Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (81 page)

True, not everyone was pleased, as there was a strong view in certain sections of conservative society that a divorced man should never get a knighthood, and indeed Smithy was the first divorced man to ever be so honoured.

Never mind. That evening Sir Charles and
Lady
Kingsford Smith, if you please, dined with His Excellency the Governor-General Sir Isaac Isaacs, at a banquet at Government House given in honour of the King’s birthday. Asked the following day how her husband felt about the honour, Lady Kingsford Smith said her husband was very pleased, as ‘it was at least some tangible proof that Australia felt about him the way he felt about Australia’.
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Smithy himself was quoted: ‘In view of this new honour, I am more determined than ever to remain in Australia. I was born here. I have lived here and I like Australia better than any other country I have visited. While it is true that I should by now have been a comparatively wealthy man had I become a naturalised American or had some of the lucrative offers from abroad been accepted, I am content to remain here and to earn my own living in my own way.’
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Though many of his supporters were public in their view that the government should ‘look after’ Smithy and give him the job of the unfortunate and still hospitalised Horace Brinsmead as Controller of Civil Aviation, nothing had come of that. Kingsford Smith didn’t ask for the position, and the government didn’t offer it. This meant that giving joy flights was the way he had left to make a living, and even if there were many people who took a dim view of a knight of the realm engaging in such common commerce, Smithy himself had no such compunction.

‘While there is a living to be made in the
Southern Cross
,’ he told a packed house at Brisbane City Hall on the evening of 1 August 1932, during one of his paid public lectures, ‘I do not think it is any disgrace for one on whom His Majesty has conferred the honour of knighthood to remain in his own country and earn his living in an honest way.’
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The response was warm applause. Thus, ‘Smithy’—and that is what he insisted he be addressed as, and never Sir Charles—kept on flying, much as he had ever done, with his one concession to his new status being to acquiesce to Mary’s insistence that he get a couple of tailored suits to wear on formal occasions.

Which was as well, because there were even more of them to get through, as mayors positively
outdid
themselves to welcome the ‘
Honorary Hair
Commodore
Sir
Charles Kingsford Smith’, though on one occasion a particular mayor decided to go the whole hog.

‘And we are honoured to have here today,’ he said, ‘
Lord
Smith…who ‘as conquered the Hatlantic Hocean, the Pacific Hocean, and heven the great [Mediterr-hanean Hocean…]’
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Only just was the aviator able to prevent himself from bursting out laughing. But enough of all that. It wouldn’t be long before there was a particularly strong reason to stay closer to home. On 22 December 1932, not long after his flying for the year was done, Mary gave birth to a fine son, whom they christened Charles Arthur Kingsford Smith.

Late on the evening of 6 January 1933, at about eleven o’clock at night, Bert Hinkler called two of his closest friends. He asked if they would meet him at Harmondsworth aerodrome in a couple of hours’ time to help him get away on his planned trip to Australia, in which he hoped to break C.W.A. Scott’s latest record from England to Australia of eight days, twenty hours and forty-seven minutes, which the Englishman had set eight months previously.

Hinkler’s friends agreed, and at one o’clock on that Saturday morning met him in fog so thick it was like being in a coalmine at midnight with a blindfold on. Bert had intended to get away at 2 am, but it was 3.10 am before—between them—they managed to get the Puss Moth into position, with its engine warmed up and ready to go, lit by the headlights of the cars the friends had driven there. Bert now opened ‘er up and the tiny plane was quickly lost in the fog. His two friends, chilled to the bone and desperately rubbing their gloved hands together to try to get circulation back in them, returned hastily to the warmth of their homes, while Bert flew to the south-east.

He was spotted first over France, and then in Italy to the west of Turin, heading on a straight course to the Italian Riviera. That accomplished, just after eleven o’clock local time on the morning of 7 January, he was spotted over Florence, still heading south-east. His next task was to get over the Apennines, the mountain range that effectively forms the backbone of the Italian peninsula.
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And then Bert Hinkler, son of Bundaberg, love of Nancy’s life and famous through much of the world, simply disappeared. There was no word of him at either Brindisi or in Athens—his possible landing points that afternoon—and the alarm was slowly raised. The devastating news was passed to Nancy as she was about to return to her ship in Auckland—on her way, she thought, to meet up with her Bert in Bundaberg—as a search operation was launched by the governments of France, Italy and Switzerland.

Though very concerned about Hinkler’s disappearance, Charles Kingsford Smith had his own worries early in the new year of 1933. On 11 January, he took the
Southern Cross
down to Seven Mile Beach at Gerroa, a thirty-five-minute flight south of Sydney, in preparation for another trans-Tasman crossing. Seven Mile Beach had been chosen because its long, flat and hard surface of slightly curved shoreline and distinctly compact sand—often used for horse, car and motorcycle racing—was perfect to give their plane, heavily burdened with post and fuel, every chance to take off and if necessary to stop safely if that take-off had to be aborted. (Mascot runway was too short with such a heavy load on board, and Richmond too near the Blue Mountains, which represented a potential obstacle should the wind dictate a westerly departure as the most desirable.)

