QF32 Read online

  After eleven years, Dad’s time at ANA came to a ­voluntary end after a disagreement with Sir Ivan. Dad had suspended Sir Ivan’s nephew for being absent from work when an incident occurred at Perth Airport. Dad had a lot of power and influence at ANA, but it didn’t extend to being able to suspend a Holyman. To his extraordinary credit, and as a measure of his integrity, Dad refused to have his decision overruled and so resigned from the job he loved dearly.

  ANA would make other mistakes. The Australian Government approached Sir Ivan about nationalising ANA and making it Australia’s sole domestic airline. Sir Ivan, a staunch believer of private enterprise, refused the offer. Another offer was made to a smaller airline – Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services – an offer that was accepted by its founder Sir Hudson Fysh. Qantas was turbo-charged into the form we know today and ANA would find itself ‘kneecapped’ by the government, which set up a domestic competitor (TAA) and restricted the aircraft ANA could purchase. After Sir Ivan Holyman’s death, ANA’s steady demise continued until it was sold to Sir Reginald Ansett, who then rebadged the airline as Ansett–ANA.

  As for Dad, he went to work for his father-in-law at his newsagency for a time and then started a furniture business called StyleCraft, which became successful.

  Dad finally got to fly. When I started pilot training in the RAAF, Dad bought a Piper Turbo Arrow aircraft (registration VH-SOI) and started his flying lessons again on the same day that I started my flying in the RAAF.

  Patricia Champion de Crespigny, my wonderful mother, died unexpectedly when I was in my final year at school. Mum had dedicated her life to bringing up four over-energetic sons and forwent so many of life’s pleasures – she never travelled overseas. I left home to join the RAAF and Dad later married Mariea, another wonderful woman 22 years his junior who has been a loving wife to Dad and a wonderful mentor to me. Although Mariea is only nine years older than I am, I introduce her to my friends as my ‘Wicked Stepmother’. Recipients show surprise at this introduction, but I figure, all stories with stepmothers present them being wicked and feeding poisoned apples to their children – so why should my stepmother be any different? I enjoy the process as everyone who meets Mariea quickly comes to love her and appreciate the wonderful partner she is to Dad. I call her my WSM and she proudly signs her letters to me just the same.

  Dad is still a legend and inspiration to us all. He’s 86 years young now, runs an Alpaca farm, keeps his flying licence current, flying his Piper Turbo Arrow aircraft every few days and swims a kilometre three times a week. My wife Coral and I spend ten days every year to go powder skiing in America with him and Mariea.

  Finally, the Champion de Crespigny surname needs an explanation.

  The Champion family were good Roman Catholics in Normandy, France, until 1617, when Richard Champion changed his religion in order to marry Marguerite, the daughter of a wealthy Huguenot. From her father they acquired the property called Crespigny near Vire.

  Their son Claude did even better. Claude took the more aristocratic name of Champion de Crespigny and he persuaded the government that he had noble ancestry and so did not have to pay the Taille tax which was levied on commoners. He then married the Countess of Vierville and they lived in his wife’s manor at Vierville-sur-Mer, on the coast near Caen. Their fine family chateau survives today. It was at the centre for the D-Day landings of 1944, yet survived the bombardment. It can be seen today at the top of the peaceful winding road that climbs away from Omaha Beach, and a plaque on the front gate explains that the house was spared so it could serve as Allied headquarters after the invasion.

  Unfortunately, however, King Louis XIV took a dislike to Huguenots. In 1685 he revoked the ‘Edict of Nantes’ which had granted them tolerance, and Claude and his family were forced to flee to England. They were at first very poor there, but they adapted remarkably well and became respected citizens. The gravestone of Claude and Marie is still preserved and displayed in the churchyard of Marylebone in the centre of London.

  Our formal surname ‘Champion de Crespigny’ is often shortened to ‘de Crespigny’. However, both names are syn­onymous and history abounds with interesting tales from my ancestors and relatives who gained notoriety from living outside the square.

