Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (31 page)

As to what planes to fly, they soon began negotiation with Nigel Love, down in Sydney, who had the A.V. Roe (Avro) agency in Australia, and was already manufacturing the Avro 504K plane, with specially modified engines for Australian conditions.
¹⁴

The next job that hove to on Smithy’s aviation horizon in California was flying stunt planes in an amazing place called Hollywood, where they were making moving pictures with stunning women frequently known as ‘movie stars’. Heaven on a stick. Smithy’s job was to perform acts of derring-do in his plane as the cameras rolled, filming scenes for the many movies then featuring aeroplanes. It wasn’t long before Smithy noticed that the stuntmen were getting paid a lot better than he was. Perhaps it would be a good idea to try a few stunts himself, while someone else flew the plane?

Yes and no…

‘So what we want you to do,’ a director explained to him on one occasion in August 1920, ‘is hang upside down from the wing, with your leg curled round one of the struts. Do you think you can do that?’

In for a penny, in for a pound, in it for the dollars…Smithy thought he probably could do that and had a go, first, while the Avro plane they were planning to use was parked on the tarmac. True, when the plane was actually airborne it took a great deal of courage to do the same thing, but courage was always something that he had in strong supply, so that wasn’t the problem.

The
problem
, after dangling with his arms outstretched, furiously buffeted by the wind, was getting himself back up again! On the ground that had been easy, but now, flopped over the front of the wing, he had 90 miles per hour of wind belting at him and restraining him from righting himself. So it was that for fifteen shocking minutes he stayed there, contemplating what would happen to his head if he was still like that when the plane landed. Finally, blessedly, with the last ounce of strength he had in him, and acting out of desperation pure, he was able to get back up, hugging the strut for dear life and sucking in huge gasps of air.

The following day, still shaken, Kingsford Smith was on site when a fellow he had become friendly with, the greatest Hollywood stunt flyer of them all, Lieutenant Ormer Locklear, was filming the climactic scene for
The Skywayman
, being shot for William Fox Studios.
¹⁵
It required Locklear to dive from a great height with flames billowing from his plane, and then dramatically bring the plane under control just before he hit the ground. At 10 pm, Locklear dropped a flare to indicate to the cameramen and directors that he was ready, and then, after his aide and long-time flying companion Lieutenant Milton ‘Skeets’ Elliott activated the device to get some impressive flames going in a spot where they would do no actual damage to the plane, they began what was meant to look like a death dive towards the ground.

Perfect…perfect…lovely…lovely…the director and cameraman were both ecstatic as the plane came down, looking for all the world as if it really was on fire and about to hit the ground when…

When just at the point where they expected Locklear to pull out of the dive, it was apparent that something was wrong. Very wrong…Pull out, Ormer,
pull out
! And the American pilot tried, he really tried. At the end, he was so close to the camera crew that they could see him hauling back on the stick, trying to get the plane to flatten out. Before their horrified eyes the plane hit the ground not 100 yards away from them, with a sickening
whump
, a split instant before the whole thing exploded with flames shooting into the night sky.

During the war, Kingsford Smith had seen, and been responsible for, similar deaths. But somehow this was different. Sick to his stomach, he saw up close the results of such flaming crashes, the charred remains at the bottom of the deep hole caused by the impact, and gagged on the stench of burnt human flesh. This wasn’t the ‘bagging’ of a German and another notch on your bragging belt, this was the real deaths of men he
knew
, and it was appalling. And yet it
was
no different because the deaths of all the pilots in the war had been equally appalling—it was just that he hadn’t known them personally, or seen their deaths up close. Again, revulsion at what had happened in the war came to him, as the visions of the men he had killed in the air and on the ground returned.

In the there and then, however, the tragic deaths of Ormer Locklear and Milton Elliott confirmed for Kingsford Smith that he no longer wanted to fly for Hollywood.

