Beyond Lion Rock

by Gavin Young

  In La Quinta Motor Inn with me all those years later, Roy summed it up. ‘A new phase was beginning. We’d done extremely well. We had four planes flying and money in the bank. We hoped a new form of success lay ahead.’ I could see him reliving that time as he thought about it, enjoying once more the memory of that early success. The glass of Coca-Cola raised to me now might have been one of those Cuba Libres at the bar of the Manila Hotel he had raised to Sydney de Kantzow, Bob Russell, Millard Nasholds and Bill Geddes Brown way back in 1946, toasting the future of a baby airline, newly baptized; toasting the unforeseeable empire of the air to which he and Syd were godparents: ‘To Cathay Pacific Airways!’

  *

  Cathay Pacific was born – long live CPA! ‘CPA. That’s what it was then,’ Farrell told me. ‘In the beginning we always called it CPA.’ In fact, CPA came to be regularly called by its full name only when those three initials ran the risk of confusion with the C, Ρ and A of Canadian Pacific Airlines. These days, if someone refers to Cathay Pacific Airways as ‘CPA’ you can tell he is an old Hong Kong hand, betraying his generation as much as an Englishman does who refers to the radio as ‘the wireless’.

  Hong Kong, Australia and a good segment of the Orient were very soon hearing and reading about the new airline with the exciting name. ‘Wing Your Way By CPA’ said an early advertisement in the China Mail. ‘Fly to Singapore … Fare $880; Bangkok … Fare $528; Manila … Fare $600; Sydney … Fare $2,200. Baggage allowance 55lb. Freight and passenger bookings to be made at the office of CPA’s new agent, P. J. Lobo & Co. at 4 Chater Road.’ [In 1946 five Hong Kong dollars were worth one American dollar.] On 23 October Neville Hems worth piloted VR-HDA (alias Nikki) with seventeen Chinese students aboard in the first of CPA’s charter flights from Hong Kong to Gatwick Airport outside London: a thirty-day round trip on what was a pretty long haul for a twin 1200hp-engined ‘crate’. He described the flight as ‘very tough’, but that charter was a milestone. And one month into the official life of Cathay Pacific the Roy Farrell Export-Import Co. (Hong Kong) Ltd. had chartered one of Cathay’s two DC-3s for Hemsworth to inaugurate the first Roy Farrell ‘airmerchandising’ service to the United Kingdom.

  The partial derivation of CPA’s name from Terry and his Pirates must have struck a good many observers as apt, however much Roy would have liked to think otherwise. The new company did have a swashbuckling air about it. Chic Eather remembers hazardous flights along the coast of China to Lungwah field at Shanghai, relying on the eccentricities of unpleasantly low-powered radio beacons at Swatow, Amoy, Foochow, Wenchow and Ningpo – flights that on more than one occasion might have cost him his life in that storm-ridden region. Even so, Shanghai remained a popular destination with Syd’s pilots – or Syd’s ‘pirates’. According to Chic, Lyell Louttit, the Radio Officer, found the Arcadia nightclub particularly bewitching when he was in the grip of the grape – and probably in the equally powerful grip of one or other of the club’s blonde White Russian hostesses who, incidentally, very much fancied the skimpy Scamp swimsuits imported by Farrell.

  Apart from Shanghai there were charters to Bangkok, Manila, Saigon and Singapore, and they were no less adventurous. On one occasion – it was certainly worthy of Terry and the Pirates – Eather’s DC-3 from Bangkok was suddenly diverted, in full flight for Hong Kong, to Tourane in central Vietnam (later to be renamed Da Nang and become a major American base) by mysterious orders cryptically radioed to the aircraft’s Captain, Dick Hunt, a former squadron leader in the Royal Australian Air Force. The war between the French and the Viet Minh nationalists was at its height, and it was a very bloody one in which anti-French guerrilla forces were becoming increasingly bold. Hunt and Eather spent a sleepless night in the villa the French Air Force general in Tourane had allotted them, listening to bursts of machine gun fire nearby; the shutters were tightly closed for fear of a Viet Minh grenade attack. At dawn next day they stumbled out to the airfield, hoping to discover why they were there. A few minutes later the Emperor Bao Dai of Annam and his entourage were driven up and escorted aboard their plane, and Hunt and Eather, stifling their yawns, flew the lot of them to Hong Kong and into exile. The French had decided that Indo-China was to have an independent, democratic government – though the exclusion from it of a certain Ho Chi Minh was to prove a costly omission.

