Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (32 page)

In short order, Smithy had done his calculations and worked out that if he put all his combined capital together he could afford to have a small ownership of the business amounting to…
let’s see
…£1’s worth, so long as Lionel would lend him that pound…which Lionel did!

The main thing was that it was work, and flying work at that. Whatever his woes, he was determined never again to be reduced to wielding a paintbrush or the like, as he had been back in California. Nothing of his experiences to that point had lessened his love of flying by one jot. In his wartime service he had logged 800 hours in the air, and since that time another 900 hours. It was a part of him, and he couldn’t imagine life without it.
²⁶

There was a big buzz in the Queensland town of Winton on the sunny Monday afternoon of 7 February 1921. Two planes from the new aviation company of Qantas were due in after a long journey from Sydney and, in two shakes of a burnt stick, there they were! To hearty clapping from the crowd, McGinness landed first on the bit of flat ground next to the artesian bore in an Avro 504K, and he was followed shortly thereafter by Hudson Fysh in a Royal Aircraft Factory BE2e, a modified two-seater reconnaissance type, with an RAF-1a engine of 90 horsepower. Both planes could go as fast as 65 miles per hour, though it certainly wasn’t as simple as dividing long distances by that speed to work out how quick the journey would be. As a matter of fact, the journey of 1200 miles from Sydney had taken six days with seventeen hours and thirty minutes of flying time at an average speed of 68.5 miles per hour, and quite a few unscheduled stops along the way.
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No matter. The town turned on a hearty welcome, and that evening at the North Gregory Hotel packed to capacity with locals and good cheer, Qantas was toasted three times, as was King George V.

\ Ladies and gentlemen, the King!

The King…the King…the King…

In a towering voice, Fergus McMaster, who had arrived as the sole passenger in McGinness’s plane, made a resounding speech, noting that this was not just a great day for Qantas, but for ‘the defence of Australia’, which was now dependent on aviation.

‘Australia,’ he warned, ‘lies open to all from the air. The only reason that Australia is held by us today, gentlemen, is because we are fortunately a part of the greatest empire in the world.’

Hear, hear! Hear, hear!
Hear, hear!

‘This commercial aviation company,’ he continued when the enthusiastic rumbling had subsided a little, ‘should get your support as Australians, not investors; not for the dividends it is likely to bring in, but for the great influence it must have in the administration, development and defence of Australia.’
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Bravo! Hurrah!

In any case, they had made a start and were soon in operation, flying through every district of western Queensland, where the need for Qantas’s services was greatest. A sure source of revenue was joy flights, where a member of the public would be taken aloft for ten minutes and £3 and 3 shillings, or £5 if they wanted to do a ‘loop-the-loop’.
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If, on the other hand, they wanted to be taken to an outlying station or another town, the basic rate was ‘two shillings per mile flown’. Though not yet ready to begin taking passengers on scheduled services, Qantas kept working towards that day, spreading the word and setting up airfields in the towns they intended to fly to. Leaflets were distributed saying such things as:

The person who has not been in the air has not yet started to LIVE. Fly in the famous B.E.2e, second in the Sydney Aerial Derby. Have you ever had a flight in a British War Machine?
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The people flocked to it in their droves.

For Charles Kingsford Smith, a wild, wild time in various country towns around New South Wales followed his employment with the Diggers Co-operative Aviation Company. Under the terms of his contract, he was to be paid £12 a week as a base rate, with a further commission of 10 per cent of gross after he had made a certain amount. First-class accommodation in each country town was also to be provided by the company.

In return, Kingsford Smith was expected to ‘fly in’ around £80 a day, and his first job was to take one of the company’s Avros from Mascot and drop into the small New South Wales country town of Oberon to work the local show. And Kingsford Smith intended to do exactly that, and would have, if not for a small crash on landing due to an unexpectedly boggy paddock. The question then was: to tell the company or make his own arrangements?

