Crome Collection
Discovery video
Stuart: Hello, my name is Stuart Baines and I'm the Assistant Director of Education and Public Programs at the National Library of Australia. Welcome to this discovery video in which we will explore the E. A. Crome Collection. A rich and diverse collection full of pictures, manuscripts and objects telling some of the fascinating stories of Australia's aeronautical history.
The E. A. Crome Collection documents the stories of people who navigated Australia's skies in the golden era of aviation. In those early days of flight, without GPS or radar, successfully navigating across this wide country came down to the pilots ability to read the land or the skies. The geographic landmarks and celestial bodies of this continent have guided travellers long before the first plane took to the skies. The first people of Australia have trusted the land and sky to point them safely to their destination for generations and have repaid this guidance with caring for the land and preserving its knowledge for generations to come.
The National Library of Australia acknowledges Australia's first peoples, the first Australians, as the traditional owners and custodians of this land, and we acknowledge them as the first navigators of the continent. We pay our respects to their elders past and present, and through them to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Ernest Alfred Crome was born in Sydney in 1902. He became fascinated by aviation in 1919 when he witnessed the arrival of a Vickers Vimy in Sydney, piloted by Ross and Keith Smith, who had just completed the first flight from England to Australia. From then on, he began collecting aviation material. In 1928, Crome met Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm. His collection is especially rich in material relating to the career of these two men.
The Library acquired a substantial quantity of Crome's collection in 1966, including photographs, manuscripts, and objects relating to aviation. The Library also interviewed Crome as part of its oral history project, in which he describes his collecting and some interesting stories behind some of the objects. Audio recording of E.A. Crome: Today they are finding-
by people who have been interested in the air and collectors. They're finding rare envelopes or cards or even pamphlets that have been thrown out of balloons, aeroplanes, and from this they're finding records of people and events that have been long since forgotten. But now they're beginning to find the very important links that create the story of aviation.
Crome continued to make donations to the Library for the rest of his life, and after his death in 1987, the Library received what remained of his collection. During his lifetime, Crome also donated around 20,000 items to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Along with music, manuscripts and books relating to his other lifelong interest: violin making. The collection held by the Library spans a range of formats including 250 books, magazines and pamphlets. Flight log books including those of the crew of the first transatlantic flight in 1928. There are 1145 photographs depicting early aviators and planes.
Many of Australia's early aeronauts were pilots during the First World War. While the collection does hold images and objects relating to military pilots and aircraft, it is primarily focused on civil aviation, with the bulk of the collection consisting of around 30,000, yes, 30,000 aero philatelic items. For those of you who don't work in a library, that's items relating to airmail and other civilian flight related ephemera including menus, photos, and leaflets.
One of the great things about the National Library is that our objects and collections are free and available for anyone to come in and view them. All you need is a library card. One of the other great things about the National Library is that we understand not everyone lives in Canberra or can get here easily. To that end, we have digitised a huge amount of our collection and have made it freely available online. You can access these collections wherever you are. You don't even need a library card. The Crome Collection is no exception. With almost two and a half thousand digitised items.
I'm going to show you how to find out more about this collection, how to located it in the catalogue and along the way look at some of the standout moments from Australia's aviation history. Locating the collection is a simple matter of finding your way to the National Library's website. Opening our catalogue and doing a search for E. A. Crome. If you're looking to browse the whole collection, you can work your way through the 127 pages of results. However, if you're only looking to see what's available digitally, you can use the narrow search buttons. Along the side here and limit to all online. It doesn't narrow down the pages too much, but you can at least know all results are viewable online. Now, if you're looking for photographic material, you can scroll through the pages, but I would suggest using this result.
This is the catalogue entry for the formed photographic collection. Clicking through you can get an overview of what you might find inside using the link down the bottom. You can open the trove viewer and click browse this collection. You now have all digitised photos at your fingertips to scroll through with a short description of each. Once you find one you think you might be interested in, just click the thumbnail and you'll get the full image in high definition.
