1897 - 1935

It is a commonly shared story in Bondi that Charles Kingsford Smith, the first aviator to fly across the Pacific Ocean, was also the first person to be rescued by the surf life saving reel in Bondi. While it isn’t conclusive that this actually occured it is a legend of Bondi which is widely circulated.

Born in Hamilton, Queensland, Sir Charles Edward Kingsford Smith, known as Smithy, was one of the world’s most notable aviators and Australia’s boldest pilot, who used his incredible stamina to advance global travel and paved the way for the domestic and international travel we enjoy today. He was the first aviator to fly across the mid-Pacific, in 1928, and on 24 and 25 June 1930, he and a crew of three performed the memorable feat of flying across the Atlantic, from Portmarnock, in Fingal, Ireland to Harbour Grace, in Newfoundland, Canada.

From 1903 to 1907, the young Charles and his parents lived in Vancouver, Canada, and after they moved to Sydney, when he was 10, he attended St Andrew’s Cathedral School and Sydney Technical High School. After graduation, he took up an engineering apprenticeship with the Colonial Sugar Refining Company. During World War 1, in 1917 and ’18, he served in the Royal Flying Corps, and after being wounded, he served as an instructor in the Royal Air Force. In 1924, at age 27, he became the chief pilot for West Australian Airways.

Two years later, he introduced his own interstate flight services, and in 1927, he and colleague Charles T. P. Ulm flew around Australia in fewer than 11 days. The following year, the two Aussies and a crew of two flew from Oakland, California, to Brisbane, Australia via the Hawaiian capital Honolulu and the Fijian capital Suva. In October 1933, Smithy took seven days and five hours to fly solo from England to Australia, and the next year, he and P.G. Taylor flew from Brisbane to San Francisco.

On a personal level, Charles was married twice, to Thelma Corby in 1923 and Mary Powell in 1930. 

In 1935, when he was only 38, he and fellow Australian aviator Thomas Pethybridge disappeared after flying over the Indian city of Calcutta (Kolkata) en route from London to Australia. The plane was presumed to have crashed, and no wreckage of it was found for 18 months. Australians mourned the death of the flying ace who’d thrilled them with so many feats and firsts throughout the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression.

Smithy is said to have a remarkable connection with Bondi. In 1906, at a time that leisure and beach culture were evolving and swimming in the surf was a relatively new pastime, nine-year-old Charles is said to be the first person to be rescued by lifesavers who were using the surf-lifesaving reel. The simple but ingenious device had been invented only two weeks earlier, by local surf-club members Lyster Ormsby, Percy Flynn and Sig Fullwood. The reel was a godsend for Bondi’s lifesavers, who could now pull a drowning swimmer into shore quicker than when their only ally had been their strength as swimmers. In early documentation of rescues in Bondi appears the name Chas Smith accompanied another 9 year old boy on the 3rd of January 1907. Later this would become the myth that Chas became Charles Kingsford Smith – its true he was about that age and based in Sydney in 1907, but there is no other primary proof that this is true.

Fully grown Smithy had a lean build and cool blue eyes, which you might be old enough to have seen in graphic form on the Australian $20 note that was in circulation between 1966 and 1994. The $1 coin that was minted in 1997 also bore his image, in celebration of the centenary of his birth. Sydney’s Kingsford Smith International Airport was also named in his honour, as were both the division of Kingsford Smith – the federal electorate that surrounds the airport – and the suburb of Kingsford within it.

The name of the trans-Australia, trans-Pacific and trans-Tasman pioneer has also been used for a school, a drive, a pavilion, a memorial and two airbuses, as well as a trans-Encke propeller moonlet – an ‘inferred minor body’ – of the planet Saturn. Surely a bloke couldn’t soar much higher than that!

Courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and the Bondi Surf Bathers Life Saving Club.