Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (80 page)

Arriving in Bangkok just five hours after the tragedy, Kingsford Smith was particularly devastated as he had such an enormous regard for Colonel Brinsmead. And yet, advised there was nothing he could do to help the Controller of Civil Aviation, Smithy—with both the mail and Scotty Allan on board, as he had picked up both in Alor Star—flew on.
²¹

Apart from a brief return of Smithy’s illness, when he was again taken ill while over the Bay of Bengal and had to excuse himself while Allan took over the controls, so he could stagger back to lie on the mailbags to recover, the flight went well.
²²
After proceeding via Bangkok, Karachi, Aleppo, Le Touquet and Lyons, they landed at Croydon, 10 miles out of London, on 16 December 1931, twelve days, twenty-one hours and eighteen minutes after leaving Australia, to hand the mail to the representatives of the General Post Office.
²³

‘I am very proud to bring the first direct air mail to England,’ Smithy told waiting pressmen. ‘I hope it will be the forerunner of a regular service. The Australian public has shown that it wants an air mail. If I get a similar load on the homeward trip, it will show that England also appreciates the service.’
²⁴

Mail from Australia in less than thirteen days! Hinkler’s sixteen-day record cut to pieces! The achievement caught the popular imagination, and for a day or two Smithy’s feat was the talk, if not the toast, of London.

Even as Kingsford Smith was approaching London, however, another famous Australian aviator had already reached the end of his even more amazing journey to that destination from afar. In the annals of long-distance aviation, Bert Hinkler’s trip would always be a standout. In his tiny single-engined 120-horsepower de Havilland DH.80A Puss Moth monoplane, travelling solo, as ever—with no radio and just a compass and
Times Atlas
for guidance—in late November he hopped first from Toronto to New York and then down to Jamaica, before crossing over 700 miles of open sea to Venezuela. After that, a little jaunt to Trinidad before popping across the Gulf of Mexico to the land of Alberto Santos-Dumont, Brazil, where the 39-year-old from Bundaberg was stunned to see enormous flocks of brightly coloured birds rising from the jungle to greet him.
²⁵

After a short rest, he made ready for the
big
leap, across the South Atlantic. On the morning of 25 November, Hinkler flew above the enormous jungle beside the mighty Amazon River and was reflecting that it looked like a motionless green sea, when he saw it: the
real
sea, the Atlantic Ocean up ahead. At its sight he experienced a momentary quavering of confidence and then came the familiar surge of steel.

‘Now or never,’
²⁶
he breathed to himself, and flew on.

Using, among other things, his uncanny ability to judge wind direction by the shape of the clouds he was heading into, and making allowance accordingly, Hinkler was able to stay on course.
²⁷
After flying for twenty-two hours and forty minutes across the storm-tossed ocean he arrived at Bathurst in British Gambia, where he sent his wife, Nancy, a typical cable: Landed at Bathurst, Gambia.
OK
. Bert. (At that point Nancy would not have been surprised if he had popped up in Patagonia.)
²⁸

‘I am thrilled at his great success,’ Nancy told the
Evening Standard
, ‘for only one other man, Colonel Lindbergh, has succeeded in flying across the Atlantic alone…I think he has done wonderfully, but then he is a wonderful husband.’
²⁹
A few more hops and he was touching down in Casablanca, in Morocco, before heading off to Madrid, the town of Tours in France, and finally…England! And there was his Nancy, waiting for him, and throwing her arms around him joyfully the moment he emerged from the plane.