Once positioned at the Berry Surf Club about 2 miles down the beach from the village of Gerroa, in the wee hours of the following morning, by the light of myriad car headlights and the flaming flares strung along the beach and those of the two Fox Movietone newsreel film crews, the
Southern Cross
rumbled along the beach like an ungainly albatross trying to get up enough speed to get off the ground.
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On board, co-pilot Bill Taylor—who had been a pioneer of aerial navigation and ANA’s most outstanding regular pilot—was awestruck at Smithy’s skill in keeping the right-hand wheel of the heavy plane on a straight course just above the rising tide, and the left-hand wheel just below the soft sand.
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Any deviation meant disaster, and yet Kingsford Smith kept the hurtling plane precisely on track. The faithful bird finally left the sand just before 3.00 am, before swinging in a graceful arc back over the surf club, her searchlight glaring balefully in the foggy night, to set course to the east, towards New Zealand.
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Never before, on a serious flight, had the
Southern Cross
been carrying so many people. As well as navigator and co-pilot Bill Taylor, the crew included radio man John Stannage (who had just married Smithy’s niece Beris after something of a whirlwind romance), Associated Newspapers journalist Jack Percival and one Stan Nielson, the secretary of the New Plymouth and New Zealand Aero Club, who had not only been instrumental in upgrading the club’s airstrip so the
Southern Cross
could use it, but had also parted with a cheque for £100 for the privilege of being the first fare-paying passenger to fly to New Zealand with them.
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For once,
for once
, this proved to be a relatively uneventful flight—apart from Bill Taylor at one point fearing they were frightfully lost, and John Stannage getting severe electrical shocks from his radio gear—and no more than fifteen hours later they were able to land at Bell Block aerodrome in New Plymouth, escorted by five de Havilland Gipsy Moths, to be greeted by Smithy’s old friend and flying companion from the Coffee Royal days Tom McWilliams, as well as Chilla’s brother Wilfrid, who had gone on ahead to make arrangements, in a new managerial role he had just taken over. Also there waiting was Tommy Pethybridge, who was jubilant. He had been extremely worried about whether the
Southern Cross
was going to make it, and at its very sight had leaped into the air, danced around and yelled, ‘Those bloody marvellous engines!’
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They had done it again, pulling Smithy and his crew through mortal danger.

Kingsford Smith’s first focused words upon landing, after the preliminary greetings, were to the point: ‘By the way, is there any word of my friend Hinkler? He is an extraordinarily resourceful man. I am by no means unduly alarmed. He has probably landed somewhere on one of the various mountain ranges on his route, and is beyond communication.’
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That Hinkler was beyond communication was certainly clear, as no further word from him was heard, and the search was finally called off. Though Smithy grieved, he knew, almost better than anyone that the strong possibility of death and disappearance were to him and his fellow pioneer flyers what a bad back was to a bricklayer—it simply went with the job.

For now, at least, he didn’t need to engage in any great risks and continued barnstorming in New Zealand for the next three months, punctuated only by a short stint at home when his plane was in need of repair. A sign of his ailing emotional health, however, was his brief hospitalisation in Auckland for ‘nervous exhaustion’, before he returned once more to the air to take as many people as possible on joyrides.
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Not that barnstorming
ever
offered much respite from the constant pressure, as wherever he went the well-meaning public always wanted a piece of him. Once, after a very long day, one of Smithy’s mechanics, Harold Affleck, was resting on his hotel bed when the door burst open and a wild-eyed Smithy rushed in.

‘These two blokes are after me,’ he blurted out. ‘Tell them I’ve jumped over the balcony and gone out.’ Without another word, he dived under Harold’s bed, just before two men came in clutching bottles of champagne.

‘Where’s Smithy?’ they asked.

Gone over the balcony and run off, Harold replied. Deeply disappointed—why would ol’ Smithy do something like that, when they just wanted to have a bit of fun with him?—they left the bottles on the bed and said, ‘When you find him, tell him to have a drink on us.’
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Heightening the pilot’s great celebrity was the publicity being organised for him by a man fast becoming a great friend, one Beau Sheil who was with Vacuum Oil, and had a part in ensuring that both the oil company and Smithy received plenty of column inches in the newspapers. Travelling a town ahead of them, Sheil would make sure that journalists were forewarned of the great man’s arrival, where he would be staying, where he would be doing the barnstorming from and so forth.

Such advance publicity meant very good business for joyrides in the
Southern Cross
, and just as it had been in Australia when business was good—and they were able to gross as much as £200 a day
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—Smithy was so keen not to lose time for so much as a toilet break that he used what was effectively a urinal in the cockpit, a funnel attached to a tube, that led to a container beneath the fuselage.
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(James Warner could only wish that Smithy had had such a thing back in 1928!)

On 26 March 1933 their sojourn was finally over and, with Bill Taylor, John Stannage, Tommy Pethybridge and a New Zealand businessman by the name of Mackay—who was interested in establishing a commercial air link between New Zealand and Australia—Smithy flew the
Southern Cross
back across the Tasman, leaving from Ninety Mile Beach at Hukatere. This particular flight had the distinction of being the first time that an amazing new technology called ‘wireless telephony’ was used in an aircraft in the southern hemisphere.
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Unbelievably, as the
Southern Cross
flew on, radio operators in both Australia and New Zealand could actually hear the crew
speaking.

What listeners didn’t hear, mercifully, was Smithy experiencing another spell of illness halfway across the Tasman. Once again, he had to scrawl a message asking Bill Taylor to take over the controls, then excuse himself and go and lie down on the mailbags for a couple of hours until the nausea passed.

On the upside, however, during the trip back—in a manner that was reminiscent of Louis Blériot flying over Alicia on the
Escopette
going across the Channel two decades earlier—Smithy was able to use the wireless telephony to speak to his wife on the MV
Wanganella
, which had left New Zealand before them and was also heading to Sydney. True, Mary had to reply by Morse code, courtesy of a ship radio man who could do the translations for her, but the technology was simply
stunning.

Smithy later wrote for public consumption: ‘Our flight emphasised the practicability of instituting a regular airmail service between the two Dominions, and it confirmed in me the belief I had long held, that the day was not far distant when the pioneer flights that we were then making would be succeeded by regular commercial flights, made to schedule, on a dividend-earning basis.’
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