Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (34 page)

It was a catastrophic beginning to the life of the airline, but tradition was observed. Within as short a time as possible,
flying resumed as normal.

Finally, it was ‘Ginty’ McGinness who effectively refused to take no for an answer from Billy Hughes. Knowing that without the subsidies Qantas was as good as dead, McGinness took extreme measures. Learning that the prime minister would be on the night train returning from parliament in Melbourne to his home in Sydney, Ginty boarded the train with one thing in mind. ‘Prime Minister Hughes?’ he said, thrusting out his hand. ‘Paul McGinness—from Qantas.’

Billy Hughes, his head like a warped walnut with two piercing eyes that missed nothing, sat there looking at him silently and menacingly, and there was nothing for it but for McGinness to quickly state his business.

‘Look, is there no way that I can convince you how important it is for us to have that mail contract?’

The fact that Hughes didn’t yell at him that he wished to be left in peace McGinness took as a positive sign, and indeed it wasn’t long before Hughes even delicately pointed the way towards a deal.

‘It’s a sad fact,’ the prime minister began carefully, ‘that these days you have to give something to get something…‘
⁵¹

They continued to talk as the Australian countryside thundered past in the night and, in the early hours of Saturday morning, McMaster was woken in his Brisbane home by an excited Ginty speaking from a railway station somewhere north of Albury.
⁵²
His message was simple. If the Country Party would stop backing Labor in the Senate estimates—the method whereby senators could closely question the government’s public servants, to the point of inquisition, about all matters to do with Budget expenditure—and start backing the Hughes government, then it would be quite likely that the government would find the money needed to subsidise a service between Charleville and Cloncurry.

The following morning, McMaster began to make his own calls, and within days, the Country Party had indeed started backing Hughes in parliament. Things began to move, and within three months the news was formally announced. The Hughes government would back Qantas with a subsidy scheme for a one-year trial period similar to the one Western Australian Airways enjoyed, to the tune of four shillings a mile flown, equal to about £30,000 per annum…
⁵³

Thursday, 13 April 1922.

Just near the Vickers Aircraft factory at Weybridge, England, Sir Ross Smith and Jimmy Bennett, one of the mechanics who had been with him on the flight from London to Darwin, had taken one of the new Vickers Type 54 Viking IVs skywards in preparation for a flight around the
world
that they were planning. The plane was an enormous amphibian, almost like a boat with wings, powered by a 350-horsepower engine and capable of landing
on
the ocean.
⁵⁴
That day, Sir Keith was meant to have been with them but he had been caught up in London, so Sir Ross and Jimmy had taken off without him to go for a quick spin to test the plane out a little and see what it could do. So it was that Sir Keith arrived just in time to see the plane fall out of the sky from a height of perhaps 1000 feet, and come to earth with a screaming wrench of metal behind nearby fir trees. Sir Keith was at the scene within minutes, and it was immediately obvious that the crash was every bit as bad as he had feared. In the twisted wreckage Jimmy seemed to already be dead, while Sir Ross was showing just the barest glimmer of life, though with a deep gash down the right-hand side of his face. When a man identifying himself as a doctor skidded to a halt, Sir Keith composed himself and said: ‘Please look at my brother and see if there is any chance of saving him.’
⁵⁵

He then wandered off a little way from the horror of it all, only to see the doctor approaching him less than a minute later.

Sir Keith steeled himself and said to the medical man: ‘I see by your face, all is over.’

The doctor nodded, and Sir Keith broke down and wept, and was soon kneeling over his brother’s remains.