  In 1805, the grandson of Claude and Marie, also called Claude, was appointed a Baronet, a hereditary title.

  The Baronet’s grandson, the Reverend Heaton de Crespigny was one of the last Englishmen to take part in a duel. The scene was set in 1828 on the beach at Calais after Mr Long Wellesley (a failed politician and nephew of the Duke of Wellington) had publicly insulted Sir William de Crespigny (Heaton’s paralysed father). Wellesley refused Heaton’s demand for a retraction, so Heaton ‘called out’ Wellesley to a duel: ‘You think I have only got a black coat,’ he said to Wellesley, ‘you are wrong: I’ve a shooting one as well.’ Soon afterwards, facing each other on the French sands, both men faced off at ten paces, then fired at each other. Both missed. (Heaton was a clergyman, hence the ‘black coat’. He was later defrocked and died in the Australian goldfields.)

  In 1847, the great-great-grandson of Claude and Marie (and great-nephew of Heaton) was born and as you probably would have guessed now, was also called Claude. On the death of his father in 1868, he assumed the title to become the fourth Baronet, Sir Claude Champion de Crespigny.

  Sir Claude led a remarkable and eccentric life, full of adventure and danger. His escapades are encapsulated in his book, Forty Years of a Sportsman’s Life. He spent time in the Royal Navy (in India) and the British Army with the Limerick Artillery in Ireland. He still believed that duels fulfilled a method to restore a savaged dignity, writing ‘should a man be challenged, he is bound, if a gentleman, to go out.’ Nevertheless, Sir Claude was more a sportsman than a fighter.

  Sir Claude lived to experience the genesis of electrical power and was the first member of the family to have a passion for aviation, though this period was well before the advent of handy communication devices such as the radio. He took a keen interest in ballooning and is remembered for many epic flights. During one short flight he unfortunately launched into a strong wind that drove him and his basket into a brick wall – breaking his leg. Being more adventurous, he broke another leg on 11 June 1882, when attempting to cross the English Channel from France to Maldon, England. Unperturbed by injuries, our intrepid Sir Claude tried the opposite direction. So at noon on a mild and sunny English day in June 1883, Sir Claude set off in a balloon made of ‘India rubber and bird lime’ in an attempt to cross the English Channel from England to France. Met­eorology was not the science it is today, and so Sir Claude soon found himself above cloud and after rising in a thermal to an altitude of 17,000 feet, wisely decided to descend before nightfall. He and his fellow balloonist crash landed in Holland, and that is how they accidentally become the first people to cross the North Sea in a balloon. Sir Claude won the Ballooning Society’s Gold Medal for this achievement. Sir Claude’s eccentricities had no bounds. In 1886, much to his wife’s chagrin, he became the assistant executioner in Essex under the ‘nom de noose’ of Charles Maldon. He remarkably died of natural causes in 1935 but his name persisted through all five sons whom he called ‘Claude’!

  Another interesting relation was Colonel David de Crespigny Smiley, the son of Valerie de Crespigny (and Sir Claude’s grandson). David was a British Special Forces and Intelligence Officer in Europe and Persia during the Second World War. It’s thought that the author John le Carré moulded David’s character into ‘George Smiley’ in his 1974 spy novel ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ (now a movie). David was also a noted sportsman, holding the record for the most broken bones accrued in a season of skeleton sledding at the famous Cresta Run at the St Moritz Tobogganing Club. My son Alexander completed his first Cresta Run in Saint Moritz in 2008 and he’s been accorded the honour of being the Tower Boy at the Cresta at the end of 2012. I hope he’s not targeting Smiley’s record!

  The ‘flying bug’ gene will proba
bly continue through the de Crespigny line. I have the ‘flying bug’ gene, and Coral inherited the same courtesy of her father, Roy Ford who was also a RAAF pilot flying Avro Ansons at 15 Squadron SFTS, Canada during the Second World War. This answers Alexander’s ­curiosity as to why his dreams are replete with the touch of a wing, the taste of an oxygen mask, the sound of the radial, the smell of kerosene and the sight of women in uniform.

