Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (90 page)

In Hollywood, Kingsford Smith and John Stannage were having lunch at Fox Studios with the actor and famous syndicated newspaper columnist Will Rogers. They had been delighted when, nearing the end of the lunch, the tiny Shirley Temple had rushed up to Will Rogers, saying, ‘Take me for another ride on that little pony, Uncle Will.’
⁵⁸
Introduced, they found this girl, the world’s most famous child, to be charming and completely unspoiled, rather like she appeared in the movies. And then one of the Fox executives came and told them the devastating news. Ulm and his crew had gone missing, after sending out distress signals.

An ashen-faced Smithy immediately abandoned the lunch. ‘Let’s go,’ he said to Stannage.
⁵⁹
The two went straight back to their room at Los Angeles’s Roosevelt Hotel and for the next five or six hours worked their contacts to try to learn as much information as they could about the last fixed position of the
Stella Australis
—where it had likely gone down, and precisely what was being done to find them. In the end, Smithy couldn’t stand it any longer, and gave Stannage the order: ‘Get the plane ready.’
⁶⁰
They were going to search for Ulm.

Surely Smithy couldn’t be serious? Surely he understood that it would be
madness
to simply jump in a plane and head to Honolulu unprepared? (That was, after all, precisely what had led Keith Anderson and Bobby Hitchcock to their deaths, when they had gone looking for the
Southern Cross
four years earlier.)

But no, Smithy was dead set upon it, and no amount of protestations from Stannage or his brother Harold—nor even a teary phone call from Mary in Sydney, begging him not to go—could dissuade him.

All right then, Smithy, what about at least a farewell drink? Smithy agreed, but before he could drink it, Smithy’s friend Bud Morriss managed to slip a very powerful sedative into it, which knocked the half-crazed airman out for the next twenty-four hours, by which point some of his rationality had returned.
⁶¹
By the time he was properly back on his feet, the
Los Angeles Times
was running a story on its front page with the ominous headline, ‘FLYERS DEAD, SAY EXPERTS IN SEA HUNT’. The article detailed how, ‘despite the largest rescue force ever pressed into action, forty-eight hours now having passed since they went missing and the chances are probable that Ulm and his companions have perished’.
⁶²

In Sydney meanwhile, and refusing to believe any such thing, Charles Ulm’s second wife, Josephine, kept up a teary vigil, supported by family and friends, as she desperately waited for news. Day by day the newspapers delivered ever more grim reports, focusing on the news that there really was no news.
Nothing.

Despite the massive search with planes and ships combing and recombing the area where the plane was thought to have disappeared, there was not the tiniest sign. After a week the American authorities were left with no choice but to regretfully call off the search. While appreciating the efforts of the United States, the grief-stricken Mrs Ulm refused to give up hope and clung to the belief that her husband
must
still be alive—just as Harry Hawker’s wife Muriel had done a decade and a half earlier when it appeared that Harry had been lost in the Atlantic.

The only way that could be so would be if Ulm and his crew had landed somewhere on the chain of tiny islands which extend for 1200 miles from Honolulu in the south to Midway Island in the far north. So it was that, via the good offices of the British consul in Honolulu, she was able to charter a cutter by the name of
Lanikai
to keep searching along that chain.

Still nothing. Stone cold motherless nothing.

As to thirteen-year-old John Ulm, he found that wherever he went people were suddenly going out of their way to offer their deepest condolences on the tragic death of his father. They would cross the road to embrace him, to mutter their grief, people whom he’d never even met before. He really felt very important.

A cruel juxtaposition to the tragedy—as if marking the final triumph of successful passenger airlines over the pioneers who had blazed the path—was that just six days after Ulm’s death, the first Qantas Empire Airways link between England and Australia was successfully inaugurated (albeit with older planes following a terrible accident as one of the new planes was being delivered), after being officially launched in Brisbane by Prime Minister Joseph Lyons and His Royal Highness Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester. That first regular airmail, carrying precisely 1267 pounds and 4
³
/
₄
ounces of letters and packages to England, where it arrived just fourteen days later, was the beginning of a new era.
⁶³

Struggling to find a role in this new aviation world that was developing all around him, Smithy remained devastated by Ulm’s death—Stannage would later write that he ‘cracked up’
⁶⁴
—and wrestled with the problem of what could have gone wrong. He wrote to the Controller of Civil Aviation, Edgar Johnston, ‘It is impossible, from the scarcity of information available to form any very definite opinion of how it all happened, but it looks as though they were somewhat uncertain of their position throughout the flight, and were relying on picking up the wireless beam at Honolulu. Whether their uncertainty of position was due to bad weather conditions or to laxity or inefficiency in navigation I do not know, but it seems almost inconceivable that with Charles in charge the latter could be the cause.’
⁶⁵

It didn’t make sense that Charles Ulm would have been anything other than totally assiduous in his preparations and selection of his crew, but against that, Smithy knew better than most just how many things
could
have gone wrong.

As a matter of fact, as he knew only too well, that even safely on the ground things could go wrong. A case in point was that, despite all his plans, he could not sell his Lockheed in America for love nor money, and was eventually obliged to leave it in a hangar at Burbank and return home via ship, leaving San Francisco on the SS
Monterey
on 28 January 1935. Such was his reduced state at this time, that at Smithy’s insistence, Mary had to cross the Pacific from Sydney to come and get him to accompany him home.

As to where his energies should be concentrated now, once again the answer was not obvious. While in America he had fielded another offer from Anthony Fokker to join his company as part consultant and part roving ambassador. Though flattered, he had declined. For better or worse, for richer or poorer, he loved his life in Australia and wanted to remain there, as did Mary. Apart from everything else, it was where they wanted to raise their son, now a bonny two-year-old with blond curls, rather like his baby photos showed Chilla to have been at the same age.

