Tom Skeyhill Takes to the Sky
Dr Jeff Brownrigg
Visitors to these pages might already know a little about the extraordinary life and adventures of Tom Skeyhill, who was the subject of an early contribution to the ‘stories/articles’ section of this website. (It is probably worth reading that piece before you look at this one.) There is still much to be discovered about Tom’s experiences in Australia before WWI, at Gallipoli and in Egypt, his time of the Tivoli Circuit in Australia as the War ground on and also, after 1917, his complicated rise to prominence in the USA. It should come as no surprise that, focussed as Tom was on the forging ahead with recovery after the War, he turned his mind to ways in which he might come to represent the new, youthful post-War generation. Just what might this look like politically, culturally and domestically? He was convinced that ‘old men’ had caused the War and its horrific consequences.
In the late 1920s in America, Tom was flourishing his credentials as an innovator and a ‘futuristic’ thinker. He was, by then, chairperson of the Lecture Committee of the International Lyceum and Chautauqua Association, an important adult national education provider in the USA. He had been growing his profile in various organisations. In April 1931 he spoke in East Aurora. The ‘puff’ offered for his appearance in Easy Aurora, NY State, is a characteristic amplification of things he had done in his life. Of the ANZACS and Gallipoli, The Roycrofter says that he was a ‘youngster when he enlisted and was soon made a lieutenant’. Half of this is true. His couple of weeks at Gallipoli before feigning the blindness that helped him escape from the battlefield, is hardly an illustrious, creditable military career. He told the East Aurora audience that he was wounded at Gallipoli but, once recovered, returned for the whole campaign finally travelling with his regiment to France where he was wounded again. ‘Every time I put up my head I seemed to get hit,’ he told The Roycrofter. In his article concerning Tom’s visit, Elbert Hubbard the Second, finally suggests that Tom’s lectures on WWI, Mussolini and Napoleon, like his recently published book The Last of the Long Hunters (1930), are all ‘perfect gems of eloquence’. And Hubbard continues:
I have heard many speakers in my time, but never a one like Skeyhill – never a one who could so lift me up out of myself as can Skeyhill… a superb orator and a fine fellow as well.
Tom wrote his own publicity and like most other trusting editors who failed to check his story, Hubbard took what Tom said as gospel, writing publicity that reinforced Tom’s creation of himself as a redoubtable hero. He was certainly not that, in military terms. But he busily crafted the great theatrical façade of the heroes life that he flourished. People believed what he said without needing corroborating evidence of achievement, or even an accurate, credible representation of the truth. And his imagination suggested new theatrical tropes that might help to shape the edifice that audiences found so engaging.
My copy of The Roycrofter cropped up in a sale of books in the US recently. The leading article in the publication reinforces knowledge of just how Tom’s life was a sort of theatre. The magazine was published in April 1931, adding to Tom’s notoriety amongst ads for maple honey and other wholesome foodstuffs.
Roycrofters were committed to something like the ideology of the British Arts and Crafts movement.
Even the advertisements for his lectures and presentations began to look self-consciously ‘modern’, even stylistically progressive.
This is a programme from 1930, presenting Tom as ‘The Greatest Living Orator’ (almost certainly his own words). This highly theatrical even cinematic picture, lays emphasis on the huge shadow he casts, underlining the scale and pervasiveness of his influence on young Americans.
Before 1930 his main mode of travel to speaking engagements, was by rail. He had, after teaching about WWI on the War Bond Lecture Circuit and for the Amalgamated Chautauqua Adult Education service, moved his focus to that ever-growing reliable audience available in the American classrooms. He had authored two very successful books about the USA’s most decorated First World War hero, Sergeant Alvin C York. (The one written for young people can be seen in our earlier Skeyhill article on this website.) These books proved to be lucrative. He was in demand all over America as a public speaker. Although his speeches were usually crafted from other people’s books, he spoke on a rich array of topics, often reinforcing common prejudices about countries that were not America. In addition to an apartment in New York, he seems to have owned a holiday (summer) house not far from the Kennedys, who lived at Hyannis Port. It was from Hyannis Port airport that Tom took his final flight in a plane, said to be his own. He died of complications from a broken leg, a couple of days after a crash landing. In most respects Tom was at the peak of his achievements.
He was wealthy enough and conspicuous enough to look to ways he might extend his reach into communities that had not heard him speak and who might buy his books. In August 1931, Tom wrote to an aircraft manufacturer hoping to secure an aeroplane in which he might continue to expand his lecturing.
