Beyond Lion Rock: The Story of Cathay Pacific Airways (11 page)

The legal aftermath was something of a farce. The self-confessed pirate Wong Yu was never tried for murder or piracy, since the British considered his evidence inadmissible in a Hong Kong court and the Portuguese authorities took the position that they had no jurisdiction over piratical acts on a British plane. According to some, Wong Yu slipped across the Chinese border a free man and disappeared. But when Roy Farrell, visiting Hong Kong many years later, asked an old friend – a well-informed Chinese
businessman – what finally became of Wong Yu, he was told that the pirate had been released from the prison where he had been detained during the investigation at about nine o’clock on the night of a particularly bad typhoon. Flying debris struck and killed him only a block or two from the prison gate.

Of course, there have been numerous airborne hijackings of various kinds since the Miss Macao disaster, but at that early time Sydney de Kantzow believed the only solution to this new hazard was to run metal detectors over passengers and baggage at every departure point. He did not consider practical the suggestion that the door to the flight deck should be locked, and Chic Eather, a very experienced pilot, agrees with him.

‘The flight deck is connected by interphone with the several cabin attendants’ points and I do not think as pilot I could place myself above the welfare of a hostess or passenger threatened with summary slaughter if I refused a hijacker’s instructions to open the crew door. I could see a situation where every passenger could be executed while I, with grim determination, held on to the flight deck. This is not the action of a commander; his main duty is to protect each and every life placed in his care.’

Poor Dale Cramer had no opportunity to make any decision at all.

*

Late in 1947, after only a few months in existence, fate knocked for Roy Farrell’s CPA. As Roy tells it, ‘A. J. R. Moss, the Director of Civil Aviation in Hong Kong, cabled me in Manila saying he needed to see me, so I checked in with him the following day. He told me that the Governor had been advised by Whitehall that every government considered
communications
and transportation vital to national security, and they couldn’t see an American owning a British-registered airline. I had to reduce my interest from a third, not to exceed 10 per cent. I asked what would happen if I failed to comply, and I was advised my landing rights would be cancelled. Still, Moss did tell ’em I could have adequate time to find a legitimate purchaser.’

‘Adequate time’…. Roy and Syd and their partners were not to know just what that meant, so Moss had given them food for urgent thought. But he had not panicked them. They knew they were sitting on a good thing. They had a profitable operating fleet of aircraft; they had experienced and devoted personnel; they had an air maintenance setup at Kai Tak. They might be obliged to sell – but at least they had something worth selling. And at that juncture, like one of those blimpish figures in knockabout farce, along came Brigadier General Critchley of Skyways, London.

Skyways was a British air transport company newly formed in the
aftermath of the war by a trio of accomplished aviators. Brigadier General A. C. Critchley, its chairman, had been the wartime Director General of BOAC (the new name for Imperial Airways); Captain R. J. Ashley, the Managing Director, had been his personal pilot; and Sir Alan Cobham was a famous aviation pioneer. Skyways owned Avro Yorks and Lancastrians, and had a lucrative contract with the giant Anglo–Iranian Oil Company to fly their employees and freight between the United Kingdom and the Persian Gulf. It also flew charters to Europe, Palestine and Africa, and operated an embryo Hong Kong–Singapore service.

Critchley disliked Roy and Syd almost on sight; and decidedly the antipathy was mutual. The Brigadier was less than diplomatic. He and Skyways seemed to think they were God’s gift to Far Eastern aviation, coming to save a tinpot organization from instant dissolution and penury, but they were alone in this belief – certainly as far as Roy and Syd were concerned. No doubt serious discussions of a purely technical nature relating to a possible Skyways takeover of CPA did take place between the two parties, but what emerges from the Skyways episode as a whole, before the inevitable collapse of serious negotiations, was pure slapstick.

‘After our first meeting,’ Roy says flatly, ‘I realized Critchley was trying to steal our airline.’ Syd concurred, and in next to no time Critchley found himself in a kind of hellzapoppin’ scenario for which nothing in his past experience had prepared him.