  Similar CPA escapades – one could say they were literally ‘fly-by-night’ – ensued during a three-week charter by Indonesian nationalists. The Dutch had thrown up an air blockade to isolate the forces of Dr Ahmad Sukarno’s pro-independence government in central Java. Lyell Louttit, for one, was involved in surreptitious flights, often after dark, between Jogjakarta and Bukit Tinggi in western Sumatra before the whole devious adventure ended in the ignominious impounding of a CPA DC-3 in Singapore. Dutch officials there suspected the aircraft had been sold illegally by CPA to Sukarno, and it took Harry de Leuil, Syd’s general manager, some time to convince the Directors of Civil Aviation in Singapore and Hong Kong of the company’s innocence. It was a salutary experience, showing in those days of national independence movements how extremely unwise it was to mix commercial aviation with the violent imponderables of other people’s politics. Far less risky were the chartered air shipments of refugees from Eastern Europe to Australia, and the series of two-month charters that Roy Farrell arranged to fly plane-loads of fresh fish from Kuantan in East Malaya to Singapore. True, the stink of fish permeated the aircraft from stem to stern and almost put the CPA crews off fish for the rest of their lives, but at least they weren’t in danger of being shot down by British or Dutch fighters.

  More charters were waiting to be picked up than Cathay could handle, and during these operations two aspects of the company became most obviously apparent. First, as I have already said, it was a distinctly shoestring operation. Second, its success was quite largely due to a very few people who were inspired to work – or rather, overwork – by an unusually high level of enthusiasm.

  In next to no time Roy and Syd had to expand their staff. They had already added Harry de Leuil, a veteran Australian aviator, to run the CPA office in Sydney while Russell (and, later, Eric Kirkby) handled the Roy Farrell Export-Import Company’s. In Hong Kong, Syd de Kantzow – by now, of course, specifically in charge of air operations – took on CPA’s first local employee at Chater Road. This was Marie Bok, a strong-willed, intelligent, Hong Kong-born Chinese girl, who had previously worked with the Colony’s Harbour Authority. They had met at the CPA ticket office in the Peninsula Hotel and Syd, wasting no time, had said, ‘Come along and be my secretary.’ Marie accepted the hard work and chaotic surroundings and stayed with the airline for thirty years.

  Conditions were certainly spartan. ‘We had one badly lit room,’ she recalls, ‘and our staff consisted of Syd (when he wasn’t flying off somewhere), an accountant, and myself. That’s all. We had to do everything – produce manifests, issue tickets, obtain clearances for this and that. Thank heavens the then DCA, Uncle Moe, was most helpful. He really adored Syd and wished him and CPA nothing but well.’ She laughs at a sudden thought: ‘You know, in those days payments were often made in cash and we carried these stacks of bank notes through rain and howling winds to the Chartered Bank wrapped in nothing more than a few sheets of the China Mail.’ (Neville Hemsworth remembers Syd handing him wads of banknotes with no thought of accounting for them.) ‘Shoestring? I’ll say it was. Syd wouldn’t spend what he thought of as unnecessary money, so we even had to borrow a cable code book and a long carriage typewriter from Roy Farrell’s office.’

  No one, least of all Syd de Kantzow, talked of office hours from nine to five; a twenty-four-hour day would have been insufficient to cope with the work, so Marie was relieved when two more stenographers were brought in, and overjoyed when – wonder of wonders – Syd agreed to pay for a couple of typewriters for them.

  Today Marie Bok and her husband are the prosperous owners of a pearl emporium in Kowloon; she spends half the year there and the other hal
f in Perth, Western Australia. A very handsome woman still, she remembers the ‘happy old days’ – Roy Farrell sauntering into the CPA office twice a week, so ‘charming and outgoing’, of Syd, sometimes a bit sulky or perhaps simply preoccupied. Roy’s other partners, ‘Nash’ and Russell, she says, were ‘more the cowboy type. High-spirited. Great blokes, but not great workers.’ ‘Nash’, thickish-set and jowly, had poor health; he seemed to attract every passing local bug, and generally stuck close to home in Manila. Jolly Bob Russell, on the other hand, gravitated more and more to Hong Kong. He found it difficult to take things too seriously, and now and again Marie Bok had to file some unusual letters – like the one to Syd that began: ‘To the Most Exalted Emperor and/or King of CPA. From: The After-hours House-boy.’ Marie liked Russell’s cheery grin and his unusually florid ties, one of which had jockeys’ whips and horseshoes on it, a symbol of his frequent attendance at the Happy Valley racetrack where he gambled with mixed success but a passion matched only by his unrestrained enthusiasm for girls of all shapes and sizes.

