The Lonely Sea and the Sky

by Sir Francis Chichester

  One night I was out courting and had an interesting adventure. I motored out to the coast and was among the sand dunes close to the beach. Suddenly my friend, or shall I say mon amie, said, 'Look! Over there.' It was a dark overcast night but I could see on the crest of a sand dune silhouetted dense black against a less black sky a man creeping on all fours. I watched his position changing as he approached at an angle along the crest, though I could not see any movement. Then he disappeared, and I knew that he was coming down from the crest towards us. It was a thrilling excitement as he stalked us. There was no one within miles, not a sound of him could be heard above the subdued roar of the Pacific breakers and the rustle of the nearby dune grass in the light breeze. He had completely disappeared, and I had no idea whether he carried a gun or a knife. I took off my spectacles and passed them to my companion to hold. Suddenly she squeezed my arm and whispered, 'There.' I turned my head half left, and stared into the dark with my short sight. 'There.' Then I saw a black form. It was stationary. I could see no movement but suddenly it was nearer, close. When I thought the distance down to six feet I sprang! He was off like a streak, away, over a low dune, towards the beach. There was a steep hard bank down to the beach. He went down it at full speed and fell at the bottom. I jumped on to his body, pinned down his spread-eagled arms with my knees, and seized his throat with both hands. I had him. He stopped struggling. Then the whole thing struck me as grotesquely comic, and I wanted to laugh. I loosed my hold and said, 'Now, explain.' He told some cock-and-bull story about hunting for his girl who had gone off with another man. There was nothing I could think of doing. I suppose that if he had been going to murder me I could not legally defend myself until I had been killed. So I let him go. I should be surprised if he stalked anybody else for a good while, however, and, after all, he had provided a great thrill. I had found being hunted could be more thrilling than being the hunter.

  I fell in love with another young girl, and this ended disastrously. She was a sweet, charming brunette. I was passionately in love, and when she steadfastly resisted everything else, I asked her to marry me. Before we were married I knew, or felt, with a dreadful sinking feeling, that it was a blunder; but I was fettered by some terrible code of honour and we got married. I was only twenty-three at the time, and three years later my personality seemed to have changed completely. I was leading a tremendously active life, while she retreated farther and farther into a narrow circle of domesticity. Sometimes I would get into my car and drive all night, mostly over primitive potholed roads, to reach Rotorua, 350 miles to the north, next morning. Then I would go off on some shooting or camping escapade with Harold Goodwin. Finally my wife and I parted, and she went off with our son George to live with her family.

  All this period I was homesick and lonely and unhappy without knowing why. I had left England soon after leaving school without having any girlfriends. And I had had no chance to mix with any grown up social set. When I watch Giles, now sixteen, who is at Westminster School, and the lively, bright, active, press-on set of girls and boys in equal numbers with which he mixes, when I see the number of problems, serious and frivolous which they tackle with no inhibition, I realise what a restricted, inhibited youth I had.

  My business career was just as successful as my other life was disastrous. Geoffrey Goodwin already had a ghastly old-fashioned office at Lower Hutt. It was really a shop with the bottom half of the wide shop window painted bright green, and clear plate glass above. For these undesirable premises he paid a rent of ten shillings a week. He had acquired the local agency of the State Fire Insurance Department, the only nationalised concern I have found to compare with private enterprise for efficiency. There were 1,500 houses on the books, and our commission on the premiums paid for an office girl.

  When I started work I found that I had not the slightest idea of how a house was built, or what it was made of. Our first need was to get an agency for more houses to sell, so I started hunting round Lower Hutt (which was like a small suburb) calling on houseowners, to ask if they wanted to sell their houses. One of my first victims asked me what I reckoned his house was worth; I guessed a figure – £5,000 – and he burst out laughing; the house was worth about £1,500. However, it was not long before I could value a house to within £10 of its building cost.

  With Geoff's shrewdness and my press-on vitality, we soon began to make a success of the job. At the start, customers looking for a house or land did not come to us but went to the old-established firms in the township across the bridge on the other side of the Hutt River. However, on the way from the railway station they had to pass our office and I soon got to know the expression on a buyer's face and used to dart out and waylay him. Success depended on summing up a man's character and taste so well that one knew better than he did himself what was the best sort of house for him. This may sound smug, and naturally we had our failures, but it was surprising how many successes we had too. I found quickly that even if one could tell what was the most suitable property after a minute or two's talk, it would be inviting failure to take the customer straight to it. I always showed him the second-best property first, which I didn't think quite right for him. After three years we moved on to the Main Street across the cantilever bridge with a framework of squared, unpainted timber baulks above the roadway. We bought the baker's shop with his dwelling place behind the shop and the baker's oven. We had the wooden shop and five-roomed house jacked up, moved and resettled on concrete piles, so that we could build three new shop fronts facing the High Street. It was a corner lot, and we hid the old weatherboard wooden side of the dwelling with stucco on expanded wire netting. We made the corner shop into our new office.

