How to Lose an Air Race in Style
September 18, 2024The golden age of early aviation produced plenty of names to conjure with. Lindbergh and Earhart; Amy Johnson in her Gipsy Moth and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry over Arras. Two names that few people remember, however, are Parer and McIntosh. Which is rather a shame, because their tale is among the oddest and most uplifting of all.
In 1919, the Australian Government offered a prize of 10,000 Australian pounds for the first air crew to fly from southern England to Darwin, in Australia’s Northern Territory. Of the six teams that entered, only two made it. The winning team – entered by Vickers Ltd and led by celebrated aviators Ross and Keith Macpherson Smith – did it in 135 hours and 55 minutes. In second place, however, were two unknown Australian Flying Corps Lieutenants, ‘Battling’ Ray Parer and John Cowe McIntosh, who achieved a majestic journey time of nearly seven months.
In contrast to the Vickers team’s specially modified twin-engine Vimy bomber, Parer and McIntosh had talked a Scottish whisky magnate called Peter Dawson into fronting them £900 to buy a decommissioned wartime DH.9 – the second-cheapest plane available from the government’s Aircraft Disposal Company in Croydon. Never regarded as a particularly brilliant aircraft even when new, Parer and McIntosh’s single-engine DH.9 – marked ‘PD’ in honour of its sponsor – was constructed of varnished fabric stretched over a wooden frame, with some battle damage to its wings and engine. As Cecil Day-Lewis wrote in a largely forgotten poem celebrating their journey:
‘…For no silver posh
Plane was their pigeon, no dandy dancer quick-stepping through heaven,
But a craft of obsolete design, a condemned D.H. nine;’
By the time ‘the PD’ struggled from the runway at Hounslow Heath on 8 January 1920, the race had already been won nearly a month earlier, but Parer and McIntosh didn’t care, because they were going home in style (they were also, as it happened, technically AWOL from the Australian military). Parer was an experienced test pilot, but ‘Mac’ was a burly, Scottish-born forester who’d served most of the war in the army and had only flown once before. He insisted on referring to the DH.9 simply as ‘the bus’.
Their first crash occurred just across the English Channel, and they would go on to leave a trail of splintered wood and twisted metal stretching halfway around the planet. They came down twice more crossing France, then burst spectacularly into flames over northern Italy.
‘Fire in an aeroplane is not a bright outlook at any time,’ noted McIntosh afterwards in his diary.
Having narrowly avoided being sucked into Mount Vesuvius (McIntosh was trying to get a photo), they battled on through storms, food poisoning, engine faults and bureaucracy. Over Brindisi, the wind ripped open one of the PD’s storage compartments, and their entire stock of maps blasted out of the back of the plane like a party popper. On Crete, they visited the wreck of one of the other planes that had crashed out of the race. ‘Never mind, Ray,’ said McIntosh. ‘At least our kite’s in better condition than this one.’
In Cairo, an Australian colonel gave them thirty quid each, and – in Parer’s telling of the story – a bag of grenades, which they later demonstrated to inquisitive locals after a forced landing in the Syrian desert. At Chabahar in Iran, they found themselves celebrating a Hindu festival late into the night with a battalion of Indian soldiers, their foreheads daubed with red tikas.
By Calcutta, they were out of funds. McIntosh made 3,000 rupees wing-walking for a crowd of onlookers at Barrackpur Racetrack, and they earned some quick cash by bombarding the city with thousands of flyers for Lipton’s tea, Shell petrol and ‘someone or other’s No. 9 pills’. By now the PD’s wings were literally held together with piano wire.
‘We’ll fly this bloody crate till it falls to bits at our feet,’ said Parer.
An engine fire brought them down in the Burmese jungle, then they crashed spectacularly on Moulmein racecourse, stumbling petrol-soaked from the wreckage but miraculously alive. They patched the plane up with mismatched bits of car engines and other aircraft, then sputtered on through Penang and Singapore. The tropical weather rotted the PD’s fabric covering, and strong winds now began to tear holes in her. In Surabaya they smashed a propeller and ripped the undercarriage off yet again – and Parer got malaria for good measure.
At last, they tied an improvised survival raft to the inside of the starboard wing, loaded the plane up with as much fuel as they could manage, and took off for one last long reach across the Timor Sea – absolutely at the limits of the little kite’s range. At 6.25pm on Monday 2 August 1920, they finally landed in Darwin. Parer turned the plane back along the runway to taxi triumphantly past the crowd, but the PD’s engine sputtered and died. On further inspection, the fuel tank was completely dry.
While the catalogue of Parer and McIntosh’s mishaps verges on comedy (and has perhaps been ornamented a little in the retelling), it’s easy to forget that crammed in the cockpit were two men of fragile flesh and blood, trying to hold themselves together as well as their ludicrous aircraft. As the pilot, Parer in particular struggled with low morale and emotional exhaustion at their relentless bad fortune. Of course, life was more precarious back then, and as Great War veterans they would have been relatively habituated to danger, but dangerous it really was. Four out of the six aircraft that competed in the Australia race were wrecked. Four airmen were killed in the attempt and two were detained as suspected Bolshevik spies in Yugoslavia. But the flimsy DH.9 bucked on through the headwinds.
The really delightful thing about this story, of course, is that technically Parer and McIntosh lost the London to Darwin race by a vast gulf. Only they didn’t, because they were playing a different game.
They came up with a ridiculous plan and they saw it through despite extraordinary setbacks. Their tale is infinitely more interesting than that of the winning team, and in this their victory is absolute.
According to one record of popular culture in the inter-war period, The Long Weekend (Graves & Hodge, 1940), this ‘most remarkable flight of all […] was almost uncelebrated in the press’, and yet there remains a wonderful out-of-print poem about Parer and McIntosh by Cecil Day-Lewis called A Time to Dance:
‘…though desperate eddies spun them
Like a coin, yet unkindly tossed their luck came uppermost
And mastery remained.’
John Cowe McIntosh’s luck ran out when he was killed less than a year later in Western Australia’s first fatal air crash, but Ray Parer’s life continued as an exercise in the improbable. He set aviation records and destroyed more planes. He ran a petrol station in Tasmania and a commercial airline in New Guinea, prospected (unsuccessfully) for gold, pearls and oil, and served as an engineer on a United States supply ship in the Second World War. He died a farmer in 1967 – a late photograph shows a wizened figure in tennis shoes, knee socks and a French beret, sat astride a Fergie tractor. The archetypal misfortune-prone Aussie battler, he is a happy reminder that success isn’t the only way to measure a life.
In October 2023, after more than a century, both men were finally inducted into the Australian Aviation Hall of Fame. As for the PD, she underwent an eight-year restoration project in the 1980s, and is now tucked safely away in the Australian War Memorial’s storage and conservation facility near Canberra. Her flying days are long past, but then she was never very good at it anyway.