Guy Menzies phones home from Hokitika on the evening of January 7, 1931, while postmaster Ralph Cox listens in. Photo taken by David Stevenson.
Young journalists today, if denied the use of their iPhones and
their laptops, wouldn’t have the slightest clue how to do it. But 85 years ago,
in January 1931, reporters from the Greymouth
Evening Star - armed with no more than their wits and their Remington
portable typewriters - hurdled with impressive ease the massive challenges that
confronted them. A rebellious young daredevil flyer called Guy Lambton Menzies
had crashed-landed in a South Westland swamp at the end of a groundbreaking unscheduled flight from Sydney. It was one of the biggest international news story of the
day, making a sizeable splash on The New
York Times’ world page (under the headline “Youth Breaks Record on Tasman
Sea Flight”). Even before The Gray Lady’s story was printed, those Grey Star reporters had got it on to the
front page of such distant evening newspapers as the Corsicana Daily News in Texas and the Iola Register in Kansas - that very same day! (Well, in fairness, in the meantime it had crossed the international dateline, but still …) In startlingly quick
time, US dailies such as the Morning News
in Wilmington, Delaware (“Another Famous Southern Cross”) and the Terril Record in Iowa (“Inglorious
Ending of a Glorious Flight”) printed Greymouth photographer Lawrence Andrew
Inkster’s images of Menzies and his Avro 616 Sports Avian IVa – Charles
Kingsford Smith castoff, the Southern Cross
Junior – upside down beside Alf Wall’s cow paddocks at Herepo outside Harihari.
Photos at crash site by Lawrence Andrew Inkster
Inkster’s photos,
which clearly showed the registration letters G-ABCF underneath the Avian’s
wings, had instantly given rise to some Kiwi wit – they stood for, one Harihari
humorist promptly declared, “Gee – Aussie Bastards Can’t Fly!”
The 21-year-old Menzies had hit the La
Fontaine ground at 3.15pm on January 7, 1931. By the time he had fallen headfirst into mud out
of his cockpit, waded across swampland to find help, had afternoon tea with May
Berry and was put in Bert Kelly’s cream truck,
Grey Star and Grey River Argus reporters were well on
the way south to meet him. One had somehow latched on to the story almost as
soon as it happened, and had already spoken to Menzies by telephone from
Harihari postmaster George Rowley’s store. It was a trying interview – after
his 11-hour 45-minute flight from Mascot, Menzies was still pretty much deaf
from the constant roar of the Avro’s engines.
Photo by David Stevenson.
The Grey
Star and Argus reporters were
there at Ross, 29 miles of then hazardous road north of Harihari and 40 miles from
Greymouth, when Menzies arrived in Kelly’s truck. His story was disseminated so
far and so rapidly that it had reached Sydney by 3pm Eastern Australian time
(5pm in New Zealand) and a Sydney Morning
Herald journalist was able to ring Menzies’ mother, Ida, in Drummoyne, to
give her the good news of Guy’s “safe” arrival. In those days, New Zealand’s
cooperative news agency, involving dailies both metropolitan and provincial
feeding copy into a national grid, was called the United Press Association. As affiliates,
the Grey Star and Grey River Argus filed stories of major
news value to Wellington, from where those of international appeal were sent on to Australia and beyond
by “electric telegraph”. In 1931, UPA was under the management of former
Christchurch Star news editor Alexander
Buchan Lane.
The impression one gains from Max Wearne’s
2005 The
Life of Guy Menzies: The Forgotten Flyer is that Australian newspapers were
as much on top of this story as those in New Zealand. Yes, New Zealand
journalists were supplied with some details about mystery man Menzies, but
Australia’s eastern seaboard was two hours behind New Zealand, and yet New Zealand
newspapers still “owned” this story the next morning. For ample evidence of this, one only
has to compare The New Zealand Herald’s
massive coverage (above) with the skimpy paragraphs in The Sydney Morning Herald, a newspaper in which the most prominent Menzies
“news” item was a half-page Atlantic Motor Oil advertisement lauding “this
daring aviator”.
Now in fairness, Harihari is about as a remote
a hamlet as there is in a sparsely populated and rugged country. In that part
of the New Zealand, in that era, telephone communications were only possible
through party lines, directed onward through the post office in the town of
Hokitika. When on the evening of the Menzies landing, postmaster Ralph Cox put Menzies
through to Sydney, to speak to his mother and to Frederick William Tonkin
(1884-1956), the much-travelled editor of the Daily Guardian, it was the first time such calls had been made
between Westland’s capital and Sydney (two firsts in one day!).
Menzies relaxes in the Cox home, the postmasters' residence.
Photo by David Stevenson.
Menzies' log book shows that he estimated he would land "about Greymouth".