  All this time I was working immensely hard. One night, after midnight, I was sitting alone in the office working at the accounts (I did all the book-keeping myself), there was no sound in the township, and I must have been concentrating on what I was doing to the exclusion of all else. Suddenly, I became aware of a mouse burrowing into my thigh against my skin; it had run right up my leg inside my trousers without disturbing me. I pinned it against my groin from outside with one hand, and with difficulty, as gently as I could, caught it with my other hand. As it had showed such trust in a human creature, I reciprocated as best I could; I left the office with it; and walked 200 yards to a fine garden which I thought a good place for a mouse and there let it go.

  One day we bought a fifty-acre property at an auction sale. This was 30 miles from Wellington, the capital city, and we named it 'The Plateau'. It was a flat rectangle of land, deserted, with plenty of evergreen native trees dotted about; there were also some man­planted exotics, cypresses, firs and the like which gave it a park-like appearance. A stream running from end to end had cut its way down to a lower level leaving a sheer gravel cliff 100 feet high in places. Before leaving the property, this little stream meandered round a razor-back ridge covered with tiny-leaved native birch trees. The saddleback of the ridge was sharp enough to sit astride it. It was a fascinating spot, and I used to love the days we spent there, walking about and planning its development. We ate our picnic lunch beside the stream to the tune of the cicadas zizzing in the heat. It was a social crime to chop this heavenly spot into small bits for weekend cottages, but if we had not done so, somebody else would have. We built a half mile road through it, cut it into fifty allotments and made a financial success of it.

  I advocated giving up our agency work, and selling only our own property. Finally Geoffrey agreed to this; I think he got bored with hearing me plug away at the theme that 'you cannot broke and deal at the same time'. We sold the goodwill of our land agency business with a lease of the shop we owned, and moved into offices in Wellington. Next we bought a property at Silverstream, about 10 miles from Wellington, and started developing that. It was 1,100 acres.

  CHAPTER 7

  LEARNING TO FLY

  We developed this property in two ways. First, we planted it with pine-trees. Geoffrey was an enthusiastic tree-grower, an
d believed in forestry as a profitable investment. I like trees too, so we got cracking. I raised the first 40,000 trees in my backyard from seeds collected from pine cones; it was fun watching the little pine-needle seedlings emerge with the seeds on their backs. The beds were protected from the sun's heat by scrim (a kind of sacking) stretched across wooden frames. We planted out these experimental seedlings on a hill in rows six feet apart, with nine feet between seedlings. They took well, so we started a nursery of our own, and soon had several planting gangs at work. We planted a million trees, and Geoffrey's son has been milling them for the past ten years. I am proud of having raised a crop of timber in my lifetime from seed planted in my own garden. New Zealand is a wonderful tree-growing country; our pines used to put on six feet in height a year, and, once they got started, an inch in diameter. We built miles of road, and at one time had three teams of surveyors at work. We had to sell off small lots of land as sites for weekend cottages in order to pay for the whole scheme. We bought another property alongside, and cut that up as well. We built up a sales force of thirty salesmen, selling only our own land. Geoffrey was himself a wonderful salesman, but I found that I could not sell my own property. I became shy and inhibited about it, which I never did when I was selling things belonging to other people. The only trouble was that Geoffrey was always selling ideas to me. We bought the Miller Chair Company that supplied seats for theatres and cinemas. I never could get really interested in this. We didn't know enough about it, and lost money through it. However, we now owned three private companies operating in land which were doing well. By the time I was twenty-six my income was £10,000 a year. Then Geoffrey sold me the idea of an aviation company, and we formed the Goodwin–Chichester Aviation Company Limited. My first flight made me wildly excited and enthusiastic. We took the New Zealand agency for A. V. Roe, bought two Avro Avians, and began a joy-riding tour of New Zealand.

  This was good fun; first we had to scout around for a field suitable for landing and taking off passengers; then we advertised. Our aim was to fly around as many passengers as we could in the few hours when they flocked out to the field. We had four of the best pilots in New Zealand, but their experience had been with heavier military planes in the First World War, and they found the light Avian landing on grass fields too fragile for the job. We were lucky that we only lost ten shillings a head on the 6,000 passengers we carried. Undercarriages were the chief weakness in the planes, and sometimes farm fences seemed to be in the wrong place. One day I got exasperated at one of our crashes, and determined to learn how to fly myself, to find out what it was all about.

  I went down to the New Zealand Air Force station at Christchurch and had some lessons there in an Avro 504K. This plane had a rotary engine, which means that the propeller and the engine went round together. You could not throttle back the engine; you just cut out the ignition when coming in to land, and cut it in again hopefully if you made a bad landing and wanted to take off again quickly. The engine used castor oil, which stank to high heaven, and sprinkled the pilot's face copiously. I struggled away trying to learn, but was a hopelessly bad pupil. By December 1928 I had had eighteen hours fifty minutes of dual instruction, and still could not fly. I think this was partly because of trying to mix flying with an intensely active business life. Geoffrey and I were running five private companies at full blast, besides our partnership, and I was ruthlessly trying to make money for twelve hours a day or more.

