Beyond Lion Rock: The Story of Cathay Pacific Airways (21 page)

At this satisfactory juncture a second retirement was announced: that of Jock Swire. It was as if a beloved monarch had abdicated, and the shock of the announcement was only slightly relieved by another that said he would stay on as Honorary President of Cathay Pacific Airways. His place on the Cathay Board was to be taken by his second son, Adrian, a doubly appropriate appointment since Adrian was an enthusiastic pilot in his own right, and his elder son, John, succeeded as Chairman of John Swire & Sons in London. Yet this was not the end of Jock. The soldierly figure with the trilby and the baggy suit, the battered briefcase and the suitcase held together with fraying rope would not disappear from the airports of the Far East. Far from it. As a sprightly septuagenarian, he had visited Bill Knowles in Hong Kong to take a look at the new Convair, pronouncing it ‘a lovely aircraft and very quiet’. After a prolonged globetrot that included Australia and a call on General Dynamics at San Diego, he had noted in his diary:

Jock would continue to bound about the world until he was nearly ninety. Still, his retirement closed an era. To everyone in Swires and Cathay, even to Jock himself, it seemed a very long time since the day in 1914 when he had sailed into Hong Kong’s wonderful harbour and first glimpsed from the deck of the Blue Funnel steamer the Peak and the sunlit, green hills of the New Territories rising into China. A long time, too, since his return from the Western Front to take Swire’s staff under his wing and pen in his diary, ‘The reason why B&S lack
esprit de corps
is because London are not
sufficiently human or sufficiently acquainted with local colour….’ It had almost amounted to a manifesto.

Suddenly it was time to reflect on the nature of the man and on the meaning of Jock’s leadership. Those who worked with him speak of Jock as a great man; but that does not mean he was free of all human failing. His son Adrian points to an angry, impatient side to his father that now and again erupted with Vesuvian effect. ‘He didn’t stand fools or malingerers gladly. He could be quite frightening – he gave his senior colleagues hell from time to time. But it was never his way to bully his juniors. He was not a bully. Ever.’

Mrs Joan Esnouf who was Jock’s personal secretary and assistant for many years, including those of the Second World War and the Blitz, says of him: ‘Terribly generous. Terribly impulsive. Terribly impatient.’

‘Autocratic?’

‘No-o-o. Not that. And not really frightening – he had this saving sense of humour, you see. He had a temper, yes, but if he was in the wrong he became very upset and would rush back into the room crying, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m so terribly sorry. Oh, dear. Excuse me.” He was so human. I remember a little secretary, a new girl, said, “I’m so glad Mr Swire’s back off holiday next week. It’s like a dead office without him.” He loved the family idea of Swires. When the wartime government rationed food he used to bring a bottle of milk from one of his own Jersey cows in his old attaché case, just for him and me. I expect you’ve heard about the attaché case. Its four corners were worn away and patched with leather. He loved that little case.’

In his time Jock
was
Cathay Pacific, just as Roy and Syd had been. He made Mrs Esnouf think of Mary Stuart and Calais: she almost believed they would find CPA written on his heart if the Company ever failed. A compulsive traveller on Cathay’s behalf to his dying day, Jock was a compulsive worker (and writer) as well: everything went down into memos, official letters, private letters and that personal diary. However exhausting a day had been, Jock wrote up his impressions of it.

He’d say, ‘I like getting things off my chest.’ Striding up and down and fiddling with his watch-chain as if it were a string of worry beads, he’d dictate pages of letters to Hong Kong, sometimes long after everyone but he and Joan Esnouf had gone home. ‘It was like talking to himself. If he wasn’t satisified with the day’s long telegrams to Hong Kong, he’d back them up with letters. He liked to record
everything
.’

While this book was in preparation I lost count of the number of former employees now retired in Australia, Britain, New Zealand, America or Hong Kong, who happily recalled meetings with Jock Swire in offices or on
airfields, in aeroplanes or at Company parties, at which inevitably he had hailed them by name as if they had been his own nephews and nieces. The Cathay family feeling was unfailingly reinforced whenever Jock made an appearance. Of course, things have changed. Success has increased the tally of Cathay’s employees to such a number that no living soul could put a name to all of them on sight. Even by the late 1960s, Cathay’s staff totalled 1,372, of whom 109 were captains, first officers and flight engineers. Nowadays the total staff numbers some 9,000 with the cockpit crew figure getting on for 800, and still growing.

Everything one reads or hears of Jock Swire demonstrates his two greatest virtues – an inflexible dedication to straight dealing and an extraordinary humanity. People said that his handshake was every bit as good as a signed contract (not, by the way, something that could be said of many business leaders in Hong Kong’s rough-and-tumble history). And as we have seen, his private diaries register the most homely details: that maddening stomach upset on the Yangtze River; the hat stolen in Shanghai; the crying need for some curtains and a kitchen range for the occupants of the Taikoo house in Hangkow.

Jock Swire’s life is not the story of a superman who took a mangy little airline by the scruff of the neck and with splendid, unhesitating gestures raised it to enormous triumph. There were hesitations galore, and misjudgements, too. Adrift in the barely understood world of Air, a world composed of contending forces of terrific intensity, Jock thought quite seriously once or twice of giving up and returning to familiar earth, but he was not one to panic and he stuck it out. He too had his romantic side. In his cautious, old-fashioned English gentleman’s way, he shared the vision of Roy Farrell and Sydney de Kantzow.

