Beyond Lion Rock: The Story of Cathay Pacific Airways (6 page)

Because Roy himself was less interested in flying than in the buying and selling – in fact he soon stopped flying altogether – the two men complemented each other as perfectly as a good tennis doubles pair, and thus the pattern of the future began to assert itself. The new ‘order of battle’ was: first Bob Russell, then Eric Kirkby (a most competent ex-RAAF equipment officer) in the Sydney office; Farrell and ‘Nash’ in Manila; ‘Ged’ Brown in Shanghai; and Neil Buchanan in Hong Kong. Syd, the air ‘supremo’, flitted purposefully about, gnawed by visions of more and better
planes and more pilots to fly them. Soon, because Hong Kong was at the geographical centre of things, he acquired an office of his own there – a room rented from P. J. Lobo & Co. at 4 Chater Road.

Business continued brisk but in a characteristically hit-and-miss fashion. As far as outside appearances went, Buchanan’s office writing paper was pretty smart, carrying not only the Farrell company’s address (‘Prince’s Building, Ice House Street, Hong Kong’ and its cable address, ‘Bronco’) but the company logo that Betsy and the other planes already wore – the debonair kangaroo, the smiling dragon and the three flags. Beneath the logo the company proclaimed itself ‘The first international Airmerchandising service in the world’, and its prospectus that the interesting range of Australian products it ‘airmerchandised’ ran from men’s worsteds and Scamp swimsuits, to plastic belts and picture frames. Nor did things stop there. Presently a most unusual advertisement appeared in Hong Kong’s
South China Morning Post
.

Farrell’s Sydney office still treasures a cable that Kirkby and Bob Russell received from Hong Kong: ‘Strictly confidential Korea shipment netted over
£
60,000 sterling.’ Kirkby still feels proud of it – for good reason. For those days it was a
very
big sum which puts Farrell’s success into perspective, just as the ‘Oysters by Air’ idea demonstrates his flair for salesmanship. As for his partners, what they lacked in business experience they made up for with a simple exuberance that can be seen in the boisterous letters (often in longhand since they decided they should save money on secretaries) that flew back and forth between them. ‘Have lined up a terrific cargo,’ Buchanan wrote to Russell from Shanghai while on a visit to Ged
Brown. ‘Some costume jewellery in the form of real silver bracelets, some leather fancy goods … brocade Mandarin jackets.’ Chinese Mandarin jackets for Sydney’s élite – Why not? In another letter to Russell, Buchanan talked excitedly of the big money in dried fruit and radiator wire (whatever that is), signing off breezily, ‘Keep your legs together, Yours sincerely, Neil B.’ Another time, Russell seemed quite carried away by the thought of a consignment of blankets and ‘700 gross human hairnets at
£
2,000 selling price Australia’. Something of the haywire element of the whole venture comes into focus in a long, peppy letter from Roy Farrell himself during a recce of the China market. Typed in slapdash fashion on the (second-hand) Shanghai office Remington and addressed to ‘Dear Bob and Syd’, it reveals the warmth of Roy’s easy-going character that was itself vital to the success of the enterprise. The letter reads, in part:

It ends: ‘Love and kisses, Roy.’

*

Syd had already rented office space in Chater Road, and the company also opened a passenger ticket office (it was a desk opening on to the lobby) at the Peninsula Hotel – visible signs of the mutually agreed division of powers in the Farrell–de Kantzow partnership.

The separation of the almost wholly American-owned Roy Farrell Export-Import Company from its aviation department was first
foresshadowed
in a most significant report from Neil Buchanan in Hong Kong. The report refers to a ‘successful’ meeting he had had with Mr A. J. R. Moss, Hong Kong’s Director of Civil Aviation, ‘over a cup of tea and a
bottle of whisky’. The subject of the meeting was one of critical importance – namely, the immediate necessity for the company’s air operations to be registered in British Hong Kong if they were to be allowed to continue using it as a base.

Buchanan wrote:

The italics are mine: the crisis was Farrell’s.

Betsy, as much as Farrell, Russell, Nasholds and Geddes Brown, was, in her inanimate way, an American citizen. But Hong Kong was most emphatically British, and this insistence on the plane’s British registration by the British Civil Aviation Authority in British Hong Kong was a decisive element in the emergence of an independent Farrell–de Kantzow aviation venture in the Far East and, later, of the much bigger and wholly British version of it.