And so it was back to the barnstorming with Moffett. This time, however, it wasn’t his plane that crashed, but the whole flying circus itself. One morning Kingsford Smith woke up to find that Moffett had hopped it during the night, taking his plane with him and, more importantly, all the money that the Australian was owed. For his second stint, the 24-year-old Kingsford Smith had not yet received a dime.

As ever, he retreated to his brother’s house and dulled the pain by carousing in the speakeasies and drinking far too much. Sister Elsie, particularly, worried about him. She wrote home to her mother:

I really think his experiences are beginning to somewhat daze even his doughty heart. As he remarked after the last discouraging letter from his lawyer, re Moffet—‘Oh d---. I’ll be glad when all this knocking about is over, and the flight accomplished so I can settle down in Australia to a good steady job.’ (‘And get you a wife,’ I added, and he grinned.) You see, Mum, after nearly a year here, Chilla is no better off than when he arrived, excepting for the increased experience, so the sooner he can go back and get a settled job the better, and quit rushing around the country with sundry weird gangs…
¹⁶

And yet if the decorated war pilot had thought at this point that he had hit rock bottom, he was most definitely mistaken. That would come a few weeks later when, in an effort to muster the money to buy a third-class fare home, he was forced to take a job painting signs for a petrol company at the rate of US$15 a week.

Normal work that was nothing to do with aviation? He hated it, absolutely
hated
it. The sheer tedium of it! The brain-sapping, soul-destroying boredom of it all. He might have been able to do that kind of menial work when he was a young lad, back at the Colonial Sugar Refinery in Pyrmont, but that was before he had discovered flying, before he knew how to live. He stuck it out for as long as he could—about three weeks—but then he could simply bear it no more.

Chilla knew in these first weeks of 1921 that it was time to head home. ‘Funds will not permit me to travel as a passenger,’ he wrote to his parents, ‘so I am going to have to work my way over. You know, it’s too bad that I haven’t got lots more money than I have.’
¹⁷

Indeed. In the end, his brother Leofric cabled him the money he needed to get home. To get there he took a circuitous route, catching the good ship RMS
Tahiti
from Vancouver, which he thought was heading straight across the Pacific just as it had when he had been a young lad returning to Australia from Canada, but no…

For some unaccountable reason, the ship sailed down the west coast of the American continent and stopped at San Francisco, which had been his starting point! Though generally Kingsford Smith was not a man prone to panicking, on this occasion he did so and then some. Convinced that the sole reason the
Tahiti
had diverted to San Francisco was because he was on board and the American tax authorities were after him, he stayed in his cabin for the entire two days the
Tahiti
was in port.
¹⁸

Finally, the steamer weighed anchor and headed out of the magnificent San Francisco Bay through the ‘Golden Gate’, the name the San Franciscans had given to the spectacular narrow strait that separated the bay from the Pacific Ocean, and headed home, home to Australia. Only then did he breathe easy.

And so it was done. Following the dictates of the Versailles Treaty to which Australia had been a signatory—and the subsequent Paris Convention where the fine detail had been worked out in October 1919—in December 1921 the government of Billy Hughes set up a Civil Aviation Branch to administer flying around the country. Of course, it was a part of the structure of the Department of Defence, as it was the view of Hughes and his like-minded individuals that aviation was to be encouraged, primarily because of its defence potential. No less than £100,000
¹⁹
was set aside for the encouragement of civil aviation—to set up and maintain airfields as well as subsidise important air services—and it wasn’t long before contenders came forward. Foremost among these was a pilot by the name of Norman Brearley, who wanted to set up an air service in the great north-west of Australia, a place where there were no railways and the very area where the government felt the country was at its most vulnerable to invasion from the ‘yellow peril’—the 750 million Asians who lived on the country’s doorstep.
²⁰
To have pilots and planes operating in the area therefore, to bolster defensive capacity, was viewed as a matter of urgency—with the bonus that it would help the local population by carrying sick patients and doctors in emergencies.
²¹
Previous government estimates were that it would cost £86,000 a year to have military planes based in that area. But if they were to subsidise Brearley’s service, or one set up by a competitor, they could have planes there for as little as £25,000 a year.
²²
The choice seemed obvious, and Defence Minister George Pearce was not long in making it known in Federal parliament.