For a start, Syd turned up at their first meeting smoking a monstrous cigar which filled the room with dense clouds of smoke and considerably upset the Brigadier – he had come to deal with a cringing suppliant, not Ronald Colman playing the part of Lord Beaverbrook, blowing arrogant smoke rings at him with a Corona-Corona. At that first meeting Roy and Syd learned that Critchley hated to be kept waiting, so for the second meeting they contrived to turn up twenty minutes late.

‘This meeting accomplished nothing,’ Roy told me, ‘but we agreed to a third.’ For Critchley this was a mistake. They all met, Roy recollects, in a suite of rooms at the old Hong Kong Hotel. This time Roy and Syd were thirty minutes late.

Roy says: ‘When the General’s blood pressure got back to acceptable limits, I told him I had three propositions for him.

‘The first proposition was that he should pay our price. This he violently refused.

‘My second proposal was to let me keep the airline for eighteen months with all landing rights and at the end of the eighteen months I would give him the airline. His reply was “Don’t be a bloody fool.”

‘My third offer was that I would play him eighteen holes of golf to see if he would double my price or nothing. The General was an excellent golfer and he immediately shouted that I was a bloody fool and that he would beat me, to which I replied that I knew his handicap and I knew mine and he wouldn’t have a chance – after all, I’d played barefoot with the caddies in Calcutta. With this he exploded and said he would have me run out of Hong Kong.’ The meeting, not surprisingly, was at an end.

Roy and Syd consulted Uncle Moe Moss at Civil Aviation, anxious about Critchley’s threat to have them run out of the Colony. Uncle Moe had a word with the Governor, and no more was heard of that.

‘And so,’ Roy says, ‘some months later we started negotiations with Jock Swire, and about eighteen months after Critchley we sold 80 per cent to Swires and their associates.’

That was in June 1948. How this momentous change of life came about for Roy, Syd and everyone else connected with CPA I shall try to explain a little later. But meanwhile I must introduce the great and noble Hong Kong house that John Swire built.

The Times
of London of 25 February 1983 carried the following obituary notice.

How far is it from the house where postmaster Clint Farrell’s son was born in Vernon, Texas, to John Kidston Swire’s home at Hubbard’s Hall, Harlow, Essex? Cathay Pacific, the regional airline that grew up to span continents, links both men and both places. Yet to J. K. Swire – universally known as ‘Jock’ – parts of the Far East had become as familiar as his own backyard long before Roy Farrell flew Betsy into Shanghai. How did he come to be there?

We need to go back two generations to find out. His grandfather, John Samuel Swire, born in 1825, was the initiator, later to be known to all who worked for him as ‘The Senior’. In 1847 he had inherited
his
father’s
Liverpool business, John Swire & Sons, which imported cotton from America until the Civil War disrupted that trade. Thereafter he turned instead to China and Japan, taking on a Bradford wool mill owner named Richard Butterfield as partner. The partnership was short-lived for Butterfield resigned after only a few years, yet the company remained Butterfield & Swire for nearly a century, a much respected trading name in the East. When word came that Fletcher & Co., the partner’s Shanghai agents, had gone broke, Swire sailed out East to see things for himself. The oriental die was cast.

Swire was not a man to waste time. He stepped ashore in Shanghai on 28 November 1866; he rented an office in Fletcher’s Building on the Bund; he staffed it with five Europeans; and on 4 December he announced in the
North China Daily News
that Butterfield & Swire would open for business on 1 January 1867. The announcement read:

Next, according to local custom, he needed a House (or ‘Hong’) name for the new company, and with the help of a sinologist of repute and imagination chose the ambitious name ‘Taikoo’, a combination of two Chinese words meaning ‘Great’ and ‘Ancient’. He himself, also in keeping with local practice, would, as head of the new Hong, be referred to as its Taipan (‘the main plank in its roof’). The Taipan of Taikoo…. In next to no time, John Samuel Swire had become a leading performer in the Far Eastern commercial arena. It was a turbulent region.

