The Lonely Sea and the Sky (10 page)

We developed this property in two ways. First, we planted it with pine-trees. Geoffrey was an enthusiastic tree-grower, and believed in forestry as a profitable investment. I like trees too, so we got cracking. I raised the first 40,000 trees in my backyard from seeds collected from pine cones; it was fun watching the little pine-needle seedlings emerge with the seeds on their backs. The beds were protected from the sun's heat by scrim (a kind of sacking) stretched across wooden frames. We planted out these experimental seedlings on a hill in rows six feet apart, with nine feet between seedlings. They took well, so we started a nursery of our own, and soon had several planting gangs at work. We planted a million trees, and Geoffrey's son has been milling them for the past ten years. I am proud of having raised a crop of timber in my lifetime from seed planted in my own garden. New Zealand is a wonderful tree-growing country; our pines used to put on six feet in height a year, and, once they got started, an inch in diameter. We built miles of road, and at one time had three teams of surveyors at work. We had to sell off small lots of land as sites for weekend cottages in order to pay for the whole scheme. We bought another property alongside, and cut that up as well. We built up a sales force of thirty salesmen, selling only our own land. Geoffrey was himself a wonderful salesman, but I found that I could not sell my own property. I became shy and inhibited about it, which I never did when I was selling things belonging to other people. The only trouble was that Geoffrey was always selling ideas to me. We bought the Miller Chair Company that supplied seats for theatres and cinemas. I never could get really interested in this. We didn't know enough about it, and lost money through it. However, we now owned three private companies operating in land which were doing well. By the time I was twenty-six my income was £10,000 a year. Then Geoffrey sold me the idea of an aviation company, and we formed the Goodwin–Chichester Aviation Company Limited. My first flight made me wildly excited and enthusiastic. We took the New Zealand agency for A. V. Roe, bought two Avro Avians, and began a joy-riding tour of New Zealand.

  This was good fun; first we had to scout around for a field suitable for landing and taking off passengers; then we advertised. Our aim was to fly around as many passengers as we could in the few hours when they flocked out to the field. We had four of the best pilots in New Zealand, but their experience had been with heavier military planes in the First World War, and they found the light Avian landing on grass fields too fragile for the job. We were lucky that we only lost ten shillings a head on the 6,000 passengers we carried. Undercarriages were the chief weakness in the planes, and sometimes farm fences seemed to be in the wrong place. One day I got exasperated at one of our crashes, and determined to learn how to fly myself, to find out what it was all about.

  I went down to the New Zealand Air Force station at Christchurch and had some lessons there in an Avro 504K. This plane had a rotary engine, which means that the propeller and the engine went round together. You could not throttle back the engine; you just cut out the ignition when coming in to land, and cut it in again hopefully if you made a bad landing and wanted to take off again quickly. The engine used castor oil, which stank to high heaven, and sprinkled the pilot's face copiously. I struggled away trying to learn, but was a hopelessly bad pupil. By December 1928 I had had eighteen hours fifty minutes of dual instruction, and still could not fly. I think this was partly because of trying to mix flying with an intensely active business life. Geoffrey and I were running five private companies at full blast, besides our partnership, and I was ruthlessly trying to make money for twelve hours a day or more.

  In the spring of 1929, ten years and three months after I had landed in New Zealand, I decided that the time had come for me to go to England for a visit. I wanted to fly back from London to Sydney, and thought that the best chance of achieving this was to obtain the safest and most reliable aeroplane. With this in view, I first visited the United States, and spent two months looking at any possible makes of aircraft. I had demonstration flights in an American Eagle with a 180 h.p. Hispano engine, a Ryan six-place Brougham, with a Wright 300 h.p., a Whirlwind six-place Kuntzer Aircoach with three 90 h.p. Le Blonds, a Curtis Robin three-place, with a Curtis 180 h.p. Challenger, a Curtis Fledgling two-place trainer, and a Fairchild seven-place plane with a Pratt and Whitney Wasp. Three other types I never tried out because in each case the aeroplane crashed between the time of my making an appointment and reaching the airfield. None of the types I flew in was really suitable, and my visit was aeronautically a flop. However, I made a good friend in Charlie Blackwell, and thoroughly enjoyed staying with him in Santa Barbara. There I survived a game of bridge with three millionaires, used the same bath as had Prince George (later Duke of Kent) during a visit to California, and was introduced by Charlie to his tailor in London who made the best dress clothes in the world.