‘If we can encourage civil aviation,’ he told the Honourable Members during debate over the Air Navigation Bill, in the parliament’s last sitting in 1920, ‘it will doubtless relieve the Commonwealth of a large expenditure on military aviation.’
²³

At Sydney, as ever, the Kingsford Smith clan turned out in force to greet their prodigal pilot when he arrived on the morning of 11 January 1921. There was Catherine on the docks, dressed in her Sunday best. William, as pleased as punch to have his boy home, was beaming like a lighthouse on a dark night, and there were his brothers and sister and some of their own families. In an instant, after coming down the gangplank of the
Tahiti
, the youngest son—dressed in a tatty suit and straw boater and carrying an old grass-woven suitcase
²⁴
—was awash in hugs and kisses and hearty handshakes.

In the time that Chilla had been away, his parents had moved from Neutral Bay and settled into the place that would be their long-time abode, a gracious home called Kuranda at 73 Arabella Street in nearby Longueville, while Leofric Kingsford Smith and his wife, Elfreda, were practically next door, across a side street at No. 75.

Despite all the bonhomie, however, and all the subsequent welcome-home dinners at Kuranda and piano-playing and songs led by Chilla who continued to be the life of the party, the family was in fact quite shocked at their boy’s appearance and demeanour. It was not simply that he was so much thinner and more worn than the lad who had left two and a half years earlier, and had come home owning only the clothes on his back and the two American dollars he had in his pocket. It was that between the laughter and jokes and songs there were so many thousand-yard stares, sudden silences and small bubbles of misery that seemed to pop to the surface at odd moments, suggesting a deep well of great unhappiness inside him. Bit by bit, the family became aware that their beloved youngest member was bearing scars beyond the ones on his foot, and that mentally he was still suffering the effects of the punishment he had undergone during the war.
²⁵

Little by little they were to learn more of what ailed him, some of the things that had happened to him, what life in the trenches both in Gallipoli and on the Western Front had been like, the men he’d killed while flying, and the narrow escapes he’d had, the friends he’d lost and still mourned, together with the great disappointments he had experienced since the war. He’d wanted to fly in the England to Australia race, but that had been denied him. He had wanted to fly the Pacific, but that, too, had failed to elicit any interest from anyone to back him. And despite his ongoing passion for flying—nothing else came remotely close—he’d only just been able to keep body and soul together by doing it since the war had finished. So of course all was not well. What had he achieved? What had he done? Where was he going?

The answers to these questions weren’t obvious, either to Chilla or to his family, so for the moment he tried to settle down, hoping something would turn up. In the meantime, the residents of Arabella Street were able to note in subsequent months a rare phenomenon—maudlin banjo playing. For hours the youngest Kingsford Smith would sit in his room plucking at strings to make chords that would occasionally assemble themselves into a recognisable tune, but more often meandered mournfully along. In the evenings, when he could scrape enough money together from family and friends, he would sometimes go into downtown Sydney to catch up with wartime cobbers and do some drinking. And, in fact, it was this activity that was to provide him with his first employment since arriving home…

One evening in early February 1921, Kingsford Smith was getting a rather positive beer perspective by drinking heavily at the Carlton Hotel in Castlereagh Street—it was amazing how much better everything looked when you’d drained a few schooners—when he fell in with a wartime comrade, Lionel Lee, a bloke he’d come to know very well as they had been on the same courses at Denham and Oxford, before they’d flown together with the Royal Flying Corps. And Lionel had news. A few blokes were getting together to form the ‘Diggers Co-operative Aviation Company’, which would do taxi trips and barnstorming all through country towns. It was going to be funded entirely by them, and everybody working for it would be a part owner, no matter how small a percentage that might be.