‘I must admit,’ Bert said quietly at the formal welcome that awaited him at Hanworth Air Park in Middlesex, ‘that on a certain night my hopes of dying as a respectable old man with long white whiskers appeared as if they would not be realised.’
³⁰

In honour of his achievement, the Royal Aero Club announced that Bert Hinkler would receive their gold medal at a dinner on the night of Wednesday, 16 December 1931. On the following evening, Hinkler was invited to attend a Guild of Air Pilots and Navigators dinner in the Florence Restaurant in London. And perhaps the just-landed Kingsford Smith would like to come too? Indeed he would. It was an odd circumstance that despite having both flown in the Great War and then crisscrossed the skies over and by each other through the 1920s in various parts of the world, the two aviators had never actually met. Both were delighted to do so, just as they were delighted that Amy Johnson, a young Englishwoman of extraordinary pluck—who had stunningly risen to fame the year before when she had become the first woman to fly solo to Australia, in nineteen days—was also at the dinner.

The wine flowed, the conversation warmed up and there was no doubt in the mind of anyone that the future of the splendid aviators at that dinner was a bright one, just as was the future of aviation itself. For in this game the sky wasn’t the limit—there
were
no limits!

As the Royal Aero Club chairman, His Grace the Duke of Atholl, exulted in his toast that very evening: ‘I foresee the time when women can fly from England to Australia with their hair newly Eton-cropped and return in a week’s time, with their hair in the same smart condition.’
³¹

As a matter of fact, this fitted in rather well with Hinkler’s own views of where aviation was heading, as he was firmly of the belief that in the future most long-distance flying would be done at night, while the days would be reserved for seeing things. He thought that a whole industry might grow up around this, with masses of people flying around the world to different places, to sightsee by day, before climbing back into the plane to sleep at night and travel somewhere else, before seeing another thing!
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Invited to say a few words, Kingsford Smith made an elegant speech saying he was proud to claim Bert Hinkler as ‘a brother Aussie’. He did, however, jestingly reprimand Hinkler for the risks he took in flying the South Atlantic in such a slender craft, and would Bert mind telling everyone if there was a big flight that he
wasn’t
going to do, as Smithy himself would like to have a crack at it.

Laughter all around, as the drinks continued to flow into the merry evening.
³³
Pass the port…

‘
Hello Mary, darling. Chilla here. I’m in London…
’

It was her husband, Charles, on the phone, sounding very distant, which, of course, he was. Though they had been married for a year, the way things had worked out, Mary—just like so many wives of pioneering aviators—had spent much of her time on her own in their Bellevue Hill home, waiting for him to return, and in fact had even spent their first wedding anniversary, Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve without him. This time she had hoped he would be soon on his way back, bringing New Year’s post from England to Australia, but now he had bad news.

There had been
another
accident, and again it was with Scotty Allan at the controls. Scotty had been moving the
Southern Star
from the Hamble aerodrome over to nearby Croydon in preparation for departure, when a smothering fog had closed in and he had lost his bearings. With little petrol on board Scotty had brought the plane down on a flat bit of ground in Kent, which would have been perfect except an orchard was planted on it, and he had smashed the undercarriage, knocked the wing off its pegs and finished with one of the engines half-buried in the soft ground. Charles was very sorry, Mary, but it looked like at least a week’s worth of repairs before they could again be under way.

Never mind, darling, the main thing is that you’re all right, and Scotty wasn’t hurt either.

Mary finally hung up, feeling lonely. Being the wife of a famous aviator had many upsides, but on other occasions it wasn’t easy at all.

In fact, the penalties of being part of the family of a famous aviator were never so graphically illustrated as when, late on the evening of 1 March 1932, it was discovered that not only was the first-born child of Charles and Anne Lindbergh missing from his bed in the family mansion in East Amwell, New Jersey, but a ransom note had been left on the windowsill. It read:

Dear Sir, Have 50,000 $ redy $25,000 in 20 $ bills 15,000 $ in 10$ bills and 10,000 $ in 5 $ bills. After 2-4 days we will inform you were to deliver the Mony.

We warn you for making anyding public or for notify the Police the child is in gut care.

Indication for all letters are singnature and 3 holes.

The greatest search in American history was immediately launched, ending a few weeks later when a truck driver pulled over to allow his assistant, William Allen, to relieve himself beneath a grove of trees 5 miles from the Lindbergh home, only to discover the badly decomposed remains of the child, with a caved-in skull that had almost certainly occurred on the night. Even amid such tragedy the press did not respect the Lindbergh family’s privacy, with photographers trying to break into the mortuary to get a photo of their dead son.

