Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  ‘What was that about?’ Thelma asked her mother as they left the shop.

  ‘You don’t need to know,’ her mother replied rather primly, before quickly changing both the subject and the direction they were walking.

  Thelma was, naturally, intrigued.

  A few days later, she saw the dashing 25-year-old pilot at the Race Ball, and was able to get a closer look. There was eye contact…an introduction…a whiff of excitement in the air. He asked her to dance. Yes, there had been her mother’s admonitions about this man, but on the other hand, she wasn’t there and didn’t need to know.

  He moved quite well, she thought, and she rather liked him. Just mind the foot, Thelma, if you would. Small war wound, you see. Nothing to worry about.

  As it happened, Smithy rather liked her, too, and was particularly taken with her vivacious, voluptuous looks, not to mention how finely educated she was, courtesy of a Perth boarding school and Sydney finishing school for young ladies. Thel was all class, and so very different to most of the women with whom he had been amorous. Thel and Charles parted from each other that evening with some sorrow, but with no declarations made.

  That was it then. Though he had probably done more than anyone to get Qantas off the ground, in the end Paul McGinness decided to move on. One reason was that it was all getting too serious and something called a ‘management structure’ had been put in place. What really stuck in his craw was that while Hudson Fysh was the head of flying operations, and Fergus McMaster was chairman, there was no spot for him, even though he was the biggest shareholder in the company! Another thing that got his goat was that both Fysh and McMaster—neither of whom, for some reason, were drinkers—had decided that there would be a blanket ban on drinking for pilots on duty, and that didn’t suit McGinness at all. He liked a drink here and there and the truth of it was that, if it came to it, he could still fly better drunk than most men could fly sober. But when he was the only one on the board who voted to rescind the rule, there seemed only one option.4 Pull out.

  As described by John Gunn in his book on the history of Qantas, ‘To the carefree and venturesome elements of McGinness’s temperament, the slog and detail of daily administration and bureaucratic sword-cross were impossibly pedestrian. The dawning truth that his romantic vision of airline operations had at its centre the combined reality of a railway timetable and a cash book, that adventure and risk must subside into routine, repetitive perseverance, was disillusioning.’5

  Things weren’t so bad that McGinness didn’t agree to stay on until Qantas could find a replacement pilot—perhaps a few months—but it simply wasn’t as much fun as it had been. While he loved to fly, the deadly seriousness and constant routine of business life didn’t really suit him.

  It was late October 1922, and one hot day as the approaching summer was just beginning to bite and chew, Thelma Corboy was stunned to see from the cool shadow of the veranda of her family’s homestead at Meentheena something slowly begin to emerge from the shimmering heat waves of the far horizon. She stood up from her chair and gazed closer. Slowly, slowly, alternately appearing and disappearing in the molten mirror of heated air, it soon emerged that it was a man, walking their way, leading an exhausted horse. But who? There wasn’t a homestead between Meentheena and the railhead at Marble Bar, which was 60 miles away as the exhausted crow flew to the north-west, and not even the station’s blackfellas walked like that in the midday sun. The figure was perhaps 200 yards away when she recognised him by his bouncing gait…the insouciant can-do way he carried himself, notwithstanding his slight limp, courtesy of his war wound. It was Charles Kingsford Smith, and he had been riding for the last two days from Marble Bar to get there! Madness, sheer madness. Sweating, sunburnt, thirsty, he was quickly ushered inside and plied with water and hospitality. Why was he here exactly?

  Thelma suspected only too well—and so, frankly, did her mother—but felt obliged for the moment to go along with the explanation he gave: he was there to reconnoitre for landing strips and thought there might be a good one in those parts, maybe somewhere on their property. Of course he was.