In the quarter-century since Shanghai had been opened up to Western trade there had been frequent rebellions and wars on a large scale, even for China. The Chinese City of Shanghai had been attacked and captured, and on one occasion occupied by rebels for as much as eighteen months. Luckily for him, John Samuel Swire happened to arrive there in a period of lull and had time to look around in peace. The three-quarters of a mile stretch along the curve of the Whangpoo River now known as the Bund was, he saw, already occupied by a number of fine two-storeyed European buildings
belonging to the Hongs, the big commercial houses; there were churches, a Customs House, a club and a racecourse, and broad streets running inland beyond the four-mile-long walls of the Chinese City. Gracious living was possible – among hazards: disease, for example. One of his staff, invalided home in the spring, died halfway there at Aden; his replacement died the same autumn. A newly admitted partner survived only eighteen months. There were other deaths, but no time to waste in mourning if you were, like Swire, struggling for a foothold on the China coast. He began trading at once in tea, silk, cotton and sugar. He opened a Yokohama branch and three years later an office in Hong Kong, too. At this point William Hudson Swire retired and John Samuel took in a partner, J. H. Scott; Swires and Scotts have been closely associated in the direction of the firm ever since.

In 1872 – a major milestone – Swire established a shipping outfit, the China Navigation Company, known as CNCo; its purpose was to run steamers up the Yangtze River. At first two vessels, the
Tunsin
and a paddle steamer, the
Glengyle
, plied twice weekly the 600 miles between Shanghai and Hankow, and later vessels reached Ichang in Hupeh Province near the Yangtze Gorges. ‘We are going to run the River,’ John Swire declared, and the hitherto dominant American company, Russell & Co., sold out quite soon, leaving B&S by far the biggest foreign operator on the Yangtze. Presently Butterfield & Swire expanded CNCo’s operations to the coastal trade, running profitable north-south grain charters carrying soya beancake from Newchwang and Dairen in Manchuria to Swatow, Hong Kong and Formosa, where farmers used it as fertilizer. By 1883 CNCo operated fifteen coasters for the beancake trade, reinforcing this success by building the Taikoo Sugar Refinery in Hong Kong and later the Taikoo Dockyard there. By 1905 the Taikoo fleet had expanded to no fewer than fifty-four vessels, some of which carried passengers from Shanghai to Tientsin, and from Amoy to Hong Kong and Manila.

If you examine The Senior’s portrait, the hard jaw and the confident eyes, it is difficult to imagine John Samuel Swire reduced to a ‘state of fear and trembling’, but that is the state he liked to claim he was in when he took the plunge into passenger transport. In 1886 he had ordered four large passenger ships to provide a regular liner service between Foochow, Hong Kong and Australia – and the immediate result was the magical appearance in the South China Sea of the
Changsha
, a beautiful yacht-like steamer with two tall masts and one tall slim funnel: a ship to dream of; a ship almost worth building even if she lost money from the moment of launching, which was not the case. There were to be three more
Changsha
s in the years to come, but none more beautiful than the first.

The steamers all made money, though it was not an era when circumstances conspired to make every shipowner rich. A Sino–French war in the south of China, a Sino–Japanese war in the north and the alarums and disruptions of the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the century – despite these horrendous events Swire’s activities prospered in a number of directions, particularly after The Senior, with extreme patience and diplomatic skill, had evolved a
modus
vivendi
with an imperial Chinese government notoriously given to periodic bouts of xenophobia. ‘In future, we must share the same bed, celestials and terrestrials,’ John Swire murmured soothingly. And he insisted that terrestrials, too, had to bunk down together from time to time. A live-and-let-live agreement to keep competition more or less within gentlemanly bounds was arrived at with Swire’s rival Hong, the oldest and most powerful commercial house, Jardine Matheson, supreme in the region since the Emperor of China had been obliged at the end of the First Opium War to cede Hong Kong to Great Britain by the terms of the Treaty of Nanking of 1842.

Daily sailings by Swire vessels became the rule on the Lower Yangtze and on the Middle River from Hankow to Ichang, while on the Upper River Swire ran a passenger and freight service up to Chungking, 1,310 miles from the sea. Yet another service opened from Hankow to the lake port of Changsha and Siangtan, and small motor vessels even penetrated up to Kiating, little more than two hundred miles from Burma. Thus the Taikoo flag reached far into the heart of China.