Via the wonders of modern communications, Catherine Kingsford Smith was shocked to read of Sir Ross’s death in the following day’s edition of the
Sydney Morning Herald
under the headline: ‘ROSS SMITH KILLED WHILE TESTING MACHINE.’
⁵⁶

The paper went on to editorialise next day: ‘With his death Australia has lost the star airman of her flying service, built up during the late war, and the Empire has lost an airman whose heart was in the pioneering of air routes which should link up the dominions with the old country.’
⁵⁷

Devouring the account, Catherine wasted no time in writing to her son in Western Australia to voice her concerns. And her youngest son was equally quick in trying to allay her fears. He wrote:

Mum, You remark re Ross Smith—‘the air, like the sea, can be pretty treacherous’ I would like to correct that impression, Mum. Apart from an actual breakage of a vital part (almost an unheard-of occurrence, thank goodness) the air is never, in my opinion, treacherous to a
careful
pilot. From what details have come to hand, Ross Smith evidently killed himself through taking a strange (to him) machine up after nearly two years away from the controls, and attempting an evolution that I don’t think has been done on that type before…Poor chap, it is a sad ending to a brilliant career. I wish some philanthropist would finance me to step into his shoes, and continue the flight. My dream of a trans-Pacific flight is not yet ended, and some day I’ll do it.
⁵⁸

At least, in the meantime, Kingsford Smith was gaining enormous experience in an entirely different form of flying. Until this point, in all of England, France, America and eastern Australia he had never had to fly much more than 50 or 60 miles at one time. Now, he would do 300 miles in a single hop and nary turn a hair, finding his way across the terrain by virtue of his compass and recognising known landmarks—such things as the contour of the coast, hills, rivers, various townships and scattered missions. It was a stark landscape, but Kingsford Smith came to love it bit by bit, and was earning a steady wage for the first time since the war.

By mid-1922, the company was in such good shape that Major Brearley decided to replace the two men who had been so tragically killed six months earlier. The new pilot with the jutting jaw was a tall, notably good-looking, quietly spoken fellow by the name of Keith Anderson, another former fighter pilot in France—with five kills to his credit—and he and Kingsford Smith hit it off from the first, each recognising that the other was that greatest of all Australian male things, a ‘good bloke’. On their meeting at the aerodrome in Carnarvon, he and Kingsford Smith firmly clasped hands, and Anderson was soon on the back of Smithy’s pride and joy—the motorbike he had just bought for £75—as they hightailed towards the Gascoyne Hotel, where they could slake their thirst and begin to talk.

In character they were entirely different. Charles Kingsford Smith was almost universally ‘Smithy’ to everyone who knew him, which really
was
just about everyone. Keith Anderson, a year younger, was either ‘Keith Anderson’ or ‘Anderson’ to the limited circle of his acquaintances, and ‘Keith’ or ‘Andy’ to a precious few. Smithy was loud, while Anderson was quiet; Smithy was gregarious, while Anderson was content with his own company; Smithy could light up a room all on his own and did so at every pub along that north-west Australian coast whenever he was in town, while Anderson was happy to hide his light under a bushel. And yet, the brotherhood of both being war veterans immediately got them off to a strong start, as did the fact that they both had dreams of doing some serious long-distance flying.

Not for a minute had Kingsford Smith abandoned his plans of flying the Pacific, and he had nurtured the dream from the first day it had come to him. As to Anderson, his huge ambition was to fly across the entire Indian Ocean and he had also put a lot of thought into how his ambition might be accomplished.

Naturally enough, the two began to consider each other’s dream and before long, Anderson’s had folded into Kingsford Smith’s. They began to talk about how they might be able to fly the Pacific together. What route should they take? What kind of plane would be best? And once they got the said plane, just where would they be able to put all the petrol tanks that they would need, and how much they would be able to fit in and still take off. Blériot had done his calculations and drawings on the tablecloth, they did theirs more often than not on the back of whatever scrap of paper they might have handy.

Whenever they met, up and down the great north-west coast of Australia—and usually in whichever town’s main pub—it became a constant subject of conversation between them, the default topic they would return to. Yes, flying was heaven, but both men felt that heaven needed to have its boundaries extended.

