by Gavin Young
‘“These yours?” I said to the co-pilot and the radio officer, both Chinese.
‘“Oh, no, Captain. Not mine.”
‘“Good. Then they’re all mine,” I said and stuck them under my seat. ‘Well, it was very cold, but oddly enough I could see the co-pilot streaming with sweat, the radio officer, too. So I said, “Look, boys. I know it’s yours, all this. But listen, if anyone smuggles anything on my plane, I do. Please tell all your friends that. If not there’ll be trouble. Plenty trouble.” And I gave the loot back to ’em. We got on fine after that.’
Political bigwigs smuggled for much bigger stakes, as Syd de Kantzow found out when an engine caught fire as he was taking off from Chungking, obliging him to make a forced landing in the Yangtze River. Mail, diplomatic bags, all the cargo went to the river bed. Divers finally brought up a huge sum of waterlogged currency, currency Chiang Kai-shek’s people were spiriting out of the country.
In that fevered time money itself became unreal. Pilots earning $2,000 a month with nowhere to spend it took to heavy gambling. A dangerous way to kill boredom.
‘We’d play five dollars a point at gin rummy,’ Farrell says. ‘That’s pretty damn high. In one game you could lose twenty thousand, fifty thousand dollars.’ Imagine the whine of mosquitoes in a stifling hut, the heavy monsoon raindrops bouncing like bullets off the iron roof. ‘Money had little meaning because you didn’t know who’d come back from the missions next day and who wouldn’t. After the war, the returning GIs and pilots went to the gambling houses at home and that’s when they learned the value of money. The hard way.’
After a pause he said, ‘See, those CNAC people weren’t much good at anything but flying. Not much good at making a living.’ He laughed. ‘They were really the biggest bunch of renegades….’
They were renegades at just the right place at just the right time. And two of them at least had their heads screwed on the right way. Roy Farrell in Dinjan and Syd de Kantzow in Calcutta were men who knew how to make a living.
‘Guess where we came together?’ Roy said.
I tried to guess. In Calcutta over curry at the Grand Hotel? At Dinjan in some airless Nissen hut, with a radio pulsing to Glenn Miller’s Big Band, Artie Shaw’s clarinet, the voices of Dick Haymes or the Andrews Sisters? There would have been pin-ups tacked to three-ply cupboard doors – Betty Grable in the famous tight sweater; Dorothy Lamour, Polynesian in her sarong; a pouting Lana Turner, very blonde under a strong studio light….
‘Tigers,’ Roy said, grinning. ‘Tiger-hunting, that’s where we met. In Cooch Behar, an Indian state near Calcutta; Bayah, the maharajah, had a palace there. He was a great friend of Syd’s. Tiger-hunting, golf, drinking: luxury. Bayah even gave us wine with rubies ground up in it. It’s an aphrodisiac, the Indians say.’
‘And was it?’
‘Hell, I wouldn’t know. Didn’t need aphrodisiacs in those days!’
Eve de Kantzow had shown me photographs of those tiger-shoots. A caption to one of them read: ‘Captain de Kantzow on the extreme left, the Maharajah of Cooch Behar (second from right), beside a team of trained hunting elephants and their “mahouts”.’ The maharajah wore his trilby cocked rakishly over one eye and a well-made safari jacket. Somebody else wore a pair of colonial, knee-length, bell-bottomed shorts. Syd wore a pith helmet.
‘I had a very heavy gun – a cannon without wheels,’ Roy said. ‘It slammed me back eight steps and brought the tears to my eyes….’
Tears in his eyes; visions of the future in his head. It was the China end of the Hump run that evoked the visions. They came to him in Chungking, a place that, because it was Chiang’s temporary capital, was crammed with officials in limousines on one hand and people in sedan chairs on the other; soldiers in cheap uniforms and bewildered refugees with bare feet; a grossly overcrowded place of ostentatious riches and secret corruption, self-evident slums and degrading poverty. One ramshackle, rat-infested hotel, the Shu Teh Gunza, was run by a wizened Eurasian called Harris who touted for foreigners’ custom, but the CNAC people stayed at the Standard Oil installation. For foreigners, life was cheap at twenty Chinese dollars to one American, but there wasn’t much to do. There were prostitutes, of course. People went after them when they got bored with the poker, crap or bridge games.
