Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (78 page)

Smithy was on the tarmac at Mascot to greet the Englishman, distracted as he was, as the cameras rolled.

Sixteen
TO AND FRO…

Yes, I am scared out of my seven senses sometimes, but I don’t let on.

C
HARLES
K
INGSFORD
S
MITH
,
TO HIS MOTHER
, C
ATHERINE, WHEN SHE ASKED HIM IF HE WAS NOT NERVOUS WHEN HE MADE THOSE LONG AND DANGEROUS FLIGHTS
.
¹

A
nother crash. This time it wasn’t an Australian National Airways plane, but an Imperial Airways one, the first of the test airmail flights between England and Australia.

Heavily loaded with 15,000 letters from England, the
City of Cairo
had been approaching Koepang in Timor on 19 April 1931, when it had run out of fuel and crash-landed 10 miles short of the airfield into a rice paddy. It now became a matter of urgency to get another plane there as soon as possible, to ensure that the mail went through. But whose? One from Qantas, which had a plane waiting in Darwin for the post to arrive? Not on your nelly.

In all its expanding fleet, Qantas did not yet have a multi-engined aircraft, considered
de rigueur
for flying over water. The only company that had that kind of aircraft
and
a pilot experienced in flying long distances over water was ANA with—that man again—Smithy!

It was for this reason that on 21 April, Charles Kingsford Smith, on just twenty-four-hours’ notice—and at the personal request of Prime Minister James Scullin—was given a welcome respite from the ongoing agony of the disappearance of the
Southern Cloud
, and was, with fellow ANA pilot Scotty Allan and two others, flying towards Koepang with all the speed that the now rather ageing engines of the
Southern Cross
could muster.

‘It is a great opportunity,’ Smithy had told the press before departure, ‘for Australian aviation to show its merits. I earnestly hope that in the near future the airmail authorities will allow Australian aviators to work on the Australian end of the route.’
²

Once in Koepang, the mail was transferred to the
Southern Cross
, and yet Smithy was no sooner back in Darwin than he had to go again—this time taking 25,000 letters weighing 700 pounds from the Qantas DH.61
Apollo
, which had brought them from Brisbane in new white canvas bags with bold red stripes, and flying them on to Akyab, in Burma. There, he was able to hand them on to the Imperial Airways plane doing the second of the England to Australia airmail flights, to take back to London, and in turn take that plane’s post back to Darwin. All up, it was a confusing blur of comings and goings, take-offs and landings, but the bottom line was that the first test run of England to Australia airmail had taken twenty-four days.

And though originally Kingsford Smith’s ANA was meant to have had no part in either of the first two historic test airmail flights, it had soon been proved that the firm was indispensable in making it happen—a wonderful advertisement. Smithy later wrote, ‘This experience, at very short notice, of carrying a long-distance mail, convinced me of the practicability of establishing a regular route without further delay, provided that the government assistance—for a limited period only—was available.’
³

Ulm was equally convinced and while Smithy had been flying, he had been making another approach to the government, to secure a certain contract to carry post on the Australian end of the England to Australia journey. In tough times, such a contract would be a guarantee of survival, and the times had never been tougher since the
Southern Cloud
had been lost. They
had
to get that contract or Ulm feared all would be lost.

Hudson Fysh felt equally strongly that Qantas would also take an enormous hit if they didn’t get the contract, and sent a telegram to McMaster to that effect:

Application made by A.N.A. to operate permanent route Brisbane-Darwin and to India. Receiving considerable support. Position fairly critical to our interest.
⁴

In short, if Fysh hadn’t taken ANA seriously before, he certainly was now, because if the Kingsford Smith crowd won the contract for the route to India, they would be a very serious force indeed. Other contenders for the prize were West Australian Airways, and Imperial Airways flying the whole route alone.

What to do? It was something that McMaster mulled over for some time before coming up with a possible solution. In mid May, he wrote to Fysh suggesting that Qantas form a subsidiary company with Imperial Airways, which could be called Qantas Empire Airways. And he also asked Fysh to push ‘the matter of triple-engined machines as much as possible, and to get in touch with Westland Aircraft and Blackburn, as well as the American people’.
⁵
While Australians felt that it was a matter of national honour to ‘buy British’, McMaster was not of their number. He just wanted the best planes at the best price.

She was a charming, gracious lady, beloved by the people of Australia for her performances on stage and screen over the previous half-century, but by the winter of 1931 her body had had enough. On Monday, 21 June 1931, following a three-day downhill spiral from pleurisy and heart trouble, 72-year-old Nellie Stewart died in her Clifton Gardens home by Sydney Harbour.
⁶
Typical of this happy soul, she begged that no black be worn at her funeral—a request that was respected by the thousands of people who turned up to farewell her from St James’s Anglican Church in Sydney—and as the hearse bearing her coffin moved away on its journey to Rookwood cemetery, many people threw rose petals upon it. Ah, she was loved, not least by Smithy.

There had always been something about her serene, warm beauty and manner that touched his soul and he was devastated at her death. And although some people said it was bad luck to continue to bear her photo in his plane as a good-luck charm, Smithy didn’t agree and insisted on taking it with him. Her photo had got him through Gallipoli, the Western Front, across the Pacific and the Tasman, through countless other adventures in the air and he wasn’t going to give it up now.
⁷

Finally, there was no way out. In the middle of the Depression, with enormous public concern about ANA’s safety standards in the wake of the loss of the
Southern Cloud
, the airline simply did not have the custom to keep the planes going—sometimes scheduled flights were leaving
empty
—and on Friday, 26 June 1931, it shut down regular services between Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Launceston, with all the planes returning to Sydney on the Saturday. This did not mean the end of the company, as there was still a chance they would be able to keep it going through charter work and joyriding until such time as it could hopefully secure the contract from the Federal government to carry the post on the international route to link up with Imperial Airways, but in such straitened economic times it was always going to be a close-run thing.