Both men saw quite plainly how desirable an operating base in Hong Kong rather than Shanghai would be. You had only to look at a map and it stood out a mile: Hong Kong was the region’s very heart. It was a bit of a wreck, but it was also delightfully free of the political torment that so racked mainland China. And there was another pressing reason for giving up Shanghai as a principal base for air operations. The question of forming a Chinese airline was much in the minds of Chinese businessmen in Shanghai, and one in particular looked enviously at Roy Farrell’s success: his name was T. C. Loong, a most powerful man in Chiang Kai-shek’s China who was later to found another airline, Civil Air Transport (CAT), in Taipeh. Loong offered to buy Farrell’s air operation and when Farrell demurred he turned nasty in retaliation. Farrell’s planes faced arrest each time they landed in China. ‘I realized then my hopes of an airline in China were non-existent,’ Farrell told me. ‘So that’s why I decided to form a Hong Kong-registered airline instead.’

Thus Hong Kong entered the story as Cathay Pacific’s permanent home.

The territory of Hong Kong, which means ‘Fragrant Harbour’, looks unimpressive on a map, hanging like an insignificant pilot fish beneath the underbelly of the mainland Chinese province of Quangdong, formerly anglicized as Kwangtung. It comprises Hong Kong Island (32 square miles), the mainland peninsula of Kowloon (3.5 square miles), the mountainous New Territories and numerous islands that in 1946 amounted to 335 square miles: 370 square miles in all (later land reclamation has added quite a bit more). But this appendage to China is perfectly poised between South East Asia, the Far East and Australasia, with the Pacific on its doorstep and, beyond the Pacific – America.

What above all else gives Hong Kong the right to the title ‘Gateway to South China’ is the broad, natural harbour between the island and the peninsula. This expanse of water is protected to the west by a number of islands big and small, and approachable from the east through the
quarter-mile
-wide Lei Yue Mun Gap – a gap of great importance to aviators as well as ships’ captains, as will be seen.

To the west, the largest island of all is Lantau, more than twice the size of Hong Kong Island itself and at its highest over 3,000 feet – a dragon-like shape pointing its straggly tail towards the broad western anchorage. And your aircraft, swooping in from Bangkok or Singapore over the grey mouth of the Pearl River, cuts first across Lantau to traverse the inevitable fleet of ocean-going ships at anchor, and then across pebble-sized Stonecutters Island before skimming the fluttering tenement washing on the threshold of Kai Tak’s runway.

What of the Colony’s air services between the wars?

Hong Kong’s only airfield, Kai Tak was (and still is) situated in the northeast of Kowloon, its eastern edges skirting the waters of Kowloon Bay. Its name derived from the early part of the century when two prominent
Chinese businessmen, Sir Kai Ho-kai and Mr Au Tak, not remotely interested in flying, simply decided they liked the look of this remote piece of green, grassy land, bought it and enlarged it by reclaiming land from the Bay with the intention of making it into a 45-acre garden city development. Before that could come to anything, a group of British air enthusiasts spotted the land as ideal for the flying club the Colony lacked, and they talked the Governor, Sir Cecil Clementi, into agreeing to a compulsory purchase. Money was forthcoming to buy it and soon, in the early twenties, Sir Cecil drove out to declare the Flying Club open.

From that moment events moved rapidly. The interest of the Colony’s ruler was now roused and thoughts of imperial defence came to mind. Sir Cecil agreed that yet more money should be put out to reclaim another 160 acres of Kowloon Bay and then, in partnership with the RAF, the government actually took charge of what was now the Colony’s new and only official aerodrome. In next to no time a few Fairey Flycatcher aircraft of the Fleet Air Arm were based there under the eye of a Director of Air Services, who was also Harbour Master. Flight training in Avro Tudors began. The Portuguese Air Force wing in Macao was allowed to park a couple of its Fairey 1110 biplanes there. This was the beginning. It was the coming of the flying boats that proved the making of Kai Tak Airport.

Britain’s Imperial Airways Empire Mail run from the United Kingdom to the East began the influx. Aviation enthusiasts, veterans of the First World War, had promised successive Hong Kong governors: ‘We’ll be flying out from London in seven days!’ and eventually, with Imperial Airways’ luxurious twenty-four-passenger, 164mph, Short S-23 flying boats, ‘they’ managed to do just that. Important developments across the Pacific, too, focused attention on Hong Kong. In 1937 Pan American Airways began a trans-Pacific ‘China Clipper’ service, with huge (for those days) four-engined Martin M-130 flying boats carrying forty-eight
passengers
at 163mph. They joined San Francisco to Hong Kong, touching down for fuel at Honolulu, Midway Island, Wake Island, Guam and Manila, connecting with Pan American’s affiliate CNAC, the Chinese airline, on the Manila-Hong Kong sector. By 1938, as a result of this pioneering, 9,969 passengers a year were disembarking on the mud and grass airport where Sir Kai Ho-kai and Mr Au Tak’s garden city might have been.

