Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (38 page)

And the preliminary signs were good. After just one month’s operation, Chilla was very proud to report to his even prouder parents that so far the business was ‘a great success’, and that their gross takings were ‘around £380’.
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Now, just how much of that was profit, he wasn’t quite sure, as figures had never been his forte and he generally found the actual running of a business really dull work, as opposed to the actual fun of doing stuff, but the venture certainly seemed promising. It wasn’t long before he and Anderson were able to afford to buy Carlin out and run the show on their own.

And yet, while his trucking business had been growing, his parents-in-law on Meentheena had gone bust with so many debts after the devastating drought they had just been through, that the bank had foreclosed on them. Thelma was deeply upset to see her stepfather reduced to going gold prospecting again, while for his part Smithy was a little stunned to find himself the chief provider for a family he had never heard of two years previously. And, clearly, in such tough times, and without his father-in-law to supervise things, his own hopes of establishing a successful pastoral syndicate were also over—his only hope of salvation lay with his trucking business. (His father-in-law clearly tried other things to stay afloat, as within six months he was convicted in Perth Supreme Court for rustling and received two years’ hard labour in Fremantle Gaol, together with twelve strokes of the cat-o’-nine-tails.)
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Penned in 1906, they were among the most famous lines by an Australian, about Australia:

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of drought and flooding rains,

I love her far horizons,

I love her jewel sea,

Her beauty and her terror—

The wide brown land for me.

Which was fine. The truth of it, however, was that Dorothea Mackellar would have been unlikely to have written those immortal lines had she been a long-distance truck driver trying to move along those plains, over those mountains, through those floods and towards those endlessly receding far horizons, ever and always on a track winding back to nowhere in particular.

Kingsford Smith and Anderson’s essential idea was a good one, and indeed potentially lucrative. But, bugger them dead, it was
hard
work. To transport tons and tons of wool across a terrain strongly opposed to and willing to fight against
any
movement that wasn’t the languid wave of a hand to remove flies, or perhaps the dying twitches of an exhausted animal, was something that would sap any man, and in this case it sapped two men. At any given moment either or both of them could be anywhere from Geraldton to Carnarvon to the Black Stump to out the back of Woop Woop.

How did Thelma cope with Smithy’s now even longer absences? Only…just. Still, she might have coped,
just
, if when he finally returned home Smithy had stayed with her exclusively, but he didn’t. Once returned from the backblocks, her husband invariably had a thirst that could have drained the Indian Ocean and was wont to spend his evenings at the local pub, downing beer after beer between singing raucous songs and engaging in his favourite party trick, which was to do both of the aforementioned while standing on his head. Thelma had been amused the first time she had seen him do it, irritated a little on the second occasion and completely disgusted the fiftieth time.

And then, complete with a horrible hangover, he would be gone again.

No woman could put up with that kind of treatment for long, least of all a very beautiful and strong-willed one who had other options.

Smithy, meanwhile, remained focused on getting the job done when he was in the scrub and was amazing in his resourcefulness, whatever the circumstances—by simple dint of the fact that he had little choice in those parts. For what else could he do but be resourceful when travelling through such country?

On one occasion, right out in the middle of nowhere, over 60 miles from anywhere, the former war pilot’s truck had ground to a horrible, shuddering halt. Upon investigation Kingsford Smith discovered that the oil cock had been knocked off the crankcase, probably by hitting a jutting rock, and all the oil had drained away, causing one of the big-end bearings on the crankshaft to be chewed to pieces for want of lubrication.

The heat beat down, and he faced three days’ march in any direction to get help. But not to worry.

Reasoning his way through the many technical problems, Smithy concluded that he could fashion a solution. In his load he had an enormous box of soap, bound for one of the outlying stations. By grinding it down and mixing it with a very small amount of water, he felt he had a rough approximation of oil. Now for the molten and gouged bearing. Cutting down a bit of hardwood gum with an axe, and using his pocket-knife thereafter, he was able to whittle a wooden bearing shell to do the job. After he sealed off the damaged drain valve he poured in the thick mixture of soapy liquid. Then he started the engine for the first time in two days and gingerly moved forward. It worked! It really worked!

Who was his uncle? Bob was his uncle, that’s who! In such a fashion did Charles Kingsford Smith and his wounded truck limp forward for the next 60 miles until he was able to get to a town where more sophisticated help was available.
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On another occasion, when Smithy found his big truck blocked by the raging Murchison River while he was trying to get to Perth on time for a certain social engagement, he refused to be beaten. It took a while, but after scouting around for enough of the abandoned empty oil drums that abounded in that area, he lashed them together into a rough kind of raft, and
floated
the bastard across!
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As the months went by and the Gascoyne Transport Company became better known—and the station managers could see for themselves what an improvement it was to get their wool straight to Carnarvon and on the first steamer out—the two partners became even busier. If Smithy got word of a record wool consignment that needed to be moved, he immediately insisted on doing it, and always tried to do it in record time.
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Smithy liked records.

As to Keith Anderson, he did the best he could, but he did not remotely enjoy the reputation of Kingsford Smith for self-sufficiency and derring-do. Apart from his strong friendship with Smithy, he was essentially a loner and did not mix easily, but he could be counted on to do long hauls, so long as nothing went wrong.

