Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (96 page)

At the first flush of dawn on 6 November 1935, they were ready once more. ‘There’ll be no turning back this time,’ Smithy told one journalist, ‘I must stick up somehow.’
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On top of everything else, Smithy had had a gutful of the cold and fog of England, of the constant sniffles, of wrapping up in heavy clothing and hopping up and down to keep warm, as his teeth chattered. If he could pull this off he would be back into an Australian summer before he knew it.

‘I want to see the sunshine again,’ he told another journalist, ‘but most of all, get back to my family…‘
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And with that, they were off, flying away to the south-east at 6.28 am.

At 4.30 pm local time, they were in Athens, having traversed the 1760 miles in just eight hours, at an average speed of some 220 miles per hour. All good, everything going well. Next stop Baghdad, and they were on their way in only a couple of hours, arriving there at dawn the following day. Again their time was good, only ninety minutes behind Scott and Black at that stage, even though the Englishmen with their full tanks, from the beginning, had been able to fly there directly.

In Australia, everyone was waiting for news on his flight, but nowhere more than in Melbourne, where Mary had gone home to her mother’s house to await the arrival of her husband in that city, and in Arabella Street, where Catherine was monitoring closely the progress of her last-born.

The good news was that at one o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday, 7 November, the
Lady Southern Cross
was spotted by an airport controller using binoculars at Karachi, cruising south-east at an altitude of about 15,000 feet—proven to be the level at which the supercharged Wasp engine worked at optimum efficiency, even if aviators had to breathe heavily to get enough oxygen in their lungs—a tiny speck in the far skies. Due to an infernal headwind, however, when Smithy and Pethybridge arrived at sundown at Allahabad’s Bamrauli aerodrome, in Northern India, just over 2300 miles away from Baghdad, their time had fallen back to being nearly three hours behind Scott and Black’s mark.
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One way of catching up was to simply refuel and keep going, barely taking the time to wolf down some food, let alone anything as indulgent as a rest. In total, they were on the ground for no more than an hour before they were winging their way onwards once again. Next stop, Singapore, which was 2200 miles away. If they could get the wind to go their way, they really might be able to cut into Scott and Black’s record.

Just after 9 pm, the
Lady Southern Cross
was spotted in the moonlight over Calcutta’s Dum Dum aerodrome, before Smithy took her out over his dreaded Bay of Bengal, the one exceedingly long stretch of water on the trip. Still, they made it, and around midnight, they were spotted above Akyab aerodrome in northern Burma, making good time by the light of a setting full tropical moon. From there, Smithy was heard, but not seen, flying over the Burmese capital of Rangoon at around 1.30 am. At three o’clock that morning of 8 November 1935, another Australian pilot by the name of Jimmy Melrose—endeavouring to break Smithy’s solo record of seven days and four hours between England and Australia in his green Percival Gull Four,
Westley
—was on his way to Singapore from Rangoon. Flying above the Andaman Sea off the coast of Burma, to his great excitement he thought he saw the blue glow from the twin exhaust pipes of Smithy’s much faster Altair overtake him at an altitude of about 10,000 feet, a couple of hundred feet above him. An imprecise thing, true, at that time, in that situation, to positively identify another plane, but that was certainly his impression. It
had
to be good ol’ Smithy. Still out there, still going strong! It was an honour to be in the same skies as the famous aviator.

When Jimmy landed in Singapore several hours later, a short time after dawn, he looked out for the
Lady Southern Cross
and was surprised it was not visible on the tarmac. Perhaps it was in one of the hangars being worked on or, just maybe, Smithy had already refuelled and taken off again, as his stamina was legendary. Either way, Jimmy’s sense of disappointment was keen.

Where was Smithy, he asked cheerfully, upon alighting from his cockpit. Smithy hasn’t arrived yet? But that’s not possible! Jimmy had been in his much slower Percival Gull, while Smithy had been in his speedy Lockheed Altair, nudging 200 miles per hour at 13,000 feet altitude and he had
personally
seen Smithy overtake him in the wee hours of the morning! How could it be that he hadn’t landed?

After talking it over with ground staff, the situation became as clear as it was serious. There were no other airports within cooee of the
Lady Southern Cross
’s fuel range, and the only possible explanation was that Smithy and Tommy Pethybridge had met with misadventure and perhaps…disaster. Within hours a major search operation was under way as squadrons of planes and fleets of ships methodically covered every square mile along his route. The searchers included Jimmy Melrose who announced that, ‘I cannot continue while there is a chance of finding my fellow Australian’,
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and so immediately retraced his path to see if he could spot anything.

In Australia, Smithy’s family was devastated that he had clearly failed to break the record, but not unduly worried that he hadn’t turned up yet. Smithy’s brother Wilfrid told the press: ‘It is not likely the boys overflew Singapore. It is my theory he took the jungle route to Burma to avoid monsoon storms over the ocean. It is also possible that if forced down he may have landed on one of the emergency airport fields which have been established along the Malay Peninsula on the coast line of the Bay of Bengal, without radio communication. I have no fear for his safety. He has been lost several times before and I feel confident he will come out all right.’
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And so said all of them.

As to Mary, in Melbourne with Tommy Pethybridge’s wife, she too was very upset that the record would not now be broken, but not unduly alarmed. ‘He has been in many difficult situations,’ she told the press, ‘and his ability has always pulled him through. I have the utmost confidence in him, and I am sure that if he has met trouble he has made a safe landing.’

Strangely, despite all her previous fears about what
might
happen to him, now that he
had
actually disappeared she felt confident that her husband was safe somewhere. There had been other times when he’d gone missing, or had been hideously overdue and always, always he had turned up. That would no doubt be the case this time, too.

