reputation, as well as a £10,000 loss from the uninsured crashed plane and subsequent costs of searching, everything had to be done to save the company.

In the end, though, they were wading against a tide that could not be stemmed. In the middle of the Depression, money to fly was already in short supply, and after the loss of the
Southern Cloud
, no-one wanted to fly with ANA. After all, what was wrong with the old way of getting to Melbourne—the overnight train, with a wake-up at dawn at Albury, to change trains and go from there? It was much cheaper than flying, there was almost no chance of the train crashing, and even if it did, they’d at least know where to find you to bring help. A
plane
to Melbourne? No thank you.

At least the record-breaking flights went on. Only a few days after the search had been abandoned, an English pilot by the name of Charles William Anderson Scott, oft known as C.W.A. Scott, landed his de Havilland DH.60M Metal Moth,
Kathleen
, at Mascot after breaking Smithy’s England to Australia record a few days before, when he had arrived in Darwin, just nine days and five hours after leaving England, on 10 April 1931. Scott had been a burly heavyweight champion of the RAF
⁹⁰
before becoming a door-to-door mousetrap salesman in Melbourne
⁹¹
and then a flying instructor for Qantas at their Brisbane Flying School, and this was his first real taste of fame.