Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (2 page)

My long-time researcher Sonja Goernitz was a great help across the board, liaising with libraries, newspapers and museums around the globe, as well as using her own prodigious writing skills to give much salient advice as my manuscript took shape.

I record my appreciation to my other long-time researcher Glenda Lynch for her efforts in working the wonderful resources of the Australian War Memorial and National Library for me; Henry Barrkman in London for the research work he did for me there, most particularly with the British Museum and gleaning crucial, minute detail by trawling through newspaper archives around the world; David Wiseman in Israel; and my friend Dr Michael Cooper, who helped me a great deal with medical research.

I hope in the thousand or so endnotes and bibliography to have acknowledged all other writers whose work I have drawn from, but there are several in particular I wish to cite here. In his book
The Wright Brothers
, the aforementioned New Zealand writer Ian Mackersey recounts how, as soon as he began writing it, everyone in the field said if you’re doing Orville and Wilbur, then you have to talk to Tom Crouch, who had himself done a biography of the brothers and is the acknowledged leader in the field. My own experience was similar except that when it comes to Kingsford Smith, it is Mackersey who is the equal authority on Charles Kingsford Smith. His book
Smithy
is, and will remain, the benchmark for research on the great pilot, and the notes of his book were also particularly valuable pointers as to where the diaspora of Kingsford Smith treasure-troves of information could be found.

Ted Wixted and Pedr Davis are two other writers who have done particularly valuable work over the years. Beyond
Smithy
, I found John Gunn’s book on the history of Qantas,
The Defeat of Distance
, another absolute treasure trove of fascinating material—with equally valuable notes. (I was impressed with Gunn’s book after just reading it, but when I saw the Qantas Heritage Collection, and the truckloads of archival material that he had to trawl through, I was in awe.) And, though Percy Cogger’s book on Charles Ulm—
Wings and the Man
—
the Private Papers of Charles Ulm, Aviator
—was never published, I found the manuscript held by the Mitchell Library of Sydney immensely helpful, most particularly when it came to the machinations of the Air Inquiry Committee hearings, after the Coffee Royal affair.

I also cite Scott Berg’s masterwork on the Lone Eagle himself,
Lindbergh
, and note that Robert Wohl’s book,
A Passion for Wings
, was a wonderful pointer to early aviation history. In 1990, the Australian academic Dr Leigh Edmonds wrote a paper titled
Problems of Defence, Isolation and Development: What Civil Aviation Could Do To Help
, which I have subsequently sucked dry for information in that field.

I found the wider aviation community and descendants of particular characters in the Kingsford Smith story to be wonderfully helpful.

My thanks for their contributions to this manuscript go to: Ashlyn Macfarlane, Ivor Davis, Warwick Finlay, Jo Beresford (NZ), Dave Homewood (NZ), Brian Caldersmith, Mac Job, Frank Cuttell, John Laming, Cam Spencer, Aub Pop, James Oglethorpe, Pauline Curby, Terri McCormack, Stewart Wilson, Tom Sonter, Kenneth Hope-Jones, Helen Wilder, Millie Cooper, Cynthia Balderston, Jack Eyre, Glenn Pettit, Eta Varani-Norton, Mr Tukana Rainima, and my great friend, the late Matt Laffan.