Smithy was devastated by the news, and constantly thought back to his meeting with Lindbergh two years earlier in New York’s Roosevelt Hotel, when the American pilot had been so thrilled at Charles Jnr’s recent birth and had shown him photos of his baby son.

Smithy!
Smithy!
It’s Smithy! Come quick!

And come quickly they did, first in Sydney—where the discovery of a nudist colony in the thick bush around Kingsgrove which could be viewed from the air helped boost business no end
³⁴
—before heading off through the likes of Tamworth, Newcastle, Bendigo, Echuca, Deniliquin, Kyabram, Melbourne, Colac, Terang, Warrnambool, Maryborough, Ballarat and Geelong. In the first months of 1932, Smithy earned his living by taking enormous numbers of endless joyrides charged at 10 shillings a pop, which might have been steep for some, but a small price to pay to say you were one of the select few who had been ‘up in an aeroplane!’ and ‘with Smithy!’ to boot. All those who purchased a ride were given a ticket embossed with the words ‘Souvenir Flight in
Southern Cross
Piloted by C. E. Kingsford Smith’, and for many people it was the experience of a lifetime, something they would remember fondly and talk about for
decades
afterwards. Often local councils would be so excited about the impending visit of Australia’s most famous man that school children would be given a half-day holiday, which helped business no end.

Ideally, of course, Smithy would have been able to put another pilot in charge of the
Southern Cross
, but over the years they had learnt that that simply didn’t work. The person everyone wanted to fly with was Smithy himself, one of the most celebrated men in Australia—with only Donald Bradman able to argue the toss (
heads
), and perhaps Phar Lap to snort derisively. True, it was a pity he didn’t have more serious flying work to do, as the Christmas postal venture had actually turned a profit despite all the misadventure, but for the moment nothing beckoned.

Except Sydney and its newly minted Harbour Bridge. And so in March he returned in time to take part in the celebrations that marked its opening, leading a fly-past in the
Southern Cross
and then taking people for joyrides.

That evening he took a party of celebrants, all in evening wear, including his mother-in-law, for a spin over Sydney. Was he ‘flying blind’, in a different sense of the word? Perhaps. At the very least, there was a lot of alcohol around on that momentous day and evening.

In any case, with an undetected tailwind he landed way too hard, collapsing the undercarriage and sliding along the airstrip. Holding the plane straight the best he could, even as the
Southern Cross
slithered and squirmed in agonised protest, Smithy mentally calculated the cost—£500…£800…£1000…£2000—before it finally came to a merciful halt. Fortunately no-one was injured, the chief casualty being what was left of Smithy’s bank balance.
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In fact, six weeks and £1500 later he had no choice but to head back out again, through Wellington, Warren, Narromine, Dubbo, Forbes, Young, Grenfell, Temora, Canberra, Cowra, Bathurst, Canowindra and Orange.

As it happened, Smithy was in Grenfell on the early morning of 3 June 1932, when young Tommy Pethybridge—whom Smithy had first met as an RAAF mechanic, but who had recently left that service so he could work for his hero—burst into his boss’s hotel room, beside himself with some stunning news he had just heard on the radio. The King’s birthday honours had been announced and, wait for it, King George V had knighted Smithy! He was now Air Commodore
Sir
Charles Kingsford Smith. In an instant, Smithy’s world changed, as phone calls were made, telegrams began to arrive, everyone was giving him three cheers together with newly respectful slaps on the back, and he immediately had to make plans to fly Mary to Canberra that very afternoon in preparation for the investiture.
³⁶
(It was the second bit of wonderful news for the couple in recent times, after confirmation that Mary was pregnant, when he had been back in Sydney for the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge celebrations.) For his part, Tommy Pethybridge was thrilled that he was the one who got to tell
Sir
Charles the news.