Beyond Lion Rock: The Story of Cathay Pacific Airways (5 page)

Roy paused and stared at me, his eyes wide, remembering something. ‘Abreast of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I did a 90-degree turn to look back at New York. It shone as if it were fairyland.’

*

Miami, Puerto Rico, British Guiana, Brazil, across the South Atlantic to Ascension Island, Liberia – Pappy Farrell, Bob Russell, Bill Geddes Brown and Betsy flew gamely on to China, not without experiencing moments of interest. Approaching Belem in Brazil, Russell’s presumed flying expertise had begun to display serious shortcomings and Farrell seized control of Betsy ‘to prevent us ending as a pile of ashes’. It was the first and last time he’d ever had to do such a thing, and though he stayed in the team Russell never landed or took off one of Farrell’s planes again. Over Libya they dropped down to 500 feet to get a look at the relics of the Desert War: hundreds of miles of crashed aircraft, burned-out tanks and half-tracks,
shattered bunkers and Tripoli harbour blocked by sunken ships. Christmas Day in Cairo, then on to Abadan, Karachi, Agra. A New Year’s Eve party in Calcutta, and next day Farrell was in Kunming once more – where his euphoria even survived a partial looting of Betsy by thieves who stole $5,000-worth of toffs’ clothing. That left the final leg to Shanghai. But in Shanghai all air traffic was shut down; the airport had virtually no visibility. Was Betsy – were all of them – going to be written off at this moment of triumph?

‘We had no fuel for an alternative field, if one had existed,’ Farrell said. ‘So we were going in, hell or high water, on the first pass. After all, I had landed in Assam in such ground fog that the first thing I would see was the runway at the tip of my nose. So now, over the tower on the correct heading, and a turn downwind. Gear and flaps down, at 90 miles an hour, I crossed over where the airport’s boundary fence should have been.’ Farrell’s broadest grin. ‘Lucky. First thing – a runway light out my left window. I was straddling the centre line. One half second either way – a total
crack-up
.’

The USAAF bedded down the three happy if exhausted Americans for the night. While Betsy slept on Lungwah Airfield, her oriental destiny assured, Roy Farrell lay with the bed-covers over his head, thinking: ‘Suppose World War II hadn’t come along, I would be in South America or some place, running an insurance business. But this is not South America, it’s Shanghai, and – my God! – the first part of my plan is complete.’

Now he could start thinking seriously of that ‘empire’.

The headlines over two long features in an Australian weekly newspaper summed up a decidedly topsy-turvy postwar situation. The Shanghai into which Farrell had almost crash-landed was a chaotic city only recently given up by the defeated Japanese, and the Americans replacing them had moved in in a big and very noisy way.

‘The Cathay and Palace Hotels, Broadway Mansions and Cathay Mansions out in French-town,’ the Australian reported, ‘are among the world’s most luxurious buildings and apartment houses, and the
Americans
have them all.’ He sounded bitter; had he been relegated to a
doss-house?
‘In them American officers live like kings.’ Armies of cockroaches were doing the same: the city was once again a place of the ultra-rich and
the devastatingly poor. Good food and drink was plentiful but fabulously dear. The hundred or more nightclubs ranged from honky-tonks to elaborate establishments with Chinese tumblers and White Russian girl dancers as the main attraction. The behaviour of the American Navy was ‘scandalous’ (the reporter let fly again) ‘with American sailors from the warships lying out in the Whangpoo River brawling with Chinese nightly in the city’s streets’. What is more, bribery was almost
de rigueur
. Still, like it or not, the reporter concluded, ‘Shanghai was, and will still be, China’s richest city, dominating as it has for a century the mouth of the mighty Yangtze and its valley. But from now on, with the abolition of the International Settlements and with them a 104-year-old direct foreign dominance over Shanghai’s economic affairs, it will be a Chinese city, and it will probably take a decade to set in order again.’ The guns of those foreign warships lying off the Bund would never again be called upon to protect the interests of European taipans ashore; they were there now by courtesy of the Chinese government – Chiang’s government, for the moment. If anybody was losing sleep over the impending Communist victory, neither the reporter nor Roy Farrell seemed to meet them.

