Untold History: Raymond Parer and John Cowe McIntosh first to fly single-engine aircraft from UK to Australia

The daring airmen flew towards Mount Vesuvius in southern Italy. Fascinated by the smoking volcano ahead, pilot Raymond Parer and his flying companion John Cowe McIntosh decided to take their de Havilland D.H.9 lower for a closer look. It was 1920. Parer was at the controls and McIntosh had the camera ready. “The crater was extensive, with local patches giving off white smoke, and in the centre the fearful-looking spouting neck, just waiting for an opportunity to disgorge its molten lava and white, hot gases,” Parer would later write in The Flight and Adventures of Parer and McIntosh. “Just then, the machine seemed as if it had been hit a tremendous blow from above. She dropped down as suddenly and helplessly as a feather caught in a sudden downward gust. “It seemed only an instant when we were practically over the brink. The petrol in the half-empty tanks hit the top with such a thud that it made me fear for the structure of the machine. “This showed that she must have accelerated downwards, and not merely dropped. I grabbed at the seat to hold myself in, but my hands were torn away. “It seemed that we were being irresistibly drawn into the inferno . . . The engine stopped for a few seconds, but luckily started again just in time, and pulled us over the top, out of the smoke. “We were both a bit dazed and shaky . . . My hands were quite numb and utterly without feeling, and upon looking at them I found the skin all off the palms!”, Parer wrote. It was just one of a series of scrapes and near misses the pair survived as they undertook what was — and remains — an amazing adventure. And yet little, if anything, is known today about their incredible achievement in becoming the first to fly a single-engine aircraft from England to Australia. And even less is known about McIntosh in particular, who had moved to WA from Scotland, served his new country in World War I, ridden a motorbike with sidecar across the Nullarbor back to the State, leaned to fly with the famed Norman Brearley, only to perish soon afterwards in WA’s first fatal air accident. So here is some of their story. An entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography by Keith Isaacs says Parer was born in 1894 in Melbourne. As a teenager he developed a keen interest in mechanics and aviation and later became a motor mechanic. In November 1916 during WWI Parer enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force, set out to join the Australian Flying Corps, then transferred to Britain, qualified as a pilot, and tested and ferried aircraft to units in Britain and France for the Royal Air Force. According to notes held by the State Library of WA, McIntosh was born in Lumsden, Scotland, and aged just 17 arrived in Fremantle on the SS Ormuz in June 1909. He worked in the timber industry and when war began in 1914, joined the 4th Field Ambulance of the Australian Imperial Force and served in Gallipoli. He was evacuated to England in 1915 and married Amelia Taylor. “By the end of the war, he had reached the rank of acting second lieutenant in the Australian Flying Corp and was ready for repatriation back to Australia,” the library says. Here the men’s stories merge. In March 1919, the Australian government offered a prize of £10,000 for the first flight by Australians in an aircraft of British Empire manufacture from England to Australia accomplished within 30 days, the library says. Parer declared his intention to enter the race, but needed an aircraft and a crew member. In late 1919, McIntosh (who had only flown once) joined Parer and they managed to organise sponsorship from Scottish whisky magnate Peter Dawson. “Parer purchased a single-engine de Havilland D.H.9 biplane, G-EAQM, and painted ‘PD’ on the fuselage to acknowledge his sponsor,” the library says. “By this time the air race had been won by (Sir) Ross and (Sir) Keith Smith who reached Darwin in December 1919 (after 28 days) in a converted twin-engined Vickers Vimy bomber. “Parer and McIntosh decided to be first to do the trip in a single-engined aircraft,” the library says. The dictionary says the men left Hounslow on January 8, 1920. They made the first of many forced landings soon after leaving England. “As they struggled from one disaster to another they left a trail of broken propellers, smashed undercarriages, damaged tail-skids, ruined radiators, crumpled wings, and bent fuselages,” the dictionary says. Their engine twice caught fire, they narrowly avoided a horrible death in Mt Vesuvius, and had to fight off an attempted attack in the Syrian desert. “Finance was such a problem that Parer and McIntosh undertook advertising flights