And who was minding the office during these adventures and the many prolonged absences they entailed? The more successful the business became—as more trucks were purchased and more drivers put on—the greater the demands of office work, and the less inclined was either Kingsford Smith or Keith Anderson to do it. Again, Chilla called on his sister Elsie, and her ever-reliable husband, Bert Pike, to come and run the business side of things, which they were free to do, given that the pastoral lease had come to nothing. Neither she nor Bert was in any doubt that Chilla needed them, once they had a look at how things were running.

For in ordinary business routine he was clearly hopeless. His office methods were haphazard in the extreme, and he was hopelessly unpunctual and harassed and bewildered by the usual financial adjustments and worries connected with running one’s own business. ‘A funny thing about Charlie,’ Elsie later wrote, ‘was that he just could not bear to ask for an account to be paid. He would go out to collect, and usually come back empty handed. When he did collect, he would almost apologise!’
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On those rare occasions when Kingsford Smith and Anderson were together and not out ‘on the track’, as they called it, business was almost the last thing they discussed. The first thing they talked about was flying the Pacific. They continued to examine all aspects of its many possibilities. In terms of finance there was no doubt that it would be extremely expensive, but between them they were not without contacts, or credibility for that matter.

After all, in the entire world there probably weren’t two pilots more experienced in long-distance flying, given how long they had been in the air, and their work with Western Australian Airways. And while building the Gascoyne Transport Company, Smithy had kept his hand in flying by doing the odd job for Major Brearley—with whom he had substantially repaired his relationship—sometimes ferrying planes back and forth to Perth. So when the two men talked about flying the Pacific there were people who listened, and some of them were wealthy. Finally, they had a breakthrough.

Through the course of his travels in the north-west, Smithy became very friendly with a wealthy young man from Mundabullangana station, by the name of Keith Mackay, who promised to back them for as much as £2300,
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so long as he could come with them.

Done!

Keith was a good bloke, very capable, and for the several thousand pounds he was offering, they would be delighted to have him. They could even, at last, maybe be able to afford to buy one of Lebbeus Hordern’s seaplanes…

Just when the whole thing was warming up, however, Keith hired a plane from Western Australian Airways to drop him back at his station. Tragically, however, in the course of the trip, which took place on Wednesday, 16 July 1924, the pilot—Smithy’s old mate, Len Taplin—lost control of the plane and crashed into the sea, just off the coast. Taplin and the mechanic swam to shore but Keith Mackay didn’t make it.

‘I’m afraid that’s my last hope gone west,’ Smithy wrote forlornly to his parents.
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Still, that thing inside him, that burning desire to fly across the Pacific, come what may, no matter the obstacles, was not long in re-establishing itself.

Keith Anderson felt the same. Early in 1925 Keith wrote to his rich uncle in Toorak, setting out their plans, and their possible financial needs. True, that uncle, after looking at it all said no, but he hadn’t said so instantly! And they had also got a positive response from one of the oil companies they had contacted, offering them free fuel if they could actually get a plane into the air. Smithy continued to be keen on buying one of Lebbeus Hordern’s seaplanes, berthed in Sydney. And yet, alas…Smithy wrote to his parents:

I haven’t had any reply from Hordern or his secretary, but am hoping for favourable news. Damn it all, one must have a last flutter at the flying game before one quits if one must. You ought to have seen the things that were said about me when I left flying: ‘An irreplaceable master of the air, whose wonderful ability was only equalled by his courtesy and consideration to his confident passengers, etc.’ My Gawd, I’m some lad it seems.
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Which seemed, genuinely, to be the widespread view of Kingsford Smith and his flying abilities. But no more firm backers appeared, despite all the talk, which didn’t mean that he and Anderson were remotely tempted to give up.

‘As a last resort,’ Smithy wrote, ‘we will work this show at maximum capacity for two years when we will be able to afford to buy a machine ourselves and tell them all to go to hell.’
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There comes a time in every adventurer’s life when he must either embrace a long nurtured dream and try to make it happen or give it up…and know that he will simply die wondering. The times since his air crash in Crete had been particularly busy for George Wilkins, and they had included being second in command of the British Imperial Antarctic Expedition, returning to the same parts the following season with the Sir Ernest Shackleton
Quest
Antarctic Expedition, travelling widely through Russia and also the deeply depressing trek through northern Australia to collect the specimens for the British Museum. But through it all, he, too, had been nurturing a dream—to explore from the air the vast tracts of the Arctic Circle that had never been seen by human eyes. He also felt that once that exploration had been accomplished by fanning out on many trips northwards, he could then make one big hop from the north of Alaska, right over the top of the world and land in Norway!

True, there were many worthy experts who said it couldn’t be done and, of these, the great Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was foremost, telling Wilkins firmly: ‘What you are trying to do, is beyond the possibility of human endeavour.’
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And yet by mid-1925 Wilkins was convinced his critics were wrong, and set out to prove it. With the support of a deal with the North American Newspaper Alliance, in return for exclusive news and pictures, and help from the Detroit Aviation Society and the
Detroit News
, he was able to come up with the funding he needed. Courtesy of his old friend and great supporter Anthony Fokker—now a well-established American businessman, adored for his
bon vivant
ways—he was able to buy two Fokker planes. Such was Fokker’s personal regard for Wilkins in turn, that the Dutchman personally ensured that they were constructed to the highest standards and precision. The wings and fuselages of the planes were constructed in Holland before being shipped to New York in December 1925, where the engines, the engine mounts, fabric covering and controls were added at the Fokker factory at Hasbrouck Heights, in New Jersey.
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Once complete, they were disassembled and shipped in crates to Fairbanks in Alaska.