  At the end of July I arrived in London, and began learning to fly again. At first I had some instruction at Stag Lane, but I could see that I was not going to get on very fast there, and switched to Brooklands, where Duncan Davies and Ted Jones took me in hand. It was not until 13 August that I first went solo for five minutes, and that was after twenty-four hours of dual. I was a slow pupil, but perhaps not quite as bad as it sounds, because only five and a half hours of that dual instruction was in England. On 28 August I secured my 'A' flying licence, which permitted me to fly an aircraft alone. What about navigation? Suppose I couldn't navigate across country? The first time I ventured away from the aerodrome was most exciting. At first everything was a jumble; then I picked out a railway line, the Thames, the Staines reservoir. With the aid of the map I found Byfleet. Flying at a snail's pace, I recognised other landmarks shown on the map. Thrill, excitement, joy! If I could do that much the first day, competence must be a matter only of practice and experience. On 8 September I bought a Gipsy Moth which weighed 880 lbs unloaded. I had left New Zealand with the idea of a bigger and better machine, but money worries were troubling me. Almost as soon as I had left New Zealand the 1929 slump had hit us hard. Everything I had was invested in land, and we had big overdrafts to finance our land purchases. The bank got jittery, and wanted us to reduce them. But our customers, like us, were hit by the slump, and although we had a lot of money owing to us for land we had sold in small lots, it was hard to collect it. The Moth was all I could afford, but I was lucky to get it. It turned out to be a wonderful little aeroplane with its Gipsy motor, and Handley Page slots. Three days after buying it I flew to Liverpool, where an actress friend of mine was playing in a show. I did no good in that direction so turned round and flew to North Devon to visit my parents.

  The aeroplane was so new that it had not yet been fitted with a compass. I was 'flying by Bradshaw', following the railway lines across country, and I wondered if I could fly by the sun. The sky was overcast, with ten-tenths at 1,000 feet. I climbed up into the cloud, and proceeded until I had passed through a 9,000 feet layer of it to emerge at 10,000 feet in brilliant sunshine over a snowy white field of cloud. Not only had I no compass, but no blind-flying instruments at all. I reckoned that if I got into trouble I could force the plane into a spin, and that it was bound to spin round the vertical axis, and that therefore I should be sure to emerge vertically from the cloud. After flying along for half an hour by the sun, I climbed down through the 9,000 foot layer of cloud. I then wanted to find out how accurately I had carried out this manoeuvre, and I used a sound principle of navigation. I fixed my position by the easiest method available – I flew round a railway station low down, and read the name off the platform. By some extraordinary fluke I was right on course. I probably uttered for the first time the navigator's famous cry 'Spot on!'

  This visit was not a great success. I had been away more than ten years and I arrived back thinking (privately) that I had a tremendous achievement behind me in building up a business and turning my £10 into £20,000. My family not only never mentioned this, but showed me plainly that I was an outsider as far as they were concerned. I had a New Zealand twang, and no doubt talked too much and too loudly. For my part, I disapproved of the air of decay creeping into the house where I had been born, the weeds sprouting from between the paving stones of the stable yard, and the difficulty my family was finding in attending to their own housework efficiently after having been used to having it all done for them. I believe that what upset my family most was the odd matter of a wreath. While I had been away in New Zealand my great aunt Jinny, of whom I had been tremendously fond, had died at the age of over ninety. When I first visited my family I brought down a wreath for her grave. It was big and rather exotic looking; perhaps more suitable for a cemetery in Wimbledon than for a Devon village where the wreaths are more likely to be made with a few daffodils or primroses. I think that this wreath upset my family more than anything else that I did; they thought I must be a frightful barbarian to produce such an unusual thing.

