Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (50 page)

For his part, Bert Hinkler’s conception of long-distance flight—in his case, all the way from England to Australia—was close to that of Charles Lindbergh’s. Instead of a multi-engined plane with a large crew, Hinkler believed that the best way to go was in a single-engined plane bearing just one crew member. Him. He had been flying a long time now, with a resumé that included a Distinguished Service Medal, an Air Force Cross for his efforts as a gunner/observer with the Royal Navy Air Service, flying a Sopwith Camel fighter with the RFC in Italy during the Great War, and five years spent after the war as a test pilot for Avro. He was a man who had justifiable faith in his own abilities, and given that his long-time plan had been to break Ross and Keith Smith’s aviation record from England to Australia, he was now trying to make it happen.

So it was that at dawn on Tuesday, 7 February 1928, Hinkler made ready to take off from Croydon aerodrome in his tiny silver Avro Avian 581 prototype biplane G-EBOV. Just 24 feet 3 inches from stem to stern, with a 28-foot wingspan and an 85-horsepower ADC Cirrus Hermes engine, this particular Avro was regarded by most in the aviation world as little more than a toy plane—so small that Hinkler could well have been a ‘Lone Sparrow’ to Lindbergh’s ‘Lone Eagle’, in his relatively enormous Ryan monoplane.

Now, as the mechanic swung the propeller and the engine burst into life—and the rush of air from the hurtling blades flattened the wet grass all around—the aviator stepped back from the plane so he and his beloved, the softly-spoken and beautiful Nancy, whom he had met during the war when she was a hospital sister, could have a few last words together. There were no crowds, because Bert had told only his nearest and dearest that he was going. That morning when he had woken at 4.30 am, to look out on the damp misty morning, so unpromising for flying, he had had a sudden crisis of confidence, but that was all gone now, and he felt much stronger.

‘I hope you’ll have good weather and safety, Bert,’ Nancy said as she held both his hands in hers. ‘I’ll be thinking of you.’

‘Thank you, Nance,’ the quiet pilot replied. ‘Don’t worry.’
³⁵

At which point he kissed her and then climbed into the cockpit. Always, this was the worst part—leaving Nancy. Chocks away, a wave, and the tiny plane tore down the airstrip, through the last wisps of mist, and was soon a disappearing speck in the eastern skies.

Navigation?

On his lap he had the London
Times Atlas
, and if, a couple of dusks and dawns and several stops later, that little town below him on the North African coast was Tobruk, as he thought, then it must have a small airstrip where he could land and replenish his fuel supply, before snatching a quick sleep and resuming his journey the next day. Somewhere up ahead, he knew, he would see Cairo and pyramids out to his starboard side and about 95 miles after that, according to his atlas, he would spot the Suez Canal. No matter that the scorched desert kept sending up harsh thermal currents to buffet his tiny plane, his trusty compass told him in which direction he needed to steer to cross the canal at the right point and he flew on with as much pluck as confidence, to Jericho, the sands of Syria, the Euphrates River and so on…

Flying in this manner, hopping his way across the world nearly twice as fast as Keith and Ross Smith had done it—they had taken twenty-seven days and twenty hours—Bert Hinkler landed in Darwin on 22 February 1928, less than sixteen days after departure.

Australia went wild, in the now familiar fashion, and the country followed his progress as he continued to fly on to Sydney airport, marvelling that the whole thing had only cost him £55 in the amount he paid for petrol from one side of the planet to another, otherwise stated as a halfpenny a mile!
³⁶

At their home in England, a nervous Nancy was told the news by a journalist just after nine o’clock on a cold Wednesday morning.