  For the next two weeks, as it turned out, Smithy continued his investigations into possible airstrips at Meentheena, riding in the early mornings and late afternoons with Thelma to all parts of the vast property and returning between times for wonderful lunches and lavish dinners put on by Thelma’s mother—to her surprise she had really warmed to him after getting to know him a little, as he seemed to be quite the gentleman after all—where he was always at his charming best. Afterwards, Smithy might chat with Thelma’s Irish-born stepfather Maurice McKenna, and later take his banjo and sing with the Aboriginal workers for a while, before returning to sit with Thel on the veranda in the cool of the night. Sometimes while Charles played the banjo, Thelma would sing, and she sang beautifully—a further bond between them.6

  True, Thelma’s mother had been nonplussed when he had first appeared but Charles Kingsford Smith was nothing if not charismatic and his natural attentiveness to her personally was wondrous, just as was the gentlemanly approach he took to Thelma. No doubt that scuttlebutt she had heard about him back at the drapery shop was just that, and she should take him as she found him. Charming!

  For his part, Smithy was equally taken with life at Meentheena, and was quick to write to his parents upon his return:

  Went out riding in the bush to reconnoitre possible landing grounds at the stations. Met a nice girl at ‘Meentheena’…

  The station is amongst the hills, and except for being hard to get into, is a bonzer place. It is only 900,000 acres in extent. Mrs McKenna and Thelma gave me a splendid time, and I enjoyed the break immensely.7

  Such a letter from their slightly chaotic son caused mother Catherine, for one, to sit up and take notice. Though Chilla had always been popular with the girls, in all his many letters to the family from all parts of the world he had never noted a particular one who he was keen on.

  Shit! The bloody goats had been eating the plane again. Qantas mechanic Jack Hazlitt—himself a Gallipoli veteran—had been working hard to get one of the company’s old Armstrong Whitworth FK8s it had bought into shape, and yet when he had come back from lunch it was to find several of Charleville’s goat scourge munching on the plane’s tail. And tomorrow was the big day! It took Jack a while, but after shooing the endlessly munching, farting goats away, he got to work and finally the hole was fixed, so that all was in readiness the following morning…8

  One could not quite say that Qantas was prospering, but at least it was surviving, which was a triumph in itself, given the number of other nascent aviation companies around the country going bust. And its breakthrough day did indeed come on 2 November 1922, when the young airline was ready to begin its first regular scheduled service, to carry airmail subsidised by the government and a paying passenger. Paul McGinness was to pilot the first leg, in a plane that looked to be in reasonably good shape bar a strange new patch it had in its tail, and before departure he made a speech to the assembled crowd in which he said that one day, ‘Qantas will link Australia to Asia, Africa, Europe and Great Britain’. The crowd applauded with enthusiasm. And then Arthur Baird, the Qantas engineer, stepped forward to swing the propeller and the 160-horsepower Beardmore engine burst into deafening life.9 For this inaugural trip, McGinness delivered 108 letters from Charleville to Longreach, about 300 miles away, in a trip that took just over three hours. And then the following day Hudson Fysh was ready to fly the next leg, with the said passenger aboard.

  Though born eighty-seven years earlier, Alexander Kennedy, one of the first investors in the company, was always up for a new experience, and was champing at the bit to get under way and…

  And Qantas apologises for this small delay.

  After the plane flown the day before failed to generate enough revs in its engine to take off, everything, including Kennedy, had to be transferred into a second plane. Fortunately, Kennedy’s baggage was not lost in the process. And in f
act, as they took off, half an hour later, Kennedy—resplendent in his aviation cap and goggles and warm coat which he wore despite the hot day, to protect him when they got to the cold awaiting them at 5000 feet—shouted out, ‘Be damned to the doubters!’10

  As a young man, Kennedy had travelled from Longreach to Cloncurry in a bullock wagon, a journey that had taken him eight months. That had been in 1869. This time, over fifty years later, the journey in a Qantas plane took him just four hours and thirty-five minutes, including stops at Winton and McKinlay along the way! McGinness then flew back to Charleville with the company’s first female passenger, Miss Ivy McLean. Qantas was now properly launched and the previous estimation that there would be a demand for their services proved correct.

