Straight on Till Morning

by Mary S. Lovell

  In early spring there was news that Tom had entered the forthcoming race from London to Melbourne. Thrilled, Beryl wrote asking him for more news. His reply came almost immediately. Beryl’s letters to Tom do not survive (except the one she reprinted in her memoir), but some of his answers do. They are far from ardent, even before he met the beautiful actress with whom he was to fall headlong in love and pursue until she simply gave in and married him. Rather they have an avuncular, almost patronizing tone, though Beryl disagreed with this assessment, saying it was ‘just his way’, and she had long ago edited them, typing them out and printing the words ‘extract from a letter to me from Tom Campbell Black’ at the top of the pages.

  The Royal Aero Club

  119 Piccadilly,

  London W1

  24th March 1934

  Dear Beryl,

  Very many thanks for your letter, it was clever of you to understand, so really clearly, what I tried to convey about the definite undercurrent of intense and deadly jealousy which exists in people in East Africa. Purged of many of them the country would blossom out into a land of amazing allurement and prosperity – a land in which one could find the contented realization of one’s dreams.

  This London houses and holds the millions, yet here things are a little different; the affairs of neighbours, the jealousies of friends, create less interest than in the little tin-pot land of Kenya.

  Yet with the marvellous freedom from condemning scandals, with the complete knowledge that one is free to do with oneself as one wishes, see whom one likes, and live entirely untrammelled if so wishing, yet even so, a ghastly mantle of depressing melancholy turns one’s thoughts and ambitions in another direction and makes one long to become a personality again, and so to break away from it all, go back to the individuality and independence of the life in Kenya, even despite the lying, scurrilous thoughts and bitter comments of one’s neighbours there.

  Perhaps what I have written is senseless and contradictory, but I pay you the compliment of knowing that if you cannot logically follow my reasoning, you will at least understand the theme of what I’m writing, and so I will not re-read this letter, because by alterations one may perhaps become more clear in expression, but perhaps one alters what one wishes to convey.

  Those who have been friends to us, and even more, should be included in the list of things for which we should be happy and proud. They form my fellowship of lofty thoughts. And one must keep one’s dreams, forgetting nightmares, and grotesque unpleasantnesses of ‘never mattering’ people.

  Here I am, longing for freedom, chained to the monotonous drudgery of a well paid job, chained by invisible bonds, for truly if I broke away from my present occupation I should be breaking up the very things that mean so much to me. I like Furness most awfully. Kind and considerate to me in all his business dealings, he is more outside this sphere and so dependent on me for so much, that to leave at the moment would be an ingratitude! Fancy Tom Black, supposed by all to have exploited Mrs Wilson (vivé Wheeler’s version) to write like this!!! Just fancy sentiment entering into anything in this astonishing age. And from both you and I!

  Anyway I’m always mad, and have been lately, for getting down to some practical details of existence I have taken some most amazing stock market gambles and I think I’ve lost. I now only exist therefore until October. You ask me to write of the race – there isn’t much to tell.

  I was determined to enter, as I wish it to be a preliminary opening for my flying ambitions. What these are it is difficult to detail, because as machines and ranges get swifter and bigger, so do one’s ideas, and much must depend on how the race eventuates. In idle moments we have talked Atlantic Oceans, of cabbages and Kings, and Cape Flights, and now, if all is well and goes well, perhaps it is all within my grasp, but with a faster, possibly impossible conception. The Race must anyway, thank God, be tackled first.

  The machine is being built and will I think be fast and the range long. Scott is a grand man to be with, and both of us thought it better right way back at the early whisper of the Race, to go together fifty-fifty level basis, rather than for each separately to rely on second pilots, one or both of whom would not enjoy our absolute and complete confidence, or anyway fit in as a 100% team.

  Then we were each separately offered mounts for the Race, and both unknown to each other refused, because of our past agreement. This left us a team without a machine; but we were optimistic and so at length, after many discussions with various syndicates we accepted the Comet. It will be ready in August and we hope for the best. Without knowing other people’s performances it is ridiculous to even hint or guess at our chances.

  I leave Furness in August, temporarily until after the Race when I rejoin him in Kenya, and meanwhile from August till October go into training. We take the Race very very seriously and of course hope for the best. If we can put up a good show and have luck in our favour, perhaps my having left Kenya was for the best and not in vain.

  Have been over in Germany during the so-called revolution and I think Hitler’s action in facing 200 armed rebels only with his pilot and himself, at night, and during the meeting of rebels, one of the most marvellous pieces of physical courage in the annals of history. He is like that though – a wonderful man, above all considerations of personal weakness.10

  God bless you Beryl and don’t please be bored with my attempts to write my thoughts, however badly they are expressed, because I have tried to keep pace with them, and so, naturally have undoubtedly made many, many errors of both composition, construction and coherence.

  Tom11

  Whilst Beryl must have experienced disappointment that Tom was making a record attempt without her (for undoubtedly she had hoped to be part of any record attempt made by Tom), she was reassured by his statement that he would be returning to Kenya after the race. All would be well then. If he succeeded, she reasoned, Tom would be famous and then they would have no trouble in gaining sponsorship for other joint feats of airmanship. However she badly wanted to be part of Tom’s attempt – if only to see him during the build-up to the race.