  Even so, Russell was not all frivolous. In fact, his ‘Most Exalted Emperor’ letter contained two perceptive remarks. ‘At present,’ he wrote, ‘there are surprisingly few who know you can travel from Sydney to Hong Kong by air, but we can certainly change that when permanent permissions are granted.’ And: ‘After we advertise on a large scale we can obtain more passengers than we can handle.’

  Passengers and advertising: Bob Russell had identified CPA’s way to the future. It seems obvious now, but in the Far East of 1946 advertising was in its infancy and few people thought of flying; there were ships galore, after all, and surely ships were cheaper than planes. Roy Farrell had always been aware of the power of advertising. Very early on, for instance, his ads had plugged the unexpected availability in Hong Kong, thanks exclusively to CPA, of fresh Sydney Rock Oysters – a plug that sold CPA as much as the oysters. It was a modest beginning but in later years, of course, like everybody else, Cathay Pacific would spend millions of dollars on advertising. As for Bob Russell’s mention of ‘permanent permissions’, it reflected a growing awareness among Roy’s partners that CPA urgently needed regional landing and operating rights on a once-for-all basis.

  The little fleet had grown to five by January 1947. Syd began to recruit more crews from Australia, sprucing them up by replacing the company’s American-style uniform with shorts and summer jackets of white linen. Routes were consolidated and added to: the familiar ones to Sydney and Manila remained, but Cathay Pacific now flew to Singapore via Bangkok, a long haul which meant leaving Hong Kong at crack of dawn in order to get back next day. (There were no flights in or out of Kai Tak after dark.) ‘A bloody awful time to get up,’ the flight crews moaned, but no one challenged the necessity for Syd’s gruelling work schedules if the line was to blossom for the benefit of all.

  ‘Only one crew did the entire Hong Kong–Singapore–Bangkok flight,’ wrote Chic Eather, a veteran of it. ‘That meant a duty period of some thirty hours. One got a rest when one could – the aircraft being as good a place as any other until the close, humid atmosphere and the inevitable bugs and mosquitoes of Singapore’s airfield drove the would-be sleeper out for a walk and some fresh air.’

  Even in Hong Kong, their home base, the exhausted CPA crews had to doss down on camp beds in a couple of almost bare rooms in the Peninsula. Flight-time limits, palatial hotel accommodation and interesting stopovers lay in some distant and almost unimaginable future. The lordly aircrews of today wouldn’t begin to tolerate the schedules which for Syd’s fliers became routine. In any case, modern regulations quite rightly forbid them. Take Eather’s work period in the final two weeks of 1946, and imagine any pilot undertaking it today. One day he was in the air for eighteen hours and twenty-five minutes. He had two days off in the fortnight and muses wrily, ‘I wonder how they managed to forget me for those two days. Perhaps they had no spare aircraft.’

  Syd de Kantzow drove his pilots with an almost evangelical zeal, but pioneers are zealots and Chic’s conclusion is fitting: ‘Such a rat-race operation could hardly be justified, but the general dedication and willingness to do more than one’s share must have contributed to the future fortunes of the company. It could be argued that if this attitude had been absent there would have been no Cathay Pacific and none of the comfortable flying jobs of today.’

  Another de Kantzow-inspired step forward was the recruitment of CPA’s first air stewardess. After all, any new air service in which passengers were more highly considered than woollen goods, Chinese silk hats and even oysters must have stewardesses. In Syd’s opinion, stewardesses were a sure sign that an airline had ‘arrived’.

  One of Cathay’s first and prettiest stewardesses lives now in happy retirement near Surfers’ Paradise on the Queensland coast, having moved there after marrying Jack Williams, one of Cathay’s Australian engineers. The smart little bungalow she shares now with her second husband sits back from the sea in a garden suburb that in its peacefulness is far from the roaring days of Syd’s Dakotas. Though not really so far for Vera: ask her about that time and you realize you have started something; she laughs, runs to bring you a chair and a beer, dashes for her photograph album and in no time is acting out what they were like, the endless days and nights inside those rattling, bouncing, propeller-driven crates, as if she was playing a delightful game of charades. What had it been like to stagger about with trays and cups of tea on a heaving aisle hour after turbulent hour all the way from Hong Kong to Sydney – and then back again? Vera makes it sound as if those were the happiest days of her life – and perhaps they were.