in Calcutta, and embellished their aircraft with slogans ranging from tea to whisky,” the dictionary says. After 208 days they reached Darwin on August 2. The flyers’ route included Paris, St Raphael, Lyon, Naples, Brindisi, Taranto, Athens, Crete, Alexandra, Cairo, Ramla, Baghdad, Basra, Bushehr, Bandar Abbas, Karachi, Allahabad, Calcutta, Rangoon, Moulmein, Penang, Singapore, Subang, Batavia, Surabaya, Bima, Sumbawa, Timor and Darwin. The plane was badly damaged when they landed at Moulmein, (now Mawlamyine, Myanmar). The Argus, Melbourne, of August 3, 1920, said that when Parer attempted to land, “the crowd rushed the aerodrome.” “To save an accident, and possible loss of life, he deliberately turned the nose of the machine down, with the result that the propeller was smashed and the undercarriage ripped away. The necessary repairs took some considerable time,” the paper said. The Australian War Memorial says engine failure and rough terrain had ended in a forced landing on a sand bar in the Sandoway River, Tharrawaddy, Burma. Local residents then cleared the sandy ground of vegetation to enable the plane to take-off again. And even after reaching Australia they had one more misadventure to overcome before their official welcome at Flemington racecourse, Melbourne. In his book, Parer later described a landing outside Culcairn in NSW. “It was too late then to open up the engine again. “The wheels sank about six inches (15cm), and she turned completely over.” The men were unhurt but the plane was in bad shape. The Argus of August 30, 1920, said the aircraft was “completely disabled”. “The left top wing was broken, as well as the propeller, the rudder, both longitudinal spars, the compression ribs, and the struts.” The rickety aircraft had finally given up, and the men flew to their welcome in a supplied plane as their own aircraft was carried by train and truck to the course. The Argus of September 1 said the men were given a rapturous welcome including by the prime minister, William Hughes, who said they had completed an odyssey which would long live in the annals of Australia — and had shown the world that for Australians nothing was impossible. The aviators were each presented with a £500 cheque and an Air Force Cross. Somehow they had managed to carry with them a bottle of PD Whisky, which they gave to the prime minister — which the dictionary describes as “the first symbolic freight flight” from England. The adventurers soon parted ways. The dictionary says Parer formed a commercial aviation service and continued to make pioneering flights. During an attempt to make the first flight around Australia, he got as far as Boulder, in WA, before crashing on take-off and winding up in Kalgoorlie hospital in February 1922. He flew aircraft in New Guinea, and in World War II sailed in supply and reconnaissance boats along the New Guinea coast. He died in Brisbane in 1967. Perth’s Christine Williamson, whose great, great aunt Amelia married McIntosh, has researched his story. In a letter supporting McIntosh’s induction into the Australian Aviation Hall of Fame, Mrs Williamson said that after his flight with Parer, McIntosh saw how important air travel was going to be for Australians. “With this in mind, he left Melbourne for Perth on a motorcycle and side-car, complete with a passenger,” Mrs Williamson wrote. Along the way he scouted for possible landing sites to enable planes to refuel while flying across the continent. After reaching Perth, McIntosh completed his flying licence with Brearley and bought from him two aircraft. But as he took up a joy flight over the Wheatbelt near Pithara, McIntosh and a passenger died in an accident on March 28, 1921. A memorial plaque marks the accident site and modern adventurer Dick Smith has spearheaded a push for a monument at the site of the earlier crash at Culcairn. Mrs Williamson said big crowds lined the streets to see McIntosh’s coffin, draped in a Union Jack, carried to the cemetery. A fundraising committee was set up to erect a monument to McIntosh, (in Karrakatta cemetery), found a scholarship, and pay for his widow and young son to travel from England. The administration of the McIntosh Memorial Scholarship was transferred to the Royal Australian Air Force Auxiliary (RAAFA) in 1983, she said. The $5000 tertiary education scholarship is open to West Australian descendants of service personnel in the RAAF and Commonwealth air forces. McIntosh and Parer will be formally inducted into the Australian Aviation Hall of Fame today. The airmen’s plane has been restored and is in the collection of the Australian War Memorial. Mrs Williamson told The West Australian it was hoped that the plane would be put on permanent public display again.