CHARLES KINGSFORD SMITH – KING OF THE AIR

Charles Kingsford Smith was the most commanding flyer of the golden age of aviation. In three short years, he broke records with his astounding and daring voyages: the first trans-Pacific flight from America to Australia, the first flight across the Tasman, the first non-stop crossing of the Australian mainland. A tickertape parade was held in his honour on New York’s Fifth Avenue. At home, he became a national hero, “Our Smithy”. To reflect on the amazing exploits of Charles Kingsford Smith, Ann Blainey, historian and author, most recently, of King of The Air – The Turbulent Life of Charles Kingsford Smith addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 9 April 2019.

CHARLES KINGSFORD SMITH – KING OF THE AIR

ANN BLAINEY

Nellie Melba, the great opera singer, is said to be the most internationally famous of all Australians. But, also famous internationally, in much the same period, was Charles Kingsford Smith, the great Australian aviator. At the time of his famous flights – which were in the 1920s and 1930s – Aviators were the pop stars of the age. Foremost among these glamorous creatures was Kingsford Smith. In America, his fellow-Aviators voted him the greatest flyer of his generation. And they gave him a special title. They called him the “Daddy of Us All”.

Smithy – as he was popularly called by his fans – was born in Hamilton, a riverside suburb of Brisbane. His father’s name in those days was plain William Smith – it would be another five or six years before the family added the “Kingsford” to its name. In the years prior to Smithy’s birth, William Smith had been the manager of the Cairns branch of the Bank of North Queensland. However a bad attack of malaria impaired William’s health and, in 1896, the bank invalided him to the cooler climates of Brisbane and Sydney. Thus, it was that William’s seventh and last child – Charles the great Aviator — was born in Brisbane on 9 February 1897 and spent the first years of his life in Brisbane and then in Sydney.

In 1899, while he was managing the Sydney office of the Bank of North Queensland, the ailing William resigned from the bank and four years later sailed with his family to a new city of opportunity – Vancouver in Western Canada. There he quickly found work as a voucher clerk with the Canadian Pacific Railway. He got on so well that a couple of years later he left off clerking and went into business for himself – opening a store that imported, among other things, goods from Australia. His business flourished until 1908 when a bad harvest sent the Canadian economy into recession. Anxious to cut his losses, William and his family sailed back to Sydney

By this time, Smithy was twelve years old: an intelligent, hyperactive lad, full of fun and pranks and something of a dare-devil. He was also fascinated by engines, and skilled at playing the piano.

Seeking a suitable school for him in Sydney, his parents discovered that, thanks to his musical talent, St Andrew’s Cathedral School was prepared to accept him as a chorister and pupil. He did well at the school, receiving an excellent general education, and learning the value of serious study. He remained at the Cathedral school until his voice/broke. Then he transferred to Sydney Technical High School to study electrical engineering and at 16 took up an apprenticeship at the Colonial Sugar Refinery. And there he might have stayed – if war had not broken out.

Smithy enlisted in the AIF as soon as he turned 18, and because of his engineering training – and his skills at riding a motor bike – he was made a dispatch rider in the 4″ Signals Company of the Australian Light Horse. In June 1915, he and his fellow signallers sailed for Egypt and, after a few months training, were sent to Gallipoli. They were extraordinarily lucky. By October 1915, the bitter fighting was over and life on the Gallipoli peninsula had become almost humdrum. A few months later he and his fellow signallers took part in the remarkable evacuation – an exercise carried out so stealthily that the Turks were unaware of it until nearly every man was safely away.

Back in Egypt, Smithy was shipped to France, to serve as a motor cycle dispatch rider in Flanders and on the Somme. Life was unspeakably grim, and he was thankful – in September 1916 – to answer a call for volunteers for the Royal Flying Corps.

From that moment, as he often said, his real life began.

After a short training course, he entered the RFC as a Second Lieutenant, and was appointed to a squadron at La Lovie, near the French-Belgian border. The death rate was fearsome – the average survival time for a pilot was about two weeks – but Smithy not only survived, he prospered. It was clear from the start that he had a natural gift for flying and he threw himself into it, heart and soul.

On 14 August 1917, during an aerial dog fight, part of his left foot was shot off by a German bullet.

