Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (6 page)

To most of the bystanders it was obvious that his rescuers had got there too late and he was
gone.
And yet even as some people, mostly women, began to wail at the tragedy of his loss—and young Rupert, wrapped in a towel, gazed dully at his seemingly lifeless cousin, trying to comprehend the magnitude of what had just happened—a short, angular woman with a no-nonsense attitude about her strode forward and took charge. Her name, with title, was Nurse Sweeney. (Her Christian name was Sadie, but no-one ever called her anything other than Nurse Sweeney. She really looked as though she had just been
born
a ‘Nurse’, and there had never been any need to call her anything different.) She was from Quirindi, a bit over 200 miles north of Sydney, and was visiting Bondi to get some sun and fresh air, as she had herself been poorly from an undiagnosed illness. Luckily Nurse Sweeney had been trained in the modern method of resuscitation—the Sylvester Method.

Turning the young lad over on to his back, she kneeled at his head, pulled his tongue forward to clear a passage to his throat, and then grabbed both his arms at the wrists and pulled them out and upwards until they were above his head, pulling his ribs up and sucking air into his lungs. She then pushed his arms back down and applied a gentle pressure on his ribs to force the air back out again—and repeated the process between fifteen and twenty times a minute.
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A persistent woman, Nurse Sweeney. Even when a quarter of an hour had passed and there was still no response from the lad, she didn’t give up. She had made a career of beating death back from the door and if, in this case, death was in fact already through the door and halfway down the hallway before she caught up with it, well, it was just going to have to be dragged out again. For some onlookers in the crowd it was so obvious that she was wasting her time that they began to drift away, some of them even returning to the surf. And then suddenly, after nigh on half an hour, the kid coughed. He coughed!

It was true.

Somewhere from the darkest depths where death lurked, Chilla, or the thing inside him that still stood for life, was slowly, slowly, agonisingly making its way to the surface, and when he finally did burst through, coughing furiously and expelling the last gulp of water from his lungs, it sounded almost like a spluttering motor…

Though shocked and trembling when he at last came to, there was nothing physically wrong with him that a shaky night in bed, with his calm and caring mother watching over him by candlelight until dawn, couldn’t fix. Emotionally, it might have been another question…

Sadly, in the case of Nurse Sweeney, death would have its ultimate revenge when—though still fighting it to her last breath—just a few weeks later she succumbed to her illness and passed away.
³⁷

And finally it had come to this.

After endless experimentation and modification mixed with many test flights—nearly all of it well away from the public eye and journalists—the Wright brothers’ latest version of
Flyer I
and
II
,
Flyer III
, had magically grown and changed shape from its previous incarnations. The propellers were still driven by a single 16-horsepower engine, but the elevator and rudder were twice the size of the earlier models and extended back twice as far from the wings, which now had a slight upward tilt from the fuselage. Flights of up to 24 miles in figures of eight and of thirty-nine and a half minutes’ duration had been accomplished.

The new version of
Flyer III
, in which they had hoped to interest the US Army Signal Corps, was powered by an improved engine producing between 30 and 40 horsepower, and the pilot sat upright for the first time, exerting control by virtue of twin ‘joysticks’ variously connected to the wing-warping cables, elevator and rudder.

Despite a shocking setback when the plane had crashed during a demonstration for the US Army, breaking Orville’s left thigh and several ribs and killing his passenger, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge (a member of the official army board, who now had the disastrous distinction of being the first fatality from a powered flight), the brothers still felt that they were at last ready to demonstrate their flying machine to an international audience. Specifically, they wanted to show it in France, which—absurdly, in the Wrights’ view—considered itself the centre of world aviation. Ideally, the brothers wished to make it clear that anyone buying a plane in Europe should buy a Wright plane from either them or one of their European agents, otherwise they would not be getting the
best.

So it was that at Hunaudières racetrack, about 7 miles from Le Mans and 132 miles south-west of Paris, on the Saturday afternoon of 8 August 1908, Wilbur Wright continued to fuss about the machine that he had personally and oh so methodically assembled over the previous two months, as the impatient, sceptical crowd waited. No matter that these spectators from the French aviation community were there at Wilbur’s specific invitation, he was oblivious of the expectations of others, and kept to his own schedule—just as he had done since arriving in France—leaving nothing to chance, and doing everything personally to ensure that every last tiny detail was looked after, under his own hand and done absolutely perfectly to
his
satisfaction.

‘LE BLUFF CONTINUE’, a Parisian newspaper had trumpeted in a headline the day before, as Gallic impatience had boiled over into irritation and frustration at the continued delays to the flight. Yes, they had read all the stories about these Wright brothers and knew that flight in some form was possible—as witness the wondrous leap of Santos-Dumont—but could this strange, gaunt little man in his dusty, dark grey suit with a starched white wing collar, all ‘neath a ludicrous green cap really do what he claimed and fly this awkward-looking thing wherever he wanted? He seemed so odd, so disdainful of all around him, so charmless, so
unfashionable
—especially when compared with their own incomparable Santos-Dumont—it was inconceivable that one so ordinary could accomplish something so miraculous. He really must be a
bluffeur
…

‘Even if this man sometimes deigns to smile,’ the French aviator Léon Delagrange, there for the occasion, would write of first meeting with him, ‘one can say with certainty that he has never known the sweetness of tears. Has he a heart? Has he loved? Has he suffered? An enigma, a mystery.’
³⁸
The French were accustomed to visitors to their shores raving about the wonders of their country, the wine, the food, the women, the Eiffel Tower, but this strange one barely said a word.

On this afternoon, Wilbur Wright continued his preparations regardless, entirely untroubled. His every move was calculated and even, yes, rather birdlike, in the kind of twitchy way he did things—tightening nuts, checking struts, using a screwdriver on the carburettor—but that was the only thing that remotely resembled flying.