Once his strength had partially returned he was able to do a little barnstorming, but the situation was far from satisfactory, and there were many people who thought that a well-paid role should be found for the great man. One who felt like this was Bill Taylor. He wrote that it was a sad situation when ‘the world’s greatest airman has to live a hand-to-mouth existence by giving people joyrides in
Southern Cross
when, in fact, his achievements were such that they should have been bringing him the rewards of Government sponsorship and other encouragements’.
⁶⁶

But there was none.

It was a time when aviation companies came and aviation companies went. Within just a few weeks of Smithy arriving home from America in early 1935, Kingsford-Smith Air Services Ltd—
going, going, gone!
—was sold to rival Eastern Air Transport, which was planning to extend air services into rural New South Wales. Throughout his company’s brief life span it never achieved great heights, and in fact could often be found rumbling low between the craggy walls of the Valley of Death. It had never made any big money, even at the best of times, and Smithy no longer had the energy or interest to run it. Besides which, selling it would free up some much-needed capital to play the last card he had in his business deck…

Yes, he had had his troubles in Australia and Great Britain and America, but never in New Zealand. There, his welcome had been unwavering. There, they had listened to his proposals. There, he was taken seriously as both an aviator
and
as a businessman. So it was there that he hoped to finally organise, and get up and running, a twice-weekly trans-Tasman air service between Sydney and New Plymouth, backed by the weight of the New Zealand government. With that in mind, Smithy, Bill Taylor and Beau Sheil—who had left Vacuum Oil and practically become Smithy’s manager—firmed up plans to form the Trans-Tasman Air Service Development Company Ltd, with the idea of getting a service up and running by early 1936.

The response was lukewarm at best. The Australian government evinced almost no interest, and although Smithy was received by the New Zealand cabinet when he ducked across the Tasman on a quick visit by ship, it was obvious that they, too, felt that as the most far-flung outpost of the British Empire, they were almost obliged to use that Empire’s leading air company, Imperial Airways, for such an important leg. Broadly, while Smithy was most certainly the man they wanted to have a drink with, and tell their wives they had met, he wasn’t necessarily the one they would choose to run a serious aviation concern.

Why, the people of Melbourne wanted to know, was that plane buzzing Flemington racecourse on this afternoon of Wednesday, 13 February 1935? Oh! Oh dear. Why it was none other than…yes it was, Raymond Parer, ‘The Reparer’! With his flying partner Godfrey Hemsworth, Parer was arriving in Melbourne rather later than the three days it has taken C.W.A. Scott and Tom Campbell Black when they had won the race. As a matter of fact, it had taken Parer the Reparer no fewer than 116 days. Fuel trouble. Engine trouble. Wing trouble. Propeller trouble. Trouble-trouble. Still fuming, Raymond Parer didn’t want to talk about it. But at least he and Hemsworth had finished, which was something…
⁶⁷

Nineteen
OUT ON A WING AND A PRAYER

He was always fond of saying ‘I don’t want to be the world’s most famous pilot, I want to be the world’s oldest pilot…’
L
ADY
K
INGSFORD
S
MITH
, 1978
¹

Kingsford Smith, his gallant spirit never admitting defeat, gradually had his essential fibre whittled away, leaving effective only his spirit and his body with his unafraid smile.
B
ILL
T
AYLOR
²

To conquer or die—that was life’s eternal challenge for this truly great adventurer…

J
OHN
S
TANNAGE
³

J
ust before midnight on 14 May 1935, Smithy was sitting in the Officers’ Mess at Richmond air base when a rather ominous thought struck him: ‘Here I am, thirty-eight, apparently sane and sensible, and yet I’m going out over the ocean again, in the middle of the night.’
⁴

In half an hour, he was due to head off in the
Southern Cross
over the treacherous Tasman Sea once more. As May 1935 was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the accession of King George V, Smithy had conceived the idea to take a ‘Jubilee Flight’ across the Tasman and for the first time carry mail from Australia to New Zealand. He hoped the flight would so capture the imagination of the public of both New Zealand and Australia, that the trip would be the forerunner of a regular service—to be run by him and his partners.

To double the impact, the original plan had been to take the late Charles Ulm’s
Faith in Australia
, the former Australian National Airways
Southern Moon
, as well, but this plan fell through at the last moment.

For the trip, Smithy had chosen the redoubtable Bill Taylor as his co-pilot and navigator, and the ever-faithful John Stannage as his radio operator, who would be broadcasting to stations on both sides of the Tasman as this historic flight took place. On board, they had 34,000 letters to be delivered, together with several other items of freight, including wrapped bundles of Sydney newspapers.

So long as they got there, of course…

Bill Taylor thought it was no sure thing and was also beginning to question his own sanity in going on this trip. Just the day before, he had wandered into Smithy’s hangar at Mascot to see John Stannage and the Associated Newspapers aviation correspondent, Jack Percival—neither of whom were even close to being trained mechanics—up to their elbows in what had been the starboard motor, but which they had now stripped down into tiny pieces to replace the cracked crankcase. In Taylor’s mind this was not the stuff successful flights were made of and, given a rising presentiment that he was about ‘to walk the plank into the Tasman Sea’,
⁵
he considered refusing to go. In the end, however, his loyalty to Smithy was such that he decided he just couldn’t pull out. He would go on the flight, walk the plank, and hope for the best. So too, John Stannage, who had his own grave doubts, but simply couldn’t say no to Smithy. For Smithy was not a man you let down, and to refuse to go would be to question his judgment, which was
unthinkable.