Kunming was an altogether better place in Farrell’s view. ‘At 6,000 feet you had to wear several layers of clothes, of course. But, oh, what a lovely place in summer! Hell, you know if I were really picking a place to live – Calcutta in winter, Kunming in summer.’
Even then, even with victorious Japanese armies everywhere and no end to the war clearly in sight, Roy Farrell had liked the look of China as somewhere to do business. The entrepreneur in him made some calculations and came to that conclusion: the Far East would be the place for him when things returned to normal. He had read about a man years before and never forgotten him: an American businessman with his eyes open who had made a fortune immediately after the Spanish–American War by shipping sugar from Havana to New York. That was the sort of thing that appealed to Farrell. The Japanese were bound to be defeated sooner or later, and then there would be markets out here. No doubt of that. Look at China … its size … its population…. The thing would be to get in early. That’s what the fellow in Havana had done.
Roy Farrell nursed his dream and waited patiently for the end of the war.
Quite independently, Syd de Kantzow was having similar thoughts, and unlike Roy Farrell he revealed them to the press.
‘In his flight across the Pacific to the Philippines and Hong Kong,’ an interviewer in the Australian magazine Cavalcade reported, ‘Captain de Kantzow was very impressed with the efficiency of the organisation of the service and the flying equipment. He considers America has made tremendous advances in trans-ocean passenger flying.’ Then, almost thrown away, came an interesting sentence: ‘De Kantzow sees China as a vast undeveloped country and her many needs can be well supplied by Australia.’
Looking back across four decades, one can see that Cathay was even then a gleam not in one pair of eyes, but in two.
CHAPTER 3
The long-range Boeing 747s of today’s Cathay Pacific fleet home into Kai Tak Airport over the rooftops of Kowloon on wings as broad as three-storeyed houses are high. Worlds apart in time, Farrell and de Kantzow used to fly into Hong Kong, bucking and skidding through the turbulence in overworked DC-3s – ‘crates’ was the affectionate word for them – that sometimes seemed unlikely to clear the enveloping hills. How did the two rough-riders of CNAC make the immense jump from unremembered sweaty Dinjan to the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, the commercial hub of the Far East?
It is too late to ask Sydney de Kantzow; after surviving the perils of pioneer aviation, he died in a motor accident in 1957. But it is not too late to ask Roy Farrell. Farrell is, as always, a jauntily active man with a sharp eye for business, and an indefatigable talker who can make you see the old swashbuckling days from his wryly humorous point of view. Syd helped enormously, probably decisively, but even before Syd came Farrell’s willpower had turned his own dream into reality. He launched a single aircraft in the air and watched it become a great airline. ‘I wanted an empire’ – that was the confession he made the first day we were together. Well, he mapped out an empire, even if in the end it was not to be his.
When I set out to find Farrell I knew he lived partly in Vernon, Texas and partly in San Carlos, Mexico. His grandfather, born in Hoboken, New Jersey, had worked as a foreman on the Union Pacific Railroad, and his second son Clint, Roy’s father, had moved to Vernon in 1887. Clint was Vernon’s postmaster under six Presidents and for more than twenty-eight years until his death in 1937; a bit of a businessman and a good golfer, too. Roy was born in Vernon in 1912. So he would be seventy-four years old, and I wondered if he would want to talk about the old days. I found his address at Cathay Pacific’s headquarters in Hong Kong and we began to exchange letters. To my relief, he was friendly and sounded quite ea
ger to reminisce. When I asked where we could meet he said, ‘Come to Texas.’ After a delay (his wife had recently had a stroke) I flew to America to talk to him.
‘I arrive Tuesday, Roy,’ I said on the line from New York. ‘Dallas–Fort Worth Airport. 12.15 midday.’
A soft, cheerful Texan voice answered me. ‘I’ll meet you. Tall and bald. You may recognize me.’
‘I’d know you anywhere.’
‘Oh?’
‘I’ve been looking at your picture. It’ll be very good to see you.’
‘You bet,’ the Texan voice said.
