Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (95 page)

Was it perhaps time to give it away before that number did come up? Not in Smithy’s view. ‘The flying life of pilots, as of planes, is short compared with other forms of transport. At thirty-eight I recognise that I am a veteran. Well, there is life in the old dog yet!—and I still sigh for uncharted spaces and new worlds to conquer—even though trans-oceanic flights are selling at two cents to the bushel and there is the ever-present problem of financing to worry me. To be sure, I have a nice little air business in Sydney, but my heart is in adventure and the last frontier is the air.’
⁶⁷

After flying the
Lady Southern Cross
to New York, Smithy used the absolute last gasp of his financial resources to arrange passage for both himself and his plane on separate ships to England, where he would meet up with Beau Sheil to see if they could rustle up the money they needed.

Alas, when he got to London after a four-day voyage, the problem Smithy came up against was an all too familiar one. That is, while his record as a pilot was without peer, his resumé as a businessman was a lot less illustrious and he was yet to demonstrate his capacity to make an aviation company grow in the long term.

Knock-back followed knock-back and, in many ways, the situation was reminiscent of the one that Smithy had previously known in San Francisco before his first Pacific flight. It was one thing for people to wish you well, slap you on the back and invite you for a drink, and quite another for them to commit to writing a big cheque, most particularly when you had a record of squandering the big cheques others had written. And while it was true that the world of business and the world of aviation were merging in the mid-1930s Depression era, with bankruptcies rife and unemployment continuing to rise the men that the businessmen were putting their money behind were not the hardy pioneer adventurous types but responsible buttoned-down men who put long hours in at the office—a description which Smithy just didn’t fit.

Compounding Kingsford Smith’s problems was that not only was he not getting the hundreds of thousands of pounds he needed but, well, he didn’t actually have the money he needed to live on, to pay his travel expenses, hotel accommodation and so forth. If the Australian government had fully paid for the
Southern Cross
as they had promised to do, he would have been okay, but—because government lawyers had yet to get to the bottom of the documentation to prove that Smithy was the plane’s actual legal owner—they had withheld half the payment and an increasingly angry, frustrated and depressed Kingsford Smith was reduced to cabling John Stannage in Australia and asking him to take it up with the government on his behalf.
⁶⁸
He needed that money, and he needed it immediately.

Despite his claims to journalist Edwin Parsons that he had a ‘nice little air business’ in Australia, the truth was that that business no longer existed, he had no capital of note as backup, and he was clearly unable to raise the money he needed in London to launch the trans-Tasman venture he just knew would work if given the chance! The walls were closing in, and there seemed precious few ways out.

In difficult times in the past, Smithy had traditionally fallen back on one of two options: taking up barnstorming until things got better, or breaking a record. Although in 1935 breaking records was not the wondrous thing it had been in the past—people didn’t seem to care quite as much anymore—it was at least something. The more he thought about it, lying awake late at night, tossing and turning, the more it seemed like he had just one last option, now that the
Lady Southern Cross
had arrived and been offloaded.

‘I’ll fly her back to Australia,’ he told Beau, ‘and break Scott and Black’s record of seventy-one hours. The publicity will do us a lot of good.’
⁶⁹

Beau argued strongly against it. In his passionately held view, ‘breaking records and trying to start an international airline are two totally unrelated things…!’
⁷⁰
There was no doubt that Smithy was a wonderful pioneer flyer, as he had proved time and time and time again. What he had to prove now was that he was a canny aviation businessman who could be trusted to wisely spend whatever capital they could raise. If anything, breaking another record would work against them. Smithy, don’t you see?!??

But Smithy wouldn’t hear of it. He was going to break the record; going to show he could have won the Centenary Race if he had been given the chance, and that was that.

Beau was not nearly so sure.

For one thing, it was obvious to him that Smithy wasn’t well. To fly a plane from England to Australia in under fifty-one hours as he intended to do, was a gruelling task and could only be undertaken safely by someone who was physically fit and mentally strong. And Smithy in no way answered that description. Emotionally and physically exhausted, often bedridden, he was not remotely close to the level of fitness required, but nor would he hear of cancelling the flight.

Even beyond Smithy’s determination to make the attempt, however, there were many problems, starting with the same one he had had with Australian officials over his plane’s fuel capacity. Smithy’s plan had been to use the American certification to get British certification, which would then allow him to get Australian certification when he got home. But, as before, the American certification would only allow a capacity of 145 gallons, which was the normal capacity for the Altair. And so the British—in the form of a twenty-year-old air official from the Air Ministry, still in his nappies when Smithy had flown his first plane—informed Kingsford Smith, quite reasonably, that he would only get certification for that amount and,
furthermore
,
hereto with pursuant
,
see Paragraph 3
,
Clause A
, he would have to remove all the extra tanks from the
Lady Southern Cross
that it had arrived in Britain with, or he wouldn’t be able to fly it at all.

F—ing officals!

Scarcely believing that it was happening again, Smithy, at the end of his tether, was beside himself with rage.
He
was the one risking his life, not
them
, and
he
should bloody well know how much
his
plane could take! And it could take 514 gallons! How
dare
they impose a limit on him that was way less than a third of the amount he’d had in it when he had flown the bleeding Pacific Ocean! And back then, of course, as the first man in, the bloody bureaucrats hadn’t yet had a chance to set up shop to try and strangle him. Back then there had been no certificates, no stamps, no endless paperwork, no officious officials continually trying to stop a man from doing what a man could do when left to his own devices.

Well, Smithy was on to their game, all right, he was. He just knew that all this was part of a British plan to prevent him, in an American plane, breaking Scott and Black’s record, which had so magnificently and patriotically been done in a British plane.