I'd like to look at this one here, so I'll click through, and we can now see the gorgeous de Havilland Comet Grosvenor House, the winner of the MacRobertson Air Race in 1934. The air race took place as part of the Melbourne Centenary celebrations organised by the Lord Mayor of Melbourne and with the prize of 15,000 teams vied to fly from RAF Mildenhall in East Anglia to Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne in the fastest time possible. Grosvenor House took out the trophy with a flight time of 71 hours. The 2nd place winner. A team from the Netherlands flying in Douglas DC-2 "Uiver" made the trip in 90 hours and 13 minutes. Despite an unexpected stormy stop in Albury.
You can read more about that side adventure on our Digital Classroom. The links below in the description.
The pilots of Grosvenor House Flight Lieutenant Charles William Anderson Scott and captain Tom Campbell Black not only took home the prize money, but a spectacular trophy. The Crome Collection holds one of the few photographic records of this trophy. The trophy is reported to have been melted down to aid the Red Cross Fund during the war in 1941.
Using the Trove newspaper archives, you can see one of the other existing photos of the trophy in an article reporting the plans to melt it down. There are too many photographs in the collection for me to go through all of them today, but if aviation is your thing, there should be enough here to keep you busy for days.
The current collection is rich in manuscript material. This is defined as items, usually handwritten that are not published or made commercially available. Items, including personal correspondence, play scripts and the like. The main groups of manuscripts in the Crome collection consists of papers and memorabilia are some of Australia's early aviators. Records of Australian National Airways, Imperial Airways Limited and other airlines and aircraft logbooks between 1925 and 1940. It is important to note here that of the manuscript collection only the logbooks and the arrow philately items are digitised.
Among the most important items, digitised and notes exchanged between the crew of the first Trans Pacific flight in 1928, the log kept by Charles Ulm on the flight of the Southern Cross from Richmond to Wyndham in 1929, ending with a forced landing at Coffee Royal and the log of the Southern Cross on the 1st East West crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in 1930. The digitalization of the aircraft and engine logs were made possible through the generous financial support of Dick and Pip Smith Foundation. To find these notes and all the other manuscript material in the collection, we can once again search for E. A. Crome in our catalogue and use the narrow search format function to limit to manuscripts. And here the first result, we can see the papers of Ernest and Vertie Crome. Clicking through this record will open up a finding aid. These guides make it easier to navigate through large collections. This finding aid was published with the assistance of the E. A. Crome Trust. Here you can see we have several logbooks listed in series, one each one of these is a whole logbook with many pages in them. You can scroll down here or in the contest list here to find what interests you and then click through I mentioned in the Southern Cross on the 1st Trans Pacific flight. Just a moment ago.
Here are a collection of notes passed between the cockpit and the cabin during the nine-day flight. Clicking the icon will bring up images of the pages. Then you can click on an image to see it up close. Here we can see the optimism of the crew as they neared the end of their journey. You can use the next or previous links along the top to scroll sequentially or use the browser. This collection link along the top to jump back to the overview and browse. You can follow the breadcrumbs to get back to the guide and continue browse.
This finding aid also includes the aero-philately collection full of airmail paraphernalia, postcards, and stamps. This first album here also has a few early photos in it, including this image of W.A. Heart, the first person to qualify for an aviator's certificate in Australia in 1911.
And on the next page, two photos of Harry Houdini. Yes, they're going over Niagara Falls in a barrel illusionist Houdini, who made three flights in Australia in 1910 at Diggers Rest near Melbourne in a single engine Voisin biplane. The rest of the album is more in line with philately collecting postcards, souvenir material autographs, flight covers. It does also have objects connected to one of the most unusual eras in world aviation history: the age of the airship.
From 1908 to 1939, Zeppelins or German airships carried passengers mail and cargo around the world. The post marks and stamps were highly prized by collectors and revenue from postage financed much of the operating costs. This water-resistant mail pouch from LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin , which would be thrown from the moving airship close to the receiving post office, has instructions in four languages for the finder: "Please deliver the contents of this post bag immediately to the next post office." Attached to the pouch, the long, striped cloth tail to increase its visibility.
