Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (28 page)

Harold had rather a pathetic letter from Charles…telling all about their troubles (re England–Australia flight) & saying he will not return to Australia unless he can fly back—after all that fuss and publicity made. Incidentally, he hoped that Harold might be able to finance him to the extent of a couple of thousand pounds so that he could get his own machine.
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Harold, though a faithful brother, wasn’t particularly interested, and Smithy, with increasing desperation, was obliged to continue looking elsewhere for money.

Anthony Fokker was now going well, expanding his aircraft manufacturing premises in North Amsterdam and focusing on building fast, reliable planes capable of carrying the maximum number of passengers and goods the greatest distance—while his old wartime rival, Tom Sopwith, was fading fast. As soon as the Great War finished, the impoverished British government had immediately cancelled all of its orders with the Sopwith firm, with no recompense, and then pursued Sopwith vigorously for a great deal of back taxes!

What could Tom Sopwith do? The only thing he could—allow the old firm to go bust and form a new one with himself and new partners Harry Hawker, Fred Sigist and Bill Eyre, each contributing £5000. This new company bore the name H.G. Hawker Engineering. Sopwith didn’t mind that his name was not on the new firm. After all, he told everyone, ‘Harry Hawker was largely responsible for our growth during the war.’
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In no time at all they were making Hawker planes and H.G. Hawker two-stroke motorcycles, while Harry soon personally added to his fame by being the first man to drive a 1500 cc car—whose engine he had personally modified—faster than 100 miles per hour.

It was possible there were more inhospitable terrains in the world to take a car, but notwithstanding the fact that both Hudson Fysh and Paul McGinness had flown planes in Syria, Palestine and Egypt, neither had ever seen anything like this. For it wasn’t just the endless sand dunes that confronted them as they tried to make their way from Longreach, Queensland, to the Katherine railhead in the Northern Territory, 1354 miles distant. It was also the sucking black plains of western Queensland, which just a few points of rain would turn into a muddy glutinous mass and make them all but impassable. It was the oppressive heat, ‘neath a sun that did not so much shine as
beat.
It was the lack of any kind of roads except scratched tracks, and the lack of bridges to get them over constant raging torrents. It was the fact that the population was so sparse that when you did get into trouble there was likely no-one to help in any direction for 100 miles, even if you knew where to begin to look for them. Nevertheless, McGinness and Fysh persisted, in the company of their long-suffering mechanic, George Gorham, who somehow managed to keep his straw boater intact, perched atop his head through everything.

Slowly, painfully, the three men continued to edge their way forward, as the general
put-put-put
and sometimes angry snarl of their overloaded Model T Ford melded with the thick, sweltering buzz of the Australian bush. As they went, it was Fysh who meticulously sketched and mapped the landscape documenting possible places for airstrips to be built. McGinness, never one for details, focused on finding ways to just keep them moving, come what may.

Occasionally they would argue, such was the strain they were under, and mostly it was McGinness who would have the last word. He was a sometimes domineering rough diamond of a man who cared little for correct form—an extrovert Australian original who believed that there was no problem so great that enough elbow grease and fencing wire couldn’t fix it. Fysh, on the other hand, was a lot more laid-back, an introvert of a far more cerebral nature.

Somehow, between them—with George the mechanic nearly always in tow but also pushing, too, as well as taking his turn at driving—they continued to make their way roughly west, shooting parrots and the like for food when their supplies ran out. On a bad day they would make only 4 miles. On an average good day they could go as far as 15 or 20 miles. What was soon abundantly clear, through their own observation and through talking to the few people they met, was that this was a part of the world that desperately needed an airline, as land travel was just too damn difficult. The only transport infrastructure that existed in a few parts were the railways, and they terminated at Charleville, Longreach, Winton and Cloncurry, with no connections between.