  As a result I took to showing off more than I would otherwise have done. Also I was bursting with the joy of living, and the thrill of flying my own aeroplane. After taking my sister for a flight I made a bad landing on a rabbit burrow, bounced into the air to find an oak tree dead ahead. I could not take off again and plonked down with a bang. One wheel hit the side of a cart track; daylight burst through the side of the fuselage, and the plane came to rest with a drooping wing. The damage to my cocky pride was worse, and I scratched my head hard. Then I thought of George Moore, the local carpenter who used to be my sparring partner when I was a boy. I rushed off for George, and we got busy with hammer and saw. We quickly replaced the fractured ribs, and added one or two extra. Eighteen hours later I was in the air again. The next day I took up Wilkey, who used to be our gardener, and when we landed he reminded me that it was my birthday, and that twenty-eight years ago he had ridden into Barnstaple to fetch a doctor to help me make my first landing in the world.

  I went back to Brooklands in a 35mph wind – with the help of my two sisters and Wilkey hanging on to the wings I just managed to taxi into position safely to take off. In the strong gusty wind at Brooklands my first shot at landing was a dud. I bumped, and went off again. The next time, I put the plane down well, and it rolled to a halt. I started taxiing towards the hangars across wind, but a gust started lifting the windward wing. I saw the other wingtip dip slowly and gracefully to the ground. I watched, fascinated, as the tip slowly crumpled up. The windward wing rose equally slowly, up, up, up until the whole aeroplane was balanced on the crumpled wingtip. Then it took a leap into the air, and landed fair and square on its nose, with the tail pointing to heaven. I found myself in the undignified position of dangling in the safety-belt and looking down at the ground ten feet below me.

  I spent fifty hours working on the repairs, under the supervision of the chief rigger. I learned a lot. Perhaps I should add that my rustic repairs to the longeron and compression struts caused the riggers much amusement. It was a novelty for them to have a pilot repair his own aircraft. Fitting and rigging the new wing and the new propeller was valuable experience for me.

  After this I settled down to serious flying training. For hour after hour I practised landing into wind, across wind and downwind, and then in a confined space. I used to plant my handkerchief ten yards inside a fence and practise touching down on it. Then I would move it 150 yards from the fence, and practise ending my landing run on it. This last (without brakes) was the hardest manoeuvre of all, because of the variable wind. For half an hour a day I practised forced landings. I used to climb to 1,000 feet, cut the engine, pick the best field I could see, and land in it. At first I always overshot the field. I imagined that my motor really was dead, and that to undershoot would be fatal. Eventually my skill improved, so that I could just skim the trees or the fence, and drop into the field I had picked. I played this game with serious concentration, and one day I put up a 'black' ; after I had rolled to a halt on the grass with my dead motor after my forced landing, I found myself staring at Windsor Castle a few hundred yards in front!

  I also liked to put in half an hour a day on aerobatics. I used to do my loops over a long stretch of straight railway line, so that I could check each loop for accuracy as I flattened out.

  On 3 October my compass arrived and was adjusted. I began feeding navigation into my day's programme and checking up on petrol consumption at different speeds. On 15 October I took off and landed in moonlight. This gave me twenty-three minutes of intense enjoyment; I had a feeling of complete isolation and solitariness, and the thousands of lights below intensified the feeling of being completely cut off. I looped, and did a few stall turns for the same reason that a dog barks at something which scares him.

  When I had arrived in England in July I had made up my mind to fly back to Australia single-handed. This may not seem much of a project today, but at that time only one person had flown alone from England to Australia, Bert Hinkler, a crack test pilot from Bunderberg, Australia. I gave myself six months in which to learn to fly sufficiently to make the trip. Time was now running out and so was money; cash was getting desperately short. I cabled Geoffrey asking him to try to raise £400 for me while I went for a trial spin round Europe. The next difficulty was that I had to insure the aeroplane, because I still owed some money for it. November was the worst month in Europe for this kind of flying, and I was not an experienced pilot. However, Lamplugh, who was a good sport and friend to novice aviators, finally agreed to underwrite the risk if I would start by taking with me Joe King, who was an experienced commercial pilot.