Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (45 page)

But in fact, Kingsford Smith was in a very difficult position. The first thing was, given Keith Anderson’s engagement to Bon Hilliard, his ex-girlfriend, Keith was hardly in a position to lecture
him
about what was and wasn’t acceptable under the Old Mates Act. And secondly, well, there was one incontrovertible fact that he couldn’t get around. For five years, he and Keith had talked endlessly about their dream to fly across the Pacific, and nothing had actually happened. Charles Ulm had been on the ground for only weeks, and already things were starting to fall into place, in terms of contacts, plans, sponsorship monies…the lot. If Smithy was really going to do this, really going to fly across the Pacific, then he felt he had to give Ulm a fair go in organising the whole thing and if Ulm wanted to go in the first plane with him, then that was the way it was going to have to be. Sorry, Keith.

So it was that when on the morning of 18 June 1927 Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm set off from Mascot airport to go round Australia in one of their Bristol Tourers, a fuming Keith Anderson was there to see them go.

In the open cockpit, Ulm and Kingsford Smith wore thick World War I-issue flying suits, as necessary protection against the cold air and rain they would be experiencing, but which made them sweat like the Dickens as they kept busy feeding 5-gallon tins of petrol into their main tank via a funnel. A false start shortly after take-off necessitated their return to Mascot to use the other plane, but they were soon on their way again and before their out-stretched wings, the sometimes lush, sometimes stark, always endless landscape of Australia rolled out before them and gradually ceded to their assault.

It was a gruelling exercise to fly for as much as twelve hours a day, only to land and become frantically busy getting the petrol supplies they had organised into the tanks and on board, and then work late into the night on the plane and the recalcitrant old engine to ensure everything would be ready for take-off at dawn the following day. Too, Ulm would have to find time to file his ‘EXCLUSIVE!’ reports to the
Sun
in Sydney, the
Age
in Melbourne and the
Courier
in Brisbane (and at least they would get the name right, whereas the
Sydney Morning Herald
had reported the departure of Mr C.T.P. Ulm and Mr Hungerford Smith!).
⁴⁴
Broadly, while Smithy’s key responsibility was to fly and look after the plane, Ulm did everything else; from helping to navigate, to cooking, organising, writing and assisting Smithy with the engine maintenance. One way or another, despite their disparate personalities—Smithy extroverted, and Ulm intense—they were, as they discovered, a very good team.

So it was that much of Australia followed their journey, as city after city, state after state after territory, fell behind them and interest built as to just how much they would slash the record by. The hairiest part was crossing some of the godforsaken Kimberley in Western Australia, over a region previously unseen by white men, which Smithy described ‘as bristling with buttes of rocks and roughly timbered slopes’, before traversing ‘an endless ocean of bronze green bush’.
⁴⁵
If they had been forced to crash-land down there, Kingsford Smith knew, ‘our chances of getting back to civilisation would have been slender’.
⁴⁶
Still, they survived the Kimberley to then knock over Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne, and both pilots were stunned when, ten days and five and a half hours after they left—a record!—they landed once again at Mascot to find no fewer than 50,000 people had turned out to greet them. And one of them was none other than Nellie Stewart, the wonderful Australian actress whose photo Smithy had now carried with him all over the world—a photo which he refused to fly without—and she was as gracious and gorgeous as ever. That good woman kissed the aviators on both cheeks, placed laurels around their necks and said a few wonderful words to them.
Bliss!

In the midst of the applause and the sheer exuberance of the crowd, Ulm turned to Kingsford Smith and spoke loudly over the tumult: ‘If we could fly the Pacific from California to Australia, we’d be made!’

‘Ye-e-s,’ Smithy replied dryly. ‘And if it would only rain pound notes we might be able to try it.’

‘It won’t rain pound notes,’ was the reply from Ulm, ‘but I reckon I can fix it up.’
⁴⁷

And maybe he could. A bare beginning, right then and there, was to get into the ear of the Premier of New South Wales, Jack Lang, who had turned out to greet them and make a speech of welcome where he warmed to the theme that they had, in his words, ‘accomplished something as hazardous as Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic Ocean’.
⁴⁸

As the Premier was a massive man—who towered over the two relatively diminutive aviators by a good 6 inches—getting into his ear wasn’t necessarily easy, but he certainly listened to their hurried exhortations as to how this round-Australia trip was only a prelude to what they really wanted to do, which was cross the Pacific, and if only his government could give them some financial backing, they were sure it could be done.

