Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (27 page)

The thing about plane crashes, Kingsford Smith was discovering with some regularity now, in much the same way as Louis Blériot had discovered a decade earlier, was an unearthly sense of time suspended…and then rushed…as the once so distant scenery below…slowly floats up…towards…you…and.then.comes.hurtling.right.at.you!

Belting down onto the fields below, they were at least able to avoid trees this time, but nothing could stop them from first breaking off one wing, then the other, then the undercarriage…until all they were left with was the fuselage…bursting over a ditch and into a thick hedge. Never mind, neither of them was hurt and in any case the insurance company would pick up the cost, what?

Yes, albeit reluctantly, and the company was increasingly reluctant when only a short time later a third plane flown by Kingsford Smith had a disaster. This one burst into flames in midair, and he was able to practise a technique he had long heard about—keeping the flames under control by ‘side-slipping’, banking left with ailerons, while simultaneously applying lots of right rudder to keep the plane straight. The lateral relative wind blew the heat and flames away from the cockpit and at least he was able to get the plane on the ground before running for his life, just seconds before it exploded. Somehow, the insurance company did not seem as joyous as he was that he had lived.

When Kingsford Smith subsequently crashed a
fourth
plane—after a lovely nurse he had taken aloft suffered a panic attack and gripped the controls as if her life depended on it—things had really gone too far and, in some ways, it was perhaps Oscar Wilde who enunciated the principle best: ‘
To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
’

One lost plane might be merely misfortune; two lost was carelessness; three destroyed was cause for pause, and four…? Four was cause for serious examination as to just what was going on.

One day shortly after the fourth crash, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Williams, the Australian government’s chief organiser of the England to Australia race, based in London, a distinguished war veteran, received an odd phone call in his office at Australia House from the manager of the Blackburn Aircraft Company. Would Lieutenant Colonel Williams mind popping around for a little chat?

Not at all, not at all…

After polite formalities, the manager got to the point. Would the Australian government have any objections if this chappie Charles Kingsford Smith was replaced as a pilot for the Blackburn Kangaroo, which was already entered into the race?

‘So long as the replacement is an Australian,’ Williams replied, a little bemused, ‘it is no business of mine or the Australian government to say who should or should not be the pilot of a competing aircraft.’

Still, Williams could not resist asking why they wanted to replace Kingsford Smith?

The manager, in turn, was frank.

It’s like this: the pilot concerned is purchasing aircraft from government disposals and going barnstorming around the country, ignoring civil air regulations and landing in fields not approved for the purpose. It seems he has also found that he can insure his aircraft for an amount in excess of that for which he can replace them and there have been some crashes…

He paused.

The bottom line? The view of the Blackburn Aircraft Company was that such behaviour was undermining not only civil aviation control, but also damaging aviation insurance, which was just in its early days. So, if the Australian government had no objections, Kingsford Smith was out.
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And Cyril Maddocks too, for that matter…

And out, they were. Blackburn would simply have to find some others to fill his crew.

Back in Sydney, another Australian pilot from the Great War, Nigel Love, had finally made his decision. Like Smithy, he was convinced that there was going to be a quid or two to be made in aviation in peacetime, and with that in mind he had, along with a couple of his mates, formed the grandly titled ‘Australian Aircraft and Engineering Company Ltd’. Their key asset was the licence to make and sell in Australia the Avro aeroplane—those constructed by the major British industrialist Alliot Verdon Roe, who had first learnt the principles of flight by throwing paper planes out the second storey window of the family home—and it had fallen to Captain Love to find a spot to build an airfield from which they could operate. After scouring Sydney, and then following up on a tip from the real estate firm of Raine & Horne, he knew that he had the perfect spot.

It was a paddock of 160 acres on the northern edge of Botany Bay, in a suburb called Mascot. The paddock had been used by a local abattoir to fatten cattle before their slaughter, but as the company was going out of business the land was available to initially lease from its owners, the Kensington Racing Club.
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The key feature for Love was that the land was flat, fairly well drained—though it had originally been a swamp—and it was covered in buffalo grass that had been kept low by the cattle. The area had clear approaches from every direction for planes to land. All that, and it was only a little bit more than 4 miles from downtown Sydney.
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And so it was with great enthusiasm that Love sealed the deal and followed it up by also securing premises on nearby Botany Road, where he established a workshop to maintain aircraft and began to fabricate the Avros for customers.
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But what about the rest of Australia? In the immediate post-war days there was a growing awareness of the need for more aerodromes around the country, as the England to Australia race drew closer. How were those planes that made it to Darwin or to Wyndham in the north-west, to proceed to the east coast, to the likes of Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne? Where could they land in the Australian outback? Where could they stock up on petrol and supplies? Clearly, someone was going to have to find the right spots, and then follow up by clearing trees, mulga bushes and the like for a good airstrip.

In an attempt to do exactly that, the government of Prime Minister Billy Hughes commissioned two veteran war pilots, Paul McGinness and Hudson Fysh, to reconnoitre the far north of Australia from Longreach to Darwin—an overland trip through vast swathes of land never penetrated before by vehicles of any description. ‘From Cloncurry to Katherine River,’ their instructions read, ‘you will obtain fullest information about the air route proposed, and if possible traverse it by car. Places suitable for aerodromes and for forced landings will be marked and field sketches made of the surroundings to facilitate identification from the air.’
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They were just the men for the job, and they were also used to working together. In the Great War, both had served with distinction, first landing at Gallipoli with the Light Horse. ‘Ginty’ McGinness, as he was known, a burly knockabout knock-’em-down kind of man from Victoria had won the Distinguished Conduct Medal in an action at Pope’s Hill, and gone on to consolidate his reputation as a fine soldier from there. Fysh, too—a slight and quiet man by nature, whose uncle had been Tasmanian Premier—had been handy with a rifle, and was commissioned as an officer after his own section officer, none other than Lieutenant Ross Smith, had left to join the Australian Flying Corps. When, not long afterwards, McGinness and Fysh had decided to follow Smith and also join the AFC, McGinness had quickly proved himself a fine pilot, with Fysh as his observer. Together they saw a lot of action in Palestine where ‘Ginty’ registered seven confirmed victories,
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and Fysh, just before the war ended, gained his own wings.

