Flying far
The centenary of the 1919 England to Australia Air Race provides a chance to remember this largely forgotten chapter of aviation history and honour the courageous men who pioneered modern international flight.
This year marks the centenary of the epic Air Race from England to Australia.
In the end, only two aircraft to attempt the flight completed it.
THROUGH THE CHILLY d a rk ness of a n ea rly Sunday morning in March 2018, a Qantas 787-9 Dreamliner landed at London’s Heathrow Airport to complete a historic milestone in Australian aviation history. The 17-hour non-stop journey of QF9 from Australia was “game-changing”, said Alan Joyce, Qantas Chief Executive and a passenger on board.
A Qantas 747 Jumbo had made an experimental f light without a break to Sydney in 1999, but QF9 from Perth to London was the first flight of a regular non-stop service between Australia and England. Alan Joyce was right: for Australians at least, the new 14,498km route was a major step forward in global interconnectedness.
Stepping back almost 100 years to the dawn of long-distance aviation, the first aircraft to fly between the two countries took roughly 40 times longer than QF9 to complete a comparable journey from London to Darwin. But rather than being a mere game-changer for 1919, that first flight was a monumental groundbreaker, arguably one of the greatest single advances in aviation history. Andy Thomas, Australian astronaut and veteran of four space missions for NASA, describes the 1919 feat as the “moon landing of its day”. Yet the Australians who first flew halfway around the planet are today unjustly absent from the pantheon of national heroes, and, beyond the ken of aviation historians, their daring deeds are often overlooked.
PRIME MINISTER Billy Hughes claimed to speak for “60,000 dead” Australians at the end of World War I in 1918. Through that battlefield blood sacrifice, Australia was, at Hughes’s insistence, entitled to its own seat at the diplomatic table, a seat he himself would occupy. While peace negotiations proceeded through early 1919 at Versailles, the pugnacious and energetic Hughes was flown back and forth from London to Paris in a converted Handley Page bomber.
A passion for aviation and its peacetime potential was taking hold in Hughes’s mind. New deeds, he sensed, rather than old exhortations to honour, were needed to reinvigorate the bonds of Empire after four terrible years of conflict. The previous Christmas, Hughes had visited wounded Australian troops at Cobham Hall in Kent. Eager to return home, some of the airmen dreamt of flying their aircraft – their “machines”, as they were known at the time – all the way to Australia. At first, Hughes thought the idea too risky. In 1918 no aircraft had yet crossed an ocean, let alone flown anything like the immense distances needed to reach Australia. They were now not being shot at, but aircraft still fell from the sky with depressing frequency.
The idea nevertheless persisted, and in February 1919 Hughes cabled his cabinet back in Melbourne with a proposal. Acting prime minister William Watt responded officially a month later: “With a view to stimulating aerial activity, the Commonwealth Government has decided to offer £10,000 [almost $792,000 now] for the first successful flight to Australia from Great Britain.”
In his appeals to cabinet, Hughes claimed the venture would “concentrate the eyes of the world on us”. That undoubtedly would be so, but what if the latest breed of flying machines proved incapable of reaching Australia? The whole thing could turn into a tragic flop, and nearly did. With his government facing an election later in 1919, Hughes, despite his post-war popularity, was taking a significant political risk.
The government’s offer matched a standing prize staked in 1913 by London’s Daily Mail newspaper for a trans-Atlantic crossing. Delayed by war, it was not until June 1919 that John Alcock and Arthur Brown in a modified Vickers Vimy bomber successfully crossed the Atlantic from Newfoundland to Ireland. The pair spent more than 15 hours above turbulent waves, demonstrating that a flight to Australia might be feasible.
Inevitably, the naysayers back home were quick to savage Hughes’s idea. Melbourne’s The Age dismissed the race as a
“circus”, and a “poorly disguised attempt at selfadvertisement” by the government. “As usual,”
The Age whined, “the person who pays is left wondering what practical value he is to get out of the generous spending of his money.”
Its equally stuffy rival, The Argus, thought government encouragement was unnecessary, because “private enterprise may be trusted to develop aviation”.
With no appreciation of the dangers ahead, The Argus commented that the “achievement would, after war experiences, be something of a commonplace in aviation.” With typical bush terseness The Cowra Free Press felt that as many politicians as possible should be bundled aboard the “experimental voyage” and left “somewhere else”.
But come what may, the race was on.
RULES WERE QUICKLY drafted and refined by the UK’s Royal Aero Club. Only Australian airmen were eligible for the prize; they had to supply their own British-made machine; a time limit of 30 days was set; and all entrants were to depart from Hounslow Heath Aerodrome west of London or, for any seaplanes entered, Calshot near Portsmouth. Darwin was set as the end point, and the prize would remain open until the end of 1920.
Six Australian crews duly entered the race. Most of the men had seen service with the Australian Flying Corps (AFC) over the Western Front or the Middle East. A seventh, unofficial, entry came from French aviator Étienne Poulet.
From the start, the trials and tribulations of each entry made a mockery of the armchair judges and their “commonplace” dismissal of the event. Apart from daily confronting the nerve-racking fragility of their machines, the airmen had to fly in open cockpits through a freezing European winter and storm-tossed Asian monsoon. When they chose to land, or had an emergency descent forced upon them, stretches of open ground that even remotely passed for an airstrip would be terrifyingly scarce. In the end, only two aircraft to attempt the flight completed it.
On 21 October, the first machine left Hounslow and soon faced trouble. The Sopwith Wallaby (G-EAKS) of George Matthews and Thomas Kay was delayed by engine trouble and storms while crossing Europe, and, as wartime tensions lingered, the pair was temporarily imprisoned as suspected Bolsheviks in Yugoslavia. Their journey came to an abrupt end with a crash in Bali in April 1920.
