Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (47 page)

And then, while in Seattle, he read it—a bloke called Kingsford Smith was in San Francisco with a couple of other Australian pilots, and they were looking for a plane to fly across the Pacific with.

Wilkins immediately dispatched a cable to Kingsford Smith:

Have Fokker I can sell you, without engines or instruments.
⁵

Who immediately wired back:

Re Your wire. Come down to ‘Frisco and talk it over.

George Wilkins did exactly that, meeting Kingsford Smith, Ulm and Anderson a few days later in their hotel. The older man was not long in coming to the point. As a matter of fact, the first words he spoke to his fellow Australians simply followed up his telegram. ‘I think I have the machine you require for your Pacific flight,’ he said flatly. ‘It is a tri-motored Fokker. No engines or instruments, but the wings and airframe are in excellent condition.’
⁶

One didn’t achieve as much as George Wilkins had in his life by wasting one’s time on small talk. And Charles Kingsford Smith was at least his equal in wanting to get on with the task at hand. ‘Well, George, I’d very much like to see the machine. Where is it?’
⁷

There was an easy affinity between the pair. Australians in America, they were both pursuing a dream, both adventurers, and both war veterans with a slight limp.

The sticking point was the price. Although £3000 was a more than fair sum for Wilkins to be asking—as it was only about a third of what he had paid for his plane
⁸
—the simple reality was that Kingsford Smith, Ulm and Anderson just didn’t have that kind of money for a Fokker without engines or instruments.

To this point they were living on the money they had from their own capital in Australia, while the money promised from the New South Wales government was held in escrow, to be released if and when they made their start—a government, they noted, which had just changed hands in the October 1927 elections. Their supporter, Premier Jack Lang, had been obliged to hand over the reins to his conservative opponent, Thomas Bavin. They presumed that Bavin would honour the commitments of Lang, but when that money did arrive it would not be enough to pay for the Fokker and fit it out with everything. Where could the rest of their required funds come from? None of their submissions to companies in the United States had produced the tiniest scrap of interest. The answer was not apparent on the instant, but as Wilkins took his leave Kingsford Smith made the promise that they would get back to him as soon as possible, once they had organised their finances. The first step was to cable the New South Wales government and request an extension of funds by another £1000.

Request denied. Back to square one.

Where to now?

Where to now? Sometimes, it was hard to keep track. For Charles Lindbergh, the craziness surrounding him simply didn’t dissipate with the passage of the weeks and then months. ‘I was astonished at the effect my successful landing in France had on the nations of the world,’ he later wrote. ‘To me, it was like a match lighting a bonfire…’
⁹

With the flying ability of a ‘Lone Eagle’, and the courage and strength of a grizzly bear, Lindbergh also had the stated morals and apparent manner of a good, God-fearing Sunday school teacher, and America obsessively loved him for it. Everyone wanted a piece of him, and some were prepared to pay for it—with the formerly humble pilot receiving five million dollars worth of commercial offers within a week of landing. Many a man facing one-hundredth of that level of adulation would have been destroyed by the temptations and trappings of fame. Lindbergh, however, remained humble. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, and eschewed casual sexual relationships—he was
precisely
the kind of man fit to be put on an American pedestal. ‘The important thing,’ Lindbergh later reminisced of this time, ‘was to meet and marry a girl you would stay in love with. I intended to pay particular attention to that. It meant not falling in love with one of the first women you met—a question of time, patience and intelligent selection.’
¹⁰

He registered his extreme distaste for the promiscuous approach, and told stories of some of the appalling things he had seen in the aviation world, how
some
pilots would have one-night stands, night after night after night, and others would even use prostitutes. Well, that was not for him. ‘My experience in breeding animals on our farm had taught me the importance of good heredity…’
¹¹

Wherever he went he was photographed, had questions shouted at him, had women faint at his very sight. In St Louis there was even a fight between some women over a corncob he had just gnawed on. In Dayton, Ohio, he not only met Orville Wright, but spent the night in the great man’s residence. Back in his home town of Little Falls, souvenir hunters had stolen the doorknobs off his childhood home.
¹²

And yet he kept moving, embarking on what was essentially an aviation missionary tour in the
Spirit of St Louis
, across America, visiting eighty-two cities in forty-eight states, as no less than 25 per cent of the entire population turned out to see him in person. At one point, though, he took pause. Passing west over the Rocky Mountains in South Wyoming, he spied desert ahead. With no-one in it! Not a soul. No matter that there were thousands of people and many journalists waiting for him at the next town, he simply had to have some respite, and he brought the
Spirit of St Louis
in for an expert landing.

Silence. Blessed silence. The peace was so overwhelming, he decided he needed to spend the night there, a night that would set the course of the rest of his life, as he took some hard decisions. ‘I would reduce my obligations, give away some of my possessions, concentrate my business and social interests. I would take advantage of the civilisation to which I had been born without losing the basic qualities of life from which all works of men must emanate.’
¹³

Enter Sidney Myer.

It was at this time that, through the loose network of well-heeled Australians living in California—of whom Harold Kingsford Smith was a notable—Kingsford Smith, Ulm and Anderson met the Melbourne retailing magnate and got on well with him from the first. Myer was an interesting man of no little ability. Having arrived in Australia from Poland in 1899, speaking practically no English, he had started a store in Bendigo that went bust, then sold various goods door-to-door to rebuild. With his capital re-established, he opened another store in Ballarat that so prospered he was able to open another one and then another one and another one after that, until the beginnings of a whole Myer chain was developing around the country. He had done so well out of the business personally that he and his wife had decided to buy a mansion in Burlingame, just outside San Francisco, and when not in Melbourne—which was most of the time—it was the place they regularly took their holidays.

