Doug Muir, An Aussie Aviation Legend.

[sixtiesrelic]

I wrote this in 2009. Doug died last year.

 

He was a mate of me father’s….old Doug.

 

He’s over ninety now, but still going strong…. preparing to go off camping for a couple’a days in the home made, canopy on the back of his ute when the weather cools down a bit.

 

Funny… I’m in me mid sixties and lotsa young people think I’m old and yet, I still privately think of him as “Uncle Doug”.

 

I tend to regard our aviation legends as wind blown coves, wearing crumpled suits and a tie, who extricated themselves, lighting up a fag as they did, from an oily collection of rags and sticks, while crowds mobbed them.

 

While Doug Muir didn’t smoke, drink much, or wear suits and ties very often, he did make history however.

 

At the age of sixteen he sailed alone on the Macduhi to Salamaua, New Guinea to start working for Stevenson Aviation.

 

His old man, Frank, who was in the building game at Wau had gotten him the job working in the hangar he was building for “Stevo”. A bloody great timber framed thing with iron cladding. The one at the top of the Wau strip that the Japs flattened seven years later.

 

 

Can you imagine a today’s mummy letting her darling sixteen year old travel fourteen days on a ship… alone. The shipboard companions were gold miners, tradesmen, explorers, patrol officers and indenture agents… probably heavy drinkers.

 

Picture her “precious”, sleeping in a cabin down in the bowels of the ship, sharing it with strange, inebriated man.

 

The Southeast trades blowing only marginally harder than the ship’s speed wouldn’t be providing much breeze as the temp and humidity increased.

 

Young Doug didn’t notice the heat, he was on an adventure. Seeing Brisbane, Townsville, Cairns, Moresby, Samauri and Salamaua for the first time.

 

Doug tells me the Macduhi was the height of genteelness with silver service, snow white linen and the passengers “dressing” for dinner. “very much the Somerset Maugham style of life”.

 

Those of you who lived there and haven’t read some of that author’s stories of South East Asia and the Pacific… you should. You’ll see some of those stuffy older generation you thought were pompous old gits in the pages.

 

Pre-war New Guinea was very much that way of life. Men wore solar topes and ties, didn’t befriend the Chinese, kept the Kanakas very much in their place.

 

 

Solar topes worn by most men from the Administrator to Doug's mate Charlie Gray

 

There was no apprenticeship in Wau, Doug just worked on airframes and engines and learned as he went. He’d loved mucking around with engines since he’d been a kid and happily dismantled and rebuilt ‘n modified motorbikes before ever sailing.

 

He eagerly studied new knowledge and was quite happy spent his evenings swotting for hisA, B,C and D engineering licenses as he munched on his weakness…chocolates, that came in the tins, like Ardath cigarettes. They’re the size of a condensed milk can.

 

For the first few years he worked in Wau then went to Butt near Wewak for a while (Pronounced like put, in “ PUT it down”) where he happily worked on Stevenson’s Dh 50 and 60 and the Waco 6 that mostly serviced gold prospectors in the Maprik area.

 

 

During the evenings, he’d go over to Ray Parer’s donga and hear stories of the London to Sydney air race as well as discussions on aviation and the pursuit of gold.

 

Back in Wau he got a girlfriend, but unfortunately she was up at Edie Creek, the richest of the gold fields where miners slept in their tens that had a wall of containers of gold dust and nuggets. Those containers were anything that could hold the product, like empty tins to legs of old trousers. Cut down shorts got fashionable on Edie Creek in the early days.

 

Guinea Airways veranda could have tons of gold left on it by the end of the day’s flights in the thirties as the pilots dumped the cargo down there on their way into the office.

 

Doug would rug up in his leather coat and gauntlets (which you’ll hear more of later) and tear up the ten thousand foot climb in seven miles, taking thirty minutes on his motorbike to see the lovely Shirley.

 

 

There was a nice lookout on the way up at Blue Point, which was on a three thousand foot precipice where you could look thousands of feet down to the aircraft flying by.

 

At the age of twenty he sailed to England to join the RAF who didn’t take him on … “What! a common old colonial?...”, so he got a job with Imperial Airways in the hangar in Croydon getting experience on modern aircraft and engines.

 

After six months he returned to New Guinea and sat for his A and B engineering licenses which he got just before he was eligible. He had to lie about his age as you had to be twenty one to sit.

 

He passed first go.

 

He now was the only holder of all engineering licenses in New Guinea, which got up the nose of the older blokes, especially his bosses who didn't hold all the licenses.

 

He did six months with Guinea Airways then returned to Stevenson shortly before the Japs hit Pearl Harbour.

 

 

Doug had joined the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles when he returned to New Guinea from England and each weekend, the boys would do a bit of drill and then get into the interesting stuff… shootin’ guns.

 

They practised with Lewis and Owen guns and .303s

 

Stevo had bought Charles Ulm’s Avro 10, “The Faith in Australia” and had her shipped up to Salamaua. She’d been dismantled since 1940.