He promised he would come back to them.

What on
earth
was going on!? Down in Melbourne, four days behind Kingsford Smith and Ulm, Keith Anderson and Bobby Hitchcock were stunned to read a newspaper report saying that the next challenge for the two men who now had the round-Australia record was to cross the Pacific, and that they had already booked their passage on the RMS
Tahiti
to take them to San Francisco, from where they were going to fly! And there was
no
mention of Anderson or Hitchcock accompanying them! As a matter of fact, it looked to them as though Ulm and Kingsford Smith would be gone even before Anderson and Hitchcock got back to Sydney…

‘And so, ladies and gentlemen, would you please put your hands together and welcome to the podium, Charles Kingsford Smith!’

The gathering at the Hotel Australia—where George A. Taylor had formed the Aerial League of Australia seventeen years earlier—for a glittering luncheon the day after they had landed at Mascot had been given by the directors of Sun Newspapers Ltd. The miniature plane of shimmering orange silk, with violets and wattle blossom crusting the wings, dangling above this gathering of the
crème de la crème
of Sydney’s business and political classes set exactly the right tone.
⁴⁹
It was an audience that included none other than Billy Hughes, looking more like a gnarled walnut than ever and now no longer prime minister, but still a very strong supporter of Australian aviation.

‘We are met here to welcome back to Sydney two most gallant Australians,’ began the Chairman of Directors, Mr H.A. Russell. ‘They have blazed afresh the trail that leads to a larger success in commercial aviation. Men from the earliest times have had ideas of flying. They probably came from some subconscious memories of the days when men were angels. If that is so, we seem to be rapidly getting back to an angelic state. The war forced upon us and upon the men who took the risks, the necessity for the full development of aviation. These two men have carried on that development…’
⁵⁰

Hear, hear! Hear,
hear
!

Before such an esteemed group, Kingsford Smith, with Charles Ulm looking on approvingly, made reply in due course. Ever the showman, Smithy told something of their adventures over the previous fortnight—the highs, the lows, the things they had learnt.

‘We passed over country we have never seen before,’ he said, ‘and probably no white man has ever seen. Between Darwin and Wyndham, and Wyndham and Broome, there are tracts that have never been explored. The people at Darwin told us we were mad to fly over the Kimberleys because of the fierceness of the Aborigines, the absolute impossibility of landing, and because, even if by some miracle we did land safely, we could never be located by relief parties.’
⁵¹

Smithy then made the case for the potential of a Pacific flight. It would not be easy, he acknowledged, but it was going to be done, and it might as well be Australians who did it. And not just any Australians. Them. They had proved, they hoped, by their record-breaking trip around Australia that they were at the forefront of long-distance flying, and now they wanted to do it on a bigger stage. The biggest stage in the world: the Pacific Ocean. But it would take money, quite a lot of money, and that is where they hoped that the esteemed patrons of this lunch might come in…

And so it went. Within days, Premier Lang had indeed made the public announcement that his government would guarantee such a flight to the tune of £3500! Other promises of tentative support started to emerge from some of the men at the lunch, and suddenly what had been just a distant dream actually started to materialise. Maybe they could really do this!

The following fortnight was simply a blur. With the money just about assured, Kingsford Smith, Ulm and Anderson were quick to book tickets on the next ship heading across the Pacific to the west coast of America and a seemingly endless round of farewells, drinks, speeches and parties followed, together with an enormous dinner at Kuranda, hosted by Kingsford Smith’s parents, to send their boy and his friends away in proper style. Not that all of it was pure joy.

At one point the intrepid trio had to tell their faithful mechanic Bobby Hitchcock that despite their previous plans—and the fact that he had resigned his job on the strength of their promise that he would accompany them to America—there simply wasn’t going to be room for him to come with them. The money they had could only go so far, and it wouldn’t extend to a party of four. As a matter of fact, they had had an enormously hard time making it stretch to three, with another bitter dispute between Anderson and Ulm occurring as to who should accompany Kingsford Smith on the Pacific attempt.