From particular institutions, I thank Megan Wishart and Allan Rudge, Walsh Memorial Library at Auckland’s Museum of Transport and Technology; all the fast, friendly, reliable and rotating staff at both the National Library of Australia and the State Library of New South Wales; David Watmuff and Matthew O’Sullivan, Air Force Museum of New Zealand, Wigram; Bob De La Hunty, Historical Aircraft Restoration Society; Ian Debenham, Powerhouse Museum; Val Carpenter, Cowra and District Historical Society and Museum; Dace Taube, Doheny Memorial Library, University of Southern California; Karen Harrigan, Sydney Airport Corporation; Cecilia Ng, Alexander Turnbull Library, New Zealand; Rebecca McConnochie and Toni Kasch, Brisbane Airport Corporation; Lex Rowland, Hinkler House Memorial Museum; Richard Breckon, Australia Post Historian; Roger Meyer, Airways Museum, Essendon; Richard Chenoweth, Santa Maria Valley Historical Society; Hans Holzer, Deutsches Museum, Aviation Department; Hayden Hamilton, APT Collectibles; William Edwards, Reference Officer, National Archives of Australia; John Blanch, Bondi Surf Bathers’ Life Saving Club; Peter Dobson, New Plymouth Aero Club; Des Sullivan, Qantas Heritage Collection, Kingsford Smith Airport; Guy Tranter, ABC Document Archives; Michael Nelmes, Curator, Narromine Aviation Museum; Sarah-Donna Philips and Lynette Riquelme, Supreme Court of New South Wales; Nancy Meddings, Allan Hancock College, USA; David Whatmuff, Wigram Aviation Museum, New Zealand; Di Davies, Bank of England; Meg Reilly, Sydney Technical High School; and Professor Sean Brawley, University of New South Wales.

For her help in all things to do with the form and texture of the book, I offer, as ever, my deep appreciation to my treasured colleague at the
Sydney Morning Herald
Harriet Veitch, who put many weekend and evening hours into the project. I also record my appreciation and professional respect to everyone I worked with at HarperCollins, most particularly Shona Martyn, Mel Cain and the indefatigable, unflappable, Mary Rennie.

Finally, my thanks to my wife, Lisa Wilkinson. In fact, Lisa was not only supportive of the project from the beginning, but also did a wonderful job once again of applying her long-time professional editing skills to—in my opinion—making it sing where it sometimes was only warbling. I have always loved that line from Jack Nicholson to Helen Hunt in
As Good as It Gets
, when he says: ‘You make me want to be a better man.’

Lisa does that for me, too, but she also makes me write better books.

I hope you enjoy this book.

Peter FitzSimons

Sydney, April, 2009

One
IN THE BEGINNING…

I came into the world of flying at its dawn, and what a glorious dawn…

C
HARLES
K
INGSFORD
S
MITH
, 1935
¹

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!

W
ILLIAM
W
ORDSWORTH
²

In my mind, the flying machine will tend to bring peace and goodwill to all; it will throw light on the few unexplored corners of the earth and it will herald the downfall of all restrictions to the free intercourse of nations.

L
AWRENCE
H
ARGRAVE
,
SPEAKING TO AN AUDIENCE IN
S
YDNEY IN THE LATE
1890
S
³

J
anuary 1894. A soft, snowy kind of day…

Before a roaring fire in the study of his stately Chicago home, the respected French-American scientist Octave Chanute was seated at his oak desk, putting the finishing touches to the manuscript of his book which he intended to publish under the title
Progress in Flying Machines.
It was a work that had been a long time in coming.

After retiring from a successful and prosperous career as a railway engineer, the robust 62-year-old with the white and well-groomed spade beard had recently returned to a passion that had first engaged him some forty years earlier. As a young man, he had become so absorbed in documenting the history of man’s quest to fly that it threatened to derail his paying job and he had been obliged to put it aside. Now freed from that daily burden of work, he had been able to re-enter the field with gusto and had been quick in publishing many learned treatises on the remaining riddles of successful flight.

As he put it in a letter to a friend: ‘My general idea is to pass in review what has hitherto been experimented with a view to accounting for the failures, clearing away the rubbish, and pointing out some of the elements of success, if I can…’
⁴

Chanute’s book covered everything from the Greek mythology of Icarus and his wings of wax to the genuine vision of Leonardo da Vinci that man would be able to fly. He took particular interest in the eccentric English baronet George Cayley, who in 1809, at the age of thirty-six—after examination and experimentation with the theories of flight dating back to 1792—had published a treatise, ‘On Aerial Navigation’. In this work, Cayley had stated as firm principles that ‘lift’, ‘propulsion’ and ‘control’ were the three key elements that had to be resolved before successful flight could take place. For the next forty years Cayley had continued refining his gliders to the point that, by 1853, the then 80-year-old had been able to press-gang his coachman into sitting in a fixed-wing machine as it glided serenely for several hundred yards across Yorkshire’s Brompton Dale. Cayley was immensely impressed, but the coachman was
not.