Typically, Smithy decided to make his own arrangements, and managed to get the local blacksmith and undertaker to fix the undercarriage and wing. (And if that made the plane resemble a little more a flying coffin, then so be it, and maybe he was dipping a lid to his old French wartime comrade Charles Nungesser, with his famed symbol of a coffin flanked by candles painted on the side of his plane.)

From there Smithy went to Dubbo for a picnic of railway workers, men widely renowned for their thirst and ability to pack beer away as if there was no tomorrow. Even they, however, would likely have had to acknowledge Smithy as their master when it came to drinking.

On this rather warm day, what Smithy did was to take a couple of paying passengers skywards for about ten minutes, then bring them back down and have a bit of a beer while another pilot took the next pair, whereupon he would take over again to take another pair up. Then another beer, before taking another pair up. And another, and another, and another. Beers, cheers, pairs, planes, flying, Dubbo, up, down, over, under, beers, in the end it’s all a blur, arr…duzzenmatter.

What was certain was that late that afternoon, and with the beer goggles so firmly attached now that
everything
seemed like a good idea at the time, he decided to take this particular couple, young Oliver Cook and his fiancée, Dulcie Offner, on a couple of loop-de-loops.

As the crowd below watched open-mouthed, Smithy did indeed manage to pull off a spectacular version of the aeronautical loop. ‘S matter of fact, it wash sho good, he decided to try another! This time, alas, he was only halfway through when there was a sudden loud crack like a gunshot, as either the work of the undertaker or blacksmith gave up the unequal struggle, and now it was the plane that began to drunkenly lurch.

Only a master pilot could possibly have wrested the machine back under control in such circumstances, and Smithy almost did just that. Somehow he managed to get the whole thing back on the ground with his passengers intact but shaken, in a plane that nevertheless had its nose partly buried in a hillside, with a broken undercarriage and snapped propeller.
³¹

Up there!
For the people in the Queensland coastal country town of Bundaberg on the sunny afternoon of 11 April 1921, it was an amazing thing to look up and see a plane, a real
plane
, buzzing around overhead. Most of the town was completely mystified as to who it could possibly be, but not John Hinkler, nor his wife, Frances. They both knew it had to be their boy Bert, who had left town nine years ago to become first a mechanic with Sopwith and then a pilot with the Royal Naval Air Service, making no fewer than 122 flights over enemy territory. He had always said that when the time came, he wanted to
fly
home, as a ‘real dinkum pilot’,
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to the ones he addressed as ‘my beloved parents’ in his many letters home.

John Hinkler—always distinctive because of his enormous Ned Kelly-like beard—was down town when he saw the plane and, knowing only too well where his boy Bert would head to, immediately crossed the bridge to the north side of town and headed home. Out in the garden, a teary Frances watched as the plane circled lower and lower, and then she saw him, her Bert, waving furiously from the cockpit of his tiny white biplane, as he zoomed low over his childhood home and she waved furiously back before rushing inside to put the kettle on. Banking sharply, the pilot came in for a perfect landing on the Bundaberg Foundry Green and then, as stunned people rushed from everywhere, he taxied it up Gavan Street to his home—blessed home!—as locals on bikes and horses kept pace, and others ran alongside tried to keep up. And there, inside the lattice-enclosed front veranda was his now grey-haired mother waiting for him, soon joined by his father, who was fit to bursting with pride and happiness. Bert was home. In a new Australian record—not that the self-effacing Bert cared, as he was simply flying his Avro 543 Baby home from Sydney, where he had unloaded it from the good ship
Ascanius.
Yet Bert Hinkler had flown 700 miles non-stop in eight and three-quarter hours.
³³

There was much hoopla, many headlines and numerous civic receptions to honour his achievement, the first of which was held the following evening in Bundaberg Town Hall, with Bert and his beaming parents seated at the table of honour. After an overwhelming speech from the mayor, which went on for some time, Bert stood up and simply said: ‘Thank you. I’m glad to be home.’
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In the end, perhaps this result was inevitable, such were the risks that he took and in such flimsy aircraft. Just after 6 pm on 12 July 1921, Harry Hawker was flying his Nieuport Goshawk biplane above the Burnt Oak and the RAF Hendon airfields in preparation for the aerial derby in just four days’ time, when on this wonderfully balmy early evening in England the amazing luck that had always characterised his survival despite everything, suddenly began to waver.
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Witnesses saw his plane catch fire and begin to spin towards earth almost immediately afterwards, with Harry fighting it all the way down…

Oh
,
blessed Muriel…Oh
,
my daughters!