  As well as flying passengers on regular flights, Qantas continued to take people up on joyrides, make deliveries of urgent supplies and do anything legal that would turn a pound. This involved everything from delivering fresh fruit and vegies to outlying stations willing to pay for the privilege, to taking doctors on SOS missions, to hunting wild turkeys from the sky. Even, on one famous occasion, tracking down a car thief who had stolen a station owner’s vehicle before heading off down the one road in that entire part of the country and thinking he was totally safe from apprehension, as he had a three-hour start on his pursuers.

  On another occasion, in a legal case, the judge, the plaintiff, the defendant and two legal counsellors travelled together in a Qantas plane to get to the regional courthouse where the case was to be heard. For two bob a pop, Fysh even ran a little service for lonely and lovelorn blokes, dropping gifts ‘neath parachutes with notes attached addressed to the objects of their affection on outback stations! All up, the airline’s local renown was growing to the point that when a particular minister was taking a Bible study class at Winton State High School and asked, ‘Who was Pontius Pilate?’ one of the schoolboys was quick with his answer.

  ‘He’s the cove who drives the Qantas mail plane.’11

  If that was the case, then it was also fair to say that he was very busy. Journalist Norman Ellison documented that Qantas pilots did everything—from making tickets, to handing them out, loading baggage, unloading it, making sandwiches and filling thermos flasks. Fixing planes, arranging accommodation, even selling shares in the company…12

  In the hot dusty conditions, it was not always easy to keep the planes in the air, but the company mechanic, and investor, Arthur Baird, was a superb operator who was able to maintain the growing fleet and make modifications to improve performance.

  From Chilla, there continued to be signs that this young woman Thelma was working his spirit, as clearly the relationship was beginning to heat up…For example, just a month after his first mention of her, at the end of a very chatty letter about this and that and nothing much in particular, Chilla got to the PS, which he wrote down in the margin of the page: ‘P.S. Thelma Corboy (Mrs. McKenna’s daughter,) heap nice girl. Am very interested…’13

  And a month later, again, on the last day of 1922…‘Next week I go out to Meentheena again for a few days spell. Guess I’ll end up a family man alright. Can’t find anyone I fancy better, and I’m tired of pub life. What say you?’14

  To that question there is no recorded reply though, generally, the Kingsford Smith family was just happy that Chilla sounded as though he might have found someone wonderful to settle down with, after such a prolonged period of rattling around like a spare nut in a jam tin. Too, it was clear he had a good job. One year after Western Australia Airways’ disastrous beginning, it had achieved a 97 per cent efficiency rating in terms of keeping to its schedule, and it had actually made such a good profit that it could afford to pay its shareholders a dividend. With his extra responsibilities and greater flying time Kingsford Smith had been granted a £50 increase in his annual salary. Thank heavens he was secure in his employment, and earning a steady and reliable wage for the first time since the war had finished. Not that his wage went far enough for him. It never did. Still, he thought he was closing in on what the problem was, as he wrote to his parents on 7 February 1923 from Geraldton:

  I have been working out why I can’t get ahead of my bank balance. I found out the average weekly bill for hotel and washing comes to just on a fiver, through moving about so much. And as I’m paying off still to Airways for a loan for shares and monthly payment on the motorbike, it doesn’t leave me anything to spend at all. I think I’ll have to get spliced. Not that I relish losing my erstwhile freedom, but I must have a home at this job, or otherwise I’ll have to chuck it. It’s a ghastly coast line after one has been up and down it a few dozen times and to finish one’s run with one’s only prospect of going ‘home’ to a bush pub—Gawd!

  Wish I could aviate across the Pacific or do some damn thing, but even that is fading into things impossible, tho’ longed for.15

  Of the many frustrations that Kingsford Smith had at this time, one particularly gnawed at him. It was that he and his fellow pilots were accomplishing on a daily basis the kind of thing that the press on the east coast were raving about as if it was something world-breaking.

  At one point Kingsford Smith was certain that he had broken an Australian record by flying from Broome to Port Hedland—310 miles in two and three-quarter hours—at an average speed of 113 miles per hour, only to read upon his arrival a breathless account in an east-coast paper about how one Nigel Love—the bloke who had established that new airport at Mascot—had won the second Australian Aerial Derby off Victoria Park racecourse, just ahead of Hudson Fysh, at the colossal speed of 75 miles per hour!

