Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (5 page)

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Hanging out the porthole? This time he had gone too far and after a few whispered words between Catherine and the ship’s captain it was all organised. In no time Chilla and the young friend he had been doing it with were hauled before Captain Phillips, who gravely informed them that if there was one more instance—just
one more
, do you hear me?—then the two terrors would have to be placed in chains for the duration of the voyage, if not keelhauled first. Was that
absolutely clear
?!?!

Yes, Cap’n. Sorry, Cap’n. Terribly sorry, Cap’n. It will not happen again, Cap’n.

Not to worry, there was soon plenty of excess excitement aboard the
Aorangi
anyway, as the ship crossed the equator. There had long been a tradition among English-speaking seafarers that all who crossed the equator for the first time should be initiated into the Solemn Mysteries of the Ancient Order of the Deep and such. Those who were yet to ‘cross the line’ were derisively referred to as ‘pollywogs’, whereas, once they had crossed and thereby entered into the domain of His Royal Majesty
Neptunus Rex
, otherwise known as King Neptune, they could henceforth be known as ‘trusty shellbacks’…

At the age of just six, thus, Chilla had crossed the line, and—after going through a fun ceremony consisting of having mud and whitewash smeared over his face, and being dumped backwards into a tank of water
26
—was now a trusty shellback.

Although William’s new job as a humble clerk with the Canadian Pacific Railway company wasn’t a particularly well paying one, it was certainly better than being unemployed in Australia, and the family settled down to make the best of it. For at least they had each other and at least Vancouver provided a whole range of fresh outdoor pursuits for them to engage in. On the weekends they would go camping in the great Canadian outdoors, skiing in winter, sailing in summer, salmon fishing any time. The best part of the fishing, apart from the marvellous moment when you first felt the tug on the line, was that it did a lot to put free food on the table, which was a great bonus given William’s humble wage. And somehow, too, Catherine always managed to make that wage go a long way. Generally, William was in his wife’s considerable thrall, acutely aware that he had not turned into the great provider she had thought he would be when they married, and yet also deeply appreciative that she did not rub his nose in it for that fact. A sensitive, retiring type, he was a good father, and that was something…

By this time the ‘Smith’ family had become known as the ‘Kingsford Smith’ family, by virtue of the fact that they were living on a street in Vancouver where two other families named Smith lived, and it was just easier that way. For many families, living in a foreign land would have been daunting, removed as they were from all things familiar including wider family and friends, but not for the Kingsford Smiths. They were entirely self-contained, enjoying their own company enormously and always looking out for each other. Of the children, Harold was perhaps the most serious, feeling the responsibility of being the oldest brother, while Winifred was a deputy mother to Catherine in her relations with the younger ones. Wilfrid, Elsie, Leofric and Eric all had the charming combination of being hard-working but fun-loving types, while the most carefree of the lot was young Chilla—sure as he always was that he only had to stumble and there would be a dozen hands instantly reaching down to lift him up again.

The Wright brothers kept working, as indeed did other aviation inventors around the world. On 20 September 1904, just a little less than a year since their first flight,
Flyer II
hit the launch rails at the nearby prairie cow paddock owned by Dayton banker Torrence Huffman and lent to them
gratis.

Made of fragile white pine, instead of spruce, their new flying machine was equipped with a stunningly powerful 16-horsepower engine and a more efficient wing shape. In the absence of reliable winds of the required strength, the Wrights had developed a catapult launch system consisting of a tower from which a cable was attached to 1600-pound iron weights. With the motor running and poised to launch, the pilot released the weights, which had been winched to the top of the frame and attached to the plane by a cable.
27

It worked, first time.