One way or another, Myer was a man who had the capacity to back himself against enormous odds and, most importantly, felt a duty to help those who were trying to do the same thing. But really, gentlemen, do you actually think it is possible to fly a plane across the entire Pacific Ocean? They assured him it was feasible, and they had found the very plane to do it in, if only they could get the money together to buy it.

Well, Mr Myer would like to help. But the thing was, boys, he simply didn’t feel right having any part in a venture of which he was convinced the best-case outcome was that they would only break their necks, and the worst was their being killed outright. Their counter to his concern was that with or without his financial support they would find a way to do it, and he was therefore absolved of any guilt should the worst case indeed happen.

Finally, Sidney Myer came to a decision. He would simply
give
them £1500, no strings attached, and it was theirs to do with what they would. If they chose to spend the money on their venture that was their business, and no concern of his. He wished them well.

Eureka!
And a double eureka when, shortly afterwards, the New South Wales government came good after all, with a £1000 extension on the original £3500 guarantee.

Wilkins agreed to turn the machine over to them on the first condition that he receive a down payment of £1500 immediately, with the rest to be paid once they had left for Australia and their money from the New South Wales government was thus released from escrow. The second condition was that the machine be test-flown and prepared by a pilot chosen by Wilkins, who could also instruct Kingsford Smith on how to handle such a large, multi-engined machine.
¹⁴

Done!

It wasn’t that the flyers were flush with cash, because the process of getting the plane they had bought from George Wilkins back into the air was going to be an expensive one, but they at least had enough to make a down payment of £1500 to Wilkins and use the rest to get the work done.

Kingsford Smith cabled Wilkins to that effect, and the deal was formalised. The three aviators in San Francisco were now feeling so confident that things were on track that they decided to engage the services of their old mate Bill Todd from the
Tahiti
to be their navigator. Yes, they had all learnt the rudiments of navigation under his tutelage, but none of them wanted to trust their lives to his own calculations when they could get an expert like Todd to take a leave of absence from his maritime service and join them.

Todd soon moved into the Roosevelt Hotel with them, on the promise that it would not be long before they were ready to go. He was happy to have a break from shipboard life and, the laws of Prohibition notwithstanding, had soon ferreted out every speakeasy within staggering distance of the hotel. On excursions to such places as Izzy Gomez’s, Monk Young’s, Coffee Dan’s, the House of Shields or Cafe Du Nord, to which you could gain access if you knew the password of the day, Todd was frequently joined by Smithy, who continued to have an enviable capacity to drink a great deal by night, before performing well the next day, before doing it all again the next night and then the next day. (For ones so disposed, California was probably the best place to be during Prohibition. San Franciscans had voted overwhelmingly—83 per cent—against the introduction of the Prohibition laws, and more or less ignored them when they were brought in. Although there were raids, no-one particularly cared. It was, for example, the stuff of legend that the speakeasy in the Hotel D’Oloron on Columbus Street had been raided so many times that when the courts would shut one address down, ‘the owner simply cut a new door in the wall, slapped on a new address and continued pouring drinks’.
¹⁵
)

Christ! It turned out that every other aspiring aviator in the country had come to the same conclusion about the virtues of the Wright Whirlwind engine as the Australians, who were now informed that they were at the back of a very long queue—ninety orders long in fact—to get their hands on three such engines. It would be a wait of
six months
, minimum. What to do?

It was all very well to be in America—land of the free, home of the brave—but they had been there long enough to know that a good lot of the grease on which the wheels of the country turned was
who knew who
, and how much influence could thus be brought to bear on key decision makers. So it was that via a man who was to become a great friend, Locke T. Harper—a leading executive of the powerful Vacuum Oil Company—they were able to arrange an introduction to Rear Admiral Christian Peables, the US Navy’s second-highest ranking man on the West Coast.

This good man, an officer and a gentleman, was initially dead against the whole idea of a flight over the Pacific. ‘I do not want to be interested in this thing in any way,’ he told them, his moustache bristling as he pounded the table. ‘I don’t want to be connected with it—you’re crazy. Flying to Australia! I want to keep right outside of it. Look at what happened to the Dole flyers!’
¹⁶

These proved to be merely his opening remarks. From that point the rear admiral, supported by his aide-de-camp, expanded on the hideous dangers the flyers faced—the storms, the distance, the winds, the hundreds of thousands of dollars the navy had already spent in trying to retrieve foolish fallen airmen, and so forth. At last, however, there was a small lull in the barrage—much as there used to be occasionally in Gallipoli and on the Western Front—and, seizing the opportunity, Smithy was able to quickly fire his own shot: ‘We’re going to use a three-engined Fokker.’
¹⁷

On the instant, both the rear admiral and his aide-de-camp calmed down. Using a three-engined Fokker showed the flyers were serious, not mere fly-by-nighters who invariably crashed by night
and
day. The US Navy man was further impressed to be informed by the Australians that they intended to have a four-man crew, including a radio man and professional navigator, the latter of whom they had already hired.

If they used a machine like that, with personnel and specialised equipment, then perhaps it
was
possible to traverse the Pacific. A long discussion ensued, and both the rear admiral and his aide-de-camp agreed that Wright Whirlwind engines were the right choice. By the end of the meeting the rear admiral had pledged the full co-operation of the US Navy in their project, and most crucially, affirmed that the Australians could take the navy’s position at the front of the queue for three Whirlwind engines! With this commitment, the men were at last able to engage expert mechanics and get the refitting process under way at the Boeing Aircraft Company, just outside Seattle, where the fuselage and the wing of the
Detroiter
—the bigger plane—were reunited once more, turning the plane back into the Fokker F.VIIb.3m. After that, the engineers began to install the engines and instruments.