  ‘I’m not too keen on publicity,’ he wrote to his parents, for all the world as if he meant it, ‘but it seems funny that no-one over there seems to realise that we do quite some flying on this service. About as much in a week, in fact, as the rest of the Commonwealth does in a month altogether! The mileage flown on the mail route alone is now nearly 40,000. Yours truly has done about 19,000 miles of that himself…’16

  The answer, of course, was to do something that would make the east-coast press sit up and take notice, and Smithy knew just the thing—a flight around Australia using one of WAA’s planes, to bring both the airline and himself favourable attention. His idea had been that such a feat would garner him valuable experience in flying truly long distances against the clock, day after day, and also get for him the publicity and thus, credibility, he needed to attract sponsors. He wanted to fly from Perth, via Derby and Darwin, across to Queensland and down the coast to Sydney, Melbourne and then across to Perth again.

  And yet, even though Major Brearley had expressed initial interest, in the end he and the board of the company decided against allowing it on the grounds that they couldn’t spare either a plane, or their best pilot, for the time it would take to complete the flight. Too, Brearley noted in a formal letter to Kingsford Smith that even the Controller of Civil Aviation, Horace Brinsmead, was against him making such a flight…17

  Still, the Pacific dream burned on, and despite Kingsford Smith’s occasional pessimism that it could ever happen, he and Keith Anderson continued talking about it. For the time being, though, all they could do was to continue flying in the hope that something would turn up to bring the possibility of that flight closer…

  The British are coming!

  In the autumn of 1923, an imposing British naval squadron, including the most powerful battle cruiser afloat, the mighty Hood, and four attendant cruisers, was en route to the harbour city of Sydney, and day by day, the newspapers were trying to outdo each other with features, columns, snippets of gossip and endless speculation as to when exactly the squadron would arrive. All put together, such expectation sold papers in enormous numbers and this was good.

  In his office at the Sun—on Flinders Street in the suburb of Darlinghurst—on the afternoon of Monday, 7 April 1923, the veteran newsman Herbert Campbell-Jones was doing what he did most days. That is, he was trying to work out just how to get a jump on his many rivals in the bit
ter newspaper war that was then under way, hoping for inspiration on how to get the story or the photo that none of his competitors had. He was in just such a mood, when through the fog of cigarette smoke, stench of printer’s ink and endless clatter of typewriters going nineteen to the dozen, emerged a visitor with a very interesting proposal.

  His name was Charles Ulm, he was another veteran of the Great War, and more importantly still, he had an aviation company which he wanted to place at the service of the Sun, for the right price of course. Why not, he asked, send one of his planes down the south coast to get photos of the fleet before it arrived?

  Sold!

  So quickly in fact did the editor agree to Ulm’s requested fee of £500 that the young aviation entrepreneur felt certain that he might have been able to squeeze him for double that amount, if only he had been a little more greedy. It was a mistake he was determined not to make again. Never mind, the object, to establish a deal with a major newspaper and demonstrate the power of planes to lift circulation when the right story was on offer, was on track. For when Ulm did exactly what he had promised to do, and the Sun was able to sell every copy by providing photos of the fleet at a time when they hadn’t even reached Sydney Harbour, a firm relationship was established between Ulm and Herbert Campbell-Jones.

  This timely injection of money allowed Ulm to keep alive what had become his dream—apart from that one he shared with many other pilots of flying the Pacific of course. Surveying the fledging Australian aviation industry, he had become convinced that the best and most profitable way forward was to establish a fleet of planes capable of flying between the major cities, and carrying everything from people to cargo to, particularly, post, which he viewed as the key component of a successful airline. In England, others had reached the same conclusion, and the noted aviation commentator Lieutenant Colonel Felton Vesey Holt, who had been one of the first recruits to the Royal Flying Corps, had written: ‘Private aviation having come to nought, there is only one other way to keep a large civil aviation organisation in being, and that is to establish an airmail service in England.’18