Though both intrepid aviators had wanted to enter the England to Australia race themselves, they had failed to get the necessary finance when their chief backer died just before writing the cheque and his family had decided they didn’t want to go on with it. Still, just being involved in the race was honour enough for them, and they pursued the plans enthusiastically, organising to get a Model T Ford packed with provisions to the railhead at Longreach, and for another war friend, a mechanic by the name of George Gorham, to accompany them. (The reckoning was that if it had wheels and an engine, then George could fix it—with his bare hands if necessary.)

It is an ill wind that blows no-one any good, and the fact that Blackburn withdrew its sponsorship of Charles Kingsford Smith opened the way for none other than George Wilkins to take his place. Wilkins had just returned from the ghostly haunting silence of Gallipoli, where he had been engaged by Charles Bean to document precisely what had occurred there four years earlier, and he had spent many weeks traipsing with his camera around and about such spiritually troubling places as Lone Pine, the Nek and Hill 971, where the tattered bits of cloth and bleached bones of dead Allied soldiers and Turks were still scattered across the bloodied landscape. Back in London, Wilkins wasn’t sure if he wanted to be part of the venture to race to Australia when initially approached, but the more he looked at it, the more he liked it.

The money didn’t attract him particularly—he had never been motivated by money—but it was a challenge, an adventure, and he could see that it really would help the land of his birth, to open up an air route between Australia and England, so he accepted a position on the Kangaroo. Most importantly, for him, it was an opportunity to continue on his life’s quest of scientific discovery, and he was careful to pack all kinds of equipment that enabled him to record temperatures, humidity, air pressure and so forth, in the course of the journey.

In the final structure, Wilkins became both the commander and the navigator on the flight of the Kangaroo and it was a measure of the respect in which he was held within the London establishment that at the crew’s departure from London’s Hendon aerodrome at 10.37 on the morning of 21 November 1919,
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he was carrying the cabled best wishes of no less than the future King of England, Prince Albert and the former First Lord of the Admiralty, the Right Honourable Winston Churchill. Which was to the good. All their ‘good lucks’, ‘bon voyages’ and ‘tally-hos’ were very much appreciated. But could the crew actually do the job they had set out to do…?

Trouble. Big trouble. After a problem-plagued trip that had taken them only a quarter of the distance to Australia in two and a half weeks, George Wilkins and his Blackburn Kangaroo crew suddenly had the spectre of death riding along with them. Eighty miles south-west of Crete—with the North African coast ahead about the same distance again—Wilkins looked out his window to see the plane’s lifeblood pouring away. Just off the back of the port-side engine, an oil pipe had burst and was spraying the black gold into the waves of the Mediterranean Sea, some 2000 feet below. After an agonised, grinding growl to indicate how unhappy it was to go in such a tortured fashion, pilot Val Rendle quickly switched the port engine off to preserve it.

This left the Kangaroo with one engine to make it to the nearest land, and meant going back to Crete—their calculations showed that on one engine from that height, the greatest distance they could hope for was 30 miles. Still, reasoning that it was better to be 50 miles from land in the middle of the ocean than 80 miles, they turned the plane and did their best.

And were favoured a little by providence…as a propitious wind blew up, and helped them on their way.

Paradoxically, as they edged along past 30 miles, 40 miles, 50 miles, then 60 miles, the crew members began to show increasing signs of fear. Somehow, with a growing chance of survival, they all began to feel afraid of dying.
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At last, at last, Crete came into view, but still they were not safe. For where could they land? Everywhere they looked, all they could see were cliff faces, rugged rock and yawning, hungry canyons, each one clearly happy to swallow them whole without burping.

In vain did they search the terrain beneath them for some flat ground where they could attempt a smooth landing…or at least land flat enough on which they could get down intact. Finally, it was obvious that they were going to have to take their chances on the flattest handkerchief of land they could find. Rendle dropped the throttle back, and began to bring the plane down on the impossibly small clearing that now presented itself. And while it was reassuring to once again be close to mother earth, and in some rough kind of control, the problem was that they were still moving in far too quickly and…and…after clipping the tiles on a farmhouse roof, a solid stone wall, which had been a good distance away when they first made contact with the soil, had now grown legs and was rushing towards them with unseemly haste. As the entire crew held their heads in their hands, in an instinctive effort to provide some protection, the plane rushed over a ditch, up a bank and came to rest against the wall, with its nose in the ground and its tail high in the air.

Now, given how many people thought that only lunatics would enter such a race in the first place, it was perhaps appropriate that the wall they had hit belonged to Crete’s largest lunatic asylum. Still, at least they were alive to fight another day!

And, truth be told, George Wilkins was not at all perturbed about not winning the race. As he had made clear from the beginning, he was only interested in competing for the opportunity to collect a lot of scientific data. His major concern after the crash was to ensure that his notebooks were secure, and that his varied equipment—barometers, thermometers, hygrometers, wet and dry bulbs and density meters—was all intact.
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Kingsford Smith, meantime, was discovering his own new worlds, albeit in rather different circumstances. After Blackburn had so hurtfully pulled the rug out from under him, he had tried to interest other sponsors, but to no avail. He had even written to his prosperous brother Harold in California asking for money, with a similar result. Chilla’s sister Elsie, then staying with Harold, wrote something of a telltale letter to their parents: