Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (71 page)

A few days before their arrival, at a time when the
Southern Cross
had just been leaving the hot winds of Karachi behind, the body of Keith Anderson had at last arrived in Sydney, after a long journey by rail. At Central Station, his flag-draped coffin had been met by his mother, Mrs Constance Anderson, Bon Hilliard and her parents, a party of RAAF officers who acted as pall-bearers and a large crowd of sympathisers.
¹⁵
From there his coffin had lain ‘in state’, at St Stephen’s Church in Phillip Street, where thousands of Sydneysiders could file past and pay their respects. Many women, particularly, fell to their knees and sobbed before the casket.
¹⁶

And on the cold morning of Saturday, 6 July 1929, after the funeral service at the Presbyterian Church on Belmont Road in the harbourside suburb of Mosman, 6000 mourners filed behind the horse-drawn gun carriage upon which Keith’s coffin lay, as it made its way to his final, final resting place in nearby beautiful Rawson Park, with views stretching far out through Sydney Heads into the Pacific Ocean over which he had long dreamed of flying. It was the day of his thirty-eighth birthday. Overhead, five Gipsy Moths flew in the formation of a cross, followed by eight No. 3 Squadron RAAF Westland Wapiti biplanes that swooped down low to drop wreaths on the burial site.
¹⁷
As Keith’s coffin was lowered into the grave, a high-winged monoplane broke away, a Westland Widgeon III and, swooping low, managed to drop a wreath of red roses and green leaves nearly right on top.

An honour guard of soldiers fired their rifles in the air as a last salute—rather as had been done at the Red Baron’s funeral at Bertangles a decade earlier—as Bon Hilliard quietly wept, supported by her family. A lone bugler played the ‘Last Post’ as the coffin was laid beneath the sod.

‘He died there in the course of duty, out there in the waste places of Australia,’ the Reverend D.P. MacDonald intoned, ‘but he will live forever in the hearts of the Australian people.’
¹⁸

Vale, Keith.

Bobby Hitchcock, meanwhile, at his wife’s insistence, had been buried a couple of days earlier in Perth’s Karrakatta cemetery after a relatively quiet funeral. For this farewell, Smithy and the crew of the
Southern Cross
had sent messages of condolence and flowers.

Although the purpose of the trip to London had been to buy planes for the Australian domestic route, already the thoughts of Kingsford Smith and Ulm were turning to opening up international commercial routes—in particular, expanding Imperial Airways’ current London to Karachi route, all the way to Australia.

‘I anticipate an efficient Sydney to Melbourne air service,’ Smithy told waiting pressmen on the ground in England, ‘and am also interested in the inauguration of the Karachi to Australia service.’

‘I hope,’ Ulm added, ‘the Commonwealth and Imperial governments will subsidise the proposed services. This is a very important subject in the closer linking of the Empire.’
¹⁹

Once again the
Southern Cross
had performed so well on the flight that if all else had been equal, Kingsford Smith and Ulm would have liked to have purchased six Fokkers to establish their airline, and yet that would not have been a good look with their future passengers who had been raised on the notion, as had they, that ‘British is best’. The solution was to buy four Avro 618 Ten monoplanes from A.V. Roe and Company, which had purchased the rights to manufacture Fokker’s F.VIIb.3m machines in Britain—and the two pilots cum businessmen, soon journeyed to the company’s headquarters in Manchester to begin negotiations.
²⁰
They decided to buy five planes and have them fitted with 225-horsepower Armstrong Siddeley Lynx seven-cylinder engines instead of the Wright Whirlwinds, which would make them 5 miles per hour faster.