‘I knew he could do it,’ she said. ‘But I must admit I’ve been lying awake almost every night, flying each hop with him. Now that he’s there, I’ll be able to sleep easily again.’
³⁷

In London,
The Times
exulted at his breathtaking feat, and even pondered the possibilities of there one day being an airmail service between Great Britain and Australia.
³⁸

As to Bert, when he approached Bundaberg on a hot afternoon four days after his first Australian landfall in Darwin, it was to find the entire town—and in fact the people of every township within a dozen cooees—gathered around the North Bundaberg recreation reserve, awaiting his arrival. On the ground, his mother had at last been prevailed upon to speak, and was thanking everyone ‘for the wonderful reception you are giving my son, and for the thousands of messages received…’ when she suddenly broke off with, ‘I see my son coming! Goodbye!’
³⁹

And hello, Bert!

In the bigger cities, the welcome was even greater. At Mascot, an enormous crowd, estimated at 80,000, began singing, ‘
Hinkler
,
Hinkler little star
,
Sixteen days and here you are
,’ a line taken from a
Punch
cartoon. So many people wanted to shake his hand everywhere he went that for a time he was reduced to the subterfuge of wearing a bandage around his right hand, but it was no use, as people simply grabbed his left.
⁴⁰

I shook his hand
,
I shook his hand!

He made headlines across the country, poems were penned in his honour, and ‘Hustling Hinkler’ as he instantly was nicknamed—
sixteen days!
—inspired seven popular songs. At dancehalls, couples began doing the Hinkler Quickstep, while fashionable women began to wear the ‘Hinkler Hat’, in two-tone felt, with their ears securely covered just as Bert had appeared in so many of those front-page photos. It was London’s
Sunday Express
, however, that best captured exactly why he was being so hailed: ‘These Antipodean giants help us to look even a Lindbergh in the eye…They enable us to see our prodigies as others see them. Hinkler is a true antidote to our poison of self-humiliation. He provides history a hundred years hence with an excuse for saying that there were giants in those days. A race which breeds a Hinkler is not altogether degenerate…‘
⁴¹

Hinkler, it was agreed, was the ‘unquestioned monarch of the air’.
⁴²

On the day that Bert Hinkler landed in Australia, Keith Anderson left San Francisco and headed to the same destination. Anderson had had it, for good. Just three days before—while holding a cable from home, from Bon—he had told Smithy he wanted to have a quiet word. He had thought about it, he said, and he was going to go. There was only so long a man could wait by the shore for his ship to come in, or for his plane to go out, and Anderson felt strongly that that time had passed. It was obvious to him, as it must be obvious to Smithy, that their Pacific flight was simply not going to get off the ground and it was time for them all to get on with their lives.

In the end there was nothing that either Kingsford Smith or Ulm could say to dissuade him, though both men tried strongly. Ulm, particularly, was furious at Anderson’s decision and felt terribly let down—perhaps because his withdrawal was going to make the finances of their venture all the more precarious as Anderson’s mother and uncle would inevitably be insisting on getting their money back. Which was money they didn’t have…

At home in Australia, the celebrations went on. All up, in these late days of February 1928, Australia had its aviation hero, and it certainly wasn’t Charles Kingsford Smith or—
what’s the other guy’s name again?
—Charles Ulm. In San Francisco the two aviators read of Hinkler’s triumph and, while happy for him, had rarely felt so desolate.

At their lowest ebb, they decided to go to Los Angeles to see if they could sell the
Southern Cross
to the Union Oil Company of California and then…maybe…fly it to Australia as employees of the company? It seemed like a good idea, making the best of an exceedingly bad lot.

Some idea of the extent of their penury was that while they were still talking big about flying the entire Pacific Ocean, at this point their biggest problem wasn’t that they didn’t have the money to buy the petrol to fly to LA. They couldn’t even afford the
train fare.

Somehow, however, they managed to scrounge enough petrol to fly down and arrived with 18 cents between them, half a bottle of bourbon remaining to make them feel better about things and, as if it mattered, a letter of introduction Ulm was carrying that had a vague chance of facilitating access to a supposedly rich banker.
⁴³

And yet, just as it is known the world over among adventurers from all ages that the ‘darkest hour is right before the dawn’, so was it proven on this occasion. Not long after the Union Oil Company gave them and their proposal short shrift—and their bourbon and 18 cents were also gone—it so happened that one day in mid-March they were standing rather disconsolately at Rogers airport talking to the president of the Californian Bank of Los Angeles, Andrew Chaffey. And he was
listening
to them! Taking them
seriously
!

