F. Douglas Mill aerial photograph collection
The majority of the F. Douglas Mill Collection contains
images which represent some of the first civil aerial photographic surveys in
New Zealand, the images range from the late 1920s to the middle of the 1930s
and document the country at that time from the Bay of Islands down to Waimate
and Dunedin.
Details of the collection can be found here
in Local History Online. The photographs include an early aerial survey of
Auckland containing images such as this one of the Auckland War Memorial Museum
under construction:
In addition to the image collection, the West
Auckland Research Centre also have an interview from 1974 with Douglas Mill
in the oral
history collection held there. The sections in italics below are taken from
a transcription of this interview and allow Douglas Mill to explain his
motivation for buying the plane and how he went about it.
Douglas Mill was a New Zealand pioneer in the field of
aerial-survey photography and indeed civil aviation. In the History of New Zealand Aviation Ewing
& Macpherson state that, “when F. Douglas Mill imported a new DH 60 Cirrus
Moth from England in February 1928 and formed the Air
Survey and Transport Company at Hobsonville, civil aviation began again in
New Zealand. (p.84)”
“The Air Survey Company was doing aerial
surveys and that looked like a good bread and butter thing so instead of it
being just joy riding or intercity transport which could call on government
subsidy, there seemed to be a chance for an individual, private enterprise to
get into it, and this got me going.”
According to Ewing & Macpherson the Moths were priced at
less than £1000 and this made them affordable for private buyers. This was
still a substantial investment, according to the Measuring Worth website £1000 in 1927
is worth around £70 000 today. Indeed as Mill says, “Bought a Moth – it was a hole in my capital down…. I couldn’t afford to
insure it – it was 15% I think it was, so I had to take the risk, therefore be
very careful whatever I did.”
“Douglas Mill completed a refresher course in England and,
in August 1927, purchased his own DH 60 Moth, G-EBTI. A Williamson ‘Eagle’
aerial camera was fitted by de Havilland, and preparations were made to ship
the Moth to New Zealand. De Havilland, which was looking to the export market,
offered Mill the New Zealand agency, taking back G-EBTI and providing a
brand-new DH 60X Moth, G-NZAT, at a discount. (p.84)”
Doug Mill explains the refresher course: “I had to go through a conversion course
because I had been trained on flying boats at Kohi [Kohimarama] ...just after
the war. I had to be converted to land planes and I also had to get my
commercial pilot licence.”
Ref: DH.60X Moth on the ground, 1927, West Auckland Research Centre, Auckland Libraries, FDM-0966-P.
The purchase of the aeroplane was newsworthy back home in New
Zealand.
The arrival of the Moth aboard the Mataroa at Auckland
on 24 February 1928 marked the start of a new era for New Zealand civil
aviation. …the biplane caused some excitement in Auckland – being displayed in
Milne and Choyce’s Queen Street store in early March (Ewing & Macpherson, p.84).
“We sailed out in the
Mataroa and the next thing was, the number one aircraft which had been, you
might say, bought as a straight out commercial proposition, for commercial work
and a person involved entirely on aviation for a living, was taken up to the
Auckland Motor Company where Bay Farrell very kindly allowed me enough space to
assemble it and on a Sunday morning it was trailed behind mother's Austin Coupe
over Grafton Bridge and out to Mount Wellington to the Court's farm where a
decent sized paddock was available.”
G-NZAT – New Zealand’s most modern aircraft- made its first
flight from a paddock bordering the Tamaki River on Sunday 11 March.
“[The] Herald had sent
out Williams to go with on the first flight and so - I think it was a Sunday,
yes, up we go and I lent Williams the camera which had been the source of all
the trouble and he shot some pictures for me and that was the first cash, you
might say, that I earned, selling the Herald the first pictures, selling
commercially for the company. Very soon after that clubs throughout New Zealand,
or rather they weren't clubs as yet, they were all fellows who had been in the
air force, and they were all terribly keen; they had been watching the
publicity that the press had given me through flying to Venice and what not and
bringing a plane back.”
Whilst over in England Mill had entered the famous Schneider Trophy with
Leonard
Isitt and there was a lot of press
coverage of it back home.
They all were dead
keen on getting back into a bit of flying and each place was forming little
committees with a view to forming clubs and so on. Of course, I was pretty much
in demand and invited by all these people to be questioned and grilled about
everything else, which I was only too happy to do and at the same time, of
course, putting the hard word in that they must buy a Moth eventually.”
Mr and Mrs Mill made three flying tours to the South Island
during 1928, making newspaper
headlines regularly and attracting hundreds of New Zealanders outside to
watch the progress of the Moth overhead. As we can see from this photograph,
the excitement continued throughout the year.
“[Mill] shifted operations to the site of the new NZPAF base
at Hobsonville. He built
a hangar and workshops across the road from the airfield. The Air Survey
and Transport Company was formed, and Bob Johnson, former works manager for the
New Zealand Flying School, came out of retirement to be chief engineer.
As well as representing de Havilland in New Zealand until
1939, Mill’s Air Survey and Transport Company conducted the first civil
aerial-photography surveys in his Gipsy Moth, ZK-AAD. This aircraft was used
extensively by Mill, notably for an aerial survey of an area bounded by
Edgecombe, Tarawera, Rotorua and Cambridge in May 1929 – the first civil
aerial-survey photography (Ewing & Macpherson, p.85).”
On the 15
March 1928 the New Zealand Herald
prominently featured an image of central Auckland taken from Doug Mill’s Moth.
Douglas Mill’s Air Survey and Transport Company continued to
import Moths and chalk up historic flights until war interrupted.
For more information about the area see our previous posts
about Mill’s
house at Hobsonville and Hobsonville
Point and read a summary
of the heritage walk around Hobsonville Point.
Further reading:
On early aviation in New Zealand Douglas Mill’s recommendations are, “In actual fact you’ll probably find a good account as any in Ted Harvie’s two books. His one about George Bolt is particularly well documented and illustrated.”
The background information that informs this blog post is
taken from The history of New Zealand aviation: by Ross Ewing and Ross
Macpherson.
Douglas Mill features in a couple of resources available
through Ancestry.com. He is in the Who’s who in New Zealand and the Western
Pacific, 1938. On account of his time spent on the refresher course in the
United Kingdom, Mill also features in the Great Britain, Royal Aero Club
Aviators’ Certificates, which contains index cards and photographs that are in
the care of the Royal Air Force Museum, London. You can access Ancestry from
any of Auckland Libraries’ 55 branches.
Author: Andrew Henry
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