  The idea of flying at once to England became irresistible, but Beryl could not afford it. She must have discussed her thoughts with Blix, for he came to the rescue with a solution to the problem. His nephew Gustaf ‘Romulus’ Kleen, who was then farming in Tanganyika, was just about to depart for Europe and would undoubtedly be glad to pay the expenses of the trip if Beryl would fly him there. The flight was hastily arranged and two weeks before the planned departure Romulus went to Nairobi where he stayed with Beryl at her cottage at Muthaiga.12

  A few days before the flight planned for mid April they flew to the Carberrys’ farm Seremai, where Beryl’s Avian was overhauled by J. C.’s flight mechanic. Torrential rain had submerged the airstrip at Seremai on the day of departure, making a fully-laden take-off inadvisable, so it was decided that the aeroplane should be flown to nearby Nyeri aerodrome by Sidney St Barbe. Beryl and Romulus were to drive there with the luggage which would then be loaded on to the aeroplane while it was receiving its full load of fuel for the trip.

  The rainwater which submerged the runway at Seremai also covered an unseen hazard. In the heavy downpour a deep channel had appeared across the runway. On its take-off run the Avian hit this furrow and turned over. Luckily St Barbe was unhurt but the aeroplane was slightly damaged and the propeller broken. A new propeller would take a month to arrive from the UK and to Beryl’s dismay the flight had to be abandoned.

  ‘As it turned out,’ Romulus told me, ‘the accident was a piece of luck, for Beryl went down that same evening with an attack of malaria and had to be taken by hospital plane to Nairobi the following day.’ Although very gravely ill, with alternating acute chills and burning fever, sometimes barely conscious and often delirious, Beryl fiercely refused to go to hospital. Romulus and the devoted arap Ruta nursed her back to health in the cottage at Muthaiga and as soon as she was out of danger Romulus departed for Europe by boat. They did
not meet again for a quarter of a century.13

  It was six weeks before she was able to fly again and by then the Avian was still not airworthy. Carberry therefore loaned Beryl a Klemm to get around in the meantime. The Klemm was a low-wing mono-plane of German manufacture. Carberry was very pro-German and his feelings were reflected in his aeroplanes and cars. However the Klemm was powered by an engine of British manufacture – a 90-hp Pobjoy, which enjoyed an almost unrivalled reputation for unreliability. Beryl disliked the Klemm. Its only saving grace seemed to be its ability to glide on its huge wings for long distances. Its engine she described as ‘so feeble as almost to require of the pilot the sensitive touch of a pianist to keep it in harmony with the weather and wind’.14

  She did a few taxi jobs in the Klemm in June and July, but it was not until the Avian was repaired at the end of August that Beryl took up her work again. She made only seven flights between April and August, and probably she had not fully recovered her health, for even after the Avian was returned her initial flights were short hops.15 It was not until November that she was able to continue her work scouting for elephant. She persisted in this despite the warnings of her friends about the risks, and they were many, for it was lucrative work paying nearly twice as much as other charter jobs.

  It is true that had Beryl had a forced landing in such country she would have been in deep trouble. In 1986 David Allen, who runs a flying safari business in Nairobi which is the present-day equivalent of Beryl’s, was in no doubt. His work today takes him over much of the territory that Beryl flew over in the 1930s. ‘I wouldn’t like to do it in a single-engined aeroplane and no radio, landing wherever you could get the plane down. It would take some doing.’16

  During July and the first part of August Beryl stayed with her father, making an unusually long recovery (for her) from her illness. The month-long convalescence with its recurring ill health, headaches and muscular pains, was purgatory to her. In a way it was a blessing she did not know what was occurring in England, for the purgatory would have become hell.

  In August Tom had flown Lord Furness to the races at Le Touquet where he was introduced to the dazzling young comedy actress Florence Desmond. She was relaxing after a successful run in the show Why Not Tonight and had been to Paris to buy some clothes. Immediately attracted to ‘Dessie’, as she was known to all, Tom spent the evening telling her about the forthcoming race to Australia. She thought he was either mad or had been drinking too much champagne. England to Australia in three days? An impossible idea!

  Shortly after she returned to England Tom phoned Dessie at her cottage in Hertfordshire and she invited him down for the day. He said he would fly down in Furness’s Puss Moth if she would place a sheet in the biggest field near her house so that he’d know where to land. This incident not unnaturally provoked interest in the village, coupled no doubt with some lively gossip about ‘that actress lady and her pilot friend’. Even the village policeman got in on the act, pedalling portentously down to Dessie’s cottage ‘to take particulars. In the weeks to follow,’ wrote Dessie in her autobiography, ‘it became a regular week-end treat for the village – the arrival of the little Puss Moth. People were beginning to take a big interest in the forthcoming air-race to Australia, and the fact that Tom was taking part in the race added to their interest and curiosity to see him when he landed.’17

  By October when he took off for the race, Tom’s feelings for Dessie ran deep. His letters to her are a far cry from those he wrote to Beryl and it is hard not to make comparisons. Whilst he was in training for the race he wrote to Dessie:

  Mildenhall Aerodrome

  Wednesday

  My Darling, Because I haven’t written to you, nor rung you up don’t think for one moment that it is because I haven’t thought of you. You are ever with me, by day in the air, by night in sleep, and here in the evenings round the fire I see your reflection in the deep shadows of the room.

