Beyond Lion Rock: The Story of Cathay Pacific Airways (18 page)

The letter also made reference to the ‘easing of the international situation – through the recent Geneva Conference’ which had restored peace (
temporarily
) to Indo-China; and that perhaps is the reason why the Chinese were so quick off the mark with their regrets. Another aspect of the international scene at that time may well have contributed to the ‘unfortunate incident’. The Chinese letter referred to landings by Chiang’s secret agents on the coast of China, including Hainan, to the dropping of subversive pamphlets, in fact to a general campaign of harassment ‘to create tension in Asia’. Nerves were very much on edge. Remembrance of those half-forgotten times came back like a book read long ago as Phil Blown sat thirty years later under the blue gums near the sign saying ‘Road’s End’. Yes, the Chinese had reason to be nervous, he said—

‘The Americans used to run up and down the China coast, you know, looking. And the Chinese sent up planes to watch ’em. A hornets’ nest was being stirred up then from Taiwan, Swatow, all the way down to Haiphong nearly. The Yanks were dropping pamphlets in Chinese over southern China. General ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, the founder of OSS, America’s wartime spy outfit, was around there as ambassador in Bangkok and used to fly about in Curtiss Commandos of Civil Air Transport – CAT – the Nationalist Chinese line. The Chinese didn’t like all that. They were irritated, bloody irritated, and had been for some time.’

I asked, ‘Were you and VR-HEU a little bit too close to Hainan for safety?’

‘Not really. We were well inside the international corridor. So it was they who encroached. And they thought, probably, that Cathay Pacific was CAT. And then they thought – “Ah, Donovan – there he is, the bastard.”’

Mrs Blown came into the room with two more cans of beer. ‘They wanted to kill us all,’ Phil said. ‘If there’d been no survivors the Chinese pilots would never have admitted to their action. But compensation was paid. What happened to the pilots, God knows!’

The morning of the attack, Bunty Blown had gone to work as usual at the Butterfield & Swire passenger department. ‘I thought that’s funny, no one’s talking to me. So I asked Marie Bok, “What’s up?” and she said, “Well, there’s been a plane lost. The flight from Bangkok.” Of course I knew Phil was on that flight.’

‘What did you do?’ I asked.

‘I went to the insurance office,’ she laughed. ‘No, not really. We weren’t insured for that sort of thing. But you know what Phil did later? He sent his watch to Switzerland, to the makers, complaining it had stopped at the time of the accident. Meant to be waterproof, after all. And he got a new one back!’

In a letter to London, J. A. Blackwood, then Chairman of Cathay in Hong Kong wrote, ‘The behaviour of all concerned seems to have been in the highest tradition. Captain Blown’s effort in the manner of ditching and the saving of personnel has aroused the admiration of the flying world here.’ Blown was out and about, he added, with apparently only a cracked rib and a bruised nose. Cedric Carlton was not so mobile, with a sprained ankle and more serious bruising. Neither of them wanted special leave, and indeed they were both soon flying again.

When it came to handing out rewards, a pleasant element of humour crept into the exchange between Swires’ senior executives. In the margin of Blackwood’s letter someone in the London office has pencilled: ‘Should we give them a memento?’ and a note from Jock adds: ‘I would like to but who to? A gold watch to Woodyear?’ Replying, Black wood suggested: ‘I think it would be a good gesture if CPA gave Captain Woodyard (not Woodyear) some tangible recognition of their appreciation. I doubt if a conventional watch would be of use to a member of the services. I should have thought that a salver, suitably inscribed, could find a place in his home now, although Captain woodyard personally might not see a great deal of it until he retires. I certainly cannot think of anything that an Air Force man would carry around with him.’

In the event, Captain Woodyard received the Distinguished Flying Cross from the US Air Force and the salver proposed by Blackwood. It was engraved:

Jock felt that instead of a company award, Blown and Carlton deserved something rather grander. Sure enough, dressed in their smartest
shirt-sleeve
order, the two heroes paraded about a year later before Hong Kong’s Governor, Sir Alexander Grantham, and before numerous distinguished guests he presented them with the Queen’s Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air.

‘It was a little bit of paper signed by Winston Churchill,’ Phil explained. ‘Not a gong, more a sort of shield you can stick on your lapel.’

‘Do you wear it?’ I asked.

‘Oh, no, never,’ he said smiling.

