Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (25 page)

Sadly for him, Kingsford Smith was unable to participate in the celebrations. He had become so crook with the flu and pneumonia then sweeping desperately cold Britain that he had been admitted to the Royal Naval Hospital in Chatham, and at one point when one of his lungs filled with fluid it had even looked like he was going to die.
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Though very pleased that the war was over—at least sort of pleased, as he had hoped to fly against the Germans again before it finished—it was a terribly demoralising thing to be stuck in a hospital feeling like death warmed up, while everybody else was celebrating wildly. Still, at least in the quiet of it all, he was able to take time to contemplate the question that millions of other servicemen were also dealing with—that is, what now? Some men, certainly, were able to return home and pick up where they had left off—on the farm, in the factory, with their families. For many, though, the places they had left simply no longer existed, while others, like Kingsford Smith, were no longer the same men.

When he had joined the war he had been little more than a kid working in a factory. Now, he was a veteran of hideous trench warfare in two theatres, no less than a war pilot, and a decorated one at that. Return to the tight little world of the Colonial Sugar Refinery in Pyrmont as a glorified grease monkey? Out of the question! Most pilots felt exactly the same way. Once you knew what it was like to fly, to take wing into the clouds and sail before the sun, you never really wanted to do anything else.

‘Of course,’ he wrote to his parents on 22 November 1918, ‘I am going to continue flying if possible, so long as it doesn’t come down to the level of being a chauffeur, which I don’t think is highly likely. Anyway, there are lots of openings for starting schools for aviation, etc…‘
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Once out of hospital and strong enough to plan his next move, Kingsford Smith wasted little time. As soon as he could, he left his position as an instructor at the Royal Air Force station at Eastchurch, to be ‘demobbed’, the term used for those who left the services. After an attempt to gain the agency to sell Avro planes in Australia came to nothing—despite at first looking promising—the 21-year-old tried a different tack.
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Together with an enormous and robust 27-year-old wartime flying friend from Perth by the name of Cyril Maddocks, he formed a company called Kingsford Smith–Maddocks Aeros Ltd.

The two young aviators made plans to buy several new or surplus Royal Aircraft Factory BE2e (Blériot Experimental) reconnaissance biplanes, with the intention of eventually shipping them home to Australia and starting a flying school. To finance his share of them, Kingsford Smith was counting on the £300 ‘demob’ money that was coming through, plus another £150 he was to be paid to remain part of the ‘Special Reserve’, essentially a standby war pilot who could be called on if the need arose. In the meantime, he and Maddocks would conduct a few joy flights at country fairs and the like around England, taking paying passengers aloft, to earn some more money.

In the history of the world there had never been such a gathering of the good and great as was assembled in the glittering Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles for the Peace Conference during the early months of 1919. The series of meetings involved representatives from the twenty-seven victorious nations of the Great War, gathered to decide everything ranging from the reparations that Germany must pay to who should take over the former colonies of the defeated Axis powers. And yet, though the defeated Germans had no seat at the conference, this did not prevent there being disputes. For there were many…

One of the matters fiercely debated was the proper fate for the former German territory of New Guinea. President Woodrow Wilson of the United States was passionate in his advocacy for Japan, which had fought on the side of the Allies in the war, to take it over, while the irascible Australian prime minister, Billy Hughes, was equally insistent that it should be Australian territory—in part, as a buffer against what he suspected might be Japan’s future territorial ambitions across south-east Asia and into the South Pacific.

When a frustrated Wilson said to Hughes that in his role as Australian prime minister, ‘after all, you speak for only five million people’, Hughes cut him short with: ‘I speak for 60,000 dead. For how many do you speak?’
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At this table, in this forum, Australia had made a far greater sacrifice than America had, and it
would
be heard. In the course of attending the Peace Conference, Billy Hughes was constantly flying back and forth between London and Paris. Journeying by aeroplane set him to thinking…

If travel in a plane could cut down a one-day trip to just an hour, what would it mean to Australia if an air-route could be established between, say, London and Sydney? If instead of a six-week trip by sea, the whole journey could be cut down to a matter of just a week or two? After all, England was awash with Australian pilots, some of whom Hughes had met while visiting recuperating servicemen at Cobham Hall in Kent, men who had come to the war by ship—but, now it was time to go home they wanted to do the obvious and
fly
back!

The first clue as to which way Hughes was thinking came in a cable he sent from Paris to the Australian cabinet, on 18 February 1919:

Several aviators are desirous of attempting flight London to Australia in Handley-Page machine. They are all first class men, and very keen.
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And things began to move quickly from there…

Have you heard?!?! In March 1919 the Australian government announced a prize of no less than £10,000 for the first all-Australian crew, or solo Australian pilot, who could fly all the way from England to Australia in a plane of British make!

£10,000!

In a world where the average working wage was less than £10 a week this was an astronomical sum. Yet Hughes considered it absolutely appropriate as a means of encouraging aviation, which would in turn lessen Australian isolation and bind her ever tighter to Mother England—close to the furthest country on earth from her shores. And yet, the path between them, across four continents, remained relatively squarely within the British Empire.

Certainly it was a risky venture, with even the
New York Times
commenting that ‘Christopher Columbus did not take one-tenth the risks that these bold air pioneers will have to face…They will be throwing dice with death’.
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The fact was, however, that most of those entering the race were veterans of the air war in France and had thrown dice with death most days before breakfast, and so far they had won every time. So what was another roll?