Roy himself was probably far too busy for political crystal-gazing. This young Texan-in-a-hurry soon found that his American passport was less than helpful. The China–America trade was already oversubscribed and he determined not to waste time with that. Where to turn? Australia? He made inquiries. It looked tempting. Wide open, too. He’d flown piece goods from America to Shanghai – why not piece goods from Sydney? In true bustling Farrell style, he buttonholed a friendly RAF squadron leader in the British Legation on Foochow Creek (the British were representing Australia in China) and soon had him hypnotized with his flamboyant account of life over the Hump, of how he’d adopted ‘his baby’ Betsy, and of the flight halfway around the world. Succumbing to Texan charm, the British airman nodded enthusiastically when Farrell spoke of using Betsy to fly Australian commodities to Shanghai; furthermore he promised to do all he could to arrange official landing permission for Betsy at the Australian end. Farrell floated down the British Legation’s steps as if reborn.

Even so, anyone with his mind set on getting a new airline business off the ground in the corrupt world of post-war Shanghai had to face setbacks to shatter the strongest souls. You needed permits for everything: to stay, to go, to trade, to rent offices, and of course to fly – and you needed to find friendly officials to give them to you. Eight men out often might have given up – sighed, shed a tear for a lost dream, and headed home to sell encyclopedias door-to-door. Anything might have seemed preferable to the
trekking round offices; the pleading with indifferent or hostile officials; the confrontations in freezing hotels and smoke-filled bars with idle or suspicious American majors, greedy Chinese colonels and evil-tempered generals of both countries who might offer invaluable help or invite you brutally to get lost. Farrell has never been, to put it mildly, unduly respectful of rank, and he needed all the tact he could summon to be civil to military men whose own financial ambitions were frequently tied to CNAC (now Farrell’s rival), or whose officiousness was buttressed by contacts at the highest levels of government in Washington.

Luckily Roy Farrell had what it took. His relentless determination, his down-to-earth manner, his good-natured Texan smile (which can only be described as ‘sunny’), made short work of the problem of operating from China. He naturally turned his partners’ (and his own) easy way with a drink to advantage. Russell, Brown and Farrell could have drawn an extremely accurate map of Shanghai’s bar circuit. ‘And since,’ as Farrell says, ‘their clients normally were drinking a good bit, we learned a good bit about Shanghai.’

Within a mere day or two, Farrell and his partners began to settle in. First, where to live? It was mid-winter and unbelievably cold. All those American officers were said to occupy the best accommodation, yet Farrell somehow wangled a room in that imposing block called Cathay Mansions. Once upon a time Cathay Mansions had been grand, but the Japanese Army had changed that, even melting down the plumbing and heating systems to make bullets. Farrell bought six old-fashioned oil heaters that smelled and smoked abominably, and thanks to them – and an impressive intake of strong buttered rums at bedtime – the three partners usually managed to get enough sleep. As for an office, Brown and Russell warned Farrell he was foolish to want to rent one in a city like Shanghai without having any precise idea what the future was going to be. But Farrell had thought things out.

‘You have to operate out of an
office
,’ he argued. ‘You can’t go about building an airline or an empire without an
office
.’

Naturally he soon found one and left ‘Ged’ Brown in it to cope with the paperwork necessary to get a company properly licensed for business. Then he went after Australia. Striding hopefully up the steps of the British Legation, he shook hands again with the friendly squadron leader. He was not disappointed. With a few encouraging words, the squadron leader handed Farrell his landing permission for Darwin.

That permission was a licence to make big money and Farrell lost no time in simply gazing at it. In what seemed like a matter of seconds, with Russell beside him, he had clambered aboard Betsy once more and was winging
south. As they went, Ged Brown threw open the office door at 25 rue du Consulat in Shanghai and introduced the world to the ‘Roy Farrell
Export-Import
Company’.

With the opening of the Shanghai office things began to move. Farrell and Russell, flying south, spent a single night in Canton and only a short time in the Peninsula Hotel, Hong Kong, which was then Kowloon’s grandest but virtually empty in the aftermath of the Japanese occupation. Just time enough for Farrell to change his savings (some $30,000) into local currency and Australian pounds, then once more Betsy took to the air for the 4,000 miles via Darwin, where he wrangled a licence to land at Kingsford-Smith Airfield at Mascot, outside Sydney.