The only people who seemed to move easily in this kind of country were the Aborigines, whom they would occasionally see flitting away in the distance—and they had had thousands of years to acclimatise. (And for the most part the white men were glad not to make too much contact, as they had been told by locals, ‘The blacks are bad, and Murdering Tommy is out in the Turn-Off Lagoon area.’
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)

As to the race itself, Ross Smith and his quietly spoken older brother Keith, a former RFC and then RAF flying instructor, were considered by many judges to have the best chance of winning it. With two mechanics, they had left Hounslow Heath at 9.05 am on 12 November 1919 and flown, on average, ten hours a day. Every night, as the mechanics worked feverishly on the engines, the brothers carefully put such petrol as they could find into their machine, being very careful to strain it through cloth to remove whatever local impurities it might contain. Eschewing a radio, as at 100 pounds they had decided that it weighed too much to carry, their one concession to safety was to take a fishing line and a few hooks, on the reckoning, as Ross Smith described it, that they might be useful, ‘in case we should land on some small uninhabited island and have to do the Robinson Crusoe act for a time’.
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And coming down unexpectedly in strange country was certainly a common experience. In Yugoslavia, a Sopwith Wallaby piloted by Captain George C. Matthews—formerly of the Light Horse and then of No. 4 Australian Flying Squadron—with Sergeant Tommy D. Kay of Ballarat as mechanic, had been obliged to land in bad weather just 100 miles out of Belgrade. This part of the world was still in a state of post-war upheaval, and it had not yet been definitively determined just who were the patriots and who were the traitors. And yet those in temporary power where the plane had come to earth had only taken one look at the Australians before they knew exactly what they were—
Bolsheviks!

Therefore, for the Australians’ trouble, they were immediately arrested and thrown in a room so tiny and dark it was little more than a vertical coffin, just capable of holding the two of them. For four days they were fed only enough of the local delicacy—black bread topped by pig fat and swarming flies—to keep them alive. Until…Until they managed, in the middle of the night, when their captors had fallen into a drunken stupor, to make a break for it…run like mad things for their plane, get it started and fly away…all of it in the company of myriad bullets winging around them.
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See yers!

In a highly creditable performance, over the next few weeks Matthews and Kay managed to hip-hop all the way to Bali—practically in sight of Australia, just a hundred horizons ahead!—before they crashed into a banana plantation on the island on 17 April. But at least they survived. Not all were so lucky…

Sadly, just 6 miles after take-off from Hounslow Heath near London, the
Alliance PZ Seabird
, named after Cook’s ship, flown by Captain Roger Douglas and navigated by Lieutenant J.S. Leslie Ross, crashed into a Surbiton orchard, killing both men. Only minutes before, when the plane had been wheeled out of its hangar at Hounslow and the sun had burst through the clouds with an unexpected brilliance, the onlookers had broken into loud applause at such a good omen for a wonderful trip.
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Quite what went wrong was never established, though it was noted by some that the plane had excessive emergency provisions, which would have weighed it down—as would the leather upholstered armchairs both men were sitting in.

As to another plane, a Martinsyde, flown by the Australians Cedric E. Howell and George Henry Fraser, which crashed into St George’s Bay off Corfu in the Adriatic Sea while flying at night on 9 December, its demise was equally tragic. Villagers on Corfu saw distress rockets go up in the night, and could even hear Howell and Fraser yelling for help, but in the middle of a terrible storm it proved impossible to reach them. Then the shouting stopped. A few days later the wreckage washed up on the beach, and two weeks after the crash, Howell’s body was also washed ashore.
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Finally, with no finance forthcoming and all hope of entering the race abandoned, Charles Kingsford Smith and Cyril Maddocks were to find that even trying to sell their joyriding concern was a very lugubrious endeavour because no-one was remotely interested. So it was that, devastated and humiliated in equal measure by his failure to be part of the race, Smithy decided to go home to Australia by alternative means.