The collection also includes the parachute used to drop mailbags from the infamous LZ 129 Hindenburg . Crome made no distinction between collecting items that a library might archive, or a museum might archive as a quirk of this collecting, the Library has a number of objects and artefacts relating to some of Australia's early aviation exploits, including this a suitcase. It might make sense that a suitcase is related to air travel, but this one isn't famous for carrying luggage. The inscription carved on the front tells you all you need to know about these objects history: Bag used to transfer oil in Southern Cross Jubilee Airmail Tasman Flight 15 May 1935. C Kingsford Smith PG. Taylor, John SW Stannage.
In 1935 Charles Kingsford Smith was again in the news for his exploits; flying a now ageing Southern Cross on a promotional trans-Tasman mail run. Eight hundred kilometres into the journey a chunk of metal broke off from the centre engine and shattered the starboard propeller. The crew turned back to Australia; a flight of 10 hours into a headwind. The plane began to lose altitude and cargo was jettisoned to lighten the craft, but the engine struggled.Two hours into the emergency flight back, the port engine began losing oil. Notes passed in the cabin show the crews concern "1220 port engine giving out. May not last an hour."
In a now famous act of bravery, the Southern Cross co-pilot, Bill Taylor, walked out along the starboard wing to collect the disabled engine's oil in a thermos which then emptied into the leather suitcase held by John Stannage, the radio operator. He walked out along the wing and filled and emptied the thermos six times and then reversed the operation on the portside, filling the haemorrhaging portside engine from the contents of the suitcase. The next note passed among the crew reads "1256. sunlight. still in the air. Bill hero. Climbed out and got oil for dud motor." Followed by. "Bill's the world's greatest hero. He transferred about one gallon of oil, hope to see land in about 10 minutes now. " As it approached the coast, the Southern Cross was escorted to Mascot airport in Sydney, where it landed safely. This would be her last flight.
What a remarkable story and the nerve. And what better way to preserve the memory of the event than to carve your name into the suitcase that helped save the day. Ernest Crome acquired the suitcase and notes for his collection, and they were among the first objects donated to the Library by Crome in 1966.
Before I leave you to explore the collection for yourself, I do want to mention the legacy of E. A. Crome. After his death, Crome left a bequest to the National Library of Australia. The E. A. Crome Trust Fund was to be used to continue documenting the Australian aviation industry and to maintain his collection. The EA Crome Aviation Project is currently 2368 images strong of the modern Australian aviation industry, showing modern aircraft terminals, maintenance and the process of modern air travel. The project also extends to collecting oral history recordings of people who work in the aviation industry. It's worth noting that these modern recordings unfortunately are not available digitally as they are bound by access restrictions imposed by the interviewee but historic recordings of Crome himself talking about his collection are available online. As I've said, this collection is vast. Within it, it includes just about every type of material the Library collects: photographic, material, paintings, manuscripts, books, magazines, audio maps, the list goes on. While it's not possible to show you everything that is online in this collection today, I hope I have sparked your interest in discovering more about it.
If you have further questions about items within the collection or need help accessing it, don't forget you can submit an Ask a Librarian request on our website. Our reference librarians can work with you to help you find what you're after. Thanks for watching.
Key items in the collection
This collection hosts a range of formats, including:
The original collection contained about 250 books and pamphlets, mostly on aviation history. Many of them are inscribed to Crome. The authors include Sir Ross Smith, Sir Gordon Taylor, Jim Mollison and Sir Hudson Fysh, and there are several works relating to Kingsford Smith. Within later consignments were books on Australian history, art, music, poetry, local history and other subjects, and some published music scores. Many of the books are signed or inscribed by the authors. One of the oldest works is a copy of Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1780), which belonged to Captain John Hunter.
The Crome Collection contains a vast quantity of printed ephemera. Material on aviation includes commemorative booklets, brochures, leaflets, circulars, airline magazines, receipt books and tickets. In addition, there are stamp catalogues, auction catalogues, travel brochures, Rotary newsletters, and concert and theatre programs.
