Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (98 page)

With Eagle Farm airport closing, the
Southern Cross
was moved again in late 1987 to its present and permanent home at the Sir Charles Kingsford Smith Memorial, on the approaches to Brisbane airport.

The fate of the effete Alberto Santos-Dumont, who first came to fame as the flying dandy of Paris and the first man to get an aircraft aloft in Europe, is a curious one. By the early 1930s, he was living in the land of his birth, Brazil, and on 23 July 1932, while in the city of Guarujá, he hanged himself, without leaving a note. It was, however, said that he was depressed over both the fact that he had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and how aircraft, his beloved flying machines, had become devastating weapons of war. (A mercy then, perhaps, that he did not live to see the likes of the London Blitz, or the levelling of Dresden by Allied bombers in World War II.)

Of the
14-bis
itself, I can find no trace. The best reckoning seems to be that Santos-Dumont broke up that original to use in subsequent planes. A number of flying replicas have been built and are extant in Brazil. One of the replicas was displayed at the 2005 Le Bourget Paris Airshow. Another replica was unsuccessful in becoming airborne during a test flight at Bagatelle in 2006 when a wing folded.

The
Blériot XI
hangs from the ceiling of the
Musée National des Art et Metiers Techniques
in Paris, not quite forgotten but certainly with little fanfare. To look at it up close is to be simply staggered by both its fragility and Blériot’s courage in setting off across the English Channel in it. At Les Barraques, from where he set off, the once rolling farmlands are now densely populated and the point of departure is today a school, but at least that school is named after Blériot. Alicia would have been proud.

Louis Blériot, with his wife, Alicia, beside him all the way, continued to prosper through the 1920s and early 1930s, as his aviation manufacturing company Blériot-Aéronautique maintained its position as a leader in its field. He remained a highly respected figure in the international aviation community until his death on 1 August 1936, in Paris. He is buried in the Cimetière des Gonards in Versailles.

Anthony Fokker also prospered throughout the 1930s, the Depression notwithstanding, with his planes being placed with no fewer than fifty-four airlines around the world. Alas, in 1939 he contracted pneumococcal meningitis—an inflammation of the brain and spinal cord—and, after fighting a losing battle for three weeks, died in New York City. He was forty-nine years old.

These days, Roland Garros is famed as the name of the stadium where the French Tennis Open is played in Paris every year, though the man himself, his long-distance aviation feats and the fact that he was the first to turn his plane into a flying machine gun has been substantially forgotten. After he was shot down by the Germans in 1915 and taken prisoner, he was well treated by his captors, being put in a camp for elite prisoners. Desperate to get back to fight in the war, Garros made many attempts to escape and finally succeeded in February 1918, when he crossed the border into Holland. He returned to an air war that was unrecognisable from the one he had left, in which the planes were far faster and more manoeuvrable, and the guns far more lethal than anything he had experienced to that point. On 5 October 1918, just five weeks before Armistice, and the day before his thirtieth birthday, Roland Garros was shot down and killed at Vouziers, in the Ardennes region. There he was buried, and there lie his remains today.

And then there was Charles Nungesser. As recounted in Mark Sufrin’s book,
The Brave Men
, a lobster fisherman was working his pots in Casco Bay off Maine, on the east coast of the United States, in January 1961 when he was surprised to haul onto his boat a strange catch—a large piece of aluminium with some rivets apparent. He handed it over to police and, after scientific examination, the word came back that it appeared to be part of an aircraft made in the 1920s. What is more, when all the gunk over the metal was cleaned off, it showed a coat of white paint, with an edging of black. Perhaps part of an enormous black heart?
¹⁵
If so, Nungesser and Coli really did get extraordinarily close to flying across the Atlantic Ocean, from Paris to New York.

Not the slightest trace of the New Zealand aviators Moncrieff and Hood has ever been found, though there have been many false dawns. As to their widows, Dorothy Moncrieff lived at the same address in Wellington for many years afterwards, but a few months after her 31-year-old husband disappeared, the very private Laura Hood returned to her native England to nurse her ill mother and never returned.