She arrived there on 4 February 1946. Farrell found delays to contend with at Sydney over landing permits, but eventually these were granted and with them the Roy Farrell Export-Import Company had won what he was after: the right to carry freight (but not paying passengers) between Australia and the Far East. The dream advanced. Again Farrell didn’t waste a second. He and Russell ransacked Sydney for the woollen goods they needed for China. In no time they had opened their second office, in the Prudential Building, Martin Place, and recruited an Australian – a
thirty-three
-year-old ex-squadron leader and former accountant called Neil Buchanan – to help run it.

Then Farrell called a press conference.

It was another turning-point, for Roy was by nature a one-man public relations organization. Next morning every newspaper carried pictures of three cheerful young men in new suits and bright ties, grinning broadly. One caption read: ‘A new air service, the only one of its kind, will begin to operate from Sydney to China tomorrow, when these three men set off in a Douglas Dakota aircraft, laden with Australian woollen knitwear and piece goods, which they will sell. They expect to arrive in Shanghai in three days’ time. Left to right: Neil Buchanan (Aus), Roy Farrell (US) and R. S. Russell (US).’ The
Sydney Morning Herald
gave details: ‘Mr Farrell made 520 crossings over the hazardous Burma “Hump” route to China. Mr Russell
won the American DFC air medal, a Presidential citation, and the Chinese Order of the Flying Cloud for air operations with the Chinese–American Air Force.’ The accompanying story went on: ‘This will be the first air shipment of Australian goods for China by the Roy Farrell Export-Import Co., three and a half tons of clothes – for the tattered of China.’ The
Melbourne Herald
quoted Farrell as saying that on the return flights he hoped to bring back ‘Chinese silks, fishing tackle and napery’.

Smiling, charming, expansive, he also revealed something of his vision of the future. ‘We will continue to fly these needs into China until the sea routes are open again, and then, when we have established our markets, we will do most of our hauling by our own ships and fly in only urgently needed medical equipment and supplies.’ So the ghosts of that long-dead entrepreneur of the Spanish–American War days and his long-dead ships still hovered.

On 28 February, Farrell and Russell set off for the first time from Sydney to Shanghai. A
Sunday Telegraph
journalist along for the trip
enthusiastically
reported at the end of it: ‘Thirty-three hours flying time out from Sydney, Australia’s first overseas air freight service delivered three-and-
a-half
tons of Australian goods for Shanghai – and sold them all in six hours!’ The flight up to China covered a span of the recent Pacific War: Cloncurry, then bomb-battered, fly-blown Darwin; on to tropical Morotai in the Dutch Halamaheras, where jungle had recaptured an American wartime base save for a single red mud and gravel strip; to Leyte in the Philippines, then on to Manila (almost completely destroyed by American bombing) and thence to a Hong Kong still recovering from the shock of occupation, dilapidated but British once more, and desperate for trade.

‘The American ex-Army fliers were offered high prices,’ the
Sunday
Telegraph
man wrote, ‘to unload their freight at Manila and Hong Kong, but they had already contracted for Shanghai deliveries.’ In Shanghai itself, he reported, there had so far been American and British deliveries of UN refugee relief aid and petrol, but little else. The market therefore seemed wide open for Farrell’s woollens. ‘Old traders are tipping that China will probably be divided into three main trading spheres – Russia will dominate Manchuria, America will control the rich Yangtze Valley with Shanghai and Hangkow as entry ports, while Britain will control the south through Hong Kong….’ In these predictions Mao Tse-tung was not mentioned. Although the proclamation that henceforth China would be known as the People’s Republic was only three and a half years away, the wise ‘old traders’ of Shanghai had nothing to tell the
Sunday Telegraph
about a communist threat.

One photograph in particular of Roy Farrell taken at that time reflects his realization of the region’s commercial possibilities. It is the one from which I recognized him at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport forty years later, the spirit of ‘up, up and away’ personified. And Betsy is shining brightly, no longer a drab little army work-horse anonymous behind her military number NC58093: a newly painted logo on her aluminium fuselage – a big circle enclosing the flags of Australia, America and Chiang’s China with a kangaroo bounding in the top left-hand corner and a laughing green dragon bottom right – boasts of her new civilian identity. ‘Bound for China,’ the caption proclaimed. At that moment did Farrell remember the casual suggestion of the old friend in New York’s Lexington Hotel – ‘Pappy, why don’t you buy an aeroplane?’. If so, those words must have seemed to him like something spoken in heaven.

