Adelaide aviator Jimmy Melrose rises to global celebrity as youngest/ only solo pilot in 1934 England-Australia race
Charles James (Jimmy) Melrose left Adelaide's Parafield airport on his 21st birthday in 1935 and flew solo to England in a record eight days. Inset: The Percival Gull UH-UVH flown by Melrose, over Adelaide.
Image courtesy of State Library of New South Wales and Helen Blake/Graeme Minns
Young Adelaide aviator Jimmy Melrose’s global celebrity in the 1930s was short but spectacular. He was hailed as “the next (Charles) Lindbergh” with fame that, as an Australian handsome heartthrob, rivalled Errol Flynn’s. Melrose set several Australian and then world flying records in just three years before dying in a crash at 22.
An only child from a prosperous pastoralist family, Burnside-born Charles James (Jimmy) Melrose grew up with his mother Hilda (his father had died) at Glenelg South.
While at St Peter’s College, Melrose took flying lessons with the (Royal) Aero Club of South Australia at Parafield, gaining his licence at 19. As reward, his mother bought him his own plane, a DeH Puss Moth, which he named My Hildergarde.
In 1934, aged 20, he left Adelaide's Parafield airport on a 12,875km solo flight around Australia, cutting record by almost two days to five days, 10 hours, 57 minutes. On his 21st birthday, he left Parafield in his Puss Moth for England, reaching Croydon in a record eight days, nine hours.
He became a global sensation, as the youngest entrant and only solo competitor (coming third) in the 1934 Centenary Air Race from England to Australia.
Soon after returning to Australia, and in his first major accident, Melrose crashed his Percival Gull (that he used to search for Charles Kingsford Smith over the Andaman Sea in 1935) at Penrose in New South Wales. Recovering quickly from severe injuries, Melrose sailed to England and flew back in a five-seater Heston Phoenix he intended to use to start the nation’s first flying taxi service. A crowd of 8000 greeted him in Adelaide on Anzac Day, 1936.
Melrose was killed six weeks later. With one passenger, war hero Alexander Campbell, Melrose was flying to Adelaide to pick up another for a trip to Darwin when the high-wing monoplane broke up in low cloud over Melton.
Both houses of the South Australian parliament were suspended in respect of his death and there were funeral services in the Anglican cathedrals of Adelaide and Melbourne. More than 100,000 mourners attended his state funeral procession in Melbourne.