Wigram Field, where Kingsford Smith and Ulm landed in September 1928 to complete the first trans-Tasman crossing, remained the hub of New Zealand aviation for many decades afterwards. By pure happenstance, I visited Wigram on 27 February 2009, the last day it was to be operational as an airfield. Though houses will soon be marching across it—as part of a new development—the actual spot where the
Southern Cross
landed will be marked for perpetuity by a plaque in a park.

Harry Hawker has been substantially forgotten in his native Australia, despite his massive contribution to international aviation. At least his name, however, and to a certain extent his legacy, lives on in the form of the famed aerostructure component-manufacturing company Hawker de Havilland, a division of Boeing. This is a direct descendant on the corporate family tree of the company H.G. Hawker Engineering, which Hawker had established in 1920 with Sir Thomas Sopwith and two others, which continued to prosper after his tragic death at the age of thirty-two.

Muriel Hawker, aged twenty-six, was left with two toddler daughters when her husband died. Consumed by grief, she could only just function. Spurred on by Mrs Phyllis Sopwith, however, she resolved to set down for posterity the extraordinary events of Harry’s life, and in July 1922 her book,
HG Hawker: Airman—His Life and Work
, was published. To provide an income Muriel started a shop in London selling smallgoods, put it on its feet, and in due course, bought another. And then another. And then still another. In 1929 she married again, this time a ship’s doctor, whom she had met on a voyage to New York—but sadly, he died only six years later. Bowed but unbroken, Muriel married a third time just before the outbreak of World War II—another doctor—and more or less lived happily ever after, never too far from her daughters or subsequent six grandchildren, and great-grandchild. ‘It must have been an odd sort of life,’ her grandson, Kenneth Hope-Jones, noted in a letter to me in December 2008. ‘The early years with Harry were meat and drink to a girl of Muriel’s spirit, and were surely the most entrancing years of her life: and yet she lived for another sixty-two years after Harry’s death. But she never lived in the past: she got on with her life and lived it to the full. I, her eldest grandchild, remember her with great affection.’

Muriel died in 1983 at the age of eighty-seven, adored by all of her descendants.

Both of Bert Hinkler’s most famous aeroplanes—the Avro Baby, G-EACQ, and his Avro Avian, G-EBOV—are at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane and are impressively displayed. As to Nancy, the seeming love of Hinkler’s life, there is little trace of her beyond the first few months after his death—and for good reason. In a bizarre tale, it turned out that although they had intended to marry after the Great War, there was a legal impediment caused by her previous marriage being technically still in existence. So they had simply lived together as a married couple to all intents and purposes—and certainly, Nancy was always described in the press as his wife, ‘Mrs Hinkler’. But wait, there’s more. For Nancy, Bert’s family and the Australian authorities were all staggered to find out in the weeks after his death that on Saturday, 21 May 1932, eight months before his death, Hinkler had secretly married in Connecticut an American woman by the name of Katherine Rome, whom he had met seven years previously. As this was, apparently, his only legal marriage, it was Katherine who subsequently inherited his estate. It was a saga worthy of a book, and the late, great, Ted Wixted has written it:
The Last Flight of Bert Hinkler.

In 1936 Bert’s mother, Frances, travelled from her home in Bundaberg, Queensland, all the way to the other side of the world, to Italy, and visited both the monument that had been built at the spot where her Bert had crashed, and his grave in Florence. In 2008, that gravesite was refurbished by the Hinkler House Memorial Museum, situated in his home town of Bundaberg.

The good fortune of the DC-2
Uiver
, which was so wonderfully saved in Albury, did not last long. Only a few months later, it disappeared while on a routine flight between Amsterdam and Batavia in the Dutch East Indies—now Indonesia—flying the Cairo-to-Baghdad leg in the early hours of 20 December 1934. At 2.30 am, a radio message was received in Baghdad reporting that the DC-2 was lost, and then nothing more was heard. Its burnt-out wreckage was found two days later in the Syrian desert, with the loss of all seven lives on board, although many items of its singed cargo of Christmas mail were retrieved and today attract a premium on the philatelic market.
¹⁶

Sir Keith Smith, who had first risen to fame as the co-winner of the famous £10,000 race in 1919 between England and Australia, with his brother Sir Ross Smith in their Vickers Vimy plane, long endured as a respected figure in the Australian aviation industry. After that victory, and the subsequent tragic death of his brother, he became the representative of Vickers in Australia, and was a highly regarded director of many airlines and other public companies. He died, aged sixty-five, on 19 December 1955, a wealthy man. In his will, he left a bequest to Wally Shiers, the only surviving crew member of the England to Australia flight. The Vickers Vimy plane G-EAOU is now proudly displayed at Adelaide airport.