*

Cash flowed in. The air cargoes of woollen goods from Australia sold out in Shanghai in no time. It was like throwing fish to hungry seals and, as Farrell pointed out to his suddenly prosperous partners, ‘$70,000 clear for seven or eight days’ flying is not bad.’ Indeed, in those days it was very big money – so big that after only a couple of deliveries it was possible to expand the organization. More aircraft, more managers – and more pilots to free Farrell and Russell to cope with burgeoning paperwork. When Millard Nasholds, another old American comrade-in-arms from CNAC days, asked Farrell if he could come in, Farrell said ‘Sure’, and put ‘Nash’ in charge of a rented staff house and a new branch office in Manila. The air shuttle of passengers (largely Chinese) between Manila and Hong Kong had become another money-spinner.

Then something of the greatest importance happened. Syd de Kantzow reappeared from Calcutta. It seems that even in the Hump days he had wanted to team up with Roy Farrell in some post-war aviation venture. As soon as he had heard of Roy’s plans to sink money into a plane and fly her to the Far East, he had sent $10,000 of his own money from India to an
absent-minded
friend of Farrell’s in New York, asking to buy a share in what he saw was an enterprise quite after his own heart. The friend, strangely, had forgotten to pass on the money to Farrell (he returned it later), but when Syd walked into the office in the rue du Consulat Farrell welcomed him with open arms. There and then he joined the partnership.

Farrell not only liked Syd; he admired him too. He was not alone, for Syd was as much respected in the Australian aviation world as he had been in Sino–American CNAC, and news of his new employment was greeted with excited interest Down Under. When he arrived in Darwin with Betsy his
photograph was taken for the
Sydney
Sun
of 17 April 1946 – the handsome, serious face with the slim moustache, as like Ronald Colman as ever. ‘With a cargo of Chinese silk, Mr S. de Kantzow of the Roy Farrell Export Co.,’ the newspaper informed its readers. Back in Shanghai, as if to celebrate his old friend’s reappearance, Farrell bought a second C-47 (quickly named ‘Nikki’). He also sent a message to Syd to do some recruiting, and so the company acquired its first Australian employees: John Wawn, known to his friends as ‘Pinky’, and Neville Hemsworth, both pilots and old friends of Syd; Vic Leslie, who had had much wartime experience in New Guinea and the Pacific as a first officer; and a radio officer, Lyell ‘Mum’ Louttit. These men were the first ‘outsiders’ to fly Betsy.

Although Farrell was soon able to augment this little fleet with two more DC-3s in 1946, and in the following year with yet two more, those pioneer postwar fliers had taken on a hard job. For 1947 was still a pretty ramshackle world to fly in. According to Farrell, ‘Maps over Australia didn’t exist, hardly. Sure, they showed rivers, lakes, etc., but for most of the year rivers and lakes didn’t exist, and there was little if any trace of where they might have been.’ It was often a case of taking off on a 1,000-mile flight and pointing the aeroplane in the general direction of where you wanted to go. When you began to get close, you turned on your radio and homed in on the airfield.

Neville Hemsworth was a Sydney man who had been with Qantas, flying six or eight passengers at a time in Liberators – old wartime four-engined bombers – between Ceylon and Australia. That had been a long,
turbulent
haul, but even he found the immense distances of the Sydney–Shanghai–Sydney route tough going. ‘In those remote days,’ he says, looking back, ‘flying Betsy to Shanghai involved six hours from Sydney to Cloncurry, then, oh, I’d say twenty-four hours all told to Manila, and then another nine hours over Formosa to Shanghai. Thirty-three hours or more. Well, we were young then. We had no regulations about sleep. We dozed in the cockpit and just kept going hour after hour, just three of us – Wawn, myself and a radio officer. And that mountain of cargo sitting there behind us.’

I have squeezed my six-foot-three frame into Betsy’s cockpit – an historic cockpit but so tiny that my knees would have been literally around my ears if they hadn’t been immovably trapped by the control column. Thanks to this experiment I was able, as I listened to Neville Hemsworth, to speculate on what it might be like to fly for thirty-three hours on end in that tortured position. I said, ‘You must have been dead at the end of each trip.’

‘Buggered, yeah.’