Then there was an interruption. On 8 December 1941, out of a clear sky, planes were seen approaching Kai Tak. The Second World War was well under way, of course, but people cheered and waved, thinking they were the long-awaited reinforcement of RAF planes coming to help defend the Colony against the Japanese. Help was certainly needed; the existing defence was laughable. Wing Commander ‘Ginger’ Sullivan, in charge of Hong Kong’s RAF station, had at his disposal nothing more impressive than four Vickers Wildebeeste torpedo-bombers and a trio of ungainly
Super-marine
Walrus amphibians, which could just about make 100mph with luck and a strong tail wind. Unfortunately, the planes everyone was applauding were not RAF reinforcements but Japanese bombers. Their bombs soon began to fall on Kai Tak’s single runway, and among the Wildebeestes that Sullivan had assembled near the seadrome so recently used by the Imperial Airways flying boats. For Hong Kong it was clearly all up. A few intrepid British pilots were skilful enough to land between the bomb craters at night to pick up a handful of British evacuees, but everyone else (and the Colony itself) went ‘into the bag’ on Christmas Day 1941. The Colony died, and nearly four years of Japanese occupation went by before anything in it came to life again. Roy and Syd arrived a year after the Japanese surrender. What did they find?

Needless to say, what they saw had very little in common with what one sees now. The bankers’ playground of today, with its ultra-modern gold and ivory skyscrapers, its high-rise luxury housing, the urban sprawl that seeks to contain a relentlessly growing population that at present easily tops six million – everything that so impresses us today lay hidden in the unforeseeable future. At the time of the Japanese surrender in August 1945 Hong Kong was a disaster area. During their occupation the damage through looting and neglect – not to mention American bombing – had been immense. Roy Farrell took his first look at post-Japanese Hong Kong and saw a sad, end-of-the-road sort of place that seemed to have slipped halfway back to the nineteenth century. Its people had a depressing shabbiness about them. ‘The Chinese looked like destitute coolies,’ he wrote.

Furthermore, the Colony had been isolated from the world to a degree almost impossible to grasp in these days of jet travel. Shipping had been terribly disrupted, passenger and cargo ships scattered, wrecked or sunk. Hong Kong’s harbour – formerly one of the busiest in the world – was still an abandoned and stagnating pool, its anchorage cluttered with the wrecks of eleven big ships and seventy-two smaller ones, some of them deliberately scuttled by the British as the Japanese came in, some victims of General Claire Chennault’s China-based bombers, which the supplies flown over the Hump by the likes of Roy and Syd had kept flying. Kowloon’s port facilities were in an atrocious state; shipping was at a standstill. Air services, of course, were virtually non-existent. There was no international telephone service. Public transport was so sketchy that it was a problem to get around the Colony at all – it was a bright thought of Farrell’s to have imported two
jeeps from Okinawa. On top of everything, the Japanese had made off with whatever they could lay hands on. Across the harbour in Kowloon the imposing and conveniently situated Peninsula Hotel (known to everyone as ‘the Pen’), the centre of a slowly reviving social life, needed a lot of reviving itself. In spite of its busy lobby and rowdy bar furnished with heavy,
hide-backed
oriental chairs and huge blue Chinese jars, it was, Farrell thought, little more than an upholstered slum.

Little by little, a makeshift British military administration, overworked and desperately improvising, put together a few basic pieces of the Colony’s disjointed life before the returning civilians took over once more in May 1946. Of course, Hong Kong’s eventual rehabilitation was assured by the mere fact that it is uniquely situated at the centre of one of the world’s most densely populated regions – something that is a good deal easier to see now than it was in 1946. Then, nothing was clear, nothing predictable. The entire Eastern world was a shambles: Imperial Japan a defeated cripple under American occupation; the spirit of China broken by war, its people and land fragmented between the Nationalists and Communists. In the colonial territories of South East Asia – Indochina, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies – the upheaval of war had exposed the essential weakness of the imperial powers, Britain, France and the Netherlands. The spirit of national independence was abroad, and nationalist leaders were planning violent confrontation with colonial governments from Burma to Vietnam, from Laos, Malaya and Singapore to the remotest islands of the Dutch East Indies. Only a born optimist like Roy Farrell could have been quite so confident in the future, quite so sure of making his fortune. ‘Oh, things will pick up,’ he told his associates. Of course things had to improve. But how long any serious improvement would be in coming no one could foretell.

