Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (97 page)

The widows wept, the masses mourned, but at least these men had lived lives like no others, before or since—something worth remembering, and saluting, nigh on a century later.

Vale.

EPILOGUE

Surely it cannot be that this laughing, sunny-haired baby, eager boy and great-hearted man, who gave so much happiness to all around him, has really left us. Is it not more likely that in some sea-girt isle, carried thither by the drift of reckless ocean currents far from the ebb and flow of our fitful civilisation, he and his companion keep watch, with wistful eyes, for the help that seems so long in coming?

W
INIFRED
S
EALBY
, C
HARLES
K
INGSFORD
S
MITH’S OLDEST SISTER
,
WRITING WHIMSICALLY IN
1950
¹

We need such performances as Sir Charles Kingsford Smith’s, not only to advance the technique of transportation, but to enlarge our conception of our social destiny. The man who thinks nothing of skimming through the air for a distance of 3,000 miles between sunrise and sunset sets us dreaming of a Wellsian future, when the whole atmosphere will become a playground and the barriers to the free intercourse of nations seem ridiculous.

E
DITORIAL IN THE
N
EW
Y
ORK
T
IMES
, N
OVEMBER
1935
²

As it was, there was no other way for Smithy. To have dragged out his life in some physically secure but drab situation would have been death for him anyhow. He was completely right in setting out upon this flight. It was necessary for the freedom of spirit on which he lived.

B
ILL
T
AYLOR
,
ON
S
MITHY’S FINAL FLIGHT
,
AND ITS RESULT
³

O
n 16 March 1936, Lady Kingsford Smith appeared in Sydney’s Probate Court and swore to the death of her husband. ‘From today,’ said one press report, ‘Sir Charles Kingsford Smith is legally dead.’
⁴
Only a few months afterwards, on Friday, 14 August 1936, the Defence Minister, Archie Parkhill, announced that Mascot airport in Sydney would officially become Kingsford Smith Aerodrome to mark his contribution to world aviation.
⁵

So what
did
happen to Smithy and Tommy Pethybridge?

To this day, no-one knows. The only trace that ever emerged came in May 1937, when two fishermen were walking along the rocky shore of Aye Island off the south coast of Burma (today’s Myanmar), about 145 miles south-east of Rangoon, and came across the inflated wheel of an aircraft still attached to its undercarriage leg. Upon investigation, it was established that this wreckage belonged to the
Lady Southern Cross
—tangible proof, at least, that Smithy had crashed in water.

The most popular theory to have emerged since the disappearance is that, flying late that night, Smithy clipped the 463-foot top of the jungle-covered island, tried to get his plane back under control but ended up crashing into the waters just off the island—hence the wheel floating to the shore eighteen months later, as the action of the incoming and outgoing tides broke one of the wheels loose. That theory has at its base the investigation conducted by Captain Alan Eadon, the Director of Civil Aviation of Burma at the time, who wrote in his report ‘if my suppositions are correct, then Aye Island must definitely be the scene of the accident and that the remainder of the wreckage of the aircraft lies covered with the sea around its shores.’
⁶

The other theory—which I personally find compelling—is put most cogently by the New Zealand writer Ian Mackersey, who studied the issue from all angles for many years and even managed to obtain a rare permit from the Myanmar’s military government in 1996 to visit Myanmar’s south coast. There he was able to interview locals, including those of such age that they could remember the events of 1935.

Mackersey’s view is that Jimmy Melrose’s testimony that he saw the
Lady Southern Cross
can be accepted, and therefore Smithy was sighted at least 100 miles
south
of Aye Island. He contends that the prevailing currents in that area explain why the wheel, once it bobbed to the surface, would have subsequently drifted north.