Bunty laughed. ‘And you can’t put QC after your name, can you?’

‘What did you get, Bunty? A kiss on the cheek from Sir Alexander?’

‘Oh, just a handshake. He was a dear old man, Grantham.’ She went into the bedroom to find the commendation.

Phil Blown, stocky and dependable, looking more Cagney than ever, and as if nothing more exciting had occurred in his life than a sprained wrist playing croquet, told me, ‘I had one kidney torn away in that ditching. Yes, Ced and I were thrown forward very hard and then the deceleration tore the kidney away from its moorings. It took about a year to find out about it. They sewed it back eventually and I’ve been fine ever since.’ But I was wondering why he wasn’t dead.

Bunty couldn’t find the Queen’s Commendation badge after all. We walked out to the short drive that led to the Road’s End sign. Jays and mynah birds screeched and whistled.

‘We’ve got foxes out here,’ Phil said, ‘and wombats.’

‘And six-foot snakes, parrots, cockatoos and nasty spiders,’ Bunty added. ‘I was relieved,’ she went on, ‘when Phil “swallowed the prop” [pilots’ slang for ‘retire’] in 1961. Flying took him away so much. We had a son to educate here.’ We looked at the countryside beyond the trees. ‘There’ll be a
four-lane
highway here some day, but not for twenty years. That’s how slowly things work in Australia.’ Light rain was beginning to fall and Bunty held out a hand to catch the drops.

*

Strange to relate, the Hainan tragedy had a silver lining as far as Cathay Pacific’s future was concerned. Dave Smith believes it was a ‘turning point’, that the tremendous publicity had the effect of a particularly good advertisement. The reason for that, of course, was the heroism. For a time Phil Blown’s performance was one of the smaller wonders of the world.

As for the compensation promised by the Government of China, Cathay handed in a bill for
£
251,400 which the Chinese promptly paid to the British Government. Inexplicably, Cathay got only
£
175,000 on account, and the Foreign Office took until the following year to make the final payment. The ‘brutal’ Chinese had moved faster.

In operational terms, however, the loss of HEU came as a staggering blow. Fresh capital might be in the offing, but how could Cathay continue to operate for the next few weeks without planes – that was the urgent question. At this late hour, could the airline carry on with only two DC-3s?
Clearly not. A replacement for HEU had to be found without delay.

Luckily Jock, as we have seen, had found a new friend on his trip to Canada. ‘HEU was shot down 24.7.54,’ he noted in his diary, ‘and we cabled Grant McConachie in Vancouver “We have no aeroplanes can you help us”. He leased us a DC-4 Skymaster VH-HFF at once.’ Jock Swire, Grant McConachie, Ivan Holyman and Sydney de Kantzow – as Jock had pondered earlier, they all fell for each other at first sight: adventurers in the same mould. Jock’s character once more had saved a dangerous situation from deteriorating into a fatal one.

The new DC-4 arrived three weeks after the loss of HEU. Cathay first leased it, then bought it from McConachie’s Canadian Pacific Airlines. It was not the most immaculate Skymaster in the world. Initial trouble caused grave concern to Jack Gething, Cathay’s Chief Engineer, when one after the other three of its engines had to be replaced by HEU’s spares. But soon it was standing up well to the eighty hours a week required of it.

But that was not enough; VH-HFF only took Cathay back to where things had been just before HEU’s shooting down: on the point of acquiring a DC-6. Accordingly Ivan Holyman, passing through the United States in November, succeeded in buying from Pan American–Grace Airways in Miami the DC-6 on which Jock had set his sights. The price of US$1,225,000 included all spares, two spare Double Wasp engines and the training costs for two crews. Holyman was assisted in this purchase by Jack Gething and Captain Kenneth Steele. Steele flew the new DC-6 to Hong Kong with Phil Blown, now an international hero, as co-pilot. Also aboard were Engineer Jack Williams and Flight Hostess Vera Rosario, whom we saw earlier bouncing about serving tea and sandwiches over the Australian outback in the DC-3s flown by Syd’s ‘pirates’ in CPA’s earliest days. Jack and Vera had recently married.

Even after the agonizing decision to acquire a DC-6 had been taken, Cathay still had to run very fast to keep up with the Joneses of aviation. While the heart-searching over Hong Kong Airways, the doubts of future
profitability,
the debate over whether to pack up or be bold and risk money on a bigger aircraft had been dragging on, the jet age had been approaching Hong Kong like a meandering but relentless typhoon – and suddenly it arrived.

