Gatty: A Man Who Gets Things Done
pp. 67-69 · Read in the full issue
By R. W. Robson
A TUNA-FISHING industry on the American scale —which means that it is big, all blue-printed well in advance, and heavily financed (the Ameri can principle in business, as in war, is never to send a boy on a man’s errand) is now being established in Fiji. This week, in Australian newspapers, adver tisements invite applications from persons competent to fill some big and well-paid jobs in this new enterprise.
I, naturally, am interested in the big plan; but I am more interested in the brain behind it all. It is the conception of 45-years-old Tasmania, Harold Gatty, who already has achieved distinction in three other fields.
Gatty was educated in Hobart and the Royal Australian Naval College; but, while he was still in his twenties, he decided that there was little future for a navi gator in the Australian Navy, and he re signed, and went off to the United States.
No red carpets greeted the small-built, keen-looking youth with the square-jaw —in fact, he found it extremely hard to get his feet onto even the lowest rung of any kind of ladder. But. by 1931, he was a senior navigation engineer in the United States Army Air Corps, in Wash ington.
In the ensuing three years he made many useful contacts; and it was in re cognition of his technical skill as well as his tenacity of purpose that he was selected to accompany Wiley Post in his
epoch-making feat of flying a small plane right round the world, in 1934.
Thenceforward Gatty’s was a world famous name in aviation. That was his first great suc cess.
IN the ’thirties, the Aust r a 1 i a n s Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm were pioneering air routes across the Pacific. Australia’s national “leaders” could not see the significance of the
achievements of their young men; but the meaning was clear to the restless intelli gence and keen vision of another Austra lian, Harold Gatty. Gatty somehow sold his idea to the then new and developing Pan American Airways. Australia and
New Zealand were doing nothing in re lation to trans-Pacific aviation—but they were sitting stubbornly on their landing rights. No foreign concern, said Canberra and Wellington, was going to get landing rights from them.
To the astonishment of the South Pacific world, Harold Gatty did get from the New Zealand Government, in 1935, permission for Pan American aircraft to use Auckland as an air-station. No one yet has discovered what Indian sign he employed to induce those Wellington rangitiras to put their name on the dotted line. But I think the real reason was the hypnotic power of the Gatty eye—a very clear, steady, blue eye, with a power of understanding behind it.
In these matters, Australia and New Zealand generally work as a team; but in this particular matter Canberra would not play ball with Wellington, despite everything that the usually irresistible Gatty could do.
Pan American Airways ran test flights between Honolulu and Auckland, via Kingman Reef and Pago, in 1937; but accidents in 1938 caused the postponement of the regular service. PAA had just completed the organisation, in 1940-1941. of a regular schedule, using Canton Island, Fiji, and Noumea, when the Pacific War came and caused a suspension of all civil airlines in the Pacific until 1946.
From 1935 until 1942, Harold Gatty was PAA’s representative in the Pacific, con tacting more or less hostile administra tions and slowly and patiently creating, in islands hitherto untouched by aviation, the elaborate organisation necessary if sea and land planes were to operate regularly and safely. He did a most notable job. The successful introduction of trans-ocean air transport to the South Pacific was the second outstanding achievement of Harold Gatty’s life.
(Continued Overleaf)
W.JEN the Japs came into the Pacific, and the PAA services disappeared, Gatty returned to the air as a serviceman—although he was no longer a juvenile. In a period when so many individuals gave such distinguished service, the achievements of Gatty were not noticed. I have never been able to get any information from him; but I have been told that he did a remarkably good transnou ol^6o^ 11 tn 68^ 6 ’icfvap nf AU v? ra i la x larg ? h Wh T° had , b6en CUt on in Indonesia b> the Jap advance.
Somewhere among these various performances he won the Distinguished Flying Cross of the United States; but how and when I don’t know.
TX)R many years Gatty the navigator I 1 had taken a keen interest irT the methods by which the Polynesians of the pre-European era found their wav across the vast spaces 1 of the Pacific °„ cea ? 1 - B y charting the stars, by a study of winds and currents, and by observing ce F tall i natural phenomena, they had developed a navigation technique that was
not only unknown generally to Euro peans, but was quite successful.
In the course of years, Gatty accumu lated a large amount of data on this fascinating subject, intending some day to put it into a book. Suddenly came the war, and thousands of our airmen and sailors were in danger of being cast adrift on the Pacific’s empty waters.
“A knowledge of Polynesian navigational methods might save many lives,” argued Gatty, and decided to rush his book to publication.
Any publisher or printer who has seen ‘‘The Raft Book” will understand what I mean when I say that every technician to whom he took his terrifying manu script either fainted away at the very idea of tackling that kind of printing job, or else demanded terms which would have left Gatty in debt until the millenium. But ‘‘The Raft Book” was published, and in quick time.
Gatty did not waste the precious weeks in argument. He fossicked around until he found, in New York, a printing house in which he could acquire a sufficient interest to direct operations as he wanted them; and then he printed and published “The Raft Book” himself.
Before the Pacific War was half over, the US Government was providing a special pack for every man who might find himself cast away on the Pacific— and every pack included “The Raft Book.”
It was not only a useful contribution to American equipment in the war; the shrewd business brain that functions alongside the visionary in the Gatty make-up saw to it that “The Raft Book’’ was not published and distributed at a loss. For his tenacity and courage in producing “The Raft Book,” he deserved whatever good profit he made out of the
enterprise.
I list “The Raft Book” as his third suc cessful achievement.
IN 1946, Gatty saw Pan American Air ways return to the South Pacific and restore its interrupted services; saw the stubborn Australian politicians finally grant landing-right to PAA; and then he more or less disappeared from the PAA organisation, and settled down in Suva.
He took over one of the well-known residential bungalows there, and he acquired a lovely little island, complete with residence and coconut plantation, in the romantic Lau group, a couple of days’ sail from Suva.
But there was no lotus-eating for Gatty —he was now talking, thinking and dreaming of fish. Something had directed his ever-questing mind to the fact that huge schools of tuna, and related fish, haunted those Fijian seas. The fact had been known for generations, but no one seems ever to have bothered about it.
Before long, two or three curiously shaped little ships made their head quarters among the islands in the western end of Suva harbour, and slipped away on unpublicised cruises; an occasional gentleman with “expert” written all over him came and went; and it was a matter of common beach gossip that “Gatty is fiddling around with some idea of catch ing fish.”
No new idea ever yet was hailed and praised by the gentlemen who sit in the sun on any tropical beach and scratch themselves: and Harold Gatty’s fishing plan collected the usual amount of criticism and ridicule. Gatty said noth ing—he only disappeared at regular in tervals in the general direction of the United States, and seemed very busy.
The rest is history. For a full descrip tion of the new industry, its lay-out and ramifications, see the article in another nart of this journal. It still has to prove itself; but even at this stage I am prepared to write it down as the fourth great achievement in the remarkable life of Harold Charles Gatty.