He spent the next four months in a London hospital, and in recognition of his bravery, received the Military Cross from King George V at Buckingham Palace.

Returning to civilian life, he found it hard to fit in and he was often depressed. For one thing, all he wanted to do was fly and flying – as a profession – was still in its infancy. He spent over a year in California, stunt flying for an aerial circus and giving joy rides to paying passengers – an occupation that was known as barnstorming. But stunting and barnstorming were not enough. What he really wanted was to perform a daring aeronautical feat such as flying across the Pacific Ocean.

Back in Australia, Smithy tried to pull himself together. He became senior pilot in the newly formed West Australian Airways which flew regular flights from Geraldton to Derby.While in their employ, in February 1922, he seems to have been the first pilot in Australia to fly a doctor to a patient – a precursor to the famous Flying Doctor Service.

Connecting the isolated ports along the West Australian coast was important work but it failed to satisfy Smithy’s dare-devil spirit and soon he exchanged the monotony of flying regular air routes, for running a transport service to the outlying stations in the Pilbara, carrying their wool clips by truck to the ports for shipping to far off markets. He also found a wife – a nice, country girl named Thelma Corboy who came from a cattle station not far from Marble Bar.

Smithy, however, was not cut out for marriage any more than he was cut out for flying to a schedule or running a trucking business. In 1925, he left his wife and his trucking business  and, in company with a fellow pilot named Keith Anderson, relocated to Sydney. Here they started up a charter air service… and here, Smithy had the most momentous meeting of his life. He met Charles Ulm “Charles Ulm,” Smithy later wrote, was “my twin spirit. …. Ulm had similar ideas to mine. He wanted to do something that would make the world sit up.” And in due course the two of them did just that

Ulm was a born organiser and Smithy was a born pilot, and both were inspired by Charles Lindbergh’s aerial crossing of the Atlantic ocean, a feat that had hitherto been considered impossible,

 because of the difficulties of re-fueling over a vast expanse of sea.

Planes, they now discovered, could be procured with sufficient tanks to allow then to travel vast distances without re-fuelling. Armed with this knowledge, they began seriously to plan a Pacific crossing. They also began to badger the state and federal governments to finance their scheme. They got nowhere with the federal government, but once they had demonstrated their prowess by making a record flight around Australia, New South Wales premier, Jack Lang, began to listen to them. He agreed to back the Pacific flight and they and Keith Anderson sailed off to California.

They arrived in California in August 1927. There followed almost a year of effort and disappointment during which Anderson gave up and returned to Sydney, while Ulm and Smithy struggled on. The month of March 1928 saw their lowest ebb. The New South Wales government withdrew its guarantee and their plane, a Fokker tri motor which they had named the Southern Cross, was about to be repossessed for debt.

Just when everything seemed to have touched rock bottom, they were introduced to a sympathetic American millionaire named Allan Hancock. He took a great liking to these two young Australians and agreed to finance the flight.

Moreover, he presented then with a competent American crew – an experienced navigator named Harry Lyon and an experienced wireless operator named Jim Warner. It is doubtful that they would have succeeded without Lyon and Warner. On 31 May 1928, the four of them took off from California’s Oakland aerodrome. Their first stop was to be Hawaii. Their second was to be Fiji, and from Fiji they planned to fly on to Eagle Farm aerodrome in Brisbane.

At first their flight was not so difficult. Planes had already flown from California to Hawaii and a wireless beacon in Honolulu kept their navigator on course. But the second and third sections – Hawaii to Fiji and Fiji to Brisbane – were uncharted territory and they had no idea what they were flying into. No-one, so far, had any knowledge of the Tropical Convergence Zone — that area near Fiji where trade winds clash and erupt into violent storms. The Aviators met such terrible turbulence that they were almost blown out of the sky.

Conditions on board the aircraft were also difficult to bear. The plane was draughty and cramped: conversation was impossible because of the deafening noise of the engines. Communication was carried on through notepads and pencils. Worst of all, they sat on wicker chairs – chosen because of their lack of weight. When a storm hit, the flyers bounced about the ceiling because nobody had thought it necessary to bolt their chairs to the floor or provide them with seat-belts.

 Nevertheless, thanks to skill, courage, and good organisation, they survived.