In an effort to prove the Aye Island theory correct, searches have been mounted in those waters, first by Jack Hodder in 1938, and by Ted Wixted in 1983 with, alas, no trace found of an aircraft lying at the bottom of the sea. Then, in late February 2009, the Australian documentary maker Damien Lay—the man who originally approached me to write this book—mounted a major search with state-of-the-art sonar equipment looking for traces of a plane around Aye Island. In late March, Lay claimed he had been successful, based on sonar images he said matched remains of the plane, with the news first breaking in Sydney’s
Daily Telegraph.

‘To me it’s 100 per cent proof positive,’ Lay was quoted as saying. ‘The critical pieces of evidence are three equilateral triangles contained within what I believe is the starboard wing. These structures don’t occur in nature and they measure exactly 1.5m x 1.5m x 1.5m. We know those are the dimensions in which these aircraft were manufactured.’
⁷

What Lay took as proof-positive, however, others saw only as indeterminate grainy images, and most outspoken in extreme scepticism was Ian Mackersey himself, who called the claims ‘nonsense’.

‘The two occupants’ bodies would have quickly disappeared without trace,’ Mackersey told the press, ‘and so, in those tropical waters, would all the wooden components—followed eventually by the light alloy sections which would include quite a bit of the engine. All that will remain somewhere, probably spread across 200 yards of the ocean floor, will be the few steel parts of the engine.’

For his part, Dick Smith told the
Sydney Morning Herald
of Lay’s claims: ‘It could be so but I think it’s about a one in 1000 chance.’
⁸

Undeterred, Lay has announced a plan to head back to Myanmar later in 2009 and mount a major retrieval operation to bring the plane back to Australia. I wish him well and hope he can prove us all wrong.

Whoever is right, there is no clue as to what catastrophic failure of equipment—or total exhaustion or just possibly terrible judgment of the pilot—led to the crash, wherever it occurred. But what is certain is that there had been a time on nearly every long flight when Kingsford Smith, in his own words, had been in many, many ‘tough spots when it’s been touch and go whether I lived or died…’
⁹
Always, in those situations he had managed to find the solution, often
in extremis
, that had allowed him to live. This time, sick, exhausted, older, slower…he did not and, again in his own words, it turned out that his ‘number was up’.

Rest in peace, Smithy. You were a fascinating, courageous and inspiring man, a mixture of so many talents that for two decades of your adult life you were able to overcome your flaws to accomplish extraordinary things.

For her part, Catherine Kingsford Smith was devastated by her youngest son’s death, outlived him by only a couple of years, and died at home on 18 March 1938.

Smithy’s first wife, Thelma Corboy, never talked publicly about her first marriage, though in 1990 Mackersey was astounded to find that she was still alive at the age of eighty-nine and living in Perth. He made his best efforts to interview her, but was firmly rebuffed on the grounds that that part of her life was long gone and she wanted no-one to know that she had once been married to the ‘great aviator’, as she apparently referred to him. She had since gone on to a much happier second marriage.

Nevertheless, Mackersey persisted and via the intermediary of one of Thelma’s cousins, Milton Baxter, was able to get much valuable detail about her time with Smithy, before she died in September of that year.

As to Lady Mary Kingsford Smith, in 1937 she married again, this time an Englishman, Alan Tully, who was the Australasian and Far Eastern manager of the Ethyl Corporation. From then on she lived mainly in America and Canada, where she raised her son, Charles Jnr—who was just three years old when his father died—as well as a second child, Belinda, who was born to the couple. (Sadly, the baby with whom she was pregnant to Smithy, was miscarried shortly after he disappeared.) After Alan Tully died in 1975, following thirty-eight years of marriage, Mary married in 1984 for a third time, to a former General Motors executive, Frank Noldin, and they lived in Florida. Mary lived until the middle of 1997—dying at the age of eighty-seven—and generally remembered her first husband fondly, making herself available to appear at various commemorations over the years, as well as happily talking to most journalists and authors who asked her about him.