It was at this point that Anthony Fokker sent Smithy and Ulm a cable to the effect that if they could get the
Southern Cross
back to where it was first built, in Amsterdam, he would see that the whole plane was entirely reconditioned, from wing tip to wing tip, tail to propellers, at his own expense—an extremely generous offer. When the negotiations were completed with the Avro people, they flew their champion plane to Amsterdam and were thrilled to be greeted by a veritable honour guard of Fokker fighter planes sent up by the Dutch government’s LVA
Luchtvaartafdeling
(aviation department) to escort them to Schiphol aerodrome. There, an enormous crowd awaited them—an indication of the pride all of Holland had taken in the achievements of the
Southern Cross.
²¹

The four aviators were hailed as such great heroes that it was hard to imagine only two months previously they had been vilified as liars and cheats by a significant portion of their own public at home. Within a fortnight, however, it was time to head back to London, and they left the
Southern Cross
in the wonderfully skilled hands of the Fokker engineers. The board of Australian National Airways had made it clear that it wanted Ulm to return immediately to help get their new airline set up, while it had very reluctantly agreed to allow Kingsford Smith to head to America by ship, to explore the possibilities of fulfilling his dream of being the first man to fly around the world.
²²
(At least, while crossing the equator. In 1924, a US Army team using massive resources had managed to get two planes around the world while staying wholly within the northern hemisphere.)

Having done the San Francisco to Sydney leg, and then the Sydney to London leg, all he needed now was to cross the Atlantic from Europe to the American mainland, and then proceed to San Francisco, and it would be done! If it worked out, Smithy could also claim to have made the first
successful
crossing east to west, as although two Germans, Günther von Hünefeld and Hermann Köhl, together with Irishman Captain James C. Fitzmaurice, DFC, had partially done it a couple of years earlier, they had crash-landed on an island off Labrador and then been stranded for several weeks, so that hardly counted!

When Smithy landed in New York on this preliminary trip, he was delighted to meet his old friend Anthony Fokker once more who, hail-fellow-well-met, showed his eagerness to help Smithy be the first man to fly the Atlantic from the other direction by immediately pulling out his pen and chequebook and handing over a cheque for £1000.
²³

Now
that
was Smithy’s kind of encouragement!

October 1929. Vancouver.

What was going on? On her regular course back and forth across the Pacific, the RMS
Aorangi
had been due to leave the docks of Vancouver at high noon, and yet here it was, two o’clock in the afternoon, and there was still no sign of movement. Finally, the word went round. There was to be a slight delay, because one of the passengers to come was the famous Australian aviator Charles Kingsford Smith, who was then and there addressing Vancouver’s almost equally prestigious Canadian Club. He should be boarding very shortly, apparently, and then they would be full steam ahead across the Pacific. Which was all right for
some.

Many passengers were thrilled at the news that for the next three weeks they would have Australia’s most famous man among them. Others, however, were furious—
furious
, do you hear—that an entire ship and all her passengers were being held up for just
one
man, and none was angrier than one Mary Powell, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the rich Melbourne horse breeder Arthur Powell and his wife, Floss. Mary and her parents had been on a grand tour of the world for the last nine months, and were now about to leave on the last leg home, and would have already left, if not for this wretched pilot chappie. Bother. Bother.
Bother.

At last, near three o’clock, there was a flurry of activity on the docks. A car pulled up and out of it got a man with a young woman, both of whom were soon hurrying up the gangplank, with the porters carrying their luggage scurrying behind.

‘Here’s Kingsford Smith at last,’ Arthur Powell said to his daughter.

Mary looked.
That
was Kingsford Smith? She was stunned.

‘It was a bit like saying,’ Mary later recounted, ‘“Here’s the King.” I remember my absolute amazement that in the flesh, he was such a little man. I said, “How insignificant he looks to have done all those things.”’
²⁴

Well, her parents didn’t think him insignificant. When he had touched down at Essendon aerodrome the previous year, they, like some 80,000 fellow citizens of Melbourne, had been there to greet him—while Mary had had a tennis party—and they were now delighted to be seeing him up close…

And yet, if Mary Powell was not impressed with the aviator, Kingsford Smith felt quite the opposite that evening at dinner when he cast his eye over the assembled company and picked her out as the most attractive young lady present. Small and gorgeous, elegant and poised, impeccably groomed, with high cheekbones and full lips, this ravishing brunette had piercing blue eyes that simply mesmerised him.