  I have given to my feelings for you the same concentrated determination which I am putting into this flying race, and I want you to realize just a little more than you do, that somewhere, somehow, and some time you are going to look on me as of importance to you.

  Maybe it will only be for a tiny period, one cannot control these things at all, any more than one can be quite, quite certain that the machine will hold together.

  I think and hope it will, and we are certainly going ‘all out’ and if the machine lasts the distance we have quite a good chance of winning, even though the French and American competitors have brought over specially built racing machines too.

  The weather here is appalling, but we have managed to do a few of the necessary tests. We only took delivery on Saturday, which doesn’t allow much time to put it thoroughly through its complete paces. However, except for a night landing at Baghdad on the first night out, and for the filthy weather conditions over Central Europe which are forecast for the next week, everything else is all right.

  Do think a little of me as I am always of, and with you in thought.

  Always

  Tom

  Dessie went to see Tom on the eve of the race. She found the circus that surrounded him with the thousands of avid spectators, press and photographers, aircraft designers, backers and manufacturers, as well as the atmosphere, which was charged with tension,

  …rather frightening. These keen pilots, the best the world had to offer, were about to compete in a race which would make flying history. Both Tom and Charles Scott18 had been training for weeks for the race. They were just about as fit as any two men could be…Champagne corks were popping but neither Tom nor Charles took a drink, they had been ‘on the wagon’ for many weeks. That morning the King and the Prince of Wales had been to Mildenhall…to wish the competitors God-speed. There were three Comets in the race, one was Jim and Amy Mollison’s, the second was flown by Cathcart-Jones and Ken Waller, and the third was Grosvenor House, which Tom and Charles Scott were to fly. It was a beautiful-looking twin-engined, low-winged mono-plane. At that time it was the finest aircraft of that particular type which had been produced. In order to achieve maximum range, the machine was literally a flying petrol-tank. They carried petrol in the wings, in the nose and in the tail. The pilots sat one in front of the other in a very small space, their heads almost touching the top cowling. As I looked inside that tiny space which was to house Tom and Charles for the next three days (at least that, if their calculations were in order) I wondered just how two men could stand the physical strain of operating a plane while being cooped up like that for so many tedious hours.19

  Dessie did not want to watch the take-off, which was at dawn on the following day, and as Tom walked her to her car he asked her to marry him. Emotionally upset at the parting and knowing that in the morning Tom would experience a take-off in the Comet carrying for the first time a full load of petrol, as the preliminary to the flight of over eleven thousand miles, she felt that it was the wrong moment to make such an important decision. ‘Tom,’ she said, ‘I’ll tell you when you come back.’20

  The next days were anxious ones for Dessie. When a reporter called and asked if it was true she was going to marry Tom, she told him she did not know. ‘I told him Tom had asked me to marry him before he took off on the flight, and that I would give him his answer when he got back.’ Finally the news came through that Tom and Charles Scott had won the race in 2 days, 22 hours and 59 minutes. Dessie’s joy turned to outrage when she saw the newspapers: ‘Campbell Black racing for a bride. [Miss Desmond says] “If you win the race I will give you my answer.”’ What if Tom thought she’d actually said that? Tom, when he telephoned her from Australia, laughed at her concern, ‘Stop worrying about it. Will you marry me?’ But she still didn’t give him an answer. She felt that the race had no bearings on her feelings for him.21

  The welcome given to Tom and Charles when they arrived in England was something seen these days only on occasions such as royal weddings. It was followed by receptions, parties, press conferences
, an endless round of dinners where Tom had to speak – he always came up with some amusing little line to offset the more dramatic (though completely factual) descriptions given by Scott. But despite their acclaim and reputation, the two men made almost no financial gain from their flight. They had been backed by A.O.E. Edwards, owner of the Grosvenor House Hotel in London’s Park Lane, who put up £5000 to buy the Comet. The prize of £10,000 and the Gold Cup worth £500 went to Edwards, and he received besides an unknown amount of benefit from the flight because the words Grosvenor House were on the front of every newspaper in the world. Tom and Charles Scott received no share of the prizes and Edwards eventually sold the Comet to the Air Ministry for £7000 for research purposes, though Tom pleaded with him to sell it back to him for the £5000 it had originally cost him. The only proceeds Tom received out of the venture were the fees people paid to see the Comet, when it was put on show in London, together with payment for a few newspaper articles and advertising copy, and a cheque from Lord Wakefield in respect of services to aviation. A little while later Dessie came to a decision, and next time Tom asked her to marry him she agreed.22