Bert Hinkler by Grantlee Kieza

Author:Grantlee Kieza
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC Books
Published: 2012-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Bert Hinkler had a natural gift for flying. He did not seem to fly the machine but rather to be actually part of it. Just as the legs of a trained athlete obey his brain, so the wings of an aeroplane answered Hinkler’s instinctive control. He was a master one could not hope to copy, but to fly with him, as I did, gave an insight into the ways of a pilot who was undoubtedly a genius.

John Leeming, Lancashire Aero Club chairman and record-breaking pilot

Bert returned to The Nest from New York on 8 November 1925 aboard the Red Star liner SS Lapland. Although Katherine had made an indelible mark on his heart, he did not outwardly show it as life with Nance returned to normal. They went ahead with their new home on the Thornhill estate and, on 9 December 1925, the day after his thirty-third birthday, Bert submitted plans for the construction of the two-storey detached cottage of brick, Baltic pine, European red wood and a Welsh slate roof on Nance’s one-acre allotment. It was given the street address of 29 Lydgate Road. H.W. Small, a builder in Bitterne, turned the first sod on 15 January 1926. In Italy Prime Minister Mussolini was also getting his house in order, and on 23 January he became the head of Italian aviation, taking over the ministry of the air as well as the portfolios of foreign affairs, army and navy.

Throughout 1926, while a team of workers carted in the bricks, cement render and glass for the new Hinkler house, Bert was almost always up in the air testing and delivering the new Avro machines and working on the new helicopter-like autogyros Avro was developing in conjunction with the Spanish engineer Juan de la Cierva. He also had the hope that Katherine would visit her relatives in Scotland before long.

He still had time to be the dutiful husband for Nance, in practice if not name. Early in March 1926 they attended the Ideal Home Exhibition at London’s Olympia together like a couple of newlyweds looking at the latest furniture and gadgets to equip their Thornhill home. They bought a long, white enamel tub for the upstairs bathroom where Bert could stretch out and relax after a long day covered in oil splashes and windburn. Bert wrote home to his parents that he and Nance were so excited by all the wonderful displays of the latest wood stove kettles and gas cookers that their legs worked overtime and grew weary long before their ‘peepers’. On some weekends he and Nance, together with their Scotch terrier Rufus, would drive in the Willys through the night to visit Nance’s mother at Royston in Yorkshire and finish the weekend by driving back with her through the night down the Great North Road to The Nest. It helped prepare Bert for the long journeys into night that lay ahead.

On 16 April 1926, five days before George V celebrated the birth of a granddaughter named Elizabeth,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.