Charles Jnr is now retired from his career as an electronics engineer and lives in Colorado. Among other passions, he is a pilot and a courageous one. In 1978, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Pacific Ocean being crossed for the first time, he decided to co-pilot a Cessna 340 II pressurised twin—fitted with extra fuel tanks, of course—on its delivery flight from San Francisco to Sydney. During the preparations for this flight, the young Australian television journalist Ray Martin, then working for the ABC’s
This Day Tonight
, turned up with the famed Vietnam War cameraman David Brill, wanting to fly with Charles Jnr from Wichita back to Colorado. And they would have, too, but when a tornado rolled in from Texas, blocking their path, Martin and Brill decided that it would be something close to suicide to take off.

Not Charles Kingsford Smith Jnr, though. Spying on his radar a tiny window of opportunity in the middle of the tornado, he decided to go and at least have a look as to how manageable the weather was, and took off without them…As he discovered, it wasn’t remotely manageable and he ended up landing at a nearby airport, where he spent the night on a couch in the pilot’s lounge.

No big deal. These things happen. Soon afterwards, Charles Jnr did indeed cross the Pacific in the path of his father, and was féted upon arrival. For the record, the only memory he retains of his father is being taken on ‘an airplane ride and sitting between two big men, one of them my father, I’m quite sure. I can still visualise the propeller turning in front—it must have been idling because I could see the blades. It was noisy and scary, and I was crying, and I think my mother was not too far away trying to comfort me. I don’t remember the ride itself, nor coming back. But I definitely was not happy about the whole experience!’
¹⁰

Captain Hancock continued his business and philanthropical ventures for another thirty years and passed away, just nudging ninety years old, in 1965, to the end the very personification of his motto ‘Keep Moving’.

In September 1931, Captain Les Holden who was piloting the
Canberra
when it discovered the
Southern Cross
and its crew at Coffee Royal, flew from Sydney to New Guinea in an historic first, and essentially followed up on Bobby Hitchcock’s dream by starting a successful air-freight business in those parts. Alas, the following year, on 18 September 1932, while briefly back in Australia, he was killed when a plane he was travelling in from Sydney to Brisbane crashed near Byron Bay.

Jimmy Melrose did not survive Charles Kingsford Smith for long. On Sunday, 5 July 1936, he was killed instantly when, in the middle of a terrible storm over South Melton, Victoria, his wooden Heston Phoenix plane crashed into a field strewn with boulders, one of which connected with his head, splitting it, according to the
Canberra Times
, ‘like an overripe rockmelon’.
¹¹

After years of languishing in storage, the
Southern Cross
at last emerged to public view when it was placed in a hangar at Brisbane’s Eagle Farm airport on 17 August 1958. High in the air above, a skywriter traced the word ‘Smithy’ in the clear blue Brisbane sky, while five RAAF Meteor jets flew over the ceremony in a formation representing the celestial Southern Cross.
¹²
Charles Ulm’s son, John—who had gone on to a distinguished career as a journalist and then executive with Qantas—presided at the dedication. Most interestingly, he had been instrumental in getting Harry Lyon, now a rather crotchety 73-year-old, to attend with his wife. Ol’ Harry—who had served his country once again in World War II, even commanding a small cargo vessel—said very little at the ceremony, but one thing that he stated into a microphone John Ulm would treasure ever afterwards: ‘Without Charlie Ulm, we would never have got into the air.’
¹³
Thirty years on, and it was at last all even on the cards between Harry and Charles Ulm.

Harry passed away in the Veterans Hospital at Togus, Maine, on 30 May 1963.

As to Jim Warner, who also came out to Australia for the dedication with one of the six wives he married in his allotted life span, the one constant in his life was radio. After returning from that first Pacific crossing he opened a radio shop in Fresno, California, before serving in World War II as a radio instructor. He did, nevertheless, complain for the rest of his life—I said, he did, NEVERTHELESS, COMPLAIN for the rest of his life—that the
Southern Cross
journey had permanently damaged his hearing. He died in 1970 at the age of seventy-eight.
¹⁴