  Her album shows the young Vera, dark-haired with a big white smile, at the top of the steps at Betsy’s open door. She is cool and petite in a dark blue double-breasted uniform, the long open collar of a white blouse flopping casually over its lapels, and a soft round hat gold-embroidered with the initials CPA enfolded in a pair of wings. Her high heels must have been the least ideal footwear for carrying babies’ milk and airsick pills up and down the narrow aisle of a tossing aircraft, but she certainly added a welcome touch of beauty to the austerity of flying.

  For there was no luxury in flying then. Consider that old warhorse, Betsy the DC-3. Unlike Vera, she was no oil painting. To be frank, she closely resembled a tubular sardine can with rivets. No upholstery brightened her dull interior. Her floor was a strip of metal; her seats were nothing but metal buckets, lightly cushioned, down each side of the fuselage. Structurally strong, Betsy was very thin-skinned. Her every riveted rib was starkly visible, and if you had happened to prod her metal skin too violently with the tip of an umbrella you might have found yourself prodding the air rushing by outside. A glance at her Meccano-like innards gave very little promise of an enjoyable two-or three-day flight to Darwin and Sydney, even without the virtually inevitable dust storms and thunder. Who could have wanted to fly? After all, you were not ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell roaring over the Hump yelling ‘Gung-ho!’ to zap the Japs…. Yet Vera loved every flying minute.

  The comradeship was a large part of it. When she pointed to a group photograph of smiling girls in CPA uniform, she glowed with happy recognition. ‘That’s Dolores Silva – she’s in the States now, in Alabama. This is Margaret Wheeldon Pugh, she’s in America, too. Who married first? Was it me? No, Terry Marquis, I think. Irene Machado, look, she’s married to Ken Begg, an early CPA pilot. Oh, and that’s Linda Fernandez. She was our air chief.’ Her face temporarily lost its smile when she came to the next name: ‘Delca da Costa. Oh, dear. She was killed in the Macao hijacking….’ And two minutes later the smile faded again: ‘Olive Batley. She was on the one that flew into the Braemar Reservoir. She was a new girl, not long with the company.’

  After a pause I said, ‘Not just a line of pretty faces, were you, Vera. Brave as well.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. It was a job to do.’

  Most of the first five or six CPA stewardesses were Portuguese girls born in Macao or Hong Kong.
Chinese girls became the majority a little later, and oriental cabin crews were to become (and remain until now) a Cathay trademark.

  Vera said, ‘You only think of work in the plane. Think of the passengers. See they’re well covered, that they have a pillow. Flying to Sydney tough?’ She scoffed at the suggestion. ‘We looked forward to the shopping, seeing the world.’ She smiled. ‘Even if we did have to wash all those dishes in Darwin on the way. A DC-3 carried only one stewardess, you know – there were only five or six of us in the company all told. But you could doze when the passengers had had their dinner.’

  Dinner? In that tin tube of a plane?

  ‘We served mostly sandwiches or salads. Nescafé in a thermos. Coca-Cola. But proper knives, forks and plates, please note – no plastic! Some passengers thought they were for them. We had to ask some from Saigon “Give us back our plates, please” as they left the plane.’

  To complicate things, on the day-long Hong Kong–Singapore run there were often passengers from China who knew none of the three languages that CPA’s first stewardesses usually spoke – Cantonese, English, Portuguese. And what about those famous storms over the South China Sea? ‘Well, the planes would jump about, yes. Jo Cheng, our first Chinese girl, was carrying a tray of tea and the plane got into an air pocket. She went down and the tea all over her – oh, she was so funny about it!’

  Hot tea all over? Funny?

  ‘Dear Jo. So funny.’

  In due course CPA bought four-engined DC-4 Skymasters with startling refinements – leatherette-covered chairs in rows, ceiling fans and cupboards. Luxury! At last it was just possible – just – when Vera and her friends served proper food – eggs and steaks – to shed the uneasy feeling of being trapped half-starved in a Tin Lizzie troop-transport. The steaks – and Vera serving them – would have made up for turbulence, fatigue, and even quite frequent mechanical shortcomings. She remembers how a CPA DC-4 lost an engine coming in on the approach to Bangkok. ‘Don’t worry,’ Vera smiled to a trembling passenger. ‘We’ve got three more.’ Another engine went: ‘Two to go,’ she cried happily, adding for extra reassurance, ‘The Captain says we’ll soon be there.’