by Gavin Young
While volunteer mechanics installed cabin tanks for the long haul to China and removed heating equipment from the fuselage to give extra cargo weight, Farrell rushed about buying things to sell to the Chinese. Combs, lipsticks, a gross or two of toothbrushes. That didn’t seem much, so he sped to a Fulton Street shop that specialized in buying used clothes from wealthy families and soon he had a plane-load of ‘Lord Chesterfield’ coats, tails, tuxedos, sports coats, suits, dressing gowns, smoking jackets…. The unsuspecting poor of China were about to find themselves perfectly dressed for the Kentucky Derby or dinner at the Waldorf. Never mind, Roy thought: the Chinese need clothes, any clothes, and clothes they will get.
Officially certified ‘civilian’, Betsy was swiftly packed to bursting with countless bales of morning coats and toothbrushes. Roy personally paid and thanked the cooperative TWA mechanics. One last problem remained. Who would fly Betsy to China? Roy could not fly all that way alone. He asked about and in no time had signed up Bob Russell, a young retired captain in the Army Air Force with much experience in C-47s (‘or so his records showed’). A navigator? Up came a volunteer: Bill Geddes Brown. Now at last all was ready. Roy opened a bottle or two of champagne.
‘All of a sudden it hit me,’ he told me at La Quinta. ‘Now, after thirteen years of dreaming of being the first to fly into a foreign country after the war with a cargo, I could see the possibility of actually starting an airline. After thirteen years, I realized I was ready to go. We got our spurs on and mounted our steed by crawling over all those bales of clothing in the fuselage. I taxied out, ran up the engines and called for take-off clearance. The tower called back and we were cleared. I released the brakes and started for the runway. We lifted off….’
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’.
SHANGHAI A CITY OF CHAOS.
OLD SHANGHAI GONE FOR EVER.
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 frequentl
y 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’.
CHAPTER 4
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 mana
gers – 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.
