Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (35 page)

I don’t want to join the army…

I don’t want to go to war…

I’d rather hang around Piccadilly Underground

Living off the earnings of a well-born lady…

Monday I touched ‘er on the ankle

Tuesday I touched ‘er on the knee

On Wednesday I confess I lifted up ‘er dress

On Thursday I saw it (cor blimey)

Friday I put my hand upon it

Saturday she gave my balls a twist…

But on Sunday after supper…I rammed the bastard UP ’ER

And now I’m paying seven and six a week (cor blimey)

One can’t help wondering if on one such occasion a local sage might have quietly pointed Smithy out and said, ‘Look, yers wouldn’t believe it, but that bloke will have a knighthood within ten years…’ Perhaps not.

In the meantime, life in that remote part of Australia was changing courtesy of Western Australian Airways. The well-heeled people of Derby could now get to Perth in as little as three days! And they could have weekly post and newspapers delivered from Perth. Why, the women could get the latest issue of the
Western Mail
, engage in mail-order shopping and have a new dress in their hands in under a week! Similarly, business and legal matters that used to take months to complete could now be expedited in a little more than nothing flat, and the wheels of commerce began to spin in the area as never before.
⁶⁴

Bloody Chilla!

Once returned from the war, it had become apparent to the rest of the family just how hopeless the youngest of the clan was in managing his money, so Catherine had decided that Leofric, a responsible forty-year-old accountant, should effectively manage the wayward one’s money for him. This would entail Leofric having control of a bank account that Chilla would contribute a portion of his weekly wage to, which was fine, on principle. The problem was that Chilla
still
had no idea of saving, and thought that account was something he could raid whenever he needed to. One particular letter, sent on New Year’s Eve 1922, demonstrated just how hopeless the task Leofric had been set was.

‘Many thanks for the book, Mum, dear,’ Chilla wrote warmly, before adding grandly, ‘I want you to take a few pounds of my dough, and buy yourself and Dad a little treat of some variety, and will write the Old Dragon re same.’

The ‘Old Dragon’ in question, Leofric, was then stunned to read several paragraphs later, when his mother had passed it on to him:

I’m still plunged in impecuniosity through said motorcycle, but am getting lots of fun with it. By the way, my income tax for the last two years will soon come to hand and as it will be at least £30 I’ll have to get assistance from over there, so tell Leofric to make ready in a few weeks.

Nor was he averse to getting Leofric to do some running around for him, re said motorbike, asking in another letter.

If Leofric has time, can he get a kick-starter pedal complete with gear quadrant for a 4
¹
/
₄
Premier (1918 model). Tell the Dragon that I have no dough to spare over here to pay for it, and mainly there are no Premier agencies in this state anyway. Also tell him that I now consider Scrooge an archangel of charity. Also that he won’t get the £25 back, as it’s gone into the other bike. If he still lives after that it ought to be in a chastened state of mind. I can’t bear to think of his poor little daughter going ragged and starving, a footsore waif, from house to house, begging pennies so that her father can hoard and gloat over them in his avarice…
⁶⁵

Impossible! On matters of money, it was Leofric’s strong view that his brother was simply impossible to keep on the straight and narrow!

Eight
THELMA

I don’t know how Taplin’s little accident got into the papers. These little spills are only to be expected on a difficult service like this, and the publicity merely unfortunate. Papers, ‘blooming ghouls’, always mention the accidents. But you never hear that we have already flown about 18,000 miles of the most difficult, loneliest and longest aeroplane mail service in the world. But that’s the way of things.

K
INGSFORD
S
MITH
,
IN A LETTER HOME TO HIS PARENTS
, 30 M
ARCH
1922
¹

McGinness, I think, had even less academic education than I had, but he had something else, something great, something born of the young, immature but intensely venturesome Australian returned from the war, groping with gusto for something ahead, something undreamt of but which he must do. It was men like McGinness, Ross Smith, Kingsford Smith, Ulm, Hinkler and other Australians who infused that first great spark of adventure, Columbus-like, into what air transport is today.