Now he was gone and a new generation came to the fore. Thirty-nine years old when he became Chairman, John took over Jock’s traditional responsibility for the Company’s staff, and the noticeably high quality of Swires’ expatriate employees in the East (it is universally remarked upon) must owe a good deal to him. Twenty-one years later he too retired to be Honorary President, and Adrian inherited the Chairmanship.

Adrian was to have more direct dealings with Cathay Pacific than John. Born in 1932, he had joined Butterfield & Swire in the Far East at the age of twenty-four after Eton and University College, Oxford, and a spell in the Coldstream Guards. After five years learning the business in Hong Kong, Japan and Australia, he had returned to the directorship in London in 1961. Adrian Swire was well suited to aviation; he was born with a love of flying as others are born with a love of the sea. He had learned to fly as a very young
man; joined the University Air Squadron at Oxford; and later enrolled in Hong Kong’s Auxiliary Air Force. In 1969 he bought a private Spitfire Mark IX, which he kept for fifteen years, managing, he says proudly, ‘to get it off the ground and down again regularly over that period without ever breaking anything.’ Apart from his directorship of Cathay Pacific, he became Chairman of the China Navigation Co. in 1967, and fifteen years later this dedicated flyer was knighted for his services to British shipping.

The succession of Jock’s two sons ensured continuity of the family feeling. It was not difficult for those who had known Jock to feel his spirit reborn in John and Adrian. John was not unlike the old man in appearance – a towering, rather military figure with an easy laugh. Adrian, though physically less a replica of his father and certainly less intimidating, shared all Jock’s enthusiasm for travel, people and, of course, for Cathay Pacific Airways. Both brothers inherited their father’s openness and his fondness for coming straight to the point. The Swire family’s benevolently patriarchal control of its empire had been re-emphasized to the satisfaction of everyone in it.

What the airline now amounted to was well set out in an article written in 1968 from Hong Kong by Derek Davies for the
Financial Times
of London.

Derek Davies’s article must have been a great boost to Cathay’s image. Wine, cocktails and an international cuisine controlled by Swiss chefs! It was a long way from the DC-3 world of Vera Rosario, the world of
bucket seats, coffee and sandwiches, and the horrendous bumps that made you feel you were in a high-speed elevator and spilled hot tea all over poor Jo Cheng.

Editors everywhere were suddenly paying attention to Cathay Pacific, this new-born phenomenon out of the East. ‘Most remarkable,’ an aviation correspondent, John Seekings, wrote in
Aeroplane
, ‘Cathay’s record has been achieved in the most highly competitive area in the world. Between Tokyo and Hong Kong, for instance, there are no fewer than fifteen carriers competing for services. Between Bangkok and Hong Kong, another key route, there are twelve carriers sharing the market.’ What were the advantages, he asked, that enabled Cathay to be such a sudden success after a period of solid but unspectacular performance? He pinpointed several basic factors. First, the sheer attraction of Hong Kong as a tourist centre and as one of the few places in the world where very high-grade labour – skilled and energetic – is available relatively cheaply. Second, the region is one in which Swires have unique experience. Next, sound organization.

Then there was HAECO, now one of the major aircraft engineering companies in the world, employing 2,000, offering high-quality engineering at low prices to Cathay and the owners of the 1,500-odd aircraft which passed through its hangars each year. And finally there was Cathay’s air catering service and Swire’s share (with Jardine Matheson) in Hong Kong Air Terminal Services (HATS) which organized all the passenger-boarding and aircraft ground-handling at Kai Tak Airport.

The
Aeroplane
article made much of the quality of Cathay’s flight crew recruits and the generous rates of pay, then
£
9,500 a year for a married Senior Captain with two children. Because of this, the article said, 600 pilots had applied recently for twenty vacancies. Allied to this, small aviation companies found it difficult as a rule to attract high-calibre management recruits, but Cathay was part of the much larger Swire group of companies, with 10,000 employees in a wide range of activities (trading, shipping, shipbuilding, property) in an exotic part of the world. If you joined Cathay, you signed up for the opportunities enjoyed by the whole group. Finally,
Aeroplane
said, and more important than any other factor, had been Jock Swire’s early insistence on taking into management only the top class of graduates in the graduate-recruiting scheme he had set up way back in the 1920s.
Aeroplane
did Cathay no more than justice.

Yet no echo of this eulogy can be found in the office records of Cathay Pacific Airways or in Jock Swire’s private diaries. There, self-congratulation is, and always has been, taboo. Even mildly hopeful predictions of the Company’s future course are packed round with cautious phrases like ‘with
luck’ or ‘should things go well’. Success was never to be taken on trust, for Jock was a steadfast believer in the dangers of
hubris
, the overweening pride which, the Greeks thought, drew down sooner or later on human heads a terrible corrective from the gods. ‘Pride goes before a fall’ was a maxim no Swire employee needed to pin to his office wall. It was stamped on his brain from the day he joined.

Thus, typically, John Browne at this moment of early success: ‘We have had successes. We must be wary of over-optimism for the future. Competition from the world’s major airlines is hotting up. A new spaciousness is coming into air travel with 747 Boeing aircraft able to carry from 350 to 450 passengers looming in the early 1970s. Fares are dropping and we shall undoubtedly continue to have to fight every inch of the way.’ Spoken like a true Swire man.

What a melancholy thing it is to have to record that Cathay Pacific Airways, having cast out
hubris
and standing at long last on a plateau of unaccustomed success, was hit by not one but two mishaps. The second of these was as great and as unmerited a tragedy as any that has struck any airline anywhere in the world.