As to Koene Dirk Parmentier—the
Uiver
’s courageous pilot on that dark and stormy night over Albury—he fared a little better. By the end of World War II he had risen to the position of the Dutch airline KLM’s chief pilot, and then devoted himself to the company’s training school, where he was particularly strong on lecturing young pilots on aviation’s many dangers and how to avoid them. Especially, the importance of watching out for the power lines on the approaches to Prestwick airport in Scotland, he said, showing slides. Tragically, in 1948, while in command of KLM Lockheed Constellation
Nijmegen
in deteriorating weather, he took the big airliner into those very wires, and all on board were killed. The airport’s approach charts were riddled with errors and the pylons for the 132,000-volt main nationalgrid cables were shown as being 45 feet high. They were really at 450 feet—the height at which Parmentier was circling to an alternative runway which he had forbidden KLM pilots to use at Prestwick in low cloud.
¹⁷

In 1977, the multimillionaire electronics entrepreneur and aviation enthusiast Dick Smith set out with a team in well-equipped four-wheel drives and a helicopter to find the
Kookaburra
in the Tanami Desert. It eluded them. Undeterred, and knowing it was there, he and his team returned the following year and, after another six days’ search, they found it, on 21 August 1978. The Northern Territory Museum immediately sent out a ground party to recover the wreckage, which is now on permanent display in Alice Springs, a stone’s throw from where it took off for its last flight.

Bon Hilliard never really got over the death of Keith Anderson. In 1935, she did marry another good man, Major Thomas Tate, though he died just eleven years later, and she never remarried. And yet the wounds caused by the aviator’s tragic death remained raw. In 1977, it was Dick Smith who told her personally that the telegram she had sent to Keith in April 1929, advising that she did still want to marry him, had reached him at Broken Hill, as it was found on his corpse. She cried at the news—it was something that had haunted her for decades. Such was her feeling for Anderson that a part of her final will and testament, opened upon her death in 1982 was the request that her ashes be scattered from the air above Keith’s grave in Mosman’s Rawson Park. Sadly, it was no simple matter in the early 1980s to take a light plane low over a heavily built-up area for such a purpose, and it was not possible to fulfil that request.

In the meantime, on 12 May 1981, after much searching, Dick Smith also located the site of Coffee Royal where Smithy had put the
Southern Cross
down in 1929. As a matter of interest, he decided to burn some sump oil to see if it would show up against the green foliage that abounded all around. It didn’t show up. And yet burning some branches that they cut down clearly did.

Smithy had been right!

From being no more than a remote religious settlement, Drysdale River Mission achieved rather more significant aviation fame in World War II, when it became the site for an air base, and was heavily bombed by the Japanese for its trouble in 1943. It now has the name of Kalumburu and is a closed Aboriginal community.

On the fortieth anniversary of the first aerial crossing of the Tasman Sea—11 September 1968—Ross McWilliams, a pilot for Air New Zealand, flew one of that airline’s DC-8s from Christchurch to Sydney. On board was his father, none other than Tom McWilliams. Greeting them in Sydney was Hal Litchfield—whose career after his flying days were over had encompassed returning to marine navigation on the
Tahiti
, and joining the Royal Australian Navy Reserve—thus reuniting the last two survivors of the first Tasman flight, as well as the Coffee Royal episode.

After those adventures, Tom had forged a successful career as a sales representative with the Shell Oil Company, before being put in charge of the Royal New Zealand Air Force’s Air Training Corps during World War II, and then embarking on a successful career in business after the war was over. When the fiftieth anniversary of the first crossing was celebrated, this time with Ross McWilliams flying an Air New Zealand DC-10 from Sydney to Christchurch, alas Tom McWilliams had been in his grave for five months, having died on 28 April 1978. And yet, on board was not only Hal Litchfield, still going strong, but Charles Kingsford Smith Jnr and John Ulm. Hal Litchfield, after a career in the Royal Australian Naval Reserve, died in 1987.