The morning of my flight from New York was sunny and cold and my neighbour was a small man who slurped Diet-Cola and never said a word, so there was plenty of time to think about the man who would be meeting me. The photographs I’d seen were forty years old, but it should not be difficult, I thought, to recognize that long head, the slicked-back, fairish hair (it would be grey now, of course), the wide smile, the lean, wide-awake face. I had brought to New York what I think is the best photograph anyone ever took of Roy in the old days. It shows him looking out of the open pilot’s window of Betsy, his first commercial and always favourite aircraft, broadly grinning, with a long, strong hand held serenely aloft. It was an appealing photograph that projected pride and good nature in equal measure – a forty-year-old photograph, but I was pretty sure I would know that laughing face any time, any place.
And so I did. The plane landed fast and swung towards airport buildings like a sand-red set of children’s bricks. Farrell was waiting at the arrival gate. The face may have been seventy-four years old, but there was no mistaking it. He came forward, hand out, grinning the old grin, a tall, spare, balding, bespectacled man wearing a short-sleeved shirt open at the neck and casual slacks.
‘So we do recognize each other.’ He laughed and led me to a big maroon Oldsmobile in the airport’s parking lot. We swung out onto a six-lane highway that stretched away across land flat as a board in both directions.
‘I’ve booked you into La Quinta Motor Inn outside Dallas. That’s where I’m staying,’ Roy said.
He had come in from Vernon, a four-hour drive away, to do some business, to see his married children and to see me. His wife, Marjorie, was at their other home in San Carlos in Mexico. She was recuperating from the stroke he had written to me about, and he was still worried about her. Now and again during the next two days he would apologize and interrupt our conversation to telephone San Carlos, to soothe and reassure her, saying a gentle goodbye each time with, ‘I love you, darlin’.’ I thought: no doubting this man’s good nature. ‘Pappy’ they had called him in the old days. I could see why.
We began to talk about his early life, and it was some time that first day that he said: ‘I wanted an empire.’ He said it sitting in his chair at the Motor Inn, a long finger tapping his bony knee abstractedly, as if he saw something very far away.
Outside La Quinta a non-stop flow of traffic belched its way past the neon signs, the untidy ribbon development and the expensive garden suburbs spreading out like a giant fan from the tight, unexpectedly small cluster of skyscrapers in downtown Dallas. Overhead, a twin-engined jet dropped down towards the Dallas–Fort Worth Airport.
‘I wanted an empire. Yes, I did.’
An empire? Had that idea really churned in his head 20,000 feet above the peaks and ravines of Upper Burma as he peered around for Japanese Zeros and wished his fleece-lined jacket would meet his pants and keep out the cold? Apparently so. But young Farrell’s vision had not been of the sort of empire of the skies that Cathay is today. Not then. For one thing, his original dream had been of ships, not planes. It is odd. In spite of all his flying over the Hump in C-47s and his confidence in those tough little aircraft, when Farrell returned to the United States in 1945, burning to get his hands on something to haul commodities across the 7,000 miles of the Pacific to the Far East and make a fortune, aircraft were not in his mind. Aircraft were too small. A ship: that was what he was after. Extraordinary? Well, a boat was what that entrepreneur had used to launch himself to success after the Spanish–American War.
‘What I didn’t know when I got back from the war,’ Farrell was saying, ‘was that there were no boats for sale. And had I been able to buy a boat I would have been unable to fill it with commodities. There were no commodities. The war was barely over and it was hard to buy even a dozen toothbrushes or a dozen lipsticks.’ He laughed. ‘Of course, it would be hard to fill a boat with lipsticks, toothbrushes and combs.’
A chance meeting put him on the right and – we can see it now – the obvious track. An old friend drinking with Farrell in the Revere Room of the Lexington Hotel, New York, hearing him moaning about the lack of ships, said, ‘Pappy, why don’t you buy an aeroplane? War surplus. They’re available for purchase right now at Bush Field in Augusta, Georgia.’
Of course! In seconds Roy Farrell, the flier, had thrust ships out of his mind and was up and away to Bush Field, the only stop between his room in the Waldorf Astoria and that Georgia airfield a quick dash into a liquor store for a case of Black Label scotch whisky. Typically he thought: ‘It might come in useful.’
Once his mind was on planes Roy knew exactly what he wanted. He closed his eyes, clenched his fists and prayed he would find a C-47 at Bush Field – one of the Douglas Dakotas, the old reliables, he had got to know so well in Assam and China. That was part of the dream. To go back to China in a C-47 would be a little like reliving old times with an old friend. At Bush Field he buttonholed a friendly sergeant and poured out his story. To his dismay, the sergeant, an important official in procurement, regretted that for the moment he was out of C-47s. Perhaps later…. If a C-47 came in, Roy implored him, would the sergeant call him – urgent collect? ‘At the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, New York City.’