  *

  Even though flying was in my blood, it wasn’t really an obsession for me before my teen years. My first love was engineering and motorbikes. Growing up in Melbourne’s inner-city Toorak and going to a school like Melbourne Grammar was always a bit stifling for my three very active brothers and me. It was a case of too much testosterone and no place to burn it off. We were often in trouble around the neighbourhood – not for any criminal reasons but just because we were always getting bored and would easily fall into making mischief.

  My father was aware his four sons were a handful and that we needed room to let off steam, so he bought 5 hectares of wild bushland fronting the King Parrot Creek near Flower­dale, 70 kilometres north of Melbourne, with 400 square miles of national park surrounding it. We called the property ‘The Ponderosa’, after the American TV show Bonanza, and Dad commissioned the builder of the Australian Alpine Club ski lodges to build a very basic timber house on the property. There was no electricity, so we plumbed our own gas lights, heating and water.

  From when I was about nine years old until my early twenties, this bushland was where we’d spend most weekends. I was the second youngest son, and it was a classic role-play: the oldest, Michael, was sensible; the middle son, Simon, was a rascal; and the third – me – was spoiled. Christopher, the youngest, was a very cute toddler.

  One day Simon found an old motorbike in a ditch beside a road – the original owner had nearly died in an accident and had left the bike at the scene. The 1930 model Ariel Red Hunter is a large, very heavy British motorbike with a ‘live tail’ (no rear suspension) and a dry clutch. It had the hallmark of everything British-made at that time – it leaked oil and broke down. To start the 500 cc single cylinder motor, you had to move a lever to retard the ignition, another lever to engage the decompression valve, then slowly press down on the kick-starter to position the piston up to TDC (top dead centre) after the compression stroke. Finally, you closed the choke butterfly valve then kick-started the beast into action. Miss any of these steps and you risked a kick-back that would either bruise your leg or eject you over the bike. But no one told any of us this. Michael and Simon had to discover how to fix the bike then get it back into working condition. For me, it was the first motorbike I knew, so I assumed they were all heavy, loud, unmuffled and had leg-breaking torque.

  We used to ride the bike up into the forest. On one occasion, the clutch sprang apart, disgorging the rotating clutch plates onto the ground – they then found traction and accelerated away in front of us! We were stranded 10 kilometres away from home on a rough dirt road in a quiet forest with a broken-down bike. We could have panicked, but there was no point – there was no one else to help. I remember fumbling around, finding the springs, screws and clutch plates, reassembling the mess and then riding home. It was a confidence-building experience.

  I was ten years old by the time I could ride the Ariel, but I was not tall enough to touch the ground, so to get it going we would rotate the bike back up onto its rear stand so the rear wheel was off the ground, start the bike, put it into gear, get the wheel spinning in second gear, then rev the engine slightly. Simon would then slowly ease the 150-kilogram bike forward off the stand. I can still clearly remember the sound of the thumping engine dropping a few revs as the enormous knobby tyre engaged with the sodden grass, throwing a thick rooster tail of mud 6 metres into the air as we slowly accelerated away – leaving behind a snaking 3 inch–deep trench – magic!

  But four kids can’t ride one bike. So I scraped together $15 and bought an old broken Lambretta motor scooter. We would go screaming through the forests exploring, jumping creeks and having a ball. I owned four motorbikes during my teen years.

  There were so many injuries then, and today I still feel guilt and remorse for the anguish I caused my mother. Before I left home I broke my leg four times – once skiing, and the other three times on motorbikes. The time I broke it skiing I was six and Mum had just given birth to Christopher. Dad had been planning a family skiing holiday, and after Chris was born we left Mum behind in the hospital and travelled to Falls Creek. Unfortunately I broke my leg on the first day, so Dad drove for five hours to take me back to Richmond hospital – the same hospital where Mum was staying with Christopher. I remember Dad having to ask the staff not to tell Mum her son was in the next ward having his leg set in plaster.

