Travellers' ChecksInside London’s Great Scotland Yard hotel – once home to famous criminals

The first hotel in The Unbound Collection by Hyatt to open in Britain, the Great Scotland Yard occupies a location famous for being the original headquarters of London’s Metropolitan Police. Due to open next month, the luxurious 152-room property will pay tribute to the criminal underworld with The Forty Elephants, a lounge bar named after a gang of female thieves that operated in London and across England from as early as the late 1700s to the mid-20th century.

Remembering the Smith brothers, who flew from England to Australia in 28 days in 1919

Just after sunrise on November 12, 1919 – in weather described by the British Air Ministry as “totally unfit for flying” – four men took to the skies over London in a twin-engined Vickers Vimy biplane. Their destination was Australia, where a government-sponsored prize of 10,000 Australian pounds awaited any British Empire-built plane, crewed by Australians, that made the trip from England in under 30 days.

Side by side at the controls were Captain Ross Smith and his co-pilot, navigator and brother, Lieutenant Keith Smith. Their mechanics were sergeants Jim Bennett and Wally Shiers. Flying east, they passed over the Mediterranean, the Middle East, India and Southeast Asia, arriving in Singapore on December 4. The Malaya Tribune reported that “throngs of people of all nationalities […] including a large proportion of the fair sex” turned out to witness the landing. Police cordoned off the aircraft, but a number of spectators “were able to write their names on the body of the aeroplane, which already had the signatures of people of several of the other cities visited”.

Since Smith and his crew had left London, three flights had followed, but none of those would reach Australia, and four lives would be lost. Smith and crew arrived in Darwin, by way of the Dutch East Indies, on December 10, after spending a total of 135 hours and 55 minutes aloft, in just under 28 days. The prize money was shared between the four men, and the Smith brothers were swiftly knighted. Silent footage of the flight can be viewed at vimeo.com (search for “The Ross Smith flight from London to Australia).

There have apparently been no prizes for flying non-stop between England and Australia, which might be why it was almost another 70 years before a Qantas Boeing 747, loaded with special aviation fuel and fewer than two dozen people, did so in 1989. A daily scheduled Qantas service between London and Perth, in Western Australia, was finally launched last year. That flight takes more than 17 hours, and the airline will next month be undertaking tests as part its Project Sunrise, to determine the feasibility of flights of up to 20 hours duration, which would put London and New York within non-stop flying range of Sydney for the first time. If tests are successful, commercial flights may begin next year.