Older brother Wilbur managed to take off and pilot
Flyer II
in a complete circle of a distance of just over 4000 feet and remain aloft for a full minute and a half! A couple of months later, the distance covered had grown to 3 miles and they were able to stay aloft for over five minutes. With each flight the brothers were growing in understanding what modifications their machine needed to get better control in the air, and also
feeling
that air better, how it was filled with eddies, pockets and currents, which were not necessarily apparent to an observer on the ground. And, of course, other intrepid aviators from all parts of the developed world kept doing their utmost to get aloft and replicate what the Wright brothers had done. Nowhere were they trying harder than in France, where, with its long tradition of trying to thwart the laws of gravity in balloons and gliders, the nation was positively beside itself with enthusiasm for flying…

For the French, the great breakthrough came on 12 November 1906, when a Brazilian-born man by the name of Alberto Santos-Dumont took off from the Parisian park Champs de Bagatelle, within the Bois de Boulogne, in a machine built in secret by the
frères
Voisin—two brothers who operated what was later acknowledged as the first commercial aircraft factory in Europe. The plane, christened
14-bis Oiseau de Proie
(bird of prey), but colloquially dubbed
Canard
, was an enormous version of Lawrence Hargrave’s box kite, based directly on his still unpatented designs, with an engine and propeller attached. In this strange contraption the foundation member of ‘the beautiful people’—with his always fashionable dress, bowler hat and impeccable suit set off by his gaily billowing red scarf and perpetually preened moustache—succeeded in tearing across the ground like an ‘infuriated grasshopper’,
28
and then taking off to fly
un magnifique
239 yards in less than twenty-two seconds!
Victory!
The first real flight in Europe!

Santos-Dumont, alternately laughing and crying with joy, was carried around the field on the shoulders of his many admirers. Paris was agog, and its immense excitement was manifested by the wall-to-wall coverage in the French newspapers the following day. To this point the 33-year-old Santos-Dumont had been famous in Europe as a rather foppish pioneer of the lighter-than-air dirigibles, and he had been a frequent and famous sight above the streets of Paris in a basket beneath his elongated balloon, elegantly floating along. He was a trendsetter, as witness the fact that once, over dinner at Maxim’s—celebrating his victory in a balloon race around the Eiffel Tower—he had complained to his jeweller friend Louis Cartier how difficult it was to check flight times on his pocket watch while flying, so Cartier had invented something called a ‘wristwatch’ for his friend. And now
everyone
was wearing them!

But nothing Santos-Dumont had ever done had attracted attention like this. Clearly, he had abandoned balloons and was now going for heavier-than-air planes. And whereas the Wright brothers had needed a rail and derrick and weights to launch their plane—and it only worked when the wind was blowing in the right direction—the thing about Santos-Dumont’s aeroplane was that it had needed none of that. He had wheels to launch himself along the ground, and an engine to provide propulsion, and he had flown.
Le tout Paris
had seen it!

One observer who was present at the flight and keenly interested in the press reports the following day was Britain’s Lord Northcliffe, the proprietor of the
Daily Mail.
Immediately upon reading his own newspaper’s coverage of the event the outraged Lord Northcliffe—who had begun his serious journalistic career by becoming editor of
Bicycling News
—got his editor on the phone and put his views in the strongest terms.

‘The news,’ he said deliberately, ‘is not that Santos-Dumont flies 722 feet, but that England is no longer an island. There will be no more sleeping safely behind the wooden walls of old England with the Channel our safety moat. It means the aerial chariots of a foe descending on British soil if war comes.’
29

The implications of flying were huge, they were going to change the world
and
sell a lot of newspapers. The
Daily Mail
, Lord Northcliffe told his editor, had to be at the forefront of this coverage and he further instructed that the man he had recently appointed as the world’s first specialised aviation correspondent, Harry Harper, be immediately dispatched to Paris to interview Santos-Dumont. From that point on, the indefatigable Harper, with his owl glasses, quizzical but distracted manner, and mania for taking notes in his notably large copperplate script, became a perpetual presence at airfields around Europe. If it ‘appened, ‘Arry was there. Or at least heard about it.