Owning only the clothes he stood up in, which was by now his rather threadbare uniform—to make up the fare he had sold his one and only proper civilian suit—Kingsford Smith took a ship to New York, where his first true port of call was the Alien Immigration Hospital on Ellis Island, courtesy of the return of the same kind of flu that had laid him so low a year previously. Overcoming that, he took a train across America and, living on a solid diet of oranges and more oranges—the only food item he could afford—arrived in California six days later.
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There, the 22-year-old had expected to be met at Oakland Station by his 40-year-old brother, Harold, but instead received a wonderful surprise. Besides Harold and his wife and their teenage daughter, Beris, he was greeted by his sister Elsie and brother Wilfrid who, unbeknown to Chilla, were visiting Harold too. In a blizzard of hugs, kisses and pumping handshakes, it was all ‘hail brother well met’, and back to the bosom of his family in Harold’s large and stylish home at Menlo Park, just south of San Francisco, to kill the fatted calf.

Though his siblings were more than a little shocked at his ragged appearance, broken finances and rather fragile health, he seemed to revive quickly in their presence and the old Chilla soon re-emerged, laughing, telling them of his adventures over the dinner table and a few drinks afterwards in front of the fire, and of course gathering them around the piano to sing songs and make merry into the night…

Harold, of course, had to rise early the following morning to go to work in his executive position with the American-Hawaiian Steamship Company, leaving Chilla and the others to sleep in, but that was no problem. Someone in the household had to work…

It was one of the greatest thrills in Hudson Fysh’s life. After fifty-one days of crossing the central north of Australia, followed by six weeks of overseeing the building of a small aerodrome on the edge of Darwin at Fannie Bay, Fysh was at that very spot at 3.40 pm on the steaming tropical afternoon of 10 December 1919, with a crowd of two thousand people or so, awaiting what seemed like a miracle. News had come to the Darwin wireless station from Timor to say that Ross and Keith Smith should be arriving some time soon, and yet, in truth, no-one was going to believe it until they saw it.

And then the most wonderful thing happened.

Far to the north-west, out over the sparkling sea, they saw the tiniest speck just above the horizon.
There!
As one the crowd focused on it, straining their necks forward and squinting their eyes against the glare. A seagull? An albatross, maybe? No! It was a plane! A plane was coming their way. And not just any plane. This, they knew, was the plane flown by Ross Smith, with his older brother Keith as navigator, both distinguished veterans of the Australian Flying Corps. The flyers had left England just a little less than four weeks before, and at the moment they landed they would be the official winners of the England to Australia race, in the first plane to arrive in the Great Southland under its own power. Hurrah!

As it happened, Fysh would have been delighted to see any Australian pilot now reaching the end of the race, but given their common service with first the ‘Emma Gees’—the 1st Machine Gun Section of the 1st Light Horse Brigade—and then the AFC, it was a special thrill to see the Smiths.

And now here it was! An enormous howling beast, like an ungainly flying hippo, a Vickers Vimy bomber with the civil registration of G-EAOU marked in huge letters upon it, which, it later turned out, the crew insisted stood for ‘God Elp All Of Us!’. At the moment the wheels touched Australian soil, a cheer went up, and when the plane finally trundled to a stop, the crowd surged forward—brushing aside the two zealous customs and health officials keen to examine the new arrivals—and marvelled anew at the journey the men had made.

Can you believe it?
Close up, it was obvious the whole plane had been held together by prayer for the last part of the trip. A small branch of a tree lodged in the plane’s undercarriage told how close they had come to disaster on their last take-off, from the airfield at Timor.

Over the previous twenty-seven days and twenty hours the plane and crew had overcome obstacle after obstacle, been through storms, howling winds and cascading rain; had broken down, fixed themselves up; been nearly knocked out of the skies by lightning; come close to crashing; become bogged; dug themselves out; become bogged again, dug themselves out again; taken off
in extremis
and flown over lands where natives had cowered at their very sight, thinking that they were evil spirits of the dead come back to earth,
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and somehow,
somehow
managed to keep going through it all. Indeed, there was so little fuel left in the plane’s tanks when it landed that one of the mechanics on board, Wally Shiers, later noted, ‘We almost fell into Darwin’.
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But look at the time! In 1788, the First Fleet had done the trip in eight months; by 1849 that had decreased to ninety-one days; and there had been a leap forward in 1854 when it had been cut to sixty-three days. But under twenty-eight days? It almost beggared belief.