On that first night on the high seas, only a few minutes after spotting Mary, Kingsford Smith breathed quietly to his 25-year-old niece, Beris—Harold’s daughter, to whom he was shouting a trip to Australia, after he had spent a couple of weeks catching up with the American branch of the family in their Californian home—that he had made his choice.

‘The one in red will do me,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t mind practising on her.’
²⁵

And he was as good as his word.

From that moment on, as the Pacific Ocean opened up before them, the rising 33-year-old pilot turned the full force of his charm on both the young woman and her parents. As he was quickly installed on the captain’s table, it didn’t take long for him to organise for the Powell family to be invited, too, and it was not long until they were
all
in his thrall.

No matter what the subject, Smithy usually had a well-turned, self-deprecating story to go with it. When it came up that, on their recent tour, Mary had been presented at court to King George V, the war veteran was able to tell his own story of meeting the King when he had, can you believe it, tripped over his own feet and gone to ground! Laughter all round.

When Arthur Powell mentioned that he and his wife had been there at Melbourne airport the previous year after the trans-Pacific flight, Smithy was able to relate to the family anecdotes about that splendid afternoon, what the Governor and Premier had said, and so forth.

And what of India, where the Powell family had lived for many years, as Arthur bred his horses? Smithy had been there many times on his cross-global travels, and was a wonderful mimic of the Indian accent, complete with imitation of the curiously sideways nodding Indian head. Ah, how he could make the family laugh, just as he could reduce many of Mary’s friends, who were also on board the ship and all eager to meet him via her, to tears of mirth.

And yet, despite the breadth and grandeur of Kingsford Smith’s experiences, somehow he managed to present it all in such a down-to-earth and humble fashion that he didn’t seem to have an ounce of arrogance about him. Nothing could make him tell a story about one of his adventures where he was made to come across as heroic. Rather than talk about himself, he seemed every bit as interested in them, as they were in him. He was a good listener too. And while everyone on the ship seemed to be competing for his attention, it was clear that the Powells were at the top of his list.

Dance, Mary?

Yes, Charles, she would like to dance, and did so beautifully, around the floor as he held her close. Mind the foot, dear. Small war wound, nothing to worry about…

The hit of the era, because it was both romantic and also captured so wonderfully the enduring prosperous spirit of the times was Irving Berlin’s ‘Blue Skies’:

Blue skies

Smiling at me

Nothing but blue skies

Do I see

Bluebirds

Singing a song

Nothing but bluebirds

All day long

Never saw the sun shining so bright

Never saw things going so right

Noticing the days hurrying by

When you’re in love, my how they fly
…

In America, as Charles and Mary danced on, night after night, a curious thing was happening at the New York Stock Exchange, the world’s largest and most powerful exchange. On the morning of Thursday, 24 October 1929, turmoil had set in as the price of shares started to tumble, and then continued to fall at an ever-increasing rate. Panic begat panic. By virtue of the fact that every ‘buy’ order was on a black pad and every ‘sell’ order was on a red pad, this panic was soon represented by a sea of fluttering red papers being furiously waved on the floor by desperate stockbrokers trying to unload shares and save their clients.

Something had to be done, and it was. By noon of that day the most influential of the Wall Street bankers had a meeting in the House of Morgan, directly opposite the exchange, in an effort to find a solution and turn the market back around. On the spot, they put together an effective fighting fund to support the market, and an hour later Dick Whitney, the vice-president of the exchange, made what was to become a famous walk across the floor. Speaking in a firm voice and holding a black order form, he called out in a loud voice, calculated for effect, ‘I give $205 for 10,000 US Steel.’ This was ten dollars up on the asking price!