One such aeronautical event that Harry Harper covered early in his new job was a flight by a British Army soldier, Sapper Moreton, who, attached to an extraordinary collection of Hargrave box kites, was borne aloft to an altitude of 2600 feet above Sussex, and stayed there for over an hour! With just such a system, the British Army intended to be able to easily discern enemy movements well before they reached the men on the ground.
30
A veritable revolution was under way.

‘The kindness of parents to their children,’ Lawrence Hargrave wrote to a friend, at a time when he was not only crook but going through familial turmoil, ‘is like presents to savages. Both are incapable of appreciating a gift. Whatever love you feel for your offspring, be careful of not showing it, be stern, and give as you would a bone to a dog.’
31

It was, of course, a severe statement from an occasionally severe man, and yet the truth of it was that the older Lawrence Hargrave became, the more difficult he found it not to show his love for his children. He and his long-suffering wife, Margaret—who had no interest in his wretched experiments, and only wished they wouldn’t so dominate their lives—had had seven children, of whom five had survived, and Hargrave was always very conscious of his duty to his offspring. As to which ones he was closest to there was little doubt. His first-born daughter, Nellie, and his only son, Geoffrey, were the sole members of the family who really took an interest in his endless experiments. And after Nellie and one of his other daughters, Margaret, moved to England to study art and subsequently marry, the relationship between father and son became closer than ever. This led to the quietly spoken Geoffrey even becoming his father’s scientific collaborator after the young man began attending Sydney Technical High School. One of Geoffrey’s great passions would become the modifying and refining of his father’s original rotary engine design—whose first version had run on compressed air—by building a petrol-fuelled rotary engine. ‘If he develops a little ambition,’ the proud father had written to a friend, ‘I think he will outstrip the ruck…‘
32

Of course Geoffrey was not the only person to become interested in his father’s engines. Lawrence Hargrave was soon approached by some German professors visiting Australia, with the offer to display his kites and engines in Munich’s Deutsches Museum, where his work could be readily accessed by all interested workers in the field. Given that none of the Commonwealth government, New South Wales government, Melbourne Museum, Smithsonian Institution, or any of the British museums had previously shown any interest in displaying them, Hargrave agreed, and it was not long before European engineers were all over them, paying particular attention to his revolutionary—in both meanings of the word—rotary engine.
33
And well before that, almost as soon as he had invented it, Hargrave had provided notes on the concept to
Railroad and Engineering
journal, an English publication, and it was this that had first attracted Chanute’s attention to him. Thus, while the Wright brothers continued to zealously guard their every breakthrough and take exhaustive legal action against everyone who they felt tried to copy them, Hargrave’s approach, from the beginning, could not have been more different.

It was a current that was surely going to kill him. On the hot afternoon of 2 January 1907, the ten-year-old Chilla—on a brief holiday back home in Australia with his mother, paid for by Catherine’s father—was swimming out beyond the breakers with his cousin Rupert Swallow at Bondi Beach when the two boys were suddenly gripped by a strong rip that carried them further out to sea.
34

Chilla was almost immediately in trouble, as was Rupert. Try as they might to swim towards the shore, the land quickly receded and they were soon exhausted, their arms feeling like lead. Both began to flounder, and Chilla to swallow water, as a haze of blackness began to envelop him.

So easy…now…to stop…thrashing…to let go…to sink down…just a little…letting go…

Suddenly a strong hand descended into the water and gripped him, probably at the last possible instant. The hand belonged to a man by the name of Warwick Wilce, of Croydon, and he was in turn attached to what was know as a lifeline, a long rope stored in a box on the beach which allowed the lifesaver to stay connected to the shore.
35
Back on the beach, the surf lifesavers of the newly established Bondi Surf Life Saving Club began to haul on the line, and both Chilla and his rescuer, Wilce, were quickly brought back to the shore, just as Rupert Swallow was, by other lifesavers. Rupert quickly recovered from the ordeal, but not Chilla. Once back on the sand in the middle of the crowd that had gathered, he not only looked dead, but probably was.

BOOK: Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men
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