The main groups of manuscripts in the Crome Collection consist of aircraft logs (1928–40), papers and memorabilia of some early Australian aviators, and records of Australian National Airways, Imperial Airways Ltd and other early airlines. Among the most important items are notes exchanged between the crew on the first trans-Pacific flight in 1928, the log kept by Charles Ulm on the flight of the Southern Cross from Richmond to Wyndham in 1929 (ending with a forced landing at ‘Coffee Royal’), and the log of the Southern Cross on the first east–west crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in 1930. There are several logs of the Southern Cross (1928–34) and Faith in Australia (1933–34). Among the aviators whose flights are documented in the logs are G.U. Allan, Nancy Bird, Charles Kingsford Smith, Tommy Pethybridge, P.G. Taylor and Charles Ulm.
The personal documents mainly relate to Ross Smith, Charles Kingsford Smith, Charles Ulm and W.H. Shiers. They include letters, telegrams, licences, passports, certificates, receipts, newspaper cuttings, maps, badges and other memorabilia. There are also screenplays of the films Smithy and The Old Bus, together with biographical notes, articles and papers relating to memorials to early aviators. The Smithy Book, compiled by Crome over a period of 30 years, contains comments by many of the aviators and others who knew Kingsford Smith.
The most extraordinary component of the Crome Collection is the aero-philatelic items. They total about 30 000 items and comprise flight covers, postcards, photographs, menus, vignettes and leaflets. There are about 1000 Australian and Papua New Guinea covers, dating from 1914 to 1969. They document inter alia the first Australian airmail (1914), the first England–Australia airmail (1919), the first regular service in Australia (1921), the first Australia–Papua airmail (1922), the first England–Australia round trip (1926), the first England–Australia solo flight (1928), the first flight around Australia by a woman (1932) and the first official Australia–New Zealand airmail (1934).
In addition to the Australian covers, the collection contains flight covers from New Zealand, Britain, Canada, Europe, the United States and other parts of the world. They include zeppelin flights, flights over the North Pole, rocket flights and space flights.
The collection contains 25 paintings by Crome, comprising depictions of the first balloon ascent in Sydney, the Southern Cross and Miss Southern Cross, William Willis in his yacht Little One, and landscapes in New South Wales and Queensland. Other paintings include portraits of Crome and his wife Virtue Crome by Lyall Trindall (1944), a portrait of his mother Lottie Crome by Perceval Norton (1931), and a portrait of Jack Lang by Fred Leist (c. 1930).
The Crome Collection contains 1145 photographs, mostly depicting early Australian aviators and planes. They include photographs of G.U. Allan, Keith Anderson, Jean Batten, Nancy Bird, Jim Broadbent, Alan Cobham, Hudson Fysh, Bert Hinkler, W.E. Hart, Amy Johnson, Charles Kingsford Smith, Guy Menzies, Jim Mollison, W.H. Shiers and Charles Ulm. There are also photographs of air crashes, early services of Qantas, airfields, parades, aircraft workshops, RAAF operations during World War II, and memorials to early aviators.
Crome did not make any distinction between library and museum materials and a large number of objects, mostly associated with early aviators, found their way into his collection. In his own listing of his collection, compasses had pride of place: the compass used by Kingsford Smith on the Southern Cross and the compass used by Ulm on Faith in Australia. Other artefacts include a radio receiver used on the 1928 trans-Pacific flight, the case used by P.G. Taylor to transfer oil from a failed engine on the Southern Cross as it crossed the Tasman Sea in 1935, and a pilot’s jacket and RAAF uniform worn by Kingsford Smith.
Apart from some early family photographs, the personal papers of Crome date from about 1932 until his death. He maintained an extensive correspondence with aviators, stamp dealers, collectors and libraries and retained copies of his own letters. There are also scrapbooks, travel diaries, notebooks, autograph books, research material, drafts of talks and publications, newspaper cuttings and a very large number of photographs.