On 12 September 1958, before an applauding audience of VIPs, Sir Robert Black, the Governor of Hong Kong, bundled his wife and daughters into a helicopter that promptly took off and ceremoniously severed a ribbon stretched across the impressive new runway at Kai Tak. It was 8,350 feet in length, long enough to accommodate any aeroplane flying or likely to fly in the foreseeable future. Chinese firecrackers sparked and fizzed in
celebration
of a new era and, as if to demonstrate the sort of future the new runway heralded, a four-engined BOAC Comet 4 jet took the Governor’s party up for a bird’s-eye view of the Colony. Cathay for its part could only launch an old DC-3 and the new DC-6. But thank heavens for the DC-6.

Perhaps past adventures, Burma, the takeover of HKA and the recital of other events in Cathay’s young life have obscured its still puny size. Even by 1955 Captain Pat Moore, the Company’s flamboyant Irish Operations Manager, was sending directives intended for his senior flying staff to no more than fifteen pilots, including his Flight Superintendent, Captain Ken Steele. They were: Captains Phil Blown, Pat Armstrong, Dave Smith, Geoff Leslie, John Carrington, Laurie King, G. D. A. Rignall, G. V. Renwick (he retired in 1956), John Warne, Chic Eather, Cedric Carlton, B. G. Hargreaves (who joined Qantas in 1965), L. J. Kloster (ditto) and Norman Marsh.

Even if you add eight or nine First Officers and a small handful of Radio Officers, Moore’s Merry Men were still a relatively cosy band. Change was in the offing.

At the severing of that ceremonial ribbon by Sir Robert Black, the knell sounded for days like the one on which Ken Steele, piloting a DC-6 into Kai Tak in pelting rain and with no windscreen wipers, skidded blindly with brakes full on to stop against the fence round the RAF compound and heard his co-pilot murmur, ‘Go through the fence, Ken. There’s a hospital there.’
*
And for moments like the one when grand old Captain Pat Moore replied to someone’s grouse that he was barely skimming the rocky hills between the Kowloon Police Station and the old Kai Tak runway: ‘Well, I’m not hitting ’em, am I?’ It seemed that a more grown-up world had suddenly arrived. A good thing in its way, but sad, like the loss of childhood. Actually the new runway had been opened prematurely, fifteen days before the formal ceremony, because a USAF Skymaster had gone up in smoke (no casualties) on the old one. So the first pilot to touch down on the 8.350-foot innovation was a Philippine Airlines captain called Manuel Conde, who burbled excitedly to reporters that it was ‘beautiful, smooth and straight’. (It would have been strange if it had been anything else.) A year later Kai Tak took another step into the modern world. Cathay’s DC-3 Nikki flew in after dark: Hong Kong’s airport was declared open for night operations at last.

*

Cathay’s DC-6 had attracted favourable attention when the company added it to its all-Douglas fleet. The Hong Kong press called the new aircraft ‘sleek’ and ‘extremely smooth’, and when, like the Skymaster, it began a direct, non-stop service between Hong Kong and Singapore, leaving the Colony at sunset and taking off from Singapore at around midnight, businessmen were delighted by its greater speed and the newly installed sleeping berths. An advertising slogan – ‘Be specific … fly Cathay Pacific’ – was invented (inspired no doubt by the ‘Don’t be vague … ask for Haig’ ads) to promote the all-night service. It was nicknamed the ‘Midnight Special’ – although flight crews swiftly dubbed it the ‘Midnight Horror’ owning to the absence aboard of even elementary navigational aids, coupled with the exhausting all-night flying and the prevalence of thunderstorms.

Since the early days of the DC-4 the Cathay flights had caught the imagination of the itinerant Overseas Chinese – and for this Η. Η. Lee in Singapore can take much credit. ‘Luckily,’ he said later, ‘with my CNAC experience in China I had very good connections. Before 1947 CNAC had 
connected South China and Hong Kong. CPA had flown second-generation Chinese from the Straits Settlements to Hong Kong, and from there they visited their native villages. They were energetic in Malaya, and some got rich and went home to show off their nice suits or to get a bride, to build a house or a temple and then return to the Straits. For a time from 1949, Overseas Chinese still harboured the idea that China would be much the same – only a change of government, even if it is Communist. Well, of course, they were disappointed. But in the early days we tried to develop the Overseas Chinese trade.