Clearly, the best asset the company had, apart from the planes themselves, was the love the Australian public had for Smithy. And if Smithy was who they wanted, then Smithy was who they would get. This meant that for the next couple of months, he was kept busy going everywhere from Albury, through Corowa, Jerilderie, Wagga, Coolamon, Leeton, Griffith, West Wyalong, Parkes, Forbes, Newcastle and Goulburn. And back again.

Everywhere in Australia the times were tough and getting tougher. The economic malaise that had started at the New York Stock Exchange in late October 1929 had spread throughout most of the world, and Australia was hit particularly hard. Unemployment queues continued to grow, as did the numbers of homeless people living in places such as Sydney’s Domain, where hundreds of unfortunate people slept outside every night under whatever newspapers they could gather around themselves to try to keep warm. A shantytown grew like topsy in the sand hills at La Perouse, consisting of huts constructed out of whatever spare timber could be found, upon which were tacked old sugar bags and galvanised iron. Any job vacancy advertised would draw hundreds of applications, with fights frequently breaking out to see who could get in the door first. Hit particularly hard were returned soldiers, most of whom were in their mid-thirties, and often unskilled and uneducated, as their careers had taken a five-year pause while they had been serving in places like Gallipoli and the Western Front. Was
this
what they had been fighting for? A world where they didn’t have enough money to even feed their kids?

All up, there was enough anger around and enough madness in the air that a strange, paramilitary fascism movement called the New Guard began in New South Wales, with a membership base composed largely of disaffected soldiers and a leadership that was made up of solid returned servicemen. Though difficult to define, the New Guard was broadly composed of extreme loyalists to the Crown who regarded themselves as an auxiliary to the police to prevent there being any possibility of a Bolshevik revolution taking place in Australia—and they cared nought that the police did not want their support.

A particular target of the New Guard was the duly elected New South Wales government of the day, led by Jack Lang, who had returned to power and staked out a remarkable position. That was, that if the government was caught in a choice between paying for such things as food rations for the people of New South Wales and making due interest payments to the British bond-holders from whom it had borrowed money to build such things as the nearly completed Sydney Harbour Bridge, it would be the citizens who came first. Lang would ‘repudiate’ the debt to Great Britain. Cry treason!

The New Guard’s first major rally was held in the Sydney Town Hall on 24 July 1931, where they sang loyalist songs and cheered their leader Eric Campbell—none other than Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm’s long-time solicitor. Whether Smithy attended that meeting or subsequent New Guard meetings is not definitively documented, though Campbell would later describe them both as ‘sound New Guard members’, as was, by Campbell’s account, Sir Frederick Stewart, one of the leading directors with ANA.
⁸
What is certain is that both the State and Federal governments of the day took the view that they were involved, after police surveillance spotted Kingsford Smith’s car outside New Guard meetings. It was
not
something calculated to find favour for him or ANA in high circles of power.

Whatever Smithy’s involvement with the New Guard, it was certainly tangential, as he had to keep barnstorming to pay the bills. While it wasn’t a great existence, at least he was still in the air, still flying. Clearly, it was important to keep his name before the public, to maximise the company’s chances of being awarded the contract. And, as ever, the best way to keep his name out there was to break not one but two records in one fell swoop.

It was with this imperative in mind that he set his sights on Jimmy Mollison’s Australia to England record of eight days, twenty-one hours, in itself over half a day better than the former Qantas pilot C.W.A
.
Scott’s record. Then he would turn around and sprint back home, to flags waving, in less than nine days—or, even better, eight days. He felt he had just the plane to do it in, the
Southern Cross Minor
, another Avro 616 Avian biplane that he had just purchased with the help of his rich father-in-law, but this time it was the MK.V fitted with long-range fuel tanks.

To get to his starting point of Wyndham, Smithy—after bidding a tearful Mary goodbye—flew first to Alice Springs, where he was obliged to get some running repairs done, just as Keith Anderson and Bobby Hitchcock had done two years earlier when one of the tappets had come loose, causing the engine to vibrate. Smithy’s problem was that the vibration had caused an oil-gauge pipe to fracture, though he wasn’t particularly concerned. In fact, so little concerned was he with this problem that the next day, when he was following the Overland Telegraph Line north, just as Keith Anderson had done, he decided to take a short cut inland over the Tanami Desert, just as Keith had done…
⁹

With Keith, of course, the decision had resulted in his and Bobby Hitchcock’s tragic deaths. In Smithy’s case, however, he was able to fly on through to Wyndham, no worries.

Such was the luck of the draw for intrepid aviators…

After leaving Wyndham in the
Southern Cross Minor
, at two o’clock on the morning of 24 September 1931, Smithy landed in Cheribon, in Java, just sixteen hours and fifteen minutes later, and left the following morning at dawn, bound for Victoria Point, which was 1390 miles distant on the southernmost coast of Burma. Alas, after circling the RAF aerodrome at Seletar in Singapore, only a short time later he found himself in a monsoonal rainstorm and became disoriented. Effectively flying blind, he had no idea where he was, or whether he could stay aloft long enough to make it to Burma, even if he could navigate his way there in the storm. The only way forward was to fly within 30 feet of the ground and keep the coast in sight. The monsoonal rain kept battering his slender craft, almost as if it was in a conspiracy with the wretched wind to force him to crash.
In extremis
it became obvious that his one hope of salvation was to land on a beach and wait the storm out.