‘Sure will, Mr Farrell.’
‘I suppose you have a jeep?’ Farrell wondered aloud. ‘Where exactly …?’
Presently, when Roy Farrell had left for New York, the sergeant climbed into his jeep and drove off with the case of Black Label on the passenger seat beside him. The phone rang in the Waldorf two or three evenings later and a voice said, ‘Captain Farrell, your C-47 will be landing tomorrow daybreak. Can you be here?’
‘That’s me you hear knocking on your door.’ Roy was in a cab to Penn Station almost before the sergeant had rung off.
Sure enough, at Bush Field at daybreak, as Farrell watched, his palms wet with excitement, a C-47 touched down; she taxied up; her engines were chopped. A perky, good-natured little thing, he thought. In his euphoric state he could have sworn she winked at him when he walked up to her.
‘I went aboard. I looked at her records. She had come out of Dismantling, Inspection and Repair, which was the most thorough going-over the Army Air Force could give to an aeroplane. I checked the instruments and the interior, then got out and kicked the tyres. I understood C-47s pretty well, and I knew – I just knew – I had found my plane.’
He had found Betsy.
There was a little formality to complete before he possessed her. He flew at once to Washington DC, bearing a cheque for $30,000 payable to the Foreign Liquidation Commission – and there for a moment he thought his world had come to an end. Eagerly pushing the cheque through the cashier’s window, he heard the clerk’s voice: ‘Captain Farrell, this plane has already been sold to American Airlines.’
Farrell felt faint.
‘I yelled, “No, it can’t have been.” The clerk assured me it had definitely been sold. No question. I said the rules specified the aircraft had to be inspected at Bush Field – nowhere else – and that no American Airlines representative had been at Bush Field the previous sun-up when she arrived there, so who but me could have bought her? “Makes no difference,” the clerk said. “She’s bought.”’
Roy Farrell thought it made a big difference. ‘“Can I use your phone?” I asked him. “Sure,” he said. “Who are you calling?” I told him first I was going to call Congressman Ed G
ossett who had lived at Vernon, our home town, for six years; and second, my friend Senator Tom Connally, who was Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. The clerk said, “Put the phone down. The plane’s yours.”’
Cock-a-hoop, Farrell hurried back to Betsy and flew her through a snowstorm to New York’s La Guardia Field. There was much to be done. Betsy needed to be converted from a military to a civilian plane – from a C-47 to a DC-3 – and at La Guardia Farrell thought he had friends among Pan Am’s mechanics. He begged them: would they do a rush job – for a favour? Sure, they would, his friends said. Oh, sure. Some friends. Days went by and poor Betsy, untouched by human hand, stood forlorn and lonely in the snow. In despair, Roy taxied her across to the maintenance apron of Pan-Am’s rival, TWA. At TWA’s No. 1 Hangar things did not look much better. A crew chief there laughed in a scornful manner and said, ‘Look, bud, we’re having so much trouble with these new Connies – these Constellations – we aren’t about to spare a man to do any converting for you.’ Horribly aware that China was a long, long way away, Roy decided it was time to show character. And a scene followed that would make an excellent climax to reel one of a film biography of Farrell. This is the chief actor’s own account of it:
‘I handed the head mechanic a hundred dollar bill, and at about four, at the end of the afternoon shift, I climbed onto the wing of a Constellation and a whole lot of mechanics were gathered below. I might have been “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell or Claire (“Flying Tigers”) Chennault or Lord Mountbatten addressing the troops. You know, straight from the shoulder stuff. I told ’em exactly what I wanted. I told ’em I had bought a C-47 and was damned well going to fly it back to China to start an airline. There was a whole bunch of laughter. But they soon saw I was serious. And then any number of volunteers came forward and I told ’em I’d pay whatever bill they presented me – hey! eyebrows shot up at that. I added I thought they were good guys and would not overcharge. We exchanged grins. Yeah, grins. Within ten minutes my baby was in the hangar out of the cold and snow, and the mechanics were swarming all over her.’