As it was, on a bad day Smithy’s experiences could look a lot like hell. At one point, he was flying over Roebuck Bay, just south of Broome, when the engine on his plane ran out of oil and it was all he could do to keep the plane aloft long enough to
just
reach the mangroves on the north side of the bay, where he was able to land on the beach. He and his passengers were stranded there for several days and by the time they were rescued most of them were so badly sunburnt they had to be put to bed for a week.
⁵⁹

On other occasions Kingsford Smith or other Western Australian Airways pilots were obliged to land on beaches in moonlight, or make forced landings in rough country, where the general plan was to bring the plane down as close as possible to the Overland Telegraph Line—so they could shinny up the pole and cut the wire—and then sit in the shade under a wing until the wire repair team inevitably arrived a day or two later.

Twice, when Keith Anderson went down in the desert, well away from the Telegraph Line, it was Smithy who managed to find him by scouring the countryside back and forth along the rough path until he located him—and on one of those occasions Anderson had been in particularly desperate straits, being lost for just under three weeks.
⁶⁰
Though to that point the two had been close, the fact that Anderson felt that Smithy had saved his life drew them closer still.

Smithy learnt better than ever how to fly through heavy rain and shrieking wind, and became more confident flying in the dark, though it was still something to be avoided if possible. So too was his knowledge of the mechanics of aircraft increasing as, in the time that he wasn’t actually flying the planes, he was usually busy fixing and maintaining them, and in that manner was able to qualify as a ground engineer Category D.
⁶¹

For all that, it remained aviation on the wild side as Western Australian Airways continued to ply and fly its trade up and down the far north-west coast. Always the emphasis was on getting paying customers into the plane and if there wasn’t quite enough room for them, as in when another pilot had to be transported up the coast to do a different leg, then something else would have to be worked out.

On one occasion, thus, when two paying passengers were on offer, Smithy flew while the other pilot sat outside on the lower wing, hugging the strut as the hot air rushed all around him. For Smithy, it was nothing compared to what he and his mates had got up to in America wing-walking, barnstorming and so forth, so what was the problem? He took the same attitude to sometimes strapping his motorbike to the undercarriage of his plane so he could have transport at the next destination.
⁶²

Of course the Civil Air Regulations strictly forbade such dangerous activities, but who cared? The same government that had sent him to Gallipoli and the Western Front, and facilitated him flying against the Germans with a mortality rate of 25 per cent a week, was now going to threaten blue murder if he took a couple of short cuts here and there, short cuts that he was better qualified than anyone to judge the safety of? He didn’t think so.

Besides, even though on one or two occasions they had carried the new Controller of Civil Aviation, Lieutenant Colonel Horace C. Brinsmead, MC, OBE—a distinguished veteran of both Gallipoli and the Australian Flying Corps—Western Australian Airways was generally so far removed from aviation officialdom that the pilots were able to do more or less what they liked.

The bottom line was that, one way or another, both Charles Kingsford Smith and the airline were doing fairly well. In late 1922, Norman Brearley, a good man and canny operator, even formally wrote to him, recording how impressed he was:

I have had excellent reports about you from all and sundry and am very pleased indeed with the way you are carrying on. I know now that you are all you appear to be, and that is saying a lot. I only hope that my treatment of you meets with your approval too, as I want to keep the show one of the very best.
⁶³

Not that his star pilot was without blemish. As good as he was in the air, he could still be a wild man on the ground and, although two decades earlier it had been Bishop Wright’s avowed hope that his sons’ invention of the aeroplane would help to spread the word of Christianity…it was fair to say that Smithy was not the patron saint of that movement. This was irrespective of the fact that he was flying further than almost any other pilot in the world. A girl in every port? No, but Smithy had a girl in most of the towns they flew to; did enough drinking for two men and at least his fair share of fighting—he remained a good man to have on your side in a bar-room brawl, displaying surprising strength and ferocity—and all up, his days of hymn singing were long gone. Rather, at his best and most comfortable, he would be drunk, at the pub piano and surrounded by cheering chanting punters as he belted out another classic from the Great War, the likes of: