by Carol Baxter
Jessie ‘Chubbie’ Miller: the picture that Bill Lancaster treasured most. (Getty Images)
Other books by Carol Baxter
An Irresistible Temptation
Breaking the Bank
Captain Thunderbolt and His Lady
The Peculiar Case of the Electric Constable
Black Widow
First published in 2017
Copyright © Carol Baxter 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
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Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: [email protected]
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Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 9781760290771
eISBN 9781925576641
Maps by Janet Hunt
Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Cover design: Emily O'Neill
Front cover photographs: Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe (Jessie Miller); iStock (frame).
Back cover photograph: City of Toronto archives
To the fabulous Chubbie Miller, for your consideration in leaving so many personal accounts describing your activities, thoughts, feelings and conversations.
A reader’s delight. A writer’s dream.
Contents
Prologue
Part One: Hopes
Part Two: Dreams
Part Three: Nightmares
Part Four: Resolutions
Epilogue
Author’s note
Notes
Bibliography
FAMOUS WOMAN FLYER ARRESTED
Mrs Keith Miller, internationally known aviatrix, was taken to the county jail here today and held for investigation by State Attorney’s investigators. Jail attendants said they understood she was held in connection with the shooting of an airline pilot.
Harold Farkas, United Press
Prologue
Nobody could have foreseen such an unprecedented response.
From all over Britain, people converged on London’s Croydon Airport, lugging picnic baskets brimming with pies and buns and sugary cakes, and pulling out cards and novels to while away the hours. By mid afternoon on Sunday, 29 May 1927, every approach was clogged with vehicles and pedestrians, a honking, cursing muddle. Trams and buses pushed through the crowds. Trains disgorged thousands more to join the eager multitudes. At 3.30 pm, when the long-awaited plane commenced its journey across the English Channel towards Croydon, 25,000 spectators already thronged the aerodrome’s perimeters.
Airport authorities watched apprehensively as wooden fences bent under the pressure. Still the people kept coming: 50,000, 100,000 . . .
At 5.52 pm, the control tower’s klaxon sounded its discordant warning. All eyes turned towards the horizon where a clump of dark dots had appeared. A moment later, a drone could be heard as if a swarm of bees buzzed towards the aerodrome. Soon, the dots transformed into an honour guard of three large biplanes at the front and three smaller ones at the back. Between them, Lilliputian-like, flew a sleek monoplane.
At the sight of the monoplane, the spectators’ mood changed. A sigh of satisfaction, of awe, erupted from thousands. Then they swept across the airfield, trampling wooden fences, knocking down iron barriers, surging through the police cordons, determined to reach the runway where the plane was about to land.
Officials, policemen, pressmen and photographers screamed ‘Get back! Get back!’ Airmen jumped into automobiles to try to herd the mob like sheep. If they failed to corral them, the pilot would have to abandon the official British welcome and land elsewhere in ignominious obscurity—not the celebration planned for the newly crowned King of Aviation.
As the monoplane circled the aerodrome, a strip of ground cleared amid the throngs of people and vehicles, allowing the pilot to swoop down and roll to a stop. The cockpit opened and a smiling man stood up and waved to the cheering crowd. America’s Captain Charles Lindbergh had just reached England in the Spirit of St Louis after his epic Atlantic crossing from New York to Paris, the flight that would launch the Golden Age of Aviation.
Never before had the entire world worshipped a human as if he were a god. In the words of a biographer, it was as if the man had walked upon water rather than flown over it.
The world’s extraordinary response to Lindbergh’s achievement was an epiphany to anyone who had ever dreamed of success or craved a more exciting life. One such person was in London that day, a petite, vivacious, twenty-five-year-old Australian housewife, with bobbed dark hair and mischievous brown eyes. In the years to come, she would move into Lindbergh’s aviation circle. Indeed, her name would also be splashed across the world’s newspapers although, in her instance, partly through fame and partly through infamy. Yet Lindbergh’s flight didn’t directly trigger the transformation in her life that began a few weeks later. Instead, it was something so small, so mundane, so ridiculously prosaic, as a pat of butter.
Chapter One
If she’d been asked before her holiday to imagine a word to describe London, it wouldn’t have been ‘freedom’.
Her late father had long urged her to visit his home country. His England was a world of dainty whitewashed cottages nestling around spires that thrust resolutely towards the heavens, of church fetes and church dances and church picnics, where the vicar was loved almost as much as his god. It was a world of moral rectitude and righteousness, of class and, most importantly, tradition. Everyone had their place and—as long as they accepted it—all was right with the world.
The lure for her had been different, touristy more than anything. The chance to drink tea beside the Thames as it slipped through the greatest city in the western world. To stroll across the romantic London Bridge. To ogle the crown jewels that boasted the nation’s wealth and importance.
Yet it was the atmosphere of flapper London that proved so unexpected, so at odds with her father’s fond memories of a Victorian England. The ‘bright young things’ who dashed around London in their loose glittery dresses and daring knee-high skirts had not only abandoned the Victorian constraints of corset and crinoline, of piety and prudery, they had embraced the sensual. Their adventurous flamboyance expressed an intoxicating independence, an uncaging of body and soul. This freedom represented the dawn of a new era, with London as its centre, the quintessence of modernity.
It couldn’t have been more different to the insular world she had come from, the world that would drag her back when her six-month holiday had ticked away.
She was born Jessie Maude Beveridge on 13 September 1901 in what, by comparison, was the middle of nowhere: the town of Southern Cross, sitting on Western Australia’s flat red earth, 230 miles from Perth at the terminus of a railway line. The town was named after the constellation that twinkles above the southern continent and guided two prospectors to strike gol
d there in 1888. Its name suggested an otherworldliness for its inhabitants, that they were beings of both the Earth and the stars. But while most of its early residents never had the chance to rise above the Earth’s clutches, for ‘Chubbie’—as she was nicknamed in childhood—life would be different. Not only would she take to the skies, the name ‘Southern Cross’ itself would play a strangely significant role in shaping her destiny.
Her birth in Southern Cross proved as serendipitous as the gold discovery. Those glittering specks lured business operators to set up shop alongside its dusty roads, among them her father, Charles Stanley Beveridge, a Commercial Bank manager. The pious son of an English vicar, Charles met her mother, Ethelwyn Maude Lavinia Hall, who was the equally devout daughter of an Australian clergyman, when she visited Southern Cross to attend a wedding. Their marriage was a match made in heaven, so to speak. But for Chubbie, all that stultifying spirituality would propel her from the nest as soon as her fledgling wings could carry her.
Late in 1906, her family packed their trunks and headed to Broken Hill, New South Wales, another hot dry mining town in Australia’s sunburnt outback where her father established another Commercial Bank branch. There she found her own spiritual solace: the piano. As music filled her soul, she dreamed of becoming a concert pianist. Her parents’ ambitions for her were more traditional: marriage and motherhood. And she had been brought up to respect and obey.
When the Great War began, she dutifully knitted socks and mittens for the soldiers. She would have preferred playing the piano or being outside in the sunshine: swimming, playing tennis or riding any horse given to her, whatever its temperament. Her adventurous spirit wasn’t suited to the role of a submissive daughter—or, in the future, wife. Nor was her sense of humour or her tendency to say what she thought. To fit in, she needed to curb her hasty, unrestrained ways, to learn tact and reticence.
In 1915, her family relocated to Timaru in New Zealand’s South Island—prettier but much colder than outback Australia—where her father established yet another bank branch and she attended the Craighead Diocesan School for Girls. There, her musical abilities were celebrated in gold letters on the school’s honour board, an achievement that for most of her peers would have been their only award in the inexorable progression towards marriage and motherhood.
Two years later, her family moved back across the Tasman to Australia’s second-largest city, the bustling metropolis of Melbourne. Desperate to escape the family home, she took the only step towards freedom allowed in her parents’ narrow world.
His name was George Keith Miller, although everyone called him Keith, and he was a twenty-two-year-old journalist for Melbourne’s Herald. They were married on 3 December 1919, just two months after her eighteenth birthday. Looking back, she could see that they were mere babes playing at being adults. Still, marriage offered her more control over her life: no more strict rules, no more prayers and piety, no more church.
As the 1920s dawned, her first baby was born prematurely at six months and lived for only five hours. Her second and third miscarried. The doctors said she wasn’t the right build for child-bearing, so her hopes of having a family died with them. Then her father succumbed to cancer in 1924 and her brother Tommy to kidney disease in September 1926, aged only twenty. She and Tommy had been soul-mates, lying on the hearth rug together on chilly winter nights, making plans to travel the world. His death was the final soul-destroying loss in a half-decade of heartbreak.
Her husband couldn’t provide the consolation she needed. Their personalities and characters were so different they had already drifted apart. She was finding it increasingly difficult to hide the truth from herself, to admit that she had married the wrong man and was stuck with him forever. They jogged along together, making the best of things, and probably would have kept on doing so if Tommy’s death hadn’t acted as a catalyst.
When she received a letter from her father’s sister inviting her to England, she decided that a six-month holiday was the medicine she needed. She asked Keith to join her. But while she still yearned to travel the world, Keith was content to sit by the fire. He said no.
She thought about travelling there on her own, but didn’t know how to finance such a journey. Her despair deepened.
Over the previous few years, a feeling of discontentment and purposelessness had festered inside her as she realised that the role of wife and mother—the role she had been nurtured to fill—was no longer open to her. What was she to do with the rest of her life? It was obvious that the postwar world was different to that of her childhood. The war had allowed middle-class women to enter the workforce and, try as the conservatives might, this genie refused to be shoved back inside the domestic bottle. Women like herself were no longer valued only as wives and mothers. They could work and earn money rather than wait for handouts from their parents and husbands.
The chance to earn her holiday cash came only a short time after Tommy’s death, when she attended Melbourne’s Royal Show. For a lark, she stepped up to demonstrate an electric suction cleaner and proved so able she was hired by the company and sent into rural Victoria to sell their products. Before long, she had earned enough money to pay for her fare.
As summer slipped into the autumn of 1927, she kissed and hugged her loved ones and climbed the gangway of the ship that would take her to England. With a blast of its horn and an answering yelp from the tugboats, it pulled away from the dock and headed down the Yarra River. As she stood on the deck waving goodbye, she wasn’t to know she was farewelling her old life forever.
Melbourne had seemed the epitome of modernity until she saw London’s sophistication and elegance and found herself swept up in its giddy atmosphere of endless possibilities. She spent six weeks at her aunt’s Hampstead home then, with a recently arrived Australian friend, she rented a furnished bedsit in Baker Street, the street made famous by the Sherlock Holmes mysteries.
As she and her friend clomped up the stairs one day, they encountered a young man descending towards them. He paused and asked them a question. Only with hindsight would Chubbie realise that a fork in the road had appeared in that moment—and might not have reappeared if they had given a different answer. He asked if they could lend him some butter. And they said, ‘Yes’.
He knocked at their door a few days later and held out a replacement butter pat and a hand of greeting. His name was George, he said, and he was an artist living on the floor above them. Would they like to come up and see his paintings?
As he opened his door, the heady odour of paint and turpentine wafted towards them. They gazed around his large airy apartment, furnished with nothing but a small sleeping divan, a table and chair, and a scattering of cushions for his guests. His art was clearly his passion. It was everywhere—lining the walls, squatting on easels, stacked in corners. Moving around the room, they inspected his work and murmured their approval. Their sincerity transformed the hand of greeting into one of friendship.
They spent many hours with George over the next few weeks. He treated them with affectionate amusement, laughing at the things they said and did, asking fondly if all Australian girls were as naïve. In the big smoke of Melbourne, they would have resented such teasing, being convinced they were thoroughly modern women. In this bohemian city, though, far from the apron-strings of pursed-lipped family members, their eyes had been opened to their own innocence and unsophistication. Chubbie, especially, could only laugh sheepishly and ruefully admit the truth of his gentle taunts. He would understand if he knew about her pious parents and strict upbringing.
One day he announced that he was having a party and they were invited. Could they help him decorate his apartment by purchasing some items at Woolworths? Delighted to help—their first London party!—they dug into their savings and bought the requested lampshades, cushions and cheap glasses. They also agreed to use their apartment as a powder room and cloakroom for his female guests.
A few days before the party, a fist hammered at their door. Ge
orge stood outside looking distraught. He said that fifty people had accepted his invitation including Layton and Johnstone—yes, the black American vocal and piano duo who had taken London’s elite clubs by storm. Other famous musicians were coming as well so he had rented a grand piano from the piano manufacturer’s showroom downstairs but the company required a £15 deposit and he was temporarily short of cash. Could they help him out?
Chubbie dug into her savings again.
On the big night, they donned their best evening frocks and waited at their front door to assist George’s guests. They gazed star-struck at the exquisitely dressed women and then followed their perfume trail up to George’s apartment. There, through the cigarette fug, they saw people talking and laughing and shrieking out greetings to newly arrived friends. It was intoxicating. Layton sat down at the magnificent piano and stretched his elegant fingers across the ivory and ebony keys. When Johnstone’s rich voice joined in, Chubbie felt a sense of joy flood through her, washing away the pain of her years of heartbreak. It was time to live life to the full again.
The only discordant note in the wondrous evening was that Great War veteran Captain William Newton Lancaster—or ‘Bill’, as everyone called him—was besieging her. He was a few years older than her, a nice-looking man of middling height, balding, as so many were, with a friendly manner and an infectious laugh. George had introduced him as a Royal Air Force reservist who was about to fly solo from London to Australia. He introduced her as a recently arrived Australian. At the word ‘Australian’, Bill’s eyes had lit up. Thereafter, he hadn’t left her alone.
He told her that no one had yet flown a light aircraft from Britain to her homeland and he wanted to be the first. Sure, the Smith brothers had piloted the pioneer flight back in 1919 but they had flown a much larger Vickers Viking, a heavy aircraft designed for war-time service as a bomber. While theirs had a been a risky flight, it was substantially less so than his own endeavour would be. Then he plagued her with interminable questions about landing fields and weather conditions, questions that she had little chance of answering correctly as she had lived a cloistered domestic existence far from his flight path.