In the circumstances, the achievement of the Grey Star and Grey River Argus reporters, and the Greymouth correspondent of the
Christchurch Press, was truly
remarkable. Thousands of words were sent in extraordinarily short time across
the world, followed the next day by the prints from the crash scene taken by
Inkster and a photographer who had somehow managed to find his way to South
Westland from Dunedin, Alexander William Bathgate (right, 1877-1961) (remember, there
was no Haast Pass back then, nor would there be one for another 30 years).
While Inkster was still on his way south to capture
Menzies at the crashed Avro, two of the more famous Menzies images, one of him
on the telephone and the other at dinner with reporters and his hosts in
Hokitika, were taken by a young Hokitika photographer named David Stevenson Jr
(1907-1949).
Inkster’s photos
were prominently used in the Auckland
Star and Wellington Evening Post on
the 10th and, with Stevenson’s and Bathgate’s, in the Auckland Weekly News on the 14th, no
mean feat given the capricious picturegram method of transmitting images by wire back
then. Inkster’s images also appeared in Australian newspapers from the 13th.
For someone whose work in the La Fontaine swamp in 1931 is mostly uncredited
today, Inkster’s legacy is that his photos of the upturned Avro are the ones by
which the Menzies story is still most easily identified. However, one of his
more telling images, illustrating just how boggy La Fontaine was back then (below, right), is
no longer used, credited or otherwise. Stevenson and Bathgate have been given
no lasting credit, either.
The talented Inkster, left, was born in Westport on April 2, 1897, the son of
a Shetland Island migrant who died when Inkster was six months old. He was raised by his mother, who came from Araluen, outside Canberra. Inkster first worked on the railways but found his forte in
photography and joined forces with James Ring in 1924. He took over Ring’s
renowned agency when Ring retired in 1929. It was still called Inkster’s when
Joe Quinn became owner after Inkster’s death on August 29, 1955. Quinn also photographed
for the Grey Star.
For the Star and
Argus reporters to have got hold of
the story, to have made contact with Menzies, either by phone or in person, to
have carried out their interviews, typed their long and detailed stories, and
to have filed them from Hokitika on the night of the crashlanding, using party lines, in the time
they had available to them ahead of deadlines, was quite astonishing. Don’t worry, I know what I’m talking about – I
once had to file a story using a party line from a remote part of the West of
Ireland, and it was a most exacting task - and that was in 1974! Remember, this
flight in 1931 was unscheduled, made by an unknown pilot. And it ended a very long way from Menzies' intended destination outside Blenheim (or, as Australian authorities had been led to believe, Perth). So at first, at
least, details were sketchy to say the least. What the Star and Argus men did
took some doing.
Archibald Kibble
The Grey Star
team was marshalled by the newspaper’s editor, Archibald Kibble. Kibble was
born in Holborn in London on November 7, 1879, and first worked in New Zealand
as a clerk in Napier in 1911. He started his career in journalism in Hobart in
1914 and enlisted for World War I when he returned to New Zealand in 1917 and
settled in Christchurch. Kibble became editor of the Ashburton Guardian in 1919 and took over as editor of the Grey Star when John Robert Wallace died
in April 1921. Kibble remained editor for 25 years. There was a break in 1939
when he went back to England, but he returned at the outbreak of World War II.
After leaving the Grey Star in 1946,
Kibble returned to Christchurch and was still in journalism at the age of 78.
After two trips back to England in the 1950s, he eventually settled back there in
1959 and died on July 26, 1965, in Bournemouth.
"Our photographer", the "first man on the scene with a camera", was in fact Lawrence Inkster of Greymouth.
Sadly, the names of these intrepid Grey Star and Argus
reporters who covered this historic event are unknown. The hundreds of newspapers around the world which
published their stories only gave them the standard “Our Correspondent” byline,
as if to establish they had someone on the scene.
Uncredited Inkster photo in an Australian newspaper.
"Gee – Aussie Bastards Can’t Fly!" can't be seen!
We do know, however, that one “ace” New Zealand
journalist, James Ogden Hanlon, was back in harness in Christchurch, after
stints with the Sydney Sun and as editor
of The Fiji Times in the late
1920s. Born in Auckland on June 10, 1899, Jim Hanlon had worked for the Auckland Star, Wanganui Chronicle and the Grey
River Argus before going to Australia and on to Suva. He spent most of the 1930s as a
chief of staff and roving reporter based in Norfolk, England, before returning
to Auckland. Hanlon died on June 21, 1986, aged 87, and is buried at Purewa Cemetery.
Above, Menzies with young female admirers in Hokitika. Below, Menzies' plane is carted from Hokitika to Greymouth
Below, in Greymouth.
Amazing how back then a single engine crash made such news. Then records in aviation were still being set though. One of the sayings we had when I did a lot of flying is a good crash is one you can walk away from. Glad I never even had one of those.
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