Meanwhile, for expatriates at least, Hong Kong was an easy-going place and rather fun to be in. ‘Syd and Angela were in a Peninsula Hotel suite for a while with her temple dog, Butch,’ Roy remembers, ‘and actually, we had the darnedest time. It was relaxed, you know. Syd and I used to roll in there from the Star ferry from Hong Kong Island late at night bawling out “San Antonio Rose”. I guess you’d be thrown out for doing that today.’

The immediate postwar shortage of ships in the Far East greatly inspired and benefited the rebirth of civil aviation in Hong Kong. For one thing, the task of dragging China back onto its feet, of coping with its millions of ragged, barefoot and half-starved refugees, required every available form of transport and, given the distances involved in this huge country, aircraft played a most important role. Kai Tak soon became relatively busy again with civilian aircraft, most of them belonging to CNAC, flying to and from
China. At the same time British Overseas Airways (BOAC), the postwar successor to Imperial Airways, restored its flying boat service from Britain, once more delivering passengers, mostly senior government officials and businessmen, in just under a week.

A year later, British aircraft of companies to be nominated by His Majesty’s Government were granted rights of setting down and taking up passengers at four Chinese airports, Kunming, Canton, Shanghai and Tientsin, and a BOAC subsidiary, Hong Kong Airways, began operating from the Colony under this Sino–British agreement. By 1948 aircraft from the United Kingdom, China, the Philippines, Siam (now Thailand), the USA and France were arriving at Kai Tak at a rate of about twenty-five a day, and in a twelve-month period the number of passengers amounted to nearly a quarter of a million, the majority still passing to and from China. The commonest civilian aircraft were recently demobilized DC-3 Dakotas and DC-4 Skymasters, but a new pride of the skies appeared, too – the ‘Connies’, the sleek, three-tailed Lockheed Constellations.

This was satisfactory for the time being, but Hong Kong’s postwar bugbear was that by modern standards Kai Tak Airport left much to be desired. Aircraft had grown heavier. They needed more space in which to land and take off. Kai Tak itself huddled uneasily under an escarpment of forbidding rocks. The Japanese had increased the little airport’s dimensions by ruthlessly demolishing acres of Chinese housing, and they had pulled down the ramparts surrounding Kowloon’s ancient Walled City to use its massive stones in the construction of two longer runways. Even so, Chic Eather’s first impression of Kai Tak in late 1946 was one of a muddy swamp. Duckboards led to immigration and customs ‘offices’ located in a cluster of old army tents near the seadrome, and Chic felt his spirits plummeting with every squelching step. Syd de Kantzow did little to raise them by walking him to the centre of the field and jabbing a finger at the enveloping escarpments to the east and north. ‘Never,’ he said, fixing young Eather with a hard eye, ‘
never
let yourself be a party to a take-off on Runway 31.’ You only had to look at Runway 31 to see what he meant: it pointed straight as an arrow at Lion Rock, a 1,500-foot-high knuckle of vaguely leonine appearance into which a departing RAF DC-3 had ploughed not long before, with the loss of nineteen lives. Runway 31 was only to be used for landings, Syd commanded. A government report issued that year went so far as to state that ‘Kai Tak, close under a range of steep hills of up to 1,800 feet, remains inadequate for heavy aircraft.’ Furthermore, foreign airline operators were coming to the same conclusion, the report warned: ‘There is a serious danger that international aircraft may start overflying the Colony.’

The thought of such a boycott struck panic into the minds of Hong Kong’s officials and businessmen. In the event, Kai Tak was not boycotted, but the mere possibility of such a thing started agitated talk of building a new, better airport. Where? Anywhere … somewhere in the New Territories…. It was a debate begun in urgency that was to drag on for over a decade, find temporary solution in a compromise at Kai Tak – and then drag on again to this very day. Cathay’s early inter-office letters and memos reverberate hopefully with excited chatter of the imminent construction of a big new airport fit for the twenty-first century. It would be, the memos promised each other, out at Deepwater Bay. But nothing happened. At last, in the early sixties, came compromise at the old Kai Tak site. Obstructive hills were levelled, their rubble dumped into Kowloon Bay, and where all had been water a new giant runway sprang out across the waves, aimed at the Lei Yue Mun Gap. The debris of those hills, suitably surfaced, is what you land on today.