‘We could give lots of help to Chinese – some had no passports, only Certificates of Identity. There were forms to be filled in, permits, landing cards, customs forms, immigration forms – all in English. We helped with the language. I was always out at the airport helping our passengers. BOAC made people handle all these strange, unfamiliar matters themselves, and in a foreign language. BOAC’s air hostesses were all English and
English-speaking
. We slowly built up our reputation as Asians. We had oriental food, hostesses speaking every Asian language. So even when BOAC introduced faster planes than us – they had Britannias when we had the DC-6, and later they had 707s when we had Electras – Chinese and other Asian passengers were happy to take a longer time flying with us. We were better known to them. We flew the merchants whose goods travelled in our ships all through the region. Then in 1960 tourism began in quite a big way, too.’

Beavering away in the Ocean Building office or speeding back and forth to Singapore Airport, Lee was often encouraged, as so many other Cathay employees were, by the sight of the formidable though avuncular figure of Jock Swire dropping in for a visit. ‘His suitcase was always tied up with string,’ he told me.

This airline appealed to Asian governments and national airlines for an even more basic reason than those which Η. Η. Lee mentioned. Paul Jurgensen, a Danish ex-fighter pilot, a hard-headed veteran of the Biafran war and a down-to-earth character who became Cathay’s South East Asian Regional Manager in the 1980s, believes that because of Jock’s strict and perhaps old-fashioned standards of straight dealing, the airline became particularly well respected in Singapore from the word go. ‘We were considered upright and honest – and in Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s rather puritanical “rugged society” state that is appreciated.’ At first even Jurgensen, before he joined Cathay, thought ‘the Swire business was weird’. He found it hard to grasp that, with them, a handshake really was final. ‘Such a thing,’ he believes, ‘is not only honest, it is
unique
. Particularly,’ he glowers, ‘when you consider that the airline industry is a bunch of pirates!’
After Lee’s technically go-ahead little island split with Malaysia in 1965, Singapore created its own excellent airline; relations with Cathay, which might have been strained by competition, remained extremely cordial.

Meanwhile, Captain Bob Howell (with Lyell Louttit) took the first DC-6 charter to London, flying into Gatwick on a drizzly Saturday in November and expecting to be met by Jock Swire in person. Instead, in the freezing wind, a Cathay secretary sweetly handed him a note that read, ‘Welcome, Captain Howell – You should know better than to arrive at 3.30 on a Saturday during the fox-hunting season!’

The DC-6B that joined the Cathay fleet soon after was a sort of milestone – the first brand-new aircraft bought direct from the manufacturer. It was equipped with radar, and both planes usefully filled a gap and attracted passengers. The DC-6B did more – it pioneered the Hong Kong–Taipei–Tokyo route newly acquired after HKA’s absorption into Cathay. But the DC-6s were already something of an anachronism – the new Kai Tak runway and the symbolic presence of the Comet showed that. A Brave New World had arrived, and with Pan Am’s transatlantic crossing by 707 jet the time had come to switch to something more up-to-date than piston engines.

That did not mean that little Cathay should rush headlong into the world of pure jets. Propjets were quite a new phenomenon and modern enough for now. But which ones? Dave Smith said later, ‘There was always a patriotic compulsion to buy British aircraft. But the fact was British aircraft didn’t suit us. We had to have a plane that could hold fuel in case of emergency – say, flying Bangkok to Hong Kong, there had to be the possibility of diverting to Manila. We looked at the British Comet 4, but it still hadn’t been cleared for civilian flying, and it had a record then that the public rather shied away from (though, of course, BOAC flew them again quite successfully). So we chose the Lockheed Electras – American planes. Two of them, in fact.’

Don Delaney, an experienced engineer, was quite sure the Electras were a much better choice than the British alternative, the short-range Vickers Viscounts and Vanguards. ‘Electras flew like dreams,’ he said, ‘and handled like fighters.’