Eric Kirkby, the astute Australian who came in to help in the Sydney office of which Russell was now in charge, remembers only too vividly a flight he took as a passenger to Hong Kong and back. ‘Coffee in vacuum flasks. Packed sandwiches. Grog? Good Lord, no. And the heat! No air conditioning then. Morotai is bang on the Equator. Nothing there; no buildings; no shelter. Phew! You stood under the wings for shade, and stared at a few red-hot fuel drums. If anything, the field at Darwin was worse – notorious for its swarms of huge, black flies that covered you from head to foot like bees swarming.’

All this and the weather too; the north-south route crossed both the Equator and the typhoon belt. Luckily, Betsy (like all DC-3s and DC-4s) was exceptionally canny; she could ride a typhoon as a bird rides a gust of wind, and it was just as well she could. In those days of simple navigational aids, you didn’t always know when to expect bad storms, and when they loomed up, as Neville Hemsworth explains, ‘You couldn’t afford to change course to go very far round them. If you diverted too far you could end up not knowing where you were.’ Another hazard lay in Farrell’s precious cargo. In really bad turbulence the crew would be seriously worried that all those tons of freight might shift and crush them. ‘If it got very rough, we could only put the gear down so that going slower we’d rise and float with the weather. Going fast, we’d cut and bump right through it.’

In the book of reminiscences he called
Syd’s Pirates
, Chic Eather, a young Australian who joined the company shortly after Hemsworth, described an occasion when survival depended on how quickly he and the crew could dump most of a very precious cargo. Heavy with freight, his DC-3 had lurched up so ponderously from the coral strip of Morotai, her wing-tips so perilously close to the fringe of coconut palms, that Eather suddenly wondered whether he had chosen the right employment. At 9,000 feet, he was even more appalled to hear the normally placid voice of the pilot, Pinky Wawn, yelling, ‘Get back and start tossing out the cargo!’ It seemed they had lost 3,000 feet and were going down fast – the port engine had packed up. Roy Farrell himself was aboard, Eather wrote, ‘and as I pushed past him his face was white and strained. With his background of flying the Hump, this emergency would not have frightened him – but jettisoning his cargo of woollen merchandise …!’ And the precious cargo was followed by two life rafts, two stretchers, sundry aircraft tools, safety belts, life belts and other small but expensive items. Snatched from the jaws of death, young Eather was beset with visions of puzzled inhabitants on the beautiful islands below fleeing a lethal hail of 180lb bales of woollens. What had they done to make the gods so angry?

*

Something more must be said now about Sydney de Kantzow, for his sudden reappearance at Farrell’s side is crucial to the history of Cathay Pacific.

Peace had thrown him into a new and unfamiliar world. The pith helmet had gone; India, the Hump, tiger-shooting – all that must have seemed a long way behind him. When de Kantzow, a demobilized pilot with a determined expression, stood at dusty, fly-infested Darwin airfield next to a DC-3 loaded with Chinese silk-lined hats and pig bristles, he was in some ways a different man.

One important link with India remained. Syd was about to marry a beautiful English girl he had first met in Calcutta in 1943 – Angela, daughter of the British Resident in Patiala, John Duncan May, had been born in Multan, a city in that part of the Punjab which is now in Pakistan. They were married at the Anglican Cathedral in Shanghai shortly after Syd joined Roy Farrell, and the
China Press
made the event doubly memorable by attaching to the photograph it published of the happy couple on the cathedral steps a caption of bewildering inaccuracy. ‘The marriage of Miss Angela Mary de Kantzow to Capt H. L. Woods….’

*

Flying expertise coupled with a driving organizational ability were exactly what was needed in Farrell’s outfit, and Syd’s partnership with Roy was as fitting as that of Marks and Spencer or Laurel and Hardy. From now on, de Kantzow worked like the fanatic he could be to build up a flexible, if rough and ready, flying organization that was in effect the air transport wing of the Roy Farrell Export-Import Company. If Roy was the ‘Pappy’ (his universal nickname), Syd became the show’s stern and exacting Nanny. All those still alive who flew with him talk with reverence of Syd’s flying ability. Neville Hemsworth, whose good opinion is not thoughtlessly bestowed, speaks for many others: ‘Syd was a very
smooth
pilot. I mean, you get “flyers” and you get “drivers”. Syd was a “flyer”.’ Roy Farrell says simply, ‘Syd was as good a pilot as I ever rode with.’