The Autogyro Company of America, was owned by Harold Pitcairn, who worked closely with the Spanish designer Juan de la Cierva, one of the first pioneers of ‘nearly’ vertical take-off and landing aircraft. The plane was called a PCA-2 (presumably ‘Pitcairn/Cierva Aeroplane, model 2?). Tom went straight to the top, writing to Harold Pitcairn in August 1931. In what follows, you can read Tom’s 1931 letters seeking to be provided with an aeroplane free of charge. It was with characteristic elan that he wrote to the company’s American head, though, as you will see, his request was turned down. Undisturbed by the refusal, Tom tried again with an offer of paying for a plane in instalments. He was aware of the substantial publicity for the autogyro generated by the involvement of Amelia Earhart, pictured below with a PCA-2. (Wikipedia: Purdue University) On April 8, 1931, in Warrington, Pennsylvania, Earheart set a world altitude record, having climbed to 18,415 feet in a Pitcairn PCA-2 autogyro. The autogyro was very conspicuous in that year.
And added to Amelia’s story, the Pitcairn Autogyro PCA-2 was also in the 1931 news and newsreels having landed and taken off from the front lawns of the White House. With cameras rolling, President Herbert Hoover greeted the pilot and awarded the Autogyro Company of America an ‘Honor Trophy’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpBrYGZo0EI
Tom was in no doubt that owning a flying machine would add to the theatrical flair of his arrivals and departures from colleges and schools, reinforcing the idea that he was the coming man; a man and a leader of the future. It is reasonable to suggest that there was just a smidgin of the posturing of the ‘WWI air ace’ about this sort of arrival and departure. Louis Adels, his putative brother-in-law and a trained pilot, would skilfully bring the plane into its destination, then settle Tom’s new aircraft down on the college or school’s playing fields. Tom could then emerge from this latest technology, a technological leader of his fellows. He had probably seen news footage, such as the following shot not long before he wrote his ‘begging’ letter to Harold Pitcairn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQieKnglzj4
One the Owls main goals in setting up this website and stated at its inception, was to find ways of sharing the continuing research undertaken in ‘retirement’ by those who had conducted it at the NFSA. So, this essay is not altogether self-indulgent. Since I left the Archive, in 2005, I have kept a weather-eye on auctions where Skeyhill and Sergeant York material is likely to turn up. A year or so back, I picked up the following letters that Tom wrote to the Autogiro Company. The Company could not see its way clear to handing him an aeroplane, so Tom replied suggesting a deposit followed by time payment. The aircraft he crash-landed in does not appear to have been an Autogyro PCS-2, though it is hard to tell from the press photographs of the time and other documentation is scarce. The press photograph of the accident is too indistinct to be absolutely sure.
Had Tom survived for more than nine months after writing these letters there might have been more evidence of his use of the plane and just what sort it was.
1932 photograph of the type of aircraft Tom was requesting.
(Wikipedia: A E Hill, photographer)
The crash that produced the fatal injury, and Tom with his daughter Joyce.
It is difficult to ascertain what sort of aeroplane Tom’s common-law brother-in-law, Louis Adels, (Joyce’s uncle), was piloting. It might have been the answer to his request for time-payment. What seems clear is that Tom was convinced that he, as a leader of the young people of the world, could set a precedent for others and adopt air travel as a matter of course. But that stopped abruptly near Hyannis Port on 21 May 1932. After a day or two in hospital, a blood clot moved from his leg and killed him.
The National Library of Australia has started to collect material from Tom’s life and will probably be the best place to deposit these letters, periodicals and the clippings that accompanied them. That seems appropriate given that his short life, 36 years, encompassed soldiering, (of a sort), poetry, education and recruitment, lectures on politics and life, and the creation of a central narrative of the USA’s involvement in WW1 in his two biographies of Sergeant York. Tom’s last book has been in print continuously since 1930 and used to underpin a fairly brutal and whitewashed colonial history. And both books were quarried by the scriptwriters for the Howard Hawkes film Sergeant York, or which Garry Cooper won his first Oscar in the title role.
The variety of possible connections to Australian collecting institutions for this now largely lost but eminently memorable Australian, scoundrel though he may have been, is obviously not an area of collecting interest for only one of these. A couple of years back the NLA collected what was advertised as a collection of Skeyhill letters (correspondence). The letters were, in fact, the notes made at the front of books Tom had read in the 1920s and then donated to his hometown Mechanics Institute at Hamilton (Victoria) where he hoped to establish a great national library… every book would be annotated by Tom Skeyhill, master of international affairs and ‘world’s greatest orator’. But that’s another story.
Jeff Brownrigg, 4 August 2025