About Ernest Alfred Crome
Ernest Alfred Crome (1902–1987) was born in Sydney and educated at Enmore Public School. In 1915 he was appointed office boy in the Newtown and Enmore No. 1 Starr-Bowkett Society, beginning an association with the Starr-Bowkett building societies that was to last for 56 years. He served on vessels of the Union Steamship Company in 1918 and from 1918 to 1922 he was a shipping clerk and wool sampler with Goldsborough Mort & Company. He then returned to the Newtown and Enmore Building Cooperative Society, where he was employed as a cashier and clerk until 1942. From 1943 to 1945 he was on the staff of the De Haviland Aircraft Company, working on its Mosquito Project. After the War, he was employed by various firms before returning to the Newtown, Marrickville and General Cooperative Building Societies. He retired as secretary in 1971.
Building the collection
Crome became fascinated with aviation in 1919, when he witnessed the arrival in Sydney of the Vickers Vimy piloted by Ross and Keith Smith, at the end of the first flight from England to Australia. He began collecting aviation material, particularly flight covers and other aero-philatelic items, and continued to do so all his life. In 1928 he met Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm and his collecting was especially focused on the achievements of these two aviators. Ulm was the patron of the Air Mail Society of New South Wales, which Crome founded in 1932. Crome won medals for his philatelic collection at the Melbourne Centenary Exhibition in 1934, the South Australian Centenary Exhibition in 1936 and the Sydney 150th Anniversary Exhibition in 1938. By the post-War years he had assembled one of the finest collections of its kind in the world.
Artistic interests
Crome, who was related to the English painter John Crome (1768–1821), studied painting at the Royal Art Society of New South Wales. Many of his paintings were on aviation themes. His parents were musicians and as a boy he studied the violin. Although he did not pursue a musical career, he had a strong interest in music, especially violin-making, an interest which again was reflected in his collecting. He was the author of Qantas aeriana (1955) and Footnotes to history and the first ten years of the Rotary Club of Newtown 1962–1972 (1972). He was awarded the Order of Australia Medal in 1983.
Collection highlights
J. L. Turner, Mr. W.E. Hart, the first Australian aviator in his biplane, [seated at controls, 1911?], nla.gov.au/nla.obj-144639799
J. L. Turner, Mr. W.E. Hart, the first Australian aviator in his biplane, [seated at controls, 1911?], nla.gov.au/nla.obj-144639799
Kingsford Smith and crew, Log kept on Southern Cross flight during the 1st crossing of the Pacific, May/June 1928, nla.gov.au/nla.obj-409498894
Kingsford Smith and crew, Log kept on Southern Cross flight during the 1st crossing of the Pacific, May/June 1928, nla.gov.au/nla.obj-409498894
Australian aerophilately album from the Papers of Ernest and Virtie Crome, 1784-2005, nla.gov.au/nla.obj-536651275
Australian aerophilately album from the Papers of Ernest and Virtie Crome, 1784-2005, nla.gov.au/nla.obj-536651275
Background to the collection
The books and pamphlets in the original Crome Collection were catalogued individually and integrated in the Australian and general collections. Books and printed ephemera that were received in later instalments have been kept with his manuscripts and personal papers in the Manuscripts Collection. The collection is held at MS 1925 and occupies 234 boxes. A 434 page finding aid is available online. The log books held in boxes 1-10 have been digitised.
The Australian and Papua New Guinea aero-philatelic items are filed in binders and housed in the Manuscripts Collection. A 54 page item listing was compiled by Tom Frommer in 1993 and is shelved in the Special Collections Reading Room. The albums have been digitised. There is no listing for the flight covers relating to other countries.
The photographs are held in the Pictures Collection at PIC 3394 and they are progressively being digitised. The objects are also held in the Pictures Collection.
The E.A. and V.I. Crome Collection in the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney has 20,000 aero-philatelic items collected by Crome. In addition, there are music manuscripts, books and other material relating to music and his interest in violin-making.
This guide was prepared using these references:
- Cleland, J.L., Ernest A. Crome talks about his aviation collection, 1967, ORAL TRC 24.
- Ingram, Terry, Old Crome Junior Takes Collection to New Heights, Australian financial review, 24 September 1987, p. 32.
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