In an attempt to break the impasse, the British Air Ministry gave the Australian the option to submit the Altair for stress analysis at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. Smithy declined—perhaps on the reckoning that she wouldn’t pass muster when overloaded.

The usual flurry of telegrams, letters and meetings ensued as August turned into September turned into October and the weather began to cool, and finally the Air Ministry relented, at least a little. They agreed to allow him to keep the extra tanks on board, on the
strict
condition that he ‘blank off’ the extra tanks and take on no more than 145 gallons. Smithy agreed promptly, knowing full well that once he was out of British jurisdiction he could land at Marseilles and fill ‘er up Bluey—up to bursting.

To go with him on this record attempt he decided to offer the position to young Tommy Pethybridge whom he had known, liked and worked with for many years, and who had, in fact, accompanied the
Lady Southern Cross
on her journey across the Atlantic. While Smithy would fly most of the way, Tommy’s job would be to handle everything at each stop—to fill in the bloody paperwork, oversee the refuelling, attend to any mechanical needs and so forth—enabling Smithy to get at least a little shut-eye.

As to Tommy, he was, of course, delighted to receive the offer. He near worshipped Sir Charles, and to have a chance to fly with him into history and have his own name in the record books was something he could only have dreamed of. True, he also had concerns about the deteriorating health of Sir Charles—who didn’t look good, and seemed very jumpy and perpetually exhausted—but on the other hand, young Tommy was hardly in a position to question the greatest flyer in history as to whether or not he was up to the task. Time and again Smithy had proved himself the veritable Houdini of the air, somehow always managing to escape from situations that would have killed lesser pilots.

In fact, however, Smithy was finally beginning to have his own concerns about whether he was up to it or not, and after confiding in Beau, began to consult London’s medical establishment. In the end there didn’t seem to be a specific thing that ailed him, so much as an unhappy concurrence of exhaustion, anxiety and a general fug of depression.

Over the crackling phone all the way from Sydney, Mary begged him—positively
begged
him not to fly—and instead come back by sea with the
Lady Southern Cross
strapped on to the deck, as it had first arrived in Australia. So crook did he feel that Smithy was at last mercifully convinced, and after consultations with Beau, decided to do exactly that. There was, however, a problem…

Smithy had no more money than a squirrel. Getting himself and his plane home was an expensive exercise, not to mention keeping up mortgage payments on his new Darling Point home, and he
still
had not received a brass razoo further from the Australian government, which was continuing to quibble over the lack of proven ownership of the
Southern Cross.
An urgent cable was sent to John Stannage in Sydney, asking him to press the government for at least an advance on the money.

Finally, the answer came back from John Stannage. Sir Charles could have a further advance of £500, so long as he signed a document whereby the government would have the right to take, and sell, all of his household furniture if it turned out that the
Southern Cross
wasn’t his to sell, and he therefore had no right to the money.
⁷¹

And that, was indeed, the last straw.

TO HELL with the lot of them! He would be
damned
if he would sign any such humiliating document, even if he could have proved he owned the plane three times over. With no money to go back by ship, and no money to stay on, now he really did have no choice. He would
have
to fly home—and if he was going to do that he would make sure he broke the record and that would be the end of it. His whole flying experience to that point had been that no matter how bad he felt going into a flight, once in the air he mostly came good so he triumphed in the end, and he could only hope that would hold true this time as well.

After one false start when he had been beset so badly by a terrible flu that the flight had to be postponed, just after dawn on the morning of Wednesday, 23 October, he began to warm up the engine of the
Lady Southern Cross
and prepare to mount his attempt. There to see him off was Charles Scott, a good sport, whose fifty-one-hour record to Darwin and seventy-two-hour record to Melbourne Smithy was now determined to break. This was it, his last hurrah…

‘I am now 38,’ he told journalists gathered for the occasion, ‘and win or lose, this is my last record attempt. Really, my last.’
⁷²
And this time he really did mean it, acutely aware that this was his fair-dinkum last long flight. A bastard of a one, but one he just had to do.

No matter that he was back within a couple of days, after hitting a violent storm over Greece which did some damage to the wings, and he was obliged to limp back to Croydon via Brindisi, Italy. Of course, he was intent on trying again.

In the interim, Beau Sheil was preparing to leave for America hoping to raise in New York the capital they needed to get the Trans-Tasman Air Service Development Company Ltd established. He made one last attempt to convince Smithy to accompany him, on the grounds that his name and clout was what was needed, but Smithy refused to be dissuaded.
⁷³
Beau, reluctantly, left him to it and sailed west across the Atlantic on 3 November 1935 after failing, at dockside, one last time to convince his friend to abandon the flight.

‘I don’t feel fit enough for the job,’ Smithy told him, ‘but I am going to see it through.’
⁷⁴

Mary pleaded with her husband.
Begged
him, her desperation crackling down the line.
Please
don’t make this flight! PLEASE. Alas, the heavily pregnant Mary had no more success in the phone call she made the night before Charles was due to take off this second time around. She promised that if he would just get on a ship, she would meet him halfway in Ceylon, but nothing she said would change his mind. As she later told author Ian Mackersey, ‘He admitted he was ill, but I knew that nothing I said would stop him. He just kept saying he wanted very desperately to get home to be with me. There was a sense of panic about the urgency, as if he couldn’t hold out much longer.’
⁷⁵

That afternoon Smithy and Tommy Pethybridge flew the Altair from Croydon to Lympne on the Kentish coast, from where they reckoned they would have less chance of being fogged in for an early-morning departure. They stayed in Hythe Hotel at the Norman-times Cinque Port town of Hythe, 3
¹
/
₂
miles from the airstrip.