‘Please, Sir George,’ he had shouted to him. ‘I wish to give notice. I was hired to drive, not to fly!’
⁵

There was also in Chanute’s towering work detailed examination of the various experiments in the possibilities of flight that were being conducted around the world. Much of his writing was heavily scientific in nature, with complex diagrams and long mathematical calculations tougher than Chinese calculus. And yet, a warm man, he was also keen to acknowledge many of those scientists, engineers and inventors around the world with whom he had engaged in such extensive correspondence, helping him to become the world’s foremost authority on the subject.

And so now, on this cold and snowy day, he came to the warmest, most heartfelt passage of all, and penned it in his elegant longhand…

If there be one man, more than another, who deserves to succeed in flying through the air, that man is Lawrence Hargrave of Sydney, New South Wales. He has now constructed with his own hands no less than 18 flying machines of increasing size, all of which fly, and as a result of his many experiments (of which an account is about to be given) he now says, in a private letter to the writer, that ‘I know that success is dead sure to come’.

M. Hargrave takes out no patents for any of his aerial inventions, and he publishes from time to time full accounts of them, in order that a mutual interchange of ideas may take place with other inventors working in the same field, so as to expedite joint progress…
⁶

Stanwell Park is a tiny strip of beach, clinging like a crab to a coastal cleft just south of Sydney. On this morning of 12 November 1894, the local eccentric, Lawrence Hargrave, who was known in those parts for his obsessive belief that it was possible to build a machine that would fly—no,
really
—was going about his business with the help of the property caretaker, James Swaine. People down that way had noticed the newly arrived bearded one with the wild eyes, long-suffering wife and gaggle of kids. They knew he was forever pottering in the workshop he had set up on the northern veranda of his house on the hill, and was always muttering about ‘air flows’, ‘thrust’, and ‘curved surfaces’ but few knew what he was on about.

Lawrie Hargrave had always been regarded as a bit odd since, as a young man, he outraged local Rushcutters Bay churchgoers up in Sydney Town by ‘walking on water’, courtesy of some ‘elongated flotation shoes’ that he had designed and built. But look, what on
earth
was he up to now? Flying kites? But what curious-looking kites they were! Three-dimensional kites!

‘Cellular kites’, he called them—like two open-ended boxes, with upwardly curved top surfaces, joined and strengthened by thin struts. And instead of flying around all over the place, diving and bobbing and soaring like normal two-dimensional kites, these strange things were amazingly stable. Somehow, they were built in such a way that as the air flowed over the curves, they were perpetually tugging upwards ever upwards and so seemingly defying the law of gravity, which had ruled the physical world since Eve ate one apple and another fell on Isaac Newton’s head.

First, as a couple of his kids sat at a safe distance watching, Hargrave got one kite in the air and then attached the rope beneath it to the next kite, which went up. And then he and the caretaker Swaine did the same thing twice, then three times more, until four of the contraptions were in the air, all connected to one rope tethered to…to…to what? What was he doing now? Sitting in a kind of sling? Yes, a sling!

And now came the celebrated moment, just before eleven o’clock—a stray puff of wind rising off the majestic Pacific Ocean from the south-west gave a silky surge and then, as it flowed over the curved shape of the box kites, the upward pressure on the rope attached to the inventor increased to the point that…suddenly the 44-year-old broke free of the ‘surly bonds of earth’
⁷
and was propelled upwards. It
was
possible! Before the awed Swaine, Lawrence Hargrave was momentarily lifted 16 feet above the ground and would have gone higher still if not for another rope that kept him tethered to heavy bags of sand on mother earth—and even then it was only just, as Swaine had to desperately wrestle with the block and tackle to hold him down. A ‘Eureka!’ moment, if ever there was one! The key fact he had demonstrated was that when air moves at pace over
curved
wings, there is enough upwards pull to
lift
a human off the ground.