Dave Smith who was later to become the company’s Operations Manager, brought Cathay’s first Electra into a perfect landing at Kai Tak on 14 April 1959 after the 8,500-mile flight from Burbank, California, in under twenty-six hours. ‘A most forgiving aircraft,’ he thought. The Electra entered service ten days later. With her spacious interior arranged to accommodate sixty-six Economy and twelve First Class passengers on the
Hong Kong–Bangkok–Singapore route, her turbines smooth and quiet with a top speed of 450mph, she gave Far Eastern passengers their first taste of a fast, luxurious flight and became an immediate favourite. The second Electra flew into Kai Tak three months later with Phil Blown, hero of Hainan Island, at the controls. They were the first two such planes built at Burbank, and all at once the Cathay fleet had reached an impressive level both in quality and numbers of aircraft: one DC-3, one DC-4, one DC-6, one DC-6B, and two Electras.

In quick succession, and with much flourish and fanfare from the press of the entire region, Cathay opened up three more major routes with their smart new planes – one of the Electras inaugurated a regular weekly service to Tokyo; the DC-6B started a bi-weekly service to Calcutta; and, most thrilling of all, the second Electra kicked off a new service to Sydney – the fastest of any airline by more than seven hours. Each of these inaugural flights was a wonderful party. Cathay Pacific’s Chairman, Bill Knowles, and Duncan Bluck, now Cathay’s young and dynamic Commercial Manager, scattered invitations to as many important people from the countries involved – politicians, show business stars, journalists and big businessmen – as they could safely load aboard, and with the collaboration of Jo Cheng, the company’s Hostess Supervisor, made sure they were pampered unmercifully.

*

In spite of these successes, on 18 February 1960 Jock Swire was moved to write a deeply troubled appraisal of Cathay’s situation. To have achieved Cathay’s first regular scheduled service Down South in the footsteps of Syd and Roy by breaking a record added a spectacular feather in the Company’s cap, but it also represented a break out from the regional image Jock was convinced was the right one and which Cathay had created for itself and adhered to up to now, and from this sprang trouble.

Australia had its own national airline, Qantas, one of the giant international flag-carriers, and its directors were a very suspicious bunch who looked askance at ambitious upstarts like Cathay if they began to show signs of getting too big for their boots. Even though, as everyone knew, Cathay Pacific was the British-owned airline designated by Her Majesty’s Government to fly the Hong Kong–Sydney route and therefore fully entitled to do so, it looked to some people in Qantas almost like a marauding raid into private territory. Australian hostility was further increased by the fact that a project to charter a Qantas Super Constellation aircraft to Malayan Airways for use on their Singapore–Hong Kong run was being
bitterly opposed by Cathay, on the grounds that once Qantas had its foot in that door with its own Superconnie – no matter in whose name the plane was flying – it would never withdraw it. The Hong Kong–Singapore service was Cathay’s bread and butter: no one at Butterfield & Swire was prepared to sit back and watch the crafty Aussies worm their way by stealth into a trade that, though a mere sideshow to an intercontinental airline like Qantas, was of vital importance to the existence of Cathay.

This time Jock’s sudden anxiety for the future was unlike earlier bursts of soul-searching. Now the question was not ‘To be or not to be?’ but ‘Where are we going – and why?’ No one, since the influx of new capital and the modernization of the fleet, had talked any more of ‘liquidation’, of packing up Air and fleeing back to shipping. As Don Delaney put it later, ‘Cathay took off with the Electras. It was sink or swim after that.’ And to continue swimming two new elements had, all of a sudden, to be taken into account. These were, first, the hostility of Qantas and, second, the arrival in the Far East of the age of the pure jet, a good deal quicker than expected. These two elements combined to discomfort a Cathay Pacific still lacking somewhat in self-confidence.

Cathay had proudly started their swift, smooth Electra service to Sydney on 23 July 1959. Five months later Duncan Bluck reported to Jock that Qantas had responded with
their
Sydney–Hong Kong Electra service – and Qantas flew three times a week to Cathay’s once.

‘We must now compete,’ Bluck warned, ‘with a well-established operator with three times our frequency and with identical equipment.’ That was one development. Bluck signalled sombre indications of another: ‘I understand Jardines have been asked to prepare for the handling of Qantas’s Boeing 707s in Hong Kong by June 1960.’ Duncan Bluck had already reported that Pan-American was starting to fly 707s four times a week to Europe via Bangkok and Tokyo, two important Cathay ‘ports’, and Jock had pencilled his comment in the report’s margin: ‘This might hurt us quite a lot.’ Now if Qantas was to introduce pure jet Boeing 707s – planes much bigger and faster than Cathay’s propjet Electras – between Sydney and Hong Kong….