H
UDSON
F
YSH
,
WRITING IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY
,
Q
ANTAS
R
ISING
,
IN
1965
²

W
hen Thelma Corboy first laid eyes on Charles Kingsford Smith in late July 1922, he appeared to be a rather curious cove, though full of life. She and her mother had been in a Port Hedland drapery shop buying material for new dresses for the race-week grand ball when she heard a lot of raucous laughter. Looking up, she saw five or six young men walking past the open shop front.

‘Who are they?’ her mother asked the shopkeeper, a little disapprovingly.

‘It’s the Kingsford Smith crowd,’ that good woman replied, pointing to the smallest of the group, the one laughing the loudest. ‘And that’s Kingsford Smith himself, the airways pilot—you must have read about him.’
³

At this point, to Thelma’s amazement, the matronly shopkeeper then took her mother aside and began speaking about the pilot in a low voice. It was not clear what she was saying, only that whatever it was, wasn’t proper for the ears of a beautiful 21-year-old girl, which Thelma was.

‘What was that about?’ Thelma asked her mother as they left the shop.

‘You don’t need to know,’ her mother replied rather primly, before quickly changing both the subject and the direction they were walking.

Thelma was, naturally, intrigued.

A few days later, she saw the dashing 25-year-old pilot at the Race Ball, and was able to get a closer look. There was eye contact…an introduction…a whiff of excitement in the air. He asked her to dance. Yes, there had been her mother’s admonitions about this man, but on the other hand, she wasn’t there and didn’t need to know.

He moved quite well, she thought, and she rather liked him. Just mind the foot, Thelma, if you would. Small war wound, you see. Nothing to worry about.

As it happened, Smithy rather liked her, too, and was particularly taken with her vivacious, voluptuous looks, not to mention how finely educated she was, courtesy of a Perth boarding school and Sydney finishing school for young ladies. Thel was all
class
, and so very different to most of the women with whom he had been amorous. Thel and Charles parted from each other that evening with some sorrow, but with no declarations made.

That was it then. Though he had probably done more than anyone to get Qantas off the ground, in the end Paul McGinness decided to move on. One reason was that it was all getting too serious and something called a ‘management structure’ had been put in place. What really stuck in his craw was that while Hudson Fysh was the head of flying operations, and Fergus McMaster was chairman, there was no spot for him, even though he was the biggest shareholder in the company! Another thing that got his goat was that both Fysh and McMaster—neither of whom, for some reason, were drinkers—had decided that there would be a blanket ban on drinking for pilots on duty, and that didn’t suit McGinness at all. He
liked
a drink here and there and the truth of it was that, if it came to it, he could still fly better drunk than most men could fly sober. But when he was the only one on the board who voted to rescind the rule, there seemed only one option.
⁴
Pull out.

As described by John Gunn in his book on the history of Qantas, ‘To the carefree and venturesome elements of McGinness’s temperament, the slog and detail of daily administration and bureaucratic sword-cross were impossibly pedestrian. The dawning truth that his romantic vision of airline operations had at its centre the combined reality of a railway timetable and a cash book, that adventure and risk must subside into routine, repetitive perseverance, was disillusioning.’
⁵

Things weren’t so bad that McGinness didn’t agree to stay on until Qantas could find a replacement pilot—perhaps a few months—but it simply wasn’t as much fun as it had been. While he loved to fly, the deadly seriousness and constant routine of business life didn’t really suit him.