Kingsford Smith, for one, was absorbed in the idea of the race, and determined to win it. Excited, he wrote to his parents: ‘Should we be chosen by any chance, and pull the job through, it will mean that we are made for life, because look at the big advertisement our own little venture would get out of it, to say nothing of the part of the £10,000 that would come to us.’
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And while he didn’t have remotely the money necessary to finance such a venture, he was convinced this was most definitely a problem that could be overcome. Now that the war was over, interest in civil aviation was just beginning to take off and there were any number of companies eager to associate themselves with whomever they thought might possibly win such a race.

One company of precisely that description was the Yorkshire-based Blackburn Aircraft and Motor Company—owned and run by Robert Blackburn—which was organising for one of its long-range bombers to be entered. (The particular plane chosen was called a ‘Kangaroo’, because when the 75-foot wingspan, 4-ton twin-engine biplane bomber had first come off the drawing board there was a small ‘pouch’ below the cockpit where a machine gunner hovered in the belly of the beast.) Blackburn had already secured one pilot in the form of an Australian chap by the name of Val Rendle, and after meeting Kingsford Smith and Maddocks, he affirmed that he was happy for them to join Rendle’s crew and fly the Kangaroo to Australia.

Kingsford Smith was thrilled. It was
exactly
the kind of venture he wanted to embark on in those immediate post-war days, when finding something to fill the void was not easy. Certainly, he was acutely conscious that the competition from other pilots would be tough, but on the other hand, he backed himself against them in having the requisite resilience, skill, hunger and…perhaps crucially…charm, to find the sponsors necessary. For whatever it was that generally placed the young, easygoing pilot at the centre of any group of men, could be devastating when focused on just one man and, in short, Smithy had personally helped to arrange for the Rolls-Royce company to provide both its best engines and the expert necessary companions to help install them. As well, the Shell Oil Company agreed to contact all its agents along the path between England and Australia—particularly in the Dutch East Indies—to organise for petrol to be supplied to the Blackburn plane when it passed through. Making everything all the sweeter was that Robert Blackburn had told the crew that if they could get the Kangaroo to Australia, and win the race, they could keep the plane. As to the two planes Kingsford Smith and Maddocks had purchased for their company, these were disassembled and packed away, in readiness to be sent to Sydney by ship—while they, of course, would bloody well be
flying
there!

All to the good and full steam ahead…

Maybe it
was
all over. When the final signature was put on the Treaty of Versailles, an edict came into force—backed by the most powerful nations in the world—which effectively shut down Anthony Fokker’s four factories and threw his 6000 workmen into Germany’s growing unemployment queues. For while a part of the armistice agreement had been an enlightened move to regulate civil international aviation by requiring all signatory nations to set up their own civil aviation authorities, there was one specific article aimed directly like a dagger at Anthony Fokker’s heart. Article IV dictated that all of Germany’s military aeroplanes and engines should be immediately destroyed, and ‘
in erster Linie alle Apparate D. VII
’ (first of all, all machines of the D-7 type),
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which were those aeroplanes made by Anthony Fokker. In the treaty, this was the only armament singled out for specific and immediate destruction, meaning that, with effectively just the slash of a few pens, it was now as illegal for the Dutchman to continue to make planes in Germany as it was for anyone to buy them. There was to be no compensation, no nothing.

Just…shut down.

What was he to do? In the end, Anthony Fokker decided that if the rules demanded that he cease production and hand over everything he had, then those rules would simply have to be broken. Taking an enormous risk, he gathered a group of loyal workers around him whom he felt he could count on, and organised to get as many of his tools, machines and
materiel
—including many disassembled planes—onto a particular train of sixty cars as could possibly fit. And then, after bribing certain officials along the way, he ‘smuggled’ the whole lot—lock, stock, barrel, engines and wings—back to his homeland of Holland to start again!

In fact, that first attempt proved so successful that Fokker repeated it—five times—on each occasion filling sixty carriages and then clearing a bribed path all the way from Schwerin to Amsterdam. The bribes were not always money, but frequently such things as sewing machines, bicycles and models of Fokker aeroplanes for the officials’ delighted children. For many Germans, helping Fokker in this subterfuge was a pleasure in any case, and one in the eye for the wretchedly victorious Allied occupiers.
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After most of the machinery was transported, together with 400 engines, 120 D-7s, sixty two-seater observation planes and more than twenty D-8s, Fokker quickly established new premises just outside Amsterdam and proceeded to rebuild. The difference now was that his focus had shifted from making military aircraft for killing and maiming, to designing and building civilian aircraft, capable of travelling long distances reliably, and bearing as many passengers as possible.

On the veranda of her home in Neutral Bay, Catherine Kingsford Smith smiled ruefully. Her baby boy just could not sit still, be it in war or in peacetime. Now, in May 1919, he had written to his parents about where his new venture was up to, and as ever he was bubbling over with both impatience and enthusiasm:

Dearest Mother and Father,

We’re hurrying like mad to get away before the first

of next month in order to beat the monsoons around

East India which would hold us up for weeks…

When we arrive (if we succeed), we’ll go straight

ahead and open an aerodrome. We have Blackburn’s

agency for a year to go on with.
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In his letter, Chilla also spelled out the route he intended to take from the other side of the world home to Australia. After consultation with all members of the crew and other pilots who had flown in various parts of the world, and sending endless cables back and forth, it had been decided that from England to Australia they would hop via Leeds, Lyon, Brindisi, Salonika, Nicosia, Allepo, Baghdad, Bushehr, Chabbar, Karachi, Baroda, Benares, Calcutta, Rangoon, Penang, Singapore, Batavia, Benjawan, Kupang and finally…Port Darwin! Certainly there remained a lot of work to do to really make it happen, but the men were up for it.