Chaffey proved to be an exceedingly friendly American who had once lived in Australia as a lad, courtesy of the fact that his father had worked as an irrigation engineer in Mildura for many years, and he knew just the bloke he would like to introduce them to, one Captain G. Allan Hancock.
⁴⁴

Just what the good captain’s calling was was not immediately apparent, though he seemed like a nice man, and they didn’t mind telling him of their plans for the
Southern Cross
and the terrible troubles they had had in getting it off the ground. The frustrating thing, they told him, was that they knew they had the right plane, and had learnt enough of the lessons from both the Dole Air Race and their own experience over previous months to know that they really could fly the Pacific. It was just that they lacked the last bit of money to make it all happen, and were in fact so deeply in debt that they were on the point of losing everything.

Captain Hancock, on this day, listened, and went for a cruise with them in the
Southern Cross
in the skies above Los Angeles,
⁴⁵
but said very little. A few days of cadging later, however, came some amazing news from their friendly bank manager, Andrew Chaffey.

He was extending an invitation on behalf of Captain Hancock, who was wondering whether the two Australians would, perhaps, like to accompany him on a cruise in a few days’ time, on his steam yacht
Oaxaca
—in reality a small ship—down the Pacific coast to the Mexican port of Mazatlán.

Would they ever! If nothing else, such a trip would provide free accommodation for the Australians and, even more importantly,
free meals.
And speaking of their poverty, both men became suddenly aware that they couldn’t possibly go on such a cruise in their current wardrobe, which was so threadbare and patched that on a bad day they could be mistaken for hobos. With some more cadged dollars—because buying new clothes was out of the question—they managed to hire some clothes at a very good rate. (Turns out it was a good rate for a good reason. Neither set of clothes fitted either airman. One set of pants had to be reefed up for Kingsford Smith and the other down for Ulm.)

It was a fairly humbling thing to board such a luxuriously appointed yacht of a millionaire while wearing another man’s trousers, but neither aviator focused too heavily on it. It was just a pleasure to be there, and for ten days at least to
pack up their troubles in their old kit bag
,
and smile
,
smile
,
smile boys
,
that’s the style.

An interesting man, Captain Hancock. From very humble beginnings, this child of dirt-poor farmers on the edge of Los Angeles might have remained exactly that if it had not been discovered that the said dirt was in fact afloat on a veritable ocean of oil. First his widowed mother leased 1000 acres of the farm to an oil company, and when that proved fruitful, Hancock decided to put wells on the land that remained. Out of seventy-one wells sunk around the family homestead—right near where the Beverly Wilshire Hotel would later be built at the end of Rodeo Drive—all seventy-one came up gushers!

And yet, far from just sitting back and counting his millions, Hancock continued to invest over the years in everything from banks to railroads to shipping to cinemas; to engage his passions, including helping to fund and occasionally play for the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra, taking boats and ships on long voyages—hence his ‘Captain’ honorific by virtue of his master mariner’s licence—and to give a lot of his money away to worthy causes.

He was a man of means, matched only by his generosity and charm…and yet both Australians also sensed a certain sadness to him in off-moments, and that story, too, soon emerged as they got to know him on the yacht. A couple of years before, Hancock and his beloved only son, Bertram, then twenty-two years old, had checked into Santa Barbara’s luxurious Arlington Hotel just before…an earthquake hit. The hotel had collapsed like a house of cards, and even as Captain Hancock was falling two floors, he was able to catch a ‘vivid, never-to-be forgotten glimpse of my son’s bed plunging downward in the roaring mass and twisted steel’. The steel rod that impaled Captain Hancock gave him a speech impediment that would be with him for the rest of his life, but Bertram’s life had ended instantaneously that night.