Beyond Lion Rock

by Gavin Young

  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.’

  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.

  OYSTERS!

  SYDNEY ROCK OYSTERS

  BY AIR

  From Australia,

  in 32
Hours

  These very fine oysters,

  well known in Hong Kong as a great delicacy,

  have been brought, alive in the shell, to Hong Kong

  from the Sydney Oyster Beds

  in the same time as they reach the Sydney householder.

  Yet another service from the

  ROY FARRELL EXPORT-IMPORT CO., LTD.

  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:

  Here is some of the latest ‘gen’ in Shanghai.

  1. We have purchased another C-47, price $ 11,000. It has 2 good motors, full radio equipment, good instruments etc….

  2. Our Chinese (maintenance) crew is more on the ball than ever….

  4. Vickie is married. The reason I know is that Ged Brown says she hasn’t called him the last few days so she must be married.

  5. We have submitted a letter to UNRRA [United Nations Refugee Relief Agency] offering our willingness to charter a C-47 to them …

  10. The sun refuses to shine …

  11. Customs stopped us from going in or out…. But this afternoon decided to let us leave. Coming back is discussed in the next chapter …

  13. Business here is still OK, but the market on woollens (women’s) is beginning to fall off …

  19. I think Ged Brown has worms …

  20. Angie is missing Syd an awful lot.

  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:

  As regards air ops. into and out of the Colony, that is very definitely on the up and up…. I have been given full approval for as many flights as we can make – subject to British registration of aircraft, the only basis on which we would be allowed to operate. When Betsy is due for re-registration, Moss is going to let me know if we may continue with a US registration.

  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.

  CHAPTER 5

  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 ope
n.

  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.