On the moment of impact the plane exploded with such force that the broken body of Hawker was found 50 yards away. At their home at Hook, in Surrey, only a short time later, Muriel was informed that there had been ‘an accident’, and departed immediately for the aerodrome, leaving her two young daughters in the care of a neighbour. While driving there she reminded herself of the Atlantic flight, and how when everyone else had given up hope, she hadn’t, and had been proven right, and Harry had returned to her more alive than when he left.

Alas…alas…

When she arrived, it was to find that Harry was dead.
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A day later, no less than King George V himself was to write in a letter of condolence to Muriel, noting that ‘the nation has lost one of its most distinguished airmen who by his skill and daring has contributed so much to the success of British aviation’.
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This time, there was to be no miraculous reappearance of Harry.

On this dreamy afternoon down Cowra way in western New South Wales, the Lachlan River was flowing as sweetly as ever, the birds were singing and the only other sound on Cowra Bridge was the pleasant clip-clopping of hooves, as a big wheat wagon drawn by twelve horses was heading homewards. In the opposite direction at a slightly faster clip came a sulky in which a farmer was rushing his heavily pregnant wife to the maternity ward of the local hospital, because she had had stirrings, she said. It was a bucolic, perfect scene, one that could well have been painted by Tom Roberts.

But do you hear something? What? That
bzzzzzzz
buzzing sound…getting louder and louder…

THERE!

From out of the blue, literally, and seemingly making straight for the Gates of Hell, suddenly descended the plane of one Charles Kingsford Smith, who had been drinking heavily, and was intent on having some fun. Flattening out above the river, he gunned it straight for the bridge, while those upon the fragile structure stared at the fast-approaching machine in horror! Was he…? Is he…? Can he…?

Yes, or die in the attempt, perhaps taking them with him. The stanchions below the bridge stood 70 feet apart at their widest point, while the Avro stretched 36 feet. This gave the pilot 17 feet of clearance on either side, while a gap of 15 feet separated the bottom of the bridge from the water, just enough, perhaps, to allow the Avro’s 10 feet 5 inches height through. Only one of the best, most confident pilots in the world, or the most foolish, or the most drunken, would attempt such a thing. As it happened, on this day Smithy was all three of those things.

The plane continued to hurtle towards the bridge at just under 100 miles per hour, as the three people on the bridge watched, completely terrified…And he made it!

Still, he wasn’t done. After emerging on the other side, Smithy pulled back on his stick hard and executed a perfect ‘Immelmann turn’, just as he had learnt to do in the Great War, which meant that after a tight loop an instant later he was hurtling back over the bridge at a very low height.

On that bridge, of course, total pandemonium had broken out. As Kingsford Smith had roared underneath, the horses hitched to the wheat wagon had bolted like scalded pigs and driven the oncoming sulky hard into the side of the bridge, which precipitated the pregnant farmer’s wife falling out and landing heavily on the roadway. Her baby came into the world there and then, on the bridge outside of Cowra, as a plane piloted by a seeming madman screamed off in one direction and flocks of terrified cockatoos raced off in every other.

And still Smithy was only warming up…

Oblivious of the devastation he had left behind him, he flew on. His job on that late afternoon, after going back to the Cowra airstrip, was to take two local men out to distant Riverslea station to celebrate the christening of the station manager’s son and heir. (And with Smithy in the area, this was an heir who was very fortunate to be born in a bed.) Feeling good. Feeling strong. Did he need to land in the big paddock, a small distance from the homestead? He did not. For he was Smithy.