  In the spring of 1929, ten years and three months after I had landed in New Zealand, I decided that the time had come for me to go to England for a visit. I wanted to fly back from London to Sydney, and thought that the best chance of achieving this was to obtain the safest and most reliable aeroplane. With this in view, I first visited the United States, and spent two months looking at any possible makes of aircraft. I had demonstration flights in an American Eagle with a 180 h.p. Hispano engine, a Ryan six-place Brougham, with a Wright 300 h.p., a Whirlwind six-place Kuntzer Aircoach with three 90 h.p. Le Blonds, a Curtis Robin three-place, with a Curtis 180 h.p. Challenger, a Curtis Fledgling two-place trainer, and a Fairchild seven-place plane with a Pratt and Whitney Wasp. Three other types I never tried out because in each case the aeroplane crashed between the time of my making an appointment and reaching the airfield. None of the types I flew in was really suitable, and my visit was aeronautically a flop. However, I made a good friend in Charlie Blackwell, and thoroughly enjoyed staying with him in Santa Barbara. There I survived a game of bridge with three millionaires, used the same bath as had Prince George (later Duke of Kent) during a visit to California, and was introduced by Charlie to his tailor in London who made the best dress clothes in the world.

  At the end of July I arrived in London, and began learning to fly again. At first I had some instruction at Stag Lane, but I could see that I was not going to get on very fast there, and switched to Brooklands, where Duncan Davies and Ted Jones took me in hand. It was not until 13 August that I first went solo for five minutes, and that was after twenty-four hours of dual. I was a slow pupil, but perhaps not quite as bad as it sounds, because only five and a half hours of that dual instruction was in England. On 28 August I secured my 'A' flying licence, which permitted me to fly an aircraft alone. What about navigation? Suppose I couldn't navigate across country? The first time I ventured away from the aerodrome was most exciting. At first everything was a jumble; then I picked out a railway line, the Thames, the Staines reservoir. With the aid of the map I found Byfleet. Flying at a snail's pace, I recognised other landmarks shown on the map. Thrill, excitement, joy! If I could do that much the first day, competence must be a matter only of practice and experience. On 8 September I bought a Gipsy Moth which weighed 880 lbs unloaded. I had left New Zealand with the idea of a bigger and better machine, but money worries were troubling me. Almost as soon as I had left New Zealand the 1929 slump had hit us hard. Everything I had was invested in land, and we had big overdrafts to finance our land purchases. The bank got jittery, and wanted us to reduce them. But our customers, like us, were hit by the slump, and although we had a lot of money owing to us for land we had sold in small lots, it was hard to collect it. The Moth was all I could afford, but I was lucky to get it. It turned out to be a wonderful little aeroplane with its Gipsy motor, and Handley Page slots. Three days after buying it I flew to Liverpool, where an actress friend of mine was playing in a show. I did no good in that direction so turned round and flew to North Devon to visit my parents.

  The aeroplane was so new that it had not yet been fitted with a compass. I was 'flying by Bradshaw', following the railway lines across country, and I wondered if I could fly by the sun. The sky was overcast, with ten-tenths at 1,000 feet. I climbed up into the cloud, and proceeded until I had passed through a 9,000 feet layer of it to emerge at 10,000 feet in brilliant sunshine over a snowy white field of cloud. Not only had I no compass, but no blind-flying instruments at all. I reckoned that if I got into trouble I could force the plane into a spin, and that it was bound to spin round the vertical axis, and that therefore I should be sure to emerge vertically from the cloud. After flying along for half an hour by the sun, I climbed down through the 9,000 foot layer of cloud. I then wanted to find out how accurately I had carried out this manoeuvre, and I used a sound principle of navigation. I fixed my position by the easiest method available – I flew round a railway station low down, and read the name off the platform. By some extraordinary fluke I was right on course. I probably uttered for the first time the navigator's famous cry 'Spot on!'

  This visit was not a great success. I had been away more than ten years and I arrived back thinking (privately) that I had a tremendous achievement behind me in building up a business and turning my £10 into £20,000. My family not only never mentioned this, but showed me plainly that I was an outsider as far as they were concerned. I had a New Zealand twang, and no doubt talked too much and too loudly. For my part, I disapproved of the air of decay creeping into the house where I had been born, the w
eeds sprouting from between the paving stones of the stable yard, and the difficulty my family was finding in attending to their own housework efficiently after having been used to having it all done for them. I believe that what upset my family most was the odd matter of a wreath. While I had been away in New Zealand my great aunt Jinny, of whom I had been tremendously fond, had died at the age of over ninety. When I first visited my family I brought down a wreath for her grave. It was big and rather exotic looking; perhaps more suitable for a cemetery in Wimbledon than for a Devon village where the wreaths are more likely to be made with a few daffodils or primroses. I think that this wreath upset my family more than anything else that I did; they thought I must be a frightful barbarian to produce such an unusual thing.