After 1918 there were important changes in favour of passengers. CNCo sold the beancake fleet and moved over completely to scheduled berth services up and down the coast, and to Hong Kong and Manila as well. The move coincided with a major development that would greatly influence decisions when B&S came to give serious thought to aviation as a complement to their shipping. This was the sharp growth in importance of the southern sea routes from Swatow and Amoy to the Straits Settlements (Singapore, Malacca and Penang), and from Swatow to Bangkok because of a dramatic escalation in the number of emigrants from China. To sustain these new and immensely profitable routes between the two world wars, Swires commissioned from Scott & Co. of Greenock, or built in their own Taikoo Dockyard, at least a dozen good-sized passenger ships. And so, despite the Depression, strikes, earth-shaking political developments and the appalling disruptions of modern warfare, Taikoo and CNCo prospered.

*

By the time John Samuel Swire, The Senior, died in 1898, aged
seventy-three,
Butterfield & Swire Ltd was solidly set. With its offices up and down
China, its ships, its sugar refinery and its Hong Kong dockyard, it could now stand beside the older Hong, Jardine Matheson Ltd, as one of the two great commercial houses of the Far East. John Samuel was succeeded by his two sons, John and Warren, and it was Warren, something of a martinet, who introduced his nephew Jock to the Swire organization in the Far East with a personal letter to their No. 2 man in Hong Kong:

As it happened, the First World War broke out five months later and immediately most of young Jock’s energies were devoted to getting into it. In a sense Jock Swire was as much made for the army as for a life in high commerce; at any rate he seems to have been a born cavalry officer. After Eton he had gone to University College, Oxford, to read Law, and there attracted his contemporaries’ attention both as a horseman and as a star of the University’s Officer Training Corps. In the University magazine he was singled out as
Isis
Idol number
CCCCLXXXVI
, and the profile’s
undergraduate
author refers to Jock’s great height (‘growing like a tree’), to his horsemanship (‘learning to stick like a limpet to the saddle’), and to his ‘immense enthusiasm for life’. His football and his cricket ‘are marvels of gymnastic skill. Did he not once trundle out the City Police?’ As for his performance in the OTC: ‘As a trooper he was adequate, as a lance corporal he competed favourably, but when he came to adorn the dizzy rank of a subaltern his true
métier
was found. He set a fitting seal on his military and equestrian career’, the profile added, ‘by captaining the winning Oxford team in the inter-Varsity jumping competitions at Olympia’.
Isis
’s last words were: ‘We hear that he is bound for the Far East….’ Bound for it – and to be bound most intimately to it for the rest of his life – that is, for the next seventy years.

Jock joined the family firm in the autumn of 1913, aged twenty, and
next year sailed for Hong Kong on a ship of the Blue Funnel Line, a Swire associate. War broke out on 4 August 1914 and he had to wait until Christmas to rejoin his regiment, the Essex Yeomanry. He filled in the time in fine military manner attached to the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, patrolling from Deepwater Bay to the fishing village of Aberdeen, mostly at night, on his pony Shanghai, and so earning the affectionate description ‘Deepwater Bay Hussar’ among his friends. (He was, he said, on the lookout for the German sea raider
Emden
, then at large in Far Eastern and Pacific waters.) Circumstances took a grim turn. Almost as soon as Jock returned to Europe, his brother Glen was killed in action at Ypres. His Oxford contemporaries died in droves. Jock himself was wounded twice in France, the second time at the battle of Loos where a close call from a mortar bomb resulted in permanent partial deafness. His directness of character made him popular with his men; they seem to have taken to his sense of humour, too. After the war he liked to tell of the occasion when, on leave from the trenches, he called at a London chemist and ordered a thousand condoms for his battalion – he was worried about the ill-effect that fraternization with the French
filles de joie
was having on his men’s health. ‘A thousand? Certainly, sir,’ said the chemist, handing them over. Then, as Jock made for the door with the package under his arm, he called after him, ‘Enjoy your weekend, sir.’