Three weeks after Matthews and Kay departed Hounslow, the race claimed its first casualties. On 13 November 1919, Roger Douglas and Leslie Ross were killed when their Alliance P2 Seabird (G-EAOX), named Endeavour, spiralled out of control shortly after take-off, also from Hounslow.
Another disaster was narrowly averted on 8 December, when a Blackburn Kangaroo (G-EAOW), whose crew included Arctic explorer and fearless battlefield photographer Hubert Wilkins, crash-landed near a mental asylum in Crete. A series of inexplicable problems, including engine oil contaminated with iron filings, led the crew to suspect, but never prove, foul play.
Then, a day after the Blackburn Kangaroo’s race ended, tragedy struck a second time. A Martinsyde Type A MkI (G-EAMR), flown by Cedric Howell and George Fraser, ditched into the sea near the Greek island of Corfu. Both men drowned. By 10 December just three aircraft remained. One was within hours of staking its place in history; in contrast, the Sopwith Wallaby staggered on, while a third machine was yet to start.
Even after the race had been won, an Airco DH.9 (G-EAQM), flown by Ray Parer and John McIntosh, took off from Hounslow in January, determined to reach Australia. They flew over Mt Vesuvius, where billowing hot air “caused them to drop 600ft in a few seconds”. The machine twice caught fire and in Syria they fought off hostile Arabs. The pair took nearly seven months to complete their journey. Having succeeded against all expectations, McIntosh and ‘Battling Ray’ Parer received a hero’s welcome and were awarded consolation prizes of £500 each. Theirs had been the first flight to reach Australia in a singleengine aircraft. And, symbolically at least, they also transported the first airfreight from England – a carefully stowed bottle of whisky from the DH9’s sponsor, Scottish distilling baron Peter Dawson. The whisky was a gift intended for Billy Hughes.
As Parer and McIntosh started their perilous trek, the winning aircraft had been in Australia for almost a month. That momentous achievement had been realised on the afternoon of Wednesday 10 December 1919, when a Vickers Vimy MkIV bomber (G-EAOU), similar to that used by Alcock and Brown to traverse the Atlantic about six months earlier, “crossed the coast of Australia at twenty minutes past three o’clock” after
a six-hour flight from Timor. The Northern Territory Times and Gazette reported that “less than half an hour later it had landed… and the longest [flight] in the history of the world, was over.”
The extraordinary achievement took 135 hours in the air and came 27 days and 20 hours after taking off from a snowcovered Hounslow. On board were: South Australian pilot Ross Smith; his co-pilot, navigator, cameraman and older brother, Keith; and mechanics Walter ‘Wally’ Shiers (also from SA) and Jim Bennett from Victoria. The team finally landed at a makeshift aerodrome hacked from scrub alongside Fannie Bay Gaol. Darwin’s population was then less than 1500, but Ross Smith estimated “about 2,000…ordinary citizens” turned out to greet them. Such was the frenzy of excitement surrounding the Vimy’s arrival, he could be forgiven a little exaggeration.
THROUGH THEIR JOURNEY, Smith and his fellow pioneering aviators struggled with iced-up goggles and frozen flying suits over the Alps and were battered by sandstorms at Baghdad. To save weight they flew without a radio receiver, making weather predictions guesswork. Their only navigational aids were a handheld compass and rudimentary maps, and, when flying blind above cloud or over water and featureless terrain, Keith relied on dead reckoning to approximate their position.
Ross worried the undercarriage might be wrenched off by tree stumps erupting from a rough-hewn jungle airstrip at Singora in Siam (Thailand). He remarked it was “by the merciful guidance of Providence” that they came to rest safely. He had previously quipped that the registration, G-EAOU, stood for “God ’Elp All Of Us”. The Vimy was nearly bogged without hope at Pisa in Italy and at Surabaya in the Dutch East Indies, where locals solved the problem by stripping bamboo matting from their houses to make a take-off strip. Such were the trials of just a few of their 14 originally planned stops and 11 unscheduled landings en route to Darwin.
As the race wore on, Poulet and his mechanic Jean Benoist in their Caudron G4 biplane looked like they might upstage the Vimy. On 14 November, The Sydney Morning Herald fretted that “if Poulet maintains his present rate of flight…chances of an Australian airman beating him…will depend on a possible accident”. The newspaper need not have worried. Finally overtaken by the Vimy, Poulet abandoned his flight after a “vulture dashed into his machine” in southern Burma [Myanmar]. The Vimy forged ahead, its twin Rolls Royce Eagle VIII engines droning on and on, and on.
Billy Hughes’s “eyes of the world” on Australia prediction was fulfilled as news of the Vimy’s journey was keenly followed. When it reached Darwin, The New York Times called Ross Smith the “foremost living aviator”. The flight was described in the House of Lords as an “epoch in history”. As well as being a momentous aviation accomplishment, the flight marked the birth of airmail. The Vimy carried 364 self-addressed envelopes from well-wishers hoping for a souvenir of the great event. Once in Australia, specially printed “First Aerial Mail – England to Australia” labels were added then cancelled with local postmarks and crewmembers signed the envelopes. These Ross Smith “Vignettes”, were Australia’s first commemorative philatelic items.
Sweetly fresh-faced, Ross Smith was only 25 at war’s end, yet in those four years he had become one of Australia’s most celebrated soldiers and airmen. The ribbons above his left breast pocket told a story of conspicuous valour on