  I’ve got a few scars to show for the spills, but not as many as my brothers. Michael broke his legs a few times and lost half his calf muscle when his leg scraped up against the cooling fan on an engine’s fly wheel. Christopher had a particularly nasty compound fracture deep in the bush (we needed a bulldozer to access the site and extract him), and he required plastic surgery to stitch up his abdomen when it was punctured by a set of handlebars.

  But Mum was stoic and met all our misdemeanours with extraordinary resilience. I remember one time, when I was fourteen, I took my motorbike to my friend’s parents’ property. Although the property stretched over 100 hectares, it was clearly too small to hold our interest when compared to the Ponderosa’s forests, so we rode into Bendigo to get a milkshake. The police were not amused. We spent a few hours in the police station and I faced five charges: underage riding; riding without a licence; no registration; stealing; and displaying false plates. (I’d taken them off a wrecked bike I’d found in the bush.) Fortunately for me, my friend’s father invited the police officers to the farm for a picnic and all charges were eventually dropped. When Mum found out she just laughed – there wasn’t anything else to say.

  Not all of my injuries were sustained in the bush or on the slopes. When I was eleven, I was riding my bicycle to school one morning and was going very fast down Glenferrie Road, a busy street in Melbourne, when a woman opened her car door without looking behind. I collided headfirst with the door then fell to the street in front of the busy peak-hour traffic. I lost some front teeth and there was blood everywhere. My father was summoned, and he took one look and rushed me to the dentist. ‘Where’s his teeth?’ the dentist asked. Dad returned to the scene and found my teeth lying at the bottom of the tram tracks in the middle of the road. The teeth were re-planted, and I was told I would have to wear a denture if the teeth were knocked out again. So that was it for football and other contact sports. For the rest of my schooling I rowed and played tennis.

  Our family’s numerous injuries came at great financial cost, and the suspicions of the medical insurance company were eventually aroused. The tipping point came when Dad and three of his four boys were all laid up in bed at the same time claiming for different injuries – the insurance agent visited us personally to verify the claims were legitimate.

  School didn’t really excite me in my middle years and I was an average academic performer and not too naughty, perhaps having one detention per year. But to the great surprise of my friends, I joined the St John’s Church choir, not because of my singing abilities or religious fervour, but because my brother Michael had joined, found a beautiful girlfriend and announced that that’s where the pretty girls were. My other brother Simon had quickly joined too, and also found a girlfriend. So I joined and found a girlfriend too. Michael was right – that’s where the pretty girls were hiding.

  While I wasn’t bad academically, I just wasn’t fully motivated. My interests were motorbikes, engineering and electrics. I had extensively reworked the 240-volt wiring in my room with automatic timers for fans and lights. I now appreciate that I owe my survival to the excellent retention properties of the electrical tape that held the wiring mess together and saved me from electrocution most of t
he time. I loved the mechanics class that met once a week, where we rebuilt a VW beetle – tuning the engine by ear only. I could strip down and rebuild a bike or a car engine and get it working again. This wasn’t such an extraordinary skill back in the early 1970s; if you wanted to ride bikes you had to understand every part of the machine to build, fix and maintain it – all on your own and on a tiny budget.

  The time bashing around on those bikes and fixing them gave me a respect for machinery that I took into my aviation career. Years later, my bottom-up approach would frustrate my instructors and peers when I would try to learn how each plane I flew actually worked. I believe the foundation for safety is an appreciation of the limitations of your environment, the machinery you’re operating and yourself, so you can recognise when you are inside those limits and feel confident to operate there.

  My background often put me into situations where I had to come to grips physically with power, velocity, mass and gravity, and most of the confidence I later had with large planes originated on motorbikes in the bush behind the Ponderosa.

  As I got to the end of my schooling at Melbourne Grammar, I could easily have settled down into a career as an (electrical) engineer. However, by the time I was seventeen I realised enough about myself to know I needed a robust physical challenge to go with the mental. I would not waste my life behind a desk. I needed fast machinery in my life, but I also wanted intellectual stimulation.

  If you need a fast ride and lots of homework, there’s only one way to go: the RAAF.