The search continued, with two RAF planes based in Penang flying off the coast of Siam, as well as over the Burmese jungle for any sign. Ships in the area were alerted to keep a lookout, as were the Imperial Airways and KLM aircraft travelling the route.
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From Singapore, none other than Charles Scott himself, who happened to be passing through, took an RAF Singapore III reconnaissance flying boat and, after refuelling at Victoria Point began flying low over the Bay of Bengal, looking for the tiniest sign.
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Alas, between them all, after those first few days of frantic searching they turned up with…nothing. Undaunted, they continued to search, and before a week had passed every island on his route had been looked at, sometimes with landing parties. Wireless broadcasts went out to all stations asking people for any information they might have on the aviators, and leaflets were circulated among jungle dwellers in their own language, asking the same.
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In Sydney, Hudson Fysh of Qantas Airways made plans to get one of their planes from Sydney to join in the search, and this was soon done.
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All up, the biggest land and sea search operation in history was quickly under way.

Inevitably, in such circumstances there was a lot of focus on Jimmy Melrose’s last sighting of the
Lady Southern Cross
, and just where that occurred, though not everyone gave that sighting credence. Qantas pilot George Urquhart ‘Scotty’ Allan, for one, went public with his view that the light of a ship on the horizon was easily mistaken for the exhaust trail of an aeroplane.
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As the days passed there was still no sign. No-one wanted to believe it—no-one
could
believe it—but inevitably hope began to fade. In the House of Representatives five days after the disappearance, Minister of Defence Archie Parkhill gravely informed the honourable members that the only action left was to search the dense jungle. What made it difficult, he noted, was that Kingsford Smith had left little in the way of a flight plan, and after he was certainly spotted above Rangoon, everything else was mere conjecture as to his next destination.

This was not good enough for the Opposition, with the ALP Member for Hunter, Rowland James, boring in, asking whether the government felt they had contributed to Kingsford Smith’s death by having considered him too old for a government position. The government did not. The member for Melbourne, Mr William Maloney, asked the minister whether, with all the loss of life in such endeavours, record-breaking flights should be prevented from continuing. No, the government did not.
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From Arabella Street, Eric Kingsford Smith, Chilla’s next oldest brother, told of how his family had been contacted by many mediums and spiritualists and received conflicting information about where the two men had come down.
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One of these psychics divulged publicly that the men were no longer alive, their plane had landed in the sea at 8.12 am, floated for three hours and thirty-two seconds before sinking and drowning both aviators. They had sunk—let’s see—68 miles offshore.
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And then, just when despair was starting to set in, at last came the breakthrough. On Friday, 22 November, a fortnight after they had disappeared, flares were sighted by the captain of a vessel steaming past Sayer Island just off the coast of Siam—a place that was
right on Smithy’s flight path.
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That had to be them! They should have known that Smithy would have survived!

Alas, as quickly as hope surged in Mary—now back in Sydney with Charles Jnr—as she took cautiously congratulatory phone calls and visits from her nearest and dearest, it died. A Qantas plane was assigned to buzz low over Sayer Island and did so for a couple of hours, but saw nothing. Had the missing pilots in fact been there, they surely would have managed to make themselves known. Clearly it was a false report.

On that very day, as it happened, the Defence Minister advised that the RAF would no longer be participating in the search, as the situation was now judged to be hopeless.

And then, as is the way of these things, another report came in. On Sunday, 24 November 1935, a report filtered back from a Siamese train-driver that he had heard from a woodcutter living in the area that, on the night Smithy disappeared, he had seen a plane in flames heading towards the Setul Mountains, on the border of Malaya and Siam, in the middle of a fierce storm.
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Alas, after an RAF plane was dispatched to closely check the area this proved to be another false alarm.

Hope slumped. Mary hugged Charles Jnr all the tighter, and the Kingsford Smith clan held the both of them close to their collective bosom, as they hoped against hope there would be a breakthrough and that the obvious conclusion—that their beloved was dead—was not true.

And then, at last, and this time it really had to be something, came a genuinely credible report.

On Monday, 25 November, a crackly wireless message was received from the remote Siamese village of Kjupun, whereby a villager told how four days earlier he had met someone in another village who told him of how two weeks earlier a plane with a broken wing had landed in the jungle in the Laik Pu area, 85 miles south of Victoria Point. And they had found two airmen! One of them had a broken leg and the other was unhurt!

This time,
this time
, it had to be true. The whole report was too detailed to be conjured out of nothing.
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Sure enough, it more or less was true. But alas, when the whole thing was sorted out, it turned out to be two Polish airmen.

Smithy and Tommy Pethybridge remained missing as Christmas came and went. Mary took Charles Jnr down to spend some time with her parents in Melbourne, trying not to weep too often in front of her son, but not always succeeding. Catherine, under no such constraints, wept openly most of the time. Then New Year was upon them all.

Bit by bit the realisation really did sink in. As impossible as it seemed, that wonderful, laughing man—so full of energy, fun, vitality, charisma, derring-do, wisecracks, courage, vigour—had gone the way of Manfred von Richthofen, Harry Hawker, Ross Smith, Ormer Locklear, Charles Nungesser, John Moncrieff, George Hood, Bert Hinkler and so many, many others. How could they have believed it would have ended any other way? Could Smithy have truly believed it could turn out differently?

He was a daring flying man in a daring flying age when, almost without exception, flyers of daring died. Charles Kingsford Smith and those magnificent men all knew the risk, and went on regardless. They all had in common that they had pursued the greatest passion of their lives, and very much the passion of the age—flying—to the point that it had ended their lives.