In various meetings shortly after Keith had returned from his own round-Australia flight behind Kingsford Smith and Ulm, the physically imposing man pointed out the outrageousness of the situation to his old friend, while the usurper Ulm, who had led Smithy astray, listened. It had bloody well been the money of the Anderson family that had got them started in both the trucking and aviation business,
and
got them to this point, where they could now fulfil their dream. And what had Ulm contributed? Nothing! Not a brass bloody razoo!

Actually, Keith, no, Kingsford Smith continued to point out as calmly as he could. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Ulm organising the round-Australia flight, the deal with the
Sun
, the sponsorship with the Vacuum Oil Company and others, they simply wouldn’t have been able to pull it off. It was only reasonable to ask him to be a part of it, when he had done so much.

Finally, the dispute had been resolved with the mutually reluctant agreement that both of them would go. With that scenario, taking Bobby Hitchcock as well was simply out of the question. Besides, Bobby, the simple fact was that they would be flying an American plane that he wouldn’t be familiar with. But not to worry, Bobby. If they succeeded, there would be a thousand quid in it for him.

‘Yes,’ Charles Ulm told him on the morning of their departure. ‘You’ll hear a knock on the door, and I’ll say, “Sir Charles, Robert awaits outside about his thousand”.’

‘And I’ll say,’ Smithy said, though perhaps a little drunkenly, because they had had a big night of it until the wee hours, ‘“Show the boy in.”’

Bobby Hitchcock left their offices, devastated.

A few hours later, on the afternoon of 14 July 1927 the three men stood before the gangplank of the SS
Tahiti
, ready to board. Bon Hilliard was there to see Keith off, and she also farewelled Kingsford Smith in a manner that was somewhere between rather restrained and seriously strained. Ulm was farewelled by his second wife, his former landlady Jo Callaghan, now Jo Ulm, whom he had married on the very afternoon that he had returned from their round-Australia trip. And Charles Kingsford Smith was, as ever, sent off to glory by the Kingsford Smith clan, who turned out in force.

The
Tahiti
passed through Sydney Heads in the early afternoon of a sparkling day. Destination: the United States of America. A one-way ticket, if you please, as they intended
flying
back. And, of course, they travelled first class. After all, with the sort of money that was being bandied around, it seemed crazy to try to save just £30 per man on the difference between first class and steerage.

‘
Second star on the right, and straight on till morning…
’

So, famously, had run Peter Pan’s instructions to Wendy on how to get to Neverland. And yet, as the author J.M. Barrie also noted, those navigational directions were insufficient, as ‘even birds, carrying maps and consulting them at windy corners, could not have sighted it with these instructions. For, Peter, you see, just said anything that came into his head.’

In the real world, although navigating their way across the Pacific in an aeroplane was going to be difficult, there really was something in focusing on the ‘second star on the right’, or the like, just as mariners had done for centuries. And as the Australians were going to be on a ship for the next three weeks, why not learn it from some mariners directly?

So it was that for most of the trip the three aviators studied celestial navigation courtesy of a bloke by the name of Bill Todd, the
Tahiti
’s enormous second officer, aided by the ship’s third officer, Hal Litchfield…

Now, the thing you have to understand is that if you knew how to read it all properly, then the sun, the moon and the stars could be nothing less than signposts in the sky. By using a sextant—an instrument for measuring the angle that an object lies up from the horizon—and noting the time of day adjusted to Greenwich Mean Time, you could—by consulting tables minutely designed for the purpose—work out either your approximate or exact position on the earth’s surface, depending on whether the sun or the moon was king of the sky. In daytime, you could get your longitude position, but alas not latitude, as you only had the sun to read off, and couldn’t cross-reference with any other heavenly bodies. But at night-time, the sky was
filled
with reference points, and once you knew how to read them, you could be remarkably accurate in working out your position. By virtue of knowing the fixed points in the heavens, you could be freed from needing to see fixed recognisable points on earth!