 

 

Doug and a few “bios” got the job of putting her together using forty- four gallon drums, poles and ropes to jack her up and attach the undercarriage engines wings and tail feathers.

 

There was a problem.

 

The center engine wasn’t included and a few instruments were missing too.

 

Duggie just went into Stevo’s hangar and selected a beaut 180 HP engine with a three bladed metal prop and bopped it in the mounts to replace the original one hundred and sixty HP, two bladed wooden prop one. The old DH fifty it had come from, was still in bits.

 

Things were going swimmingly till it came time to fit the carby… Hmm Engine support’s in the way.

 

Some hack-sawing and welding of a bit of new pipe overcame that little problem.

 

The day came when Doug approached Stevo in the office and announced, “She’s ready”.

 

“Beauty! Get the kanakas to load twenty bags of rice and well take her up to Wau before the cloud close in”.

 

No second engineer to check the controls were rigged right and no quick circuit, just “jump in and lets go” BUT Stevo took the engineer with him.

 

“Steve hadn’t flown “a ten” for quite a few years”.

 

Doug was quite happy to go… the pilots let him have a fly, landing included.

 

At the time Guinea Airways employed “Cadets” to give the captains a bit of a rest with the flying and start the engines by hand cranking a whopping big handle. Cadets generally didn’t have licenses.

 

There is a couple of seconds of film clip of that first take off of “Faith” in the movie “a day in the life of a Junkers” in the Movie section of… pngair.com from time 0:47 to 0:50.

 

Obviously Doug put her together properly because she flew hard for the next couple of weeks. The second flight started the carting of two hundred and thirty women and kid, evacuees from the north coast to Moresby.

 

The second flight was after lunch, “Steve” took the Gannet while Arthur Collins and Doug took Faith across to Moresby

 

Faith’d been camouflaged with house paint supplied by the father of that radio bloke, John Laws, who owned Greenwood and Laws store at Wau where young John had lived probably up to the evacuation.

 

The cumulus were building and there’d be a fair bit of blind flying to get to Moresby. The “Old Faith” didn’t have any gyro instruments but the wrecked Dh 50 did, so before the flight, Doug shot over to the wreck and grabbed some instruments and a venturi then slipped into a hangar and found a twenty foot roll of hose.

 

As they taxied out, Doug was screwing instruments into the dash and attaching hose to them.

 

There was no time to fasten the venturi to the outside of the aircraft, so on a number of occasions, climbing and cruising at twelve thousand feet, Doug would don his motorbike gauntlet and hold the venturi our the window before they got to the next cloud.

 

He reckons wet air at twelve grand is cold enough without the howling ninety knots of wind adding to the chill factor. Did it a number of times as they had to negotiate through cloud to get the gyros spinning

 

The Administrator Sir Ian Mc Nicholl, was aboard and had tossed his beaut Dunlop foam mattress in the aircraft to cushion his and some of the dozen or so passenger’s bums … no seats.

 

On arrival at Moresby, Sir Ian was picked up and driven off and Doug was left to check the plane. Doug decided that if Administrators were going to leave their property lying about for the kanakas to pinch, the mattress would be better on his bed, so he snaffled it.

 

Doug went with “Steve” on all the subsequent flights between Wau and Moresby.

 

Doug went on most flights as a second pilot and engineer. He got to do the starts as it was almost impossible for the pilot to do ‘em alone. Also he could make any repairs if problems arose.

 

He carried a bit of a tool kit and some sensible small spares with him and on one flight from Moresby, Steve found one dead magneto. Within thirty minutes Doug had discovered the coil was cactus and whacked in the spare one he had with him and they trundled off to pick up more women and kids.

 

When Singapore fell, the RAAF ordered all civil aircraft and personnel south.

 

“Steve” and Doug took three engineers and the company accountant in Faith to Horn Island. That flight took six and a quarter hours and they were “pretty tired, so they remained there for two days and nights.

 

“We scrounged some bloody old fuel and flew her down to Cairns. That took another six hours."

 

Doug left the group there and bummed a ride to Sydney with Burt Ritchie in a Lockheed 14 belonging to Mandated Airlines.

 

 

Faith got as far as Townsville where the RAAF decided she should be parked on Garbutt to look menacing to any Jap recognisance aircraft overflying.

 

She wasn’t required for any more flying and became a shady place for soldiers to sit beneath and have a cuppa.

 

That was the end of her, She just became a forlorn stack of flapping rag stuck to a framework of sticks.

 

 

Doug got a gong for his efforts which got up the noses of the officer types in Qantas who got THEIRS for flying up to Mt Hagen ( quite a bit further away from 'the excitement' than Wau when doug and co were flying) in their four engined 'modern' DH86s.

 

The 86 could be a bit of a caution though, according to a famous oldcaptain i flew with. Starting the third engine flattened the battery, so many pilots hooted down the runway and when they had enought speed used the airflow over the prop to help kick it oover for the starting of the fouth engine.