When, on 9 June, they finally reached Australia, vast, excited crowds were waiting for them. Australians had been following their progress through the newspapers and, most especially, by means of that new invention, the radio. Morse code communications sent from the plane to Amalgamated Wireless headquarters in Sydney during the flight had been translated into ordinary words and were read out over radio stations in Sydney and Melbourne. It was not unusual for groups of fans to sit up through the night, partying and “listening in”.

This shared experience gave ordinary Australians an unusually close affinity with Smithy and Ulm. Not only had these two Aviators become national heroes, they felt like close friends. Smithy’s informality of manner and cheeky sense of fun reinforced these feelings — although it should be said that he could be formal and serious if the situation required. His biggest following, however, was among young women. He had a sexual magnetism that few women could resist. His love affairs are said to have been numerous and women comprised a large proportion of his fans.

In the seven years following that first Pacific flight, Smithy performed several more memorable aeronautical feats.

He became the first pilot to fly across the Tasman sea to New Zealand.

And he became the first pilot to fly across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west – which is a more difficult journey than from west to east. By completing this Atlantic crossing, he achieved his ambition of being the first aviator to fly right around the world by crossing the equator. The Americans were so excited by his trans Atlantic flight that,  when he arrived in New York, they gave him and his crew a ticker-tape parade down Broadway.

Finally, in the second last year of his life, when his health was failing, he became the first man to fly in the opposite direction across the Pacific – that is from Australia to California. This time he took 52 hours, lopping 30 hours off the time he had taken to fly the same route in reverse in 1928.

But not all was triumph – there were some tragedies.

In 1929, less than a year after the first Pacific Crossing, Smithy, Ulm and a crew set out on their first flight to England. A few hours into the flight, they were forced down in the wilds of North West Australia, where they remained un-rescued for 13 days. Search parties were dispatched to find them and, on one of these, Smithy’s friend Keith Anderson lost his life.

When it was revealed that Ulm, in the past, had boasted that the best way to obtain money and publicity was to pretend to be lost, some suspected Smithy and Ulm had perpetrated a publicity hoax.

 Some held Smithy and Ulm responsible for Anderson’s death. These accusations were false, but they haunted Smithy and Ulm for the rest of their lives.

In the 1930s, the stress under which Smithy was living began to affect his health. When, hoping to break a time record, he flew back solo from England in October 1930, he almost passed out from faintness and was consumed by a feeling that he described as “a sense of dread”. Today these symptoms would be diagnosed as a panic attack, but in 1930 little was known about psychological illness.

Rumours spread that Smithy was a coward and an alcoholic – and that his symptoms sprang from a craving for alcohol. The rumours were untrue and they hurt him deeply. He fought back, refusing to abandon his flights, “toughing it out” through further panic attacks in the air. In this condition, he even managed to break three time-records for flights between Australia and England. But his illness grew worse and bedevilled his last years.

Kingsford Smith was already showing symptoms of his panic disorder when he married his second wife. Her name was Mary Powell. Smithy met her on a ship sailing from America to Australia. She had just left school and was being taken for a trip around the world by her wealthy parents.

Mary came from a well-known racing family in Melbourne. Her uncle, Gus Powell, was a respected owner and trainer of race horses. Gus Powell’s champion hurdler, Mosstrooper, was one of the great winners in the history of the Australian turf. Mary’s father, Arthur Powell, was also in the horse business, selling horses known as Waiers to the British Army in India. Indeed, Smithy’s later flights owed much to racing and horses for they were partly financed by his racing in-laws.

In December 1930, Mary Powell and Smithy were fashionably married at Scot’s Church in Melbourne. But the wedding became something of a shambles when the church was invaded by avid female fans who climbed on the back of pews, the better to see the bridal party.

 It was Mary’s first taste of the public glare under which she would spend her brief married life.

Few of the great aviators lived to be old. Smithy died in November 1935, at the age of 38. He was on a record-breaking flight from England to Australia and was last sighted over the Bay of Bengal, heading towards Singapore. Despite many years of searching, he has never been found – although a wheel from his plane was washed up on an island in the Andaman Sea. As we speak, another group of searchers is planning to set out. I rather hope they don’t find him. Better, I feel, for the legendary Smithy to end his days in mystery.