Suddenly, however, Wilbur straightened, smiled, yes,
smiled
, and spoke. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, to no-one in particular among those standing around, ‘I am about to fly.’
³⁹
With which, and with absolutely no fanfare for the common man, he climbed aboard the aeroplane, gave the signal for the engines to be started up, and moved into position as the twin propellers whirled.

As the crowd pressed forward and positively crackled with excitement, Wilbur pulled the release mechanism, causing six large discs of iron to plummet from the derrick, and the plane accelerated along its rail until, four seconds later, the strange American was airborne! What followed was nothing less than extraordinary. While some in the crowd had previously witnessed flying of some sort—and two of them in Léon Delagrange and Louis Blériot who had themselves flown, a little—the vast majority of the flights witnessed or executed had been of a few seconds in duration, or perhaps a minute, and all of them in a roughly straight line.

Now, though, before their very eyes, Wilbur Wright took the plane twice around the field in an almost perfect circle—several consecutive arcs of triumph—before executing a perfect figure eight. Around the racecourse, many local children—boys and girls both—who had climbed trees in lieu of an invitation, cheered Wilbur to the echo and waved their caps at him as he passed overhead. He then brought the plane in for a precisely executed landing, 107 seconds after take-off.
⁴⁰

Uproar. Complete pandemonium. Cheering, whistling, crying. All those who had been critical and sceptical had now been definitively proved wrong. The Wrights really
could
fly, and superbly at that. With such control! Such
finesse
! Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!

Even Wilbur himself seemed moved by the crowd’s reaction and gave a small cheery wave upon alighting from the plane. He was particularly pleased at the stunned reaction of some of the French flyers, who had come to see him perform.

‘
Cet homme a conquis l’air
,’ voices in the crowd exclaimed. ‘
Il n’est pas bluffeur
!’

‘
Nous sommes battus
,’ cried Delagrange, while furiously pumping Wilbur’s hand. ‘
Eh
,
bien. Nous n’existons pas
!’

For his part, Blériot—a tall man with sad, hound-dog eyes and a perpetually sleepy moustache—was equally congratulatory.

‘For us in France and everywhere,’ he told a reporter, ‘a new era in mechanical flight has begun. I am not sufficiently calm after the event thoroughly to express my opinion. My view can best be expressed in these words—
c’est merveilleux
!’
⁴¹

Quietly pleased at the reaction of the French aviators—for his personal view on their own attempts at flight was that they were only capable of ‘hopping from the ground, or fluttering along like a hen chased by a dog!’
⁴²
—Wilbur told them he could have stayed up there for an hour if he had liked. And yet Wilbur was less circumspect in his letter that night to Orville, who was holding the fort back in Dayton: ‘Blériot and Delagrange were so excited they could scarcely speak, and Kapperer could only gasp and could not talk at all. You should have seen them.’
⁴³

The following morning, the Parisian newspaper
Le Figaro
set the tone: ‘It was not merely a success but a triumph; a conclusive trial and a decisive victory for aviation, the news of which will revolutionize scientific circles throughout the world.’ And so it did. Over the next few days, Wilbur continued to fly at the racetrack, making progressively longer flights before ever larger crowds, as more and more people made their way there to witness
le miracle.

Afterwards there were many banquets in Wilbur’s honour and great celebrations. At all of them he was asked to speak, but he declined, noting on one famous occasion: ‘The only birds who speak are parrots and they can’t fly very high.’
⁴⁴
(
Quel bon mot!
)

No matter. The feats of the Wright brothers spoke for themselves, and now that they had demonstrated their plane’s capability in Europe, they had unleashed an entire new wave of energy towards aviation in general.

In Canada, young Chilla Kingsford Smith continued to prosper, at least mostly. At the Queens School in Vancouver, which he was attending, a particularly perceptive teacher noted of young Charles’s conduct that while he was ‘Good’, he was also ‘Silly at times’.
⁴⁵
A young man of strong abilities in many areas, the general view of his teachers was that he was a good egg with the only real worry being that he lacked the maturity to focus and grind down if a subject didn’t interest him. At least he was adjudged ‘Excellent’ at writing, ‘Very good’ at arithmetic and drawing, and ‘Good’ at geography—a subject he was no doubt helped in by the fact that he had already seen a fair chunk of the world that his fellow students only knew of from books.

In London, on 5 October 1908, Lord Northcliffe announced that the
Daily Mail
was offering a prize of £500 for the first successful flight across the Channel, a distance of 22 miles at its narrowest point. The
Mail
’s nearest equivalent publication in France,
Le Matin
, sniffed that this was nothing but a cheap publicity stunt, as there was no chance that the paper would have to pay up for many years. For its part, the widely read satirical publication
Punch
offered its own handsome prize for the first man to swim across the Atlantic, and an even bigger prize for someone who could fly to Mars and back in a week.
⁴⁶

Untroubled, Northcliffe was so satisfied with the publicity the offer generated that he doubled the prize to £1000.

He had two motivations. Firstly, it was obvious that the level of public interest in flying was enormous, and by offering such a prize, and corralling much of the subsequent story to his own paper, he would easily make that money back. But secondly, he had been appalled to see that his own British government had not realised that planes were going to change the world—most particularly when it came to the colossal effect they would have on a war—and he was determined to do what he could to awaken some interest. After all, Lieutenant B.F.S. Baden-Powell, the President of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, was in no doubt about the significance of mechanical flight, after observing some of Wilbur Wright’s first flights in Europe, and even going aloft
with
him on one occasion. He had been quoted: ‘That Wilbur Wright is in possession of a power which controls the fate of nations is beyond dispute.’
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