It was late October 1922, and one hot day as the approaching summer was just beginning to bite and
chew
, Thelma Corboy was stunned to see from the cool shadow of the veranda of her family’s homestead at Meentheena something slowly begin to emerge from the shimmering heat waves of the far horizon. She stood up from her chair and gazed closer. Slowly, slowly, alternately appearing and disappearing in the molten mirror of heated air, it soon emerged that it was a man, walking their way, leading an exhausted horse. But
who
? There wasn’t a homestead between Meentheena and the railhead at Marble Bar, which was 60 miles away as the exhausted crow flew to the north-west, and not even the station’s blackfellas walked like that in the midday sun. The figure was perhaps 200 yards away when she recognised him by his bouncing gait…the insouciant can-do way he carried himself, notwithstanding his slight limp, courtesy of his war wound. It was Charles Kingsford Smith, and he had been riding for the last two days from Marble Bar to get there! Madness, sheer
madness.
Sweating, sunburnt, thirsty, he was quickly ushered inside and plied with water and hospitality. Why was he here exactly?

Thelma suspected only too well—and so, frankly, did her mother—but felt obliged for the moment to go along with the explanation he gave: he was there to reconnoitre for landing strips and thought there might be a good one in those parts, maybe somewhere on their property. Of course he was.

For the next two weeks, as it turned out, Smithy continued his investigations into possible airstrips at Meentheena, riding in the early mornings and late afternoons with Thelma to all parts of the vast property and returning between times for wonderful lunches and lavish dinners put on by Thelma’s mother—to her surprise she had really warmed to him after getting to know him a little, as he seemed to be quite the gentleman after all—where he was always at his charming best. Afterwards, Smithy might chat with Thelma’s Irish-born stepfather Maurice McKenna, and later take his banjo and sing with the Aboriginal workers for a while, before returning to sit with Thel on the veranda in the cool of the night. Sometimes while Charles played the banjo, Thelma would sing, and she sang beautifully—a further bond between them.
⁶

True, Thelma’s mother had been nonplussed when he had first appeared but Charles Kingsford Smith was nothing if not charismatic and his natural attentiveness to her personally was wondrous, just as was the gentlemanly approach he took to Thelma. No doubt that scuttlebutt she had heard about him back at the drapery shop was just that, and she should take him as she found him.
Charming!

For his part, Smithy was equally taken with life at Meentheena, and was quick to write to his parents upon his return:

Went out riding in the bush to reconnoitre possible landing grounds at the stations. Met a nice girl at ‘Meentheena’…

The station is amongst the hills, and except for being hard to get into, is a bonzer place. It is only 900,000 acres in extent. Mrs McKenna and Thelma gave me a splendid time, and I enjoyed the break immensely.
⁷

Such a letter from their slightly chaotic son caused mother Catherine, for one, to sit up and take notice. Though Chilla had always been popular with the girls, in all his many letters to the family from all parts of the world he had never noted a particular one who he was keen on.

Shit! The bloody goats had been eating the plane again. Qantas mechanic Jack Hazlitt—himself a Gallipoli veteran—had been working hard to get one of the company’s old Armstrong Whitworth FK8s it had bought into shape, and yet when he had come back from lunch it was to find several of Charleville’s goat scourge munching on the plane’s tail. And tomorrow was the big day! It took Jack a while, but after shooing the endlessly munching, farting goats away, he got to work and finally the hole was fixed, so that all was in readiness the following morning…
⁸

One could not quite say that Qantas was prospering, but at least it was surviving, which was a triumph in itself, given the number of other nascent aviation companies around the country going bust. And its breakthrough day did indeed come on 2 November 1922, when the young airline was ready to begin its first regular scheduled service, to carry airmail subsidised by the government
and
a paying passenger. Paul McGinness was to pilot the first leg, in a plane that looked to be in reasonably good shape bar a strange new patch it had in its tail, and before departure he made a speech to the assembled crowd in which he said that one day, ‘Qantas will link Australia to Asia, Africa, Europe and Great Britain’. The crowd applauded with enthusiasm. And then Arthur Baird, the Qantas engineer, stepped forward to swing the propeller and the 160-horsepower Beardmore engine burst into deafening life.
⁹
For this inaugural trip, McGinness delivered 108 letters from Charleville to Longreach, about 300 miles away, in a trip that took just over three hours. And then the following day Hudson Fysh was ready to fly the next leg, with the said passenger aboard.